Charing Cross Station.
The Queen’s London (1897)
Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was really an object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then I, rather imprudently, wished you good-night, and started for the Temple to see my husband.
We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call to-morrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes, very truly yours,
IRENE NORTON, née ADLER
“What a woman—oh, what a woman!” cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. “Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”
“From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said Holmes, coldly.83 “I am sorry that I have not been able to bring your Majesty’s business to a more successful conclusion.”
“On the contrary, my dear sir,” cried the King. “Nothing could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire.”
“I am glad to hear your Majesty say so.”
“I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward you. This ring—” He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger, and held it out upon the palm of his hand.84
“Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly,” said Holmes.
“You have but to name it.”
“This photograph!”85
The King stared at him in amazement.
“Irene’s photograph!” he cried. “Certainly, if you wish it.”
“I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I have the honour to wish you a very good morning.” He bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set off in my company for his chambers.
“This photograph!”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1891
And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.86
1 “A Scandal in Bohemia” was published in the Strand Magazine in July 1891. There was a New York edition of the Strand Magazine, and the story appeared there as well, in August 1891. However, many of the stories from the Adventures were also syndicated, that is, sold by a syndicate to newspapers across the United States. “A Scandal in Bohemia,” for example, appeared in at least seven newspapers before the New York Strand Magazine publication. Some of the papers did not use Watson’s titles as they appeared in the Strand Magazine; “A Scandal in Bohemia” appeared in one paper as “Woman’s Wit” and “The King’s Sweetheart” in another. “The Man with the Twisted Lip” ran under the title “The Strange Tale of a Beggar,” while “The Blue Carbuncle” was headed “The Christmas Goose that Swallowed a Diamond.”
2 Holmes is characterised throughout the balance of the Canon as verging on misogynistic. “Women are never entirely to be trusted—not the best of them,” he expresses in The Sign of Four. “I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson,” he remarks in The Valley of Fear. His feelings toward Irene Adler, then, eventually form a startling contrast to the accepted picture of Holmes, and it is perhaps a shrewd touch by Watson to introduce Holmes to the Strand Magazine readers by showing his softer side.
“Whether Holmes in fact falls in love with [Irene Adler],” writes Christopher Redmond, “is not a question to be answered at once, but there cannot be much doubt that Sherlockians have done so—Sherlockians who are male, that is . . . ; Sherlockians who are female have been inclined to identify with her.” Indeed, Irene Adler has captured the readers’ imagination to the point where a series of novels about her adventures, beginning with Good Night, Mr. Holmes, by mystery writer Carole Nelson Douglas, has flourished.
3 There is no real record of this reported attitude of Holmes, but here Watson wants to highlight Holmes’s reaction to Irene Adler as uncharacteristic, and so he exaggerates Holmes’s coldness. In “The Three Garridebs,” Watson remarks on Holmes’s “great heart,” and Holmes often endeavours to assist young lovers (for example, in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and “The Missing Three-Quarter”).
4 There is no evidence that Irene Adler was deceased at the time of publication of this story in July 1891. Some scholars suggest that “late” was used by Watson in the sense of “former” Irene Adler, who becomes Irene Norton after her marriage. On the other hand, J. N. Williamson concludes (“A Scandal in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’”) that the “Count von Kramm” had Irene murdered, using Holmes for an alibi. If this is so, then Holmes’s apparent relish (in “His Last Bow”), when he speaks of “the late King of Bohemia,” may be explained.
A natural death cannot be ruled out. Some wonder if Irene Adler had some long-standing complaint that accounted for her retirement from the operatic stage, even though, at the age of thirty-one, she might have been expected to be at the height of her powers.
5 Watson’s conduct in this case, in which he spends two nights at Baker Street with no mention of communication with his wife, is hardly consistent with his declaration of marital bliss—unless Watson did send a telegram to his wife and simply failed to mention it.
6 Watson means that Holmes preferred the solitary life to the social “whirl.” Cf. Holmes’s dread that he had received “one of those unwelcome social summonses” (“The Noble Bachelor”).
7 Holmes’s life style was certainly eccentric, and one who expresses as his philosophy “My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence” (“The Red-Headed League”) can hardly be regarded as conventional. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894) characterises the Bohemians as men “of loose and irregular habits, living by what they can pick up by their brains.” This description surely fits the world’s first consulting detective.
8 Crime in England became less violent and declined in proportion to the population during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the popular view may be that cities breed crime, in fact, as London grew, it became more orderly. The idea of the police, new in 1829, became more widely accepted, and the number of “official police” in Greater London grew as the population burgeoned. The Encyclopœdia Britannica (9th Ed.) reports that from 6,158 men in 1861, the Metropolitan force had swelled to 16,943 by 1880—one for every 430 citizens; the City of London police force grew from 628 to 830, or one policeman for every 61 citizens.
