“ ‘There you have the whole truth of it. You can hang me, or do what you like with me, but you cannot punish me as I have been punished already. I cannot shut my eyes but I see those two faces staring at me, staring at me as they stared when my boat broke through the haze. I killed them quick, but they are killing me slow; and if I have another night of it I shall be either mad or dead before morning. You won’t put me alone into a cell, sir? For pity’s sake don’t and may you be treated in your day of agony as you treat me now.’ ”
“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”
1“The Cardboard Box” appeared in the Strand Magazine in January 1893 and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on January 14, 1893. The first edition of Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in London in 1894 by George Newnes, Limited, contained only eleven “memoirs,” excluding “The Cardboard Box” from the series of twelve that had appeared in the Strand Magazine. The first American edition of Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published by Harper that same year, contained all twelve stories; almost immediately afterward, however, a “new and revised” Harper edition appeared that, like the British edition, omitted “The Cardboard Box.”
Theories about the odd handling of this story are sketchy at best. Arthur Bartlett Maurice, in an article entitled “Sherlock Holmes and His Creator” (Collier’s, August 15, 1908), surmises that the story’s recounting of an “illicit love affair” led a cautious Doyle to put the piece aside when preparing the collection for publication. Eminent bookseller David Randall, in his Catalogue of Original Manuscripts, etc., subsequently concludes that the American publisher Harper, having seen the story in the Strand, was unaware that Doyle had any objections to including all twelve stories in book form; upon publication, Doyle must have issued a protest, hence the quick issuance of a new Memoirs edition. The first American version is now considered quite rare. Curiously, not one of the numerous biographers of Arthur Conan Doyle has a word of explanation of this self-censorship, nor did Doyle himself comment upon it in his Memories and Adventures.
2The material following was “pasted” onto the beginning of “The Resident Patient” when “The Cardboard Box” was suppressed in the George Newnes, Limited, edition of the Memoirs. See note 1 above.
3That is, adjourned for the summer recess.
4An ancient royal hunting ground in Hampshire, the New Forest was established by William the Conqueror in 1079 as a crown property, valued for its varied terrain of woodlands and heaths. Since 1877 the area has been administered as a public park by the judicial Verderers Court. Arthur Conan Doyle had a cottage in the New Forest. See “The Five Orange Pips,” note 24.
5An eastern suburb of Portsmouth, where Arthur Conan Doyle practised medicine for a time.
6In “The Dancing Men,” generally dated in 1898 (see Chronological Table), Holmes reminds Watson, “Your cheque-book is locked in my drawer.” Perhaps there is a causal connection between Watson’s depletion of funds and Holmes’s later control.
7In defining “brown study” as a vacuous or melancholy state of mind, the 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable cites two lines from William Congreve’s An Impossible Thing, published over a century earlier: “Invention flags, his brain grows muddy, / And black despair succeeds brown study.”
8Actually, in A Study in Scarlet, Watson remarked, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. . . .” but did not read the passage aloud. The “sketch” to which Holmes and Watson refer is “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Published in Graham’s Magazine (of which Poe was the editor) in 1841, this story of a mother-daughter murder that baffles police marked the debut of amateur detective C. August Dupin. It is widely considered the first modern detective story.
9Charles George Gordon (1833–1885) was a British military hero of several distinct campaigns. After service in the Crimean War, Gordon was sent to China, where he eventually accepted the mission that would earn him the nickname “Chinese Gordon.” It is indeed ironic that the deeply religious Gordon would make his reputation doing battle with two religious zealots. The first, Hong Xiuquan, was a schoolteacher whose visions convinced him that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother. Hong proclaimed himself King of the Taiping Tianguo (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) and, rebelling against the ruling Qing dynasty, led his followers—who, according to historian Jonathan Spence, at one time numbered over 60,000 people—to capture Nanking in 1853. They controlled the city for eleven years and made various other conquests until suppressed by the “Ever-Victorious Army,” a motley force helmed by General Gordon. In Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey described the charismatic commander as attaining “an almost magical prestige. . . . More than once their [the Tai-pings’] leaders, in a frenzy of fear and admiration, ordered the sharp-shooters not to take aim at the advancing figure of the faintly smiling Englishman.” Hong and his followers were said to have committed mass suicide when Nanking fell. Gordon’s return to England was relatively inauspicious; he was made a Companion of the Bath, an award that Strachey cuttingly observed was “usually reserved for industrious clerks.”
Gordon’s final and most well-known campaign arose as a result of his governorship of the Sudan, a difficult post he held from 1877 to 1879. In 1884 he returned to defend the capital, Khartoum, from the Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad), who claimed to be the messianic twelfth Imam and who sought to eliminate the Egyptian authority and purify Islam. Khartoum was besieged for ten months, but despite the entreaties of the British public—including Queen Victoria, who telegraphed Lord Hartington, “General Gordon is in danger, you are bound to try to save him”—Prime Minister William Gladstone delayed in sending reinforcements. Shortly before his death, a defiant Gordon wrote in his journals, “[I]f any emissary or letter comes up here ordering me to come down, I WILL NOT OBEY IT, BUT WILL STAY HERE, AND FALL WITH TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS.” On January 26, 1885, two days before the arrival of a British relief expedition, the Mahdists took Khartoum, and General Gordon was killed, his head brought to the Mahdi (according to Strachey) as a trophy. Gordon was martyred in the popular imagination, and some speculate that the eccentric general might have sought out such adulation in rushing toward certain death.
