1“The Noble Bachelor” was published in the Strand Magazine in April 1892.
2In A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 1, Watson states that he was “struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery.” Later in that volume Holmes describes Watson as a man “[whose] left arm has been injured,” who holds the limb “in a stiff and unnatural manner.” Is this reconcilable with Watson’s description here? Note that he refers to a bullet “in one of [his] limbs.” Although his legs are propped on a chair, he does not state that the wound is in a leg. Yet the implication is hard to avoid. Elsewhere, in The Sign of Four, Chapter 1, Watson clearly states that he nursed his “wounded leg,” which had been struck by a Jezail bullet; in Chapter 7 of that book, Holmes questions the condition of Watson’s leg and specifically refers to his wounded “tendo achillis.” The only other reference to Watson’s wound or wounds is in “The Cardboard Box” (and “The Resident Patient” in some editions of the Canon), where Holmes observes that Watson’s hand “stole toward your old wound.” However, there is no indication there of the location of the wound.
3A customs officer who awaited the arrival of ships (formerly coming in with the tide) and boarded them to prevent the avoidance of customs-house regulations.
4As he is the second son of the Duke of Balmoral, the name should be “Lord Robert St. Simon,” not “Lord St. Simon.” His bride would not have been called Lady St. Simon, but rather Lady Robert St. Simon. Watson’s solecism was perhaps first noted by Andrew Lang, in “The Novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” in the Quarterly Review of July 1904.
5We hear of Lord Backwater again in “Silver Blaze”—his horse, Desborough, runs against Silver Blaze in the Wessex Cup (or Plate). “Silver Blaze,” for which Watson offers no date, appeared in the Strand Magazine in December 1892, eight months after publication of this story.
6In the Strand Magazine and American editions, this signature is the erroneous “St. Simon.”
7Michael Harrison writes, in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, “Victoria Streets, the seven-storied block of flats at the corner of Palace Street and Victoria Street, was begun in 1858, and flats therein were let at rentals of £300 per annum. The building was completely filled as soon as finished, so popular were the new flats . . .” One of Grosvenor Mansions’ residents was Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame. For the impoverished Lord Robert St. Simon, then, a flat would have been a means of keeping up appearances. The name “Grosvenor Mansions” appears to have been a deliberate attempt on the part of the developers to call to mind the Duke of Westminster’s “Grosvenor House,” his mansion near Hyde Park on Upper Grosvenor Street.
8What book is this? Suggestions include Debrett’s Peerage: The Official Baronage of England, by James E. Doyle (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1886), the Red Book: or Court and Fashionable Register, and Thomas Robson’s The British Herald, or Cabinet of Armorial Bearings (Sunderland: Printed for the author, 1830). None contain the quotation.
9A “caltrop” is an iron ball armed with four spikes, so arranged that three are embedded in the ground and one always stands upright. The device was used to impede cavalry troops and horses in particular.
10A “fess” is a horizontal band over the middle of a shield, usually taking up one-third of the shield’s surface. “Sable” means black. Therefore, according to Holmes, the coat of arms (or shield) consisted of a black horizontal band across the middle, with three caltrops in the top third of the shield.
11A surname commonly applied to the royal house of England between Henry II’s ascension in 1154 and Richard III’s death in 1485. Members of the Plantagenet dynasty were descendants of Queen Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. The name Plantagenet is said to derive from the sprig of broom-plant, or planta genista, that the Count of Anjou used to wear in his hat. The fifteenth century saw the Plantagenet line split into two factions, with the waging of the so-called Wars of the Roses between the House of York (whose emblem was a white rose) and the House of Lancaster (red rose), each of which had its own claim on the throne. Actual use of the Plantagenet name itself died with Yorkist Richard III; his successor, Henry VII—who was both a Lancastrian and a Tudor (see note 12, below)—united the duelling houses by marrying Richard’s niece, Elizabeth of York.
12The Welsh family that from 1485 to 1603 gave five sovereigns to England, namely, Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. They were descended from Owen Tudor, who married Katherine of Valois, widow of Henry V. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the throne passed to the House of Stuart.
