The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.4
Featuring riddles, fog banning and the lies of George R R Martin
Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Watson’s walking stick deductions were ridiculed.
And now, the story continues…
“I can only think of the obvious conclusion that the man has practised in town before going to the country.”
“I think that we might venture a little farther than this. Look at it in this light1. On what occasion would it be most probable that such a presentation would be made? When would his friends unite to give him a pledge of their good will2? Obviously at the moment when Dr. Mortimer withdrew from the service of the hospital in order to start a practice for himself. We know there has been a presentation. We believe there has been a change from a town hospital to a country practice. Is it, then, stretching our inference3 too far to say that the presentation was on the occasion of the change?”
“It certainly seems probable.”
“Now, you will observe that he could not have been on the staff of the hospital, since only a man4 well-established in a London practice could hold such a position, and such a one would not drift into the country. What was he, then? If he was in the hospital and yet not on the staff he could only have been a house-surgeon5 or a house-physician—little more than a senior student. And he left five years ago—the date is on the stick6. So your grave, middle-aged family practitioner vanishes into thin air7, my dear Watson, and there emerges a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded8, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff9.”
I laughed incredulously as Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his settee and blew little wavering rings of smoke10 up to the ceiling.
Holmes was established as a keen follower of Thomas Edison and, in early stories, claimed to have a collection of ‘several hundred’ lighting-bulbs (as they were known at the time). We can assume this was one of them.
The song ‘Happy Birthday To You’ had recently been written, but was not yet sufficiently widespread to usurp its beloved predecessor ‘Happy Union of Friends To Give You Their Pledge of Good Will’.
Noblemen of the era believed that it was vitally important to stretch one’s inferences before indulging in any mental exercise or risk straining a conjecture.
Holmes’ chauvinistic insistence that the doctor must be a man makes him a prime candidate for the classic ‘can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son’ lady surgeon riddle. On the positive side, Holmes’ ability to cross a river with a fox, a chicken and a bag of grain has never been questioned.
House-surgeons quite literally operated on houses. Need an emergency wallectomy? A house surgeon was your man. (Or woman!)
The phrase ‘the date is on the stick’ was improbably reversed in initial printings of the book, which dessertologists now believe inspired the invention of the sticky date pudding.
The air in London at the time was notoriously thin, bad news for asthmatics of the era who would often rail against the emaciated atmosphere. In 1904, more than a hundred ‘fat air’ enthusiasts marched on Parliament to demand the reinstatement of the classic London fog, which had been abolished in 1888 in order to annoy Jack the Ripper.
This alleged absent-mindedness is pure supposition on Holmes’ part, but a reasonable extrapolation given the disdain with which he holds the doctor most commonly found in his company.
For readers who aren’t ‘dog people’, imagine a size somewhere between a humble firkin cask and the widest of sugar puncheons.
To be clear, Holmes uses his pipe to generate these smoke rings. He should not be assumed to be a dragon, despite what George R R Martin insists.