15Watson’s confidence in the honesty of the cabman, and his cavalier attitude toward Kate Whitney, who was anxiously awaiting the delivery of her husband—and Watson’s own wife, presumably by now in a similar state over her own husband—are astonishing at the least. In the view of Clifton R. Andrew (“What Happened to Watson’s Married Life After June 14, 1889?”), Watson failed to refer to Mrs. Watson in stories after “Man with the Twisted Lip” because their marriage ended in divorce, as a result of conduct such as Holmes suggests and Watson adopts here.
16This is an Anglo-Persian term, which formerly meant a noncombatant but later came to mean any extra personnel on shipboard and especially “native” (that is, non-white) sailors who supplemented the crews of European vessels in Eastern waters. The large steamship companies especially favoured them, reportedly on account of their greater docility, temperance, and obedience to orders.
17A “dog-cart” was an open one-horse vehicle with two transverse seats back-to-back, possibly with the rearmost seat made to close to form a box for dogs.
18David L. Hammer identifies the building now used as the Convent of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, in Belmont Hill, as The Cedars, Lee.
19D. Martin Dakin wonders at the identity of this mysterious “John,” pointing out that he could not be St. Clair’s coachman, or he would not have remained in London while Holmes rode away. Dakin suggests, “John . . . must have been one of those casual employés whom Holmes had at his beck and call all over London. . . . It is to be hoped that he did not wait too long next morning for the appointment that Holmes never kept.”
20Watson means “rack,” clouds, or a mass of cloud, driven before the wind in the upper air.
21This was Holmes’s own bank (“The Priory School”) as well as that of Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Cadogan West (“The Bruce-Partington Plans”).
22A box of wooden blocks for a child to build with.
23Indeed, the high tide for Monday, June 17, 1889, at London Bridge occurred at about 4:30 P.M.
24Short matches, with shanks of thin wax tapers. In Roman mythology, Vesta was the goddess of the hearth; she was assisted by the Vestal Virgins in assuring that the sacred fire never went out.
25Threadneedle Street is best known as the southern boundary of The Bank of England building, an irregular and isolated building of one storey devoid of windows. Alexander Holder, of Holder & Stevenson (“The Beryl Coronet”), also had his banking office in Threadneedle Street.
26One scholar computes that the pennies would have weighed over twelve pounds!
27On March 31, 1889, an Act of Parliament created a single new “Administrative County of London,” which included the City of London and parts of the counties of Middlesex, Surrey, and Kent (including Lee, which became a part of Lewisham). Holmes’s remark here, of “three English counties,” reflects what must have been the residual popular usage and not a legally accurate description.
28Because any local inquiries about St. Clair’s antecedents and habits would not have been likely to take several days, commentators look with grave suspicion on Holmes’s sojourn at The Cedars. Three distinct theories have evolved to explain it:
First, Roberta Pearson theorises that Holmes was enjoying an illicit liaison with Mrs. St. Clair. This possibility is considered further in note 30.
Alternatively, Bernard Davies, in “Holmes and the Halls,” argues that Neville St. Clair and Holmes were old friends. This preexisting friendship ultimately gave Holmes the knowledge of St. Clair’s background that he needed to solve the case. Holmes’s “solution” of the mystery is never explained, although, if Watson knew of their friendship, how Holmes came to the solution must have been obvious to Watson. Watson could only have omitted mention of the friendship at Holmes’s request, reflecting Holmes’s desire to repress publicity about his own background.
But D. Martin Dakin rejects this theory, noting that no sign of recognition is given when the two men later meet. Dakin continues, “I think it is more likely that Mrs. St. Clair herself was an old friend of Holmes, in no romantic sense, but possibly through his family, or in connection with some earlier case, and she had begged him to come and help her. . . . [Holmes] was perhaps rather shy of mentioning this to Watson, as he had made a point of being a friendless person.”
Brad Keefauver, in Sherlock and the Ladies, lends support to this third theory, which explains Holmes’s unexpected friendliness on the basis of a preexisting friendship with Mrs. St. Clair. Keefauver points out her outstanding qualities: (1) Courage, demonstrated by her charge into the opium den; (2) a “quick feminine eye” (and ear), evidenced by her uncanny bond with her husband (which Keefauver explains as observation of subtleties); and (3) a flair for the dramatic. “Such traits sound strangely familiar,” Keefauver observes, “and you have to wonder where she got them. Whether she picked them up genetically, as a cousin or sibling, or merely got them through close contact, as a childhood playmate, it would seem that Mrs. St. Clair came by her familiarity with Holmes quite naturally—as an old friend.” It must be admitted that the foregoing is more palatable than Mr. Keefauver’s other suggestion, in “Domesticity in Disguise,” that Neville St. Clair and Mrs. Neville St. Clair were not husband and wife (à la The Hound of the Baskervilles) but brother and sister, and that she was really the wife of Sherlock Holmes.
