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)

by Doyle, Arthur Conan

  12 Freemasons were obliged to keep secret the several words and various signs revealed to them, and the motto of the order was “Audi Vide Tace” (“Hear, See, Keep Silent”). It was commonly supposed that Masons would reveal themselves to other members by secret hand grips, signs, and code words.

  13 Correctly, the “square and compass,” the emblems of the mason’s craft. The square and compass combined were at one time a fairly common object of personal adornment in the form of watch-chain ornaments or on signet rings.

  14 While the wrist may seem to be an unlikely place for a tattoo, Tit-Bits for February 14, 1891, reported: “[T]here are a great many women who employ [the art of tattooing]. With women the decoration is usually a bee, a butterfly, a spray of flowers, or a monogram. These ornaments are worn inside the wrist, so that they may be hidden by the glove, if necessary.” Why Wilson’s tattoo was on his wrist is unknown.

  15 “Everything unknown passes for something splendid,” an epigram of Tacitus, written about 98 A.D. Tacitus was a Roman historian, whose writings are the most trustworthy sources of knowledge of Roman times. This epigram is from his Life of Agricola, regarded as one of the finest biographies ever written, and Holmes, educated as a gentleman, evidently read it in the original Latin.

  16 According to Stoll’s Editorial News of June 2, 1921, the Stoll Film Company placed a similar advertisement in the Times on January 20, 1920, when filming “The Red-Headed League”: “On account of circumstances not unconnected with the bequest of the late Hezekiah [sic] Hopkins of Lebanon, Penn. USA, lucrative employment for One Day Only is now available for twenty CURLY, RED-HEADED MEN who are sound in mind and body. Those who have served in HM Forces and have some knowledge of acting preferred.” Forty curly, red-haired ex-servicemen applied to the Cricklewood Studio and the producer decided to engage them all.

  17 “Fleet Street [is] one of the busiest streets in London,” according to the 1896 Baedeker. Celebrated for its newspaper and other printing and publishing offices, by 1896, it was the headquarters of and synonymous with London’s “penny press,” sensational newspapers of the day that were the ancestors of today’s tabloids.

  18 The starting line in a race; therefore, a point at the beginning of a project at which nothing has been done ahead of time.

  19 The Morning Chronicle went bankrupt around 1860. Watson (or Wilson) thus made an error in the name of the newspaper.

  20 The evident impossibility of the newspaper bearing the correct date has been noted by numerous chronologists, who point out that considerably more than two months elapse between the newspaper date and the October 9 date given for dissolution of the League, when Wilson appears in Holmes’s sitting-room. See note 36.

  21 The pawnbroker was the major financial resource available to much of the Victorian population. Persons in need of cash deposited their valuables with the pawnbroker as security, who lent them a fraction of the value. Items not “redeemed” for the amount lent within twelve months were sold. Customers came from all strata of society, ranging from clerks struggling to rise above their working class background to wealthier members of society who had fallen on hard times. In 1836, Charles Dickens, in his Sketches by Boz, wrote: “Of the numerous receptacles for misery and distress with which the streets of London unhappily abound, there are, perhaps, none which present such striking scenes as the pawnbrokers’ shops. The very nature and description of these places occasions their being but little known, except to the unfortunate beings whose profligacy or misfortune drives them to seek the temporary relief they offer. . . .”

  22 Given later as “Saxe-Coburg Square,” no such place exists in London. Albert, Victoria’s consort, was “Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.” Watson commonly disguised the locations reported in his tales, evidently out of concern for Holmes’s clients, to preserve their confidences and to spare them sightseers.

  23 The original “City of London,” with its own government. Charles Dickens, Jr., writes, “The Municipality of the City originally exercised jurisdiction over London proper, but the town has so outgrown its original limits that the Corporation is now entirely surrounded by rival powers . . .” The City remains the financial centre of London and is the venue for Hugh Boone’s begging (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”) and Hall Pycroft’s employment (“The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”).

