On examining the premises the body of the unfortunate watchman was found doubled up and thrust into the largest of the safes, where it would not have been discovered until Monday morning had it not been for the prompt action of Sergeant Tuson. The man’s skull had been shattered by a blow from a poker delivered from behind. There could be no doubt that Beddington had obtained entrance by pretending that he had left something behind him, and having murdered the watchman, rapidly rifled the large safe, and then made off with his booty. His brother, who usually works with him, has not appeared in this job, as far as can at present be ascertained, although the police are making energetic inquiries as to his whereabouts.
“Well, we may save the police some little trouble in that direction,” said Holmes, glancing at the haggard figure huddled up by the window. “Human nature is a strange mixture, Watson. You see that even a villain and a murderer can inspire such affection that his brother turns to suicide when he learns that his neck is forfeited. However, we have no choice as to our action.37 The doctor and I will remain on guard, Mr. Pycroft, if you will have the kindness to step out for the police.”38
“Glancing at the haggard figure.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
1“The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” was published in the Strand Magazine in March 1893 and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on March 11, 1893.
2Although some scholars conjure up as many as six different wives for John H. Watson, this is plainly a reference to Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan, for Holmes later says: “I trust that Mrs. Watson has entirely recovered from all the little excitements connected with our adventure of the ‘Sign of Four.’ ” The precise date is considered in the Chronological Table.
3Prior to his marriage to Mary Morstan, Watson had shown no inclination to take up private practice. He had gone straight from his schooling and residency into the army. On his return to London, Watson had effectively given up medicine. Although he was able to save Mr. Melas from carbon monoxide poisoning (in “The Greek Interpreter”) and opine on Thaddeus Sholto’s heart condition (in The Sign of Four), and although he continued to read medical literature (a text on pathology is mentioned in The Sign of Four, and he was evidently familiar with Dr. Trevelyan’s work in “The Resident Patient”), he conducted no practice of medicine. His writing career was in its early stages, with only A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four in print, neither of which would have brought him fortune. Therefore, not surprisingly, he had to consider how to support his wife and himself. Perhaps observation of his friend Conan Doyle convinced him that building a practice on his own could be a long and unfruitful effort, and so he turned to the more rapid means of buying another doctor’s practice.
Yet one wonders how the cash-strapped Watson could have afforded such a purchase. The usual price for a practice at that time, according to June Thomson’s biography of Holmes and Watson, was one to one and a half times the annual income, and in The Sign of Four, Watson bemoans his poor financial condition when he first thinks of courting Mary. Ian McQueen points out that his activities in that case did nothing to improve his situation but goes on to concede, “Possibly his bankers obliged him with a loan; or maybe Mary was able to realise some money on her pearls.”
4The former name for chorea or Sydenham’s chorea, St. Vitus’s dance is a disease of the nervous system characterized by involuntary, irregular contractions of facial and other muscles. (St. Vitus was the patron saint of dancers, and in the Middle Ages, those afflicted with the disease were said to worship at his shrine.) Sydenham’s chorea is a children’s disease and frequently arises as a complication of rheumatic fever; Mr. Farquhar, whose malady was “of the nature” of St. Vitus’s dance, presumably suffered instead from the more serious Huntington’s disease, which is hereditary and tends to be diagnosed first in middle age.
5“Youth is, after all, a somewhat elastic term,” Samuel R. Meaker, M.D., writes, “but Watson was a ripe 36 when he started. As to energy, he admitted frankly at his first meeting with Holmes that he was extremely lazy, and there is no evidence to show that he later reformed in this respect, except for brief periods.”
6That is, the journal of the British Medical Association, founded in 1832. This organisation made significant progress in reforming the medical profession by lobbying for the passage of the 1858 Medical Act, which established a register of qualified physicians, and the 1886 Medical Act, which required doctors to train in medicine, surgery, and midwifery rather than in one of those fields alone.
7The accommodating neighbour is also mentioned in “The Final Problem.” But is it Anstruther (mentioned in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”)? Or Jackson (mentioned in “The Crooked Man”)? D. Martin Dakin, leaning to the latter choice, comments, “As Watson had only been on the job three months, it is astonishing to learn that both [Watson and Jackson] in that time had had enough days off to set up what appears by now to have been an established routine. One wonders what . . . their respective patients thought of these frequent switches . . .”
8Didn’t Watson just tell him that?
9Popular folklore has it that only those who live within hearing distance of the bells of the church St. Mary le Bow (the “Bow Bells”) in Cheapside, East London, can rightly refer to themselves as Cockney. Residents of that area’s neighbourhoods—which in the Victorian era were often desperately overcrowded—considered themselves “true” Londoners, given that they tended to be born and raised in the City itself.
A Cockney is distinguished and even defined by his accent, for better or for worse. E. Cobham Brewer, in his monumental Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, describes a Cockney as “one possessing London peculiarities of speech, etc.; one wholly ignorant of country sports, country life, farm animals, plants, and so on.” And in George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, Shaw makes a valiant attempt to reproduce Eliza Doolittle’s cockney accent, laboriously sounding out only a few lines before abandoning the effort altogether.
