2Why is 1881, the year in which the events of A Study in Scarlet occurred, omitted? Gavin Brend suggests that Watson spent most of his time that year writing up his account of that case, the only one in which he participated. He would be ignorant of any other case of Holmes’s that occurred during or before that year. “It was only at the beginning of 1882 that systemized records of the cases came into existence.”
3Numerous pastiches have explored this strange reference, but Klas Lithner, in “A Key to the Paradol Chamber,” identifies the chamber as the residence of Lucien-Anatole Paradol, a French journalist and political figure.
4As early as July 1901, the editor of The Bookman complained that the Adventures and the Memoirs were replete with “allusions to affairs of which the reader knows nothing” and demanded that the author “clear away the mystery of all the titles.” There are over 110 “unrecorded cases” mentioned in the Canon, according to Christopher Redmond, but John Hall, in The Abominable Wife, points out that there is meaningful information about only thirty-nine of these cases.
5The word “ago” becomes “before” in American editions. Lord Donegall, in “The Horological Holmes,” observes, “Dr. Watson’s statement as it stands is palpable nonsense. Holmes would have had to wind the watch and let it run down completely before being able to tell how many turns of the key or pendant represented 2 hours—even approximately. . . . Watson must have omitted some essential link in the chain of reasoning.”
6The autumnal equinox is an imaginary event, occurring annually about September 23, when the sun first travels southerly across the celestial equator. Of course, an equinox, as a mere convenience of reference, cannot actually cause any storms. However, seasonal shifts of air masses may create unusually violent weather, and the belief in “equinoctial gales” likely originated with sailors who observed West Indian hurricanes occurring most often at the time of the autumnal equinox.
7William Clark Russell (1844–1911) was an American novelist, the writer of many nautical tales. Between 1867 and 1905 he published 65 titles of fiction, most of them in three volumes, and 15 nonfiction titles. Russell’s novels included The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877), The Frozen Pirate (1887), and The Romance of a Midshipman (1898).
8The Doubleday edition’s version of “The Five Orange Pips” follows the Strand Magazine version in using the word “mother.” In the first book publication of “The Five Orange Pips,” the word “mother” has been replaced with “aunt.” The latter was adopted as the “definitive text” by Edgar W. Smith for the Limited Editions Club publication of the Adventures in 1950 and has been widely copied.
Based in part on the reference to Watson’s “wife,” some chronologists reject Watson’s explicit date of September 1887 and put the case after The Sign of Four, following which Watson married Mary Morstan. However, this is a shaky foundation, for according to Mary Morstan in The Sign of Four, her mother died before 1878, and she had no living relatives in England (“My father was an officer in an Indian regiment, who sent me home when I was quite a child. My mother was dead, and I had no relative in England”). Ian McQueen states: “Let us say here and now that we no more believe in the existence of Mary Watson’s aunt than we do in the orphan-girl’s mother. Both were figments of Conan Doyle’s imagination, erroneously inserted in the manuscript while he was editing Watson’s notes for publication.” McQueen suggests that Conan Doyle was misled by Watson’s notes into assuming that Watson was already married in September 1887 and invented the visit to Mary’s mother as the most plausible explanation for his absence from home.
It has been ingeniously suggested that Mary Morstan’s relationship to Mrs. Cecil Forrester, with whom she lodges in The Sign of Four in an unexplained relationship, was practically that of aunt and niece. Philip Weller, in “A Relative Question,” suggests that the “mother” is Mary Morstan’s stepmother. However, neither argument seems very convincing, and this editor believes that this aunt/wife reference must be to a wife who preceded Mary Morstan and died before 1888 and to whom Watson, out of delicacy for the feelings of his current wife, makes little or no reference.
9Indeed, Holmes is not exaggerating here—there is no report in the entire Canon of any person with whom Holmes has regular social intercourse, save for Dr. Watson, his brother Mycroft, and his professional colleagues Inspector Lestrade and Inspector Stanley Hopkins.
