“Her pursuer dogged her some little distance behind.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
It was close upon nine when he set out. I had no idea how long he might be, but I sat stolidly puffing at my pipe and skipping over the pages of Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème.157 Ten o’clock passed, and I heard the footsteps of the maid158 as they pattered off to bed. Eleven, and the more stately tread159 of the landlady passed my door, bound for the same destination. It was close upon twelve before I heard the sharp sound of his latch-key. The instant he entered I saw by his face that he had not been successful. Amusement and chagrin seemed to be struggling for the mastery, until the former suddenly carried the day, and he burst into a hearty laugh.
“I wouldn’t have the Scotland Yarders know it for the world,” he cried, dropping into his chair; “I have chaffed them so much that they would never have let me hear the end of it. I can afford to laugh, because I know that I will be even with them in the long run.”
“What is it then?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t mind telling a story against myself. That creature had gone a little way when she began to limp and show every sign of being footsore. Presently she came to a halt, and hailed a four-wheeler which was passing. I managed to be close to her so as to hear the address, but I need not have been so anxious, for she sang it out loud enough to be heard at the other side of the street, ‘Drive to 13, Duncan Street, Houndsditch,’ she cried. This begins to look genuine,160 I thought, and having seen her safely inside, I perched myself behind. That’s an art which every detective should be an expert at. Well, away we rattled, and never drew rein until we reached the street in question. I hopped off before we came to the door, and strolled down the street in an easy, lounging way. I saw the cab pull up. The driver jumped down, and I saw him open the door and stand expectantly. Nothing came out though. When I reached him he was groping about frantically in the empty cab, and giving vent to the finest assorted collection of oaths that ever I listened to. There was no sign or trace of his passenger, and I fear it will be some time before he gets his fare. On inquiring at Number 13 we found that the house belonged to a respectable paperhanger,161 named Keswick, and that no one of the name either of Sawyer or Dennis had ever been heard of there.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet
(London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
“You don’t mean to say,” I cried, in amazement, “that that tottering, feeble old woman was able to get out of the cab while it was in motion, without either you or the driver seeing her?”
“Old woman be damned!”162 said Sherlock Holmes, sharply. “We were the old women to be so taken in. It must have been a young man, and an active one, too, besides being an incomparable actor. The get-up was inimitable.163 He saw that he was followed, no doubt, and used this means of giving me the slip. It shows that the man we are after is not as lonely as I imagined he was, but has friends who are ready to risk something for him. Now, Doctor, you are looking done-up. Take my advice and turn in.”
“Still pondering over the strange problem.”
W. H. Hyde, Harper’s Weekly, 1899 (reused from “The Musgrave Ritual” and recaptioned, in Sherlock Holmes Series, Vol. I [New York: Harper & Bros., 1904])
I was certainly feeling very weary, so I obeyed his injunction. I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low melancholy wailings of his violin,164 and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.
142 The theory of Charles Robert Darwin, the great English naturalist (1809–1882), to which Holmes alludes is likely that expressed in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Darwin writes:
As we have every reason to suppose that articulate speech is one of the latest, as it is certainly the highest, of the arts acquired by man, and as the instinctive power of producing musical notes and rhythms is developed low down in the animal series, it would be altogether opposed to the principle of evolution, if we were to admit that man’s musical capacity has been developed from the tones used in impassioned speech. We must suppose that the rhythms and cadences of oratory are derived from previously developed musical powers. We can thus understand how it is that music, dancing, song, and poetry are such very ancient arts. We may go even further than this, and … believe that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language.
143 Madeleine B. Stern proposes that Holmes obtained his papers from the news-vendor, James Ellis Hawkins, located at 36 Baker Street. While Holmes was not reported to be a registered regular reader of any particular newspaper, he always seemed to have The Times at hand; it is mentioned in seven different tales. In Holmes’s London, newspapers were not distributed through the post but rather by news-vendors and the news-boys who worked for them. Many of the latter had regular customers who expected delivery of one or more papers at regular times, but this was an arrangement with the news-vendor and not the publisher. This business method continues today.