  24 A situation or job.

  25 Novelist-scholar Dorothy Sayers, in “The Dates in ‘The Red-Headed League,’” deduces that the day was August Bank Holiday Monday. That it was a holiday also explains why so many red-headed men were not at work during normal working hours and perhaps why the newspapers—headquartered on Fleet Street—failed to report this remarkable event.

  26 A fruit-seller, who typically sold fruit from a wheelbarrow.

  27 A board of sawn fir or pine.

  28 Used to make shoemaker’s thread more supple. It is not clear why cobbler’s wax disgusts Ross—perhaps he implies that it has been used to attach false hair to men’s heads.

  29 Very substantial pay for a half-time job in Victorian England, with a middle class defined by some as those earning over £300 per year. Compare Hugh Boone (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”), who earned £2 per week for “arduous work” as a reporter (and £2 per day as a beggar). In 1890, £300 had the purchasing power of £19,302 in 2001.

  30 Another slang term for a job.

  31 The Britannica was already well established as the encyclopaedia. After its first edition in 1768 (a mere three volumes), it had numerous printings and editions and few competitors. Wilson undoubtedly worked on the Ninth Edition, publication of which was completed in 1889. The Ninth Edition is extensively quoted throughout these volumes as a source with which Holmes himself would have been familiar.

  32 An upright case or cupboard.

  33 How odd that an employer paying four pounds a week cannot provide pens and paper!

  34 Paper varying in size according to the grade, usually 16 x 13 inches for writing and drawing paper, so-called from the watermark formerly applied to it.

  35 Thomas L. Stix calculates that based on the average page of the Britannica, according to Jabez Wilson, he copied 6,419,616 words in eight weeks, working only four hours a day. This is a rate of 33,435 words per hour, or 557.25 words per minute. What a phenomenon!

  36 There is a serious confusion of dates here, observes Stix. The first advertisement appeared on April 27, 1890. Wilson started work on April 29. Eight weeks and thirty-two pounds thereafter brings us to June 23. But the announcement of dissolution of the League is dated October 9, 1890. “In other words, fourteen weeks and four days have been unaccounted for, and 58 pounds, 10 shillings, 2 pence unpaid.”

  Ian McQueen, in Sherlock Holmes Detected: The Problems of the Long Stories, attempts to reconcile Wilson’s remark of “eight weeks” passing, the October 9 “dissolution” date, and the April 27 date on the newspaper advertising the league. He suggests that the latter date could be correct if the advertisement had been inserted in connection with earlier plans that had failed to materialize. When the plans gelled, Spaulding entered Wilson’s employment about the middle of July, using the same newspaper but concealing the date. However, this ignores Watson’s “just two months ago” remark about the date on the paper.

  37 A lawyer who practises law but is not permitted to appear as counsel in the courts, except magistrates’ courts and before Justices of the Peace. William Morris was a name well known to the public; the prominent English painter, designer, poet, manufacturer, and Socialist leader (1834–1896) was one of the founders of England’s Arts and Crafts movement, named for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society founded in the 1880s, which promoted hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts.

  38 Donald Redmond, in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources, suggests that Wilson confused the address, which properly was a few doors away at No. 44, Little Britain, the premises of Arnold & Sons, “manufacturers of trusses, elastic stockings, belts, artificial legs, arms, eyes &c.”

&n
bsp; 39 If he was indeed paid £32, Wilson is incorrect in his statement that “Spaulding . . . came down to the office just this day eight weeks with the advertisement”; it would have been nine weeks, because Wilson was not paid on this last Saturday.

  40 “Three pipes of shag in fifty minutes!” R. D. Sherbrooke-Walker writes in “Holmes, Watson and Tobacco.” “It was not a feat—it was a monstrous abuse of the membrane of the nose and throat!”

  41 Pablo Martin Meliton Sarasate (1844–1908) was a renowned violinist, who began by winning competitions at the Paris Conservatory. At age sixteen, he took up his concert career. In “Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives,” appearing in the Strand Magazine (1892), the editors write: “[T]he extreme beauty of his execution, aided doubtless by his singularly striking appearance, ensured his immediate success. . . . It is a disputed point among musicians whether Señor Sarasate or Herr Joachim is to be considered the greatest violinist of the age.”

