The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  I felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window and stood looking out into the busy street. “This fellow may be very clever,” I said to myself, “but he is certainly very conceited.”

  “There are no crimes and no criminals in these days,”87 he said, querulously. “What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard88 official can see through it.”

  I was still annoyed at his bumptious style of conversation. I thought it best to change the topic.

  “I wonder what that fellow is looking for?” I asked, pointing to a stalwart, plainly dressed individual who was walking slowly down the other side of the street, looking anxiously at the numbers. He had a large blue envelope in his hand, and was evidently the bearer of a message.

  “You mean the retired sergeant of Marines,” said Sherlock Holmes.

  “Brag and bounce!” thought I to myself. “He knows that I cannot verify his guess.”

  The thought had hardly passed through my mind when the man whom we were watching caught sight of the number on our door, and ran rapidly across the roadway. We heard a loud knock, a deep voice below, and heavy steps ascending the stair.

  “ ‘For Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’ he said.”

  Richard Gutschmidt, Späte Rache (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)

  “For Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” he said, stepping into the room and handing my friend the letter.

  Here was an opportunity of taking the conceit out of him. He little thought of this when he made that random shot. “May I ask, my lad,” I said, in the blandest voice, “what your trade may be?”

  “Commissionaire, sir,” he said, gruffly. “Uniform away for repairs.”

  “And you were?” I asked, with a slightly malicious glance at my companion.

  “A sergeant, sir, Royal Marine Light Infantry,89 sir. No answer? Right, sir.”

  He clicked his heels together, raised his hand in salute, and was gone.

  50 Many U.S. editions omit the “B.”

  51 See this editor’s “Layout of a ‘Most Desirable Residence’ “ for a discussion of the room arrangement and furnishings.

  52 After researching reasonable rents of the time, Michael Harrison estimates, in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, that Holmes and Watson likely paid an “all-in” rent of between £3 and £4 a week. This would have included laundry and food but probably did not cover gas, which “may explain the references, frequent throughout Watson’s writings, to the oil-lamps at 221B.”

  53 In Chapter I, Watson advised Holmes that he got up “at all sorts of ungodly hours.” But in “The Speckled Band,” Holmes is described by Watson as “a late riser as a rule,” and Watson describes himself as “regular in my habits.” A similar depiction crops up in The Hound of the Baskervilles (see note 2 and accompanying text), with Watson recounting that Holmes “was usually very late in the mornings.” At the very least, Holmes’s habits seem variable; “The Engineer’s Thumb” finds Watson expecting to encounter Holmes at breakfast soon after 7:00 A.M. The only consistent pattern suggested is that Watson must have regularly arisen very late, as confirmed by his late breakfast in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.”

  54 William Baring-Gould gathers that these “long walks” must have been case-related, as Holmes was “a man who seldom took exercise for exercise’s sake” (“The Yellow Face”).

  The term “low,” W. E. Edwards explains, “was a characteristic Victorian epithet to express contempt. There was a good deal of class hatred in the term ‘lower-class,’ its polite version being ‘working-class.’ ” In the Victorian era, industrialisation saw a rapid expansion of the “middle class”: shopkeepers, merchants, clerks, teachers, doctors, and lawyers; or, in other words, those who employed servants yet did not belong to the aristocracy. Those in this new middle class (whose members would have counted Holmes and Watson), who aspired to upward mobility and yet were desperate not to slip backward in status, sought to distance themselves from the working class of street vendors, miners, servants, ironworkers, and most factory workers. In 1909, the English politician C.F.G. Masterman astutely remarked that “The Rich despise the Working People, the Middle Classes fear them.”

  55 In fact, it is later evident to Dr. Watson that Holmes is a regular user of cocaine (a seven-per-cent solution), and he undertakes to wean him from the drug. His use of cocaine is explicitly mentioned in “The Five Orange Pips,” “A Scandal in Bohemia,” The Sign of Four, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” and “The Yellow Face,” and in The Sign of Four, Watson implies that Holmes has also been taking morphine. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson describes Holmes as alternating between the “drowsiness” of the drug and “the fierce energy of his own keen nature.” In “The Five Orange Pips,” Watson accused Holmes of being a “self-posioner,” and in The Sign of Four, Holmes admitted that the influence of the drug “is physically a bad one.” He defended his use on the basis that “I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”

  William S. Baring-Gould believes that the detective first sought solace in the drug following his nervous collapse in “The Reigate Squires,” which probably occurred in April 1887. In that story, Watson notes Holmes’s “strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of ’87” (in an unrecounted case involving the mysterious Netherlands-Sumatra Company) and describes arriving at his sickroom to find the detective exhausted, bored, and “a prey to the blackest depression.” But Dr. Charles Goodman concludes that Holmes first took to cocaine neither from weakness nor from boredom but from toothache, as a chronic sufferer from pyorrhea.

  In “The Missing Three-Quarter,” generally accepted as occurring in 1896 or 1897, Watson describes his efforts to rehabilitate Holmes: “For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus; but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead, but sleeping; and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes’s ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes.”

