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IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: March 1892

COLLECTION

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892

CHARACTERS

Victor Hatherley Young hydraulic engineer.

Colonel Lysander Stark Middle-aged German man who hires Victor Hatherley.

Elise Young German woman who helps Hatherley to escape.

Mr. Ferguson Stark’s “manager.”

As the reader is informed by Dr. Watson early on in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” this case is one of only two that he has brought to Sherlock Holmes’s attention. Another unusual, although by no means unique, feature is the fact that the criminals manage to evade capture. In a few other cases, the perpetrators initially escape from Holmes, but then fate steps in to mete out justice. In this story, however, there appears to be no retribution for the crime.

An early-morning visitor

So many of Holmes’s cases begin with a knock on the door of the detective’s 221B Baker Street rooms, but here the victim arrives at Watson’s home. As the doctor stresses, the events occur during a quiet, comfortable time in his life: following his recent marriage, he has established a medical practice close to Paddington Station and now only occasionally visits Holmes, for social reasons.

Watson has a useful ally at the nearby station—a train conductor, who directs a steady stream of patients toward his consulting rooms. Early one morning, the conductor arrives with a young man who has alighted from the morning train and asked to see a doctor.

"Holmes sat in his big armchair with the weary, heavy-lidded expression which veiled his keen and eager nature."

Dr. Watson

The severed digit

Watson learns the patient is a hydraulic engineer by the name of Victor Hatherley. He is pale and agitated, and when the doctor suggests that his train journey might have been monotonous, Hatherley breaks into wild laughter that borders on mild hysteria. He soon reveals to Watson the reason for his distress: he has suffered a terrible injury—the loss of his thumb.

Some critics have suggested that this loss of a thumb could be seen as akin to a symbolic castration, and that Conan Doyle was using it to issue a warning. In the 1890s, many people worried that young British men were becoming rather decadent and effete. So here this “castration” may be a reminder of the need to maintain good moral fiber and resilience in a world that challenged Britain’s dominance.

Many Holmes stories feature ruthless villains and gruesome crimes, some of which contain graphic descriptions of physical injury; yet, Watson’s recollection of Hatherley’s injury is shocking in its vividness: “There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from the roots.” Conan Doyle does not usually resort to such sensational detail to grab attention, but here it works. Like Watson, the reader is roused from the preceding, rather sleepy, narrative, and the tale suddenly gains momentum. In its way, this injury is as horrifying as a murder and, like the doctor, the reader is anxious for Holmes to step in as soon as possible.

An analytical mind

When Watson and Hatherley arrive at 221B, Holmes immediately instills calm. After producing some bacon and eggs, he listens with close attention to Hatherley’s story. Holmes invites the young man to lie down on his couch while recalling the events: an approach that is strikingly reminiscent of a key technique that the esteemed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was using with his patients at the time Conan Doyle was writing this story. Of course, the author could not have known about Freud’s ideas, which were not revealed until 1895 with the publication of Studies on Hysteria, his groundbreaking book written with Joseph Breuer. Yet there is an uncanny similarity in the way that both Freud and Holmes listen to a narrative before working toward their conclusions through a steady process of logical deduction.

A tempting offer

Hatherley explains that he is alone in the world—both an orphan and a bachelor. He has been making little headway in his small business, so when a middle-aged German man, who introduced himself as Colonel Lysander Stark, visited him earlier that week and offered him a hefty fee—10 times his usual rate—to repair a hydraulic press, he was eager to agree. Hatherley admits to having had some misgivings about the new client’s manner and his insistence that the work should be carried out in complete secrecy, saying he evoked “a feeling of repulsion” and “something akin to fear.” However, he overlooked his distrust and dislike because he so desperately wanted the work. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the warning signs, it is Stark who turns out to be the villain of the piece. Conan Doyle’s choice of a German national for his evil-doer was probably no coincidence, since it may have been a reflection of the growing anti-German sentiment in Britain at the time. Germany was becoming increasingly militaristic under the ambitious and hostile rule of Kaiser Wilhelm, who was supporting the Boers in South Africa against the British during the Boer War (1899–1902).

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Victor Hatherley, illustrated here by Sidney Paget in The Strand Magazine, finds himself trapped inside the large hydraulic press that he was hired to repair.

A narrow escape

Hatherley explains to the group that Stark persuaded him to head out into the Berkshire countryside late that same evening, to examine and mend a hydraulic press being used to compact Fuller’s earth—a clay used in the wool-making process. He was met by Stark at the isolated station and driven for an hour through the darkness, in a horse-drawn carriage with frosted-glass windows, to the house where the press was located. At this point, Holmes interrupts to ask a seemingly trivial question about the carriage’s horse—was it tired-looking or fresh? The response—“fresh and glossy”—gives the detective his first clue.

