IN CONTEXT
Short story
UK: April 1892
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892
Lord Robert St. Simon Middle-aged, second son of the Duke of Balmoral.
Hatty Doran Young American woman, recently married to St. Simon.
Flora Millar Former music-hall dancer and an intimate of St. Simon.
Francis (“Frank”) Hay Moulton Wealthy American gentleman, formerly a mining prospector.
Inspector Lestrade Scotland Yard detective.
As the story opens, Watson is confined indoors by the seasonal ache of his war wound. His day is brightened by the arrival of an eminent new client: Lord Robert St. Simon, one of the highest aristocrats in the land.
The nobleman has recently married Hatty Doran, a free-spirited American heiress. However, during their wedding reception, the bride excused herself and fled, and has not been seen since. Flora Millar, a jealous chorus girl with whom St. Simon had once been intimate, tried to storm into the reception and was subsequently seen talking to Hatty in Hyde Park. Flora has been arrested but St. Simon does not believe she has done Hatty any harm, but he is anxious to find his wife, and so he engages the services of Holmes and Lestrade.
An awkward situation
As usual, Lestrade is fixated on the first solution that presents itself: he thinks Flora lured Hatty away from her guests and then ambushed her. The discovery of a sodden wedding dress in Hyde Park’s lake, with a note written by someone with the initials F. H. M. in its pocket, seems to prove his theory. Holmes is more interested in the fact that it was scribbled on an expensive hotel bill.
As Lestrade becomes ever more confused, Holmes announces that he has already solved the case. To him, two things are obvious: Hatty had been content to go through with the wedding but something had occurred immediately afterwards that made her regret it. She must have seen someone—given her origins, this was probably an American—and whoever it was must have been important to her, most likely a man. These clues enable Holmes to orchestrate a resolution to a story that began years earlier, in the gold fields of California.
Hatty Doran is, in fact, already married—to an American gold miner named Francis (“Frank”) Hay Moulton. She thought he had been killed during an Apache Indian attack, but he escaped and has since made his fortune. Tracking her down on the morning of her second wedding, Frank sneaked into the service and passed Hatty a note, signed with his initials. Shocked and confused to see her first husband alive, Hatty ran to him; Flora accosted her en route, but she ignored her. And, in an attempt to conceal Hatty’s tracks, Frank tossed her wedding outfit in the lake.
Holmes locates the hotel that Frank had just left, and obtains his new address. There he finds the couple and, after hearing their story, encourages them to make peace with St. Simon. Faced with Hatty’s request for forgiveness, the nobleman agrees to shake hands, albeit peevishly.
"My whole examination served to turn my conjecture into a certainty."
Sherlock Holmes
In the 1800s, high-society weddings, like St. Simon’s, were lavish affairs, with brides wearing white—a new fashion made popular by Queen Victoria.
Holmes as mouthpiece
Among Holmes’s socially diverse clientele, the upper classes do not always emerge particularly well. Lord St. Simon is fussy to the point of “foppishness” about his looks, and he is self-important and not very bright. Holmes takes evident enjoyment in gently mocking his intellect and exposing his various upper-class hypocrisies. However, the duke’s son has escaped lightly compared to Flora. Holmes’s worst characteristic in this story is arguably his careless snobbery in casting off the dancer so unfeelingly.
The story is also an opportunity for Conan Doyle to express his feelings about America. Although it is not always evident from his American villains, he was a great admirer of the US and toured there several times. In 1896, he penned a letter to The Times advocating closer ties with the country. In this story, Holmes gives a voice to his creator’s vision of a future in which Britons and Americans are “citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”
AMERICAN HEIRESSES
Britain’s historic country estates were ruinously costly to run, and in the late 1800s the nobility were increasingly trading their titles for money from across the Atlantic. Just as television’s fictional Earl of Grantham saved Downton Abbey through his wealthy American bride, so the real-life Duke of Marlborough secured Blenheim Palace’s future by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt (pictured) from New York. There was even a quarterly periodical called Titled Americans, listing all the ladies of America who had married old-world aristocrats, along with notable bachelors still on the market.
The American society ladies made their mark in political matters, too. Mary Leiter from Chicago became Vicereine of India and an early conservationist; Nancy Witcher Langhorne from Virginia (whose husband was US-born but ended up a hereditary peer) was later Viscountess Astor, the first woman to sit as an MP; and Jennie Jerome from Brooklyn became Lady Randolph Churchill and Winston Churchill’s mother.