The Six Napoleons
Want to read this along with me? This essay is part of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1905. I used the epub version found on Feedbooks.com.
Before I dig into this story, let’s take a moment to look at the concept of monomania. Watson mentions this as a possible explanation of the destruction of the Napoleon busts, also referring to the French concept “idee fixe.” Monomania was a psychological disorder of the time that seems to crop up a fair amount in Victorian literature. Poe used it extensively in his own work (perhaps most famously in “The Tell-Tale Heart”), it comes up a couple of times in the works of Honore de Balzac, and Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic case of the monomaniac. Like its sister disease, the ever-popular brain fever, monomania is a great literary device, perhaps out of all proportion for the actual illness.
Other historical references circle around Italian life in Victorian London. There’s a reference to “Saffron Hill” in the story, which is one of two Italian communities in London at the time (the other was in Soho). It’s the Victorian equivalent of “Little Italy.” There’s also a reference to the black pearl of the Borgias, a notorious Italian family (the pearl, as far as I can tell, is fictional). Finally, Holmes mentions the Mafia. Doyle characterizes it as a “secret political society,” and it certainly had a disproportional amount of influence in the politics of Italy at the time, but it was just as involved in more mainstream criminal activity, such as theft, kidnapping, and counterfeiting.
Oh, and the story contains perhaps the first ever recorded incident of deliberate news manipulation.
Lestrade features in this story, and we see a bit of his relationship with Holmes and Watson. He stops in and visits with them, and they exchange information informally – Holmes gets to keep up on the latest from Scotland Yard, and Lestrade gets to ask Holmes’ advice on his latest (and presumably, less interesting) cases. Lestrade actually turns out to be a relatively good detective in his own right – obviously not as good at Holmes, but Lestrade comes to some deductions on his own. And later in the story, Holmes is moved by Lestrade’s compliment “We are not jealous of you at Scotland Yard….” In fact, we learn that Holmes actually treasures such praise quite highly:
Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke out clapping as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes’s pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause.
In attempting to date the case, there is a reference to May 20th the previous year being a payday. If we assume that May 20th is a Friday, that makes it May 20th, 1898, placing the case at 1899. However, in the story Sherlock Holmes is mentioned in one of the newspapers. But if this was after the Great Hiatus, why is Watson still kept from publishing his own accounts? Holmes just laughs at the newspaper account, so clearly he’s not worried about the reference.
“The Six Napoleons” is a very popular story, but not really one of my absolute favorites. Mainly, the story has a number of similarities to “Blue Carbuncle,” and that story captured my heart earlier than this one did.