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ОглавлениеTHE PUBLISHING OF SHERLOCK HOLMES has been a substantial industry for a hundred years. Each of the sixty stories, though it may appear fixed and inevitable on the printed page, finds its present form — its content, its text, its typography, its illustration — as the result of choices and chances not only on the part of Doyle but on the part of publishers, editors, typographers, and readers over the decades.
An understanding of the stories’ origins, the circumstances of their writing, and the details of their transmission from the author’s pen to the modern printed page is valuable in understanding their intentions and their ingenuity. The reader must sometimes be a bibliographer, sometimes a critic, and sometimes a connoisseur of language and of art.
There is no complete bibliographical listing of editions of the Canon. Some editions, especially early ones, appear in Green and Gibson’s Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983) and other works on Doyle. Ronald B. DeWaal’s World Bibliography of Sherlock Holmes (1974), International Sherlock Holmes (1980), and Universal Sherlock Holmes (1994, now online at special.lib.umn.edu/rare/ush/ush.html) include hundreds of versions of the stories separately and in collections, but the descriptions provided are sparse and often unhelpful, and editions frequently surface that were unknown to this award-winning bibliographer.
A direct source for The Hound of the Baskervilles is generally believed to exist, in a “west country legend” told to Doyle (for so he himself says) by a friend, Bertram Fletcher Robinson. At best, however, he worked from a complex of “black-dog” legends associated with unpopulated parts of England, including Dartmoor. Janice McNabb explores those sources in The Curious Incident of the Hound on Dartmoor (1984). In A Study in Surmise (1984), Michael Harrison sets out in detail what he previously argued elsewhere: that A Study in Scarlet is extensively based — indeed, that the existence of Sherlock Holmes is based — on “the vanishing, from his shop in the St. Luke’s district of London, of a German baker, Urban Napoleon Stanger. This was in 1881.” Indisputably, The Valley of Fear is largely based on the doings of the “Mollie Maguires” in the coal country of Pennsylvania in the 1870s. A few other direct sources for large portions of Doyle’s plots can be identified.
It has become clear that Doyle not only read voraciously but stored what he read, at least half consciously, to reuse and recombine names and details years later. Donald Redmond has written extensively on specific sources as they can be unearthed:
Holmes “spoke [in The Sign of the Four] on a quick succession of subjects” including the Buddhism of Ceylon and miracle plays. In fact, it seems that he was only relating what he had read in the papers. For The Times (London) had on 15 June 1888 reported upon the Congress of Protestant Foreign Missions, then in session, with a long account: “Wednesday afternoon’s conference ... subject was ‘Buddhism and other kindred heathen systems; their character and influence compared with those of Christianity’.... Sir Monier Monier-Williams [the president of the conference] at once proceeded to place in contrast the Bible of Christianity and the Bible of the Buddhists.” Among other matters in the account, evident anti-Catholic accounts would have attracted Conan Doyle’s attention. As to miracle plays, Geoffrey S. Stavert, in his recent A Study in Southsea, points out that the Rev. H. Shaen Solly of Southampton spoke to the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society (in which Conan Doyle was very active) on this exact subject....
After Mary Morstan had left their sitting-room, Sherlock Holmes was probably striving for effect when he “smiled gently” at Watson’s shocked reaction to Holmes’s languid put-down, and cried, “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money....” In the Sherlock Holmes Journal (vol. 11, Summer 1973, pp. 58–63) I looked at this remark, with instances.
Many such connections are of course conjectural. In the absence of a full reading of everything Doyle can have read over a period of several decades, much will emerge only by chance. And it is often unclear whether a correspondence between something in the news, or in an earlier author, and something in Doyle is deliberate allusion, unconscious repetition, or pure coincidence. The researcher can easily be tempted to substitute wishful thinking for evidence. Patterns do, however, emerge. Donald Redmond reports in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources (1982) that at least eight of the Scowrers, and some twenty-three other characters in The Valley of Fear, appear to be named after medical acquaintances of Doyle. Many characters in A Study in Scarlet share surnames with neighbours of Doyle in Southsea and Portsmouth, where he lived when he wrote that book. Often, it appears, a character is named for more than one original, or takes a name from one and an attribute (“club foot” or “tiger hunter”) from another.
Sherlock Holmes’s own name has been the subject of much interest, especially in the light of his first incarnation as “Sherrinford Holmes” in a page of Doyle’s handwritten notes. The author claimed that he had taken the “Sherlock” from a bowler of the Marylebone Cricket Club against whom he once had a run of luck — although the eighteenth-century theologian Thomas Sherlock lurks in the background, and James McCord revealed in the Baker Street Journal in 1992 that Jane Sherlock Ball was the mother of one of Doyle’s aunts. “Holmes,” meanwhile, is popularly assumed to come from Oliver Wendell Holmes the elder, the American doctor and author, whom Doyle much admired. Another possibility is a physician friend and neighbour of Doyle’s. Dr. John H. Watson probably takes his name from Dr. James Watson, a medical colleague of Doyle’s in Southsea; the first Moriarty ever encountered by Doyle was a master at his school, Stonyhurst College.
JOSEPH BELL. Doyle always maintained that Sherlock Holmes was modelled on Dr. Joseph Bell (born December 2, 1837, died October 4, 1911), professor of surgery in Edinburgh, and the teacher who impressed the young Doyle most. He wrote in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, that when he came to create Holmes, “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details.” Elsewhere in the same book, he tells an anecdote or two about Bell the master of diagnosis, including the famous exchange, quoted in many writings about Doyle, in which Bell begins by greeting a patient: “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army... Not long discharged?... A Highland regiment?” And so on.
