The same year that his book was published, Tebb, ever the savvy promoter, helped form the London Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial, primarily to help publicise Premature Burial. The society would become the leading agitator in the anti–premature-burial movement, holding regular meetings, organising the occasional lecture, and launching a journal, the Burial Reformer, in 1905. In addition to reporting on the society’s meetings, the journal published articles on premature burial and stories from the world’s newspapers. One example is “The Accrington Sensation” (1905), in which Mrs. Elizabeth Holden escaped burial only when an undertaker saw her eyelid twitch. According to the Burial Reformer, her trauma did not preclude her from talking to the press: “pale, wan, extremely weak, she feebly lisped out to a representative of the Manchester Courier her recollections of her terrible experience.” The journal also published poetry, exposing the public to such gems as Mark Melford’s “Living with the Dead,” printed in 1913 and containing the immortal lines: “Alive! Within the jaws of death, / No fate was ever worse! / No enemy invoked on me / So terrible a curse! / Conveyed still living to my grave! / Within a funeral hearse.” It was clear that by this time, the journal, now named Perils of Premature Burial, had taken on an increasingly sensationalist tone, running stories—such as that of a baby found within its coffin, sucking placidly from a bottle—that were frankly preposterous. Its audience dwindling, the journal ceased publication in 1914, although the society itself continued to exist until the 1930s.
Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins were among those literary figures sufficiently spooked by the prospect of being buried alive, or at least intrigued by it, to pen fiction in which premature burial played a central role. Poe, of course, qualifies as “[t]he writer with the most premature burials per page,” according to Bondeson. “[His] unwholesome fascination with this subject is apparent to every devotee of his horror stories.” Chief among these is “The Premature Burial” (1844), in which the protagonist so fears being buried alive that he takes elaborate precautions to avoid the scenario—preparations that come to naught when he suffers a cataleptic fit while travelling (see “The Resident Patient,” note 8). Poe’s creepy tale was made into a macabre 1962 film by Roger Corman, starring the fine actor Ray Milland as the death-obsessed protagonist (Milland also appeared in the 1984 Sherlock Holmes film The Masks of Death, starring Peter Cushing as Holmes). Wilkie Collins and Mark Twain both wrote works of fiction set in waiting mortuaries, and other authors wrote stories featuring characters, presumed dead, who saved themselves from a horrible fate by belatedly awakening and extracting themselves from their coffins. But in terms of sheer enthusiasm, none of these writers matched Friederike Kempner, who made a name for herself by writing, in German, a popular 1853 pamphlet on the subject. She also wrote poetry, including “The Prematurely Buried Child,” which describes a “coffin’d child” crying out, “Mummy, where are you!?” and continues in similarly dramatic fashion: “His bloody hands they knock / Unyielding coffin walls / Half dead with fright and shock / ‘Hear, I am not dead!’ / But no one heeds his call.”
Regardless of whether Lady Frances suffered from “taphophobia,” as the fear of premature burial has been termed, Holmes surely saved her from becoming what John Snart, author of the near-hysterical Thesaurus of Horror, or, The Charnel-House Explored (1817), deemed “a fermentable mass of murdered, senseless, decomposing matter!!!”
1 “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1911 and in the American Magazine (New York) the same month (entitled there “The Disappearance of Lady Carfax”). The manuscript of “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” is in the hands of a private collector. Peter Blau reports, in “ ‘It Is an Old Manuscript,’ ” that in the original text, Lady Frances is Lady Maria.
2 Holmes’s own rheumatism is discussed in the Preface. There is little agreement among the chronologists about the date of “Lady Frances Carfax,” but those who agree place it after 1900, when Watson would have been just fifty (see Chronological Table). According to Whitaker’s Almanack for 1900, at age fifty, Watson’s life expectancy was about another twenty years (today, his life expectancy would be about another thirty-three years). Therefore, his feeling old was not wholly imaginary.
3 Often misspelled as “alternative,” an alterative is any drug used to alter the course of an ailment and restore the sufferer to full health.
