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

  Mr. Windibank sprang out of his chair and picked up his hat. “I cannot waste time over this sort of fantastic talk, Mr. Holmes,” he said. “If you can catch the man, catch him, and let me know when you have done it.”

  “Certainly,” said Holmes, stepping over and turning the key in the door. “I let you know, then, that I have caught him!”

  “What! where?” shouted Mr. Windibank, turning white to his lips and glancing about him like a rat in a trap.

  “Oh, it won’t do—really it won’t,” said Holmes, suavely. There is no possible getting out of it, Mr. Windibank. It is quite too transparent, and it was a very bad compliment when you said that it was impossible for me to solve so simple a question. That’s right! Sit down and let us talk it over.”

  “Glancing about him like a rat in a trap.”

  Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1891

  Our visitor collapsed into a chair, with a ghastly face and a glitter of moisture on his brow. “It—it’s not actionable,” he stammered.

  “I am very much afraid that it is not. But between ourselves, Windibank, it was as cruel and selfish and heartless a trick in a petty way as ever came before me. Now, let me just run over the course of events, and you will contradict me, if I go wrong.”

  The man sat huddled up in his chair, with his head sunk upon his breast, like one who is utterly crushed. Holmes stuck his feet up on the corner of the mantelpiece and, leaning back with his hands in his pockets, began talking, rather to himself, as it seemed, than to us.

  “The man married a woman very much older than himself for her money,” said he, “and he enjoyed the use of the money of the daughter as long as she lived with them. It was a considerable sum for people in their position, and the loss of it would have made a serious difference. It was worth an effort to preserve it. The daughter was of a good, amiable disposition, but affectionate and warm-hearted in her ways, so that it was evident that with her fair personal advantages, and her little income, she would not be allowed to remain single long. Now her marriage would mean, of course, the loss of a hundred a year, so what does her stepfather do to prevent it? He takes the obvious course of keeping her at home, and forbidding her to seek the company of people of her own age. But soon he found that that would not answer for ever. She became restive, insisted upon her rights, and finally announced her positive intention of going to a certain ball. What does her clever stepfather do then? He conceives an idea more creditable to his head than to his heart. With the connivance and assistance of his wife he disguised himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted glasses, masked the face with a moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl’s short sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making love himself.”

  “It was only a joke at first,” groaned our visitor. “We never thought that she would have been so carried away.”

  “Very likely not. However that may be, the young lady was very decidedly carried away, and, having quite made up her mind that her stepfather was in France, the suspicion of treachery never for an instant entered her mind. She was flattered by the gentleman’s attentions, and the effect was increased by the loudly expressed admiration of her mother. Then Mr. Angel began to call, for it was obvious that the matter should be pushed as far as it would go, if a real effect were to be produced. There were meetings, and an engagement, which would finally secure the girl’s affections from turning towards any one else. But the deception could not be kept up for ever. These pretended journeys to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to bring the business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it would leave a permanent impression upon the young lady’s mind and prevent her from looking upon any other suitor for some time to come. Hence those vows of fidelity exacted upon a Testament, and hence also the allusions to a possibility of something happening on the very morning of the wedding. James Windibank wished Miss Sutherland to be so bound to Hosmer Angel, and so uncertain as to his fate, that for ten years to come, at any rate, she would not listen to another man. As far as the church door he brought her, and then, as he could go no farther, he conveniently vanished away by the old trick of stepping in at one door of a four-wheeler, and out at the other. I think that that was the chain of events, Mr. Windibank!”

  Our visitor had recovered something of his assurance while Holmes had been talking, and he rose from his chair now with a cold sneer upon his pale face.

  “It may be so, or it may not, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “but if you are so very sharp you ought to be sharp enough to know that it is you who are breaking the law now, and not me. I have done nothing actionable from the first, but as long as you keep that door locked you lay yourself open to an action for assault and illegal constraint.”

  A Victorian four-wheeler.

  “The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.

  “He took two swift steps to the whip.”

  Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1891

  “There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows.48 The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”

  “I cannot now entirely see all the steps of your reasoning,” I remarked.

  “Well, of course it was obvious from the first that this Mr. Hosmer Angel must have some strong object for his curious conduct, and it was equally clear that the only man who really profited by the incident, as far as we could see, was the stepfather. Then the fact that the two men were never together, but that the one always appeared when the other was away, was suggestive. So were the tinted spectacles and the curious voice, which both hinted at a disguise, as did the bushy whiskers. My suspicions were all confirmed by his peculiar action in typewriting his signature, which, of course, inferred that his handwriting was so familiar to her that she would recognize even the smallest sample of it. You see all these isolated facts, together with many minor ones, all pointed in the same direction.”

  “And how did you verify them?”

