A 1980 Sherlockian presentation - THE PROBLEMS WITH THE FINAL PROBLEM

In a batch of Sherlockian items I'd acquired in Australia were some items mailed from the US. Among them were this double-sided sheet of paper - a paper presented at a Sherlockian meeting in Illinois that somehow ended up in Canberra, Australia. 

So let's take a look at a 45 year-old piece of scholarship, one that touches on chronology, and takes three very neat Sherlockian approaches to understanding the Final Problem.

  

Transcript:

THE PROBLEMS WITH THE FINAL PROBLEM

I. JOHN H. WATSON'S PROBLEMS:
This is one of the few stories in which Watson's dating is not questioned by the chronologists. All but Blakoney, Brond and Christ accept Watson's, April 24, 1891. (Blakeney doesn't contradict, just says Spring 1891, Beond says April 1891 and Christ suggests 10 days earlier, April1 14).

Now stop for a moment and consider this date. Only STUD and SIGN have been published before this. THE STRAND MAGAZINE had brought out its first issue in January, just four months earlier. SCAN was to appear in the July issue just two months after the events in Fina. With the customary lead time Scan must have been written well before the events recounted in Fina. Probably all of the stories in THE ADVENTURES had been written by then. In the very first paragraph of Fina, Watson mentions the Reuter's dispatch carried in the English papers on May 7, 1891 presumably reporting Holmes' death. Yet there is not one word of it in the STRAND issue for July or in any of the other STRAND issues carrying Holmes stories from August through Novenber 1893.  This was a mere six months before Holmes' return in April 1894 which was not announced until October 1903. There is something fishy about all of this.

Watson has a Moriarty problem. On the second page of Fina (in STRAND) Holmes explains, "You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?" Watson answers, "Never." Yet in VALL which is presumed to have taken place several years earlier Watson knows about Moriarty. Much has been written on this problem and there is no solution which will satisfy every-one. If the tragedy at Birlstone did not occur until 1899 as is maintained by Ian McQueen, and I agree with him, then Moriarty did not die at Reichenbach. This makes Fina look like the hoax that many believe it to be. If it was a hoax, who perpetrated it and who was the victim? The entire trip to Switzerland seems rather thin and senseless. But was Watson taken in by Holmes or by Moriarty through his agent, the swiss lad? Or was Watson the one who was cruel enough to make up a crude story that would cause so much consternation among his thousands of readers? If so, who was the one who put him up to it? Was it Sherlock Holmes or was it Conan Doyle?
Both of them also had problems.

II. SHERLOCK HOLMES' PROBLEMS:
What happens when a private investigator gets too much publicity? Walter Paget found, to his sorrow, that public appearances could be painful. More than once in theater lobbies and restaurants he was pointed out as Sherlock Holmes and subjected to unwanted attention. The true Holmes must have faced a similar problem. The two stories that had already been published had brought him fame and numerous clients. But they had not disclosed his appearance. In Beeton's D. I. Friston showed a Holmes that looked nothing like him. Conan Doyle's father, Charles Doyle, illustrated the first editions of STUD in book form. His pictures did not look the least like

Holmes. The third edtion, profusely illustrated by George Hutchinson showed a barely recognizable Holmes, but not one that would allow anyone to positively identify him. And so, although Holmes was a master of disguise he was still able to go about London without a disguise and without being accosted as a celebrity.

But now the new STRAND MAGAZINE was about to run a series of stories and Greenhough Smith and W. H. J. Boot had engaged Sidney Paget to illustrate them. Paget's skill far surpassed that of his predecessors. He made Holmes look lile Holmes and so there was a problem in the offing. It has been said that Sidney Paget used his brother Walter as a model but Sidney's daughter denies this. Certainly there to a resemblance just as there is a resemblance to Basil Rathbone who was a Paget relative. (See Ann Byerly's articles, BSM 13, P 1 and BSM 16, P 1.)

