The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (79 page)

17
.
It is obvious
: But the town could just as easily have been Ararat, fifty-four miles north-west of Ballarat.

18
.
Assizes
: Chief county court held quarterly until 1971, when assizes were replaced by crown courts.

19
.
One day a gold convoy came down from Ballarat
: There were two famous gold robberies in the mid-nineteenth century in Australia: the McIvor Gold Robbery of 1853 and the Eugowra Escort Robbery of 1862, following which a man called Turner was arrested.

20
.
Baxter's words… ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes'
: The saying should be attributed not to Richard Baxter (1615–91) but to John Bradford (
c.
1510–55), the Protestant martyr, who on seeing criminals being led to execution supposedly exclaimed: ‘But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford.'

First published in the
Strand
in November 1891. Alternative titles: ‘Adventure of Five Orange Pips' and ‘The Story of Five Orange Pips'(
St Louis Post-Dispatch
). Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Five Orange Pips' seventh in the list of his twelve favourite Holmes stories (excluding those that appeared in
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
), as revealed in the
Strand
in June 1927. The story is set in 1887.

1
.
the adventure of the Paradol Chamber
: Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol (1829–70), French writer, shot himself in a room of a Washington, D.C. hotel in July 1870. There is a Holmesian pastiche of the incident by Alan Wilson in the
Sherlock Holmes Journal
vol. V, no. 2 (Spring 1961), pp.
45
–50, and vol. V, no. 3 (Winter 1961), pp.
78
–82.

2
.
the British barque Sophy Anderson
: There was no ship of that name.

3
.
the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa
: A fictitious island but an amalgam of the names of the Hebridean islands Ulva and Staffa.

4
.
the Camberwell poisoning case
: Apastiche, ‘The Adventure of the Gold Hunter', is featured in
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes
by Adrian M. Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr.

5
.
Clark Russell's fine sea stories
: Clark Russell (1844–1911), who wrote many maritime novels, was described by Swinburne as ‘the greatest master of the sea'. Watson may have been reading
A Sea Queen
(1883), which contains the passage ‘shrieked like tortured children at the hall-door and the window-casements, and roared like the discharge of heavy ordnance in the chimneys' and therefore may account for the preceding simile, ‘the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney'.

6
.
Horsham
; Horsham is in Sussex and therefore not in the south-west. It is revisited by Holmes and Watson in ‘The Sussex Vampire' from
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
.

7
.
clay and chalk mixture
: Openshaw would not get such a mixture on his feet from Horsham, which stands in a sand and clay belt. Holmes's observation is based on a real-life incident in which Conan Doyle's Edinburgh University tutor Joseph Bell, partly the model for Holmes, noted that a patient had crossed Bruntsfield Links as his boots contained some red clay which could be found nowhere else in the city.

8
.
at the time of the invention of bicycling
: There is no particular date for the invention of bicycling; however, pedals were introduced in the early 1840s.

9
.
the war
: The American Civil War (1861–5).

10
.
Jackson's army
: Thomas Jonathan Jackson (1824–63), also known as Stone
wall Jackson, was a Confederate general mortally wounded at Chancellorsville.

11
.
Hood
: John Bell Hood (1831–79), Confederate general who took charge of the Atlanta campaign and was beaten by G. H. Thomas at Nashville in January 1865, after which he resigned his post.

12
.
Lee
: Robert Edward Lee (1807–70), known as Robert E. Lee, general-inchief of the defeated Confederate armies in the Civil War.

13
.
extending the franchise to them
: Although such a move was ratified by the Republicans in 1870 it was not enacted.

14
.
Pondicherry
: A city in south-east India.

15
.
K.K.K.
: The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865 as a result of the South's defeat in the American Civil War. Its early aims were to nullify Congress laws that might put Southern whites under the control of Northerners supported by black voters, and it won popularity amongst Confederate leaders including Robert E. Lee. It later mutated into the well-known modern-day version, a ritual-ridden, ultraviolent, murderous society infamous for the outlandish garb worn by its adherents: white headdress, mask and robe. Conan Doyle may well have learnt something of the Klan from a conversation with the black civil rights leader Henry Highland Garnet on board the
Mayumba
in 1882. By the time the story was written anti-Klan forces in the USA were hopeful of convicting former Confederate leaders for Klan activities. There is no evidence that the Klan had been using orange pips to convey messages.

16
.
brought in a verdict of suicide
: Unlikely. Who commits suicide by drowning himself in a two-foot puddle?

17
.
reconstruction of the Southern states
: The Southern states excluding Tennessee were occupied by Union troops after refusing to accept new conditions of government.

18
.
carpet-bag politicians who had been sent down from the North
: Politicians from the North moved to the Southern states after the Civil War with, it was said, few possessions other than those which could be wrapped up in a carpet-bag. They were forced out when conservative Democrats recaptured control of the ex-Confederacy states in the 1870s. The term ‘carpet-bagger' has since been used as an insulting term for politicians who move to an area with which they have little accord to stand for office under a likely winning ticket.

19
.
one of the forts upon Portsdown Hill
: There is a red-brick fort on Portsdown Hill which looks down on Portsmouth, the city where Conan Doyle lived in the 1880s.

20
.
Fareham
: A town four miles west of Portsmouth across Portsmouth Harbour.

21
.
This is no time for despair
: ‘
Nil desperandum
', from Horace,
Odes
I, vii.