  “Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration. I knew the firm for which this man worked. Having taken the printed description, I eliminated everything from it which could be the result of a disguise—the whiskers, the glasses, the voice, and I sent it to the firm, with a request that they would inform me whether it answered to the description of any of their travellers. I had already noticed the peculiarities of the typewriter, and I wrote to the man himself at his business address, asking him if he would come here. As I expected, his reply was typewritten and revealed the same trivial but characteristic defects. The same post brought me a letter from Westhouse & Marbank, of Fenchurch Street, to say that the description tallied in every respect with that of their employé James Windibank. Voilà tout!”49

  He reached for the hunting crop.

  Sherlock Holmes in America

  “And Miss Sutherland?”

  “If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace,50 and as much knowledge of the world.”

  1 “A Case of Identity” was published in the September 1891 issue of
the Strand Magazine. It appeared simultaneously in the September-October copy of the New York edition of the Strand Magazine and was widely printed in newspapers in America that month.

  2 Holmes here paraphrases Byron’s Don Juan: “ ’Tis strange—but true; for truth is always stranger; / Stranger than fiction” (Canto XIV, ci.). George Gordon, Lord Byron, had died in 1824, but it is not surprising to find that Holmes is familiar with the great Romantic individualist. While Holmes would also have known Carlyle’s warning against Romantic self-preoccupation in Sartor Resartus (1833–1834/1836) to “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe” (in A Study in Scarlet, he paraphrases Carlyle’s famous aphorism about genius being an infinite capacity for taking pains), Holmes was the consummate individualist who administered his own justice (see “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” for an example).

  3 In another literary fillip, Holmes paraphrases Shakespeare: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii). Catherine Bell, in her annotation of Hamlet, calls this ejaculation “immediately recognizable as a sign of what we’d now call clinical depression.” Another scholar labelled the statement “dangerously self-dramatising melancholy.” Watson has already commented (in “The Red-Headed League”) on Holmes’s alternating fits of energy and melancholy, and Holmes seems here to be preparing himself to be depressed.

  William S. Baring-Gould, in Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective, speculates that Holmes spent some of his post-collegiate years acting in a Shakespearean company touring America.

  4 Which continents? In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” we learned of Holmes’s involvements in cases in or involving Russia, Ceylon, Scandinavia, Holland, and Bohemia. In The Sign of Four, Watson boasts of a knowledge of women extending over “many nations and three separate continents,” which most commentators conclude refers to Europe, Asia (India), and Australia. While Holmes plainly had American contacts (see, for example, “The Dancing Men”) and was often engaged in matters relating to Indian affairs (for example, The Sign of Four, “The Speckled Band,” “The Crooked Man”), there is no evidence of him advising or helping anyone outside Europe or Asia.

  5 In an age in which married women were considered little more than chattel, the property of their husbands, domestic abuse of Victorian women was a significant concern. In his feminist tract The Subjection of Women (1869), economist John Stuart Mill laments that a wife was “the personal bond-servant of a despot,” who “vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.” Eighteen Married Women’s Property bills were introduced into Parliament between 1857 and 1882, of which five were passed, granting married women some of the same rights accorded to those who were unmarried, but the divorce laws continued to shackle women to their husbands. Conan Doyle was deeply involved in divorce reform, and the restricted divorce laws are central to Holmes’s investigation in “The Abbey Grange.”

  Numerous students of London testify to the plague of wife-beating. For example, Montagu Williams, Q.C., in Round London: Down East and Up West (1894), writes: “If any one has any doubts as to the brutalities practised on women by men, let him visit the London Hospital on a Saturday night. Very terrible sights will meet his eye. Sometimes as many as twelve or fourteen women may be seen seated in the receiving-room, waiting for their bruised and bleeding faces and bodies to be attended to. In nine cases out of ten the injuries have been inflicted by brutal and perhaps drunken husbands. The nurses tell me, however, that any remarks they may make reflecting on the aggressors are received with great indignation by the wretched sufferers. They positively will not hear a single word against the cowardly ruffians.” The Phil May sketch reproduced here from Punch (September 1, 1894) bears witness to the common understanding of domestic relations.

  6 “This interesting case . . . involved a bit of leg-pulling, I’m afraid, for . . . even today, with all the skill of modern dental science, we cannot construct a set of artificial teeth that would withstand such violent and frequent abuse,” Dr. Charles Goodman writes in “The Dental Holmes.” Michael Ramos, D.D.S., a prominent collector of dentures, opines, however, that the “vulcanized” rubber dentures of the last century might well have stood up to such abuse where modern porcelain or even plastic dentures would not. “The rubber dentures often had a horrible smell, but they were hard as stone,” states Ramos in a letter to this editor.