9 Odessa, at the time the third-largest city in Russia (now part of Ukraine), was one of the chief centres of the 1905 uprisings against the tsar. A mutiny took place that year on board the warship Potemkin, docked in Odessa, and Sergey Eisenstein’s classic 1925 film Potemkin, filmed in the city and on the docks, memorialised the suffering of the rebels.
10 One Fyodor Fyodorovich Trepoff (1803–1889) was military policemaster of St. Petersburg. Might he be connected with Holmes’s “summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder”? Such an identification would mean that Trepoff was not the victim but perhaps the murderer. Another possibility, suggested by Richard Lancelyn Green, is General Trepoff, who was shot by a Nihilist on January 24, 1878.
11 Trincomalee is in the eastern province of Ceylon. This is not the only reference to Ceylon, then a British te
rritory and now Sri Lanka: In The Sign of Four, Holmes displays a mastery of the subject of Buddhism in Ceylon, suggesting that he actually visited there.
12 The “reigning family of Holland” was that of William III (1817–1890), who married Princess Emma of Waldeck-Pyrmont; they produced only one child, Wilhelmina, born 1880. When William died in 1890, Wilhelmina became queen.
13 This phrase implies that before 1888, Watson had been in private practice and then given it up. In A Study in Scarlet (Watson’s first novel, published in 1887, recording Holmes’s capture of an American killer), which is set in 1881, Watson had not yet taken up private practice. Little is known about the intervening years. See Chronological Table.
14 Watson refers here to the fact that during the events of A Study in Scarlet and through the events of The Sign of Four, Watson lived at 221 Baker Street as Holmes’s flat-mate. In the latter story, Watson met and courted the heroine Mary Morstan, and we learn in this tale of their wedding.
15 A “spirit case” or “tantalus” is a stand containing usually three cut-glass decanters, which, though apparently free, cannot be removed until the bar that engages the stoppers is raised. Many such cases have a padlock on the bar, to avoid “tantalising” the servants. The “tantalus” is also mentioned in “Black Peter.”
16 A “gasogene” is a device that produces sparkling soda water (seltzer). Despite its popular association with Sherlock Holmes, the gasogene is mentioned only in “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Mazarin Stone.”
17 That is, back to work.
18 “Mary Jane” was a generic name for a maid. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) characterises the general servant, or maid-of-all-work, evidently the person described here, as “perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration; her life is a solitary one, and in some places, her work is never done.” She starts in life, Mrs. Beeton explains, probably as a girl of thirteen, employed by some “small tradesman’s wife,” and, if she succeeds, moves to a respectable tradesman’s house, where she has to do herself all the work that, in larger establishments, is performed by cook, kitchen maid, housemaid, and even footman.
“The Canon is, in fact, pervaded with servants,” comments Christopher Redmond in his Sherlock Holmes Handbook. A. N. Wilson, the prominent biographer, notes that among nineteenth-century Englishwomen, “the largest occupational group . . . was, overwhelmingly, the servant class.” The 1841 census listed 751,540 domestic servants; forty years later, there were 1,386,167. As the middle class swelled, more servants were called upon to do more demeaning and back-breaking work; then again, it was preferable to factory employment, and servants often created their own household “below stairs” and were treated as members of their employers’ families. Holmes, as a lodger in a lodging house, had no personal servants.
19 “Slavey” was a term used for maid servants assigned primarily the lowest duties.
20 A compound of iodine then used as an antiseptic.
21 Silver nitrate is a caustic chemical reagent and compound then used as an antiseptic and disinfectant.
22 The stethoscope was invented by Laennec in 1819 but took the form of a hollow cylinder, rather than the modern tubing. W. J. Cairns, writing in the Daily Telegraph of May 24, 1951, reports, “Doctors were in the habit of carrying them in their hats, and as these caused a slight bulge it was always an elementary matter to pick out doctors from other wearers of silk hats.”
23 What “one or two”? Only A Study in Scarlet had been published by 1889. In “The Red-Headed League,” which apparently takes place in 1890, Holmes goes even further: “The enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle so many of my own little adventures . . .” [emphasis added]. Watson may have shown Holmes the manuscript of some of his early stories pre-publication.
24 Contrary to modern expectations, the mail was then a reliable and rapid means of communication. Reform began in 1837, with British educator Rowland Hill’s study of the postal system, and in 1840, prepaid postage by stamps was introduced. The advent of the railway and the steamship permitted a far speedier, more regular, and more reliable mail service as the nineteenth century passed. By 1900, according to Whitaker’s Almanack (1900), in the City district of London, there were twelve deliveries daily, while in other London districts there were from six to eleven collections and deliveries. Letters were normally delivered within two to four hours of posting. More urgent messages could be designated for “express delivery” at a small additional cost, or the “district messenger service,” a private carrier, could be used for 3 pennies per half-mile. Overnight delivery was the standard for mail outside London.
