The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (81 page)

3
.
dog-cart
: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip', note
7
.

4
.
Leatherhead
;A Surrey town on the River Mole eighteen miles from London.

5
.
Waterloo
: See ‘The Five Orange Pips', note
22
.

6
.
in the days of the Regency
: From 1811 to 1820, the last nine years of the reign of George III, George, Prince of Wales (later George IV), ruled as Prince Regent.

7
.
Crewe
: A town in Cheshire which has the greatest conglomeration of railway lines anywhere in England.

8
.
a cheetah and a baboon, which wander freely over his grounds, and are feared by the villagers
: Cheetahs would not attack humans, and are often domesticated in India. Baboons are found only in Arabia and Africa, not India.

9
.
Crane Water, near Reading
: Crane Water is based on Virginia Water, a man-made lake designed by the Duke of Cumberland in the 1750s. Reading is an important town by the Thames in Berkshire, thirty-six miles south-west of London.

10
.
Doctors' Commons
: Properly known as the College of Advocates and Doctors of Law, Doctors' Commons ceased to function after the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), the Court of Probate Act(1857) and the High Court of Admiralty Act (1859). The buildings, which stood on Queen Victoria Street near Blackfriars, were demolished in 1867. Conan Doyle should have sent Holmes to Somerset House on the Strand to get his data.

11
.
Eley's No. 2
: Conan Doyle probably meant a Webley's No. 2,.320 bore, a small pistol ideal for dealing with characters like Grimesby Roylott. Webley pistols, however, were marketed with Eley .320 on the barrel to avoid confusion with the Smith & Wesson .32, as Major Hugh Pollard explained in the catalogue to the 1951 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition.

12
.
trap
: A one-horse, two-wheeled carriage on springs.

13
.
Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession
: Palmer is William Palmer who was executed in 1856 for poisoning John Parsons Cook, and Pritchard is Edward William Pritchard, a Glasgow doctor hanged in 1865 for poisoning his wife and mother-in-law.

14
.
It is a swamp adder!
: There is no Indian swamp adder; it is probably meant to be Russell's viper, an Indian snake.

15
.
He has died within ten seconds of being bitten
: There is no snake whose bite could kill so quickly. The speed of Dr Roylott's death is inconsistent with that of Julia Stoner who ‘slowly sank and died'.

16
.
the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another
: ‘He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it', Ecclesiastes 10: 8;‘Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein', Proverbs 26: 27.

17
.
threw it into the iron safe
: A snake wouldn't be able to survive locked in a safe.

18
.
Then I thought of the whistle. Of course, he must recall the snake
: Snakes, being deaf, would not be able to hear a whistle.

19
.
crawl down the rope
: Although a snake could crawl down a rope it could not crawl back up one into Roylott's room.

First published in the
Strand
in March 1892. Alternative title: ‘A Strange Adventure' (
Baltimore Weekly Sun
). The story is set in 1889.

1
.
Colonel Warburton's madness
: There is a pastiche of this by Rolfe Boswell in the
Baker Street Journal
vol.XII, no. 2, new series (June 1962), pp.
85
–98; one by Norman W. Ward in
The Best of the Pips
; and one by Adrian M. Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, ‘The Adventure of the Sealed Room', in
The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes
.

2
.
at no very great distance from Paddington Station
: i.e. still near Baker Street.

3
.
16A Victoria Street
: An address at which a number of civil engineers were based in 1891. Victoria Street has Victoria Station at its western end and Westminster Abbey at its eastern end.

4
.
I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in business a dreary experience
: Conan Doyle received no patients after setting himself up as an oculist at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, Marylebone, in 1891, and spent much of his time writing the Sherlock Holmes stories. Soon after, he gave up the practice.

5
.
Colonel Lysander Stark
: The name is based on the Edinburgh-born Leander Starr Jameson (1853–1917), a well-known figure in late nineteenth-century African politics who was premier of Cape Colony from 1904 to 1908. There is a character called Lysander Starr in ‘The Three Garridebs' from
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
.

6
.
Eyford, in Berkshire
: Fictitious, but similar in name to Twyford, five miles north-east of Reading.

7
.
fuller's earth
: A mixture of clays, consisting of hydrated silicates of magnesium, calcium and aluminium, which is used to absorb oils and grease.

8
.
chinchilla beard
: A grey beard said to resemble the hair of a chinchilla, a small South American rodent.

9
.
coming down upon me
: There are a number of possible sources for the idea of machinery descending on a trapped individual:
Tit-Bits
of 12 September 1891 contained a story, ‘In the Engine Room', in which an engine descends on an engineer while he is examining it from below. He is saved by the swift response of a doctor. Wilkie Collins wrote a story, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed', for Charles Dickens's
Household Words
magazine in February 1852, in which the top of a four-poster bed comes down and crushes the drugged sleeper.

10
.
a small panel
: A rather unbelievable
deus ex machina
.

11
.
Large masses of nickel and of tin were discovered
: But strangely no mercury, an essential catalyst.

First published in the
Strand
in April 1892. Alternative titles: ‘The Story of the Missing Bride' (
Philadelphia Inquirer
); ‘The Adventures of a Nobleman' (
St Louis Post-Dispatch
); ‘Adventures of a Noble Bachelor' (
Atlanta Constitution
). Conan Doyle later revealed that he thought this to be his least favourite Holmes story. The story could be set in or around 1886.

1
.
Lord St Simon
: The peer is the second son of the Duke of Balmoral and should properly be described as ‘Lord Robert St Simon', or even ‘Lord Robert', but not ‘Lord St Simon'.