THE FLOWER GIRL: Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]
(Whether or not Audrey Hepburn did Eliza’s accent justice in the film My Fair Lady is a matter best left to the experts.)
Mr. Hall Pycroft’s speech as described by Watson does not seem to have anything near that sort of colour, though whether this is attributable to Watson’s inability to re-create his accent or to the fact that Pycroft’s station as a “smart young City man” is considerably higher than that of a poor flower girl remains open to interpretation.
10These regiments were part of a long British tradition of part-time military service, formally organised in 1863 to aid the larger, recruitment-based militia in repelling any threatened invasion of Britain. (Volunteer units had also previously served in the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.) By 1890, the number of volunteers stood at a quarter of a million. With the creation of the Territorial Force—later the Territorial Army—in 1907, however, combining the militia and the volunteers, the volunteer regiments became obsolete. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Arthur Conan Doyle took it upon himself to revive the volunteer service, a movement he undertook when his enlistment application was denied. (Doyle was fifty-five at the time.) Following the formation of Doyle’s own local Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment, the new force quickly grew to 200,000 men.
11Pycroft, speaking in the modern slang of the day, refers here to an inexperienced youngster or a new recruit. Presumably, the expression is related to the more familiar American term for a newcomer, “Johnny-come-lately.” The Oxford English Dictionary reports “Johnny Raw” as an expression referring to inexperienced soldiers as early as 1813. Numerous sources have been used in preparing this edition to discern the meaning of obscure words in
the Canon, and no particular source can be regarded as definitive. One favourite of this editor, John Camden Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary, published in London in 1865, lists over 120 similar works in its bibliography!
12That is, victimised.
13Throughout much of the 1800s, Venezuela was beset by financial and political difficulties owing to an unfortunate combination of civil wars, bad administration, debt, and complications arising from the construction of railways and other public works. During this period, the main export of Venezuela (which had become an independent state in 1830) was coffee; when prices plummeted in the 1840s, a series of political struggles and volatile military dictatorships followed suit. The longest rule of this latter half of the century belonged to dictator General Antonio Guzmán Blanco (1870–1888), who restored peace but, having filled his own coffers in the process, was ousted from office in 1888 and eventually succeeded by his ally, General Joaquin Crespo (1892–1897). During Crespo’s troubled regime, relations with Great Britain deteriorated. Venezuela had in fact broken off diplomatic ties with Great Britain in 1887 over a territorial dispute, which concerned land claimed by both Venezuela and British Guiana (now Guyana). The United States intervened, settling upon terms mostly favourable to Great Britain in 1899.
In the years to come, Venezuela’s economic climate would decline even further. So substantial would accumulated unpaid foreign loans become that in 1902, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuela until the outstanding claims, mediated by the United States, were adjusted in Caracas in 1903.
14To fail.
15Position.
16The East Central postal district houses virtually all of the London stockbrokerage enterprises. In the United Telephone Company’s list of subscribers classified by trade, published in 1885, over 200 firms are listed under “Brokers (Stock and Share),” all in E.C.
17Vern Goslin is astonished by the unnamed manager of Mawson & Williams, who hired an unknown candidate without a personal interview.
18Turn.
19The pay.
20Lodgings.
21A pejorative term for a Jew. Although the precise origin of the word is unknown, some suggest that it comes from the Yiddish expression miesse meshina, a curse; other sources, such as Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, point to the Yiddish shayner, which literally means “beautiful” but is more familiarly used to signify a pious person or a traditional Jew (often wearing a full beard). Assimilated Jews, such as those who had emigrated from Germany to England in the early part of the nineteenth century, would use the term to mock those who followed for being old-fashioned and tied to the ways of the old country.
22The Stock Exchange, familiarly known in the City as “the house,” was formed in 1773 by a group of stockbrokers that had been trading securities informally at Jonathan’s Coffee House in Change Alley. (The practice of conducting business out of coffeehouses was not uncommon; ship owners and shipping underwriters often met at Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House, which later became Lloyd’s of London.) In 1801 a group of the members raised money for the construction of the building, and rules for the exchange were established the following year; the rules subsequently have been amended several times. In 1973 the exchange merged with several regional stock exchanges in Great Britain.
23Pinner is here testing Pycroft’s knowledge of current stock prices, information which the clerks were expected to carry about in their heads. In the Strand Magazine and some American editions of the Canon, the bid and asked prices are given as “One hundred and six and a quarter to one hundred and five and seven-eighths.” Invariably, prices are quoted as “bid” and “asked” (that is, the amount for which the broker will buy the shares and the amount for which the broker will sell the shares) and therefore range from low to high (that is, the broker expects to make a profit by selling shares for more than the broker’s purchase price). Watson made this correction in the first English book publication of “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk.”
24R. M. McLaren suggests that “Ayrshires” probably refers to the stock of the former Glasgow and South Western Railway. The other two companies also ceased to conduct business before the end of the nineteenth century.
25A bet.
26On the inside, “in the know.”
