The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  “Very,” said Holmes.

  “He still carried the heavy stick which the mother described him as having with him when he followed Drebber. It was a stout oak cudgel.”

  “What is your theory, then?”

  “Well, my theory is that he followed Drebber as far as the Brixton Road. When there, a fresh altercation arose between them, in the course of which Drebber received a blow from the stick, in the pit of the stomach perhaps, which killed him without leaving any mark. The night was so wet that no one was about, so Charpentier dragged the body of his victim into the empty house. As to the candle, and the blood, and the writing on the wall, and the ring, they may all be so many tricks to throw the police on to the wrong scent.”

  “Well done!” said Holmes in an encouraging voice. “Really, Gregson, you are getting along. We shall make something of you yet.”

  “I flatter myself that I have managed it rather neatly,” the detective answered proudly. “The young man volunteered a statement, in which he said that after following Drebber some time, the latter perceived him, and took a cab in order to get away from him. On his way home he met an old shipmate, and took a long walk with him. On being asked where this old shipmate lived, he was unable to give any satisfactory reply. I think the whole case fits together uncommonly well. What amuses me is to think of Lestrade, who had started off upon the wrong scent. I am afraid he won’t make much of it. Why, by Jove, here’s the very man himself!”

  It was indeed Lestrade, who had ascended the stairs while we were talking, and who now entered the room. The assurance and jauntiness which generally marked his demeanour and dress were, however, wanting. His face was disturbed and troubled, while his clothes were disarranged and untidy. He had evidently come with the intention of consulting with Sherlock Holmes, for on perceiving his colleague he appeared to be embarrassed and put out. He stood in the centre of the room, fumbling nervously with his hat and uncertain what to do. “This is a most extraordinary case,” he said at last—“a most incomprehensible affair.”

  “Lestrade stood in the centre of the room, fumbling nervously with his hat and uncertain what to do.”

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

  “Ah, you find it so, Mr. Lestrade!” cried Gregson, triumphantly. “I thought you would come to that conclusion. Have you managed to find the Secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson?”

  “The Secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson,” said Lestrade, gravely “was murdered at Halliday’s Private Hotel184 about six o’clock this morning.”

  165 British term for editorials.

  166 In the course of Watson’s ensuing narration, he mentions three newspapers by name: the Daily Telegraph, the Standard, and the Daily News. Christopher Morley explains that the material referenced by Watson “is acute parody based on the style and predilections of each. The Telegraph, then edited by the flamboyant G. A. Sala, was a popular journal of lively tone. The Standard was Conservative and genteel. The Daily News was Liberal in sympathies.”

  The Daily Telegraph was originally founded by Colonel Sleigh on June 29, 1855, and printed for him by Joseph Moses Levy, owner of the Sunday Times (which was deliberately named after The Times but not connected to it otherwise). When Sleigh proved unable to pay his bills, Levy took over, lowering the price—the Daily Telegraph became the first “penny newspaper” in London—and appointing his son, Edward Levy-Lawson, and Thornton Leigh Hunt to serve as editors. The paper was relaunched on September 17, 1855. The reading public early embraced the Daily Telegraph’s colourful style, and within less than a year, Levy’s newspaper was outselling not only The Times but also every other newspaper in England.

  Founded in 1827, The Standard flourished into the 1880s but saw declining readership by the end of the nineteenth century. Journalist Cyril Arthur Pearson purchased The Standard in 1904 and turned it from a Conservative newspaper into a Liberal one, a move that did little to improve the newspaper’s circulation.

  The Daily News was founded by the novelist Charles Dickens, who saw the newspaper as an outlet for Liberal reform and published its first edition on January 21, 1846, declaring that it would advocate “principles of progress and improvement; of education, civil and religious liberty, and equal legislation.” Dickens presided over the newspaper for seventeen issues before handing it off to John Forster.

  167 Holmes has four cases involving organisations carrying out “vendettas,” “The Five Orange Pips” (the KKK), “The Red Circle” (the “Red Circle,” probably the Mafia, which is described as related to the “old Carbonari”), The Valley of Fear (the “Scowrers”), and “The Golden Pince-Nez” (Russian nihilists).

  168 The Vehmgerichte, known in English as fehmic or vehmic courts, were criminal tribunals used in medieval Germany. Some of the proceedings were open to the public, but the arcane methods and severe punishments often meted out—accusations could be made by attaching a notice to a tree, failure to appear in court was punishable by death, and the two available verdicts were acquittal and hanging—lent the powerful Vehmgerichte a reputation of ruthless intimidation. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.), “from the extent of their organization and the mystery which surrounded their proceedings, [the Vehmgerichte] inspired a feeling of dread in all who came within their jurisdiction.”

  169 An arsenic-based poison whose invention is attributed to a seventeenth-century Sicilian woman named Toffa or Tofana. Executed at Naples in 1709, she was said to have murdered more than 600 people. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable called the poison “much used in Italy in the seventeenth century by young wives who wanted to get rid of their husbands,” and there was wide speculation that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death was caused by this substance.

