The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (85 page)

12
.
‘An old soldier, I perceive,' said Sherlock… this is a little too much'
: The Holmeses' banter is evidently based on the well-known conversation between Conan
Doyle's Edinburgh University teacher Joseph Bell (to whom
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
was dedicated) and a patient who came to see him one day:

[Bell:] ‘Well my man you've served in the army.'

[Patient:] ‘Aye, sir.'

‘Not long discharged?'

‘No, sir.'

‘A Highland regiment?'

‘Aye, Sir.'

‘A non-com. officer?'

‘Aye, Sir.'

‘Stationed at Barbados?'

‘Aye, Sir.'

13
.
Mr Melas
: Thelma Beam and Emmanuel Digalakis pointed out in the
Canadian Holmes
13.3 that Conan Doyle probably named Melas after one Basilios Melas, a well-known linguist who moved in fashionable London circles in the 1830s.

14
.
Orientals who may visit the Northumberland Avenue hotels
: See ‘The Noble Bachelor', note
30
.

15
.
Kensington
: See ‘The Red-Headed League', note
31
.

16
.
Charing Cross
: See ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip', note
20
.

17
.
and up the Shaftesbury Avenue
: Shaftesbury Avenue connects Piccadilly Circus with the southern part of Bloomsbury and is named after Lord Shaftesbury (1801–85), the philanthropist who worked to combat poverty in the area.

18
.
five sovereigns
: Five pounds. See also ‘A Scandal in Bohemia', note
37
.

19
.
St Vitus's Dance
: See ‘The Stockbroker's Clerk', note
3
.

20
.
Wandsworth Common
: A narrow expanse of open land, considerably reduced in size since the story was written, which lies half a mile south of the Thames and four miles south of central London.

21
.
Clapham Junction
: A railway junction in south-west London which claims to be the busiest in the world.

22
.
Victoria
: The station opened in 1862 as the terminus for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

23
.
J-pen
: A pen with a short broad nib.

24
.
Beckenham
: Suburb of south-east London, historically in Kent.

25
.
Lower Brixton
: There is no
Lower
Brixton.

26
.
Scotland Yard
: The headquarters of the Metropolitan Police was then based on Derby Gate, just west of Westminster Bridge.

27
.
life-preserver
: A short bludgeon made of cane or whalebone with a lead block at one end.

First published in the
Strand
in October–November 1893. The story could be set in or around 1887.

1
.
my marriage
: See ‘The Noble Bachelor', note
2
.

2
.
The Adventure of the Second Stain
: Unlikely to be the same story first published under that name in the
Strand
in 1904 and collected in book form in 1905 in
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
, since the facts of that case could never have been explained to the French police, as Watson subsequently claims.

3
.
The Adventure of the Tired Captain
: There is a Holmes pastiche based on this reference in the
Sherlock Holmes Journal
vol. IV, no. 1 (Winter 1958) and vol. IV, no. 2 (Spring 1959).

4
.
his mother's brother was Lord Holdhurst
: The latter was probably based on Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury (1830–1903), Conservative prime minister 1885–6, 1886–92 and 1895–1902;and Phelps on Salisbury's nephew Arthur James Balfour(1848–1930), who succeeded his uncle as Conservative prime minister in 1902 (thereby giving rise to the phrase ‘Bob's your uncle').

5
.
Briarbrae
: Possibly Inchcape House, now demolished.

6
.
Woking
: A large Surrey town, twenty miles south-west of London, which grew following the opening of the railways.

7
.
Waterloo
: See ‘The Five Orange Pips', note
22
.

8
.
secret treaty between England and Italy
: There was a secret treaty in 1887, the year in which some Holmesologists believe the story is set, following which the Italians were allowed a free hand to seize Libya in exchange for Italy's allowing Britain a free hand in the Sudan.

9
.
the Triple Alliance
: The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy was established in 1882 in order that Germany and Austria-Hungary would come to the aid of Italy if it was attacked by France.

10
.
Charles Street
: Now King Charles Street, which runs parallel to Downing Street off Whitehall.

11
.
Ivy Lane
: Fictitious.

12
.
Huguenot extraction
: The Huguenots were French Protestants who were persecuted in the sixteenth century and to some extent in the seventeenth. In 1685 the Edict of Nantes, which had secured their status, was revoked and they were expelled from France.

13
.
Coldstream Guards
: The regiment of General Monk which in 1660 crossed the River Tweed at Coldstream on the Scotland–England border on their way to London to help restore the monarchy of Charles II.

14
.
What a lovely thing a rose is!
: Suggestive of Sergeant Cuff 's love of roses in Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone
(1868).

15
.
The Board schools
: Schools run by the local boards of education and financed through levying a rate on local householders, as constituted following the 1870 Education Act.

16
.
I've been making a few independent inquiries
: Holmes has been with Watson all the time since hearing of Phelps's predicament and has had no opportunity within the confines of the story to make any ‘independent inquiries'.

17
.
Bertillon system of measurements
: Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) devised a system for identifying criminals by measuring parts of the body and the bones. It was dropped early in the twentieth century when the use of fingerprints became more widespread.

