IN CONTEXT
Short story
UK: December 1891
US: December 1891 (as “The Strange Tale of the Beggar”)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892
Neville St. Clair Affluent businessman.
Hugh Boone Disfigured beggar.
Mrs. St. Clair Wife of Neville St. Clair.
Isa Whitney Patient of Watson’s, addicted to opium.
Kate Whitney Wife of Isa and old friend of Mary Watson.
Mary Watson Wife of Watson.
Unusually, this story begins in the home of Watson and his wife, Mary, when they are disturbed one evening by a distressed friend of Mary’s, Kate Whitney. Her husband Isa is an opium addict and has been missing for two days; Kate suspects he is holed up in a opium den. As his doctor, Watson is dispatched to retrieve him. This scene provides a rare insight into Watson’s domestic life; his tone seems to hold both affection and resignation when he remarks, “That was always the way. Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a lighthouse.”
Among the opium fumes
Watson arrives at the Bar of Gold, near London Bridge, and enters a “long, low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an emigrant ship.” He soon encounters Isa Whitney—in the sorry state his wife had predicted. To the doctor’s sheer astonishment, he also sees Holmes among the mumbling addicts, disguised as a decrepit slave to the drug and clearly engaged in an investigation. Watson packs Whitney off in a cab home and joins his old friend on the hunt.
Holmes reveals his mission to Watson: a respectable man of business, Neville St. Clair, has gone missing. He was last glimpsed in the upstairs window of this same opium den by his wife, who happened to be passing by sheer chance. Mrs. St. Clair gained access to the establishment, but found the upstairs room occupied only by a filthy, disfigured beggar named Hugh Boone. There was blood on the windowsill, and items of St. Clair’s clothing and property were found concealed in the room and floating in the river outside. Boone was arrested, but in the absence of any further leads, Mrs. St. Clair has commissioned Holmes to get to the bottom of it. The detective is convinced that this will prove to be a straightforward murder case. He knows the opium den to be “the vilest murder-trap on the whole riverside” and its manager “a man of the vilest antecedents.”
One and the same
Much to Holmes’s surprise, however, his theory is proved incorrect when Mrs. St. Clair receives a note in her husband’s handwriting assuring her that all is well. While Watson sleeps, Holmes at last has the solution. Castigating himself for not seeing the truth sooner, he and Watson make their way to Bow Street police station, brandishing a bathroom sponge with which, quite literally, to clean up the matter.
As Holmes reveals by scrubbing the face of the imprisoned beggar, Hugh Boone and Neville St. Clair are in fact one and the same. A former actor turned journalist, St. Clair had discovered while researching an article just how much money a successful beggar might make, and for some years has been disguising himself grotesquely in the pursuit of easy cash. Unexpectedly sighted by his wife in his changing room above the opium den, he managed to preserve his secret, but at the cost of a murder charge. However, since no crime has actually been committed, St. Clair is released, promising an end to Hugh Boone.
“That rascally Lascar”
Charges of racism are occasionally leveled against Conan Doyle’s portrayal of the lascar who runs the opium den. Lascars were Indian sailors working on British vessels, many of whom settled in London. But Holmes’s poor opinion of the lascar seems to stem more from his murderous criminality than his race, and the representation is far less uncomfortable to the modern reader than that of the crudely caricatured black boxer, Steve Dixie, in “The Adventure of the Three Gables”.
This engraving by Gustave Doré entitled The Lascar’s Room in Edwin Drood conveys the seedy squalor of the Victorian opium den. It was made in 1872, two years after Dickens’s death.
OPIUM DENS IN VICTORIAN LONDON
Dr. Watson’s evocation of the dreamy, seedy world inside the Victorian opium den is a captivating piece of writing, and the description may have been based on a real opium den at the time. London’s best-known den in the 19th century was almost certainly known to Conan Doyle. It was run not by an Indian lascar but by a Chinese immigrant called Ah Sing. The clientele was mostly Chinese sailors, but curious gentlemen and members of the literary elite were also visitors. Ah Sing’s den was to be immortalized in Dickens’s final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and Ah Sing liked to boast that the great novelist had visited his establishment.
However, there were far fewer opium dens in London than the literature and popular press of the day implied. The Pharmacy Act of 1868 restricted the sale of opium products to pharmacists, and many of London’s addicts would not have been the stereotypical immigrant men smoking in a hazy cellar, but could be anyone who was regularly prescribed laudanum (an opium tincture) for pain relief or other symptoms. Laudanum was so ubiquitous it is sometimes referred to as “the aspirin of the 19th century”.