31The Coldstreams, also known as “Coalies,” marched with General George Monck into London on February 2, 1660, to help restore the monarchy after Richard Cromwell’s government collapsed. According to Mrs. Crighton Sellars in her “Dr. Watson and the British Army,” the Coldstream Guards were “one of the most famous regiments in the whole British army. . . . Their service has been long and always honourable.” In fact, Sellars wonders whether Watson didn’t fabricate the commissionaire’s association with that regiment in order to characterise him as a man entirely above reproach.
32The intensely fragrant moss rose, which has large blossoms and many petals, is so named because the flower’s sepals and stem appear to be covered in a green or reddish moss. Mutated from damask and centifolia (or “cabbage”) roses, the moss rose was a particular favourite in Victorian times, whether in gardens, bouquets, or decorative art.
33Vernon Rendell observes that Holmes “ignores the elementary fact, for students of natural history, that colour and scent are not ‘extras’ in blossoms. They are designed to attract the insects which fertilise them and so help produce the seed.”
34Whether by coincidence or design, Holmes seems to favour this number, providing seven separate explanations of the facts behind “The Copper Beeches” and seven different schemes for getting a glimpse of Godfrey Staunton’s telegram (“The Missing Three-Quarter”).
35The schools were red-brick three-storey Queen Anne–style buildings that stood in the middle of walled asphalt playgrounds. These were England’s first taxpayer-supported schools (not to be confused with “public schools,” elite private institutions such as Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, which had once been founded to educate the poor but had altered, over the centuries, into sanctuaries of the rich, who took great pains to exclude the poor). Until the creation of a School Board for London in 1870, the only organisations dedicated to providing education to the impoverished London classes were the British and Foreign School Society, founded in 1808, and the National Society, founded in 1811, affiliated, respectively, with the Anglican and Nonconformist churches. Although they were committed (with various other religious denominations) to providing poor children with instruction—often through Sunday schools, which did not remove children from the workplace—the demands of a rapidly increasing population proved beyond their capabilities. In 1871, only 262,259 children, or 39 per cent of the estimated population of school age, could be accommodated by the public and Society schools. By October 1881 the School Board for London had supplied accommodation for more than 200,000 additional children, which gave a total number of places sufficient for some 500,000 children. It was not until 1899, with the establishment of the National Board of Education and the abolition of the fees paid by parents, that education was made compulsory and available to every child in England. The election of the School Board in 1870 broke new ground in other ways: Not only were women with property allowed to vote in the election, but they could stand for office. Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, the first woman doctor in England, was elected to the board with more votes than any other candidate.
36England’s northernmost county is a wild, chilly, remote locale, and its natives are described in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica as typically “stalwart and robust, and seldom corpulent. The people have mostly grey eyes, brown hair, and good complexions.” Neither of the Harrisons display the typical physical characteristics of the typical Northumbrian. Could the Harrisons have been spies sent to obtain the treaty?
37At that time, the omnibus that Mrs. Tangey took to her home would have been an enclosed carriage pulled by two horses, with seats for passengers both inside and on the roof. Although an eight-passenger omnibus with a single-cylinder engine was built in Germany in 1895, the vehicles were not motorized on any larger scale until the early twentieth century.
38The American editions of the Canon have the word “yesterday” and not “to-day.”
39Watson may be comparing Holmes here to a “cigar-store Indian,” or the traditional life-sized wooden figure that stood outside tobacco shops. The practice of carving and displaying such statues actually started in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with native Americans—who had introduced tobacco to English explorers and settlers—romantically and historically linked, in the British mind, to the cultivation and enjoyment of tobacco. Of course, Watson well may have seen real “Red Indians,” for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which featured dozens and dozens of Native Americans, was a frequent visitor to London.