News-vendors, Ludgate Circus (1892).
Victorian and Edwardian London
144 Edwards calls Holmes’s conclusion that the ring was accidentally dropped a speculation. “The ring might have been thrown on the body after it had been flourished before Drebber’s eyes.”
145 This is the first indication of Holmes’s affection for the “agony columns” (personal advertisements) of the London newspapers. Holmes advertised again in The Sign of Four (for the Aurora), in “The Blue Carbuncle” (for Henry Baker), and in “The Naval Treaty” (for Joseph Harrison’s cab-driver). Holmes characterised the columns as “… a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual” (“The Red-Headed League”).
146 In “The Speckled Band,” Holmes appears to give more specifics of Watson’s revolver when he says to him, “I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley’s No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots.” But as Eley was a manufacturer of ammunition rather than actual weaponry, such a make of gun did not in fact exist. The editors of the Catalogue of the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition suggest that Holmes probably meant to refer to a .320-bore Webley’s No. 2, a small “pocket pistol” that used Eley bullets. The Catalogue editors described the .320-bore Webley No. 2 as taking up little space but as being “adequate for dealing with the most determined criminal. It was the smallest really practicable weapon of its time.”
Contrary to the view of the editors of the Catalogue of the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition, Charles A. Meyer argues that Watson’s pistol was a Webley-Pryse revolver, also known at the Webley No. 4. Garry James, in “Shooting the Guns of Sherlock Holmes,” on the basis of the “No. 2” reference, concludes that Watson’s revolver is a Mark II Adams, which fired “No. 2” or “II” ammunition.
In “Firearms in the Canon: The Guns of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson,” Dante M. Torrese persuasively argues that Watson’s service revolver was an Adams No. 3 but that his pocket pistol was a Webley Metro-Police. William Ballew makes an excellent case for Watson owning only one gun, a Webley of the “Bull Dog” variety.
The multi-gun approach is also espoused by Daniel P. King, who concurs with William S. Baring-Gould’s assessment that Watson’s service revolver was an Adams .450-calibre centre-fire Model 1872 mark III, but by the time of “The Speckled Band” (1883), Watson was carrying a Webley’s Solid-Frame Civilian Pocket Model. Later, in “Thor Bridge,” Watson had switched to a more modern weapon, the W.P. (Webley Pocket) Hammerless Model 1898.
A similar view—of a varied armoury—is expressed by Harald Curjel, in “Some Further Thoughts on Canonical Weaponry,” who identifies either the .450/455 Tranter Army pistol or the Adams Central Fire Breech-loading revolver as Watson’s “
service” revolver, the Webley “bulldog” as another weapon of Watson’s, yet a third (unidentified) revolver in “Thor Bridge,” and finally a different weapon altogether in “The Speckled Band,” for the “Eley No. 2,” Curjel contends, would fit none of these.
147 Several scholars—collectors themselves—not surprisingly conclude that Holmes was a devoted bibliophile. He chose to disguise himself as an elderly book-dealer in “The Empty House,” and he exhibited an extraordinary knowledge of and interest in typefaces, palimpsests, and old books. Madeleine B. Stern devotes an entire pamphlet (Sherlock Holmes: Rare-Book Collector) to the subject of Holmes’s collection, based on various Canonical references. Although Holmes here discloses to Watson a specific title in his collection, he must have been appalled to find the information published, and aside from mentioning an author or two, he never again revealed the holdings of his collection—like many a collector, seeking to avoid rival collectors and predatory dealers.
