25Gems were customarily weighed in carats, the precise weight of which varied from country to country. An English carat of 1889 was 3.163 troy grains, which would make the weight of the blue carbuncle 12.62 English carats. Such a gem would not be “rather smaller than a bean in size.” For comparison, the Hope Diamond weighs 177 grains, roughly 45 carats.
26Only diamonds are crystallised charcoal. A garnet is a combination of the elements of magnesium, calcium, manganese or ferrous iron, together with any of the elements of aluminum, ferric iron, or chromium. So what was the “blue carbuncle”? Doyle W. Beckmeyer suggests that it was a star sapphire; several other scholars propose a blue diamond. D. A. Redmond, in “Some Chemical Problems in the Canon,” makes the interesting observation that “carbonado” is one name for a massive black diamond , an impure, dark-coloured diamond used for drilling. Thus the “blue carbonado” might be a reference to the rare occurrence of a gem discovered in a mass of carbonado, with the gem’s extensive travel corrupting the term to the “blue carbuncle.”
27The gamebird known as the woodcock has no crop. See “A Winter’s Crop,” page 224.
28A tam-o’-shanter; a soft woollen brimless hat with a flat circular crown. The fiery tropical pepper “Scotch bonnet” is so named for the resemblance its fruit bears to this hat.
29An adaptation of a phrase in one of Horace’s Satires (Satires I, 4, line 62): “Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetae” (“You would still find the limbs of the dismembered poet”).
30Although London boasted other museums in 1889 (for example, the splendid South Kensington Museum held most of the art and artifacts gathered for the great Exhibition of 1851), the Museum was the British Museum, founded in 1753 and located on Great Russell Street, a few blocks from where the goose was found. Speculation as to Baker’s occupation has led D. Martin Dakin to suggest that he was a “down-and-out” professor studying archaeology, or, more likely, a hack writer collecting material for another man’s work. Dean and Shirley Dickensheet argue that Baker was a uniformed guard or attendant at the British Museum.
31Probably best known for its association with poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, whose passionate, clandestine correspondence—574 letters in twenty months—took place while the invalid Barrett was living with her possessive father at 50 Wimpole Street in the early 1840s. The story of the two poets, who married and moved to Italy in 1846, was immortalised in the 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street by Rudolf Besier, made into a movie by director Sidney Franklin in 1934 (and remade by him in 1957, in a version including Sir John Gielgud as Mr. Barrett—Gielgud played Sherlock Holmes in BBC Light Programme radio broadcasts in the 1950s). It has also been produced twice for television, once starring John Neville as Robert Browning (1961)—Neville went on to play Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Terror, 1965—and once featuring Jeremy Brett in the same rôle (1982). (Brett starred as Holmes in the Granada television series from 1984 to 1994.) The last version also included British actor Nigel Stock as a minor character—Stock played Dr. Watson in a short-lived 1964 BBC television series.
In late 1890, Arthur Conan Doyle established a consulting room in Upper Wimpole Street.
32Wigmore Street derives its name from Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer and Baron Harley of Wigmore Castle. In The Sign of Four, Watson patronised the Wigmore Street Post Office, a visit deduced by Holmes from the distinct mould on Watson’s instep.
33A residential and academic district of Camden borough, Bloomsbury in the late nineteenth century was the site of the British Museum, the College of Preceptors, University College, and the University College Hospital. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Sedley family (Vanity Fair, 1847) lived there. Culturally, the area is perhaps best known for the “Bloomsbury group,” a group of English intellectuals (including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and, variously, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster) who met frequently for drinks and conversation between 1907 and 1930 at the homes of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Members of the group, most of them educated at Cambridge, were renowned for casting aside the mores of Victorian society and publicly embracing unconventionality, whether in intellectual thought, artistic expression, or sexual freedom. Beyond their immense literary and artistic achievements, the members’ famously libertine romantic entanglements—artist Duncan Grant’s fathering a child by Vanessa Bell, for example, whose brother, Adrian, was Grant’s former lover; or the platonic yet devoted “marriage” of homosexual biographer Strachey and heterosexual artist Dora Carrington—have also attracted attention in recent years.
Holmes and the Bloomsbury group were approximate contemporaries, but in outlook they were the products of vastly different eras. While Holmes may have been characterised by Watson as “Bohemian,” one cannot imagine Holmes, whose sexuality is virtually unmentioned in the Canon (with the extremely limited exception of his feelings about “the woman,” mentioned in “A Scandal in Bohemia”), being comfortable in the company of this group’s members, rushing as they were headlong toward modernism. Indeed, notwithstanding the detective’s description of a staid Watson in “His Last Bow,” it is Holmes, not Watson, who is truly the “one fixed point in a changing age.”
34Christopher Morley expresses the view that “the Alpha Inn” was the Museum Tavern. The other candidate is the “Plough” at the corner of Museum and Little Russell Streets, put forward on the tenuous grounds that Alpha is the largest star in the constellation of the Plough. Regardless of the choice, it is pleasant to think of Sherlock Holmes visiting these pubs in his pre-detective years. With his rooms in Montague Street (mentioned in “The Musgrave Ritual”), the Museum Tavern was less than two blocks away from Holmes’s first London lodgings.
