Review:The Oxford Sherlock Holmes/Chris Redmond
This review of the book collection "The Oxford Sherlock Holmes", by Arthur Conan Doyle was written by Chris Redmond and published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 4, 1993).
This extensive critical review evaluates The Oxford Sherlock Holmes (1993), assessing its editorial principles, textual revisions, annotations, and scholarly apparatus across the nine-volume set. While praising its authoritative ambition and rich biographical insight, the reviewer challenges certain emendations, interpretative assertions, and editorial practices.
Review
- The Oxford Sherlock Holmes
- General Editor: Owen Dudley Edwards, Oxford University Press, 1993; Nine volume boxed set (ISBN: 0-19-212329-7) £69.95. Also available in individual volumes @ £7.95 each:
- A Study in Scarlet (Edited with an Introduction by Owen Dudley Edwards) ISBN: 0-19-212313-0
- The Sign of the Four (Edited with an Introduction by Christopher Roden) ISBN: 0-19-212316-5
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Edited with an Introduction by Richard Lancelyn Green) ISBN: 0-19-212318-1
- The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Edited with an Introduction by Christopher Roden) ISBN: 0-19-212309-2
- The Hound of the Baskervilles (Edited with an Introduction by Professor W. W. Robson) ISBN: 0-19-212310-6
- The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Edited with an Introduction by Richard Lancelyn Green) ISBN: 0-19-212317-3
- The Valley of Fear (Edited with an Introduction by Owen Dudley Edwards) ISBN: 0-19-212314-9
- His Last Bow (Edited with an Introduction by Owen Dudley Edwards) ISBN: 0-19-212315-7
- The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Edited with an Introduction by Professor W. W. Robson) ISBN: 0-19-212311-4
Reviewed by Chris Redmond
Editors' note: We asked the series' General Editor to comment on points raised in the following review. He has chosen to do so by means of explanatory notes, which are linked to the review by superscript references.
Here at last is the complete Sherlock Holmes — a very different work in nine volumes from the John Murray Complete Sherlock Holmes in two volumes or the Doubleday in one. The Oxford Sherlock Holmes consists of the familiar four novels and fifty-six short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, together with Introductions and voluminous 'explanatory notes', under the general editorship of Owen Dudley Edwards of the University of Edinburgh, best known for his biographical study of ACD's early life, who now becomes the benefactor of all readers of Sherlock Holmes for his guidance of this large and admirable project. Appropriately, the publisher is Oxford University Press, the firm — one might almost say the institution — to whom English-speaking readers look for authoritative books. If this edition is published by Oxford, we can all safely think, then this edition is Sherlock Holmes as it is meant to be. Perhaps (though not necessarily) that means Sherlock Holmes as ACD meant him to be. Certainly, it means Sherlock Holmes as the present generation of readers and scholars deserve him.
No serious Doylean can now be without The Oxford Sherlock Holmes, which offers uncorrupted texts for the Canon and explanatory material for almost every difficult word. Libraries will certainly want these volumes. However, the run of detective-story readers can probably find a more handy companion, and the notes will likely overwhelm all but the most scholarly among those whom ACD described as 'the friends of Mr Sherlock Holmes'. The books are nicely typeset and clearly printed, but on particularly thin paper and in a rather small octavo size, too large to be slipped into a pocket but too small to be held comfortably by an armchair reader. It is an unusual format for reference books, the category in which The Oxford Sherlock Holmes really belongs. Still, the nine volumes look handsome on a shelf together (they arrive in a cardboard carton which, while artistically decorated, is suitable for shipping but not as their permanent home). A 'general editor's preface' by Edwards is repeated in each of the nine volumes, as are a 'select bibliography' (covering a gratifying range, if rather skimpy on conventional Sherlockiana) and a 'Chronology of Arthur Conan Doyle'.