13Grosvenor Square, close to the Baker Street Station of the Metropolitan Line, comprised many aristocratic residences. It is now the site of the American Embassy.
14Founded in 1772, it was the paper of record for the fashionable set for nearly a century. As such, it became popular among the servant classes of Victorian England as a means of following the doings of royalty. In 1881, it became a voice for the Conservative party. It merged with the Daily Telegraph in 1937.
15There is a Westbury Hotel in London, but the Westbury House is not identified in Baedeker.
16In the Strand Magazine and American editions, Miss Doran is reported instead to be making the transition to a British “peeress,” or the wife of a peer. This is inaccurate. Peeress titles are, in descending order of rank, duchess, marchioness, countess, viscountess, and baroness. However, because Lord Robert was the younger son of a duke, he was not a peer but bore only a courtesy title. The eldest son is considered a peer and is addressed as if he held legally the second title of his father, typically that of a marquis or earl. That is, unless Lord Robert’s father and elder brother died, Lord Robert would not be a “peer.” His wife would also have only a courtesy title and would have been known as Lady Robert.
17Designed and built by John James in 1721–1724, its interior restored by Sir Arthur Blomfield in 1894, the Anglican St. George’s was “the most famous church in London for fashionable weddings,” according to Baedeker. Nineteenth-century weddings held here included those of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1814), Benjamin Disraeli (1839), George Meredith (1844), George Eliot (1880), and Theodore Roosevelt (1886).
18Then a range of balconied buildings, completed in 1866, in a well-to-do residential quarter north of Hyde Park.
19The “wedding breakfast” arose as the time of celebration because pre-1887 English law required that weddings be performed before noon. Even after the legislative change, the tradition continued.
20The Reverend Otis R. Rice observes how astonishing it is that the solemnisation of such a high-profile marriage was left to the vicar or even one of his curates and not an archbishop or at least the Bishop of London. He suggests that perhaps neither Hatty nor her father found time to have her baptised. Rice also considers it unusual that the “clergyman” (as Hatty Doran refers to the officiant) did not have his name mentioned in the press notice; nor was he invited to the wedding breakfast.
21Note that the Duke of Balmoral and his eldest son, Lord Robert’s older brother, are conspicuously missing. Carol Whitlam proposes that the duke disapproved of his son’s marriage to an uncultured American, and that his eldest son, keen not to offend his father in any way, followed his example and also boycotted the wedding.
22How is it that Aloysius Doran failed to mention to the police that Francis Hay Moulton appeared at the wedding? Could this involve Lord Backwater’s horse Desborough and the running of the Wessex Cup (Plate) in “Silver Blaze”?
23There was no Allegro in London; however, the Alhambra was a large, popular music-hall/theatre in Leicester Square that featured ballet and spectacle. It burned virtually to the ground in 1882, and although it reopened in December 1883, Miss Millar may have seized that opportunity to take up other sources of income.
24The reference to Watson’s presumed departure suggests that this case occurred early in Holmes and Watson’s relationship.
25Holmes’s undue deferenc
e to Lord Robert and his misuse of aristocratic titles have been cited by several scholars as “evidence” that Holmes may have lied about his country squire forbears (mentioned in “The Greek Interpreter”) and demonstrate at the minimum that Holmes was no “gentleman.” His subsequent subtle belittling of Lord Robert is characteristic of Holmes’s reverse snobbery about wealth and position.
26A wicker armchair. The basket chair is also mentioned in “The Blue Carbuncle” and “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”
27There are several reasons the King of Scandinavia (at this time Oscar II) might have needed Holmes’s help. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the king of Bohemia advises Holmes of his impending marriage to the second daughter of the King of Scandinavia, Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen. Perhaps Holmes was asked to arrange this delicate business. Holmes’s ties to the Royal Family of Scandinavia are also mentioned in “The Final Problem.” As Norway did not sever her connection with Sweden until 1905, it is possible that Holmes’s visit to Norway in “Black Peter” was also connected with a mission for Oscar II. Despite these clues, however, Christopher Redmond discounts the entire reference as “bombast.” “If the case had been genuine,” he writes, in In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, “Holmes’s concern for ‘secrecy’ in ‘the affairs of my other clients’ would lead him to keep the client’s name confidential, even if he revealed some of the events, rather than vice-versa.”