David L. Hammer suggests, in For the Sake of the Game, that Watson concealed the name of the pub, which surely would not have suffered from publicity, out of sheer habit.
British ale predates the Roman conquest of England, and British ale houses (pubs) were conducting their businesses before the Norman conquest. A neologism of the Victorian age, the “pub” (short for “public house”), an outgrowth of the coach-houses and taverns and inns necessitated by horse-powered travel, with its frequent stops, flourished even after the advent of the railways. In 1869, there were 118,602 licensed premises (almost twice as many as today).
35High Holborn is the eastern extension of New Oxford Street. Milton once lived here, and condemned criminals were conducted along this route to hangings at Tyburn.
36Windigate undoubtedly refers to Covent Garden Market. But according to Baedeker, Covent Garden Market was at the time the main vegetable, fruit, and flower market in London, and it is unlikely that geese were sold there. The name is a corruption of “convent garden,” for produce was once grown here for the monks of Westminster Abbey; the site also housed the Royal Opera Theatre, which first opened in 1732 (as the Theatre Royal) and was burned to the ground twice in the 1800s. The entire market was relocated in 1974, but conservationists battled to preserve the buildings and won. They remain, adapted to other uses, and Covent Garden is now a popular shopping and entertainment precinct.
Baedeker indicates that there were two markets specialising in poultry, the “Market for Pork, Poultry and Provisions,” at Smithfield, and the Leadenhall Market, on Leadenhall Street, “where poultry and game have been sold for at least 400 years.”
37Penal servitude had three stages: (1) solitary confinement in a “close” prison, limited to nine months but with the prisoner engaged in some industrial employment; (2) a period of labour at a “public works” prison, and finally (3) conditional release for the unexpired portion of the sentence upon licence or ticket-of-leave if the prisoner earned “marks” of credit for remission of up to one-quarter of his or her sentence.
38This seems to be in the sense of having to do with horse racing, that is, characteristic of the manners, dress, or tastes of horsemen or the habitués of racetracks (rather than a suggestion
that Breckinridge resembled a horse), as indicated by Holmes’s later observation to Watson about Breckinridge’s sideburns and his copy of the “Pink ’un,” lending him the air of a gambling man.
39D. Martin Dakin observes that Holmes, who had no client to cover his expenses, must have been financially solvent enough at this time to spend a sovereign (a pound, or almost twice Watson’s daily wound pension of 11s. 6d., mentioned in A Study in Scarlet) to get the information he wanted from Mr. Breckinridge. Of course, he may have planned to claim the £1,000 offered by the countess for the recovery of the stone.
40No. 117 stood on a corner site, the side running along Blackwell Street, which used to be known as Baker Street!
41The popular name for the Sporting Times, a weekly paper published from 1865 to 1931. Like the Financial Times, it was printed on pink paper.
42Prussia was a kingdom of Europe, the largest state of the German Empire; its capital was Berlin. William I, who assumed the Prussian throne in 1861, was proclaimed kaiser of the German Empire in 1871 after victories in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars (instigated by William I’s premier, Otto von Bismarck) confirmed Prussia’s dominance. As creator of the German empire, it was Bismarck (now chancellor, or “The Iron Chancellor”), not the empire’s sovereign, who held the reins in shaping German domestic policy and in orchestrating international relations throughout Europe. Bismarck resigned in 1890 after a power struggle with William II, who had succeeded Frederick III as “King of Proosia” in 1888.
43Pentonville penitentiary, which opened in London in 1842, subscribed to a rather severe disciplinary system and served as a model for incarceration not only in England but also throughout Europe. The new system was so lauded because London’s prisons had historically been notoriously ineffective as instruments of punishment and notoriously corrupt. At Pentonville, a combination of solitary confinement and labour was meant to “crush the will,” according to Robert Hughes. In addition to the twelve-hour days of cobbling or weaving, Hughes continues, “Whenever the prisoner stepped outside his cell for muster or exercise, he was required to don a woolen mask with eyeholes so that he could neither recognize nor be recognized by his fellow-prisoners. The Pentonville chapel, where prisoners were assembled every day, was designed with a separate box for each prisoner; wooden partitions and a door in each box assured that no convict could see the man to right or left of him, only the preacher in the ‘cackle tub’ or pulpit.”
44There was precedent for this method of conveyance. T. S. Blakeney notes in “Some Disjecta Membra” that Sir Robert Walpole’s steward, John Wrott, used to send the rents he collected to his master inside geese, in order to hoodwink highwaymen, who in those days (early eighteenth century) infested the roads from Norfolk to London.
