A similar view—of a varied armoury—is expressed by Harald Curjel, in “Some Further Thoughts on Canonical Weaponry,” who identifies either the .450/455 Tranter Army pistol or the Adams Central Fire Breech-loading revolver as Watson’s “service” revolver, the Webley “bulldog” as another weapon of Watson’s, yet a third (unidentified) revolver in “Thor Bridge,” and finally a different weapon altogether in “The Speckled Band,” for the “Eley No. 2,” Curjel contends, would fit none of these.
1“The Speckled Band” was published in the Strand Magazine in February 1892.
2Frank Waters estimates (“Upon the Probable Number of Cases of Mr. Sherlock Holmes”) that by the time of his retirement in late October 1903, Holmes had handled some 1,700 cases.
3A small town on the river Mole, Leatherhead is one of the claimants to be “Highbury,” the “large and populous village, almost amounting to a town” of Jane Austen’s 1816 novel Emma. In that novel, Highbury’s drawing rooms and gardens provide a genteel setting for Emma Woodhouse’s machinations, although she does fear “the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second-rate and third-rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever . . .”
4Roger T. Clapp, in “The Curious Problem of the Railway Timetables,” refers to a Bradshaw of the period and the A B C Railway Guide in discovering that Holmes’s new client could not, in fact, have followed the route described here and still reached Baker Street by seven. The earliest train from Leatherhead to Waterloo left at 7:22, arriving at 8:11. Even the earlier train to London Bridge did not leave Leatherhead until 7:13. In short, Watson must have altered the location of “Stoke Moran” (presumably to protect the confidentiality of Holmes’s client) without correcting the train times. Clapp notes that there is only one correct train time given in the entire Canon.
5“A month or six weeks” in the Strand Magazine and American editions.
6Because the case of Mrs. Farintosh preceded Watson’s shared residence with Holmes and therefore Holmes’s residence at Baker Street, Howard Collins considers how Helen Stoner got the Baker Street address. If Holmes presented his bill to Mrs. Farintosh after moving to Baker Street, however, the mystery is solved.
7Apparently Holmes has progressed in his career; compare his statement to Watson in A Study in Scarlet that “I listen to [my clients’] story, they listen to my comments, and then I pocket my fee.”
8Michael Harrison, in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, surmises that “Stoke Moran” seems an obvious alias for the village of Stoke D’Abernon, located three miles from Leatherhead.
9Also known as “Berks,” this county (broken up in 1998) is home to Windsor Castle and Eton College, the famed boys’ boarding school that educated such luminaries as Prime Minister William Gladstone, economist John Maynard Keynes, and author Aldous Huxley.
10Hampshire county’s most notable literary residents were Jane Austen, who lived there for most of her life and was buried there in 1817 at Winchester Cathedral, and Arthur Conan Doyle, who first established a medical practice at Southsea, Hampshire, only to turn to writing as a sideline. Winchester also houses in its Great Hall what has long been regarded as the legendary Round Table of King Arthur fame—although it has now been established that the table was built in the late thirteenth or fourteenth century, in contrast to the supposed period of Arthur’s reign in the late fifth or early sixth century. (Adding to the confusion is Sir Thomas Malory’s identification, in his 1485 book Le Morte D’Arthur, of Winchester as the original Camelot, an assertion since widely discounted.)
11That is, the last nine years of the reign of George III, 1811–1820. It was during this period that the king’s insanity rendered him unfit to rule, and the Prince of Wales (later George IV) acted as regent in his father’s stead; the conclusion of the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic wars saw Britain plunge into a period of economic depression and social unrest.
12Then capital of British India and a glittering manifestation of British rule, its population has exploded from around 1 million at the beginning of the twentieth century to over 11 million today. The population is expected to increase by another 50 percent in the next ten to fifteen years. Victorian architecture is still notably present throughout Calcutta today. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, British India was beginning to echo with calls for reform. Following the bloody Indian Mutiny of 1857 (see the appendix on page 605), the East India Company—which had run India for nearly a century, since shortly after one of its military officials, Robert Clive, recaptured Calcutta from the nawab of Bengal—was abolished and power transferred to the Crown. Steps were made in the early 1860s toward allowing Indians to participate in government, and the Indian National Congress, a political party, was formed to further that goal in 1885. Yet despite such stirrings of change, India remained wholly a British subject (Queen Victoria was named empress in 1877) until 1947. Calcutta is the site of the opulent Victoria Memorial, commissioned to honour the queen by viceroy Lord Curzon and constructed in 1905–1921. The building now houses an extensive museum collection showcasing the history of British India.