148 The Latin phrase means “law among nations,” or international law. Morris Rosenblum, in “Some Latin Byways in the Canon,” tentatively identifies the volume as either a pirated edition of Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli et Pacis, first printed in Paris in 1625, or the continuation of Grotius’s work, written by Samuel Pofendorf in 1672 and entitled De Jure Naturae et Gentium. Madeleine B. Stern contends that the “queer old book” was the De Jure inter Gentes, written by the English author Richard Zouche (1590–1661) and published anonymously. Zouche, a professor of civil law at Oxford, a justice on the Court of Admiralty, and a member of Parliament, is credited not only with helping to establish the foundations of international law but also with popularising the term jure inter gentes, replacing the previously used jus gentium (“law of nations”). His influential treatise on international law, Juris et Judicii Fecialis, sive Juris inter gentes, was published in 1650; but Stern explains that the same treatise appeared the following year, under the Leyden imprint, and without Zouche’s name. “Holmes’s copy,” she marvels, “antedates even the so-called first edition of 1650, and hence is a find of extraordinary magnitude, one of the most desirable books in any legal collection.” If Watson correctly recorded the bibliographic data, a true rarity vanished with the rest of Holmes’s collection—perhaps burned in the fire that took place at 221 Baker Street during the “Great Hiatus” (mentioned in “The Empty House”).
149 Charles I (1600–1649), king of Great Britain and Ireland from 1625 to 1649, was beheaded on January 30, 1649, having been tried and convicted of treason by his enemies in Parliament. Charles’s relationship with Parliament had long been troubled, and he governed without a Parliament for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640. His power struggle with opposition leaders, among them Oliver Cromwell, plunged England into two civil wars, also known as the Puritan Revolution; his death helped precipitate the establishment of a republican commonwealth.
150 Peter Blau, in a letter to Donald Redmond, states that Philippe de Croy was a printer in Leiden who worked for the Elzevirs and printed Grotius’s Poemata Omnia in 1645.
151 Madeleine B. Stern scoffs, “As if [Holmes] did not know that the copy had belonged to the English divine, William White, 1604–1678, who had fathered several interesting Latin works under the pseudonym of ‘Gulielmus Phalerius.’ ”
152 It is unclear whose servant this is. There is no reference in the Canon to any servant employed by Holmes or Watson while in residence at Baker Street; therefore, we may conclude that this servant worked for the landlady of 221 Baker Street. A Baker Street “page” is referred to numerous times over the course of Holmes and Watson’s tenancy, and a “maid” is mentioned in “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans” as well as later in A Study in Scarlet (see note 158, below).
“The duties of a general servant are general,” advised The Household Oracle, edited by Alfred H. Miles and billed as “A Popular Referee on Subjects of Household Enquiry” (1897). “There is little or nothing that has to be done in the way of service in a house,” Miles went on, “that may not under some circumstances become the duty of a general servant. A maid of all work, she is expected to be a Jack of all trades, and unlike the proverbial Jack to be proficient in all departments of her work.” Miles gave the yearly wages of a general servant as anywhere from £10 to £18—the equivalent of £650 to £1,150, or U.S. $1,100 to $1,950, today.
153 William S. Baring-Gould identifies this as a ship of the Union Steam Ship Company, which ran to South Africa. In 1900, the Union and Castle Packet Company lines merged to form the Union-Castle Line. The Line ceased its regular voyages in 1977, but a Centenary Voyage from Southampton to Cape Town and back was held in 1999–2000, lasting two months.
154 The modern circus, which originated sometime in the late eighteenth century, featured equestrian trick-riding performed in a single ring; but by the Victorian era, a visitor to the circus would also marvel at aerial displays, juggling, and trained animal acts—all, after 1873, taking place in two rings under a main tent.
The most successful British circus proprietors at the time were George Sanger (1827– 1911) and his brother John (1816–1889), who formed a small travelling circus in 1853. By 1871, they were able to buy Astley’s Amphitheatre and stage grand productions both there and at Agricultural Hall, all the while continuing to tour England. The self-styled “Lords” would parade their gilded wagons and eccentric performers through the streets of towns they visited; “Lord” George’s wife, who danced with snakes in the lion’s cage, would often ride in the lead wagon, dressed as Britannia with a lion at her feet. Each brother eventually produced his own travelling show, and the shows continued after their deaths, using the family name.