10A small town in the county of West Sussex. In “The Sussex Vampire,” Holmes and Watson visited Lamberley, which is south of Horsham. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on the outskirts of Horsham in 1792. According to Baedeker’s Great Britain (1894), the town’s Free Library was opened in 1892 as a memorial to Shelley, and the Horsham Museum now has an extensive collection of first and early editions of his works, as well as memorabilia of his life and career.
11The editors of the Catalogue of the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition in London dispute this deduction, suggesting that Holmes made a rare error, Watson’s notes were incorrect, or Openshaw was not wholly honest about his movements. According to the editors, Horsham sits atop the Tunbridge Wells Sands, surrounded on three sides by the Weald Clay. “Apart from material deposited by builders or from some similar artificial source, it would have been quite impossible for Openshaw to get chalk on his toe-caps in or around Horsham. Sand and clay, perhaps; chalk and clay, no.” To the north of Horsham, however, is a zone in which may be found “the Lower Greensand, Gault Clay, Upper Greensand (a very narrow strip) and the Chalk. . . . In this zone even a short walk could provide a mixture of chalk and clay.” Perhaps Holmes actually said “south,” and Watson embellished Holmes’s statement when writing up his notes.
The editors offer three possible explanations for Openshaw’s acquisition of clay and chalk on his boots. First, Watson may have changed a reference to Dorking, for example, to Horsham, either erroneously or to disguise the actual location. Second, Openshaw may have “acquired the chalk on a previous journey and had simply omitted to clean his boots.” Third, Openshaw may have passed through Dorking, for reasons undisclosed, and neglected to mention it to Holmes. The editors of the Catalogue profess a preference for the first theory, blaming Dr. Watson’s report, inasmuch as the second conflicts with Watson’s description of Openshaw as “well-groomed and trimly clad” and the third would have been penetrated by Holmes.
12Chronologists such as H. W. Bell and Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler are quick to identify this woman with Irene Adler and use the remark to find Watson’s September 1887 date in error, instead assigning the case to a date after the March 1888 events of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” A few proponents of the year 1887 for “The Five Orange Pips” propose other candidates for the woman purported to have beaten Holmes. Gavin Brend, for example, nominates Effie Munro (of “The Yellow Face,” which Brend places in 1882). Tempting as such speculation is, however, it seems that the best that can be said is that if Watson’s dating is correct, plainly the victorious woman was not Irene Adler; perhaps one of the unreported cases was the source of this defeat. As Brend wisely notes, “After all, we do not know who the three men were who beat Holmes. Why should not the woman be equally anonymous?” For more questions on the dating of this case, see note 29.
13Baedeker describes Coventry in 1896 as “an ancient city with 54,740 inhab., possesses extensive manufactories of ribbons, dress-trimmings, coach-lace, and watches, and is famous for its artistic work in metal. It is also the headquarters of the manufacture of bicycles and tricycles.” However, Coventry is perhaps most famous for a legendary horseback ride. In the eleventh century, Lady Godiva bargained with her husband, a powerful noble, to reduce taxes in the district. He promised to do so if she rode naked on horseback through the Coventry marketplace at midday. Lady Godiva made her now-famous ride, and the taxes were eliminated. The story was recorded several times before 1400. In later accounts, probably at the urging of churchmen, the account was embellished with the tale of “Peeping Tom,” who was struck blind (or dead) when he alone gazed upon Lady Godiva. An
other later invention was the detail of the story, often added, that Godiva was covered totally, except for her legs, by an enormous and improbable quantity of hair. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, commemorated a visit to Coventry with a poem about the legend entitled “Godiva” (1842).