29A thin silk-like material similar to muslin (mousseline being French for muslin, soie for silk).
30“Surely as men of the world,” writes an amused Richard Asher in “Holmes and the Fair Sex,” “we can interpret [this posture] correctly.” As evidence that Mrs. St. Clair had “designs” on Holmes, Asher points to her insistence that Holmes stay at her house in Kent, an inconvenient seven miles from the scene of Holmes’s investigation; her attire and attitude at the arrival of Watson and Holmes seem less that of a bereaved wife than a “designing woman.” Another indication is her reaction to the arrival of Watson (who had met Holmes only by chance in the opium den), for Watson goes on to note that the sight of the two men caused her to give out “a cry which sank into a groan,” as Holmes simply shrugs. “Is it not abundantly clear that Holmes had brought Watson with him as a chaperon?” asks Asher. “Yet, even with [Watson sleeping in his room], Holmes does not seem to have felt quite secure, for he sat up all night on a pile of cushions smoking shag and probably ruminating over his narrow escape.”
C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Sarjeant, in Ms. Holmes of Baker Street: The Truth about Sherlock, see this incident as the plainest indication that Holmes was a woman. Of course, the entire incident is easily explicable by those who suggest a homosexual relationship between Holmes and Watson (for example, Larry Townsend’s The Sexual Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, first published by “J. Watson” in 1971).
31Yet “Mrs. St. Clair had fainted at the sight of the blood upon the window . . .”
32A printer’s term for the page size obtained by folding a printer’s sheet into eight leaves. In contrast, “folio size” is the result of folding a printer’s sheet once to make two leaves (four pages); “quarto size” is the product of folding a sheet twice, making four leaves (eight pages).
33In “The Blue Carbuncle,” Holmes wears a purple dressing gown; in “The Empty House” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” he sports a “mouse-coloured” gown. Whether Holmes owned three dressing gowns or one is addressed by Christopher Morley in “Was Sherlock Holmes an American?”: “Elementary. This particular gown was blue when new. . . . It had gone purple by the time of ‘The Blue Carbuncle.’ During the long absence 1891–1894, when Mrs. Hudson faithfully aired and sunned it in the backyard, it faded to mouse.” S. B. Blake suggests instead that Holmes had two gowns, one blue, one purple, that were burned in the fire set by Moriarty’s minions in April 1891 (see “The Final Problem”), and that Holmes acquired a third gown in Italy (see “The Empty House”), which he took with him during his travels in Tibet and elsewhere. Richard Lancelyn Green dismisses the controversy, observing that the
dressing-gown was likely borrowed from Neville St. Clair.
34A district in central London, it is so named for the stone cross placed there in 1290 by Edward I, marking the final stop of twelve along the route of the funeral procession for his first wife, Eleanor of Castile. (The decaying cross was destroyed in 1643 and replaced with a copy in 1863.) “Charing” is thought by some to be a corruption of chère reine, or French for “beloved queen”; others think it a corruption of the village “Cheringe” which stood there in the thirteenth century. It is frequently mentioned in the Canon, and Holmes and Watson regularly used the Charing Cross railway station and, in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a trap for a foreign agent was set at the Charing Cross Hotel. Even a century earlier, Samuel Johnson had remarked, “I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross.”
Today Charing Cross, long the home of antiquarian booksellers, may be best remembered from the title of Helene Hanff’s 1970 collection of letters 84, Charing Cross Road (and the subsequent film), inspired by her correspondence with a bookseller located there.
35A travelling bag or small portmanteau, opening out flat, named after W. E. Gladstone, prime minister of England.
36The “Surrey side” of London meant the area south of the Thames, predominantly working-class.
37The original Bow Street court was established in 1740 by Sir Thomas de Veil. His successor, Judge Henry Fielding, and his brother John in 1749 supplemented the court with a group of constables in an effort to combat the city’s widespread corruption, crime, and disorganised system of policing. The office’s stable of constables—originally known as “Robin Redbreasts” for their red waistcoats, and later known as the “Bow Street Runners”—were an important step in police reform. In 1836, the Bow Street Horse Patrol was subsumed by Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel’s ambitious new Metropolitan Police Force, created in 1829 (and known popularly as “Bobbies” or “Peelers”); in 1839, the Bow Street Foot Patrol came under the control of the Metropolitan force. The fame of the Bow Street Runners was helped in no small part by publication of Richmond; or, Scenes in the life of a Bow Street Officer (1827), probably written by Thomas Skinner Surr, which became a cornerstone of detective writing along with Vidoq’s memoirs (see Foreword).
Bow Street also gained fame as a magistrates’ court, where many of London’s high-profile criminal cases were tried. The building visited by Holmes and Watson, known as the “New Bow Street Police Court,” was constructed in 1878–1881 to better house both police station and court functions. The building was also marked by its distinctive outside lights, which were white rather than the traditional blue. These lights were used at the request of Queen Victoria, who frequently attended the nearby Opera House and disliked being reminded of the blue room in which her beloved Prince Albert had died.