Ely M. Liebow accepts that attribution in his biography Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes (1982), although he acknowledges that Holmes had other origins as well. (“His importance can be exaggerated,” Richard Lancelyn Green agrees in his Introduction to the Adventures volume of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes.) Bell was editor of the Edinburgh Medical Journal from 1873, and a teacher from 1878, as well as an expert consulted by the police in forensic matters, but it was as a practising surgeon that he was best known. Says Liebow:
Joe Bell was an operator, a great one. He was in all probability better than Syme, better than Lister or Annandale, or any other contemporary, with the exception of the great-but-silent Patrick Heron Watson. While he was in the post-Listerian age, and the post-Simpson age, he would be operating many times in his life without anesthesia and when septicemia still plagued the hospitals. “Rapidity,” writes a colleague, “was his keynote, swiftness in operating.”
His textbook, A Manual of the Operations of Surgery (1866 and subsequent editions), is available in modern facsimile. Doyle, as a medical student, was chosen to be clerk for Bell’s clinics at the Royal Infirmary, and heard the great man assess patients with rapid perceptions that he would later put into Holmes’s mouth: “This man’s limp is not from his hip but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoe where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns, gentlemen.” Such flashes of insight made an impression, and when Doyle created Holmes he wrote to Bell, “I do not think that his analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward.” Bell’s compassion, and his thirst for justice, may also be reflected in Sherlock Holmes.
Doyle wrote his stories in longhand, in a firm, squat, generally legible script but with apparent disdain for the rules of punctuation and capitalization. (“For a medical man, Conan Doyle’s handwriting was commendably legible, though his o could look like an ‘a’,” Owen Dudley Edwards wrote in 1993. For that matter, the o could pass for an s on occasion, and vice versa.) There is evidence in the known manuscripts that his first draft was also generally his last; on occasion he left a space in which he would later fill in a name or phrase. It is generally assumed that at least in later years, the text was then typewritten for attention by editors and printers, but no such typescripts seem to survive.
The manuscripts have been thoroughly dispersed by the publishers or by the author’s heirs, and the whereabouts of some is unknown. A number, including The Sign of the Four and The Valley of Fear, are in private hands. Others are in public collections — “The Red Circle” at Indiana University, “The Three Students” at Harvard, three short stories and a chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles at the New York Public Library. A census of the manuscripts by Peter E. Blau can be found, amid many other useful resources, through Randall Stock’s web site www.bestofsherlock.com.
Portions of many manuscripts have been reproduced in facsimile in Sherlockian journals, and several complete manuscripts have been published in book form, including “The Priory School,” “The Dying Detective,” “The Lion’s Mane,” “The Six Napoleons,” and “Shoscombe Old Place” (under what appears to have been its original title, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Abbey”).
PUBLISHING AND TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION
A publisher is someone, an individual or more commonly a firm, who takes on the responsibility for having an author’s book printed and distributed. The usual arrangement is that the author receives “royalties,” a percentage of the sale price of the book, often with a minimum payment represented by an “advance” or cash payment when the manuscript is submitted. A 10 percent royalty is a rule of thumb, but the figure can vary: in 1902 Doyle was receiving 25 percent of the sale price on copies of his best-selling The Hound of the Baskervilles in Canada. In some cases — rarely today, but more commonly in the nineteenth century — the publisher buys the book outright. The publishers of Beeton’s Christmas Annual paid Doyle £25 (a not ungenerous $2,000 in today’s currency) for the ownership of A Study in Scarlet. The author may choose to sell only certain “rights” to a publisher, restricted by geography (“North American rights”) or limited to a period of time. Whatever the exact terms of the contract, it becomes the publisher’s obligation to pay for the printing of the book, and the publisher makes a profit or takes a loss depending on how well the book sells. A publisher employs editors who do their best to improve the text of the book before it is printed, and staff whose job is to send copies to reviewers, encourage booksellers to stock the book, and so on.
It was “Sherrinford” Holmes, not yet Sherlock, when Arthur Conan Doyle first sketched out his character in 1886. The single page of notes has been reproduced publicly many times (first in Vincent Starrett’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in 1934) but the original is thought to remain in the hands of lawyers for one of the Doyle family estates.
Doyle dealt with several publishers in the course of his career, some briefly and others over long periods. Among the latter were George Newnes, whose interests included book publishing as well as the Strand, and the great family firm of Lippincott in Philadelphia, who also published both books and magazines. Much information about the publishing and distribution of Doyle’s works is found in the fine print of Green and Gibson’s Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle (1983). Much, however, is not known, for publishers do not necessarily keep the records of their former projects. By the early 1890s, Doyle was conducting financial negotiations with his publishers through the intermediary of A.P. Watt, a professional literary agent, and it was to Watt that (for example) the Toronto publisher George N. Morang & Co. sent substantial sums as royalties. (Records of those are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.)
Most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were published first in magazines; the author would have sold “serial rights,” for magazine publication, before the “book rights.” The manuscripts went first to an editor, such as Greenhough Smith of the Strand, and from the editor to a typesetter, whose mercy and competence largely determine the text known to succeeding generations. There is evidence, as from the manuscript of “The Three Students,” that the typesetter was given much latitude for making sense out of Doyle’s erratic punctuation and capitalization. Negative evidence, such as the survival of many inconsistencies in the stories, as well as the lack of markings on them, suggests that an editor’s hand touched the manuscripts little or not at all.
The mechanics of printing were little different in the 1890s from what they had been in Shakespeare’s day. Machinery was now powered by steam rather than by muscle, but type was for the most part still set by hand, letter by letter, allowing full scope for typographical errors of a kind now extinct, such as “wrong font” and inverted characters. The detailed study of these mechanics, as described in the definitive An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students by Ronald B. McKerrow (1962), is applied to portions of the Sherlockian Canon by Donald Redmond in Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates (1990). A typographical error, unless very obvious, could easily be perpetuated in subsequent editions of the same text, as the new typesetter might well work from a previous printed page rather than from a reliable manuscript. The consequence is that mistakes and variations throughout the Canon survive to bedevil researchers; and a new generation of such errors has been created when the text is “scanned” into computer memory, with technology that is still somewhat fallible.