14Openshaw was far from the only Englishman participating in America’s Civil War. Of course, the vast majority of Americans at the time of the Civil War were of British descent, and many in England had family connections in America, on both sides of the war. Although England remained officially neutral in the war, the British aided the Confederacy with the building and manning of commerce raiders and blockade running to Southern ports. There were pro-Confederate and anti-slavery movements and politicking in England itself, as well as natural concern for the security of its colony Canada. Thousands of Britons, including Irishmen Captain John J. Coppinger, Major Myles Walter Keogh, and Joseph A. O’Keeffe (recruited by Secretary of War Seward for the Union), and Englishmen Sir Percy Wyndham (the flamboyant Union cavalryman), Currie, Morley, Jenkins, Gordon, Broud, and Major John Carwardine (Union), came to America to fight.
15In an era when “Republican” implies “conservative,” it is perhaps hard to remember that the Republican Party was organised in 1856 on the basis of opposition to the growth of slavery.
16The board game referred to by Americans as “checkers,” so-called as early as 1400.
17A town on the eastern coast of India, part of the French colony of Pondicherry until 1954. It was said to have the purest water in southern India. Major Sholto and his son Bartholomew (The Sign of Four) lived in Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood.
18The seeds of an orange or any small fruit.
19“I am not a lawyer,” W. G. Daish writes in “Ponderings and Pitfalls,” “but I have sometimes wondered how far young Openshaw would have got with the will he witnessed . . . under which he was eventually to be a beneficiary and which, meanwhile, made his own father, his closest relative, the sole legatee.” In the United States, however, more modern laws do not automatically invalidate a will witnessed by an interested witness if there are sufficient other disinterested witnesses. Furthermore, if a witness is an “interested” witness, there is merely a presumption that the witness caused the person whose will was witnessed to make gifts to the witness by means of undue influence, menace, fraud, or duress. This presumption may be rebutted by adequate proof to the contrary.
20“[This is] surely an extraordinary verdict, under the circumstances,” observes Benjamin Clark in “The Horsham Fiasco,” “for who, drunk or sober, would ever attempt to end his life by lying face down in a two-feet-deep puddle?”
21Why the colonel took the records is never explained. Was he perhaps contemplating blackmailing fellow members of the K.K.K.?
22A former royal burgh in Scotland, it was made a city in 1892. This industrial seaport was the site of the 1879 Tay Bridge disaster, in which the two-mile bridge—then the longest in the world—collapsed in heavy winds, killing all seventy-five passengers and crew aboard the evening train from Edinburgh. It stands as perhaps the worst rail disaster in British history. Support for the nomination of poet William McGonagall, a native of Dundee, as Scotland’s (and perhaps the world’s) worst poet can be found in his memorable 1890 poem, “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” which ends with the lines:
“Oh! Ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.”
23A hill in southern Hampshire, just north of Portsmouth, overlooking the Solent. Six forts were constructed there in 1868 to defend against possible attack by the French. The invasion never came, however, and the forts became known as “Palmerston’s Folly,” after the British prime minister who ordered them built.
24A market town and English Channel seaport in Hampshire, at the head of a creek opening into the north-western corner of the major harbour of Portsmouth. Arthur Conan Doyle knew this area well, having lived for several years in nearby Southsea and later purchasing a cottage in the neighbouring New Forest (Bignell Wood). This fondness for the area was apparently shared by Doctor Watson, who, when the weather was hot, longed for the glades of the New Forest and the shingle of Southsea (“The Cardboard Box”).
25In 1856, after the successful reforms of Rowland Hill (see “A Scandal in Bohemia,” note 24), the post office divided the city into eight postal districts (West Central, East Central, East, South East, South West, West, North West, and North). Each had its district post office, from which letters were distributed to the surrounding district.
26This sentence, repeated verbatim in the Strand Magazine and all book editions, would seem to make more sense as “Why did you not come to me.”
27The meaning of “ ‘Same old platform’ ” is far from clear, whether it was a literal railway platform on which a meeting took place or was arranged or the Ku Klux Klan’s stated “platform” of subjugating, torturing, and killing blacks and their collaborators.
