by Bill Peschel
[back] Damocles: Damocles was a courtier in the court of King Dionysius II (c. 397-343 BC). When he flattered the king by telling him he was fortunate to be such a great and powerful man, Dionysius offered to change places so that he could experience it for himself. Damocles accepted and found himself on the throne, treated like a king, underneath a large sword held in place by a tail from a horse’s hair. In his fifth Disputation, the Roman orator Cicero used the story to teach the moral that virtue is all a man needs to lead a happy life, asking us to consider if “Dionysius . . . made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?”
[back] Queue de coq: French for “tail of the rooster.”
[back] Loaded to the muzzle: The phrase appears in Dickens’ Hard Times. The headmaster, Thomas Gradgrind, saw himself as “a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.” Baudelaire said about Balzac’s stories that “all his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Every mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will.”
[back] Hundred House: An 1890 building currently used as a dormitory and a library.
[back] Lady Rose’s Daughter: A popular novel by Mrs. Humphrey Ward (1851-1920) about the bastard daughter of aristocratic lovers who has to choose between the man she loves and the man she is only fond of but who can restore her to her class.
[back] Bridge-whist: An ancestor of contract bridge that was popular during the early 20th century. It is based on whist, but allows players to take turns as dummy and choose the trump suit rather than be left to chance.
[back] With gasoline: Petroleum-based solvents such as gasoline and kerosene were used in dry cleaning since the mid-19th century. They work by breaking down the oils that hold dirt and stains in place, or by dissolving the stain. Their low flash point led to the development of less flammable solvents that were also gentler on clothes.
[back] Spuyten Duyvil: A neighborhood in the Bronx, New York City. The name is derived from the Dutch for “spouting devil,” referring to the tidal currents found in the rivers—Harlem and Hudson—that define two of its boundaries.
[back] Gare du Nord: The major railway station in Paris.
[back] Mal-de-mer: Literally seasickness, also called motion or travel sickness.
[back] Mansion House: The large Palladian-style building, built between 1739 and 1752, that is used as the official home of London’s Lord Mayor.
[back] Peste: French for plague or pest.
[back] Infinite variety: A modified quotation from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
[back] Peninsular: Gerard was referring to Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, called the Peninsula War (1807-1814).
[back] Conge: A formal request to depart. Sherlock is referring to his retirement from detecting.
[back] Gascon: Gerard is from Gascony, a region in southwest France. It is possible that Conan Doyle remembered his Scots heritage when he created Gerard. In The Three Musketeers, when the Duke of Buckingham brags that he is as “proud as a Scotsman,” the musketeer d’Artagnan shot back, “And we say ‘Proud as a Gascon’: the Gascons are the Scots of France.”
[back] Forlorn hope: An assault that has little chance of succeeding. Participating in one was considered a great act of courage and survivors could be rewarded with promotions and bonuses.
[back] Who hit Billy Patterson: A popular American catchphrase that appears to have a number of possible origins. One story casts Patterson as a blacksmith who challenged a burly man from the next town over to a fight. The man knocked him out in two punches. One of Billy’s friends arrived at the fight too late, and seeing his man on the ground asked “Who hit Billy Patterson?” “I did,” said the giant, “what have you got to say about it?” “Nothing,” the man said, “except you shore hit him with a hell of a lick.”
[back] Where is my boy to-night: A gospel hymn composed by Baptist minister Robert Lowry (1826-1899).
[back] Silk waists: A woman’s long-sleeved top that is combined with a skirt to form a dress.
[back] Reciprocity: A trade agreement between nations that would reduce or eliminate tariffs or restrictions on certain products. At the time, American growers of sugar beets were competing against overseas imports from Germany, while opposing a drive in Congress to reduce sugar tariffs with Cuba.
[back] Marconigram: Messages sent in Morse code by radio, which differ from messages sent by an electrical telegraph (telegrams) and by submarine telegraph cable (cables or wires). Named by the Italian inventor and businessman who pioneered long-distance radio transmissions, Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937).
[back] The Affair of the Greek Interpreter: In the 1893 story, Mycroft sought his brother’s help to locate the missing Mr. Melas.
[back] Diogenes Club: The unique club co-founded by Mycroft to allow anti-social and “unclubbable” men to gather. The rules expressly forbid chatting or socializing among the members. It was probably named for the Greek philosopher (412-323 BC) who helped found Cynicism, which promoted a virtuous, simple life by rejecting conventional desires such as wealth, power, and sex. Diogenes also was noted for stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime and announcing he was searching for a honest man.
[back] Whitehall: A road in the City of Westminster where the centers of Britain’s government reside. Because of this connection, Whitehall has become synonymous with official authority, as in “we’ll have to hear from Whitehall before proceeding.”
[back] Multum in parvo: Latin for “much in little,” it means that Professor Mustie managed to say quite a lot with a few words.
[back] Foxy: The comic detective hero of a 1900 operetta of the same name by Reginald De Koven (1859-1920) and Harry B. Smith (1860-1936).
