Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Return of Sherlock Holmes II
In 1903, a nervous Conan Doyle wrote to
his mother: ‘Will they take to Holmes?’
A stupendous financial offer from the
American magazine Collier’s Weekly had
finally forced the reluctant creator of the
greatest fictional detective ever known to
pick up his pen once more and re-enter the
world of 221B Baker Street.
But it had been ten years since Doyle
had written the short stories in which
Holmes had first appeared and he was
apprehensive: ‘I am not conscious of any
failing powers, and my work is not less
conscientious than of old…The writing is
easy. It is the plots which butcher me…’ he
wrote to his mother. He need not have
feared. After a gap of ten years, only
tantalisingly bridged by The Hound of the
Baskervilles, the public was feverish in its
anticipation of the ‘return’ of their hero.
When the series began in The Strand in
1903, one lady at the time wrote: ‘The
scenes at the railway bookstalls were worse
than anything I ever saw at a bargain
sale…’ The queues outside the magazine’s
offices stretched the length of Southampton Street. In America, handbills announced
ecstatically: ‘Sherlock Holmes Returns!!’ The
Strandshowed typical English reserve: ‘The
news of his death was received with regret
as at the loss of a personal friend.
Fortunately the news…turns out to be
erroneous.’
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
It seems that Conan Doyle came upon the idea for The Dancing Men whilst visiting Norfolk on a golfing holiday in 1903. Doyle had just begun writing the stories for The Return of Sherlock Holmes and was consulting his brother-in-law, a celebrated author in his own right, E.W. Hornung, the creator of ‘Raffles’. (See also notes for The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.) Hornung lived near Cromer, and Doyle stayed at the Hill House Hotel in Happisburgh. The hotel today has been reduced to the level of a pub, but has not ignored the Holmes connection—press cuttings and a photograph of the Sherlock Holmes Society valiantly recreating the antics of the ‘dancing men’ adorn its walls. The landlord at the hotel in Doyle’s day was called Cubitt, which name he borrowed for one of the central characters, the Norfolk squire, Hilton Cubitt. Also, in an autograph book belonging to the landlord’s seven-year-old son, Doyle apparently found the hieroglyph of the dancing men.
So Doyle did not invent this cipher? It seems only too probable that he copied it from Cubitt Junior, who may have been familiar with the cipher, as it appeared in The Boys Own Paper in 1881. It is interesting, too, to note that Doyle had contributed a story to this magazine in 1887.
The cipher used, however, is similar to that employed by Edgar Alan Poe in The Gold Bug. For the mathematical, it has been noted that, with the various possible positions for the arms and legs of the ‘dancing men’, 784 different symbols can be produced; and if they are inverted (as some of them are in the examples given in the text) 1,568 symbols are a possibility. It would have been an intriguing exercise for a boy (or celebrated author) to investigate on a wet afternoon in Norfolk.
It should be noted that Holmes appears to be grossly negligent in not seeing the mortal danger his client was in. He delays for two days after having deciphered the code, before journeying to Norfolk! Sometimes it appears that Holmes’s desire to assemble all the facts of a case, to ‘tidy it up’, before divulging his theory conflicts with the necessity at times to be practical and avoid a tragedy. Is Doyle at pains to show us perhaps that, in returning his creation to life, he is not as flawless in his judgements as his fans would like to believe?
Norfolk proved to be an artistically stimulating county for Conan Doyle, for it was during a golfing holiday in Cromer, that his companion Robinson first came up with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Inserted into the text of this story are the pictorial representations of the ‘dancing men’, as communicated to Mr Hilton Cubitt’s wife. The line from the text which precedes each drawing is given below:
‘The markings were done in pencil…’
Fig. 1
‘He unfolded a paper and laid it upon the table. [Here is a copy of the hieroglyphics:]’
Fig. 2
‘…two mornings later a fresh inscription had appeared. I have a copy of it here:’
of it here:’
Fig. 3
‘Again he produced a paper. [The new dance was in this form]’
Fig. 4
‘…a long inscription had appeared that morning upon the pedestal of the sun-dial. He enclosed a copy of it:’
Fig. 5
Individual letters:
‘This symbol… stood for E’
Fig. 6
‘…these symbols… stand respectively for N, V, and R.’
