The Golden Pince-Nez

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.

A golden what now? This case has a few bits of interesting Victorian lore, starting with the title itself. A pince-nez is a style of eyeglasses popular in the 19th century. Instead of having arms that hooked around the ears, the glasses were pinched around the nose and held in place by the nose-pieces. A good iconic example of a pince-nez wearing would be Theodore Roosevelt, but the style was generally out of fashion by the 1920s or 1930s.

We also have a more detailed mention of cigarettes in this story. Cigarettes are relatively novel in Victorian England at this point, but they had trouble gaining traction with the higher classes (despite the fact that Holmes smokes them in this story and Watson smokes them in Hound). They were seen as particularly working-class, and ended up gaining the stigma of being unhealthy. Cigarettes were blamed for the various illnesses and medical problems that all tobacco products brought.

Speaking of cigarettes, at one point Professor Coram mentioned that he goes through a thousand cigarettes every fortnight. My wife used to work as a smoking cessation coach, so I asked her how much smoking that would be from a current perspective. Assuming twenty cigarettes in a modern pack of cigarettes, Coram would have to smoke just over three and a half packs a day, or nearly four cigarettes every waking hour! Granted, it seems that Mr. Smith was a smoker as well (and therefore may have smoked some of Coram’s cigarettes), but that’s still a hell of a lot of smoking.

Then there’s the reference to Russian nihilism. The Nihilist movement started in the 1860s as an early form of anarchism, but it became known for political violence after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. So, it’s plausible that the nihilists were active in 1894, but I can’t help but wonder if Doyle’s portrayal of the nihilists is as accurate as his portrayals of the Mafia and the KKK were in previous stories.

Finally, there’s a mysterious reference to “love-gages.” I hadn’t encountered the word before, and my online searching kept trying to correct the word to “gags,” which ended up being less helpful and more awkward. However, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. II comes to the rescue. From p. 1110:

A gage is an item offered as a token or a pledge. More specifically, it used to refer to the glove offered (or thrown down) as challenge to a duel. Here, the word is used in its secondary sense, a “love-gage” being a sign of the affection one lover pledges to another.

This story opens in late November, 1894, just after the Great Hiatus. Watson’s getting more specific with dating in his past few cases, and we learn that the time around Holmes’ return was extremely busy. We also get a quote of what is probably the densest listing of apocryphal cases I’ve seen so far:

As I turn over the pages I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin – an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour.

We see detective Stanley Hopkins again, who previously showed up in “Black Peter.” Watson also refers to “our pursuit of the Andaman Islander,” a reference to The Sign of the Four. Doyle is making more and more use of his continuity as he goes on.

A couple of interesting things about Holmes crop up in this story. At one point Holmes mentions that deciphering a palimpsest¹ was “trying work for the eyes,” and some have latched on to that as an indication of Holmes’ eyesight getting worse as he aged. Right now, that’s the only reference I’ve seen to it, and without knowing how long he was staring at the palimpsest, I’m not inclined to put any weight on the idea.

However, I will take a moment to look back at Holmes’ relationship with women. In the early canon his attitude towards the fairer sex was pretty clear: he would “make merry over the cleverness of women.”² And yet, now Watson mentions that “Holmes had, when he liked, a particularly ingratiating way with women.” Clearly we’ve seen that when he toyed with a housemaid’s affections in “Charles Augustus Milverton.” Far from being the emotionless machine that Watson often paints him as, Holmes would seem to have an attractiveness and charisma appealing to the opposite sex. Holmes’ dismissal of women may be due to the fact that he finds them easily manipulated – Irene Adler, for example, was only taken in for a few minutes by Holmes’ most elaborate ruse, while it seems that more common women easily fall for his charms. And yet, he has manipulated his own best friend, but there is no corresponding weight placed on the gullibility of men. Why the emphasis on women? Is it merely Victorian sexism, or something more?

Finally, neither the Feedbooks version I’m reading nor the Wikisource version I use for quoting had the chart that Holmes refers to. There was a picture in my copy of Annotated, however, so the story was intended to have the image. I found a copy and have attached it below.