The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.1
Featuring cyclovergency, humblebrags and parlour games
Have you ever wanted to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles, but were afraid you’d be lost? Fret not. For I’m here to guide you through the story, a quarter-chapter at a time, courtesy of my confabulannotations.
Chapter 1 - Mr. Sherlock Holmes
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table1. I stood upon the hearth-rug2 and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed3, of the sort which is known as a “Penang lawyer.” Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.,” was engraved upon it, with the date “1884.” It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring4.
“Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”5
Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.
“How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.”6
“I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot7 in front of me,” said he. “But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor’s stick8? Since we have been so unfortunate as to miss him and have no notion of his errand, this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it.”
“I think,” said I, following as far as I could the methods9 of my companion, “that Dr. Mortimer is a successful, elderly medical man, well-esteemed since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation.”
“Good!” said Holmes. “Excellent!10”
Conan Doyle took great pride in starting his stories with the most difficult to parse sentences he could muster. “Let us witness the reader’s true temper under the smith's hammer,” he would proclaim to his long suffering editors. “And the Devil take the laggards!”
A rug crocheted together from the fur of hundreds of tiny hearths, a type of rodent that infested the streets of London in the late nineteenth century (as well as 2009-2013).
A sly reflection of Watson himself, of course, who, especially in early stories, was regularly described by Conan Doyle as ‘bulbous-headed’ or a ‘thick piece of wood’ or ‘a disgusting little sycophantic dimwitted shit’.
It would have been understood by readers at the time that these sticks were also readily used by old-fashioned ‘family practitioners’ to thrash particularly slovenly chimney sweeps.
Holmes sets a trap for the dimwitted Watson here. Readers would savour these moments, many of them writing lengthy letters to Conan Doyle, expressing in great detail how much they despised Watson, and, indeed, all doctors of the era. This was sufficiently common that mobs of the sickly would roam London streets, attacking surgeons and general practitioner alike, infuriated by the lack of penicillin and other modern medicines. “Where’s me bleedin’ chemotherapy!” they’d angrily roar, as they beat their doctors to a grisly pulp, as well as anybody foolish enough to offer medical aid to the pummelled physicians. They would then steal their leeches and disappear into the fog.
There is a not insignificant faction of Sherlock Holmes scholars who put great credence in this passage. The ‘cyclovergent Holmesists’, as they are known, assert that Holmes literally has a second set of eyes in the back of his skull, usually hidden by his deerstalker cap. When pressed on the matter and the myriad of inconsistencies that arise from holding this position, the cyclovergents will usually change the subject or indulge in whataboutism, for they are, at heart, unrepentant trolls.
This is often claimed as one of the earliest examples of a ‘humblebrag’ in Western literature. Others counter that there is no humility to be found. ‘Well-polished’? ‘Silver-plated’? ‘Coffee in a pot’? La-de-da!
‘What Do You Make Of Our Visitor’s Stick?’ was also a popular parlour game of the era, most often played by ladies of the upper class, who would use it as a ready excuse to indulge in heinous racism, and Conan Doyle may be riffing on that here.
At this point in Sherlock Holmes continuity, Watson does not yet know that a vast portion of his companion’s so-called ‘methods’ are founded upon the prodigious ingestion of cocaine.
This, as we shall see next time, is a cruel lie. Again, the readers of the time revelled in this. An entire room of the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Marylebone is devoted to the chortling correspondence that Conan Doyle received from fans telling him how much they despised the ‘ill-nurtured’ and ‘motley-minded’ Watson. “Finish him, Holmes!” the letters would often conclude. “Finish the beef-witted knave!!”
Haha, loving the confabulannotations!