13The strength of the Bengal Artillery immediately preceding the Indian Mutiny was twelve battalions, out of twenty-four artillery battalions in the entire Indian Army. As a result of the uprising—largely credited with being the first major manifestation of Indian nationalism and discontent—the Indian Army went through several reforms. The proportion of Europeans to Indians in the armed forces was raised to about one to two (60,000 Europeans to 120,000 Indians), and the artillery battalions were all transferred to the Royal Artillery, that is, to the British Army. Major-General Stoner, no doubt a beneficiary of such rulings, would not only have had no Indians in his battalion but also would not have known any Indians of comparable rank: It was not until 1919 that Indians were allowed into the Royal Military Academy in England for training as officers.
14Compare the situation of Mary Sutherland, in “A Case of Identity,” whose inheritance from her father was under her own control but who also had a stepfather who would lose the use of his stepdaughter’s funds. Roylott had apparently not sought legal advice, for even after the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, a husband had control of his wife’s money received before enactment of the Act. Roylott could presumably have overridden his wife’s wishes about the daughters’ £250 a year each, points out F. D. Bryan-Brown, making unnecessary the crimes that were to ensue.
15In light of later events and the revealed character of Roylott, this saved the doctor “the trouble and danger of killing her himself,” cynically comments Michael Harrison, in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes. Others, even more cynical, wonder whether the “accident” was in fact accidental.
16F. D. Bryan-Brown points out that a murder charge would presumably be a grievous enough offence to cost Dr. Roylott his licence; therefore, setting up a London practice should have been well nigh impossible.
17D. Martin Dakin observes that this seems a somewhat optimistic—perhaps naively so—comment considering her stepfather’s murder conviction, imprisonment, and the heritage of violent anger in his family, which she will describe as “approaching to mania.”
18Gypsies (or their preferred name, Roma) began migrating to Europe from northern India in the fourteenth century, their various ethnicities and languages melding together with outside influences to form a common language (Romany) and ethnic group. The stereotype of the gypsy was that of a free-spirited, criminally minded wanderer—gypsies were often accused of stealing babies and even spreading disease—and while there certainly were nomadic gypsies, such characteristics are more fiction than fact. Several nineteenth-century novels, including Emily Brontë’s 1847 Wuthering Heights (Lockwood describes Heathcliff as a “dark-skinned gipsy in aspect”) and George Eliot’s 1868 The Spanish Gypsy, used gypsy characters to convey a certain unconventionality and otherness, both racial and cultural. Deborah Epstein Nord writes in Victorian Studies, “[I]nto the midst of English reserve, decorousness,
and control, the gypsy—or suspected gypsy—could inject impetuousness, brooding, and passion.” Nomadic gypsies appear as convenient bystanders in The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Priory School,” and the unconventional John Clay’s ears (“The Red-Headed League”) had been pierced by gypsies.
19If Dr. Roylott had acquired the cheetah for purposes of guarding his estate, then it appears that he made a poor choice, for cheetahs are by nature extremely gentle and easily domesticated. James Edward Holroyd, in “The Egg Spoon,” refers to J. A. Hunter’s African Hunter in noting that Indian rajahs would train cheetahs to assist them in hunting antelope, and that even an adult cheetah could be trained without trouble. Hunter declares, “I do not believe that in the entire history of Africa there has been a single case of a cheetah attacking a human being.” Of course, as Holroyd concedes, a cheetah transported from its native environment to England might behave altogether differently in its new home.
20Apart from the small black baboon of Celebes, baboons are confined to Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Either Dr. Roylott’s “Indian correspondent” was acquiring animals abroad or Miss Stoner’s identification of the animals is mistaken.
