Is 'Enola Holmes 2' Based on a True Story? How Real-Life Activist ...

Enola Holmes 2, the sequel which began streaming on Netflix last week, opens with a title card that reads, “Some of what follows is true. The important parts at least.”
Naturally, after seeing that, a lot of people watching the movie—especially the younger viewers that the movies are aimed at, who may not be familiar with the legacy of the Sherlock Holmes character—assumed that Enola Holmes 2 is based on a true story.
If that’s you, I don’t blame you. But I’m also here to tell you that Enola Holmes 2 is not a true story. Sherlock Holmes is not a real person. Enola Holmes is not a real person. Sorry to disappoint, but this is a fictional movie based on a fictional book series, which is in turn based on yet another fictional book series.
So what did director Harry Bradbeer and screenwriter Jack Thorne mean when they included this “true story” title card at the beginning of Enola Holmes 2? Read on to learn about the actual true story that inspired the plot of Enola Holmes 2.
Is Enola Holmes 2 based on a true story?
Not really… but sort of. None of the main characters in Enola Holmes 2 are based on real people. That said, Enola’s new case was inspired by the true story of labor activist Sarah Chapman and the Match Girls’ Strike of 1888. But it’s hardly an accurate rendition of Chapman’s story.
Who is Sarah Chapman from Enola Holmes 2?
In the movie, Sarah Chapman is the name of a missing girl that detective Enola Holmes is hired to find. Sarah’s sister says Sarah went missing after she was accused of stealing at her job at a matchstick factory, which is currently experiencing an outbreak of the deadly typhus virus. At the end of the movie—spoiler alert—Enola discovers that Sarah Chapman went into hiding after she discovered that a new substance being used to make the matches, white phosphorus, was killing the factory workers, not typhus. Sarah and her friends plotted to expose the factory for knowingly endangering workers by using this new, cheap substance to make matches to increase profits. When the truth about the factory gets out, Sarah and Enola convince the workers to strike.
In real life, Sarah Chapman was a labor activist who did help organize a labor strike in 1888, at the matchmaking factory where she worked. The strike was in protest of a myriad of unjust working conditions, including long hours, little pay, and, according to the write-up from Chapman’s great-grandaughter on the People’s History Museum website, working close proximity to a substance known as white phosphorus that caused cancer. Chapman was one of eight women on the initial “Match Girls Strike Committee.” According to Chapman’s great-granddaughter, after the match girls formed a union, Chapman was elected to the new Union Committee and was their first representative to the International Trades Union Congress (TUC) in November 1888.
However, this is about where the “Enola Holmes 2 true story” ends. Chapman never went missing nor did she form a secret identity as a high society lady, as is seen in the film. She did not secretly date the son of the factory owner. (According to Chapman’s great-granddaughter, she married a man named Charles Dearman in 1891.) And she certainly never got involved in a murder case.
Was Sherlock Holmes or Enola Holmes a real person?
No and no. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character invented by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. The first Sherlock Holmes mystery story, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887, and was followed by dozens of sequels, starring the popular detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Dr. John Watson. Since then, there have been countless adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Enola Holmes is also a fictional character, though she was not a character in the original Arthur Conan Doyle books. She was invented by author Nancy Springer, who published the first book in The Enola Holmes Mysteries series in 2006. The series imagines a new character in the Holmes-verse: Enola Holmes, the 14-year-old sister of the already world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Springer is one of many writers who took advantage of the early Sherlock Holmes stories entering the public domain in the early 2000s, giving her the license to play around in the Sherlock Holmes universe.
But again, because it bears repeating: Neither Sherlock Holmes nor Enola Holmes is a real person. In the future, Netflix may want to think twice before slapping a “this is based on a true story” title card on any old movie.