[back] Gordian knots: A legend in which Alexander the Great untied a knot considered impossible by cutting it with his sword.
[back] Man in the Iron Mask: Who wrote Shakespere: A dubious mystery that arose 230 years after Shakespeare’s death that claims he posed as the author of plays written by Sir Francis Bacon to protect his reputation. The Letters of Junius: A collection of letters that appeared in London’s Public Advertiser from 1769 to 1772. The writer accused the British government of infringing the rights and liberties of Englishmen. Man in the Iron Mask: The popular name of an anonymous masked prisoner who was jailed for 34 years in French prisons until his death in 1703. The name comes from the novel by Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). It has been speculated that the man was related to the king of France.
[back] Pompeiian lector: None of these are actual mysteries.
[back] Shakesperian Authorship: No one in Shakespeare’s time expressed any suspicion over who wrote the plays that bore his name. In 1846, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) gave a lecture in which he said he found it hard to reconcile what was known about the man with the intellectual quality of his works. Delia Bacon (1811-1859) theorized that the plays had been written by a group of writers, including Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, to promote political and philosophical systems they could not advocate in public. Bacon (who was not related to Sir Francis) promoted the idea, parodied in Bangs’ “Mr. Homes Solves a Question of Authorship,” that Bacon inserted coded messages in Shakespeare’s plays that proved his authorship. Despite the multiplicity of alternative candidates reeking of class bias and the complete lack of evidence, the impossibility of proving a negative means that this theory will never die.
[back] Priceless first folio: The first book collection of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623. Printed in folio format in which the pages are 15 inches tall, it contained 36 of his plays, 20 of them published for the first time. The highest price paid for a First Folio up to 1903 was $8,600, or £1,720, the equivalent of about $235,000 or £161,000 today. By comparison, a First Folio in 2001 sold for $6.1 million or £4.2 million.
[back] L.J. Libbey: Laura Jean Libbey
(1862-1924) was an American author who wrote 82 dime-novel romances such as Pretty Madcap Dorothy: Or, How She Won a Lover, Daisy Brooks: Or, a Perilous Love, and Kidnapped at the Altar: Or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain.
[back] Had wronged him: According to an 1858 newspaper article, the incident occurred in 1759 when Shakespeare’s home was sold “to a clergyman named [Francis] Gastrell, who because he was assessed to the poor rate, cut down a celebrated mulberry tree, venerated by the inhabitants as a memento of their immortal bard, having been planted by his own hand; and this vindictive man, a disgrace to his cloth, also pulled down his house. For these malicious acts he incurred such public odium, that he was obliged to leave the neighbourhood.” In fairness to the Rev. Gastrell, several accounts noted that the house had been heavily modified since Shakespeare’s day, and that the mulberry tree, after 150 years’ growth—if, indeed, it was even the same tree—must have been so large that it overshadowed the house. Mycroft does not say, however, how an incident from 1759 can be found in a book published in 1623.
[back] Strange historical secret: Quoted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition.
[back] Than he knew: Mycroft was comparing himself to a reference to God in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Problem.”
[back] Saint-Mars: Benigne d’Auvergne de Saint-Mars, the prison official who had responsibility for the Man in the Iron Mask. It is from his letters to government officials that we get most of our information about him.
[back] Natural son: A common phrase meaning the child was born out of wedlock.
[back] The Wandering Jew: A Jewish character from medieval Christian folklore, who taunted Jesus and was cursed to wander the earth until the Second Coming. Possibly inspired by Jesus’ words in Matthew 16:28: “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” The earliest version of the legend can be found in the Flores Historiarum (translated as Flowers of History) in the 1220s. It tells of an Armenian archbishop who visited England and met a Jewish shoemaker named Cartaphilus, who told him that while Jesus rested while carrying his cross to his crucifixion, the shoemaker hit him and said, “Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?” Jesus replied, “I shall stand and rest, but thou shall go on till the last day.”
[back] Count Cagliostro: Joseph Balsamo (1743-1795) was an Italian forger and con artist who used the Cagliostro alias. He dabbled in mysticism and the occult, consorted with criminals and nobility, and died in prison.
[back] St. Pancras: A major railway station in central London. Named for the Roman who was beheaded around 304 at age 14 during the persecution of the Christians under Diocletian. Some of his relics were taken to England, where several churches were dedicated to him, including St. Pancras Old Church in London.
[back] The mystery was solved: The book does not appear to exist, but this passage on “Bad Compression” from Diseases of a Gasolene Automobile (1903) might explain the joke:
“Compression is a term which signifies the pressure of gas in the cylinder, when the piston is at the highest point. On this pressure or compression depends the power of the engine. Every engine is designed to run with a certain compression, and there is a very close connection between this compression and the other portions of the engine, so that any variation must affect the power of the engine. . . . The simplest rule-of-thumb way of testing compression is by means of the starting handle. If there is no compression, the handle will turn freely . . .”
The compression is not an object so much as an indicator of the health of the engine, and without it, the car certainly won’t run “dead slow”; it won’t run at all!