THE STRAND MAGAZINE. All the Sherlock Holmes stories except the first two novels had their first British publication in the Strand, a monthly magazine founded at the beginning of 1891 by George Newnes (1851–1910). Newnes, originally a Manchester merchant, had become a publisher in 1881 with the creation of Tit-Bits, a weekly paper of entertainment and miscellaneous information for the lower middle class, which was becoming steadily more literate after the reforms of the 1870 Education Act. He introduced the Strand as a more respectable product, with a title taken from a fashionable West End street just around the corner from the magazine’s offices. It boasted modern-looking typography and an illustration on every double page (a policy from the beginning), and it quickly became enormously successful, reaching a circulation of half a million. In its heyday, it sold a hundred pages of advertising every month. George Newnes Ltd. went on to publish dozens of other periodicals, and briefly an American edition of the Strand. The British magazine survived until 1951, when it became a victim of financial losses and a change in public reading habits.
Although Newnes (later Sir George for his contributions to journalism) was nominally editor of the Strand, its day-to-day manager was H. Greenhough Smith (1855–1935), the “literary editor” from the magazine’s beginnings, who continued at its helm until 1930. Reginald Pound in Mirror of the Century: The Strand Magazine 1891–1950 (1966) describes him:
Tall, lean, sandy-moustached, with freckles to match on a pallid expressionless face, he surveyed the world with kindly scrutineering eyes through rimless pince-nez. His distrust of emotion gave an impression of a temperament that did not fully warrant the nickname by which he was known to his fellow clubmen, “Calamity” Smith.... Wary of originality, he was prepared to encourage it but not at the expense of readability or of the reputation of the magazine.
He encouraged H.G. Wells, Grant Allen, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, E.W. Hornung, W. Somerset Maugham, and countless other important figures of Victorian writing; the Strand was noted for good story telling rather than for ground-breaking literature. It carried articles about travel, science, the aristocracy, and public affairs as well, and deferential interviews with prominent persons, all in a generally complacent tone but without entirely concealing the problems of British society. Newnes, always insisting that he represented “the common man” but resplendent in the snug waistcoat of the successful businessman, cultivated — and received — the approval of prominent figures, including Queen Victoria, who more than once gave the magazine access to the royal apartments and scrapbooks.
A story by Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Voice of Science,” appeared in the first volume of the Strand, but his importance to the magazine — and its to him — began in Volume 2 no. 1, July 1891, when Smith received the first episodes of what became The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and called them “a gift from Heaven.” At first Doyle was paid £5 per thousand words for the stories of Sherlock Holmes; by the end, nearly forty years later, he received £648 14s just for “Shoscombe Old Place.” Doyle also wrote dozens of non-Sherlockian tales for the Strand, and his credibility with the magazine was such that when he appeared in 1921 with an article maintaining that two little girls’ photographs of fairies in their garden were authentic, Smith swallowed hard and published it. A collection of letters from Doyle to Smith, now at the Toronto Reference Library, was discussed by Cameron Hollyer in Baker Street Miscellanea in 1985.
The Strand is of more than bibliographical interest for students of Sherlock Holmes, for it perfectly reflects his Victorian and Edwardian times, in its fiction, its articles, and even its advertisements. It seems likely that Doyle read it closely, and even alluded to it, as when Watson in “The Five Orange Pips” speaks of “Clark Russell’s fine sea stories”; he may have been thinking of “Captain Jones of the ‘Rose’,” which the Strand had published in May 1891. An Index to the Strand Magazine, 1891–1950, compiled by Geraldine Beare, was published in 1982.
THE AMERICAN MAGAZINES. The stories of The Adventures and The Memoirs, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, were first published in the American edition of the Strand magazine, which was begun along with the British Strand in 1891 and was discontinued in 1916. When “The Empty House” appeared in 1903, however, and was followed by the other stories that would soon make up The Return, they appeared not in the Strand but in Collier’s Weekly, which was one of the two leading magazines in the United States (the other, about equally popular, being the Saturday Evening Post).
It had been founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier, as a weekly in the nineteenth-century tradition of Frank Leslie’s, and from 1898 was managed by his son, Robert J. Collier, fresh from Harvard College and keen to give American journalism “a little true literary flavor.” He commissioned stories by Henry James but also by Rudyard Kipling and Hall Caine as well as Doyle, and he paid Charles Dana Gibson $1,000 apiece for a hundred of his double-page “Gibson girl” drawings. He also, in 1902, hired Norman Hapgood to be the editor, chiefly to take charge of the editorial page and to direct the magazine’s muck-raking coverage of public affairs. Its war coverage, its articles on labour problems, and its exposés of patent medicines gave Collier’s much of its popularity. In 1904 it changed its title from Collier’s Weekly, An Illustrated Journal to Collier’s, The National Weekly.
When the stories of His Last Bow began to appear in 1908, Collier’s published the first two (“Wisteria Lodge” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans”). But the magazine’s interest in fiction was fading, as were its fortunes in general after the death of Peter Collier in 1909, and for the next couple of stories Doyle’s agent returned to the American edition of the Strand: “The Devil’s Foot” and “The Red Circle” in 1911. Later that year one story, “Lady Frances Carfax,” appeared in the American Magazine. Holmes returned to Collier’s for “The Dying Detective” in 1913, “His Last Bow” in 1917, and “The Three Garridebs” and “The Illustrious Client” in 1924. They would be the last of Holmes’s adventures to appear there. The magazine was sold in 1919, suffered financial and production difficulties, but recovered in the 1920s to have reasonable influence in public affairs and reasonable success in publishing such stories as Sax Rohmer’s adventures of Fu Manchu. In 1952–53 it would publish the stories by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr that became the Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Collier’s ceased publication in 1957.
The stories of The Case-Book, apart from those two in 1924 that were claimed by Collier’s, appeared in two American magazines: four in Hearst’s International from 1921 through 1924, and six in Liberty in 1926 and 1927. Hearst’s International was originally an educational journal (Current Encyclopedia, founded in 1901), and in 1911 was taken over by William Randolph Hearst, who turned it into a public-affairs monthly. Before long it became clear that there was more money in fiction, and the magazine published prominent authors, both American and European. At first it was Hearst’s Magazine, then simply Hearst’s, and from 1921 Hearst’s International. In 1925 it was merged into Cosmopolitan, another title in the Hearst publishing empire (and ancestor of the racy modern magazine for single women).
