25 The Criterion, more formally the American Bar at the Criterion, near Piccadilly Circus, was an establishment that Michael Harrison deems (in The London of Sherlock Holmes) “one of London’s then more expensive bars.” It was also, according to James E. Holroyd, a gathering place for horse-racing aficionados—thus, a likely haunt for Watson, whom Holmes, in “Shoscombe Old Place,” affectionately referred to as his “Handy Guide to the Turf.” Today the Bar is gone, but the Criterion Brasserie has returned to its former architectural glory, and a plaque at the Brasserie commemorates the meeting of Stamford and Watson.
26 J. N. Williamson, in “The Sad Case of Young Stamford,” argues that “young Stamford” had criminal tendencies known to Holmes, which explains why Stamford declined the opportunity to room with Holmes. Young Stamford is the same person, according to Williamson, as Archie Stamford, the forger mentioned in passing in “The Solitary Cyclist.” This same young man, in Williamson’s theory, pops up again as “Archie,” an associate of the villainous John Clay in “The Red-Headed League.” Williamson posits that he was captured and apparently turned to lawful means of employment; Holmes sends to “Stamford” in the Strand text of The Hound of the Baskervilles to obtain an Ordnance map (although the latter is demonstrably a slip of the pen for “Stanford’s,” the well-known map establishment). Taking an altogether different tack is H.E.B. Curjel, who, in “Young Doctor Stamford of Barts,” postulates that Stamford is a member of the teaching staff in the anatomy department of Barts—whereas Cal Wood, in “Stamford: A Closer Look,” takes the somewhat far-fetched view that Stamford was Holmes’s roommate.
27 A surgeon’s assistant.
28 St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, known popularly as “Barts” or “Bart’s,” was founded in 1123 by—legend has it—Rahere, a jester at Henry I’s court. Having taken ill in Rome, Rahere prayed on the banks of the Tiber, on the island of St. Bartholomew, that he might recover in time to die on his native soil. St. Bartholomew appeared to him in a vision, commanding him to return to London and build a church and hospital in his name. By 1896, the hospital had grown to 678 beds, treating some 6,500 in-patients and 16,000 out-patients annually. Among the instructors at its famous medical school (which was opened in 1843) was William Harvey (1578–1657), who both determined the role of the heart in the circulation of blood and demonstrated how blood flowed in a continuous cycle.
29 An 1880 advertisement for the Holborn Restaurant described it as “one of the sights and one of the comforts of London,” combining the “attractions of the chief Parisian establishments with the quiet and order essential to English custom.” William H. Gill, in “Some Notable Sherlockian Buildings,” takes a less benign view, describing the restaurant architecturally as “Victorian classicism at its worst.”
The Holborn was known as a favoured establishment of the Prince of Wales, which may well have impressed the young Watson and Stamford. Lieut. Col. Newnham-Davis captured something of the Holborn’s scale in his Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in London (1899), in which he and his dining companion “wanted something a little more elaborate than a grill-room would give us, and more amusing company than we were likely to find at the smaller dining places we knew of.” During dinner in “the many-coloured marble hall, with its marble staircase springing from either side,” Newnham-Davis and his companion listen to “a good band, but much too loud” and dine on beef and brussels sprouts, chicken and ham; when they refuse dessert, the waiter expresses concern “that something must be the matter with us, for most people at the Holborn eat their dinner steadily through.” Chapter 16 of the same book recounts Newnham-Davis’s dining experience at the American Bar at the Criterion, a “very good place for an undress dinner.”
Holborn Restaurant (ca. 1900).
Menu from the Holborn Restaurant, 1884.
30 Ian McQueen expresses doubt that Watson’s tan, if in fact acquired, would have survived his journey from Afghanistan to London. See note 81, below.
31 S. C. Roberts, in Dr. Watson, wonders whether Stamford’s strange look and hesitation meant that he foresaw his impending destiny as “one of the great liaison-officers of literary history”—comparable, in Roberts’s view, to Tom Davies, who introduced Boswell to Dr. Samuel Johnson. The analogy is apt in light of Holmes’s own characterisation of Watson as “my Boswell” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”).
