1 “Black Peter” was published in Collier’s Weekly on February 27, 1904, and in the Strand Magazine in March 1904.
2 A mere two years later, in “The Devil’s Foot,” Holmes seems a far different man than the one described here, as Ian McQueen observes in his Sherlock Holmes Detected. Although Holmes is not yet fifty years old, his doctor forces him in that case to vacation in Cornwall so as to rest and “avert a complete mental breakdown.” One wonders whether Holmes’s health takes a drastic downturn in the intervening two years, or whether Watson’s observation here is misguided.
3 Watson refers to “The Priory School,” published the previous month.
4 Cardinal “Tosca” is identified by Francis Albert Young as Cardinal Luigi Ruffo-Scilla, whose collapse and death at the age of fifty-five in Rome on May 29, 1895, came as a great surprise to many. A different churchman is suggested by Mark E. Levitt, namely, the Monsignor Isidoro Carini, who was a significant part of the effort to bring the church and the Italian government to a rapprochement in the 1890s and who died in 1895 in a “sudden and mysterious” way (according to the London Times of February 1, 1895).
5 Leo XIII was elected pope on February 20, 1878, and held the office until his death on July 20, 1903. An intellectual devoted to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Leo XIII insisted that there was no conflict between faith and scientific advancement, and his papacy was marked by a new spirit of openness between the church and the rest of the world. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes obliged the same pope in connection with “that little affair of the Vatican cameos.”
6 The meaning of Watson’s allusion here is murky. According to E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a canary can be slang for a guinea or sovereign—gold coins are yellow in colour. So, too, does the dictionary list “canary-bird” as a convict: Certain “desperate” prisoners once wore yellow uniforms, and the jail was considered their cage. Donald A. Redmond adds that “The Old Canaries” was the nickname given to the Third Dragoon Guards, after their yellow facings (although there were no Third Dragoon officers named Wilson). Redmond continues that “canary” could be taken to mean any soldier sporting a yellow armband, or “an instructor at a gas school, or one of the Sanitary Corps of the R.A.M.C.; battalion Sanitary Orderlies.’ ”
Some dismiss the idea that the “canary” of Wilson’s infamy is anything but a bird. “There is absolutely nothing whatsoever in any way, shape, or form notorious about canaries,” declares “Red” Smith in “The Nefarious Holmes.” “However, a bird trainer can branch out, as Hirsch Jacobs has demonstrated in our day; Mr. Jacobs began with pigeons and went on to become America’s leading horse-trainer in eleven of twelve consecutive years. It stands to reason that Holmes’s man, Wilson, followed a similar course. . . .”
Numerous contradictory theories abound. New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, in “Sherlock and Malocchio!,” argues that the case may have been connected with threats against the life of the famous soprano Adelina Patti. David Roberts proposes that Wilson was in the business of training informants, or “stool-pigeons.” Carol Paul Woods suggests that Wilson was a trainer of prizefighters, and that he and his fighter protégé hailed from the Canary Islands.
7 “Woodman’s Lee” is generally believed to be Coleman’s Hatch, near Forest Row in Sussex.
8 Although there may be numerous unreported disguises, Watson records the following in addition to “Captain Basil”: “a common loafer” (“The Beryl Coronet”), a rakish young plumber named Escott (“Charles Augustus Milverton”), a venerable Italian priest (“The Final Problem”), an elderly, deformed bibliophile (“The Empty House”), a French ouvrier (“The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”), a workman looking for a job, described as “an old sporting man” (“The Mazarin Stone”), an old woman (“The Mazarin Stone”), a “drunken-looking groom” (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), an “amiable and simple-minded” Nonconformist clergyman (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), a sailor (The Sign of Four), an asthmatic old master mariner (The Sign of Four), a doddering opium smoker (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”), Mr. Harris, an accountant (“The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”), a registration agent (“The Crooked Man”), a Norwegian explorer named “Sigerson” (“The Empty House”), and an Irish-American spy named Altamont (“His Last Bow”).
9 “The reference is tantalizing and obscure,” Vincent Starrett writes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. “The rooms of Mycroft Holmes, opposite the Diogenes Club, would certainly be one of them; but it would be satisfying to know the others. . . . It may be assumed that in all of his five refuges he stored the materials of deception, as well as quantities of shag tobacco.”
10 This appears to be another example of Holmes’s wildly erratic morning routine, examined in depth by Ian McQueen. In “The Engineer’s Thumb,” for example, Watson expects to discover Holmes taking his breakfast soon after seven o’clock.
11 Brownish or tawny with streaks of other colour.
12 A stand containing decanters that in some fashion locks the decanters in place. Reference is made to what may be one on the premises of 221B Baker Street (in “A Scandal in Bohemia”) as the “spirit-case.”
13 Watson also smoked “ship’s,” as mentioned in A Study in Scarlet.
14 This appears to be a misspelling (or Anglicisation) of São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil and the capital of the province of the same name. A boom in the cultivation of coffee in the 1880s brought the region economic prosperity, as well as a wave of European immigrants.