Liberty, having begun publication in May 1924, was only two years old when it began carrying Canonical stories. Already it was among the three leading weeklies in the United States, having joined Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post in selling more than a million copies of each issue. What it did not do was make money for its proprietors, Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Joseph Patterson of the New York Daily News. They sold it in 1931; successors kept trying to make it profitable, but gave up and closed the magazine in 1951.
Copyright is literally the right (owned by an author unless it is specifically assigned or sold to someone else) to copy — that is, to publish — an author’s written words. The law of copyright is byzantine and, to most lay people, dull, but even an amateur can learn not to violate copyrights simply by not copying and distributing someone else’s work. The chief exception to copyright protection is known as “fair use” in the United States, “fair dealing” in Britain and Canada. The limits on this exception are complicated and subject to litigation, but it might, for example, allow making a single photocopy of something for private use, or quoting a reasonable passage (300 words is often cited) in an article or book.
In Canada, copyright generally expires 50 years after the author’s death; Doyle’s stories thus were free of copyright in 1980. The same rule formerly applied in Britain, so that his writings were copyright-free (“in the public domain”) from 1980 until 1996. At that time, to harmonize British law with European law, the term was lengthened to 70 years, with the result that Doyle’s work was protected by copyright again from 1996 until 2000.
In the United States, foreign authors, such as Doyle, were unable to claim copyright protection until changes to the law were made in 1891. At that time the term of copyright was 28 years from first publication, renewable for another 14 years. In 1909 the renewal term was extended to 28 years, and there have been several subsequent extensions. For newly published works copyright now lasts until 70 years after the death of the author. However, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 had special provisions for works that had first appeared between 1923 and 1978: if they had not already fallen into the public domain, their term of protection was extended to 95 years from first publication. That category includes ten of the twelve stories in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, and the collection as a whole, which was published in 1927 and so will not enter the public domain until the end of 2022. The result has been that while The Adventures, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and other earlier works are available in dozens of editions — anyone can legally publish them — there continues to be a monopoly on the final stories and therefore on any edition that contains the entire Canon. They can be published only by a company licensed by the copyright owners.
Copyright in most of Doyle’s stories was originally owned by the author and, after his death in 1930, by his estate, which licensed or sold them in various ways. After American copyright law reform in 1976, it became possible for an author’s surviving spouse or children to “recapture” copyrights that had been sold, and in November 1981 Dame Jean Conan Doyle, the only surviving member of Doyle’s family, did that. Since Dame Jean Conan Doyle’s death in 1997, the American copyright in those writings that are not yet in the public domain, including the Case-Book stories, has been the property of her estate. The estate has been managed by Jon L. Lellenberg of Chicago, who reports that as of early 2009, steps are under way to wind up that legal entity and assign the American rights to a new organization to be called the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. To be based in Britain, it will also control some British rights to Doyle’s work, such as copyrights in texts that have never been published. The agent for the Conan Doyle Estate Ltd. is to be United Agents (unitedagents.co.uk) of London.
Through the second half of the twentieth century, the copyright owners licensed the firm of Doubleday (also variously known as Doubleday Doran and Garden City Publishing; it is now a division of Random House) to publish The Complete Sherlock Holmes. In recent years several other editions have also been licensed. In addition, Dame Jean also asserted a right to control the use of the characters and names of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson both in print and in other media such as film. Such a right would be based indirectly on common law, intellectual property (copyright and trademark), and unfair competition laws, since a character itself cannot be trademarked. The extent to which such a right is enforceable, allowing the owner to control the writing of new tales using the characters, is legally unclear, but American publishers typically continue to seek permission and pay fees to the estate, and most books that feature “Sherlock Holmes” include a fine-print acknowledgement to that effect.
Meanwhile, the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself had been tangled in litigation among his children and their heirs for decades beginning in the 1950s. A settlement was at last reached shortly before Dame Jean’s death, and by 2004 the assets of that estate had been distributed. There remains, however, “the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate,” operated by Andrea Plunket, the former wife of television producer Sheldon Reynolds. He had first been involved with the use of the Sherlock Holmes characters in the 1950s, and acquired the copyrights from a receiver in bankruptcy in 1974, shortly before their 1980 expiry in Britain and Dame Jean’s “recapture” in the United States. The estate headed by Plunket now maintains a web site (www.sherlockholmesonline.org) and has lawyers who maintain that it owns the American rights to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Such claims have been repeatedly rejected in U.S. federal court decisions in favour of the estate of Dame Jean.
The original magazine publication, and the newspaper syndication that followed in most cases, did not exhaust publishers’ interest in the Canonical stories, as they were republished in American and British newspapers from the early 1890s through the early years of the twentieth century. The New York World Sunday magazine rediscovered The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1905, for example; the Boston Sunday Post published the stories of The Return as “Masterpieces of Sherlock Holmes” in 1911.
Authorized publishers continued to bring out the books in full. Some of the Sherlock Holmes tales appear in the official “Author’s Edition” of Doyle’s works (1903). All are among the twenty-four volumes of the “Crowborough Edition,” begun before Doyle’s death in 1930 and published posthumously in a limited edition of 760 sets; many copies include signatures which the author affixed to pre-publication sheets. The Complete Sherlock Holmes was published in eight volumes by P.F. Collier & Son in 1928, and a six-volume edition followed in 1936. A ten-volume “Literary Guild” edition was produced by Doubleday in 1933.
In addition there were many piracies, that is, books published without the author’s approval. In the 1890s in particular, The Sign of the Four (in more than two hundred unauthorized editions) and A Study in Scarlet were extensively pirated by American publishers operating in a free-for-all atmosphere. Donald Redmond in Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates (1990) identifies and classifies many of those early volumes, but a full bibliographical listing of them will probably never be compiled.