At the house, Stark briefly left Hatherley alone, at which point he was approached by a beautiful young woman, later identified as Elise. In broken English, she repeatedly implored the young engineer to leave immediately. However, Hatherley was in desperate need of his fee, and determined to prove his toughness by seeing the job through, so he chose to ignore her warning.

Stark returned with his alleged manager, a Mr. Ferguson, and the pair took Hatherley to the press, located inside a small room. As they entered, the colonel explained that they were now standing inside the machine itself, and that it would be “a particularly unpleasant thing for us if anyone were to turn it on,” since the ceiling would come down with crushing force to meet the floor. Hatherley examined the press, and after discovering a leak in the mechanism, he advised Stark on how to fix it. However, during his inspection it dawned on him that this device was not being used for crushing Fuller’s earth; instead, it was being used to press metal. Upon hearing this, Holmes quickly realizes that it is a machine for making counterfeit coins.

Recognizing that Hatherley had seen through their ploy and afraid that he may have realized the true nature of their illegal work, Stark exited the room, locked the door, and turned on the press—intending to grind the engineer to a pulp. Hatherley screamed and begged to be let out, but his cries were ignored. The ceiling began its ominous descent and it was just a few feet away from Hatherley’s body when the engineer suddenly spotted a concealed panel in the walls of the press. He threw himself through it, narrowly avoiding death.

Waiting on the other side was Elise, who led him to a second-story window and urged him to jump. As Hatherley clung to the windowsill by his hands, Stark arrived brandishing a cleaver and hacked off his thumb. The engineer fell into the garden below and then staggered into some rose bushes before passing out. He regained consciousness the next morning and, nursing his injury, made his way to the train station, which he was surprised to find close by.

"In the silence I heard a sound which sent my heart into my mouth."

Victor Hatherley

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When Hatherley is taken from the station to the house where the press is located, the journey takes an hour, so the police estimate it was a distance of about 12 miles. Holmes believes that because the horse was “fresh and glossy” the house is in fact located very close to the station—a belief that proves to be correct.

House on fire

After hearing the story, Holmes, Watson, and Hatherley set off by train for Eyford, with policemen in tow, to apprehend Stark. En route, they calculate the house’s likely location, using Hatherley’s estimate that it took an hour to get to the house, and therefore it was about 12 miles from the station. Yet Holmes insists the house is close to the station, surmising from Hatherley’s assertion about the fresh state of the horse that the carriage had gone in a circle in order to confuse the engineer’s sense of distance and direction.

Holmes’s deduction is confirmed when, on arrival, they notice flames coming from a nearby house and, as they approach, Hatherley is sure it is the one he was taken to (the discovery by firemen of his severed thumb proves it). The oil lamp that Hatherley had used to inspect the press had started the blaze and it has destroyed all evidence of the counterfeiting gang’s machine. The mysterious German, Elise, and Mr. Ferguson (who it turns out is really named Dr. Becher) have already fled, taking their hoard of counterfeit coins with them, and they are never apprehended.

"…every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it we shall go down to Scotland Yard."

Sherlock Holmes

A painful lesson

As they return to London, Holmes is remarkably sanguine about the case’s outcome. When Hatherley complains that he has lost both his thumb and his fee, Holmes laughs and tells him to simply dine out on the experience. The story, it seems, is not meant to be one of the typical expositions of Holmes’s brilliance, which is relatively modest here, but instead a salutary tale about how easy it is to get sucked into shady and dangerous dealings if one is tempted by easy cash.

COINERS AND SMASHERS

Coins were counterfeited on a huge scale in Victorian London. It is thought that at the beginning of the 19th century there were nearly 50 mints churning out forged half-crowns and other coins, and that by 1850, more than one-fifth of all the trials held at London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) were for “coining” (counterfeiting coins). The guilty parties included both men and women.

The forgers who set up a press, like Colonel Lysander Stark and his accomplices, were known as “coiners” or “bit-fakers,” while the low-life criminals who would subsequently pass the forgeries into circulation were called “smashers.” The fake coins themselves were known as “snide,” and the smasher’s job was often referred to as “snide-pitching.”

Counterfeiting was a labor-intensive and skillful business, since the forgers had to get hold of a press and all the metal they needed to make the coins, and then correctly set up the machine to churn them out. Yet it proved to be a profitable (if disreputable) business for many.

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