32 Watson comes to develop a slightly more sceptical view of Holmes’s faculties, as in listing Holmes’s “limits” he will soon deem Holmes’s knowledge of anatomy “[a]ccurate, but unsystematic.”
33 Alkaloids, which occur naturally in plants, are known for their powerful physiological effects on humans and animals. (Morphine, strychnine, quinine, nicotine, cocaine, and curare are but a few examples.) The first alkaloid to be isolated and crystallized was morphine, extracted from the poppy plant in 1805–1806. By 1878, Holmes may have been able to experiment with various isolated alkaloids, which tend to be odourless and bitter in taste; but at the same time, not much was yet known definitively about their properties.
Alkaloids appear throughout the Canon: morphine in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” cocaine in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and quinine in The Sign of Four; the alkaloid tubocurarine, a muscle relaxant, is the active ingredient in curare, the South American poison that plays a significant role in both The Sign of Four and “The Sussex Vampire.” Of course, nicotine, which originates in the tobacco plant, is ubiquitous in the smoke-filled rooms of Baker Street and elsewhere. Stamford’s shrewd observation here remarkably foreshadows Holmes’s experimentation on Watson and himself in “The Devil’s Foot,” although whether Radix pedis diaboli is an alkaloid is unsettled.
34 Holmes’s fondness for experimentation on corpses was not limited to human cadavers; in “Black Peter,” Watson records that Holmes tested the sticking-power of harpoons on the carcasses of pigs at the shop of Allardyce the butcher.
35 Named after Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, the German chemist who introduced (but did not invent) it in 1855, the Bunsen burner combines a hollow metal tube with a valve at the base that allows for regulation of the supply of air. Flammable gas and air together are forced upward through the tube and then lit to produce a hot flame. The principles behind the Bunsen burner paved the way for the invention of the gas-stove burner and the gas furnace.
36 In “Some Observations on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson at Bart’s,” Adrian Griffith notes that in the memoirs of Sir Norman Moore, Moore recounts that he and an unnamed other student were private students of Augustus Matthiessen, who lectured in chemistry at Bart’s from 1870 onward. In 1869, Matthiessen, an employee of Friedrich Bayer & Co.—then a manufacturer of textile dyes—removed two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen from morphine to derive the subsidiary alkaloid apomorphine. Its primary function was to induce vomiting, and Bayer marketed it as a purgative similar to castor oil. It was later touted as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease and a “cure” for homosexuality, and today it is sold as a sexual-enhancement drug for both men and women. Griffith suggests that Holmes was the unnamed student of Matthiessen. Considering Matthiessen’s work on alkaloids, Holmes’s interest in the subject may well have started at Bart’s, and Moore’s recollections of Matthiessen’s career suggest to Griffith that Holmes and Matthiessen may have even collaborated on the occasional project.
37 An instrument for piercing holes.
38 If Holmes’s discovery were valid, argues Remsen Ten Eyck Schenck, in “Baker Street Fables,” it would be universally used today. The fact that it is not leads Schenck to label “unfounded” the notion that only hæmoglobin caused the agent to react. “Presumably,” Schenck continues, “[Holmes] discovered on further study that a similar result was obtained with other common substances, or else that it was not due to hæmoglobin at all, but rather to some other ingredient present in the blood, but not peculiar to it.” Holmes was even wrong about the concentration of his blood solution: Schenck estimates that the ratio of a “dr
op” of blood to a litre of water would have actually been about one part blood to 30,000 parts water, rather than the “one in a million” proportion Holmes cites shortly (although a “drop” is an imprecise unit, the smallest unit used in medicine is a “minim,” .06 of a millilitre, which would produce a ratio of 1 to 60,000). The detective “no doubt soon bitterly regretted that he had even mentioned his test, even to Watson,” Schenck concludes, “and this could well explain why it was never again referred to.”
But Leon S. Holstein, in “7. Knowledge of Chemistry—Profound” disagrees, suggesting that the test was an early version of the present-day hæmochromogen test, which is used to identify bloodstains. When blood is present, hæmochromogen crystals turn pinkish, which is perhaps, as Holstein surmises, a shade not that far removed from the “dull mahogany colour” that Holmes observes.