  42 The Aldersgate Street Station is on the Metropolitan line. The “Underground Railways,” more properly the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways, irrevocably changed the fabric of everyday life in London, carrying over 110 million passengers per year by 1896. First opened in 1863, the trains for the most part ran through tunnels or cuttings between high walls. London was the first city to adopt underground railways. The railway figures prominently in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” and Watson remarks, in A Study in Scarlet, that he would like to see Holmes attempt to deduce the lines of work of the occupants of a third-class Underground carriage. However, this is the only recorded instance of Holmes or Watson actually travelling by Underground.

  43 The traditional emblem of a pawnbroker’s shop.

  44 This is one of the two Canonical adventures in which Holmes carries a walking stick; the other is “The Illustrious Client.” Holmes is frequently depicted by Sidney Paget in the dress of an English gentleman, and, in the words of Daniel Pool (What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew), “no gentleman was ever without one or its doppelgänger, the tightly furled umbrella.” In modern London, these took the place of the eighteenth-century sword.

  45 So named from skirting the bank of the river Thames, the Strand was the great artery of traffic between the City and the West End. It contained many newspaper offices and theatres and has Canonical associations as the home of “Simpson’s” restaurant, a favourite of Holmes (“The Dying Detective” and “The Illustrious Client”), and the namesake of the Strand Magazine, headquartered on the corner of the Strand and Southampton Street, as depicted on its cover.

  46 D. Martin Dakin, assessing Holmes’s adversaries Professor Moriarty as number one and Colonel Sebastian Moran as number two, asks, “[W]ho was the third? . . . Perhaps the most likely of those known to us is Charles Augustus Milverton, whose description as the worst man in London does not prevent him from being the third smartest. But of course it might be Brooks or Woodhouse or any one of the fifty men who wished harm to Holmes [“The Bruce-Partington Plans”] . . .” Banesh Hoffman, in “Red Faces and ‘The Red-Headed League,’” nominates Holmes himself, Mycroft, and Professor Moriarty.

  47 Robert R. Pattrick, in “Moriarty Was There,” suggests that the gentleman of this encounter may have been in league with other Holmes rivals: “The ‘fourth smartest man in London’ would not be a freelance. It is even possible that the scheme of “The Red-Headed League” was originated by Moriarty himself. Certainly it was worthy of him . . .” This conclusion—the involvement of Moriarty—was adopted by Granada Television in its 1985 production of “The Red-Headed League.”

  48 “In a lifetime of frequenting music shops and libraries,” writes William Hyder, in “Sherlock Holmes as Musician,” “I have never run across any published works by Sherlock Holmes, and neither, to my knowledge, has any one else. It seems reasonable, then, to assume that Watson inaccurately used the term ‘composer’ when what he was thinking of was Holmes’s way of improvising tunes on his violin.”

  49 Compare the narrator’s observations of the private investigator C. Auguste Dupin in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue: “Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent.” Many have characterised Dupin as Holmes’s rôle model, but Holmes himself thought poorly of Dupin, calling him “a very inferior fellow” in A Study in Scarlet. Watson might well observe that we are most critical of others in whom we recognise ourselves.

  50 Books printed in the type used by the early printers. Holmes remarks in A Study in Scarlet on a “queer old book” he picked up in a London bookstall, and Madeleine B. Stern suggests, in Sherlock Holmes: Rare-Book Collector, that Holmes devoted many leisure hours to book collecting.

  51 If this case can be firmly set in 1890 (see Chronological Table), Watson is married to Mary Morstan Watson and living near Paddington Station (“The Engineer’s Thumb”). The reference here to “the Park” can only mean Hyde Park, which suggests that Watson’s residence and practice were located south or west of the park. Otherwise, one would not pass through the park to get to Oxford Street, which bounds the park on the north, or Baker Street, which lies to the east of the park.