40Before fingerprinting, there was Bertillonage, or the Bertillon system, which aimed to classify criminals through bodily measurements. The system was the creation of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), who joined the Paris police force in 1879 and became its head of criminal identification. Inspired by his anthropologist father, Bertillon reasoned that while a criminal might alter his appearance by wearing a wig, or conceal his identity by using an alias, his physical dimensions were nearly impossible to change. Under the Bertillon system, officers took two pictures of each suspect, one face-forward and one side view (Bertillon is often credited with popularizing both the mug shot and the crime-scene photo) and then carefully noted on an index card the precise dimensions of the suspect’s head, various limbs, and appendages; any defining body characteristics; and in particular, the shape of the ear. Eleven different measurements were taken in all. The Bertillon system was officially adopted in France in 1888, and its use quickly spread to police departments throughout the world. But its imperfections were demonstrated when it was discovered in 1903 that two suspects, a Will West and a William West—though allegedly no relation—possessed almost identical measurements, and thus had been classified as the same person. The two Wests did, however, have different fingerprints. (While there is some dispute over the matter, it seems likely that the Wests were in fact identical twins.) Bertillon reluctantly began including fingerprinting as a supplement to his system, and eventually the practice replaced Bertillonage altogether. See also Volume II, “Sherlock Holmes and Fingerprinting,” an appendix to “The Norwood Builder.”
41The Oxford English Dictionary credits “The Naval Treaty” as the first usage of this word to mean a sound.
42S. C. Roberts, a tireless champion of the point of view that Holmes attended university at Oxford, points out that Holmes had several intimate conversations with Phelps (who had had a “triumphant career” at Cambridge), none of which made any reference to the school. “If Holmes had in fact also been a Cambridge man it is almost inconceivable that neither he nor Phelps should have mentioned the University which they had in common.” Therefore, concludes Roberts, Holmes and Phelps must have attended different universities.
43Presumably Watson’s former bedroom, since he was no longer living at Baker Street.
44There are Canonical references to Holmes’s efforts on behalf of rulers of Bohemia (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), Holland (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), and Scandinavia (“The Noble Bachelor” and “The Final Problem”).
45How did Joseph Harrison know of the trap-door? Although he was staying in the “cheery bedroom,” he must have been an odd sort to have idly searched the room or moved the carpet.
46To knock down or bring down. James Holroyd suggests that Holmes may have knocked him down twice for reasons other than Harrison’s resilience. Instead, he suggests Holmes resented Harrison’s earlier greeting, when he clucked, “Percy has been enquiring for you all morning. Ah, poor chap, he clings to any straw.” To this may be added Harrison’s insouciant response to Holmes’s observation of his monogram: “For a moment I thought you had done something clever.” Little wonder the proud Holmes might feel compelled to take Harrison down a few pegs, in more ways than one.
47Harrison, of course, had plenty of time to make an eleven o’clock train if he committed the theft at quarter to ten. He must have said that he waited for Percy at the station and when he did not appear, he assumed Percy to be working late. When Phelps arrived home, all ha
d to be “roused from their beds,” so Harrison’s explanation of a late evening of work apparently caused no alarm.
48This editor, in a speculation entitled “From Prussia with Love: Contemplating ‘The Naval Treaty.’” points out that if Phelps had been more observant, he might have noticed that not only did Joseph and Annie Harrison bear little resemblance to true Northumbrians (their supposed forebears) but even less resemblance to each other. Holmes may have missed the opportunity to expose both Harrisons as agents for the German imperial government, sent precisely to obtain the precious treaty. Joseph Harrison then attempted to break into Phelps’s bedroom to replace the treaty, not to steal it, so that the British government would not be aware of its disclosure.
THE FINAL PROBLEM1
To paraphrase Watson, it was with heavy hearts that Strand Magazine readers began the tale Watson recorded as “The Final Problem,” which purported to include Watson’s “last words” about Sherlock Holmes. The story stunned the British public, cost the Strand Magazine twenty thousand subscribers, and led to an outbreak of black armbands. Watson kept his silence until 1901, eight years after publication of “The Final Problem,” when he published The Hound of the Baskervilles, another reminiscence of Holmes. The modern reader knows that Holmes did not die, as Watson evidently believed at the close of this account, but instead returned to London in 1894. For obscure reasons, Holmes refused to allow Watson to disclose this information to his readers until 1903, when Watson was permitted to reveal the true conclusion of the events of “The Final Problem” in connection with his report of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” the first story of the volume entitled The Return of Sherlock Holmes. But “The Final Problem” is a fine drama in its own right, with the tense and thrilling encounters between Holmes and Professor Moriarty (copied by William Gillette with great success in his play Sherlock Holmes and aped in countless films thereafter). Moriarty, who has achieved near-legendary status as the arch-nemesis of Holmes, appears only in “The Final Problem,” “The Empty House,” and The Valley of Fear, and so the information about him in this tale has been carefully mined by scholars.