4 Philip Weller remarks, “It is absurd, since there are other possibilities, such as that Watson was buying a new pair of shoes or a second pair of boots.” But Derham Groves, in “The Reason Behind the Reasoning,” explains that Holmes reasoned from a recent change in the weather that, in order to ease the ache of his old wound, Watson would seek out the Turkish baths.
5 “Holmes’s experience of women was, of course, limited,” notes T. S. Blakeney wryly.
6 Famed science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer concludes that Lady Frances was the descendant of the Lord Rufton mentioned in “How the Brigadier Triumphed in England,” first published in the Strand Magazine in 1903 and later published as a chapter of the memoirs edited by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle under the title Adventures of Gerard. Of course, the name “Rufton” is fictitious in both accounts, but, Farmer proposes, Doyle, knowing of the relationship, suggested that Dr. Watson use the same pseudonym that he had used.
7 Mark Hunter Purvis reaches the conclusion that Miss Dobney was engaged in blackmailing Lady Frances.
8 The Hôtel National, notes Michael Kaser, is not listed in Baedeker’s Switzerland guide until 1902. Scholars propose from 1895 to 1902 for the dates of “Lady Frances Carfax,” and this fact tends to support the possibility of a later dating. However, Kaser sticks to 1901, the date selected by most writers, and surmises that the hotel, while sufficiently luxurious for a woman of Lady Frances’s standing, might have taken a while to achieve the international reputation required for inclusion in a guide as venerable as Baedeker.
9 A hunting metaphor, one of many used by Holmes, perhaps reflecting his country upbringing.
10 Spelled (incorrectly) “Montpelier” in all British texts. Holmes spent “some months” in a laboratory in Montpellier between 1891 and 1894, pursuing research into the coal-tar derivatives (“The Empty House”).
11 “A wild man, truly a wild man!”
12 Is this the former Baden, Germany (now known as Baden-Baden), with its famous thermal baths? Or Baden, Switzerland, also known for its mineral springs? The principal scholars are divided on the issue.
13 The Thomas Cook travel agency was conceived at a June 9, 1841, temperance meeting in Leicester. Interested in attending a July 5 meeting at Loughborough, cabinet-maker and former Baptist preacher Thomas Cook (1808–1892) suggested that his fellow temperance workers make the journey together. Cook persuaded the Midland Railway Company to arrange a train to carry five hundred passengers the twelves miles to Loughborough and back again at the cost of one shilling per person. The success of the trip encouraged Cook to continue arranging excursions for temperance societies and Sunday schools, printing up posters and handbills to advertise his services. Eventually, Cook—today widely considered the founder of modern tourism—began taking an even more active rôle in the travel plans, researching the routes to be taken, writing up accompanying handbooks (precursors to the modern travel guide), and publishing a newspaper promoting his tours. In 1855, Cook was able to expand his business beyond Britain by taking tourists on a Grand Tour of Europe, from Leicester to the international exhibition in Paris on a circuitous route that included Brussels, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, and Strasbourg. By the 1870s, he was conducting tours around the world. So dominant in the travel field was the firm that in 1884, the British government asked it to organise the relief expedition sent to attempt a rescue of General George Gordon at Khartoum (see “The Cardboard Box,” note 9).
According to Michael Kaser, the Thomas Cook office in Lausanne was opened on April, 1891, at No. 1 Rue Pépinet. At that p
oint, the business would have been known officially as Thos. Cook and Son, as the business affairs were being managed by Cook’s son, John Mason Cook.
14 Furthering the argument for Baden, Germany, Kaser notes that an Englischer Hof for that town is listed in Baedeker’s 1893 and 1902 southern Germany editions. In addition, there is no Englischer Hof listed for Baden in the 1887 edition of Baedeker’s Switzerland.
