“Well, very soon I found that I was saving considerable sums of money. I do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London could earn seven hundred pounds a year—which is less than my average takings—but I had exceptional advantages in my power of making up, and also in a facility of repartee, which improved by practice, and made me quite a recognized character in the City. All day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very bad day upon which I failed to take two pounds.
“As I grew richer I grew more ambitious, took a house in the country, and eventually married, without any one having a suspicion as to my real occupation. My dear wife knew that I had business in the City. She little knew what.
“Last Monday I had finished for the day, and was dressing above the opium den, when I looked out of my window and saw, to my horror and astonishment, that my wife was standing in the street, with her eyes fixed full upon me. I gave a cry of surprise, threw up my arms to cover my face, and rushing to my confidant, the Lascar, entreated him to prevent any one from coming up to me. I heard her voice downstairs, but I knew that she could not ascend. Swiftly I threw off my clothes, pulled on those of a beggar, and put on my pigments and wig. Even a wife’s eyes could not pierce so complete a disguise. But then it occurred to me that there might be a search in the room, and that the clothes might betray me. I threw open the window, re-opening by my violence a small cut which I had inflicted upon myself in the bedroom that morning. Then I seized my coat, which was weighted by the coppers which I had just transferred to it from the leather bag in which I carried my takings. I hurled it out of the window, and it disappeared into the Thames. The other clothes would have followed, but at that moment there was a rush of constables up the stair, and a few minutes after I found, rather, I confess, to my relief, that instead of being identified as Mr. Neville St. Clair, I was arrested as his murderer.
“I do not know that there is anything else for me to explain. I was determined to preserve my disguise as long as possible, and hence my preference for a dirty face. Knowing that my wife would be terribly anxious, I slipped off my ring, and confided it to the Lascar at a moment when no constable was watching me, together with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause to fear.”
“That note only reached her yesterday,” said Holmes.
“Good God! What a week she must have spent!”
“The police have watched this Lascar,” said Inspector Bradstreet, “and I can quite understand that he might find it difficult to post a letter unobserved. Probably he handed it to some sailor customer of his, who forgot all about it for some days.”
“That was it,” said Holmes, nodding approvingly, “I have no doubt of it. But have you never been prosecuted for begging?”
“Many times; but what was a fine to me?”
“It must stop here, however,” said Bradstreet. “If the police are to hush this thing up, there must be no more of Hugh Boone.”
“I have sworn it by the most solemn oaths which a man can take.”46
“In that case I think that it is probable that no further steps may be taken.47 But if you are found again, then all must come out. I am sure, Mr. Holmes, that we are very much indebted to you for having cleared the matter up. I wish I knew how you reach your results.”
“I reached this one,” said my friend, “by sitting upon five pillows and consuming an ounce of shag. I think, Watson, that if we drive to Baker Street we shall just be in time for breakfast.”48
“A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME . . .”
THE NARRATOR of “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” who purports to be John H. Watson, M.D., is at home with his wife when Kate Whitney unexpectedly arrives. Watson’s wife invites Kate: “[S]it here comfortably and tell us all about [your problem]. Or should you rather than I sent James off to bed?”
The identity of “James” has plagued students of the Canon for more than sixty years, with the proposed solutions ranging from the mundane to the grotesque. Among the more benign proposals is Dorothy L. Sayers’s famous suggestion, in her essay “Dr. Watson’s Christian Name,” that “James” is an affectionate reference to Watson’s middle name of “Hamish,” the Scots for “James.” In another version of the “pet name” theory, Ebbe Curtis Hoff proposes that “James” was a playful reference to Watson’s role as Holmes’s Boswell—James Boswell.
An ingenious innocent explanation is proffered by Donald A. Yates, in “An Illumination of the ‘John/James’ Question,” who proposes that this “slip” was a familial codeword employed by Watson’s wife (to whom troubled friends came “like birds to a lighthouse”) meaning “John, leave us alone to talk privately.” However, H. W. Bell, in Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: The Chronology of Their Adventures, dismisses “James” as a mere typographical error; similarly John Ball Jr., in “Early Days in Baker Street,” asserts that Watson’s scribbled “John” could have been misread as “James” by the typographer. Dorothy Sayers rejects the “typographical error” theory on the basis that Watson must have reread the story in various book editions and never corrected it. Unlike other errors, one would expect Watson to remember his own name!
Casting the blame on Mrs. Watson, Christopher Morley (“Was Sherlock Holmes An American?”) ascribes the “James” to forgetfulness on the part of Mrs. Watson, even going so far as to suggest that this slip may have led to the Watsons’ eventual separation.