Partial collections of Canonical stories have appeared over the decades with such titles as Conan Doyle’s Stories for Boys (1938), Famous Tales of Sherlock Holmes (1958), and Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Cases (1966). In addition, a few stories were published yet again in periodical format, the oddest examples being an excerpt from The Sign of the Four and the full texts of “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Copper Beeches,” which graced the first three issues of Playboy magazine (1954). Many of the stories have been used in anthologies, from “The Dancing Men” in Famous Stories of Code and Cipher (1947) and “A Scandal in Bohemia” in With All My Love: An Anthology (1945) to “The Five Orange Pips” in Masterpieces of Mystery & Detection (1965). Unusual publications also include Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship (1944), edited by Christopher Morley and including two novels (one abridged), five short stories, and extensive notes. A little later came The Blue Carbuncle (1948), a slipcased collector’s item published by the Baker Street Irregulars.
Over the decades, by far the most commonly available version of the stories in North America has been The Complete Sherlock Holmes, published by Doubleday. The first of several Doubleday Completes was the “Memorial Edition,” shortly after Doyle’s death in 1930, which had erratic and repetitive pagination because it was printed from the plates previously used for separate volumes of the various tales. It also presented “In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes,” an eloquent if maudlin introduction by Christopher Morley, which has been a fixture ever since. A one-volume edition of The Complete followed in 1936. Early Sherlockian writings frequently refer to its 1,323-page layout, also published (from the same printing plates) as “the Literary Guild Edition” and “the De Luxe Edition” in two-volume and one-volume formats. One-volume and two-volume editions in a new format of 1,122 pages were introduced in 1960 and remain standard, in part because over several decades the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed many thousands of whatever was the most recent impression.
The one-volume Doubleday edition has also appeared as a Penguin paperback. These editions, widely and inexpensively available, have been the standard to which reference works have generally been keyed. In recent years, however, the Doubleday edition has had rivals, including two-volume paperback editions from Bantam Classics and Barnes & Noble, as well as innumerable editions of the earlier volumes of the Canon that are no longer protected by copyright. The word piracy no longer strictly applies, but contemporary paperback collections are often as cheap in every way as were the piracies of the 1890s.
The Doubleday edition suffers from a good deal of textual corruption — a famous example is “Somomy” for the historical racehorse Isonomy mentioned in “Silver Blaze” — and when he undertook to edit the entire Canon for the Limited Editions Club in the early 1940s, Edgar W. Smith laboured to correct errors and misapprehensions, eventually producing what is still widely thought to be the best text available. The original idea had been to bring out all the stories with illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele, who had already created the art for about half of them. George Macy of the Limited Editions Club commissioned him to do the other half, but Steele died in 1944 with little of the work completed. Other artists filled the breach, and the edition finally appeared as The Adventures (three volumes, 1950), The Later Adventures (three volumes, 1952), and The Final Adventures (two volumes, 1952) with introductions and notes by several scholars. Jon L. Lellenberg in Irregular Crises of the Late ’Forties (1999) tells the story of the delays and difficulties that lay behind the project, particularly resistance from Adrian Conan Doyle, who was then managing his father’s estate. Lellenberg writes that the Limited Editions Club achievement deserves, for the efforts of Smith and others and the joy with which it was received, to be remembered as “the Baker Street Irregulars edition” of the Canon. It was republished in 1952–57 as a three-volume edition from the Heritage Club, and facsimiles were issued by Easton Press in 1987 and 1996.
In Britain, the standard edition for many years was a two-volume set from the old publishing firm of John Murray: The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Long Stories and Short Stories, cited as “S” and “L” with a page number by some British commentators. John Murray is now part of a conglomerate, and its Sherlock Holmes is no longer to be found in bookshops. In its place there are hardback volumes, both titled The Complete Sherlock Holmes, from Wordsworth and CRW Publishing; a six-volume hardback set also from CRW; and multi-volume paperback editions from Wordsworth and Headline Review. All these choices provide a British text of the stories — that is, for example, one of the stories is titled “The Reigate Squires,” not “The Reigate Puzzle,” and the textual errors introduced in the Doubleday on the other side of the Atlantic do not appear. British readers can, however, get the Doubleday text if they like, as the Penguin paperback Complete is also easily available.
There is a frequent desire among Sherlockians for facsimile editions in which the original Strand appearance of the stories, including Sidney Paget illustrations, is reproduced. The most satisfactory of these is a heavy volume of 1,126 pages, The Original Illustrated ‘Strand’ Sherlock Holmes, with the Strand pages enlarged from their original size (and A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which never appeared in the Strand, set in a similar typeface and format). Unlike some earlier facsimiles, this one manages clear and bright reproduction of the drawings by Paget and his successors. The British edition appeared from Wordsworth in 1989, the American from Mallard Press in 1990. The price of its elegance is a weight that makes the book impractical for, say, reading in bed without the aid of hydraulic equipment. There is, however, a paperback edition, less hefty and correspondingly less legible. Several other facsimiles have smaller pages and, frequently, thinner paper, with the predictable disadvantages.
The complete Canon was published with a vast apparatus of notes under the title The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Clarkson N. Potter, 1967; a British edition followed in 1968 from John Murray, and there is also a one-volume reprint). Its editor was William S. Baring-Gould (1913–67), whose death while the book was still in proof prevented the correction of some errors and imperfections. Its two volumes (688 pages in the first, 824 pages in the second) provide hundreds of illustrations from many sources — often murkily reproduced — and marginal notes explaining Victorian terms, pointing the reader to related passages in other stories, and providing a wealth of background and enrichment. In addition, there are nineteen chapters on general subjects, all the editor’s work: on Sherlockian parodies, on films, on Watson, on the snake in “The Speckled Band,” on Watson’s wounds, on Watson’s marriages, on the Great Hiatus, and so on. These chapters are interspersed with the stories, in facsimile from the John Murray collected edition, arranged in the order in which Baring-Gould deemed them to have taken place. Thus “The ‘Gloria Scott’” comes first and “His Last Bow” last; the first volume goes as far as The Sign of the Four. Constant recourse to the table of contents is unavoidable.