15 Established under terms of the agreement that brought British Columbia into the confederation in 1871, the privately owned Canadian Pacific Railway was North America’s first transcontinental railroad. Construction on the main line, from Montreal to Port Moody (in Vancouver), was completed in 1885.
16 “The House” here refers to the London Stock Exchange. See “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk,” note 22.
17 The ancient stretch of forest known as the Weald (from the Old English wald, or weald, meaning forest) is nearly forty miles wide and rests between the chalk hills of the North and South Downs. It was once part of the much larger forest of Andredsweald (“the wood or forest without habitations”). As Watson notes, the Weald was heavily forested and once served as a centre for the iron industry, but the area remains one of England’s most wooded places.
18 The manuscript originally continued, “He has left half of it, which you would do well to secure, in the slit of the sash of . . .” The evidence turned out to be meaningless, perhaps explaining why Watson suppressed this false clue.
19 Contrast this action with Watson’s obviously erroneous statement in “The Cardboard Box”: “Appreciation of nature found no place among his many gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-doer of the town to track down his brother of the country.”
20 Obviously Watson is thinking of Colonel Sebastian Moran, the big-game hunter captured on a similar nighttime vigil in “The Empty House” and described with similar metaphors. (“This empty house is my tree,” Holmes says to him, “and you are my tiger.”)
21 Curiously, in the manuscript and in the Collier’s Weekly version, the time is given as “three o’clock.”
22 A loose pleated coat with a waistband.
23 ”Knickerbockers,” knee-length breeches, were worn by sportsmen. The short pants got their name from George Cruikshank’s illustrations in Washington Irving’s A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), whose fictional author was named Diedrich Knickerbocker. In the book, Dutch people were pictured wearing loose-fitting breeches that stopped at the knee. Eventually, “knickerbocker” also came to mean anyone of Dutch origin.
According to Holmes’s later comments, the young nocturnal visitor did in fact play golf, hence his wearing of knickerbockers; or else he obtained the outfit to complete his disguise.
24 Humfrey Michell, in a “Letter to Baker Street,” questions w
hy the banker’s son should have been so involved in—and so distraught over—tracking down the missing securities. Under English law, normally a person would have been appointed by the courts to handle such matters in the course of the bankruptcy. “It would have been a simple matter for him [the bankruptcy ‘receiver’] to obtain the record of the missing securities from the family,” explains Michell, “and take the appropriate steps to obtain title to them for the benefit of the creditors. The only explanation I can think of, and I admit it is very improbable, is that young Neligan was a liar and was after something else than share certificates. If so, he was a very successful one, because he bamboozled Sherlock Holmes.” Indeed, in modern commerce, someone who has had securities stolen need only post a bond and may have the securities replaced. This is not so, however, if the securities are bearer securities, that is, not issued to a named owner.
25 David L. Hammer, in The Game is Afoot, writes that the Brambletye Hotel “probably takes its name from the establishment mentioned in Black Peter rather than the other way around.” The hotel features the Black Peter Bar.
26 The “Ratcliff Highway Murders” are one of a number of topics on which Holmes extemporaneously spoke to Watson in A Study in Scarlet. These gruesome crimes were described by Thomas De Quincey in his seminal essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827).
Ratcliff Highway, a thoroughfare running parallel to the Thames, was a bustling hub of shops, lodging houses, and saloons catering to sailors and others involved in the shipping trade. Montagu Williams, writing in Round London: Down East and Up West (1894) about the street’s rough-and-tumble reputation in the 1860s, disdainfully called this section of town “a terrible disgrace to London. . . . [I]t would have been madness for any respectable woman, or, for the matter of that, for any well-dressed man, to proceed thither alone. The police themselves seldom ventured there save in twos and threes, and brutal assaults upon them were of frequent occurrence.” Williams did concede that conditions at Ratcliff Highway had improved by the 1890s, citing a decline in maritime prosperity, the transfer of shipping activity to new docks lower down on the Thames, and the fact that ocean liners were being helmed by “a better class of men.” Yet, ultimately, Williams opined that “though it gives me great satisfaction to record that Ratcliff Highway is better than it was, I confess I could wish to see it better than it is.”
27 A variety of winter apple with a red skin. It was highly prized as a dessert apple in Victorian England.
28 Presumably Holmes’s bedroom.
29 Steve Clarkson, in a “Letter to Baker Street,” takes issue with Cairns’s story, doubting that Cairns’s blow would be capable not only of stopping Carey’s rapid forward motion but also of throwing the captain backward and pinning him securely against the wall. “I wonder whether even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arm would contain such power.” As an alternate scenario, Clarkson envisions Carey in retreat, having backed up toward the wall when Cairns decided to harpoon him in order both to forestall Carey’s taking action against him and to gain access to the tin box. The sailor’s story of self-defence would earn him leniency during trial, but in Clarkson’s opinion, “Cairns should have swung for it.”
James A. Coffin proposes that Carey, repentant over the killing of Neligan and the theft of the securities, planned to goad Cairns into killing him, thus accomplishing a suicide and perhaps revenge on Cairns as well.