  170 The Carbonari (Italian for “Charcoal Burners”) were members of a secret political society that was active in early nineteenth-century southern Italy and may have originated with the Freemasonry. These dissidents first began agitating for political freedom during the reign of Gioacchino Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and the king of Naples (1808–1815). In general, while the Carbonari tended to advocate Italian unification and some form of constitutional and representative government, a more precise agenda was never defined.

  As with the Freemasonry and other secret societies, the Carbonari had their own ritual language, gestures, initiation ceremony, and hierarchy (in this case, made up of “apprentices” and “masters”). Their revolutionary fervour spread from Naples to like-minded areas such as Piedmont, the Papal States, Bologna, Parma, and Modena; and to other countries, including Spain and France. In 1831, the nationalist Risorgimento movement was formed and eventually subsumed most of the Carbonari.

  171 Marie-Madeleine-Marguérite d’Aubray, Marchioness de Brinvilliers (ca. 1630–1676), was a Frenchwoman who plotted with her lover to poison her father, her brothers, and her husband. In part, d’Aubray sought to control her family’s fortunes and to end interference in her affair with J.-B. Godin de Sainte-Croix, a friend of her husband’s. Sainte-Croix had his own motives, having been imprisoned at the Bastille by d’Aubray’s father. After allegedly testing poisons on hospital patients, d’Aubray successfully murdered her father (in 1666) and her two brothers (in 1670), but her husband survived the attempt on his life. D’Aubray was arrested at Liège in 1676, and for her crimes was beheaded and burned.

  In all, the notorious murderess was reputed to have killed fifty people, and she declared under interrogation, “Half the people of quality are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them if I were to talk.” Her trial set off a string of hysteria-driven investigations in which prominent members of the bourgeoisie, who often had done little more than purchase aphrodisiacs from fortune-tellers, were accused of being poisoners and practitioners of witchcraft.

  Holmes and Watson may well have known d’Aubray from the popular romance entitled The Marchioness of Brinvilliers, the Poisoner of the Seven, written by Albert Smith and published in London i
n 1860. Arthur Conan Doyle turned to the story of the Marchioness in his tale “The Leather Funnel,” published in the Strand Magazine in 1902.

  172 The famed economist and sociologist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was the father of modern population theory: the notion that population growth will always outrun the supply of natural resources, inevitably producing poverty and deprivation unless human reproduction can be curbed by war, famine, disease, or “moral restraint.” In 1798, he published (anonymously) his great work, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers. It attracted immediate attention and was revised and expanded in 1803; the sixth and final version of Malthus’s seminal work appeared in 1826.

  173 Ratcliff Highway, located in the East End near the docks, became notorious early in the nineteenth century when it was the scene of a series of murders committed at the end of 1811. Thomas De Quincey, who wrote about the crimes in his Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, called the area one of “manifold ruffianism.” Among the murders were those of the draper Mr. Marr, his wife, their infant child, and a boy who worked in the Marrs’ shop. The Complete Newgate Calender, Volume V (1926), recounts that when a servant girl and a watchman rang the Marrs’ bell and received no answer, a number of neighbours scaled the wall and entered the house; “and there was presented the most woeful scene that, perhaps, ever disgraced human nature: the bodies of Mr Marr and his shop-boy, the latter of whom appeared from evident marks to have struggled for life with the assassins, near each other; that of Mrs Marr in the passage; and the infant in its cradle—all dead, but yet warm and weltering in their blood.” At final count, seven people were killed over the course of eight days. Although the murders were no doubt the work of more than one perpetrator, the only person arrested was a man named John Williams, who escaped trial by committing suicide in his cell at Coldbath Fields Prison.

  The Ratcliff Highway, Stepney (1896).

  Victorian and Edwardian London

  As a result of the murders, the street acquired such sinister repute that its name was changed to St. George’s Street. By 1895, when depicted in The Queen’s London, it was reported that the street once regarded as unsavory and dangerous was “now … chiefly remarkable for the shops of dealers in wild beasts, birds, etc.”

  174 Britain’s Liberal party, which replaced the original Whig party of wealthy landowners and merchants, came to prominence under William Gladstone’s first government in 1868. Liberals tended to advocate educational and electoral reform, free trade, and a loosening of the ties between church and state. While Gladstone was the steward of the Liberal party for more then twelve years and served four terms as prime minister, his ideas were not always greeted with popular enthusiasm—the critic John Ruskin told an audience of university students, “I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub”—and Conservative opposition to his reforms, along with a poor foreign policy, drove the party from power in 1874. The Conservative Benjamin Disraeli was prime minister during the American events of A Study in Scarlet, but Gladstone resumed the office in 1880, and again in 1886. Ultimately, his insistence on Irish Home Rule (self-government) doomed his third ministry and caused many prominent Liberals to leave the party. After World War I, the Liberal party was nearly defunct, having lost considerable ground to the new Labour party.

  175 Christopher Morley observes, “Camberwell, across the Thames in South London, was an unusual lodging place for well-to-do tourists—unless possibly they chose to be near the Crystal Palace, still very famous in those days.” The composer Felix Mendels-sohn, who had relatives in Camberwell, wrote “Camberwell Green” (later renamed “Spring Song”) after staying there. The poet Robert Browning (1812–1889), whose reputation was eclipsed by that of his wife, fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), was born in Camberwell and lived there until he was twenty-eight. Bernard Davies identifies Torquay Terrace as Dover Terrace in Coldharbour Lane.