Others pin the “James” discrepancy on Dr. Watson, claiming that the “James” reference was deliberate. For example, in “John and James,” Giles Playfair argues that Watson intentionally falsified the records by having his wife refer to him as “James” (to avoid a possible libel action by Isa Whitney or Neville St. Clair), but later threw in the cabby’s name, “John,” as a clue to the true author of “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” The possibility that Watson’s name was really “James,” while he chose for some unspecified reason to use “John H.” as his pen name, is advanced by J. S. Coltart. Thomas I. Francis suggests that Watson deliberately left or placed the name “James” in the manuscript to show other women that his wife did not even know his name. “The use of ‘James’ provides a clue as to why this marriage did not last,” Francis writes.
Some scholars see the “James” reference as an indication of a “second hand” in the narrative. For example, T. S. Blakeney writes, “Composite authorship may generally be attributed to historical writings, irrespective of whether the original record was the work of the putative author or of another person of the same name; and the suggestion arises that the ‘James’ Watson spoke of in The Man with the Twisted Lip may be one of these editors.”
There are numerous suggestions that “James” refers to some person other than the narrator. Least disruptive to the traditional view of the Watson household is Ralph A. Ashton’s thought that “James” was the name of Watson’s bull pup. More radical are ideas that “James was Watson’s stepson, by the doctor’s marriage to Mrs Forrester rather than to Mary Watson” (A. Carson Simpson, in “It Must Have Been Two Other Fellows”) or that “[t]here must have been a former husband—James by name . . .” (Arthur K. Akers). Ruth Berman, in “James Watson,” hypothesises that “James” is not an error or a pet name for Dr. Watson but a reference to an adopted son—a child young enough to be described as being sent to bed, and whose death was the “sad bereavement” to which Watson referred in “The Empty House.” Corroborative evidence, the author argues, is the extra room in the Watson’s flat mentioned in “The Crooked Man.” A similar notion, that “James” was John and Mary’s newly born son who failed to survive infancy, is proposed by C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Sarjeant.
Even more fantastic is Bliss Austin’s speculation, entitled “What Son Was Watson? A Case of Identity,” that there were two Watsons, John and James; that John died prematurely (shortly after the adventure of “The Reigate Squires”); and that James, seizing a good opportunity, thereupon masqueraded as his elder brother. Equally outré is Ian Neil Abrams’s su
ggestion that there were identical twins named John and James Watson. Abrams proposes that during that fateful day in Afghanistan, John was wounded in the shoulder and James in the leg. It was John who met Holmes in Bart’s and who originally shared rooms with him in the Baker Street flat. But later, as his practice developed, it was James who would actually occupy the room. It was James who shared the adventure of The Sign of Four and subsequently married Mary Morstan; it was James who attended John’s practice during the frequent intervals when “the game was afoot.” Holmes may or may not have known the truth, suggests Abrams.
The “deutero-Watson” theories actually find support in a letter from Arthur Conan Doyle to the editor of the Strand Magazine on March 4, 1908: “I don’t suppose so far as I see that I should write [sic] a new ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series but I see no reason why I should not do an occasional scattered story under some such heading as ‘Reminiscences of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Extracted from the diaries of his friend, Dr. James Watson).’”
But for sheer audacity, no proposed solution can match that expounded by Robert S. Katz and David N. Haugen. Haugen explains their idea: “Mary’s ‘James’ in The Twisted Lip was not the result of a mistake, typographical error, forgetfulness, or any other previously cited reason. On that quiet evening she had been silently reliving those days of love with her most ardent suitor. During the ensuing turmoil, it was his name, ‘James,’ she spoke, not that of her new husband.” That man: James Moriarty!
1“The Man with the Twisted Lip” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1891. It appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer a month before its appearance in the New York Strand Magazine (January 1892) as “The Strange Tale of a Beggar.” See “A Scandal in Bohemia,” note 1.
2No such college exists—perhaps Watson here conceals the Roman Catholic Missionary College of St. Joseph.
3Opium, obtained by processing the juice from unripe poppy-seed pods, has as its principal ingredient the alkaloid morphine, a narcotic that may be processed further to create heroin. Cultivated as long ago as 3400 B.C. by the Sumerians, who called it “Hul Gil,” or “the joy plant,” opium spread throughout the East and eventually made its way to England and America, where it was used for both medicinal and recreational purposes. With the conquest of India, England actively fostered the cultivation and trade of the drug through the British East India Company, which had a government-controlled monopoly on its Indian trade. So important did opium become to the British economy that efforts by China (which had outlawed the drug in 1799) to halt its import led the British to instigate and claim victory in two “Opium Wars,” in 1839–1842 (which also resulted in the cession of Hong Kong to England) and 1856–1860, and British importation of opium from India to China increased annually.
The British government took steps to curb opium use in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but by then the genie was well out of the bottle. Although opium was commonly viewed as a symbol of Eastern licentiousness and corruption, the lure of its calming, euphoric properties claimed some famous literary addicts, including poets Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Coleridge (whose “Kubla Khan” was inspired by an opium-induced dream), and John Keats and novelist Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone, The Woman in White). Critics have speculated that Lewis Carroll’s fantastic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was written as a result of (or at least referred to) opium use.
