The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (84 page)

14
.
It is nothing less than the ancient crown of the Kings of England
: Nathan L. Bengis, in the essay ‘Whose Was It? An Examination into the Crowning Lapse of Sherlockian Scholarship' (
Baker Street Journal
3.2 (April 1952), pp.
69
–76), claimed this must have been the Crown of St Edward, also known as King Alfred's Crown, which was worn by James I and Charles I at their coronations. It was listed in an inventory of British regalia in 1649, the year that Charles was executed, as being of ‘gould wyer worke, sett with slight stones' and
therefore could easily have become misshapen; ‘gould' was not an alternative spelling of gold but a less valuable metal fashioned to resemble gold, which in the 220 years since Sir Ralph Musgrave had secreted the crown could easily have become tarnished.

First published in the
Strand
in June 1893. Original title: ‘The Adventure of the Reigate Squire'. Alternative title used in many editions: ‘The Reigate Squire'. Conan Doyle ranked the story twelfth on his personal list of the twelve best 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
.
Baron Maupertuis
: The name is based on that of the French mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), who attempted to measure the earth for Louis XV. His work on genetics inspired H. G. Wells to name
The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896) after him.

2
.
Hotel Dulong
: Fictitious, but there was a Hôtel Dubost at 19 Place Carnot.

3
.
Reigate, in Surrey
: A town twenty-two miles south of London in the Vale of Holmesdale (
sic
).

4
.
Pope's
Homer: The translation of Homer's
Iliad
issued in 1715 by the great Augustan poet Alexander Pope (1688–1764) was one of the first books Conan Doyle bought as a medical student at Edinburgh University; when the choice was between lunch or a second-hand book, the latter occasionally won.

5
.
to crack two cribs
: Slang meaning to burgle two houses.

6
.
the fine old Queen Anne house
: Queen Anne ruled Britain from 1707 to 1714, a time when Palladian architecture was popular.

7
.
the date of Malplaquet
: The battle of Malplaquet took place on 11 September 1709, when Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy defeated the French in the French village of the same name, during the War of the Spanish Succession.

8
.
You may not be aware that the deduction of a man's age from his writing
: Richard Lancelyn Green in
Baker Street Dozen
revealed that Alexander Cargill, an Edinburgh-based handwriting expert, sent Conan Doyle an article he had written, ‘Health in Handwriting', in which he claimed that the age of the writer could be estimated from his or her handwriting, and suggested that he used it as the basis for a story. Conan Doyle thanked him and admitted, ‘I am almost afraid to write to you, for fear you should discover imbecility in the dots of my i's, or incipient brain softening in my capitals.'

9
.
twenty-three other deductions
: Including such phenomena as whether the writers
were left-handed or right-handed; the type of pen, paper, quality of paper, whether the writing had been blotted and so on.

First published in the
Strand
in July 1893. The story could be set in or around 1889.

1
.
hansom
: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia', note
31
.

2
.
Aldershot
: See ‘The Copper Beeches', note
13
.

3
.
the Royal Mallows
: Probably based on the Royal Munster Fusiliers, 101st and 104th regiments, that had been with Clive in India and had many Irish members, though the Royal Munsters had no role in the Crimean War.

4
.
the Mutiny
: The Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, a revolt by 35, 000 Indian soldiers in the Bengal Army of the British East India Company. It developed into a war which raged until the British under Colin Campbell took Delhi.

5
.
the old 117th
: The highest number of a line regiment of the British Army at the time was that of the 109th, the Prince of Wales Leinster Regiment, as D. Hinrich noted in ‘The Royal Mallows (1854–88)',
Sherlock Holmes Journal
6.1 (Winter 1962), pp.
20
–22.

6
.
Guild of St George
: Probably modelled on the Catholic St Vincent de Paul Society, to which Conan Doyle's parents once belonged.

7
.
florin
: When Edward II issued gold currency in 1344 the basic unit was the florin. However, the gold in the coin was worth more than its value and so it was withdrawn and not issued again until the reign of Queen Victoria when it reappeared as a silver coin worth two shillings.

8
.
Baker Street boys
: Holmes's band of helpers, also known as the Baker Street Irregulars.

9
.
cantonments
: Army fortresses at the centre of the European quarter of an Indian city.

10
.
Bhurtee
: Possibly Allahabad, a holy Hindu city in India where the Ganges meets the Jumna.

11
.
General Neill
: General James George Smith Neill (1810–57), who relieved Allahabad in June 1857.

12
.
the small affair of Uriah and Bathsheba
: Uriah, a Hittite soldier in the Israelite army, was married to Bathsheba. David, King of Israel, coveted Bathsheba and sent Uriah to battle where he was killed. He then seduced the mourning Bathsheba who bore him a son.

13
.
first or second of Samuel
: The story appears in II Samuel 12.

First published in the
Strand
in August 1893. The story could be set in or around 1886.

1
.
Scylla and Charybdis
: In Homer's
Odyssey
Book XII Scylla is a monster with six heads, twelve feet and the howl of a dog, who lives in a cave by the sea and leaps out to snatch seamen from ships. Charybdis, who lives opposite Scylla, swallows the water and the ships sailing on it.

2
.
It had been a close, rainy day in August
': These lines, up to ‘had you not shown some incredulity the other day' (p.
418
), are not included in some versions of ‘The Resident Patient' but appear in ‘The Cardboard Box', a Holmes short story which Conan Doyle suppressed from inclusion in book form despite its publication in the
Strand
in January 1893. ‘The Cardboard Box' eventually appeared in the compilation
His Last Bow
in 1917.