22
.
Waterloo
: The terminus on the south bank of the Thames for the London and South Western Railway, which opened in 1848. Prior to this the line finished at Vauxhall and so commuters wanting to get to and from central London had to put up with the inconvenience of a two-mile trip by bus, cab or boat.

23
.
Cuvier
: Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier(1769–1832), French statesman, philosopher, naturalist and pioneer of the science of comparative anatomy. In Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) Dupin introduces Cuvier's description of the ‘Ourang-Outang' of the East Indian Islands as he solves the crime.

24
.
It was a singular document
: Watson compiled the list in chapter 2 of
A Study in Scarlet
and then threw it into the fire ‘in despair', which probably explains why his recollection of it is so hazy.

25
.
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero
: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Philosophy. – Nil. Knowledge of Astronomy. – Nil. Knowledge of Politics. – Feeble'.

26
.
geology profound
: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Geology. – Practical but limited'.

27
.
chemistry eccentric
: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Chemistry.– Profound'.

28
.
anatomy unsystematic
: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Anatomy. – Accurate, but unsystematic'.

29
.
sensational literature and crime records unique
: The original read: ‘Knowledge of Sensational Literature. – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.'

30
.
self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco
: There is no mention of this in the original list included in
A Study in Scarlet
.

31
.
the American Encyclopedia
: Probably the
American Cyclopedia
(New York, 1873–6).

32
.
A name derived
: The name Ku Klux Klan was, in fact, chosen at a committee meeting at which someone suggested the Greek
kukloi
, circle, at which point, so the story goes, another member shouted ‘Ku Klux'. Klan was then added.

33
.
in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed
: The Klan was disbanded in 1877 after federal troops were withdrawn from the South. It was revived as a more blatant white-supremacy force in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915.

34
.
Waterloo Bridge
: Built in the 1810s by John Rennie and originally named Strand Bridge, the name was changed after the Battle of Waterloo. Rennie's bridge was demolished in 1936 and replaced six years later.

35
.
I should send him away to his death
: Thus John Openshaw becomes one of only two Holmes clients to die despite contacting Holmes for help, the other
being Hilton Cubitt in ‘The Dancing Men' in
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
.

36
.
The Embankment
: Built alongside the northern bank of the Thames between Westminster and Blackfriars Bridge, and opened by Edward, Prince of Wales, in 1870.

37
.
Lloyd's registers
: Lloyd's Register of Shipping, which began in 1764.

38
.
Albert Dock
: Royal Albert Dock, Silvertown, seven miles east of central London on the north side of the river, built 1880.

39
.
Gravesend
: Port on the Thames in Kent, twenty-four miles east of London and generally accepted as the boundary between the Thames as a river and as an estuary. Gravesend was the first stop on the river for ships coming to the Port of London, where sea captains were exchanged for river captains.

40
.
the Goodwins
: Dangerous shoals off the coast east of Dover, once thought to be an island which had sunk. In the eleventh century the territory was claimed by the Earl of Godwine.

First published in the
Strand
in December 1891. Alternative title: ‘The Strange Tale of a Beggar' (
Philadelphia Inquirer
). Probable sources include a
Tit-Bits
article of 17 January 1891 entitled ‘A Day as a Professional Beggar', in which a journalist poses as a beggar, equipping himself with matches to avoid arrest for vagrancy. Andrew Lang in ‘The Novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle',
Quarterly Review
(July 1904), noted the similarity between the story and W. M. Thackeray's
The Memoirs of Mr C. J. Yellowplush
(1861), in which Frederic Altamont spends eight hours a day in the City on mysterious business. The story is set in 1889.

1
.
Theological College of St George's
: Fictitious, although there was a Theological College of St Joseph.

2
.
De Quincey's description
: i.e. the descriptions of taking opium by Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859), Manchester-born essayist and associate of the Lake Poets, whose best-known work,
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, was first published in
London Magazine
in 1821.

3
.
James
: As Watson's full given name is John H. Watson this solecism has caused Holmesologists much consternation. Some have claimed that James is a wife's pet name; others that it is an Anglicized version of Watson's middle name, which could be Hamish (the ‘H.' is never revealed); that it is a playful nod to Holmes's description of Watson as his (James) Boswell; that Mrs Watson is referring to their bull-pup; or even that Watson married Mrs Cecil
Forrester, not Mary Morstan, at the end of
The Sign of Four
, and that she is referring to a stepson called James. But it seems more likely that Conan Doyle simply made a mistake. As Richard Lancelyn Green noted, the author had a friend in Portsmouth called James Watson and once wrote a letter to the editor of the
Strand
in which he referred to Watson as James.

4
.
Upper Swandam Lane
: Fictitious (see next note).

5
.
east of London Bridge
: We later learn that the den backs on to Paul's Wharf, which has since been demolished; it lay by the river directly south of St Paul's Cathedral and
west
of London Bridge.

6
.
slop-shop
: A shop selling clothes and bedding for sailors.

7
.
Lascar
: Urdu; an east Indian sailor.

8
.
dog-cart
: A two-wheeled open vehicle with two seats back-to-back, the rear able to be shut to form a box for carrying a dog.

9
.
Lee, in Kent
: Lee, seven miles south-east of central London, was incorporated into the London borough of Lewisham in 1906.

10
.
He had no occupation, but was interested in several companies
: St Clair is in some ways reminiscent of Dickens's Alfred Lammle, from
Our Mutual Friend
, who ‘goes into the City… [and] oscillates on mysterious business between London and Paris'. In this case St Clair oscillates between Lee, the Bar of Gold and Threadneedle Street.