This Circle of Misery and Violence and Fear

Abstract

‘The Cardboard Box’ is a strange story with an unusual textual history. First published in the Strand Magazine in January 1893, it was the only story of the series left out of the fi rst English edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (published by George Newnes later the same year). It made it into the first American edition, published by Harper in 1894, only to be removed from later American editions. Its disappearance from the Memoirs led to some significant cutting and pasting: a nineteen-paragraph exchange between Holmes and Watson in Baker Street was taken from the opening of ‘The Cardboard Box’ and moved to ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’ (1893), where it replaced one and a half paragraphs of introductory material, changing the setting of ‘The Resident Patient’ from a ‘boisterous’ autumn to a boiling summer (and causing some strange meteorological phenomena in the process).