Another great circus proprietor was Frederick Charles Hengler (1820–1887). Hengler was the son of Henry, a famous circus performer, and pursued a career as a rope-dancer and horseman until he started his own troupe in 1848. Hengler saw that his prosperity lay not in performances in traditional tents but instead in permanent venues. His first establishment was the old Prince’s Theatre in West Nile Street, Glasgow, which he bought in 1863; by 1875 Hengler’s Circuses were established in Glasgow, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London (the latter at 7 Argyll St., where it remained until the early twentieth century).
Numerous travelling circuses also appeared in London, at venues such as Cremorne Gardens (in Battersea) or the Olympia Hippodrome.
155 Why would the woman identify the ring as Sally’s? It clearly was not the correct ring, and it would not profit the criminal to recover a substitute ring. Is it possible that the criminal failed to provide “Mrs. Sawyer” with a description of the ring?
156 Not surprisingly, there does not appear to be (or have been) a Mayfield Place in Peckham (formerly in the metropolitan borough of Camberwell, now in the Greater London borough of Southwark, not far east of the Brixton Road).
157 Henri Murger (1822–1861) was a French poet and novelist. His Scènes de la vie de bohème (“Scenes of Bohemian Life”), published from 1845 to 1849, was about the struggles and joys of a group of penniless artists and writers, one of whom, Rodolfe, was based on Murger himself. Puccini brought further fame to Murger’s work by adapting it to his opera La Bohème (1896).
Christopher Morley doubts that Watson was much of a connoisseur of French literature and suggests, “Perhaps Watson was trying to improve his rather simple French by reading some of Holmes’s books… . [La Bohème] was not produced until 1896 but when it came to Covent Garden I’m sure Holmes and Watson had seats in the stalls.”
Similar aspersions on Watson’s reading habits are cast by Benjamin Grosbayne, who writes, in “Sherlock Holmes—Musician,” “Good old Watson, who tries to impress us with the not-so-sly implications … that he read wicked French books in the original so easily that he could skip about and … what a gay old dog he really is ’neath his respectable exterior.”
158 This is the first mention of the “maid” as a part of the Hudson establishment at 221 Baker Street. The maid is only m
entioned as such two other times, in “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” where she is completely nondescript, although some have speculated that “Mrs. Turner” of “A Scandal in Bohemia” may have been the maid.
159 Some scholars believe Mrs. Hudson’s “stately tread” signifies that she is heavy of bearing, or “corpulent,” as Manly Wade Wellman puts it, in “The Great Man’s Great Son: An Inquiry into the Most Private Life of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” Rushing to Mrs. Hudson’s defence, Wellman reminds us that “stately, too, is the tread of many a queenly artist’s model and showgirl.”
160 By “genuine,” Holmes must have meant merely that the woman had not concealed her address. This seems very naive of Holmes, but then the accomplice doesn’t seem to act very logically—see note 155, above—and perhaps Holmes counted on her stupidity.
161 A person who hangs wallpaper.
162 “Although we will read of many other occasions on which Holmes cursed, swore, or raved, this is the one instance on record on which we are told what he said,” observes William S. Baring-Gould.
163 Holmes himself is fond of donning a disguise in order to investigate a case (for example, as a seaman in The Sign of Four and as a “drunken-looking groom” and a clergyman in “A Scandal in Bohemia”), but given his familiarity with the technique, it is surprising that he does not have a better sense of when it is adopted by others. Nathan Bengis, in “Sherlock Stays After School,” calls readers’ attention to two instances in which Holmes was fooled by the disguise of another: here and in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in which Irene Adler is dressed as a “slim youth.”
Who was “Mrs. Sawyer”? Jack Tracy argues, in “ ‘Old Woman Be Damned!’ A Partial Identification of Jefferson Hope’s Accomplice,” that the accomplice must have been an employee of the true culprit, while Rick Lai, in “The Hansoms of John Clay,” fingers the notorious John Clay of “The Red-Headed League.” Steve Clarkson, in “Another Case of Identity,” identifies the accomplice as none other than Irene Adler, the alluring figure from “Scandal in Bohemia” usually known simply as “the woman.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 13