Christine L. Huber, in “The Sherlock Holmes Blood Test: The Solution to a Century-Old Mystery,” identifies the test as one “rediscovered” in the 1930s, when it was “discovered” that hæmoglobin A is denatured by sodium hydroxide (“white crystals”) and then precipitated with saturated ammonium sulfate (a “transparent fluid”). “[T]he Holmes Test … has been in almost daily use in hospitals and research laboratories, as a part of the electrophoretic process, since its rediscovery,” she claims. “How it was lost in the first place and why Holmes never received acknowledgment for it remains a mystery.”
39 In another test for hæmoglobin (and consequently for the presence of blood), the greenish-brown resin of the guaiacum tree, or lignum vitae, was mixed with alcohol; this substance was added to the liquid being tested and then shaken with a few drops of hydrogen peroxide in ether. The presence of hæmoglobin would turn the mixture bright blue. The test was first reported in 1861 in a modified form by J. Van Deen.
R. Austin Freeman describes this test in The Shadow of the Wolf (1925), an account of the great medico-legal detective Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke—whose cases, like those of Holmes, were written up in several other books, from The Red Thumb Mark (1907) to The Jacob Street Mystery (1942). After pouring some tincture of guaiacum on a questionable stain, Thorndyke watches as the liquid spreads outward, then adds the ether and allows the two liquids to mix. “Gradually the ether spread towards the stain,” Freeman writes, “and, first at one point and then at another, approached and finally crossed the wavy grey line; and at each point the same change occurred: first the faint grey line turned into a strong blue line, and then the colour extended to the enclosed space until the entire area of the stain stood out in a conspicuous blue patch. ‘You understand the meaning of this,’ said Thorndyke. ‘This is a bloodstain.’ ”
P. M. Stone asserts, in “The Other Friendship: A Speculation,” that Holmes and Thorndyke actually met and exchanged views at some point. “[I]t is not unlikely,” comments Edgar Smith in his introduction to the essay, “that Sherlock Holmes … was inclined to seek variety—and shall we say relief?—in intellectual converse on the higher plane with someone whose capacities and inclinations were just a little closer to his own.”
There were in fact eleven original tests for haemoglobin developed between 1800 and 1881, and numerous variations were proposed. The tests, several of which remain in modern use, are summarised in Raymond J. McGowan’s “Sherlock Holmes and Forensic Chemistry.”
40 Michael Harrison surmises that Holmes offered his test to the British police, who snubbed him. It is no wonder, then, Harrison suggests, that Holmes, “nursing an unconquerable prejudice against the British police system, preferred to go his own highly individual way.”
41 D. Martin Dakin notes that “Muller” cannot have been “the Franz Müller who was the first railway murderer (1864) since he was convicted and that not by bloodstains, but by his absentmindedly going off with his victim’s hat!”
42 Owen Dudley Edwards observes, “Holmes is evidently shooting off these names at great speed with the obsessiveness of a devotee determined to bombard his audience with proofs of their own ignorance in a field he intends to evangelize.”
43 The provenance of the “Baker” in “Baker Street” is somewhat unclear. According to Hector Bolitho and Derek Peel’s Without the City Wall: An Adventure in London Street-names North of the River, most of the streets in the western part of the Marylebone district were named after members of the family of William Henry Portman (of Orchard Portman in Somerset), who inherited the land in the mid-1700s. Baker Street was, for some reason, an exception to this rule. Some scholars believe that the street was named after Sir Edward Baker, a neighbour and friend of Mr. Portman’s in Dorset. Bolitho and Peel, however, claim that a William Baker leased a number of acres near Portman Square from Mr. Portman for the purposes of development, and that it was after this Baker that the street was named.
