Hospital

Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1894. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.

This story is another literary first – in this case, one of the very first stories in what we now consider to be the espionage genre. It is also the longest short story in the canon, and is part of the final run of really good stories in the last third or so of Memoirs. While it doesn’t have canon-defining elements like the earlier “Greek Interpreter” or the upcoming “Final Problem,” there’s still a lot to dig into with this story – so much that I’m going to divide this essay into two parts, much like how the original story was published in two parts.

There are a few interesting cultural elements that come up in this story that are worth looking at more closely. This story was released relatively close to the start of World War I. In that war, France and Russia were strong allies to England, but in this story, they are seen as potential enemies who might benefit from the theft of the treaty. And yet, this is accurate of the political climate of the time, showing how radical a shift in political climate the First World War brought about at the time (and proving that it’s always fashionable to make the French and the Russians look like the bad guys).

Also, it’s fascinating to note how nepotism is perceived at the time: Phelps isn’t ashamed to note that he got his job as a government official because his uncle was a minister, a situation that would have caused a major political scandal if it had happened today. There’s also a case of Holmes making a note of something on his shirt-cuff, but that’s not all that uncommon at the time. In fact, a quick search through Google Books brought up “The Confessions of a Caricaturist” by Harry Furniss (1902), in which he talks about doodling pictures on his shirt-cuff. It’s something you did when you didn’t have a piece of paper handy to make a note on – the modern equivalent would be writing a note on your hand or on the back of a receipt.

Another cultural aspect that avid readers of Victorian fiction will run into a lot is the concept of “brain fever.” While there’s some speculation as to what this ailment actually was (or even if it was only one ailment at all), it was a recognized medical complaint at the time. It was also a useful literary device to make a character temporarily deranged and immobile for weeks or even months at a time, which is likely why it was very popular in fiction.¹ One of the most well-known appearances of brain fever in British literature of the time is in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, but the concept extended to French literature as well, such as its appearance in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Many believed that it came from excessive stress or heartbreak, which is why it is commonly attributed to female characters, but this story shows that even men could fall victim to it. Whether it was real or not, it became a common trope (and probably a stereotype) of fiction of the day, and Doyle was certainly not immune to literary fads.

This story feels almost American in composition to me. A lot of the American detective fiction in the early 20th century focused on getting information from people over examining physical evidence – the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, for example, are replete with scenes of detectives interrogating suspects, but not nearly as much examination of clues and collecting evidence. This story is similar, showing a lot more of Holmes trying to pick apart each person’s testimony and construct a series of events over his usual methods of observation. This certainly wasn’t an unusual construction – the Max Carrados stories by Ernest Bramah, for example, tend to focus on dialog and interrogation – but this story is a more explicit example of that style of mystery-writing, and it provides an interesting contrast to the usual construction of Holmes story.

That’s a lot to chew on. I’ll save the canon-watching aspects of this story for the next essay.