25 English currency is explained by Baedeker’s London and Its Environs, the classic guidebook, in its 1896 edition: “The ordinary British Gold coins are the sovereign or pound (1.= libra), equal to 20 shillings, and the half-sovereign. The Silver coins are the crown (5 shillings), the half-crown, the double florin (4 shillings; seldom seen), the florin (2 shillings), the shilling (s. = solidus), and the six-penny and three-penny pieces. The Bronze coinage consists of the penny (d. = denarius), of which 12 makes a shilling, the halfpenny (½ d.), and the farthing (¼ d.).” A half-crown, or approximately 60¢ in U.S. currency at the time, would have been a considerable expenditure for writing paper in Holmes and Watson’s day.
26 This volume also appears in Holmes’s hands in The Sign of Four.
27 The name “Egria” is an apparent corruption of Eger, the chief town of one of the twelve “circles” or districts of the kingdom of Bohemia, situated on the river Eger. The town was called Agria by the Romans, which may be the source of Holmes’s error. In 1552, István Dóbó is said to have repelled a Turkish army of 100,000 with only 2,000 townspeople by arming the women with rocks and instructing the men to imbibe the local red wine. According to legend, the invading soldiers, whose religious scruples forbade drink, saw the wine stains on the men’s clothes and, imagining that the men had become enraged by drinking bull’s blood, fled the city. Today Eger, now in northern Hungary, is famed for its Bull’s Blood wine.
28 Holmes’s Gazetteer was in error: German Bohemians were actually then a minority; the balance of the population was Slavonic, speaking Czech.
29 A kingdom of the Austrian empire, marked by a continual struggle between its German and Czech residents for supremacy. Bohemia was the greatest coal-producing province of the empire as well as the most educated. Prague was its chief city, but Bohemia contained over 400 cities within its boundaries. By the late nineteenth century, the Austro-Hungarian empire, formerly the Holy Roman Empire, was falling apart as Czech nationalism increased. In 1918 Bohemia became part of the new state of Czechoslovakia and now occupies the centre portion of the Czech Republic.
30 Karlsbad (German) or Karlovy Vary (Czech), was then a town and famous health-spa in Bohemia. The town was named after King Charles IV of Bohemia, whose dog, legend has it, discovered the hot springs.
31 Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Waldstein, 1583–1634, Duke of Friedland, Sagan, and Mecklenburg. The subject of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein: A Historical Drama in Three Parts, Wallenstein served as a general of the Bohemian army in the Thirty Years’ War. He was assassinated in Eger.
32 A light closed carriage with seats inside for two or four.
33 About $825 apiece in U.S. currency at the time. A guinea is a former English gold coin, worth twenty-one shillings. It was customary to express professional fees and prices of luxury items in guineas. To some extent, this was a marketing ploy: 20 guineas sounds like less than 21 pounds, just as a $99.99 sales ticket seems much less than $100.00. There was also an element of snob appeal. Mme. Lesurier of Bond St. charged 22 guineas for a costume (“Silver Blaze”).
34 Why does Watson start to go? By 1889, he had collaborated with Holmes on numerous cases. D. Martin Dakin, in his Sherlock Holmes Commentary, observes, “Watson’s mind seems to have worked in a curious way: He writes [A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, “A Scandal in Bohemia,
” and “The Red-Headed League”] as if they were Holmes’s first cases, although his own dating of them and of the others shows that this was not so.” See Chronological Table.
35 Contrast this affectionate reference to James Boswell (1740–1795), author of the classic Life of Samuel Johnson, which appears to express approval of Watson’s writing, to Holmes’s criticism of Watson in “The Copper Beeches”: “You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.” Boswell met Johnson in 1763, when he was twenty-two, Johnson fifty-three. Ten years later, they toured the Hebrides together, and Boswell’s journal of the tour became the basis for the Life, which was not completed until 1784. In 1888, the time of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson had only known Holmes for seven years, and Dr. Watson’s two published memoirs hardly constitute a biography of Holmes. However, the remark may indicate that during this period Dr. Watson had begun his lifelong habit of careful note-taking on Holmes’s activities. It also is indicative of Holmes’s attitude of superiority to the older Watson.
36 Lambskin with a curled wool, derived from Middle Eastern sheep; or a rough fabric made in imitation of this.
37 A mask that conceals the eyes and disguises the face, as worn by the “Lone Ranger” of comic strip and television fame.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 10