The drug’s addictive properties were not well understood. The 1888 Encylopœdia Britannica scoffed at any notion that smoking opium might be considered dangerous, comparing the smoking of opium—which enabled smokers “to undergo great fatigue and to go for a considerable time with little or no food”—to moderate alcohol or tobacco consumption. Ultimately, “[w]hen carried to excess it becomes an inveterate habit; but this happens chiefly in individuals of weak will-power, who would just as easily become the victims of intoxicating drinks, and who are practically moral imbeciles, also addicted to other forms of depravity.”
This view—that use of drugs such as opium, cocaine, and morphine could be beneficial—sounds much like Holmes’s defence of his use of cocaine: “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment” (The Sign of Four). Watson did not share this view (“Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?” [The Sign of Four]) and exerted continuous efforts over the length of his partnership with Holmes to wean him from drug usage, knowing full well that his task could never be completed.
4Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), English essayist and critic. His best-known work was Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, first published in the London Magazine in 1821. Although the work’s avowed purpose was to warn the reader of the dangers of opium, it combined a journalistic exposé of the subject with a contradictory picture of the subjective pleasures of drug addiction: “Thou has the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!” Not surprisingly, De Quincey remained an opium addict until his death.
5An alcoholic preparation of opium in liquid form, commonly administered as a pain reliever in Victorian times.
6There is no indication in The Sign of Four—or any other tale in which she is mentioned, for that matter—that Mary Morstan has this character, and John D. Beirle points this out in “The Curious Incident of the Drive Through Middlesex and Surrey.” Ian McQueen argues that Watson’s use of the past tense—“came” instead of “come”—signifies that in 1891, when “The Man with the Twisted Lip” was published, Mary Morstan was dead.
7Explanations of the reference to a person named “James”—of course Watson’s first name is John—range from the ingenious to the outlandish and are collected in “ ‘A Rose by Any Other Name . . .’ ” on page 194.
8This was a disguised name. J. C. Parkinson, in his Places and people, being studies from life (1869), reports visiting an opium den, which he refers to as Yahee’s (the proprietor’s name). Charles Dickens (Jr.)’s Dickens’s Dictionary of London (1879) notes Johnstone’s garret, off the Ratcliff Highway (mentioned in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870—see note 12) and Johnny Chang’s den in the London and St. Katharine Coffee-house, in the Ratcliff Highway, as popular opium smoking dens. J. Hall Richardson’s “Ratcliff Highway and the Opium Dens of To-Day,” which appeared in Cassell’s Saturday Journal of January 17, 1891, described a “Mahogany Bar” among other dockside haunts of “wily Lascars.” In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), the opium den was named The Wheel of Fortune.
9There is, or was, no “Upper Swandam Lane” in London, and the commentators have been unable to agree on an identification.
10Until the middle of the eighteenth century, London Bridge was the only bridge over the Thames in London. The first London Bridge was built by the Romans circa 43 A.D., but as it was made of wood, it proved susceptible to fire, flood, and attack and had to be rebuilt several times. (One such rebuilding was necessitated after Anglo Saxons and Vikings sailed up the Thames to attack London and were showered with spears by Danes defending the bridge; the attackers covered their heads with the roofs of nearby houses, getting close enough to the bridge to pull it down with ropes. The incident is popularly thought to be the basis for the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down.”)
The first London Bridge to be made of stone was completed in 1209; the bridge referred to here was opened in 1831 and stood slightly north of the old bridge (which was by then dismantled). The 1831 structure stood for over a century, until it was transported to Lake Havasu, Arizona, in 1968. Baedeker noted in 1896: “It is estimated that, in spite of the relief afforded by the Tower Bridge, 22,000 ve
hicles and about 110,000 pedestrians cross London Bridge daily.”
11A store where ready-made, cheap, or inferior garments are sold. The term is derived from the meaning of “slop” as a loose covering garment for workmen, such as a surplice, smock, or overalls, and can be traced to Chaucer (1386).
12Watson’s description may be compared with that in “A Night in an Opium Den,” by the anonymous author of “A Dead Man’s Diary,” which appeared in the June 1891 issue of the Strand Magazine. (The article is generally regarded now as wholly fictional.) Other authors of the time who attempted to depict the squalour of the opium den include Oscar Wilde, whose The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) spoke of “opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new” and where Dorian Gray, himself craving the drug, is fascinated by “the twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes” he sees in one such place. In Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the protagonist, John Jasper, awakens “in the meanest and closest of small rooms,” sharing a bed with “a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The first two are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. . . . ‘Another?’ says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. ‘Have another?’” Charles Dickens, Jr., identified the room as an accurate depiction of “Johnstone’s garret” (see note 8).
13Watson is in error about the day, the month, or the year: June 19, 1889, was a Wednesday.
14An opium pipe consists of a long stem and metal bowl. Although opium use was subjected to various legal restrictions, as late as 1907, the British continued to sell opium to China and other countries, and the normally staid Encyclopœdia Britannica, in its 1910 edition, continued to carry instructions for its use.
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 30