  Not all scholars accept the notion that Holmes used recreational drugs. Dr. George F. McCleary arrives at the conclusion that despite Watson’s statement in The Sign of Four that he had witnessed Holmes inject himself three times daily “for many months,” in fact, Holmes was never a drug addict but was deliberately deceiving Watson. He bases this conclusion on the “evidence” of Holmes’s skill with makeup and disguise and his personality traits (that is, that Holmes does not fit the “profile” of the common drug user), concluding that Holmes was playing a joke on Watson and that whatever he did inject was not cocaine. Interesting as this theory is, McCleary offers no motivation for this cruel joke. Michael Harrison, on the other hand, asserts that Watson’s descriptions of Holmes—his restlessness, ability to work for days without adequate sleep, and even without rest at all, abrupt changes of mood, and abrupt collapses into somnolence—“are the unmistakable evidence of heavy and prolonged indulgence in some powerful narcotic.”

  A more moderate view, shared by Dr. Eugene F. Carey (“Holmes, Watson and Cocaine”) and Edgar W. Smith (“Up from the Needle”), is that Holmes was, in Carey’s words, a “judicious user.” Smith concludes that “he was never a slave to the vice in the clinical sense of the term, for … he was always able to cast off the spell, and to find inspiration in the exhilaration of the chase.”

  56 Despite Watson’s description of Holmes as “excessively lean” and possessed of a “hawk
-like” nose, Richard Asher believes that Holmes was, with the exception of his heavily tobacco-stained teeth, “enormously attractive to women.” He was, Asher asserts, “a man endowed with all those gifts mental, physical and social which should have made him a success with women.” He buttresses this conclusion by noting Holmes’s effect on Mary Morstan (The Sign of Four), Irene Adler (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), Mrs. Neville St. Clair (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”), Violet Hunter (“The Copper Beeches”), and of course Agatha the housemaid (“Charles Augustus Milverton”), all of whom, Asher asserts, were tangibly drawn to Holmes.

  The earliest known illustration of Holmes (reproduced here) belies this picture of Holmes as physically attractive, although there is no evidence that the illustration was drawn from life. The drawings of Charles Doyle, father of Arthur Conan Doyle, who must have met Holmes, depict him even less handsomely (as may be seen here, here and here), although the low point of Holmesian portraiture must be the Charles Kerr illustration for The Sign of Four reproduced here. Not until Sidney Paget took up his pen and began to illustrate the Adventures was Holmes depicted in a way that may be viewed as attractive. Unfortunately, it is well known that Paget used his brother Walter as his model; Holmes himself was in Tibet and points east.

  57 An archaic term for scientific instruments.

  58 Although there is no mention in the Canon of Holmes obtaining a degree, it is clear that he participated in the “learned world” and contributed a number of scholarly monographs to various fields. Most scholars agree that Holmes attended one of the great universities, either Oxford or Cambridge, although a few suggest that he attended both, and several scholars propose a supplemental course at London University. The intricacies of the arguments, depending heavily on the culture of each of the schools, are well beyond the scope of this work. Notwithstanding his partiality, Nicholas Utechin, long editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, published by the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, has produced a fine work entitled Sherlock Holmes at Oxford, which affords an excellent summary of the arguments.

  59 Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a British historian and essayist, born in Scotland and heavily influenced by German writers such as Goethe. Carlyle, who taught mathematics and studied law, sharply criticized hypocrisy and materialism, and Holmes might have admired his firm belief that heroic leaders were integral to the shaping and altering of world events. Writing in a strange, almost violent style comprising unusual words and phrases, frenetic rhythms, and German-influenced expressions, Carlyle published several major works, including the three-volume The French Revolution (1837), the public lecture On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), and the biography History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (1858–1865). He also wrote biographies of Friedrich von Schiller, Oliver Cromwell, and John Sterling.

  Despite Watson’s statement here, few scholars believe that the knowledgeable Holmes was actually unaware of Carlyle’s work. In My Dear Holmes, Gavin Brend suggests that Holmes may have pleaded ignorance of Carlyle in an attempt to get Watson to leave him alone. Brend writes that “probably it was at a time when Holmes wanted to give his whole attention to a case, as yet unsolved, and simply could not be bothered to be drawn into a discussion about Carlyle or anything else.” Christopher Morley proposes that Holmes’s inquiry was made on the date of Carlyle’s death: February 5, 1881. Holmes’s pretence of ignorance of Carlyle is not long maintained (see note 115, below). In The Sign of Four, Holmes remarks on Watson’s reading of Carlyle with no suggestion that he has not himself read Carlyle’s work.

  60 The Copernican theory (or system), established by Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, held that the sun remained in a fixed position and that the planets revolved around it; in addition, Copernicus proposed that the Earth rotated on its own axis once every day. His depiction of the heavens represented a slight but significant deviation from the Ptolemaic system, which placed the Earth, not the sun, at the centre of the universe. Although Copernicus wrote up his theory between 1508 and 1514, it was published, as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI (Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs), only in 1543, the year of his death. It was a theory that not only gave rise to the work of Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton but also had far-reaching implications for the rise of modern science—the Earth would henceforth no longer be considered the center of the cosmos but merely one planet among many.

