Bolintineanu - The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor

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Introduction

Arthur Conan Doyle first published The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor in the Strand, in April 1892.  The story is a missing-person case.  Lord St. Simon's newly-wedded bride, Miss Hatty Doran, is married to Lord St. Simon in church, but she leaves her new bridegroom and wedding guests during the wedding breakfast and disappears.  Lord St. Simon asks Sherlock Holmes to trace the missing bride.  

This exhibit’s mission is the same:  it works its way through the story to reconstruct Hatty Doran's trajectory, from her early years in the United States to her final appearance in 221B's parlour.

Space in the Story

In “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” the narrator and point-of-view character, Dr. Watson, never leaves the cozy apartment in Baker Street:  he experiences the narrative through the eyes of visitors and of Sherlock Holmes himself.  Yet the story creates three different spaces, each corresponding to its own social world and culture:  first, Baker Street itself, the apartment, in which characters of all social classes meet with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson; second, the church of St. George in Hanover Square, a wealthy neighbourhood, in which the wedding ceremony is held—a church that corresponds to the wealthy, upper-class world of Lord St. Simon and English high society; and third, the mining camp in Colorado, where Hattie Doran grows up—the camp that corresponds to the American working-class world of Hattie Doran and her first husband.

This exhibit focuses on the two contrasting social spaces:  that of the English upper class and that of the Colorado mining camp.  The marriage between Hattie Doran and Lord St. Simon temporarily connects these contrasting social spaces.  But that brief marriage is doomed from the start: Hattie Doran recognizes her long-lost mining-camp husband just before speaking her marriage vows, and leaves Lord St. Simon for her true love.  My exhibit argues that “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” persistently highlights, in spatial terms, the mismatch in the Lord St. Simon marriage.  First, the story highlights the gap between Lord St Simon and Hattie Doran’s social spaces through names, idioms, and geographical details associated with each of their social spaces.  Second, the story uses spatial metaphors to depict the marriage as a territorial infringement, from both sides.  The St. Simon marriage is doomed from before it begins, and the story underscores this doom through spaces both real and metaphorical.

  1. Social Spaces
    1.   English upper class
  • Lord St. Simon’s family tree delineates his social space:  nobility indicated by titles (“Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral.”); by heraldic arms (“Arms: Azure, three caltrops in chief over a fess sable”); by political power (St Simon “was Under-Secretary for the colonies in a late administration” and “[t]he Duke, his father, was at one time Secretary for Foreign Affairs”); and, finally, by his family’s descent from English royal houses (“They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on the distaff side”). 
  • Enumeration of names and nobility titles of wedding attendees in St. George’s, Hanover Square:  “The ceremony, which was performed at St. George's, Hanover Square, was a very quiet one, no one being present save the father of the bride, Mr. Aloysius Doran, the Duchess of Balmoral, Lord Backwater, Lord Eustace, and Lady Clara St. Simon (the younger brother and sister of the bridegroom), and Lady Alicia Whittington.”
  • Policing of the Lancaster Gate house against Lord St Simon’s former girlfriend, by personal servants and by plainclothes police
    1. Mining camp
  • St. Simon describes Hattie’s early world in spatial terms—through nature imagery, evoking the geography of the mining camp, and through movement, evoking her own freedom and informal upbringing in the mining camp:

“ "You see, Mr. Holmes," said he, "my wife was twenty before her father became a rich man. During that time she ran free in a mining camp and wandered through woods or mountains, so that her education has come from Nature rather than from the schoolmaster. She is what we call in England a tomboy, with a strong nature, wild and free, unfettered by any sort of traditions. She is impetuous--volcanic, I was about to say. She is swift in making up her mind and fearless in carrying out her resolutions.”

  • Hattie’s movement, swiftness, and energy stand in contrast to the rigid world evoked by the many layers of servants whose job, in Lancaster Gate, appears to be to restrict and report on people’s movements, especially women’s
  • Hattie describes herself and Frank’s early life and marriage:

"Then I'll tell our story right away," said the lady. "Frank here and I met in '84, in McQuire's camp, near the Rockies, where pa was working a claim. We were engaged to each other, Frank and I; but then one day father struck a rich pocket and made a pile, while poor Frank here had a claim that petered out and came to nothing. The richer pa grew the poorer was Frank; so at last pa wouldn't hear of our engagement lasting any longer, and he took me away to 'Frisco. Frank wouldn't throw up his hand, though; so he followed me there, and he saw me without pa knowing anything about it. It would only have made him mad to know, so we just fixed it all up for ourselves. Frank said that he would go and make his pile, too, and never come back to claim me until he had as much as pa. So then I promised to wait for him to the end of time and pledged myself not to marry anyone else while he lived. 'Why shouldn't we be married right away, then,' said he, 'and then I will feel sure of you; and I won't claim to be your husband until I come back?' Well, we talked it over, and he had fixed it all up so nicely, with a clergyman all ready in waiting, that we just did it right there; and then Frank went off to seek his fortune, and I went back to pa.

  • Hattie’s description is marked by informal language, words that are colloquialisms or Americanisms, or both, etymologically connected with mining.  These words further anchor her very specifically in a space that is both geographical (U.S.) and social (the mining community).
    • “pa” (OED:  colloquial)
    • “petered out” (OED:  peter, v.2.1. US mining slang);
    • “make his pile” (OED:  pile, n.I.1.f, “Originally U.S. A large amount money; a fortune”);
    • “fixed it all up so nicely” (OED:  fix up, v.I.14.b., “(chiefly U.S. colloquial): To arrange, get ready, put in order; to put to rights, make tidy, ‘rig up’; spec. to prepare (food or drink). Also with off, over, and up and const. for (doing something).”)
  1.  Marriage as territorial infringement

The story uses spatial metaphors to depict the marriage as a territorial infringement, from both sides, in terms characteristic of both of the contrasting social worlds.