28According to Baedeker, the “London Season” consisted of the months of May, June, and July, “when Parliament is sitting, the aristocracy are at their town residences, the greatest artistes in the world are performing at the Opera, and the Picture Exhibitions open.”
29Neither Holmes nor Watson seems to have thought to censure Lord Robert for his abominable treatment of poor Flora Millar, whom he discarded after allowing her to become “devotedly attached” to him. Of course, Holmes himself is no slave to chivalry, as evidenced by his similarly casual use and subsequent dropping of the maid Agatha in “Charles Augustus Milverton.”
30In the Strand Magazine and American editions, the phrase “given instructions to the servants” does not appear, and instead Lord Robert states that he had “two police fellows there in private clothes.” The newspaper article quoted by Watson had reported that the butler and footman escorted Flora Millar out, and he apparently made this correction when the first book edition of “The Noble Bachelor” appeared.
31This may be a reference to a farmer’s practice of adding water to his milk, to increase his earnings.
32Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), American naturalist and essayist. Thoreau’s Excursions (Boston, 1863) included a biographical sketch by Emerson that incorporated sentences from Thoreau’s unpublished writings, including the remark that “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk” (Journal, 1850).
33The war ended on January 28, 1871, when Paris fell to a German siege. At that time, Munich was the capital of the German state of Bavaria, which in the Victorian era had the misfortune to be ruled by two kings who were mentally ill. Louis II, king during the Franco-Prussian War (and patron of composer Richard Wagner) was confined to a chateau at Lake Starnberger in 1886; he drowned himself there that year. His successor, his brother Otto I, was also insane but ruled Bavaria under the regency of an uncle and a cousin until 1916.
34The Serpentine, an artificial lake in Hyde Park used for boating and swimming, was created as part of Queen Caroline’s efforts to improve the park in the 1730s. It was originally fed by the Westbourne, a small stream whose source was in Bayswater, but is now supplied from the Thames.
35Trafalgar Square in Westminster is dedicated to Lord Nelson, commemorating his death at the battle of Trafalgar on October 22, 1805. Toward the north side of the square are two fountains, described in Dickens’s Dictionary of London (London, 1891–1892) as having a “ridiculous insufficiency of . . . jets of water”; between the fountains is a statue of General Gordon, Watson’s hero (1833–1885), erected in 1888. The statue has since been moved to the Embankment. The fountains are proximate to each other and so may be referred to casually as a single fountain.
36Frederic H. Sonnenschmidt, culinary dean of the Culinary Institute of America, and Julia Carlson Rosenblatt take gentle issue with the name of this dish, writing in Dining with Sherlock Holmes: “Much as we would like to vouch for Watson’s accuracy in this matter, the painful truth is that in culinary terms, one does not speak of pâté de foie gras ‘pie.’ ” They go on to explain that a pâté, according to its original French definition, consists of meat, fish, vegetables, or fruit encased in pastry—that is, a pie. It is only recently that pâté has come to mean the meat or fish variety alone. It is likely, Sonnenschmidt and Rosenblatt surmise, that the diligent Watson added the word “pie” to clarify a term that was starting to become ambiguous. The authors further note that they found two American cookbooks of the Victorian era that listed pâté de foie gras as a pie filling, leading them to conclude that Watson was familiar with American cookbooks and had spent time in the United States.