18
.
three of the reigning houses of Europe
: The fictitious House of Ormstein, rulers of Bohemia, as related in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia', from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
;the House of Orange, rulers of Holland, alluded to in the same story; and the kings of Scandinavia as mentioned in ‘The Noble Bachelor', also from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
.

19
.
Ripley
: A Surrey village four miles south-east of Woking.

20
.
had my tea at an inn
: Probably the Talbot, which, according to Michael Harrison in
In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes
(1958), was at that time ‘dozing through the recession between the passing of the stagecoach and the coming of the cycle and motorcycle'.

First published in the
Strand
in December 1893. Conan Doyle ranked ‘The Final Problem' fourth 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 1891.

1
.
Journal de Genève
: Swiss paper published in French in Geneva.

2
.
Reuter's
: Telegraphic news agency established by P. J. von Reuter in the 1850s and still the best-known of its kind in the world.

3
.
three cases
: According to William S. Baring-Gould these are ‘Wisteria Lodge' (included in
His Last Bow
), ‘Silver Blaze' (from
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
) and ‘The Beryl Coronet' (from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
).

4
.
air-guns
: First developed by Güter of Nuremberg in 1530.

5
.
Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!
: One of a number of Holmes allusions incorporated into the T. S. Eliot poem ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat',
from the 1939 collection
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
. Macavity himself is described as very tall and thin (like Holmes), as a card cheat (like Colonel Sebastian Moran in ‘The Empty House' from
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
) and as the Napoleon of crime (the best-known description of Moriarty, which occurs later in this story). Other similarities include a rifled jewel-case (the theft from the Countess of Morcar in ‘The Blue Carbuncle' from
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
), a treaty missing from the Foreign Office (the plot of ‘The Naval Treaty', see above) and some lost Admiralty plans (as in ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans' from
His Last Bow
).

6
.
Royal Family of Scandinavia
: See ‘The Noble Bachelor', note
16
.

7
.
Binomial Theorem
: The theorem, first outlined by Isaac Newton in a letter dated 13 June 1676 to H. Oldenburg, states that for numbers a, b and n

Though daunting, the theorem is crucial to understanding permutations and is used in a watered-down form by bridge players for calculating the likelihood of how the opponents' cards might fall, by those who make multiple bets such as ‘yankees' on horse-races, and by those who want to delve into the intricacies of the football pools.

8
.
Napoleon of crime
: Eliot gave Macavity this appellation in
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
(see note
5
above).

9
.
from Bentinck Street on to the Welbeck Street crossing
: Bentinck Street and Welbeck Street are two small streets in Marylebone to the east of Baker Street.

10
.
Lowther Arcade
: An arcade of small shops including many selling toys which stood on the Strand opposite Charing Cross Station. It was demolished in 1904 and replaced by a bank.

11
.
Mortimer Street
: Watson at various points in the canon has practices in Paddington and Kensington, a good distance from Mortimer Steet, Fitzrovia, or any other turning with ‘Mortimer' in its name, so its inclusion in the text is rather strange.

12
.
They had evidently taken the precaution of watching you
: Why has Holmes arranged to flee with Watson knowing that the first thing the Moriarty gang would do would be to track Holmes's ever naïve associate? Some commentators have suggested that Holmes wanted to be followed so that he could lure Moriarty into a trap away from England and English law. Watson is, of course, necessary as the narrator.

13
.
They have secured the whole gang with the exception of him
: And, it would seem, without Colonel Sebastian Moran, stalker of Holmes in the comeback story,
‘The Empty House', and Moriarty's confederate at the Reichenbach Falls who throws rocks at Holmes.

14
.
Meiringen
: A village in the Hasli Valley also known as the ‘front garden of the Bernese Oberland', which was almost destroyed by fire in 1891. The River Aare, which flows through Meiringen, forms the Reichenbach Falls.

15
.
the Grosvenor Hotel in London
: Hotel adjacent to Victoria Station which opened in 1861 (now the Grosvenor Thistle).

16
.
Rosenlaui
: A village to the south of Meiringen.

17
.
the falls of Reichenbach… It is, indeed, a fearful place
: In August 1893 Conan Doyle and his wife, Louisa, visited Switzerland and saw the Reichenbach Falls, ‘a terrible place, and one that I thought would make a worthy tomb for Sherlock, even if I buried my bank account along with him'. According to Richard Llancelyn Green in
The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes
(1983) the idea of a dramatic climax to Holmes's life came about while Conan Doyle and the Revd Silas K. Hocking were exploring the Swiss mountainsides. When Conan Doyle admitted that he hadn't yet thought out a way to get rid of Holmes, Hocking exclaimed: ‘Why not bring him out here… and drop him down a crevasse? That would finish him off effectually and save all the trouble and expense of a funeral.'

18
.
Davos Platz
: District of Davos, a Swiss health resort where Conan Doyle skied at a time when the practice was all but unknown in England. He wrote up his experiences in the
Strand
, to the amazement of readers.