30 Are we really expected to believe that twelve years after the disappearance of Neligan’s father, Neligan chooses to visit Peter Carey on the very same night that Carey is visited by the only other man who knows what happened on that fateful night in 1883? This seems to stretch the limits of coincidence and suggests that Neligan and Cairns acted in concert—perhaps Cairns had confessed to young Neligan and was then used by Neligan as the “muscle” of an effort to force information from Carey. However, when Carey and Cairns confronted each other, Cairns was goaded into an impulsive act of violence, and Neligan decided to dissociate himself from Cairns.
31 This is a far different conclusion than Holmes reaches in the case of the killer of another wife-beater, Captain Croker in “The Abbey Grange.” However, most commentators assume that Cairns would quickly have gained his freedom on a plea of self-defence.
32 Apparently, it did not occur to Holmes to pick up a telephone, which would have been far quicker. Colonel E. Ennalls Berl considers Holmes’s extremely limited and reluctant use of the phone throughout his career, noting that in this case Holmes uses a telegram to invite Hopkins to breakfast and requests that he wire if he is unable to attend. Whether or not Holmes was a telephone subscriber, in The Sign of Four it is revealed that there was a telephone across the road; surely Holmes could have phoned the Brixton Police Station and either spoken to Hopkins or left him a message. Even more inefficient, Berl chides, was Holmes’s wasting three days wiring Dundee for crew lists when “it seems almost certain that a much shorter telephone struggle through the Dundee police would have given him the information.” It seems odd that Holmes, always on the cutting edge of his own field, would shy away from the use of the telephone, which was spreading rapidly through England. See “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” note 39. Whatever the reason, Holmes has apparently overcome his unexplained aversion by the time of “The Three Garridebs” (likely set in 1898).
33 Holmes’s casual mention of a trip to Norway, where Neligan’s father was headed before meeting his demise, is bafflingly oblique. D. Martin Dakin struggles to make some concrete connection to the case, coming up largely empty-handed. “He cannot have been after some of Neligan’s securities, for, even if it had been any business of his, neither he nor they ever got as far as Norway. (What did Neligan senior hope to do there anyway?)” Howard Brody, in “That Trip to Norway,” suggests that Holmes and Watson were off to investigate whether Neligan’s dinghy had been swept into the maelstrom off the Norwegian coast that Edgar Allan Poe wrote about in “A Descent into the Maelstrom.” In “Somewhere in Norway,” Chris Redmond makes the even more tantalising suggestion that Neligan was not, in fact, murdered, but instead bribed Carey to report his death, and that Holmes went to Norway to attempt to trace his whereabouts (and the whereabouts of the missing securities).
THE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON1
After threats and subtleties fail, Holmes and Watson turn lawbreakers in the case of Charles Augustus Milverton as they seek to foil the blackmail plot of “the worst man in London.” The two men find themselves unwilling witnesses to murder, and some question the ethics of their behaviour and wonder how the murderer got away. Whether the case occurred before or after Holmes’s Great Hiatus from 1891 to 1894 is unclear, but Watson withheld publication until 1904. He may have done so solely out of concern for those victims whose reputations might still be damaged by Watson’s revelations, or possibly out of concern that the police might still be chasing him!
IT IS YEARS since the incidents of which I speak took place,2 and yet it is with diffidence that I allude to them. For a long time, even with the utmost discretion and reticence, it would have been impossible to make the facts public; but now the principal person concerned is beyond the reach of human law, and with due suppression the story may be told in such fashion as to injure no one. It records an absolutely unique experience in the career both of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and of myself. The reader will excuse me if I conceal the date or any other fact by which he might trace the actual occurrence.
We had been out for one of our evening rambles, Holmes and I, and had returned about six o’clock on a cold, frosty winter’s evening. As Holmes turned up the lamp the light fell upon a card on the table. He glanced at it, and then, with an ejaculation of disgust, threw it on the floor. I picked it up and read:
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
Charles Augustus Milverton,
Appledore3 Towers,
Hampstead.4
Agent.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“The worst m
an in London,” Holmes answered, as he sat down and stretched his legs before the fire. “Is anything on the back of the card?”
I turned it over.
“Will call at 6.30.—C. A. M.,” I read.
“Hum! He’s about due. Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo5 and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow. And yet I can’t get out of doing business with him—indeed, he is here at my invitation.”
Royal Zoological Garden.
Queen’s London (1897)
“Charles Augustus Milverton.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“But who is he?”
“I’ll tell you, Watson. He is the king of all the blackmailers. Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton. With a smiling face and a heart of marble he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry. The fellow is a genius in his way, and would have made his mark in some more savoury trade. His method is as follows: He allows it to be known that he is prepared to pay very high sums for letters which compromise people of wealth or position. He receives these wares not only from treacherous valets or maids, but frequently from genteel ruffians, who have gained the confidence and affection of trusting women. He deals with no niggard hand. I happen to know that he paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian who in hot blood bludgeons his mate with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 26