The nine volumes are the work of four editors, Edwards himself having managed three (A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear and His Last Bow) and three others two each. Also from the University of Edinburgh comes W. W. Robson (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Case-Book); from the Arthur Conan Doyle Society comes Christopher Roden (The Sign of the Four and The Memoirs); and from the Sherlockian world and from a background as joint bibliographer of ACD comes Richard Lancelyn Green (The Adventures and The Return). Some inconsistencies of approach inevitably result. Green, for example, reports having consulted manuscripts for most of the short stories that came under his care; the other editors were less fortunate in their access to original manuscripts. Because all four editors are British (1), it can sometimes seem that North American matters are given short shrift, despite recognition of ACD's own keen interest in the United States. The identifications of American places are made in a British accent, and Green slightingly refers to a familiar, if erroneous, textual reading (found in Doubleday, for example) as being of 'some late, corrupt editions'.
One purpose of a publication like the Oxford is to establish a definitive text for the work — or, since the editors do not use the word 'definitive', at least to establish the best possible text. Such a task involves considerably more than replacing 'Somomy' with 'Isonomy' and determining whether the Shafters of The Valley of Fear are Swedish or German. In this case the editors have not hesitated to wield their pens, and what appears on the pages often is not the text with which we are comfortable and familiar. Even the order of the stories has been changed in a few cases: 'The Cardboard Box' moves back to the Memoirs volume for which ACD originally wrote it, for example, which is reasonable enough, and chronological order restored or conjectured in several other instances. Rather than the sequence ACD presumably chose when a collection was made in 1927, for example, The Case-Book ends with 'Shoscombe Old Place'. Since it and 'The Retired Colourman' are equally tales of old age, retirement, exhaustion, sadness and death, there is perhaps not much to choose between the two arrangements.
Hundreds of variations and new readings are to be found, as close attention to the Strand and in some cases to manuscripts has had dramatic effects. Perhaps least welcome is the reversion to the original 'The Reigate Squire', which may well have been ACD's intention but is more likely to puzzle the modern reader. (Its appearance was the decision of Roden, who however redeems himself by choosing a five-word title for The Sign of the Four). Less remarkably, the notes to 'The Lion's Mane' are thick with variant textual readings, made more accessible by the recent publication of the Westminster Libraries' manuscript facsimile. The reader learns that some of the recognised differences between 'British' and 'American' texts in a number of stories date to the original appearances in the Strand and Collier's respectively, and that ACD's words were often deliberately changed (to remove profanity, in particular) by early editors. Most of the revisions the Oxford editors have decreed can be applauded, although some are indeed surprises, and some are of unusual interest: Edwards makes the persuasive case that ACD himself revised the text of 'His Last Bow' from the book edition for the Strand, rather than the other way round.
However, there are (or should be) limits. How can an editor justify changing the date of 'Wisteria Lodge' from 1892 to 1895, apparently on the grounds that ACD would have written 1895' had he been less careless? Generations of scholars, not all of them entirely foolish, have enjoyed speculating on how Sherlock Holmes might have solved a case in 1892 while he was presumed lying dead at the foot of a Swiss waterfall, and tampering with the original tale unwisely deprives them of that crux. (2) The same applies to the uncertainty between June and September in The Sign of the Four: Roden sensibly prefers September, and recklessly makes Watson follow his preference. But Green has left intact the impossible April-October dates in 'The Red-Headed League'. Among other victims of editorial enthusiasm are the 'Long Island cave mystery' in 'The Red Circle', where Edwards has altered the crucial word to 'cove' simply because Long Island, New York, has coves but not caves, and the Latin quotation at the end of A Study in Scarlet, in which Edwards has corrected a long-noted orthographical error. How dare an editor change something, however mistaken, which ACD or Watson certainly wrote? (3)
The editors' Introductions to their volumes vary considerably. Thus Edwards connects A Study in Scarlet to sources in Doyle's early reading, such as Sir Walter Scott, and with his own early writing, in particular 'Goresthorpe Grange'. Roden in The Sign helpfully explains that book's style and content, more sophisticated than that of its predecessor: ACD was now seeking to attract a 'wider and more reputable' readership. Green in the Adventures describes the struggles, then the quick success of the young author. Edwards in His Last Bow observes that in maturity ACD was writing tales that approached 'literature for its own sake'. And at last Robson in the Case-Book remarks that 'There was no place for the one-time cosiness of Baker Street in the cruel, disenchanted post-war world.' The editors' insights (those of Doyleans, rather than those of Sherlockians) are often carefully chosen and are of great value. When Green calls the stories of the Return 'great comic creations', or Robson assesses The Case-Book as 'glimpses of hell', they are defining the way these stories will be read by all serious students hereafter.