  52 Several scholars identify this police agent as Athelney Jones (The Sign of Four), both from the description of his person and characteristics and reference to the “Sholto murder.” Richard Lancelyn Green further suggests that Watson’s slip of the pen may have resulted because “Peter Jones” was the name of a department store on the west side of Sloane Square that opened in 1877.

  53 A straight whipstock with a leather loop. The “loaded” hunting-crop, that is, one with its handle weighted with iron, is Holmes’s “favourite weapon,” according to Dr. Watson (“The Six Napoleons”), although it appears only here, in “The Six Napoleons,” and in “A Case of Identity.”

  54 Scotland Yard, originally a place, became the popular name for the detectives of the London Metropolitan Police. The first headquarters of the Metropolitan Police were the back premises of 4 Whitehall Place. The location had been the site of a residence owned by the kings of Scotland before the Union and used and occupied by them and/or their ambassadors when in London, and was known as “Scotland.” The courtyard was later used by Sir Christopher Wren and known as “Scotland Yard.” The residence backs on to three streets incorporating the words “Scotland Yard” in their names, which were also said to have been derived from the Scott family’s ownership during the Middle Ages. In either case, by 1887, the police headquarters embraced numbers 3, 4, 5, 21, and 22 Whitehall Place, numbers 8 and 9 Great Scotland Yard, numbers 1, 2, and 3 Palace Place, and various stables and outbuildings. In 1890, the headquarters were removed to premises on the Victoria Embankment designed by Richard Norman Shaw, which became known as “New Scotland Yard” and was presumably well known to Holmes. In 1967, because of the need for a larger and more modern headquarters, a further move took place to the present site at Broadway, S.W.1, which is also known as “New Scotland Yard.”

  55 The events recorded in The Sign of Four.

  56 Merryweather is presumably referring to the card game whist, the forerunner of modern contract bridge. A “rubber” is a unit in scoring denoting the winning of two games by a side. Although some form of whist existed as far back as the sixteenth century, a formal system for the playing of the game was not created until Henry Jones’s 1862 Principles of Whist. Once bridge was introduced to London in 1894, it quickly supplanted whist. Other whist players mentioned in the Canon are the Tregennises (“The Devil’s Foot”) and the Hon. Ronald Adair and Colonel Sebastian Moran and their opponents (“The Empty House”).

  57 Slang: One who passes bad coins or forged notes.

  58 Jacques Barzun, in “A Note on John Clay’s Education,” speculates that Clay might have attended Cambridge, rather than Oxford, where he could have seen the following footnote in a treatise by Henry Sidgwick,
praelector in moral science at the University of Cambridge since 1869: “ ‘It would not be commonly thought unjust in a rich bachelor with no near relatives to leave the bulk of his property in providing pensions exclusively for indigent red-haired men, however unreasonable and capricious the choice might appear . . .’ ”

  59 To break into a building.

  60 If Aldersgate Station was only “a short walk” from Saxe-Coburg Square, as Watson previously noted, why would Holmes and party endure a “long drive” through “an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets”?

  61 One notes a certain similarity in Holmes’s metaphorical descriptions of Scotland Yard men, for in “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes describes Inspector Lestrade as “tenacious as a bulldog.” Holmes had little regard for Scotland Yard in his youth—in A Study in Scarlet, he calls Inspectors Lestrade and Gregson “the pick of a bad lot”—but by the time of his retirement, while he still decried their want of imaginative intuition, he praised their thoroughness and method (“The Three Garridebs”).

  62 That is, flagstones.

  63 The “dark lantern” was a modification of an ordinary gas or kerosene hand lantern that could be darkened while lit, by a sliding shield that covered the light without extinguishing the flame. In this way, it was the predecessor of the electric hand torch or flashlight.

  64 Holmes’s intense interest in whist is evidenced by his frequent choice of phrase:

  “At present it must be admitted that the odd trick is in his possession, and, as you are aware, Watson, it is not my habit to leave the game in that condition” (“The Missing Three-Quarter”).

  “He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning” (“Charles Augustus Milverton”).