  176 That is, on March 4 (inst. is an abbreviation of “instant” and in archaic usage meant a date in the current month). The date on which the pair departed was plainly March 3, inasmuch as Drebber’s death occurred before 2:00 A.M. on March 4. “This inaccuracy,” Christopher Morley suggests, “may of course be intended to satirize the inaccuracy of the Tory newspaper, but probably should be accepted as the first of Dr. Watson’s many inconsistencies in chronology.”

  177 Euston Station was opened in 1837 as the terminus for the London-Birmingham Railway (later the London & Northern Western Railway). It was expanded several times, including in 1873, but was demolished and completely reconstructed in the 1960s. “This deliberate act of official vandalism,” writes Holmesian scholar Roger Johnson, “led to a new appreciation of Victorian architecture. There is still a Euston Station, but Holmes and Watson would not recognise it.”

  178 The final line of Canto I of L’Art Poétique by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), which may be translated as, “A fool can always find a greater fool to admire him.” Scholars point to Holmes’s facility in the French language as part of his French heritage. In “The Greek Interpreter,” Holmes alludes to “my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist.” This artist, Holmes’s great-uncle, was likely Émile Jean Horace Vernet (1789–1863), whose paintings decorate the Battle Gallery at Versailles.

  179 A “street Arab” was a homeless child, or urchin, who wandered the city streets. E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains that they are “[s]o called because, like the Arabs, they are nomads or wanderers with no settled home.” Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) attempts to paint a fuller picture, and he takes a somewhat romanticised look at what he deems a New York City “institution” when he writes, “Vagabond that he is, acknowledging no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or anything, with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries to coerce him, [the street Arab] is as bright and sharp as the weasel, which, among all the predatory beasts, he most resembles.”

  Holmes’s band of “street Arabs,” led by the redoubtable Wiggins, is again put to use by the detective in The Sign of Four and in “The Crooked Man.” It is in The Sign of Four, in fact, that Holmes refers to his foot soldiers as “the unofficial force—the Baker Street irregulars.” The Baker Street Irregulars, of course, is the name taken by the prominent society of Sherlockian scholars, founded in 1934 by Christopher Morley.

  180 Andrew G. Fusco, in “The Final Outrage of Enoch Drebber,” argues that there was in fact a babe unborn—the child of Enoch Drebber, carried by Alice Charpentier as a result of Drebber’s “advances”—and that Gregson knew about it.

  181 Holmes makes similar statements during other cases, for example (as noted by T. S. Blakeney), “You know my method. It is founded upon the observance of trifles” (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”); “It is of course a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles” (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”); and “I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement” (“The Six Napoleons”). Blakeney concludes that “Holmes has, as Watson remarked [in The Sign of Four], an extraordinary gift for minutiae, and he was already ready to be at any pains to elicit them.”

  182 Drebber may well have expected some form of special treatment, given that he was paying the Charpentiers well above the market rate (the modern equivalent of £715, or over $1,300, per week). Baedeker gives the top price for a boarding-house (Mrs. Phillips’s, at Portland Place, in the fashionable West End) as £3 13s. 6d. per week.

  183 Modern shorthand was invented in England by the educator Isaac Pitman (1813–1897) in 1837. Breaking new ground, his Stenographic Sound-Hand used phonetics, rather than normal spelling, to represent full words. Different degrees of shading indicated the various phonetic sounds. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, one report found that 97 percent of American writers used the Pi
tman system or some variation of it, owing largely to the institute that Pitman’s brother, Benn Pitman, opened in Cincinnati in 1852. While it is considered perhaps the most rapid shorthand system—making it a preferred choice among many court reporters today—the Pitman method has been largely supplanted in the United States by Gregg Shorthand, a phonetics-based system that utilises curves instead of Pitman’s shading. The Irish-born John Robert Gregg (1867–1948) introduced the system in his book Light-Line Phonography (1888) and brought it to the United States in 1893.

  In 1881, the date of A Study in Scarlet, it seems likely that Gregson and Lestrade used the Pitman method, although many alternative systems did flourish. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.) estimated that by 1886, no fewer than 483 distinct systems of English shorthand had been published (“and doubtless many more of them have been invented for private use”).

  184 Bernard Davies identifies “Halliday’s” as Emm’s Private Hotel at No. 56 Drummond Street.

  CHAPTER

  VII

  LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

  THE INTELLIGENCE WITH which Lestrade greeted us was so momentous and so unexpected that we were all three fairly dumfoundered.185 Gregson sprang out of his chair and upset the remainder of his whisky and water. I stared in silence at Sherlock Holmes, whose lips were compressed and his brows drawn down over his eyes.

  “Stangerson too!” he muttered. “The plot thickens.”186

  “It was quite thick enough before,” grumbled Lestrade, taking a chair. “I seem to have dropped into a sort of council of war.”

  “Are you—are you sure of this piece of intelligence?” stammered Gregson.