44 Ian McQueen remarks, “The pair must rank as two of the most famous smokers of their time. [This] exchange of details about their smoking habits forms the very first swapped confidence between them …”
45 Was Watson referring to ship’s tobacco, or did he favor some particular brand? Sherry Keen, in “Ship’s or ‘ship’s?’: That is the Question,” notes that both A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by Eric Partridge, and Soldier and Sailor, Words and Phrases, by Fraser and Gibbons, refer to “ship’s” as a “naval cocoa tobacco.” Yet Jack Tracy’s Encyclopedia Sherlockiana unhesitatingly identifies “Ship’s” as “Schippers Tabak Special, a strong tobacco blend manufactured in the Netherlands and much favoured by sailors.” William Baring-Gould suggests that Watson took up “Ship’s” on board the Orontes. But remember that Watson, in returning to England, was in a much weakened state, nearly an invalid; and on that basis, W. E. Edwards surmises that he learned the habit on his voyage to India. In any event, concludes Baring-Gould, the tobacco was a “passing fancy,” for in “The Crooked Man,” Watson has returned to smoking “the Arcadia mixture of [his] bachelor days.”
46 The bull pup is never again mentioned in the Canon, and a variety of explanations have been offered for its mysterious disappearance. Robert S. Morgan, in “The Puzzle of the Bull Pup,” suggests that the dog met with a fatal accident shortly after Watson’s move, resulting in a shock to Watson’s nervous system and a permanent injury to his memory. Thomas Tully’s theory, in “Bull Pup,” is that Watson was only keeping the dog temporarily. More ingeniously, Carol P. Woods, in “A Curtailed Report on a Dogged Investigation,” speculates that Watson misidentified his pet as a dog when it was, in fact, a ferret. After Holmes called him on this error, an embarrassed Watson never mentioned the animal again. But Watson’s new roommate might have been responsible for getting rid of the animal. William Baring-Gould reasonably points out, “We must remember that Holmes in his college days had been bitten in the ankle by a bull terrier (Victor Trevor’s) and Watson’s bull pup may have found the same target irresistible. ‘Watson, that dog must go!’”
Several scholars doubt the very existence of the dog. L. S. Holstein, for example, does not believe that a “private hotel in the Strand” would have allowed Watson to keep a dog. W. E. Edwards, among others, takes the phrase “bull pup” to refer to a short-barrelled pistol (similar to the model referred to as a “bulldog”) rather than “a domestic pet impossible in Afghanistan, illegal on the Orontes, inappropriate for a private hotel, and invisible in Baker Street.” Similar identifications are made by George Fletcher (who believes the reference is to a military rifle) and J. R. Stockler and R. N. Brodie (a military revolver). Others point to Jacques Barzun, who writes, in Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, without citing a source, that the phrase referred to a person with a hot temper. From this, scholars postulate that Watson fabricated the existence of the dog to warn Holmes to watch his step (Bruce Kennedy, “What Bull Pup?”). Perhaps most interesting is Arthur M. Axelrad’s suggestion, in “Dr. Watson’s Bull Pup: A Psycholinguistic Solution,” that “I keep a bull pup” was a “psycholinguistic” distortion under stress of “I keep a full cup” (that is, “I
am an immoderate drinker”).
47 Baring-Gould suggests that this may refer to Watson’s experience of women—extending “over many nations and three separate continents” (see The Sign of Four, note 38, and text accompanying)—or his propensity for gambling (see, for example, “Shoscombe Old Place”).
48 In “The Mazarin Stone,” an unnamed narrator declares that “Holmes seldom laughed, but he got as near it as his old friend Watson could remember.” Clearly, that statement is disproved here. A. G. Cooper, in “Holmesian Humour,” claims to have counted 292 examples of the Master’s laughter, while Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach, in “The Man Who Seldom Laughed,” compiled the following table:
Frequency Table Showing the Number and Kind of Responses Sherlock Holmes Made to Humorous Situations and Comments in His 60 Recorded Adventures
Smile
103
Laugh
65
Joke
58
Chuckle
31
Humor
10
Amusement
9
Cheer
7
Delight
7
Twinkle
7
Miscellaneous
19
Total
316
49 Watson quotes here from An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope (1688–1744): “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.”
CHAPTER
II
THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION
WE MET NEXT day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B,50 Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bed-rooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows.51 So desirable in every way were the apartments, and so moderate did the terms seem52 when divided between us, that the bargain was concluded upon the spot, and we at once entered into possession. That very evening I moved my things round from the hotel, and on the following morning Sherlock Holmes followed me with several boxes and portmanteaus. For a day or two we were busily employed in unpacking and laying out our property to the best advantage. That done, we gradually began to settle down and to accommodate ourselves to our new surroundings.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 4