  7 A powdered preparation of tobacco, used by inhalation or by dipping—that is, by rubbing on the teeth and gums. Holmes’s use of snuff is never mentioned again. Note, however, that Mycroft Holmes took snuff (“The Greek Interpreter”), as did Jabez Wilson (“The Red-Headed League”).

  8 The snuffbox, on display at the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition for the Festival of Britain, is now in the collection of the Sherlock Holmes Tavern in the Northumberland Hotel in London. This reference seems to make evident that “A Scandal in Bohemia” took place before “A Case of Identity.” However, Dr. Richard Asher, in “Holmes and the Fair Sex,” argues that the snuffbox was sent to Holmes not by the King of Bohemia but by Violet Hunter (of “The Copper Beeches”) as a part of a campaign to capture his affections.

  9 It is unclear to which “papers” Holmes refers. There were no legal papers or certificates involved in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” although the king himself refers to “the papers” when Irene Adler has fled. Holmes makes a similar reference in “The Blue Carbuncle.”

  10 A diamond or other gem cut to display its brilliance.

  11 William S. Baring-Gould points to this as evidence of the financial situation in which Holmes still finds himself, needing to handle small cases.

  12 France’s main seaport and oldest city, Marseilles prospered greatly in the nineteenth century with the conquest of Algeria by France and the opening of the Suez Canal. Could this “intricate matter . . . from Marseilles” have involved the “great claret importers Westhouse & Marbank” and their employee Mr. James Windibank? See note 32. This might explain Holmes’s harsh judgment of the unscrupulous wine traveller. See note 48.

  13 Georgiana Spencer, fifth Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), was a great beauty and leader of fashion, as well as a novelist and political activist. An intimate of Marie Antoinette, her portrait by Thomas Gainsborough illustrates her captivating charm. An award-winning 2000 biography of her by Amanda Foreman was an international best-seller.

  14 French: literally, an “affair of the heart,” a love affair.

  15 A uniformed pageboy who was employed to clean boots and run errands—a jack of all trades in a Victorian household. The pageboy appears in ten of the tales of the Canon but is identified by name (as Billy) only three times. In “The Greek Interpreter,” “A Case of Identity,” “The Naval Treaty,” “The Noble Bachelor,” “Shoscombe Old Place,” “Wisteria Lodge,” and “The Yellow Face,” anonymous pages appear; Billy is named in “The Mazarin Stone,” “Thor Bridge,” and The Valley of Fear, although this may be two different boys.

  16 A vessel of the mercantile (or merchant) marine.

  17 A hundred pounds was worth about $500 U.S. at the time.

  18 Donald Redmond notes that Kelly’s London Directory of 1903 lists a Henry Albert Hardy, plumber, of 109, Southwark Bridge Road, and a William Allan Hardy, gas engineer, of Bale & Hardy, 181, Queen Victoria Street. “Mary Sutherland’s quondam foreman seems to have prospered, whichever he was.”

  19 Both the name of the northern province of New Zealand and the first provincial capital, Auckland was not founded until 1840, coincident with the Anglo-New Zealand treaty. The history of Auckland is largely the history of New Zealand.

  20 New Zealand was then a British colony, with a population of 815,862, actively engaged in the export of locally grown agricultural products and the import of manufactured goods. Although it signed a treaty with England in 1840, New Zealand went through long periods of economic instability in the late 1800s. During the 1870s, the government s
pent freely on public policies, but the country suffered a severe depression in the 1880s. Uncle Ned was clearly a shrewd investor to find profit in such times.

  21 “A highly revealing statement on the cost of living in Britain in the 1880’s,” notes William S. Baring-Gould.

  22 In 1873, the first commercial typewriter was produced by Philo Remington from the designs of Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden. When typewriters were first introduced, shorthand was in common use, but there were few trained operators of the new machines. In 1881, the American YWCA foresaw the advantages of training women to use the typewriter and began classes. By 1886, it was estimated that there were some 60,000 young women typing in offices in the United States. Rudyard Kipling, in letters from America, referred at this time to the “Typewriter Maiden” who earned her living rather than remain dependent on her parents. It was not uncommon for manufacturers to train women to type and to “sell” the trained typists to businesses along with their machines. Before he died in 1890, Sholes himself was quoted as saying, “I do feel I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard. This will enable them more easily to earn a living.”

  23 One who fits up the pipes for gas appliances.

  24 A thick velvety cotton or silk.

  25 Named after a fourteenth-century mansion with a great hall roofed entirely with lead. The mansion was purchased by “Dick” Whittington, legendary mayor of London, for the city and in 1445, the structure was opened as a market hall.

  26 Mary does not seem to have objected to his typewritten letters. Why did Angel insist that Mary handwrite hers?

  27 An acute inflammation of the tissue surrounding the tonsils—that is, acute tonsilitis.