3
.
New Forest
: William I's hunting forest in Hampshire, where Conan Doyle often holidayed and in which he partly set his historical novel
The White Company
(1891). In 1955 Conan Doyle's remains were reinterred at Minstead in the forest.

4
.
This is beyond anything which I could have imagined
: Holmes's success in breaking in on Watson's thoughts echoes Dupin's mind-reading achievement in Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841), at which point the narrator replies: ‘This is beyond my comprehension.' Holmes mentions having read Poe a few lines later. In
Through the Magic Door
Conan Doyle described Poe as ‘the supreme original short story writer'.

5
.
General Gordon
: Charles George Gordon (1833–85), best known as British Governor of the Sudan in the 1870s, who was later murdered in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

6
.
Henry Ward Beecher
: The charismatic New York preacher(1813–87) who was a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and instrumental in the campaign to keep Kansas free from slavery. His sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) who wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin
.

7
.
Civil War
: The American Civil War.

8
.
through Fleet Street and the Strand
: Fleet Street was until recently the centre of the British newspaper industry. With the Strand it forms the main east – west route from the City of London to the City of Westminster.

9
.
403 Brook Street
: Brook Street is named after the Tye Bourne Brook, which runs underneath the road. It is no longer associated with medical establishments and the numbers don't reach as high as 403.

10
.
I am a London University man
: Watson, we learn in the first Holmes story,
A Study in Scarlet
, took his ‘degree of Doctor of Medicine' at London University.

11
.
King's College Hospital
: The hospital stood in Portugal Street to the north of the Strand from 1839 until 1913 when it moved to Denmark Hill, south-east London.

12
.
the Cavendish Square quarter
: Cavendish Square is just north-west of Oxford Circus. The nearby concentration of private medical consultancies is now known as the Harley Street area, after the street which contains many of the most expensive establishments. Brook Street is not in this district, but lies on the Mayfair (south) side of Oxford Street.

13
.
Lady Day
: 25 March, named in honour of the Virgin Mary.

14
.
guinea
: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia', note
16
.

15
.
the West End
: Comprising the central London districts of what are now Soho, Mayfair, Marylebone, Fitzrovia, Bloomsbury, Westminster and Covent Garden.

16
.
brougham
: See ‘A Scandal in Bohemia', note
15
.

17
.
Oxford Street
: The main shopping street running east–west through central London, named after Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford.

18
.
Norah Creina
: Chapter 12 of
The Wrecker
by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne (1892) is called ‘The
Norah Creina
'. There is also an Irish song concerning the wreck of the
Nora Crionna
.

First published in the
Strand
in September 1893. The story could be set in or around 1888.

1
.
obliquity of the ecliptic
: i.e. the angle between the plane of the earth's orbit and the equator, approximately 23° 27', but gradually diminishing. Conan Doyle heard Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson give a lecture on the subject in Portsmouth in February 1884.

2
.
atavism
: Resemblance to a grandparent or remote ancestors rather than one's father or mother, a theme which Conan Doyle revisited in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
with the notion that certain Baskervillian characteristics were handed down through the generations.

3
.
Vernet, the French artist
: There was a family of Vernets, French painters, which included Antoine Charles Horace (called Carle) Vernet (1758–1836), who painted the Marengo battle scene for Napoleon; and his son, émile Jean Horace Vernet (1789–1863), who specialized in sentimental and patriotic
pictures and did battle scenes for Napoleon III. Either could be the model for a great-uncle of Holmes.

4
.
Mycroft
: Conan Doyle probably took the name from that of two cricketing brothers, Thomas and William Mycroft, who played for Derbyshire at the end of the nineteenth century.

5
.
Diogenes Club
: Named after Diogenes of Sinope (412–322
BC
), a leading philosopher of the Cynics group who considered human pleasure and affection to be a source of weakness. Conan Doyle based the Diogenes on the Athenaeum in Pall Mall (founded in 1824 by John Croker, who first coined the term ‘Conservative'), which was then renowned for its hostility to strangers, who would be ushered into a small room by the entrance where they would have to conduct their conversations in whispers.

6
.
Regent Circus
: Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus were both originally known as Regent Circus when built in 1819.

7
.
Pall Mall
: This once grand road which links St James's Palace with Trafalgar Square contains a number of gentlemen's clubs which grew out of seventeenth-century coffee houses. Pall Mall takes its unusual name from the croquet-like game pell-mell, which the aristocracy used to play in nearby St James's Park, and has been home to Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott.

8
.
Whitehall
: A metonym for the buildings and offices of government, many of which are situated on or near the road named Whitehall which links Trafalgar Square and Parliament Street. Whitehall takes its name from Henry VIII's palace, which stood there.

9
.
Save in the Strangers' Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, permitted
: J. M. Barrie, passing through the Athenaeum one day, asked an elderly member whether it was worth dining in the restaurant. The latter immediately burst into tears; it was the first time anyone in the club had spoken to him since he had become a member.

10
.
We had reached Pall Mall as we talked, and were walking down it from the St James's end
: Given that Holmes and Watson have walked from Baker Street to ‘Regent Circus' (whether that be Piccadilly Circus or Oxford Circus, both are east of Pall Mall), it would be impossible for them now to be walking down Pall Mall from the St James's (i.e. the western) end.

11
.
the Carlton
: The Carlton Club, the leading Conservative Party club, then based at 94 Pall Mall and now at 69 St James's Street, was founded in 1832 as the Conservatives' base for opposing the Reform Bill in the wake of their general election defeat.