The Annotated holds unswervingly to the pretense that what Sherlockians do when they exercise their imaginations about Holmes is sober biographical scholarship. Baring-Gould also included, without distinguishing it from other kinds of knowledge, biographical detail that he had invented for Holmes in his own Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, published five years earlier. The result can be cloying; the pervasive fiction slights Doyle and limits the book’s use for some kinds of study. Nevertheless, for almost forty years Baring-Gould’s enormous industry and range of knowledge were agreed to more than compensate for his quirks. The Annotated had an enormous influence on the spread of interest in Sherlock Holmes in the 1970s, and was indispensable for a generation of Sherlockian scholars.
A very different annotated edition appeared in 1993 from Oxford University Press: The Oxford Sherlock Holmes in nine volumes, under the general editorship of Owen Dudley Edwards, a professor of history at the University of Edinburgh. “Given Conan Doyle’s general lack of close supervision of the Holmes texts, it is not always easy to determine his final wishes,” he wrote in the “General Introduction.” Edwards edited three of the nine volumes himself; two were done by Christopher Roden, two by Richard Lancelyn Green, and two by W.W. Robson. In each case the editor of a volume contributed a solid introduction, with context and detail about how the stories came to be written; provided explanatory notes; and, most important, edited the text, making changes to produce a readable but also authoritative version. Some of the alterations are mildly surprising (moving “The Cardboard Box” out of His Last Bow, where it has traditionally sat, and into The Memoirs, where it made its brief first bow in 1893). Others are positively startling, as when Edwards turns the familiar if puzzling reference to “the Long Island cave mystery” in “The Red Circle” into “the Long Island cove mystery” on the grounds that there are no caves on Long Island, New York, and Doyle’s handwriting was ambiguous anyway. Whether or not one applauds all the editors’ decisions, the Oxford edition is enormously useful as a reference about textual variations and similar matters. Many of its notes also illuminate connections between Doyle’s own life and allusions that he drops into the stories. It can be tediously exhaustive (“Hampshire: a southern English county much loved by ACD”) but it can also be quickly helpful. Although some notes do address the lives of the characters, such as speculation about whether Watson had returned to medical practice at the time of “The Illustrious Client,” the Oxford editors do not indulge in make-believe biography as Baring-Gould had done. They are literary critics writing about literary characters and the author who created them, rather as one would expect from such a publisher. Also as one would expect, the books are clear and comfortable to read. The editorial notes are at the end of the volume rather than on the same pages as the text, and are signalled by modest asterisks. And each volume is compact, little larger than pocket-sized. (A paperback edition followed the original hardbacks, and Oxford is in the process of reissuing all nine volumes in its World’s Classics paperback series.) If there was one criticism generally agreed on by early users of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, it was that it appeared entirely without illustrations.
The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, edited by Los Angeles lawyer Leslie S. Klinger, took a very different attitude and addressed a very different audience, being intended mostly for dedicated Sherlockians and published in small quantities by a specialized firm, Gasogene Books of Indianapolis. Its ten paperback volumes — nine for the usual nine volumes of the Canon and a tenth for the “Apocrypha,” writings by Arthur Conan Doyle with a less authoritative connection to Sherlock Holmes — appeared over more than a decade, the first being dated 1998 and the last 2009. They include only a small number of illustrations, but in other respects the Reference Library has everything for which readers had come to rely on the Baring-Gould Annotated, with the further merit of presenting the stories in a conventional order. Klinger uses some of Baring-Gould’s notes and adds hundreds referring to other sources, including the thirty years’ worth of Sherlockian scholarship that had intervened as well as the ninth edition (1875–89) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a library full of other reference works. Although quoting at length from such works, Klinger frequently adds his own perceptions as well. He was more interested than Baring-Gould had been in the possibilities opened by textual criticism; he presents what he called “my own version” of the text, based primarily on what had appeared in the Strand, and includes many notes about variant readings and the known manuscripts. The books are not good as reading copies, their pages dense with small type, but for scholars in search of Sherlockian understanding they are indispensable, and have largely rendered Baring-Gould obsolete.
A landmark in Sherlockian publishing came in 2005 with the appearance of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, volumes I and II, slipcased together and weighing nearly as much as a piece of furniture. The two blue-bound volumes dealt with the fifty-six Holmes short stories, with a red-bound volume III following in 2006 and addressing the four novels. These too were the work of Leslie S. Klinger, whose Reference Library was almost complete by the time the New Annotated appeared.
“There are significant differences between this edition and Baring-Gould’s classic Annotated Sherlock Holmes,” Klinger insisted in a note that begins on page 1841 of his volume II. “Baring-Gould emphasized the ‘chronology’ of the stories,” he points out, whereas Klinger relegates most questions of what happened when to a chronological table, “The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes,” appended to volume I (and including year-by-year highlights of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and historical events as well as the cases and happenings in Holmes’s career). In keeping with his lack of interest in chronological puzzles, Klinger again keeps the stories in a predictable order. Large numbers of his notes reproduce material from the Reference Library word for word, but for the convenience of a larger and more general readership, he cuts out a great deal of specialized Sherlockian material and emphasizes Victorian life, geography, and technical terms. “The Golden Pince-Nez,” for example, has forty notes in the Reference Library volume for The Return of Sherlock Holmes and just twenty-one in the New Annotated. Sherlockian readers of the former are given three technical paragraphs about the likelihood and identity of a “red leech”; general readers of the latter get three brief sentences. They are altogether spared a note listing possible identifications of Yoxley Old Place with several existing houses in Suffolk, and also do not get to read Klinger’s three paragraphs about the availability of a “spirit-lamp” at 221B Baker Street.