Fig. 7
‘“See if you can read it Watson,” said he, with a smile. It contained no word, but a little line of dancing men:’
Fig. 8
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
Although these stories were written in
1903, on the threshold of a new century,
Conan Doyle chose deliberately to write of
past crimes solved by the investigative duo.
Watson in the opening of this story defines
the period more precisely as ‘the years 1894
to 1901 inclusive’. Thus Conan Doyle places
his characters forever in aspic; the world of
the nineteenth century: gaslight, Hansom
cabs, steam trains, London fogs and the
policeman on the beat, whose lot,
according to Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘was not a
happy one’. Electric lights, motor cars,
aeroplanes and an efficient police force
belonged to the twentieth century, and the fictional detectives who would follow in
their hundreds in the wake of Sherlock
Holmes.
The bicycle was a boon to young women
in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Apart from the obvious advantages for
courtship (remember Daisy, ‘on a bicycle
made for two’,—a song published
coincidentally in 1895, the year of this case),
it gave women the opportunity to be
independent and go where they liked, when
they chose. They earned themselves the title
of ‘flying females’. To emphasise this symbol
of feminism, women were encouraged to
wear ‘rational dress’: a decidedly masculine
style of jacket with—horror of horrors!—trousers or knickerbockers for ease in
pedalling. It is not recorded whether Miss
Violet Smith dressed in this conspicuous
way when cycling; probably not, though as
the daughter of an entertainer (her father
was the conductor at the old Imperial
Theatre), she may have been ‘bohemian’
enough to dress the part and be ‘modern’.
1895 was also the year of the first safety
bicycle with Dr Dunlop’s newfangled
pneumatic tyres; though ‘Raleigh’ were the
leading manufacturers of bicycles at this
date.
Violet se
ems to be a name that Conan
Doyle associates with girls who are self-reliant and enterprising; Miss Smith is
remarkably similar to the governess Miss
Violet Hunter in The Copper Beeches. It
would not be at all surprising to learn that
she, too, possessed a bicycle.
The Adventure of the Priory School
If Sherlock Holmes’ financial future was not
secure by 1901, the year of this case, it
certainly was by the conclusion of the
adventure. The Duke of Holdernesse had
offered as a reward, for information about
his missing son, what was then a colossal
sum—£6,000. Such a figure would give
considerable security to the freelance
detective and his full-time assistant (for
Watson had given up his practice at the
beginning of this collection of cases). Some
Sherlockians are disappointed that their
hero does not live up to his own dictates:
‘As to reward, my profession is its reward’,
and therefore refuse to accept anything so
sordid as payment for solving the case. But
Holmes was a practical man, and with a
healthy disdain in his voice for the privileged
in Victorian society, he accepts the Duke’s
cheque without a qualm, much to the
Duke’s disgust.
It may be that Holmes is being ironic
when he states: ‘I am a poor man’, whilst pocketing the cheque; yet equally he may
have been concerned that in 1901, the year
of this case, income tax had risen to one
shilling and tuppence in the pound (approx.
six new pence today.)
We should recall that only when he was
approached by clients who were struggling
financially did he waive his fee. Miss
Morstan, the future wife of Dr Watson, in
the Sign of Four is one such; the
unfortunate Hatherley in The Engineer’s
Thumb, another.
Once again in this story, Conan Doyle
pays tribute to the practicalities of that
wondrous machine, the bicycle (see Solitary
Cyclist above). Conan Doyle was a very
athletic man and would have enjoyed riding
a bicycle, and its variations; for there is a
photograph of him and his first wife, Louise,
outside their South Norwood home, looking
most uncomfortable on a large and
unwieldy two-seater tricycle. However, his
enthusiasm for cycling got the better of him
in this story. When Holmes determines the
direction a rider has gone by the tracks left
by his tyres, many readers questioned the
possibility of this. ‘I had so many
remonstrances upon this point,’ he wrote,
‘varying from pity to anger, that I took out
my bicycle and tried.’ He had to admit that
his readers were right.
Holmes is well out of his familiar territory
in this case—the North of England—though
more correctly the Midlands, as the setting
is the Peak District of Derbyshire. It is clear
that ‘Mackleton’ is really Matlock, some ten
miles from Chesterfield.