45In “The Priory School,” Holmes accuses the Duke of Holdernesse of condoning a felony; in “The Mazarin Stone,” Holmes agrees to compound a felony; and in “The Three Gables,” he says: “Well, well, I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual.” One wonders whether commuting here is confused with committing, condoning, or compounding. British Counsel E. J. C. concludes that no typographical error has occurred and that Holmes meant “commuting,” in the sense of exchanging Ryder’s punishment for one less severe. However, in England, according to E. J. C., the power to commute “is a prerogative of the Crown and may not be delegated to a subject.” William S. Baring-Gould ponders, “Is Holmes by any chance hinting here that he—like John Clay—had royal blood in his veins? These are deep waters, indeed . . .”
46Robert Keith Leavitt computes that in Holmes’s sixty cases of record there are thirty-seven definite felonies where the criminal was known to him. In fourteen of these cases Holmes freed the guilty person.
47This might seem to imply that Holmes, seized even further by the holiday spirit, did not accept the countess’s reward. Although Watson fails to mention any further benevolent actions of Holmes, D. Martin Dakin believes that Holmes shared the reward with Peterson and Henry Baker and arranged for Horner’s immediate release.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND1
Scholars have delighted in the minutae of “The Speckled Band,” arguing over the identity of the “speckled band” (whose characteristics defy those known to science), whether Holmes again takes justice into his own hands or an accident occurs, and the geographical sources of cheetahs and baboons. Conan Doyle, knowing a good story when he heard it, turned Watson’s tale into a highly successful stage play. Perhaps second only to “The Red-Headed League” in its popularity, “The Speckled Band” has Gothic elements to thrill every reader, and the confrontation between Dr. Grimesby Roylott and Sherlock Holmes is broadly melodramatic and highly satisfying.
IN GLANCING OVER my notes of the seventy odd cases2 in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic. Of all these varied cases, however, I cannot recall any which presented more singular features than that which was associated with the well-known Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran. The events in question occurred in the early days of my association with Holmes, when we were sharing rooms as bachelors, in Baker Street. It is possible that I might have placed them upon record before, but a promise of secrecy was made at the time, from which I have only been freed during the last month by the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given. It is perhaps as well that the facts should now come to light, for I have reasons to know there are widespread rumours as to the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott which tend to make the matter even more terrible than the truth.
It was early in April, in the year ’83, that I woke one morning to find Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. He was a late riser as a rule, and as the clock on the mantelpiece showed me that it was only a quarter-past seven, I blinked up at him in some surprise, and perhaps just a little resentment, for I was myself regular in my habits.
“Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,” said he, “but it’s the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.”
“What is it, then? A fire?”
“No, a client. It seems that a young lady has arrived in a considerable state of excitement, who insists upon seeing me. She is waiting now in the sitting-room. Now, when young ladies wander about the Metropolis at this hour of the morning and knock sleepy people up out of their beds, I presume that it is something very pressing which they have to communicate. Should it prove to be an interesting case, you would, I am sure, wish to follow it from the outset. I thought at any rate that I should call you, and give you the chance.”
A young lady has arrived in a considerable state of excitement.
John Alan Maxwell, The Golden Book, December 1930
“My dear fellow, I would not miss it for anything.”
I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis, with which he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him. I rapidly threw on my clothes, and was ready in a few minutes to accompany my friend down to the sitting-room. A lady dressed in black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in the window, rose as we entered.
“Good morning, madam,” said Holmes cheerily. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Ha! I am glad to see that Mrs. Hudson has had the good sense to light the fire. Pray draw up to it, and I shall order you a cup of hot coffee, for I observe that you are shivering.”
“It is not cold which makes me shiver,” said the woman in a low voice, changing her seat as requested.
“What, then
?”
“It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror.” She raised her veil as she spoke, and we could see that she was indeed in a pitiable state of agitation, her face all drawn and grey, with restless, frightened eyes, like those of some hunted animal. Her features and figure were those of a woman of thirty, but her hair was shot with premature grey, and her expression was weary and haggard.
Sherlock Holmes ran her over with one of his quick, all-comprehensive glances.
“You must not fear,” said he, soothingly, bending forward and patting her forearm. “We shall soon set matters right, I have no doubt. You have come in by train this morning, I see.”
“You know me, then?”
“No, but I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your left glove. You must have started early, and yet you had a good drive in a dog-cart, along heavy roads, before you reached the station.”
“She raised her veil.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
The lady gave a violent start, and stared in bewilderment at my companion.
“There is no mystery, my dear madam,” said he, smiling. “The left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven places. The marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left-hand side of the driver.”
“Whatever your reasons may be, you are perfectly correct,” said she. “I started from home before six, reached Leatherhead3 at twenty past,4 and came in by the first train to Waterloo. Sir, I can stand this strain no longer, I shall go mad if it continues. I have no one to turn to—none, save only one, who cares for me, and he, poor fellow, can be of little aid. I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes; I have heard of you from Mrs. Farintosh, whom you helped in the hour of her sore need. It was from her that I had your address. Oh, sir, do you not think that you could help me, too, and at least throw a little light through the dense darkness which surrounds me? At present it is out of my power to reward you for your services, but in a month or two5 I shall be married, with the control of my own income, and then at least you shall not find me ungrateful.”
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 35