  61 This, opines William Baring-Gould, would appear to be another situation in which Holmes is doing some “leg-pulling.” The detective’s knowledge of astronomy is clear from references in “The Musgrave Ritual” (Holmes speaks of “allowance for personal equation, as the astronomers have dubbed it”), “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” (Mycroft’s visit to 221B is likened to “a planet leaving its orbit”), and “The Greek Interpreter” (Holmes chats about “the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic”).

  62 In “The Lion’s Mane,” Holmes appears to contradict this statement by proudly proclaiming that “I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”

  63 “A list of Watson’s own points might, at this juncture, have been headed by the specification: 1. Knowledge of Sherlock Holmes.—Nil,” says Edgar W. Smith.

  64 In the preface to His Last Bow, Watson reports that Holmes, in retirement, divides his time “between philosophy and agriculture.” That this is not an interest developed late in life is evident from Holmes’s reading of books such as Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, which (in The Sign of Four) Holmes termed “one of the most remarkable [books] ever penned.” Therefore, we must conclude that this is another misperception of Watson’s.

  65 H. W. Bell believes that Watson may underestimate Holmes’s knowledge of international politics, well displayed in such cases as “The Naval Treaty” and “The Second Stain.” Likewise, S. C. Roberts emphasises Holmes’s staunch belief in democracy and progress by noting Holmes’s description, in “The Naval Treaty,” of board-schools (England’s first taxpayer-supported schools, dedicated to educating the poor) as “Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.” “It would be difficult,” Roberts observes, “to find a more concise expression of the confident aspirations of late Victorian liberalism.”

  Siding with Watson’s “feeble” assessment is T. S. Blakeney, who reminds us that in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” Holmes’s interest was not particularly aroused by “the news of a revolution, of a possible war, and of an impending change of Government.” Blakeney holds that Holmes, “who had so close a grip on realities,” would hardly be interested in the petty squabbles of politicians, nor, in Blakeney’s view, “could so strong an individualist have anything but contempt for the equalitarian ideals of much modern sociological theory.”

  66 Throughout his career, Holmes refers frequently to classic stories of crime. In The Valley of Fear, he compares Professor Moriarty to Jonathan Wild, a notorious fence who sold stolen goods back to their owners and was hanged at Tyburn in 1725. In “The Illustrious Client,” he alludes to “Wainwright,” who may have been either Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the art critic who allegedly poisoned his uncle, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law; or Henry Wainwright, a brush manufacturer who killed his mistress and was caught attempting to dispose of her body parts. As book-dealer Madeleine B. Stern observes, while Holmes likely owned various editions of The Newgate Calendar—a series of wildly popular books containing accounts of prisoners who had been incarcerated at Newgate—his “immense” knowledge of crimes seems to draw heavily on “his own commonplace books in which, from time to time, he placed his cuttings on crime, pasted extracts, and made out his ever-useful indexes.”

  67 The singlestick was a slender piece of wood, resembling a cane and used in fencing. One end, thicker than the other, was encased in a basket guard, which protected the user’s hand. Singlestic
ks were invented in the sixteenth century as a means of practising swordplay, but in the eighteenth century, singlesticking became a sport in its own right. The instrument was used much like a sabre in that one player would strike his opponent with its edge, rather than sticking him with the point. Thomas Hughes gives a marvellous and graphic description of the sport in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857): “The old gamester going into action only takes off his hat and coat, and arms himself with a stick; he then loops the fingers of his left hand in a handkerchief or strap, which he fastens round his left leg… . Then he advances his right hand above and in front of his head, holding his stick across, so that its point projects an inch or two over his left elbow; and thus his whole head is completely guarded, and he faces his man armed in like manner; and they stand some three feet apart, often nearer, and feint, and strike, and return at one another’s heads, until one cries ‘hold,’ or blood flows.”

  There is no express instance of Holmes actually using the singlestick, although he wields a hunting crop in a similar manner in “The Speckled Band,” and in “The Illustrious Client” he reminds Watson that he is “a bit of a single-stick expert” and speaks of taking blows from men armed with sticks “on his guard” (perhaps meaning his walking-stick).

  68 Albert P. Blaustein, in “Sherlock Holmes as a Lawyer,” maintains that Holmes was a lawyer. Not only does he talk like a lawyer (see, for example, “The Noble Bachelor,” where he reports that the maid Alice “deposes” that she went to her room), he acts like one in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” when he prepares objections for trial and submits them to McCarthy’s defense counsel. He points also to Holmes’s legally punctilious behaviour in “The Six Napoleons” in obtaining title to the sixth bust. Fletcher Pratt concurs, in “Very Little Murder,” adding that “when the record of Mr. Holmes’s cases is examined, we find that in every single case where an actual crime has been committed … he obtained legal proof full enough to satisfy any jury; witness evidence plus circumstantial evidence, and in many cases … a confession in addition.”