15 The Midianites, also referred to as Ishmaelites in the Old Testament, were a group of nomadic tribes related to the Israelites. Residing mostly in the northwestern Arabian Desert, they are described in Genesis as having been descended from Midian, the son of Abraham by his second wife, Keturah. In Exodus, Moses marries Zipporah, a daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro. There was no “kingdom of the Midianites.”
16 French: workman.
17 Benjamin Clark sees Holmes’s behaviour, both here and further on, as “illogical and bizarre.” If Watson had wired Holmes that Lady Frances was on her way to London, Holmes had no reason to disguise himself in Montpellier. And yet, Clark puzzles, “the detective chose this moment to indulge his craving for fancy dress by disguising himself as a French workman. Was his only purpose in doing so to have the pleasure of startling Watson?” Indeed, Watson had done excellent work, picking up Lady Frances’s trail, identifying the persons with whom she left Baden, and, notwithstanding Holmes’s accusation, doing nothing to alarm the criminals.
18 A high, frilly, cotton cap with a crown, worn indoors by women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The usage possibly originates from the obscure Dutch mopmuts, mop meaning “to cover up” and muts meaning “cap.”
19 Located in the De Kaap Valley of South Africa’s Makonjwa mountain range, Barberton became a gold rush town after the rich deposits of Barber’s Reef were discovered there in June 1884.
20 A large hotel in Portland Place. It was here that Arthur Conan Doyle first met with the commissioning editor of Lippincott’s, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, and arranged for publication of The Sign of Four. Captain Morstan (The Sign of Four) stayed here, as did the King of Bohemia (“A Scandal in Bohemia”).
21 The capital of South Australia. Mary Fraser, Lady Brackenstall, of “The Abbey Grange,” was also from Adelaide. In the manuscript, “Adelaide” is Omaha, Nebraska, a world away.
22 Philip Weller remarks: “This is a typical piece of arrogant nonsense from Holmes, since the Continental registration system (which was not as efficient as Holmes suggests anyway) could not have shown that Lady Frances might not have reached London.”
23 One must assume that this refers to the Baker Street Irregulars, mentioned by name only in A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and “The Crooked Man.” Or is this the “Agency” referred to in “The Sussex Vampire”?
24 “Bovington’s” in American texts, a thinly disguised version of Bravington’s, the fashionable Victorian jewellers.
25 Holmes most likely means Westminster Bridge Road, which runs from Westminster Bridge to St. George’s Square.
26 Also known as the Azov or Azoff Sea, this inland body of water is a northern extension of the Black Sea and is connected to it by the Kerch Strait. The Azof is the world’s shallowest sea, measuring only forty-six feet deep at its deepest point.
27 See “The ‘Gloria Scott’,” note 30.
28 Watson misspeaks here, for the “client” is declared by Holmes to be the family of Lady Frances, not her lover.
29 See note 23. Holmes here does not refer to his gang of “street urchins” but only means that he and Watson will act in a manner different from the “regular forces.” Irregular troops, for example, were used in the British Army as harassing forces or for infiltration behind enemy lines.
30 “No reason to think anyone is interested in the lady’s fate!” Benjamin Clark complains. “Why, for a week, Holmes, with what he describes as his own small but very efficient organization, together with Scotland Yard, has been investigating, advertising, combing Shlessinger’s haunt, watching his old associates, and heaven knows what else. . . . No! If Peters failed to be alarmed under the above-described conditions, he certainly does not deserve the title of astute.” Clark further observes that making two separate trips to pawn the pendants was a monumental error, one that led directly to Peters’s downfall.
31 Holmes quotes King Henry, caught between the quarreling Dukes of Suffolk and Warwick, just after the murder of the Duke of Gloucester, from Shakespeare’s The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth, Act III, Scene 2.
32 Holmes was not committing burglary or the daytime crime of housebreaking here because he had no felonious intent, that is, he had no intention to remove anything belonging to Peters or to attack Peters. Trespass is not a criminal offence; at worst, Holmes may have been guilty of conduct tending to provoke a breach of the peace. Of course, Peters was not making a formal accusation of Holmes, only speaking in the vernacular.