28For almost fifty years, until reconstruction of Euston Station began in 1951, Waterloo Station was London’s most modern, the first terminus built in the twentieth century. Opened in 1838 as “Nine Elms,” the metropolitan station of the London & Southampton Railway, in 1848, it was taken over by the South Western Railway and altered and expanded. In 1854, the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company opened a cemetery nearby, and strange one-way traffic began at a private “necropolis” station at Waterloo, from which funeral trains with specially built hearse-carriages operated daily.
29Virtually every bit of internal evidence in “The Five Orange Pips” points to 1887 as the year in which the events occurred. Yet The Sign of Four, in which the Sholtos appeared, seems equally unalterably set in 1888. It is clear that the remark respecting the Sholtos and The Sign of Four is gratuitous at best. It has no relation to the flow of the story and contains none of the critical character that Watson’s readers have come to expect in Holmes’s comments respecting Watson’s literary efforts. What purpose does the remark serve? It seems likely that Watson was engaged in a bit of advertising for the recently published book. Note the proximity of publication dates: The Sign of Four, published in late 1890, and “The Five Orange Pips,” published in late 1891. What better way to boost sales of a relatively obscure novel than a “plug,” in modern parlance, in a “hot” new series of short stories. Watson, of course, could expect additional royalties from further sales, but suspicion for the marketing ploy rests heavily on Arthur Conan Doyle, who had yet to achieve marked financial success. It may well be that Watson made a much more lucrative commission arrangement with Conan Doyle for The Sign of Four than for the Adventures. Until the details of this arrangement come to light, however, investigators can only speculate on the contractual terms between this author and agent.
30Georges (Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric), Baron Cuvier (1769–1832), French zoologist and statesman, established the science of comparative anatomy and palaeontology and demonstrated that extinct animals could be “reconstructed” from fragmentary remains by applying his law of the “correlation of growth” (later observed by T. H. Huxley to have numerous exceptions, apparently unknown to Holmes). Holmes’s remark here is similar to his assertion in his article “The Book of Life” (quoted in A Study in Scarlet) that “[f]rom a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”
31The incident is recorded in the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet.
32Watson called Holmes’s knowledge of chemistry “profound” in A Study in Scarlet. Perhaps closer observation had led Wa
tson to amend his earlier characterisation.
33The latter seems to be “the pot calling the kettle black,” in light of Watson’s own habitual smoking of “ship’s” tobacco (A Study in Scarlet).
34Benjamin Clark, in “The Horsham Fiasco,” points out various irregularities in the case if the papers were indeed of “vital importance.” Whoever murdered Elias Openshaw, for instance, seemingly made no attempt to retrieve the papers after Openshaw’s death. Further, the delay of almost two years before Elias’s brother was contacted proves puzzling, writes Clark, for “while Colonel Openshaw was in possession of the papers he could not make public their contents without implicating himself, whereas his brother, if the records had still been in existence, ran no risk, and in fact might even, without being aware of their significance, have turned them over to the police who in turn would have given them to the American authorities.” Even more difficult to understand is how the murderers of John Openshaw’s father, if they were in fact Southern-accented Americans, managed to pursue him first to Horsham and then to Portsdown Hill without attracting his notice. With the records still uncollected, Clark quips, “Presumably there is no end to insomnia in Dixieland.”
35The original Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 and grew to become the most prominent of various secret terrorist organisations (the Knights of the White Camelia was another) promoting white resistance to post-Civil War Reconstruction. Contrary to the information in Holmes’s encyclopaedia, the name is believed to have been derived from the Greek word kuklos, meaning circle. The Klan was officially disbanded in 1869 by order of Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate cavalry general, after the increasing lawlessness of local chapters began to concern the society’s leaders. Such disbanding did little to stop various splinter groups from taking violent acts in the Klan’s name, and in 1870 Congress passed the Force Act, and in 1871 the Ku Klux Klan Act, authorizing federal prosecutions of Klan members. During the late 1870s, Southern political power gradually reverted to traditional white Democratic control, and the organisations disappeared as the need for secret anti-Republican groups diminished.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 26