38Bradstreet also appears in “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Engineer’s Thumb.” Bradstreet’s postings changed over time. Here, he is posted to the E Division of Scotland Yard. In “The Blue Carbuncle,” he was serving in B Division, according to the newspapers, and arrested John Horner. In “The Engineer’s Thumb,” he accompanied Holmes to Eyford, revealing himself to be assigned most likely to the central headquarters staff.
39Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated the telephone in 1876 with his famous statement “Watson—come here—I want you” (no known relation to the chronicler of these stories), and in 1889 Almon Strowger patented the direct-dial telephone. London’s communications were mainly handled by the National Telephone Co., which maintained numerous call-rooms throughout London and its districts that were open to the public at the rate of 3d. for each three minutes’ conversation.
40Nathan Bengis observes, “[H]ad [Holmes] been as adept in seeing through the disguises of others as he was in fooling others with his own, [he] would have solved this case practically at the start. . . . at no time during these close contacts did it occur to him that the ‘shock of orange hair’ and the ‘pale face disfigured by a horrible scar’ were—or even might be—a disguise.”
41“[W]hatever [Holmes] knew about putting on make-up, he seems to have known very little about getting the stuff off, if he thought it could be done with two rubs with a sponge moistened in water,” writes D. Martin Dakin. “As everyone knows who has ever taken part in theatricals, a very careful application of cold cream is necessary; any attempt to remove it with soap and water would have disastrous results.” Dakin concludes that Watson must have been exaggerating when describing St. Clair’s quick and dramatic transformation: “[I]n fact St. Clair must have presented a decidedly piebald appearance as he told his story.”
42Before the invention of electrical footlights, theatres were lit by limelight and gaslight, which required exaggerated face paint to achieve a “natural” look. These paints were often composed of toxic dyes and were crude and dangerous. Grease-paint sticks replaced powder-based make-up after their invention in the 1860s by Ludwig Leichner, a Wagnerian opera singer.
43As early as 1838, there were more than 8,000 professional beggars in London, and the public rewarded them with donations estimated at over £350,000 per year. Neville’s claimed earnings, therefore, while above average, are credible.
44That is, served as a guarantor or surety.
45“Dollar” was British slang for the crown, or 5-shilling piece.
46“The Man with the Twisted Lip” was published in December 1891 in the Strand Magazine, reporting events of June 1889. In Tit-Bits of January 17, 1891, an article entitled “A Day as a Professional Beggar” appeared. The author records that he had the idea of becoming a beggar for a day. He engaged a small room in a back street and, applying a change of clothes and some make-up, stationed himself in the street. The anonymous author recounts how he received a severe fright when he saw his closest friend with a lady of his acquaintance approaching him. He reports that he earned three shillings and sixpence for his day’s “work.” Did Neville St. Clair break his “most solemn oaths” and return to begging?
47“Imagine . . . a superintendent of police being complaisant enough to overlook a systematic robbery of the public by a fraudulent beggar, and undertaking without demur not to prosecute,” J. B. Mackenzie writes in “Sherlock Holmes’ Plots and Strategy,” in 1902.
48John D. Beirle makes much of two points in the story, the previously unknown character of Mary Morstan Watson as a “lighthouse” (see note 6) and her reference to her husband as “James” (see Appendix). “Viewed objectively,” he concludes, “The Man with the Twisted Lip gives evidence of hasty and even careless composition by someone not familiar with Dr. Watson’s family life.” He infers that the story was not written by Watson but rather by Arthur Conan Doyle. Beirle’s view is not a popular one.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE1
Esteemed Holmes scholar and writer Christopher Morley referred to “The Blue Carbuncle” as “a Christmas story without slush,” and some readers favour the story—the only tale in the Canon set in the holiday season—over such traditional fare as Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” Like Frank Capra’s brilliant film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the tale of the stolen gem commemorates the triumph of compassion over justice. There are gems within the story, to be sure: Holmes’s tour-de-force deductions from hapless Henry Baker’s hat, Holmes’s deception of Breckinridge, the sporting seller of geese, and the clever but ultimately foolish plan of the criminal to smuggle the countess’s carbuncle to his “fence” in Kilburn. What draws us back each year, however, is the evident warmth of the friendship between Holmes and Watson, as Watson travels from his married household to visit his bachelor friend and wish him “compliments of the season.” Sherlock Holmes, too, appears more human, less the “perfect reasoner,” again taking the law into his own hands. After all, he concludes magnanimously, “It is the season of forgiveness.”
I HAD CALLED UPON my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.2 He was
lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of examination.
“You are engaged,” said I; “perhaps I interrupt you.”
“Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one” (he jerked his thumb in the direction of the old hat) “but there are points in connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest, and even of instruction.”
“A very seedy hard felt hat.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with the ice crystals. “I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery, and the punishment of some crime.”
“No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such.”
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 31