2
.
my own marriage
: To Mary Morstan, as revealed in
The Sign of Four
, although William S. Baring-Gould supposes an earlier, unmentioned marriage (
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
, ed. Clarkson N. Potter (1960), vol. I). Dorothy L. Sayers once quipped: ‘There is a conspiracy afoot to provide Watson with as many wives as Henry VIII.'

3
.
jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs
: Watson's wound has moved. In
A Study in Scarlet
he mentions being ‘struck on the shoulder'. In
The Sign of Four
he nurses a ‘wounded leg'. Now the bullet is affecting a nameless limb.

4
.
tide-waiter
: A customs officer who waited for ships to come in with the tide.

5
.
Lord Backwater
: There is a Lord Backwater in ‘Silver Blaze', from
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
, whose horse, Desborough, runs against Silver Blaze in the Wessex Cup.

6
.
Grosvenor Mansions
: The block was in Victoria Street and has since been demolished.

7
.
He picked a red-covered volume
:
Who's Who
,
Burke's Peerage
or
Debrett
.

8
.
Azure, three caltrops in chief over a fess sable
: A caltrop was an iron ball equipped with four spikes so that whichever way it landed one spike would protrude. Caltrops were used in battle to obstruct the enemy.

9
.
They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on the distaff side
: Rolfe Boswell, in ‘A Connecticut Yankee in Support of Sir Arthur' (
Baker Street Journal
2.2 (April 1947), pp.
119
–27), explained that the only house that fulfils these requirements was that of the Dukes of Beaufort. Conan Doyle's mother, Mary, could trace her ancestry back to the ancient house of Percy-Louvain, three times linked by marriage to the Plantagenets.

10
.
Grosvenor Square
: A square in Mayfair which was created in 1725 and was one of the most fashionable addresses in London before the twentieth century. It is now best known as the address of the US Embassy.

11
.
Morning Post
: Leading society newspaper of the time.

12
.
Westbury House
: There is no Westbury House in Mayfair, but there is a Westbury Hotel on Conduit Street.

13
.
St George's, Hanover Square
: Built by John James in 1724 and named for George I, the church, which is on St George Street near Hanover Square, was known for its society weddings in the nineteenth century. Hanover Square, built in 1731, was named after the royal house instigated by George Louis, Elector of Hanover, when he became George I. It was originally intended to be named Oxford Square.

14
.
Lancaster Gate
: A luxurious street and square to the north of Hyde Park.

15
.
Petersfield
: A town in Hampshire sixteen miles north of Portsmouth, which grew around the wool trade.

16
.
The King of Scandinavia
: The peninsula containing Norway and Sweden was united under the rule of Oscar II from 1872 until 1905.

17
.
Lady St Simon
: The nobleman's wife should properly be called ‘Lady Robert', not ‘Lady St Simon'. D. Martin Makin noted how Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey took it as a sign of intelligence that Aggie Twitterton knew his wife should be called Lady Peter.

18
.
jumping a claim
: Miners' slang for taking something which another person has already claimed.

19
.
Hyde Park
: A large park to the immediate west of central London and popular with upper-class society. It was named after the manor of Hyde and first enclosed by Henry VIII, who hunted there in the sixteenth century. Charles I bestowed it to the public.

20
.
a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example
: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his
address at the funeral of the American poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) mentioned a phrase Thoreau had used in his
Journal
: ‘Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.'

21
.
the year after the Franco-Prussian War
: i.e. 1872.

22
.
pea-jacket
: See ‘The Red-Headed League', note
32
.

23
.
the Serpentine
: An artificial lake in Hyde Park used by bathers in the summer. Harriet Westbrook, first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in the Serpentine in 1816.

24
.
pâté de foie gras pie
: An unusual dish made of fatted goose liver and mentioned in Thackeray's
The Yellowplush Papers
: ‘He sent me out… for wot's called a Strasburg-pie – in French, a “patty defau graw”.'

25
.
Arabian Nights
: Reminiscent of the scene in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘The Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady', from
More New Arabian Nights
, in which a body of men enter Colonel Geraldine's house carrying hampers, bottle-baskets and boxes and then disappear ‘as though the whole affair had been a vision'.

26
.
McQuire's camp
: Conan Doyle favoured this spelling of McGuire and used it regularly when referring to the Molly Maguires, indirect subjects of
The Valley of Fear
.

27
.
Gordon Square
: A square in Bloomsbury named after Lady Georgiana Gordon, the sixth Duke of Bedford's second wife.

28
.
folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years
: The monarch being George III and the minister Lord North. The failure of George III and Lord North, his prime minister, to remove the duty from tea was one of the grievances that led to the American War of Independence, which began in 1775. The British officially recognized American independence in 1783.

29
.
the same world-wide country
: In the late nineteenth century the idea of a federation of the English-speaking world was briefly popular.

30
.
In the second one which I visited in Northumberland Avenue
: Northumberland Avenue, which connects Victoria Embankment and Trafalgar Square, was built in 1876 on the grounds of the demolished Northumberland House. It features a number of times in the Holmes canon. ‘The Illustrious Client' from
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
begins with Holmes and Watson using Neville's Turkish Baths on Northumberland Avenue. Mr Melas in ‘The Greek Interpreter' from
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
earns his money acting for Orientals who stay in the Avenue's hotels. There were three hotels on Northumberland Avenue in the 1890s: the Grand, Victoria and Metropole.