The New Annotated follows the layout introduced by Baring-Gould, with notes in the outer margins of the pages (and long white spaces where nothing strikes the editor as worthy of annotation). For many of the stories there are separate brief essays on contentious or interesting topics, such as “The Rules of Rugby” to clarify “The Missing Three-Quarter,” but one thirty-page introductory essay, “The World of Sherlock Holmes,” takes the place of Baring-Gould’s many introductory chapters about Doyle, Holmes, actors, and other general topics. The New Annotated offers many illustrations taken from early editions of the Canon, and although the volumes are much too heavy for recreational reading, the typography is easy on the eye.
It is difficult to think of Sherlock Holmes without his deerstalker hat, which is never mentioned in the Canon, but was the inspiration of an early illustrator. That lasting gift from artist to character is one example of how important illustration has been in establishing the myth of Sherlock Holmes, and in making the stories successful and memorable. No wonder, then, that Walter Klinefelter found it easy to devote a full volume to Sherlockian illustration: Sherlock Holmes in Portrait and Profile (1963). Admirable so far as he goes, he only scratches the surface, for there have been dozens of illustrators whom he has no room to mention.
Unless one is merely a cartoonist, there is more to illustrating Holmes than the presence of the deerstalker hat and its usual companions the magnifying glass, the curved pipe, and the Inverness cape. Still, some modern illustrators do no more than that when they try to interpret Holmes visually. One expects from an illustrator the discernment of an artist, revealed in features, expressions, and gestures that match the Holmes described in the text. It is for achieving those expressions and gestures, in particular, that two early artists — Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele — are acknowledged to be great interpreters of Holmes, while others are nearly forgotten. In addition, the reader deserves authenticity in Victorian clothing and furnishings; the scenes illustrated should be ones that are not merely exciting and action filled but significant to the progress of the story; the illustrations should be placed on the page or in the volume in such a way that the story is not spoiled for the first-time reader; and their reproduction should be clean and clear.
The first person to draw Sherlock Holmes for print was D.H. Friston, whose illustrations for A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. (It is not clear that the often-reproduced cover of Beeton’s is intended to represent Holmes or have anything to do with A Study in Scarlet.) Klinefelter is critical of Friston’s Holmes, calling it “a travesty,” not so much in physiognomy as in clothing and headgear. Those illustrations were abandoned when A Study in Scarlet was republished, and in Friston’s place stood the author’s father, Charles Doyle, by 1888 confined to a mental institution and exercising his talent rather for therapy than professionally. Gibson and Green, in their Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, observe that “The six frail drawings bear no relation to later conceptions of the subject but are of interest none the less.” Later illustrators for the same novel included George Hutchinson.
SIDNEY PAGET. Always admired, the drawings of Sidney Paget for the original publication of about half the Canon have been more widely known since facsimile editions became available. One or two of them, such as a drawing for “Silver Blaze” of Holmes and Watson together in a railway carriage, and one for “The Naval Treaty” of Holmes sniffing a rose in a moment of ecstasy, have become virtual icons. Others, less often reproduced, still capture moments of characteristic action, or aspects of Holmes’s milieu, as no other illustrations have been able to do. It can be seen as a tribute to Paget’s mastery of his medium, and of his Victorian subject as well, that selected illustrations have twice been reproduced by the spicy British magazine Mayfair with off-colour captions replacing the original Canonical ones.
Gibson and Green in their Bibliography explain the conjunction of Paget and the Canon thus: “George Newnes wanted the [Strand] magazine to have a picture at every opening, and to achieve this appointed W.H. Boot as the art editor. He in turn chose one of the Paget brothers for this series, intending it to be Walter Paget, though in fact the offer went to Sidney Paget. The choice was a good one and met with the author’s approval, though he had envisaged a ‘more beaky nosed, hawk-faced man’.” Tradition says that Walter Paget became, rather than the artist, the model for Holmes.
It was Paget who attached the deerstalker hat to Sherlock Holmes, identifying the detective’s “travelling cap” as the headgear he himself favoured: a cloth cap in plain or (often) houndstooth fabric, with fore-and-aft peaks and with earflaps that could be tied up or down. He first drew such a hat in a picture to go with “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” when it appeared in 1891. (However, researchers have found a deerstalker in drawings that appeared in the Bristol Observer newspaper when it published The Sign of the Four as a serial in 1890; the artist is unknown.) Paget drew it only four more times, but that was enough, especially as one of the five deerstalkers is seen falling from Holmes’s head into the gorge of the Reichenbach in an illustration for “The Final Problem.” Other artifacts of the Paget household can also be identified in some of the illustrations.
“I found Sherlock Holmes half asleep”: a corner of the Baker Street suite, with chemical laboratory, as drawn by Sidney Paget for “A Case of Identity” when it appeared in the Strand magazine in September 1891, early in the sequence of stories. The soft edge and complex shape of this illustration are characteristic of Paget’s work.
Sidney Paget did a total of 356 illustrations for the Canon, to accompany the magazine publication of The Adventures, The Memoirs, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Return. (Many of them were carried along when those texts were published in book form.) Ann Byerly, writing in Baker Street Miscellanea in 1983, described his technique:
Employing the black-and-white watercolor technique, he worked [the illustrations] up on a kind of cardboard about 6” X 8” in size, first pencilling in his composition, next filling in the background with a light wash, then applying black watercolor paint to dark areas in the picture, and finally, filling in the details with black and white after that had dried.... Much more of his draftsmanship is evident when an original is tilted to the light to catch the glint of the pencilling than is apparent in the reproductions.
(Still less, of course, can be seen in most modern facsimiles.) Some of the drawings were reproduced from engravings, others from (cruder) woodcuts. Warren Scheideman, writing in the same issue of BSM, notes that some of Paget’s genius resides in the “creative rather than formal” shape of his drawings, which lack hard edges: “The lines drift into the text, sometimes like smoke, clouds, dreams, or thoughts, often in physical conjunction with the words they illustrate.”
