When did Sherlock Holmes live?

Answer 1

Holmes's birthday is generally accepted as January 6th 1854, this date is not actually recorded in Sir Arthur's documents and he never actually 'died'.
From the mid-1800's to the early 1900's, the era typically referred to as Victorian England. Sherlock Holmes was born on January 6, 1854.

Answer 2

Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character created by British physician, novelist, and detective-story writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who lived from 1859 until 1930. He published sixty stories featuring Sherlock Holmes between 1887 and 1927.

Answer 3

He was never actually alive. The fictional stories about him are set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the mid-1870s (The 'Gloria Scott') up to 1914 (His Last Bow), roughly contemporaneous with when they were published.

Dr. Joseph Bell, on whom the character of Holmes was partly based, lived from 1837 to 1911.

Holmes canonically "died" in a story set 1891 because Conan Doyle was tired of writing about him. However, fan demand eventually persuaded him to bring the character back, and in "The Adventure of the Empty House" set in 1894, Holmes appears and reveals that he had faked his death. "His Last Bow" has Holmes coming out of retirement to aid the war effort, and that story takes place in 1914 (the story specifically says it's August 2, and the German characters in it express hope that the British will not come to the aid of the French and Belgians; since that happened on 4 August 1914, it can't be any later than that). The story also puts Holmes' age at 60, so he was born in 1854 (or possibly late 1853).

Taking all that into account, the most concrete dates we can come up with are c. 1854 through at least August 1914.

Answer 4

The fictional Holmes lived in the 2nd half of the 1800s and into the 1900s.