One does not always expect to agree with the evaluations made by editors, but it does seem extraordinary to see 'The Veiled Lodger' described (by Edwards) as 'great', a judgment in which Robson seems to concur; the latter, furthermore, is dubious about 'The Retired Colourman', surely one of the most dramatic of all the sixty stories. He seems to suggest seriously that some of the Case-Book stories are not by ACD a proposition from which one shies away, despite its foreshadowing in the long-standing Sherlockian speculation that someone, perhaps ACD himself, impersonated Watson in these late writings. Why, after all, should it be inadmissible that a weary and preoccupied author in a hurry occasionally did not live up to his own high standard?
Edwards and Green, in particular, base their Introductions (and their notes) on an immense, not to say intimidating, knowledge of ACD's life: in Edwards's case the Edinburgh and family aspects, in Green's the relationships with editors and the literary milieu. The reader is so showered with facts and assertions that no dispute seems possible. Virtually all the editor's interpretations are presented ex cathedra, and there is inconsistent acknowledgement, at best, of those first offered by other researchers over many years of Doylean and Sherlockian work. In this respect, as in its flat-footed adherence to Doyle rather than Watson as author, the Oxford edition is at the opposite pole from William S. Baring-Gould's twenty-year-old Annotated Sherlock Holmes. In that great ungainly work, every possible theory or interpretation was both quoted and generously credited, a policy leading to exhaustion. In the more compact Oxford notes, the present reviewer recognises his own remarks echoed in connection with The Sign of the Four and 'The Dying Detective', in particular. Other scholars will have similar experiences. (4) A general mention in the 'Selected Bibliography' or the acknowledgements seems less than adequate as credit for specific ideas. Self-evidently no larceny is intended, but the impression is one of arrogance. (5)
When previous research is not involved, and the findings are new to the Oxford editors, the information offered (especially about ACD's own life and colleagues) is sometimes drawn from sources whose very location is not widely known. For example, Edwards asserts that there is powerful evidence of The Valley of Fear having been written originally in the third person — possibly, that is, without Watson — and later revised, but he does not fully explain how he knows. Indeed, he explicitly says that he has not consulted the manuscript. (6) Rather similarly, Green remarks, citing no source, that 'The Second Stain' was 'written at the Golden Cross Hotel'. And where is the 'diary' of ACD to which Roden refers, and how do we come to know that ACD's mentor, Bryan Charles Waller, was fond of curries? (7) In the absence of information about specific sources and depositories, such references amount to the flaunting of privileged access, and seem unfair to other scholars as well as unhelpful to future students. To cite another instance: three of the editors (one of them inconsistently) refer to ACD's first wife as 'Louisa'. If information has come to light making clear that that was her name, rather than the familiar 'Louise', they give no indication of its nature.