[back] Killed in Switzerland: This is not the only time that writers overlooked the fact that Conan Doyle set The Hound of the Baskervilles before his demise.
[back] King Cophetua’s Beggar-maid: A legend about the African King Cophetua, who had vowed never to wed, but then fell in love with a beautiful beggar woman. Shakespeare mentions it in several of his plays, and it was the subject of a Tennyson poem (“The Beggar Maid”), paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and Edmund Blair Leighton, and in Lewis Carroll’s photographs of Alice Lidell. The rest of the items in the list are fictional.
[back] Dun: Debt collectors.
[back] Stone: A unit of weight equal to 14 pounds, so Watson’s scale registered 196 pounds. Seven stone six is 104 pounds, so Holmes presumably was calling him a 98-pound weakling.
[back] Mr. Alfred Austin: English poet (1835-1913) who followed Tennyson as Poet Laureate after William Morris declined the honor and Algernon Swinburne was considered too radical for the post. His status among poets can be judged by their nickname for him: “Banjo Byron.”
[back] Sir Richard Calmady’s: Fictional hero of The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) by novelist Lucas Malet, the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley (1852-1931).
[back] Veronica’s Garden: In Veronica’s Garden (1895) is a combination of prose and poetry reflecting Austin’s love of nature, typified by “Were I a Poet, I would Dwell”:
I would not sing of sceptred Kings,
The Tyrant and his thrall,
But everyday pathetic things,
That happen to us all:
The love that lasts through joy, through grief,
The faith that never wanes,
And every wilding bird and leaf
That gladdens English lanes.
“Remarkably, Austin has the reputation of having been the worst, most unread English poet,” commented The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, “more remarkably, examination of his works bears out this verdict.”
[back] Sitting on a donkey’s back: A form of punishment similar to being run out of town on a rail. If a rail wasn’t available, an ass would do. For example, there is the debunked “Black Legend” that, in 1867, the British plenipotentiary to Bolivia refused to pay his respects to the buttocks of the president’s new mistress. He was supposedly seized, stripped naked, roped to the back of a donkey and paraded several times around the main square before being expelled from the country. In return, Queen Victoria ordered Bolivia’s capital to be bombarded. When informed that San Paolo was not on the coast, she ordered the country to be crossed off her map of the world.
[back] By a prominent journal: This could be a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes deduces the source of a message by quoting to Watson this paragraph from the Times’ leading article on free trade:
“‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but it stands to reason that such legislation must in the long run keep away wealth from the country, diminish the value of our imports, and lower the general conditions of life in this island.’
“What do you think of that, Watson?” cried Holmes in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “Don’t you think that is an admirable sentiment?”
[back] Lying down: Gruelling: Punishment. Martello Tower: A low circular fort with a flat roof on which artillery pieces could be mounted. Many were built along the coast to repel a threatened invasion by Napoleon’s fleet. Lord Goschen: George Goschen (1831-1907) was a businessman who held various government offices, including Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty. Like Holmes, he was a Free Trader during Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform movement in 1903.
[back] Holmes loq.: The abbreviation for loquitur, Latin for “speaking,” informing the reader that the next bit of dialog will be from Holmes.
[back] Manchester School: A movement originating in Manchester that argued that free trade would reduce inequalities in societies. It promoted a laissez faire economy, pacifism, free speech, and separation of church and state.
[back] Teribus: A border ballad based on the war cry used by the men of Hawick, a town near Selkirk, during the Battle of Flodden. In 1513, in northern England, the English army under the Earl of Surrey
defeated the Scots army, killing King James IV. At the battle, the Hawick men shouted “Teribus ye teri odin,” which has been translated as “Land of Death and Land of Odin” or “Thor be with us, Thor and Odin.”
[back] Sour Plums: The town of Galashiels adopted the sarcastic title of the “Sour Plums of Galashiels” to commemorate the day the townsmen massacred a detachment of the English army in 1337. According to local tradition, the party had straggled from the main body and stopped to gather wild plums when the Scots attacked and killed them all. The “Sour Plums of Galashiels” incident was also commemorated in song, although the words have been lost.
[back] Braw, braw lads: The title of a poem by Robert Burns (1759-1796) and later set to music. The song is sung by a young woman who dislikes the boys in her area and prefers the lads “o’ Galla Water,” referring to the river that runs through Galashiels.
[back] The Flowers of the Forest: A Scottish folk song about the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. The original words have been lost, and new lyrics were added in the 1750s. It is usually played only at funerals and memorial services.
[back] Flodden Field: Common-Ridings: An event that takes place annually in the Scottish Border towns. To protect his lands, the local lord would appoint a leading townsperson to ride the boundaries to watch for raids by the English and other clans. Today, Common Ridings are held between May and June, involving hundreds of riders, as a celebration of history and tradition. James IV: The Scottish king, who, as noted in the Teribus footnote, was killed fighting the English at the battle of Flodden Field in 1513.