Gordon’s death is immortalised in G. W. Joy’s painting General Gordon’s Last Stand, which depicts the general standing regally atop the stairs as his spear-holding assailants pause in contemplation below. A dramatic interpretation of Gordon’s final days appears in the 1966 film Khartoum, starring Charlton Heston as Gordon and Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi. The movie also featured Sir Ralph Richardson, who earlier played Watson in a long-running BBC Radio series, and Douglas Wilmer, who later played Holmes in various BBC radio and television productions.
10Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was an American minister, editor, and writer, perhaps the most influential Protestant spokesman of his time. Crowds of up to 2,500 would flock to the Congregational Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, on Sundays to hear the powerful orator speak not only of God but also of his opposition to slavery and his support for women’s suffrage, evolutionary theory, and free trade. The brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Beecher found a national platform as the editor of The Independent (1861–1864) and the Christian Union (1870–1881). His stature only increased in 1863 when, vacationing in England, he gave a series of lectures on the Civil War at London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Edinburgh; these appearances had a tremendous effect on the British public, winning sympathy for the Union cause. Beecher was a charismatic and emotional man—Sinclair Lewis said of him in 1927, “He was a combination of St. Augustine, Barnum and John Barrymore”—but his reputation was tarnished when his friend Theodore Tilton sued him in 1874 on the charge that Beecher had committed adultery w
ith Tilton’s wife. (Rumour had it that this was far from Beecher’s only affair.) The sensational Tilton trial ended in 1875, when the jury failed to reach a verdict. Still, the clergyman remained a prominent social figure for the rest of his life. His published works include Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844), Eyes and Ears (1862), The Life of Jesus, the Christ (1871), and Evolution and Religion (1885). Watson’s interest in Beecher remains unexplained.
11Here ends the material repeated in “The Resident Patient.”
12H. W. Bell was the first to note, in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Chronology of Their Adventures, that this famous “mind-reading” episode was repeated virtually intact in the version of “The Resident Patient” that appeared in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (but not in the original Strand Magazine version of that story). Bell guesses that, even though “The Cardboard Box” was to be excluded from the Memoirs, the scene depicted here so perfectly illustrated Holmes’s deductive talents that Watson was loath to eliminate it altogether; thus he simply transferred it to another vehicle. “Watson’s point of view is easy to understand,” Bell rationalizes. “When the Memoirs came out Holmes was, as he believed, dead, and his own activities as a chronicler terminated. . . . There would be no more Sherlock Holmes stories . . . and the passage . . . threw too bright a light on Holmes’s genius to be allowed to slumber in the files of a periodical.”
Trevor Hall, speculating in “The Documents in the Case” as to Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in suppressing “The Cardboard Box” from publication (see note 1, above), claims that Doyle, distressed at this scene’s debunking of a supposed mystical practice as little more than a parlour trick, asked Watson to eliminate the entire story as a result.
13There is no Cross Street in Croydon today, but Cross Road has existed there for many years. David L. Hammer tentatively identifies the house as No. 57 Cross Road.
14A largely residential borough in south-east London, Croydon would in 1920 become the site of London’s first official airport, the Croydon Aerodrome (later Croydon Airport), which combined a military airfield and a testing ground. It was shut down in 1959 with the construction of Heathrow.
15Tobacco with sweetener added.
16Antimacassar, a covering hung over the backs of sofas and chairs to protect furniture from hair grease, took its name from a popular hair oil, Macassar Oil. Macassar itself was made with ylang-ylang, a perfume oil extracted from the tropical Asian tree Cananga odorata and said to have calming and aphrodisiac qualities. The name is a derivation of Makasar (now Ujung Pandang), a city in Indonesia.
17By the 1800s, the use of dissection in medical schools as an aid in the instruction of anatomy had become fairly common. Yet in Britain, public qualms about the practice were still such that until the early part of the nineteenth century, only the cadavers of recently executed criminals could be legally dissected. The resultant paucity of available cadavers led to the black-market trade of grave robbing, in which corpses were dug up and delivered to surgeons and assistants who purported not to know where the bodies came from.
Britain’s most notorious body-snatchers, or “resurrectionists,” were William Hare and William Burke, an Edinburgh landlord and his tenant. Their reputation for providing exceedingly “fresh” bodies stemmed from the fact that their grave robbing had escalated to murder: in all, they killed at least fifteen people and sold the corpses to doctors such as Robert Knox, a celebrated anatomist at the University of Edinburgh. Knox’s reputation suffered when it was discovered that the cadavers used in his lectures had been so obtained. He claimed ignorance, but Hare and Burke were convicted in 1828 (Hare testified for the prosecution; Burke was hanged), and in 1832 Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which allowed medical schools to practise dissection on the unclaimed bodies of poor and homeless people.