Watson may be showing once again a
tendency towards discretion when writing
about the aristocracy’s affairs, as the Duke
of Holderness may well be a pseudonym for
the 8th Duke of Devonshire, whose
ancestral estates were, like the fictional
Duke’s, in the Peak District, most notably
Chatsworth.
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
In this case we get a glimpse of the
downside of upper class life; the potential
vulnerability for blackmail. Holmes must
have had a reputation amongst the
aristocracy for specialising in this type of
case, and indeed he had an excellent track
record. He had assisted the King of Bohemia
in retrieving compromising photographs. He
had had successful dealings, too, with the
royal families of Scandinavia and Holland by
1882, the date of this case, which though
unrecorded by Watson, may well have
involved blackmail. Despite exhibiting a
healthy disdain for those who are wealthy and privileged by birth, Holmes’ innate
sense of fair play comes to the fore when
confronted with a parasite like Milverton,
whom he unequivocally calls, ‘as cunning as
the Evil One’.
Watson records that ‘his skin went cold’,
when Holmes revealed he intended to
burgle Milverton’s house, and the gravity of
Holmes and Watson’s ‘breaking and
entering’ should not be underestimated. At
this time housebreaking carried a maximum
sentence of fourteen years. By the end of
their eventful evening they had committed
malicious damage (the burning of the
letters from Milverton’s safe) and assault
(Watson kicking himself free of the undergardener).
Not to mention the emotional
damage Holmes had previously perpetrated
on Milverton’s housemaid by proposing to
her whilst in disguise. No risk seems too
great, it would seem, to preserve the
reputations of the aristocracy!
Holmes and Watson are in evening dress
when they attempt the burglary, which
cannot fail to remind the connoisseur of
detective fiction of one of the other popular
fictional creations of the Victorian era,
A.J. Raffles—‘the Gentleman Thief’—Raffles
is a mixture of gentleman and criminal,
possessing a cool nerve which reminds
us of Holmes. He was created in 1899 by E.W. Hornung who was, coincidentally,
Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law.
Why is Watson so reticent to reveal the
facts of this case? It is with ‘diffidence I
allude to them’ he writes in the opening
sentence; he approaches his task with
‘discretion and reticence’ and despite the
‘principal person’ being beyond ‘the reach
of human law’, aspects of the case still
require ‘suppression’. So, who is the
‘principal person’ and why all the secrecy?
There were any number of high society
scandals during the 1880s and 90s that
might have inspired this story, at least one
involving that ‘principal person’ Edward, the
Prince of Wales.
It is well known that Edward had an eye
for the ladies and in the late 1880s began a
secret liaison with Daisy, the Countess of
Warwick. She was a society beauty—‘the
photographers are pursuing her’ wrote the
papers, when she was only 17. She married
Lord Brooke in 1880, but had a succession of
aristocratic lovers before her association with
the Prince of Wales. Lord Charles Beresford
was one such, to whom she penned a
passionate and jealous letter when she
discovered Beresford’s wife was pregnant.
The letter was intercepted by Lady Charles
and sent to her solicitor. Daisy appealed to
the Prince of Wales for his assistance in recovering the letter before it ignited a
scandal. The solicitor refused to give up the
letter, the Prince of Wales ostracised Lady
Charles from Society, and her husband,
Beresford, threatened to expose the whole
affair to the Press. Society closed ranks and
with the aid of his mother, Queen Victoria,
and the Prime Minister, Edward was saved
from the facts becoming public property,
though rumours rumbled on in the papers
for some time after it was settled.
The facts and characters of the case: A
Countess involved in a compromising
scandal; A ‘principal’ person implicated; a
damaging letter; references to a
photographed beauty—is it too fanciful to think that Conan Doyle was turning fact
into fiction? The real events alluded to took
place in 1891. By 1903, when Watson (or
Conan Doyle) compiled his collection of
cases included in The Return, one of the
main actors in those real-life events, the
Prince of Wales, had been crowned King
Edward VII, and so was technically above
the law and ‘beyond its reach’. It is
characteristic that Dr Watson, loyal and
true, might have had a desire to subdue and
obscure in fiction the facts of a case that if
known would rock the new monarch’s
throne.
Notes by David Timson
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS music catalogue
MENDELSSOHN String Quartets Volume 1
8.550861
Aurora String Quartet
MENDELSSOHN String Quartets Volume 2
8.550862
Aurora String Quartet
Music programmed by Sarah Butcher
