As it was, any apprehensions of today’s polarising debates on what it means to be English I’m sure were far from my mind because what entranced me most was the thought that the massive sylvan hanger that clung to the escarpment above Streat was the very embodiment of the Victorian mystery fiction I nightly devoured, thanks to a number of my grandfather’s bound volumes of the Strand Magazine I had made my own.
Explain? The massive ‘V’ on the Downs above Streat was planted in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. Composed of Scotch pine, spruce, larch, beech, sycamore and lime, this living monument to a queen regnant raised by a loyal yeoman farmer required 3060 plants at a cost of 12 pounds, 10 shillings and four pence, not including 38 pounds for labour. The outside measurement of each arm is 165 yards in length. The width of each arm is 22 yards – that time-honoured distance, the twentieth of a quarter of a mile, the length of a cricket pitch (Sussex is the birthplace of adult cricket, cited in the early 1600s). The ‘V’ is one of the most loved landmarks within the South Downs National Park.
Local legend, I recall, had it that such were the fears of ever mounting expenditure the farmer abandoned his intention to complete the V.R. (Victoria Regina) of his original scheme, and settled for the pure symmetry of a commanding ‘V’, for which a future generation of austere minimalists is profoundly grateful.
Writ large.
It’s easy to guess why I was entranced. The incomplete ‘V’ reminded me of nothing so much as that characteristic passage in the case book of Sherlock Holmes I’d read so eagerly in the Strand Magazine for 1893, published six years after the farmer’s celebrations yet sharing the impulse towards the expression of an unquestioning monarchial devotion writ large with the means closest to hand . . . saplings in the farmer’s case, and in the case of Sherlock Holmes . . .
[Watson deplores Holmes’s marksmanship.] I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
(The Strand Magazine 1893)
Yet, in my maturity, I begin to wonder whether my loyal citizenship test of Englishness does not require, after all, the further validation of an ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’*, because I must confess my knee-high view of classic Victorian crime literature is now revealed to me to be simply the fancy of a purblind innocent who, unlike the jingoistic Holmes, hadn’t completely joined up the dots . . . . . .
Toffs as Drifters: Holmes and Raffles in the Strand.
The fog-cloaked London of the Strand Magazine’s crime fiction in the 1890s, as Sherlockians will be aware, harboured both the exploits of the private detective, Holmes, and the escapades of the notorious (yet also jingoistic) Raffles, gentleman thief, the incomparable protagonists created respectively by brothers-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung. Yet, now with 20/20 hindsight, as I have hinted, isn’t it about time we took to task these two fictive toffs for masquerading as members of the Deserving Poor – ‘hansom cab-runners’, to be precise – to thus deny indigent workers their honest wage? The flippancy of their offence is all the more egregious when you consider that an unflinching social realist of the same decade, George Gissing, was also a stablemate of these feted authors at the Strand and, by contrast, had an entirely clear-eyed and empathetic view of the penniless drifters who followed cabs. A cab-runner** in those days was regarded as roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort.
As to the cold-blooded cynicism of Holmes and Raffles, I invite you to consider these extracts from their adventures in the guise of ‘horsey men out of work’, a subterfuge that exploited the advantages of cabmen as confidants. First, Holmes reveals to Watson his ‘amazing powers in the use of disguises’:
‘I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know . . . I then lounged down the street . . . and lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange tuppence . . . I was still balancing the matter in my mind . . . when up the lane came a neat little landau . . . It hadn’t pulled up before she [Irene Adler] shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for . . . “The Church of St. Monica, John,” she cried, “and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.” This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came through the street.’
A Scandal in Bohemia
(The Strand 1891)
(The Strand 1891)
 |
| A cab-runner in those days was regarded as roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort. |
‘Whip behind!’
Had Sherlock Holmes perched behind Irene’s landau, we wonder, would a street urchin have cried, ‘Whip behind!’ This, after all, was the customary exposure of free rides by stowaways on horse cabs. In the event, Holmes reverted to toff, flourished half a sovereign, and followed Irene in a cab.The rather more athletic A. J. Raffles, on the other hand, demonstrates, an even deeper immersion in the character of a ‘cab follower’, according to faithful sidekick, Bunny Manders:
‘But surely you get some exercise? ’ I asked; for he was leading me at a good rate through the leafy byways of Campden Hill; and his step was as springy and as light as ever. ‘The best exercise I ever had in my life,’ said Raffles; ‘and you would never live to guess what it is. It’s one of the reasons why I went in for this seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn out about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King’s Cross; that is, of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run my three or four miles for a bob or less. And it not only keeps you in the very pink: if you’re good they let you carry the trunks upstairs; and I’ve taken notes from the inside of more than one commodious residence which will come in useful in the autumn.’
The Rest Cure
(1905)
(1905)
‘V’ for le vice anglais?
A shilling or less! Well, before you dismiss my notion of a certain blinkered condescension on the part of celebrated toffs playing at charades with the livelihoods of a desperate underclass, please consider the intriguing fact that Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle and Hornung were close acquaintances, and Wilde was the reviled Accused at the centre of a cause célèbre of a notoriety that saw ‘illiterate boys’ called as witnesses in a trial in which Wilde was prosecuted on charges of gross indecency, mostly procured sexual encounters with young grooms and valets. From the witness-box the court heard the nature of Wilde’s inducements to those ‘illiterate boys’ to share debauches that indulged his taste for ‘feasting with panthers’, reportedly: ‘Bring your friends; they are my friends; I will not enquire too closely whether they come from the stables or the kitchen.’Does the ‘V’ of my meditation on Englishness of this sort, then, stand for le vice anglais?
In fact, the often epigrammatic wit of both Holmes and Raffles is said to be founded by their authors on the quick tongue of Wilde yet, despite this brilliance, the unconscionable exploitation of London’s underclass in the fictions of Conan Doyle and Hornung casts a dismal shadow to remind us how fin-de-siècle decadence can pervade popular literature when a prosperous middle class readership conspires in suspending disbelief. As I have pointed out elsewhere, is not A Study in in Scarlet, 1886 (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), a title par excellence for the Decadent Movement, never mind the Whistlerian connotations?
Conversely, George Gissing, writing in his characteristic vein of socio-cultural observation of the poor, owed much, I suspect, to the findings of that guiding spirit of his youth, the social researcher and reformer, Henry Mayhew.
So I must conclude that the measure of my Englishness is now most likely reduced to this: In the case of the Holmesian Übermensch versus the Mayhevian Untermenschen whose side do I take? The Infallible Polymath or the Ruined Boys?
Just to earn a few pence.
There were 1.2 million poor living in extreme squalor in the London of the 1890s, with malnutrition a scourge condemning nearly 500 of London’s poorest to starve to death in the capital annually . . . so, when I think of the Baker Street Irregulars, those ragged, hungering, lice-ridden, barefoot street urchins (‘like so many rats’) engaged for a few pence by Holmes as his snitches, I believe I know the answer:‘V’ = Vanquished
•
*For an account of the rigours of ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’, see A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
**For a character sketch of cab-runners from George Gissing’s socio-cultural perspective, see . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-theory-of-literary-reincarnation.html
•
Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