The tale of Hare and Burke has inspired various fictional works, such as James Bridie’s play The Anatomist, first staged in 1931, and the Edinburgh-born Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 story The Body Snatcher, later adapted into a 1945 film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi as well as Henry Daniell (who also appeared in three of the Universal Studios Sherlock Holmes films in the 1940s).
18The Conqueror and the May Day were real ships registered to the Liverpool, Dublin, and London Steam Packet Co. Why Watson failed to conceal their names is unknown.
19Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) made cellos, harps, guitars, mandolins, and violas in his workshop in Cremona, Italy; but it is his perfectly designed violin for which he is most famously known. (In John Meade Falkner’s 1895 ghost-story novel The Lost Stradivarius, a Stradivarius discovered in an old cupboard is described as possessing “a light-red colour, with a varnish of peculiar lustre and softness. The neck seemed rather longer than ordinary, and the scroll was remarkably bold and free.”) Approximately 650 of Stradivari’s more than 1,100 instruments survive today. The Smithsonian Institution reports that in the nineteenth century, thousands of violins were created in tribute to Stradivari after his death and were affixed with the exact same label—reading Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno and the date of production—that identified violins the master himself had made. This was common practice at the time, and since these imitation violins were much more inexpensive than the genuine article, no deception was intended. The end result, however, is that an instrument bearing the Stradivari label now has only a very slim chance of being a genuine Stradivarius violin. Presumably Holmes’s Stradvarius was genuine despite its bargain price; otherwise, the story would make Holmes appear foolish.
20The virtuoso Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) was variously a child prodigy in Genoa, the court violinist to the princess of Lucca, and a touring soloist of great renown. In addition to composing important works for the violin—both Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann transcribed his twenty-four caprices for the piano, and Johannes Brahms and Sergei Rachmaninov based compositions on his Caprice in A Minor—Paganini also played guitar and viola. Shortly after retiring in 1835, he lost his voice, eventually succumbing to cancer of the larynx. (He also lost much of his fortune, having invested heavily in a Paris casino—Casino Paganini—that failed.) Paganini’s extraordinary skill and innovations in tuning, harmonics, and double and triple stops are legendary, and he is widely considered the greatest of all violinists; nevertheless, the Penguin Dictionary of Music solemnly opines that by today’s advanced standards, “his feats are no longer regarded as freakishly difficult.”
21For a rigorous study of this method of logical thinking, see Chapter VIII, “Reasoning to Causes,” of William Neblett’s Sherlock’s Logic, a charming book on logic in which Holmes’s grandson explains and illustrates the author’s points.
22Although no one has been able to locate the issues of the Journal containing Holmes’s monographs, they may have been reprinted in the Strand Magazine, which published a pair of unattributed monographs entitled “A Chapter on Ears” in the October 1893 and November 1893 issues.
23The broad part of the upper, external ear.
24That is, the Royal Victoria and Albert Docks.
25By referring to himself as “blue ribbon,” Browner means that he had been abstaining from alcohol, probably as a member of one of several temperance organisations in existence at the time. The first modern local society was formed in 1808 by Dr. B. J. Clark, in Greenfield, New York. In the late 1820s, groups sprang up in Ireland and Glasgow, with an English society formed in 1830 at Bradford; a myriad others would follow in the decades to come. Some were based on religious beliefs, others looked to scientific rationale. Not surprisingly, insurance companies fostered groups of abstainers, and temperance hotels, temperance cafés, British workmen public-houses, cocoa houses, coffee palaces, and teetotal clubs arose in many places as social expressions of the temperance movement.
The so-called Blue Ribbon Army—which, along with other U.S. societies such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, would lend momentum to the eventual passage of the E
ighteenth Amendment and the 1919–1933 period of American prohibition—was founded in the 1870s by Francis Murphy, an Irish-American and former liquor dealer in Maine. Basing his movement on principles of “gospel temperance,” Murphy received inspiration from the biblical passage “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments, throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue . . .” (Numbers XV, 38–39). Unique among temperance leaders, Murphy did not view liquor sellers as evil, and he preached Christian charity toward them as well as toward drinkers themselves.
In addition to donning blue ribbons as a symbol of their dedication, Murphy’s followers were asked to sign a pledge that read, “With malice toward none, with charity for all; I, the undersigned, do pledge my word and honor (God helping me) to abstain from all intoxicating liquors as a beverage, and that I will by all honorable means encourage others to abstain.” A similar group was formed in London by William Noble, a Murphy admirer; and Murphy ultimately came to Britain to lead a great rally in Dundee—gaining as many as 40,000 converts—in 1882. There he recruited William McGonagall, the poet laureate of Dundee (and widely hailed as the worst poet in the English language), who wrote, in “A Tribute to Mr. Murphy and the Blue Ribbon Army,”
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 61