27After extensive examination of extant buildings in Birmingham, as well as maps and published guidebooks, Philip Weller identifies the location of the company’s offices as No. 3 Corporation Street, a five-storey building on the downhill stretch of Corporation Street.
28The 1894 Baedeker’s Great Britain lists a Day’s Music Hall at Smallbrook Street in Birmingham. Music halls, quite popular at that time, originated in the London pubs, where patrons were encouraged to sing along with local performers. So widespread did this type of entertainment become that a law was passed in 1843 that allowed pubs to license specific rooms for theatrical use. Concentrated in the East End of London and catering primarily to the middle classes, music halls spawned such personalities as Dan Leno, an immensely gifted comic performer and “pantomime dame” (who dressed up in shawl, wig, and button boots to play a character named “Mother Goose”), and Marie Lloyd, whose rags-to-riches story and rough fearlessness enabled “this weird-looking girl with buck teeth and thin hair,” according to A. N. Wilson, “to electrify an audience of cynical drunks from the moment she got up and sang ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery.’ ”
29That is, the vintage of a particularly good year. In ancient times, the superstition grew up that the passage of a comet affected the quality of the grape harvest and hence the wine produced from the harvest.
30In the English book text, the middle name is given as “Henry.” “Harry” is a common English diminutive for “Henry”; see “The Crooked Man,” where Henry Wood refers to himself as “Harry Wood.”
31In the American texts, Harry Pinner is described as “dark,” not “blond.” This is consistent with Pycroft’s earlier description of Pinner, but Pycroft already indicated that he concluded that the man he described as “dark-haired” was wearing a wig. The “blond” hair must be Pinner’s own hair.
32This method of restoration of breathing was devised by Dr. Henry Robert Silvester (1829–1908), who described it in an 1858 British Medical Journal article entitled “A new method of resuscitating still-born children, and for restoring persons apparently drowned or dead.” Silvester advocated raising the patient’s arms above his or her head to expand the rib cage; lowering the arms against the chest forced the expiration of breath. Silvester’s method was adopted by the Humane Society and the National Life Boat Institution. An article in the Lancet of August 11, 1877, described a new method advocated by one Dr. B. Howard of America, using pressure on the chest from above (the patient being placed on his back). At the meeting of the British Medical Association at Manchester in 1877, Dr. Howard demonstrated his method. (Neither method prescribes a dose of cold water thrown in the face.) The Schafer method, (published in 1904), in which the patient was placed face-down and pressure applied to the back, superseded these techniques, to be in turn replaced by the Holger Nielsen method (1932), which involved a combination of back pressure and a lifting of the arms. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation did not become the standard until the 1950s, perhaps owing to a Victorian discomfort with any rescue effort that required strangers to touch lips.
33Mr. Pinner’s possession of the early edition of the paper is an act of wizardry indeed. “If everything went well it would have been just possible to get a few [copies] of that [issue of the Evening Standard] to Birmingham by 7 P.M.,” John Hyslop writes in “Sherlock Holmes and the Press.” But, Hyslop concludes, it could only have been a late edition of the paper. Furthermore, the Birmingham Evening Despatch, with a much fuller story, ought to have been readily available by this time.
34“When the new clerk presented himself for duty,” reasons Vern Goslin, “surely the manager must have been puzzled to meet, not ‘a smart young City man’ in his twenties, but a middle-aged man, with traces of fore
ign origin.”
35A burglar. Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, wrote a highly successful series of stories, the first of which are collected in The Amateur Cracksman (1899), featuring gentleman-thief A. J. Raffles and his companion, Bunny.
36Meaning a temporary certificate or receipt for shares subscribed. The mysterious “Mr. Cornelius” (“The Norwood Builder”) also had scrip in his portfolio.
37Vern Goslin is highly critical of what he terms Holmes’s “inept handling” of the case. Holmes wasted his time by hurrying to Birmingham in the morning, even though he could not see Pinner until early evening. Instead, he should have been interviewing the manager of Mawson’s and alerted the police. Holmes could have captured Beddington, saving the watchman’s life, and still have been in Birmingham before seven o’clock to deal with Mr. Pinner.
38Several scholars point out the similarities of the criminal plot in “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” (which likely occurred in 1889 or earlier), “The Red-Headed League” (1890), and “The Three Garridebs” (1902). Robert E. Robinson, in “The Beddington Plot,” explains that although “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” had not been published at the time of the events recorded in “The Red-Headed League,” the criminal John Clay could have learned the details of Beddington’s plan from newspaper accounts; Killer Evans, the villain of “The Three Garridebs,” could have read Watson’s published account of “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” and borrowed the idea from Beddington. Holmes evidently learned from the events as well. While in “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk,” Holmes was miles from the scene of the crime when it occurred, by the time of “The Red-Headed League” and “The Three Garridebs,” Holmes recognized the “Beddington plot” immediately and was prepared for the criminals. But, Robinson notes, “[w]hile Holmes was profiting by each exposure to the Beddington Plot, Watson was learning nothing at all. In spite of his participation in the Pycroft matter, his reaction to [the events of “The Red-Headed League” and “The Three Garridebs”] was one of total bewilderment.”
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 67