IT IS WITH a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.2 In an incoherent and, as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion, I have endeavoured to give some account of my strange experiences in his company from the chance which first brought us together at the period of the “Study in Scarlet,” up to the time of his interference in the matter of the “Naval Treaty”—an interference which had the unquestionable effect of preventing a serious international complication. It was my intention to have stopped there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill. My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother,3 and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred. I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression. As far as I know, there have been only three accounts in the public press: that in the Journal de Geneve on May 6th, 1891, the Reuter’s4 dispatch in the English papers on May 7th, and finally the recent letters to which I have alluded. Of these the first and second were extremely condensed,5 while the last is, as I shall now show, an absolute perversion of the facts. It lies with me to tell for the first time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
“The death of Sherlock Holmes.”
H. T. Webster, source unknown, April 25, 1921
“The Final Problem.”
E. S. Morris, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 10, 1912
It may be remembered that after my marriage, and my subsequent start in private practice, the very intimate relations which had existed between Holmes and myself became to some extent modified. He still came to me from time to time when he desired a companion in his investigations, but these occasions grew more and more seldom, until I find that in the year 1890 there were only three cases of which I retain any record.6 During the winter of that year and the early spring of 1891, I saw in the papers that he had been engaged by the French government upon a matter of supreme importance, and I received two notes from Holmes, dated from Narbonne and from Nimes, from which I gathered that his stay in France was likely to be a long one. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I saw him walk into my consulting-room upon the evening of April 24th. It struck me that he was looking even paler and thinner than usual.
“It was with some surprise . . . that I saw him walking into my consulting-room.”
Harry C. Edwards, McClure’s Magazine, 1893
“Yes, I have been using myself up rather too freely,” he remarked, in answer to my look rather than to my words; “I have been a little pressed of late. Have you any objection to my closing your shutters?”
The only light in the room came from the lamp upon the table at which I had been reading. Holmes edged his way round the wall, and, flinging the shutters together, he bolted them securely.
“You are afraid of something?” I asked.
“Well, I am.”
“Of what?”
“Of air-guns.”7
“My dear Holmes, what do you mean?”
“I think that you know me well enough, Watson, to understand that I am by no means a nervous man. At the same time, it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognise danger when it is close upon you. Might I trouble you for a match?” He drew in the smoke of his cigarette as if the soothing influence was grateful to him.
“I must apologize for calling so late,” said he, “and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.”8
“But what does it all mean?” I asked.
He held out his hand, and I saw in the light of the lamp that two of his knuckles were burst and bleeding.
“It’s not an airy nothing, you see,” said he, smiling. “On the contrary, it is solid enough for a man to break his hand over. Is Mrs. Watson in?”
“She is away upon a visit.”
“Indeed! You are alone?”
“Quite.”
“Then it makes it the easier for me to propose that you should come away with me for a week to the Continent.”
“Where?”
“Oh, anywhere. It’s all the same to me.”
There was something very strange in all this. It was not Holmes’s nature to take an aimless holiday, and something about his pale, worn face told me that his nerves were at their highest tension. He saw the question in my eyes, and, putting his finger-tips together and his elbows upon his knees, he explained the situation.
“Two of his knuckles were burst and bleeding.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
“You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?” said he.
“Never.”9
“Ay, there’s the genius and the wonder of the thing!” he cried. “The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That’s what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell you Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit and I should be prepared to turn to some more placid line in life. Between ourselves, the recent cases in which I have been of assistance to the royal family of Scandinavia, and to the French republic, have left me in such a position that I could continue to live in the quiet fashion which is most congenial to me,10 and to concentrate my attention upon my chemical researches.11 But I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.”
“What has he done, then?”
“His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good bir
th and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem,12 which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller Universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his Chair and to come down to London, where he set up as an Army coach.13 So much is known to the world, but what I am telling you now is what I have myself discovered.
“As you are aware, Watson, there is no one who knows the higher criminal world of London so well as I do. For years past I have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power which for ever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again in cases of the most varying sorts—forgery cases, robberies, murders—I have felt the presence of this force, and I have deduced its action in many of those undiscovered crimes in which I have not been personally consulted. For years I have endeavoured to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and followed it, until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings, to ex-Professor Moriarty, of mathematical celebrity.
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 92
