HOLMES ON THE RANGE
A TALE OF THE CAXTON PRIVATE LENDING LIBRARY & BOOK DEPOSITORY
by John Connolly
The history of the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository has not been entirely without incident, as befits an institution of seemingly infinite space inhabited largely by fictional characters who have found their way into the physical realm.
For those unfamiliar with the institution, the Caxton came into being after its founder, William Caxton, woke up one morning in 1477 to find a number of characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales arguing in his garden. Caxton quickly realized that these characters—the Miller, the Reeve, The Knight, the Second Nun, and the Wife of Bath—had become so fixed in the public imagination that they had transcended their literary origins and assumed an objective reality, which was problematical for all concerned. Somewhere had to be found for them to live, and thus the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository was established as a kind of rest home for the great, the good, and, occasionally, the not-so-good-but-definitely-memorable, of literature, all supported by rounding up the prices on books by a ha’penny a time.
The death of Charles Dickens in June 1870 precipitated the single greatest mass arrival of such characters in the Caxton’s history. Mr. Torrans, the librarian at the time, at least had a little warning of the impending influx, for—as was traditional when new characters were about to join the Caxton—he had recently received a large quantity of pristine Dickens first editions in the post, each carefully wrapped in brown paper and string, and without a return address. No librarian had ever quite managed to figure out how the books came to be sent; old George Scott, Mr. Torrans’s predecessor, had come to the conclusion that the books simply wrapped and posted themselves, although by that stage Scott was quite mad, and spent most of his time engrossed in increasingly circular conversations with Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, of which no good could possibly have come.
Of course, Mr. Torrans had been anticipating the appearance of the Dickens characters long before the death of the author himself and the subsequent arrival of the first editions. Some characters were simply destined for the Caxton from the moment that they first appeared in print, and Mr. Torrans would occasionally wander into the darker realms of the Caxton, where rooms were still in the process of formation, and try to guess which figures were likely to inhabit them. In the case of Dickens, the presence of a guide to the old coaching inns of Britain provided a clue to the future home of Samuel Pickwick, and a cheap bowl and toasting fork would serve as a reminder to Oliver Twist of the terrible early start to life that he had overcome. (Mr. Torrans was of the opinion that such a nudge was unnecessary under the circumstances, but the Caxton was mysterious in its ways.)
In fact, Mr. Torrans’s only concern was that the characters might include rather more of the unsavory sort than he might have preferred—he was not sure what he would do if forced to deal with a Quilp, or a Uriah Heep—so it came as a great relief to him when, for the most part, the influx was largely restricted to the more pleasant types, with the exception of old Fagin, who appeared to have been mellowed somewhat by the action of the noose. Hanging, thought Mr. Torrans, will do that to a man.
But the tale of the Dickens characters is for another time. For the present, we are concerned with one of the stranger stories from the Caxton’s annals, an occurrence that broke many of the library’s long-established rules and seemed destined, at one point, to undermine the entire delicate edifice of the institution.
In December 1893, the collective imagination of the British reading public suffered a shock unlike any in recent memory with the publication in the Strand Magazine of “The Final Problem,” in which Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his beloved Sherlock Holmes, sending him over a cliff at the Reichenbach Falls following a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. The illustrator Sidney Paget captured the hero’s final moments for readers, freezing him in a grapple with Moriarty, the two men leaning to the right, clearly on the verge of falling, Moriarty’s hat already disappearing into the void, foreshadowing the inevitable descent of the two men.