Lives Beyond Baker Street

Christopher Redmond

Description

If you have ever read "A Scandal in Bohemia" and wondered what Watson's allusion to "Mr. John Hare" means... if you aren't sure who was in charge in southeast Asia when Mycroft Holmes mentions "the present state of Siam"... if you're wondering about Watson's portrait of General Gordon or Holmes's Vernet relatives or what Scottish expert on poisons Scotland Yard consulted when the Baker Street duo weren't available... this is your book. It provides one-paragraph biographies of 800 real-life Victorians and Edwardians who strolled down Oxford Street near Holmes and Watson or figured in the newspapers they read. That mention of Blondin on the roof at Pondicherry Lodge? Arthur Conan Doyle's literary friends? The King of Scandinavia? The British commander at Maiwand? Enquire within.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 19 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780929071
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
LIVES BEYOND BAKER STREET
A Biographical Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes’s Contemporaries
Christopher Redmond



Publisher Information
First edition published in 2016 by
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor
Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2016 Christopher Redmond
The right of Christopher Redmond to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
Although every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this book, as of the date of publication, nothing herein should be construed as giving advice. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MX Publishing or Andrews UK Limited.
Cover design by www.staunch.com



Introduction
Herein are a baron with colossal schemes, the aristocrat who owned the land beneath the houses of Baker Street, the man who designed Arthur Conan Doyle’s house, the woman who invented the brake linings for Von Herling’s powerful car, and the art editor who hired Sidney Paget to draw Sherlock Holmes. Herein, in short, are the people of the Victorian and Edwardian era, the contemporaries of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
As the stories of Holmes and Watson amble past their happy reader, one who is familiar enough with the tales yet always finding new pleasures in them, there is a moment every so often when someone mentions a person known not just to the imagination but to the encyclopaedia. “The prospect of an interview with Lord Roberts would not have excited greater wonder and pleasure in a raw subaltern than was now reflected upon the face of Mr. Kent,” says Holmes in “The Blanched Soldier”. “His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have equalled,” says Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia”. Lord Roberts was a real person, commander-in-chief of the army; Mr. John Hare was a hugely popular character actor. But not every reader knows that, at least without the benefit of an annotated text.
This work of reference was born out of the realization that there are many such people in the Sherlockian canon. Its scope grew with the realization that there are historical persons not specifically named in the canon, but clearly reflected in it. Charles Augustus Milverton, in the story that bears his name, is almost certainly a portrait (in part) of con man and petty blackmailer Charles Augustus Howell. Thaddeus Sholto in The Sign of the Four is generally acknowledged to be based on Oscar Wilde. And then there is the mysterious Illustrious Client.
Other historical persons give their names, though not their characters, to figures in the canon: the Reverend Fitzroy Macpherson, for example. Many people of this kind were first identified in the research done by my father, Donald A. Redmond, into canonical sources, published as Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources , and I have not scrupled in making use of his findings.
At some early stage, the project expanded well beyond these one-to-one correspondences between historical persons and names or specifics to be found in the published stories. One of the great delights of reading Sherlock Holmes, after all, is the window his adventures provide into the society of late Victorian (and early Edwardian) Britain, with its clichéd aristocrats and governesses and street arabs illuminated by gas-lamps in the yellow fog. In the stories themselves, the emphasis is on crime (though there is never a mention of Jack the Ripper) or at least, in Holmes’s phrase, “whimsical little incidents”.
But the era of Sherlock Holmes also experienced social change (such as the “board-schools” he mentions in one story, created after elementary education was made compulsory in 1870), technological innovation (Violet Smith’s young gentleman is an electrical engineer), art (of which Holmes had “the crudest ideas”, in Watson’s estimation), and of course public affairs. When Watson reads the newspaper in “The Bruce-Partington Plans”, he encounters “news of a revolution, of a possible war, and of an impending change of government”. When a telegram comes to Baker Street or there is a ring at the street-door, neither Holmes nor Watson can be sure which of these worlds they may be about to enter; their clients are politicians, hydraulic engineers, makers of artists’ materials, conservative but sociable bachelors of a certain sexuality who have unwittingly become entangled with a Central American junta.
In the end I decided that the most useful book for Sherlockians would gather up all these people, from all these worlds, and tell just enough of their facts and stories to be a starting point for further reading. With a little help from my friends, I developed a list of 800 people to include, whether they impinged directly on the lives and work of Doyle and Holmes and Watson, or moved in other spheres but nevertheless formed part of the society of which Baker Street was at the centre. These are the people about whom Watson read in the newspaper, the people Holmes might have encountered in the Marylebone Road, the people who made 1895 (and the surrounding years) what it was.
Of course millions of people were alive at that date, including five million in London alone (Watson says so somewhere) and another 25 million in the rest of England. The people I have selected for attention in these pages are, by and large, the prominent ones - the ones who represent trends, the ones who might have been the subject of conversation in the clubs (except the Diogenes), the ones whose names and dates have been preserved and so were available to me. There is no doubt that these pages are dominated by barons, knights and tycoons. Still, I want to note that I have tried hard to include some people of humbler backgrounds, among them a dead baker, a street prostitute and a Swiss shopkeeper. I have also mentioned as many women as possible, a difficult endeavour since the Victorians were inclined to subsume women’s lives into those of their husbands or fathers. (Mrs. Beeton is an easy exception to note, and I am proud to have found some other cases in which I could redress that wrong a little.)
The scope of these biographies extends well beyond Britain, particularly to the United States but as far afield as Brazil and Siam, and some of them have no discernible connection to Sherlock Holmes. There is a reason for that: London was the crossroads of the world, where one might encounter lascars, American miners, Andaman Islanders and Peruvian beauties. It seemed to me that acknowledging what was happening on many parts of the world stage in 1895 might provide some perspective on the lives Holmes and Watson were living in Baker Street.
Writers are perhaps over-represented in this listing, again for what I thought was a good reason: the stories of Sherlock Holmes are, above all, literature, published between 1887 and 1927, and there is something to be learned from seeing what other literature was appearing at the same time. I have made a particular point of including some authors who were friends of ACD himself, or whose work he read and admired. The entries do not include ACD’s immediate family, but a few of his in-laws have found their way in.
The time period I have tried to keep in mind is the years when Sherlock Holmes is said to have been in professional practice, that is, from about 1880 to 1903. Most of the people noted in these capsule biographies were active, or at least well known, during that period. I have extended the dates forward for some years here and there, to include more of Arthur Conan Doyle’s associates, a few early figures in the popularization of Sherlock Holmes and detective fiction, and some individuals who are notable because of World War I, an important period in ACD’s life and thought. And I have extended the dates backward to include some people who clearly cast a shadow onto the 1880s, though they were no longer living. In this category are Winwood Reade, whose iconoclastic book Sherlock Holmes recommended to Watson, and the novelist Thackeray, who dandled the infant ACD on his knee. Besides, I wanted to write about Lola Montez. With some regret I have omitted Edgar Allan Poe (but there are plenty of other places to read about him) and Henry Bradshaw, who invented the railway timetable, but regrettably died before Sherlock Holmes was born. From Holmes’s ostentatious little speech in “The Illustrious Client” about talented criminals of the past, I have included Charlie Peace (who lived to 1879) but omitted Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (died 1847).
The original idea was to keep each biography to no more than 100 words. That restriction immediately proved to be laughable. About nearly every one of these people, so much is known, and so much is interesting, that I had to write far more, no matter how desperately I pruned. And still each of the 800 biographies is a mere placeholder for a full life story - just enough, I hope, to help the reader place that individual chronologically and geographically and within the complic