21This London borough is the home of the eminent Harrow School, the alma mater of notable Britons including poet George Gordon, Lord Byron; Sir Robert Peel, founder of the Metropolitan Police; and Prime Minister Henry Palmerston.
22Reduced pay, for officers not on active service. Watson was described as being on “half-pay” in The Sign of Four.
23Paul Scholten, M.D., states that in Victorian times, brandy was used “to restore one to normal after loss of blood, in convalescence and after serious injury, in cases where one felt faint and in actual faintings.” Watson makes liberal use of it in his medical care.
24“[W]ith which hand did she unlock the door?” asks F. D. Bryan-Brown.
25Any relationship to James Armitage of “The ‘Gloria Scott’ ” is speculative.
26While Helen Stoner may be somewhat too advanced in age for her stepfather’s rough treatment of her to qualify as child abuse, one wonders how long such behaviour had been going on. In Victorian England, the plight of abused children went largely unaddressed until the late 1880s, when the Reverend Benjamin Waugh, who had witnessed neglect and mistreatment of children firsthand while working as a minister in the East End slums, founded a national society dedicated to the cause. The problems were certainly well known, for the victimized child is a recurrent figure in nineteenth-century fiction, especially that of Charles Dickens. Scholar E. D. H. Johnson notes of Dickens’s mature novels that “the all but universal neglect or abuse of children by their parents is systematically elaborated as one of the signs of the times.”
It was the pioneering case of young Mary Ellen McCormack in New York that precipitated the formation of societies dedicated to the welfare of children. Mary Ellen had been found tied to a bed in 1874, having been neglected and beaten by her foster parents. She would testify, “I am never allowed to play with any children or have any company whatever. Mamma has been in the habit of whipping and beating me almost every day.” But while animals were protected from acts of cruelty under the law, children at the time were not; and so the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had to come to Mary Ellen’s defence, arguing her case successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court. After the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded in 1875, similar organisations sprang up in England, and the London society founded in 1884 by Waugh became England’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in 1889. Queen Victoria became its Royal Patron. The NSPCC’s inspectors patrolled the streets on foot and bicycle, seeking out children who might need aid, handling 3,937 cases of child abuse in 1889 alone. That same year, England’s first Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act was passed, thanks largely to the lobbying efforts of Waugh and his supporters.
27Coverings of cloth or leather for the lower leg (as contrasted with “regular” gaiters, which cover only the ankle—called “spats,” short for “spatterdashes,” by Americans), high gaiters were favoured by farmers and country landowners.
28A pretentious, petty official. Jonathan Small uses the same expression in The Sign of Four.
29The familiar name for the College of Advocates and Doctors of Law, where ecclesiastical courts were held and wills were recorded and stored. Charles Dickens, in Chapter 8 of his Sketches by Boz (1836), described it thus: “Now Doctors’ Commons [is] familiar by name to everybody, as the place where they grant marriage-licenses to love-sick couples, and divorces to unfaithful ones; register the wills of people who have any property to leave, and punish hasty gentlemen who call ladies by unpleasant names . . .”
The Will Office was transferred to the Probate Registry in Somerset House, The Strand, in 1874. Holmes may have acquired the habit of the old name in his studies or may have visited the Will Office in the course of some of his earliest cases.
30From 1873 to 1894, prices for agricultural products dropped to less than half their former amounts and ruined many English farmers. These factors were compounded by long spells of bad weather, livestock epidemics, and rising labour costs (due principally to the enactment of compulsory education laws for children, decreasing substantially the number of people available to work).
31As Eley was a manufacturer of ammunition rather than actual weaponry, such a make of gun did not in fact exist. The editors of the Catalogue of the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition suggest that Holmes probably meant to refer to a .320-bore Webley’s No. 2, a small “pocket pistol.” Perhaps the labelling of the box—which would have read “Eley” above “for the Webley Pistol, No. 2”—may have contributed to Holmes’s confusion on the make of gun. The Catalogue editors described the .320 bore Webley No. 2 as taking up little space but as being “adequate for dealing with the most determined criminal. It was the smallest really practicable weapon of its time.” See “The Guns of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, M.D.,” page 262, for a more complete discussion.
32A “counterpane” is a bedspread.