In the United States Allan Pinkerton solved the problem of ready identification by founding an agency and hiring numerous operatives. In later years Nero Wolfe remained at home most of the time and had Saul Panzer and others to do his leg work.

But Holmes had a different solution - temporary retirement under the mask of death, and, after three years only a very few would know of his return until STRAND published Empt in October 1903. By that time Holmes was ready to permanently retire to his bee farm in Sussex. This was broken but briefly by his service at the outbreak of the Great War.

III. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S PROBLEM:
In 1890 England everybody who was anybody read PUNCH. Only Colonel Blimp, Lord Plushbottom, Mrs Grundy, the uneducated and the uncouth failed to read PUNCH as each weekly issue appeared.

Consider then, the plight of the literary agent as the issue for August 12, 1893 reached its readers. Few, if any, failed to read "The Bishop's Crime, Number I" of "The Adventures of Picklock Holes", by "Cunnin Toil." A week later there was II: "The Duke's Feather" followed by III: "Lady Hilda's Mystery" and IV: "The Escape of the Bull-dog." They were coming every week and the clever parodies on the master detective were swamping him as he appeared in Rosi and Gree in THE STRAND. After a four week rest Picklock was back on October 7 in "The Hungarian Diamond" another four weeks passed and November 4 brought "The Umbrosa Burglary." The Picklock Holes stories were written for PUNCH by R. C. Lehmann a staff writer and a member of "The Punch Table." Jon L. Lellenberg says he was "one of the best British parodists" and "the kind of parodist that sensitive authors must have dreaded" -- (BSM 2, p 15). But well before the final installment of Picklock the decision had been made. The sly digs and hearty guffaws could be endured no longer and Holmes had to go. We know now that he did not die but in the fall of 1893 nothing less than death would not stop the nuisance and so "The Final Problem" was hastily written to appear in THE STRAND for December. And on December 30 the second part of "The Stolen March" closed with an editorial note: "There is no proof positive given by any eye-witness whose veracity is unimpeachable of the death of the great amateur detective as it has been described in the STRAND MAGAZINE for this month. Where is the merry Swiss boy who delivered the note and disappeared? What was the symbolic meaning of the alpenstock with the hook at the end, left on the rock? Why, that he had not "taken his hook," PICKLOCK HOLES has disappeared, but so have a great many other people. That he will turn up again no student of detective history and of the annals of crime can possibly doubt. Is it not probable that he has only dropped out of the STRAND MAGAZINE? And is it not equally probable that under some alias he will re-appear elsewhere? Verb. sap. - ED.

How prophetic! With Holmes gone VIII: "Picklock's Disappearance" was in PUNCH for January 13, 1894. Note "disappearance" not "death." A cartoon "Dropping an 'H'" showed Picklock lowering Sherlock with a rope over the edge of a cliff. The editor commented "-- and when either "SHERIOCK HOLMES" or "PICKLOCK HOLES" may be "wanted," we undertake to produce both or either of them." For years Sherlockians thought that that was the end of Picklock. But recently we have found that he was back in the pages of Punch from October 14, 1903 to March 2, 1904 or just a few weeks after the return of Holmes.

Who among us knows which of the problems was THE problem of "THE FINAL PROBLEM."

Presented by Newt Williams to the Occupants of the Empty House meeting on Friday, June 6, 1980.

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What a delightful read. 'Newt Williams' was Newtown M. Williams. He was a member of the Baker Street Irregulars as "The Netherlands-Sumatra Company", and he died in 1986.

The obituary mentions that Newt was a key early member of the Occupants of the Empty House of Southern Illinois, and founded their journal - The Camden House Journal. 

Brad Keefauver's blog notes that the scion held its last meeting in 2022.

I've ordered a copy of the Wessex Press book 'Commanding Views of the Empty House'. I'd enjoy comparing this paper from a scion meeting to the final published article that may have ended up in the Camden House Journal.