It remains true, in spite of these strictures, that one can learn more from Edwards than from any other scholar about ACD the schoolboy, ACD the young doctor, ACD the inheritor of Irish temperament and Irish blood-feuds. His Introduction to The Valley of Fear interprets it as essentially a book about the Irish troubles, while his Introduction to A Study in Scarlet unsurprisingly goes over much of the same territory as his biography of ACD, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, making clear its sources in ACD's childhood, youth and early reading (and identifying desert starvation in 1847 with the Irish famine of the same year). Elsewhere, in Introductions and notes, Edwards offers many other equally valuable insights: for example, that 'Wisteria Lodge' was clearly inspired by the Congo atrocities, with which ACD was concerning himself just at the time when it was written. He and Roden both suggest that the suppression of The Cardboard Box' may have had much to do with the death of ACD's father, Charles Doyle, as it contained embarrassing reminders of his embarrassing life.
The weakness of Edwards's Introductions, if they must have one (beyond their desperately dense style, dependent on sentences so long, and punctuation so intricate, that the parentheses do not always match up), is that the reader may weary of being told so much. This erudite editor can let no fact, indeed no hypothetical link between source and product, go unpublished. But there are rewards to the reader, both in information and in flashes of a humour that it would be an offence not to call, like Watson's, 'pawky' (or, as Edwards would prefer to have it spelt, 'pawkie'). Green's Introductions are easier reading, a name-dropping paradise of information about how Doyle came to write the stories and the mechanics of their appearance in print. His notes reveal that he has seen ACD's account-books and that he has done immense research into the details of ACD's sporting acquaintances; he also reports a business venture, having to do with the reproduction of marble busts, that is not well known to ACD's biographers. As Edwards clearly works from his own biography of the young man, Green clearly works from the Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle which he co-edited, and from his Introduction (a lesser scholar would call it a biography) to The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes. The pages written by the third editor, Roden, have some of the character of both Edwards's and Green's, drawing on biographical and bibliographical sources (and, unlike any of the other editors, saying much about illustrators). Roden's is the most lyrical writing in any of the Introductions, and the most clearly appreciative of both ACD and his persona Dr Watson. By contrast with the other three editors, finally, Robson is pre-eminently a literary critic, commenting on the stories' strengths and weaknesses, how they reflect their times and how they impress the reader. He mentions, as Green and Edwards would not do, the 'poetry' in The Hound of the Baskervilles (although he neglects to mention the striking grey-and-green palette from which ACD's word pictures are painted).
The explanatory notes' are located at the back of their respective volumes, keyed to the text by asterisks, rather than accessible at the foot of the page or, as in the Annotated, as marginalia. Perhaps mechanical constraints make this arrangement unavoidable, but it is far from friendly to the reader. Be that as it may, they are a repository of treasure. Some of them deal simply with household articles now disused, or quirks of Victorian society (although it is difficult to imagine a reader of Sherlock Holmes who neither knows the meaning of 'tomboy' and 'canine' nor has ready access to a dictionary). Such definitions can be immensely helpful, not least the note by Edwards which finally identifies Watson's much disputed 'bull pup' as neither a dog nor a bad temper, but a type of gun. Other notes dutifully explain geographical matters and historical allusions, from Malthus to Euston. Existing Sherlockian reference books, most obviously the Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana of Jack Tracy, have done much the same, usually more briefly, although the Annotated Sherlock Holmes certainly has far more to say than do the Case-Book notes about 'Tyburn Tree'. Some phrases (Albert chain, Langham Hotel) receive the attention of more than one editor, in widely separated locations, and experience varying emphases and definitions; the extreme is reached when Green must define 'Gravesend', in similar but not identical words, twice within eight pages.
Such material, especially in Edwards's volumes, can be both exhaustive and exhausting, no possible connection being left unmentioned. And it does seem excessive for the annotations in The Valley of Fear to identify Franklin Benjamin Gowen three separate times, and to give three times the dates of his birth and death. The notes are also not without factual blunders (such as the reference to 'Canadian western states') (8) and, regrettably, typographical errors, some of them serious, such as the substitution of 1911' for some unidentifiable nineteenth-century date in the notes to A Study in Scarlet. Grammatical slips are also to be found, indication perhaps that the editing was finished in haste, and Edwards falls into the trap of mentioning 'Lady Carfax' at one point.