33 The first “workhouses” were built in response to the Poor Law of 1601, which handed responsibility for the indigent to individual parishes. While workhouses were meant to provide the poor with gainful employment, the work available was minimal, and they began to resemble prisons more than viable social institutions. The situation grew even more taxed with passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which limited aid for the poor exclusively to the workhouses, prohibiting any “outdoor” or “home” relief. Many of those in need of assistance were desperately ill, and vice versa. Workhouses were forced to add infirmaries, complete with isolation wards, to treat the overwhelming number of applicants afflicted with cholera, smallpox, scarlet fever, and whooping cough.
This centralised system was orchestrated by Edwin Chadwick, whose draconian rules made him, as historian Roy Porter puts it, “the most hated man in England.” His idea was to solve the poverty problem by making conditions at workhouses so bleak and demeaning—even punitive—that the indigent would seek to lift themselves out of poverty. To Chadwick, as Porter explains, the workhouses were “a self-operating mechanism for eliminating pauperism: the workhouse being intended as nastier than work.” Married couples were routinely separated, as were parents and children. The “work” usually consisted of breaking stones or picking okum. By law, after 1833, unclaimed workhouse bodies were used for dissection by anatomists (see “The Cardboard Box,” note 17). (When poverty levels failed to diminish, Chadwick blamed sickness itself, and he became obsessed not with improving the workhouses but with cleaning up the city’s sewage system.)
The reference to the Brixton Workhouse Infirmary is fictitious, but Philip Weller suggests that the name may be a euphemism for Brixton Prison, “where there was a female prisoner section and an infirmary, although this seems harsh for a woman of 90.”
34 Dr. Alvin Rodin and Jack D. Key observe that whatever Peters’s cleverness elsewhere, his use of chloroform is not particularly ingenious. Chloroform had been used as a medical anaesthetic since Sir James Simpson first administered it in 1847; and the technique gained popular acceptance after Queen Victoria authorised her physician, John Snow, to administer chloroform during the delivery of Prince Leopold, her eighth child, in 1853. Apparently, criminals such as Peters had already discovered alternate uses for chloroform. Rodin and Key find that the substance was used to subdue potential victims during a rash of robberies in 1850. They quote Thomson’s 1936 Story of Scotland Yard, which reports that “two notorious women used it to render a Mr. Jewett, a solicitor . . . unconscious. He woke to find himself stripped of his clothing and valuables, lying on a filthy bed in a wretched lodging.”
35 While ether in gaseous form was then used as an anaesthetic, it was also recommended in injected form as a stimulant. The Encyclopœdia Britannica (11th Ed.) calls it “perhaps the most rapid and powerful cardiac stimulant known.” The source of the ether that Watson injects here, however, remains a puzzle to D. Martin Dakin, who writes that carrying it around would have required “a black bag of colossal proportions.” Presumably, Watson could not have dashed i
nto a local shop to purchase ether, and nor could he have approached a local hospital, which would have demanded he admit the patient rather than treat her himself. “Perhaps,” Dakin muses, “although this is not mentioned, the truth is that Holmes, anticipating the need for ether, had asked Watson to bring some; just as he must have pocketed the two screwdrivers he so opportunely produced to open the coffin, and since Peters was not likely to have left such things lying about for their convenience.”
36 Philip Weller questions the conduct of the undertakers, who, even if not in league with Lady Frances’s kidnappers, “might be considered to be morally guilty by omission, in not passing on the suspicions which must have been aroused during the various stages of their involvement with the burial of Rose Spender.”
37 “ ‘Unusual’ might have been a better adjective,” Benjamin Clark concludes. “Surely it was a device with truly extraordinary risks. In the first place, the extraction from the workhouse had to be done in an innocent and plausible manner. Then it was important that the Shlessingers pick an inmate who had to be, one might say, ‘just right’—not yet dead, but awful close: and yet not so close but what she could be moved. A very ‘nice’ calculation, all things considered.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 70