33This is the third time Helen Stoner has told Holmes about the cheetah and the baboon. What strange fixation did she have on these animals—except perhaps that they “wander freely” and she does not?
34William Palmer (1824–1856) was an infamous British poisoner who lived in Rugeley, Staffordshire. A member of the Royal College of Surgeons who had studied at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, he was hanged for the poisoning of his wife, his brother, and an associate for their insurance money. He is rumoured to have poisoned at least fifteen people.
35Edward William Pritchard (1825–1865) was an English surgeon who purchased his M.D. in Germany and was hanged in Glasgow for the poisoning of his wife and mother-in-law.
36D. Martin Dakin disputes this characterisation, suggesting that Holmes was either being sarcastic or was simply mistaken: “Palmer . . . and Pritchard . . . were only general practitioners of mediocre qualifications . . . who got into trouble by their gallantries and extravagances, and would never have been heard of had not their egregiously bungled crimes brought them notoriety in the courts.”
37If Roylott’s cheetah and baboon “wandered freely,” these breaches would seem likely to have assured their immediate departure from the premises.
38In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson was able to discern a boy’s figure at a distance of “several miles” with the naked eye. Yet that was an isolated case, and more often Watson professes an inability to see as clearly as Holmes. Several scholars conclude that Watson suffered from various visual deficiencies: night blindness resulting from a deficiency of Vitamin A, extreme nearsightedness, and color-blindness, caused by the “glare of the sun” (“The Cardboard Box”).
39Holmes’s only other comparable expression of horror is the result of a drug-induced vision, in “The Devil’s Foot.” Perhaps Holmes shared a deep-seated phobia with Indiana Jones: “Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes?” (Raid
ers of the Lost Ark, 1981).
40An adder, synonymous with the term “viper,” is the name given to any number of poisonous snakes found throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. They range in length anywhere from one to six feet and are often decorated with diamond or zigzag patterns. The common viper (vipera berus), the only poisonous snake in Britain, is also referred to as the “adder,” but its venom is not usually fatal to humans. There is, in fact, no known “swamp adder.” See page 259 for a discussion of the identity of the breed of the snake.
41“Although cobra venom acts comparatively quickly, no victim could possibly die within ten seconds of being bitten, as Holmes asserted,” D. Martin Dakin points out. Julia Stoner “slowly sank and died,” presumably taking an hour or two to expire; it then seems likely, Dakin continues, that Dr. Roylott was still alive upon Holmes and Watson’s entrance. Assuming that Watson has disclosed all of the events that occurred, he was surely negligent in failing to check Roylott’s vital signs or administer any sort of treatment.
42“He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him” (Ecclesiastes, 10:8).
43Commentators note that the safe had no ventilator holes (otherwise Holmes surely would have commented upon them) and therefore must have been a most inhospitable habitat for a snake, even one so apparently malleable as Roylott’s.
44There are revisionist theories respecting “The Speckled Band.” Several argue that Helen Stoner murdered Julia and Dr. Roylott, and probably her mother as well. Vivian Darkbloom, in the self-described “somewhat revisionist” essay “Holmes Is Where the Heart Is, or Tooth-Tooth, Tootsie,” suggests that Holmes murdered Dr. Roylott, to clear the way for an illicit liaison with Helen Stoner. Roylott’s behaviour, the essay contends, was not that of a murderer but of a man attempting to scare off a suitor. The essay appeared in the December 1976 issue of the Sherlockian journal Baker Street Miscellanea, and the editors reported that “the anagramatically pseudonymous Vivian Darkbloom has not seen fit to furnish us with any personal data, and considering the scandalously iconoclastic thrust of her principal thesis, we are not surprised. The author appears to be California-based, also engaged in medical studies, and a student of the works of Vladimir Nabakov as well as John H. Watson’s . . .” A character named “Vivian Darkbloom” appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 1961 film version of Nabokov’s Lolita, for which Nabokov wrote the screenplay, and in “Vladimir Nabokov: In Tribute to Sherlock Holmes,” Andrew Page analyses references and images in Nabokov’s Lolita, The Defense, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, and Pale Fire that demonstrate the author’s familiarity with and affection for the Canon.
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 39