But these are quibbles about a mountain of learned and well-chosen material, sometimes pedestrian and sometimes illuminating. Here and there one welcomes unexpected flashes, such as Robson's note about the plausibility of the name 'Alexander Hamilton Garrideb' in 'The Three Garridebs', and Roden's deduction from the use of the name 'Regent Circus' that ACD was still working from maps, rather than from direct knowledge of London, as late as 1893. Most of the editors' perceptions, large or small, are offered matter-of-factly and without trumpet-flourishes. Green is particularly generous with notes about the likely origins of names and incidents; he begins each story's notes with a short essay on sources, something the other editors do not generally offer. Many of his identifications are original, though not all.
Robson is both original and plausible in suggesting that 'The Three Gables', long recognised as some sort of aberration among Holmes stories, was originally nothing of the sort, but a 'Regency romance', hastily revised when a deadline for a Holmes tale loomed. If he is not proven to be right, at least no more plausible idea has yet come forward. Oddly, he does not even hint at the idea, which has been raised by competent scholars, that the same is true of The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Dr Mortimer originally intended to be its protagonist. The latter suggestion is among many fruitful ideas from the Doylean and Sherlockian literature that are ignored by the Oxford editors, possibly because, having seemingly defined such literature consciously as mostly 'chaff', they have not read as widely in it as infinite leisure might have allowed. Discussing the sources of the Hound story, for example, Robson shows rather too much credulity for the Cabell family legend, and never refers to the researches of scholars such as Janice McNabb who have effectively demolished its claim. (9)
In some cases one can simply disagree with the judgments expressed by the editors, as when Edwards says that ACD 'did not make much use of symbolic surnames'. He is speaking of the author who created the Adler who addled, the Angel who was a devil, the Boone who begged, the Clay who dug in the earth, the handsome young Fairbairn, the Harker whose job was to listen, the optimistic Hope, the Moriarty who brought mortality, the Prosper who was a tradesman, and many another of that sort. Equally questionable, surely, is his insistence (half-a-dozen times scattered through the notes to A Study in Scarlet) that Lucy Ferrier was raped. She may have been ill-treated and died of ill-treatment, but polygamous marriage is not the same thing as rape. (10)
There is, in short, much to argue about in these hundreds of pages. If there were not, there would be no market for a nearly-definitive annotated edition of the Sherlockian Canon, and Oxford would never have considered publishing it. Aficionados should not, however, fall into the trap of considering the Oxford Sherlock Holmes simply a book in which some arguments are settled while others are started. Its most important result is to define Arthur Conan Doyle as an author, and Sherlock Holmes as a body of work, that can be counted with the solid and permanent in English literature. No reader of this review, surely, would wish to disagree.
Christopher Roden
General Editor's Remarks:
1. One editor is not British!
2. Thank God it does! Chris Redmond
3. ACD almost certainly wrote 'contemplor', 'cord', 'cove', 'post', which are restored here in place of printers' errors. Watson quite certainly wrote nothing!
4. I am pleased to learn that the present reviewer agrees with my remarks on 'The Dying Detective': I did not echo him. Other editors will have similar experiences. 5. As for the reviewer's wish for fewer notes, together with more notes mentioning himself, the impression is one of innocence.
6. The ms, as stated, is discussed on the basis of its opening as reproduced in The Strand, and also from scholars' reports of it.
7. Interviews with Bryan Charles Waller's surviving maid-servants, as cited in The Quest for Sherlock Holmes
8. 'States' should be 'provinces', and the reviewer should have said that.
9. The significance of Janice McNabb is hardly assisted by the reviewer's concealing the location of her work. (Chris Redmond is, of course, referring to The Curious Incident of the Hound on Dartmoor by Janice McNabb, published by The Bootmakers of Toronto, as Occasional Paper No.1, in 1984. The booklet was edited by Chris Redmond and copies may still be available — Eds.)
10. Forced marriage means rape.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