37That Holmes enjoyed good wine is indisputable. The Canon records Holmes drinking claret (“The Cardboard Box” and “The Dying Detective”), port (“The ‘Gloria Scott’,” The Sign of Four, and “The Creeping Man”), Imperial Tokay (“His Last Bow”), wine (“Shoscombe Old Place”), “something a little choice in white wines” (The Sign of Four), and Montrachet (“The Veiled Lodger”). Sherlockians who appreciate wine have nominated many bottles for this meal, and Patricia Guy, in her Bacchus at Baker Street: Observations on the Bibulous Preferences of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his Contemporaries, considers the issue in some detail and identifies the “group of . . . bottles” as an 1878 Corton (a red Burgundy and a fine match for the partridge), an 1811 Chateau Haut Brion (red Bordeaux to complement the woodcock), a 1790 Imperial Tokay (coupled with the pâté de foie gras pie), an 1874 Perrier-Jouet Champagne, with which to toast the occasion, and, after the cloth was removed, a 1789 Bual Madeira.
38That is, the Thousand and One Nights, of which Sir Richard Francis Burton published a sixteen-volume unabridged translation from 1885 to 1888. Other English translations of the period include E. W. Lane’s abridged version (1840) and John Payne’s nine-volume effort (1882–1884).
39The Strand Magazine and American texts say “morning,” which is plainly wrong.
40Mysteriously, the Strand Magazine and American editions add the description “clean shaven.”
41The Strand Magazine and American editions report the meeting as occurring in ’84.
42“Near the Rockies” is a loose description covering numerous places. Silver, gold, lead, and zinc mines occur in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Montana, and Arizona. The latter three states may be ruled out because Hattie specifically mentions that Frank has travelled to those states. Although there is little evidence with which to locate “McQuire’s camp,” there was a large discovery of gold in 1881 in Spring Valley, Nevada, and Doran’s claim may have been there. Another possibility, suggested by John Girand, is McGuire’s camp, which was situated two and a half miles east of Strong, in Huerfanos County, Colorado, one of the richest gold-producing areas in the Colorado Rockies, although there is no record of a large discovery there in 1881 (or 1884, for that matter).
43“’Frisco,” a name guaranteed to boil the blood of any current resident of the City, is a common nickname for San Francisco and appeared in contemporary literature as recently as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957).
44The late nineteenth century was indeed a time of great conflict between Apaches and settlers in the south-western United States. American settlers flocked to New Mexico and surrounding areas in the mid- to late-1800s, whether lured by the prospect of gold in the West, encouraged by the designation of New Mexico as an official territory in 1850 (the U.S. acquired the land in the Mexican War), or drawn to cattle ranching after the arrival of the railroad in the 1880s. The nomadic Apache had engaged in raids on Pueblo and Spa
nish settlements since the late 1600s; now pressured by regional governments to colonise and relocate to centralised reservations, they frequently struck back with violence. Vendettas against whites were pursued throughout the South-west by Apache chiefs such as Mangas Coloradas in south-western New Mexico, who was humiliated by his flogging at the hands of miners in 1851; Cochise, his son-in-law, whose friendly relations with American settlers ended when several of his relatives were hanged by soldiers on false robbery and kidnapping charges in Arizona in 1861; Victorio, a former Mangas Coloradas lieutenant; Geronimo, who took over leadership of the Chiricahua Apache after Cochise’s death in 1874, instigating raids on Arizona and Mexico until his surrender in 1886; and Nachis, even more feared than Geronimo because of the cruel and unusual tortures his victims received.
Richard E. Sloan’s History of Arizona (Phoenix: Record Publishing Co., 1930) records that in February 1884, Geronimo started “the bloodiest in all the Indian Wars,” and in April, he attacked the military outpost at Camp Goodwin, Arizona, routing the troopers stationed there and killing a few prospectors who had sought refuge. The murder of the prospectors was widely reported in western newspapers, and such a report was the probable source of Hatty Doran’s belief that Frank Moulton had perished.
45Richard Lancelyn Green writes, “[L]egal opinion suggests that she should have done so, as she otherwise laid herself open to a charge of bigamy (under the Offences against the Person Act, 1861) by marrying another man while aware that her husband was alive.”
46Holmes means George III (1738–1820), during whose reign the American colonies achieved their independence.
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 46
