In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Cardboard Box, there is this passage describing how Holmes deduces what Watson was thinking:
I was surprised to see the term “Civil War” used to refer to the American Civil War. I had believed that the use of the unadorned term “Civil War” in England generally refers to the English Civil War (1642-51). Of course, the earlier reference to Beecher makes it clear to which war he was referring. But if he hadn’t mentioned Beecher, without other context, would “Civil War” in Victorian England be an unambiguous reference to the American Civil War? How about today? Of course in the US it is unambiguous, and I am sure that a sizable number of Americans think that the term can ONLY refer to the American Civil War.
I believe there is some room for confusion without the context. I say this as someone who has lived in the UK.
As near as I can tell, my maternal ancestors were forced to emigrate from Yorkshire in the 1600s because they backed the wrong side. They didn’t do much better after they settled in the American South.
I think it’s simply clear because of the context. They are talking about Henry Ward Beecher’s exploits on behalf of the North in the Civil War. There’s no ambiguity regarding which civil war is meant, so there’s no need to specify and no room for misunderstanding. This is a conversation between and for people with a certain level of education and awareness, so the context is understood.
Agree with this. Also given the time period - the US Civil War would have been recent history. Also the reference to ‘The North’ as one of the sides would point to the US too (the English Civil War wasn’t North v South).
In modern times, I’m not sure even the English Civil War is particularly front of mind for most people (and pretty sketchy for many), so if you said ‘Civil War’ to the average Brit, you may need to qualify which one your meant, as they could take it for English or US, I suspect, simply because US popular media seems to talk about it a fair amount and British media hardly talks about the English Civil War at all. It was a long time ago.
Wait, you’ve got a sublime theory here: that John (or occasionally James) Watson, MD was a real person who took copious notes on his exploits with an equally real Sherlock Holmes.
Then this Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got hold of them somehow* and started cranking out stories, first in local journals and The Strand Magazine, then in book form.
*Might Doyle have won them off Watson in a high-stakes pinochle game?
Or are we to presume a family connection? I’d like to think that the notes were found in a spinster aunt’s lockbox, next to a packet of letters… correspondence with her dear friend Mary Watson.
It’s well known in educated circles that Dr. Watson wrote the stories (except for a couple that Holmes wrote himself). Doyle was simply the public face of the operation.
Even in recent decades, it’s not unheard of for an unpublished, previously unknown manuscript by Watson to turn up somewhere–a famous example is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, discovered by Nicholas Meyer in the early 1970s.
Ok, this is interesting. In the US, the term “Civil War” unambiguously refers to the US Civil War. Even given context, it wouldn’t be used to refer to another one. For example, I would be very surprised to see an American write “You were recalling the incidents of Oliver Cromwell’s career in the Civil War.” I assumed the situation was similar in England, but apparently that is not the case.
About the “recentness” issue, there’s no indication in the story of what year it is set, but it was written in 1893. At that time the US Civil War had ended 28 years earlier, so it’s not particularly recent. Referring to the “recent Civil War” then would be like referring to the “recent Gulf War” (1991) today. Although of course it was a lot more recent that the English Civil War.
Indeed. And that despite wars that have superseded it.
But that’s to do with familiarity. The English Civil War is very remote to most people, and indeed predates the UK, so only relates to part of the nation. So I think we would habitually refer to it as ‘the English Civil War’, and merely ‘Civil War’ may draw blanks or questions as to which one.