Sidney Paget was born October 4, 1860, and was a young painter and newspaper artist when he was accidentally chosen to illustrate “A Scandal in Bohemia” and the stories that followed it. He went on to produce drawings for many other stories by Doyle, and for other authors’ works in the Strand and elsewhere. In October 1897, it is reported, he painted Doyle’s portrait. He suffered from a “chest complaint” in the early years of the twentieth century, gradually doing less and less work, and died January 28, 1908. He and his wife, Edith Hounsfield, whose wedding-present from Doyle was a silver cigarette-case inscribed “From Sherlock Holmes,” had six children; one of them, Winifred, has written about her father and was a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London from its founding until her death in 1978. “Only a handful” of his original drawings are known to exist, Ann Byerly reported in 1983.
FREDERIC DORR STEELE. The leading American illustrator of the Canon was in fact its illustrator only for the final three volumes of short stories. Walter Klinefelter, in Sherlock Holmes in Portrait and Profile (1963), introduces the contributions of Frederic Dorr Steele thus:
For the text of the stories of The Return, which made its first American appearances in various numbers of Collier’s Weekly from September 26, 1903, to January 28, 1905, Steele drew forty-six illustrations. The master detective’s visage appears in twenty-six of them. For each story Steele also provided individual headpieces and decorative initials. But at the most these drawings, though of very special merit, comprise the lesser part of this artist’s contribution to the embellishment of The Return. The choicest of his drawings for this section of the canon consist of the ten gorgeous portraits which he executed in color for the front covers of a like number of the issues of Collier’s in which Watson’s stories appeared. These portraits were the finest of Holmes done up to that time, perhaps the finest that ever were or ever will be done of him.
Steele went on to do similar work for most of the stories that would make up His Last Bow, and for two of the Case-Book stories. He later illustrated one story (with cover) for the American Magazine, four (without covers) for Hearst’s International, and six (again without covers) for Liberty. A number of newspaper illustrations were also his work.
The cover illustrations are, indeed, Steele’s most important Sherlockian work, from the deerstalkered figure at the Reichenbach for “The Empty House” to his gaunt, bedridden Holmes for “The Dying Detective” and the aging figure of Holmes in retirement for “His Last Bow.” For “The Norwood Builder,” Steele drew Holmes looking not at a thumb-print but at an entire bloody handprint on the wall, perhaps his only concession to melodrama; for a pamphlet edition of “The Dying Detective” some years later, the same drawing was used, with a sketched portrait of Doyle replacing the handprint on the wall under Holmes’s piercing scrutiny. It seems clear that the model Steele used for Holmes was William Gillette, who toured America through the early decades of the century presenting the great detective on stage. Walter Klinefelter identifies the Collier’s cover for “The Priory School” as being the most like Gillette; indeed, that picture of Holmes staring away across the moor does bear a striking resemblance to pictures of Gillette that appeared on publicity material for his play and also as a frontispiece in some contemporary editions of the Canon.
Frederic Dorr Steele’s drawing of Holmes in his Baker Street laboratory was one of eleven spectacular covers he created for Collier’s magazine. Done in black and bronze, it appeared October 29, 1904, when “The Golden Pince-Nez” was first published as part of The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The story makes no mention of test tubes, but Holmes does use “my spirit-lamp,” perhaps a feature of the laboratory, to make coffee.
Frederic Dorr Steele, born August 6, 1873, was primarily a book illustrator, having worked with texts by such authors as Richard Harding Davis, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and O. Henry. He was winner of the bronze medal at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, and spent his working life in New York, where he was a member of the elite Players Club. His obituary in The New York Times said he was also a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, but that does not seem to have been the case in any formal way, although he certainly was a friend of such early Sherlockians as Vincent Starrett and Gray Chandler Briggs. The Times also mentioned that shortly before his death (July 5, 1944) he had been working on illustrations for the projected Limited Editions Club version of the Canon. He was survived by his wife, Mary. A collection of anecdotes about Steele and appreciations of him and his work appeared in a 1991 issue of Baker Street Miscellanea.
LATER ILLUSTRATORS. American magazines which published the stories in the early years of the century, but did not accompany them with Steele’s drawings, used such other illustrators as Arthur I. Keller, G. Patrick Nelson, W.T. Benda and John Richard Flanagan. The American book edition of The Return was illustrated not by Steele but by Charles Raymond Macauley. As for British editions after Paget, the editors of the Strand had similarly played the field, entrusting the illustration to Arthur Twidle, Gilbert Holiday, Joseph Simpson, H.M. Brock, Frank Wiles, Howard Elcock, Alec Ball, A. Gilbert, and even Paget’s brother Walter, who had been intended as the original illustrator two decades earlier.
By the twentieth century it was no longer fashionable for books to contain illustrations. The Valley of Fear had only a frontispiece (by Wiles) in England, although the American edition had a few Keller drawings scattered through the text. His Last Bow and The Case-Book had no illustrations at all in either American or British editions. The collected editions of the Canon, the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes, and the Long Stories and Short Stories published by John Murray, do not have illustrations, nor do most of the paperback volumes available.
There has been no well-known illustrator of the Canon since Paget and Steele; images of the detective since the 1920s have been based on the faces and postures of actors, primarily (at least in North America) Basil Rathbone. The Paget illustrations, little-known in the United States until the appearance of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes with its many reproductions, are now often seen. A number of undistinguished illustrators have made attempts at Holmes for various post-copyright editions of the stories, often not rising above the deerstalker-and-calabash level of caricature also seen in countless cartoons and advertisements. Perhaps the most successful Sherlockian artist in recent decades has been Dan Day, whose work in the 1980s was not for book illustration but for comics.
TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTIONS
The stories of Sherlock Holmes have appeared in languages from French and German to Sinhalese and Urdu, despite the vast difficulties in conveying the nuances of British life and the subtleties of Holmes’s work to readers in far different cultures. It is said — although such statements are difficult to verify — that portions of the Canon have been put into more tongues than any other work save the Bible. There is also a persistent story that in some language, in some country (Egypt?), the Canon has been used as a textbook for detectives, but the facts have never been demonstrated. Certainly the Canon has often been a textbook for the learning of English; student editions with notes and apparatus in French, Russian, Swedish, and other languages are known.