    1.   English upper class:  The English paper describing Hattie Doran and Lord St Simon’s wedding describes marriages of American women to English nobility as “prizes borne away.”  This is a metaphor from nautical warfare referring to ships captured by the enemy. The warfare metaphor invokes the public world of politics and of nationally significant events—that is, Lord St Simon’s social sphere.
    2.  Mining camp:  Hattie Doran describes her marriage with the slang expression “claim-jumping” – an expression from her own world of mining, as Holmes notes:  “in miners' parlance [claim-jumping] means taking possession of that which another person has a prior claim to.”  The mining metaphor invokes the mining world of Hattie Doran and Frank Moulton’s early youth.  Both expressions cast the Doran-St. Simon marriage as a kind of territorial infringement—an aggression in spatial and economic terms.

Digital Mapping

Building the exhibit invited me to read the text closely and carefully, and to spend extra time on the details of the story. I did not discover new information about the story.  What I did discover, though, was a deeper sense of the story’s social context—what Miriam Posner calls, in relation to humanities material, the activity of “trying to dive into it, like a pool, and understand it from within.”  Looking at nineteenth-century photographs – of the gold prospectors on the one hand, of the aristocrats on the other – helped me immerse myself into the two worlds of the story and helped me experience the enormous differences between the world of Lord St. Simon and the world of Hatty Doran’s youth.  Comparing the photo of the mining camp with the Booth Poverty Map’s economic information about St. George’s, Hanover Square, demonstrates the economic contrasts between the poverty of the mining claim and the wealth of the specific London locations through which Lord St Simon moves.

But digital mapping also complicates the picture.  These contrasting worlds aren’t completely separated. Lancaster Gate, also marked as a place of wealth on the Booth map, is rented by Aloysius Doran, Hattie’s father.  Similarly, the photo of the rich and splendid wedding dress, worn by an American woman with a father who earns all his wealth himself, invokes the riches possessed by Hattie Doran (also through her father’s self-made wealth). The wedding dress in particular highlights the fact that Hattie Doran is crossing the class divide (even temporarily) -- not through her family tree, but through her father’s massive wealth.  Through new-made American wealth, as the smarmy fictional newspaper article suggests, the Dorans perturb the rigid class distinctions of Victorian England (here, cite scholarship on the Victorian class system).

My exhibit uses Neatline, a plugin for the content management system Omeka, to navigate the partly-real, partly-fictional landscape of the story.  Neatline allows me to zoom in on real, specific locations, such as St. George’s church or 221 B Baker Street, but it also allows me to zoom out and represent more general locations, such as Lancaster Gate or Gordon Square or even San Francisco.  It allows me to colour-code locations:  in this case, green locations, such as St. George’s Street, indicate certainty; and purple locations, such as the highly speculative position of McQuire’s Camp, indicate uncertainty.  As Bethany Nowviskie observes, Neatline’s mapping process is “respectful of ambiguity, uncertainty, and subjectivity, and allow[s] for multiple aesthetics to emerge and be expressed” (“Neatline & visualization as interpretation.”)

What I wish Neatline allowed me was to move through the locations—that is, in addition to the map, to create an automated progression through the locations, so that the viewer could experience the exhibit as a video in addition to an interactive map.  That way, I could add a sense of time to the user’s the experience of the map.  Given more time, I might have used Neatline’s Timeline widget to augment the exhibit.  But what I am after is not just time measured on the scale of the timeline; it is time subjectively experienced by the readers, time divided into the “present of the story” and the “past of the story,” time as “now” and time as “flashback.”  As Johanna Drucker observes, time in a story is very different from time on a scale:

In empirical sciences, time is understood as continuous, uni-directional, and homogenous. Its metrics are standardized, its direction is irreversible, and it has no breaks, folds, holes, wrinkles, or reworkings. But in the humanities time is frequently understood and represented as discontinuous, multi-directional, and variable. Temporal dimensions of humanities artifacts are often expressed in relational terms – before such and such happened, or after a significant event. Retrospection and anticipation factor heavily in humanistic works, and the models of temporality that arise from historical and literary documents include multiple viewpoints (“Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” 33).

In “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” , there are many kinds of time:  public time, measured by the narratives of newspapers; subjectively experienced time, like the life of Hatty Doran; time that is the present of the story; time that appears briefly, many years telescoped and summarized in Hatty Doran’s flashback, yet crucially important for the outcome of the story. After all, what helps Holmes solve the mystery is his understanding of the importance of Hatty Doran’s past.  These are the kinds of distinctions that I would like to make and communicate to readers – and also help readers experience in some way, rather than just read about, through the digital exhibit.

 

Works Cited

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.”  In The new annotated Sherlock Holmes. Ed. Leslie S. Klinger and Patricia J. Chui. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. Pp. 291-318.

Drucker, Johanna. “Graphical Approaches to the Digital Humanities.” A New Companion to Digital Humanities, 2015, pp. 238–250, doi:10.1002/9781118680605.ch17.

 Posner, Miriam. “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction.” Miriam Posner’s Blog, miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.

 Nowviskie, Bethany. “Neatline & visualization as interpretation.” Nowviskie, 2 Nov. 2014, nowviskie.org/2014/neatline-and-visualization-as-interpretation/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017