I was re-reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Man with the Twisted Lip, one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. I was struck by this line, in which an English gentleman describes how he discovered that he could make more money begging than in his previous job as a newspaper reporter:
Why would Conan Doyle, writing dialog for a native English character in a story set in London, use the word “dollars”? Did this have some meaning in Victorian England other than currency used in a foreign country?
Idiom.
I couldn’t find any real usage of Doyle’s term in an big Australian newspaper database search for this period, but the term ‘Almighty dollar’ had reasonable currency [pause for laughter].
‘Dollar’ worked for Doyle’s literate audience, and there was the added tone I think for a British audience that this was slightly more crass and mercenary money than working for proper sterling. He was very good at articulating slight nuances of detail reflecting class and status which, of course Sherlock Holmes made his bread and butter.
Was your copy published in UK or US? When publishing a book from across the pond, editors will often “translate” things to make it easier for the local audience.
The Harry Potter books were notorious for this, and you can find websites going into great detail about the changes.
Arthur C. Clarke specifically added a clause in his contracts to compel American publishers to use British spelling and punctuation.
If he’s referring to loose change, a crown coin could be a dollar.
ETA anyway, it’s not like dollar-notes, dollared men, etc. were obscure references
The Wikipedia article on “dollar” points out that the word is used in Shakespeare’s plays and that a nineteenth-century five shilling piece was called a dollar sometimes. So the word is familiar to Brits.
How about dollars in Elizabethan England?
That now Sweno, the Norways’ king, craves composition. Nor would we deign him burial of his men Till he disbursed at Saint Colme’s Inch Ten thousand dollars to our general use. -MacBeth
Here, Shakespeare is clearly indicating the they’re getting paid by a foreign king, and those are literal (if an anachronism for the period in which the play is set) dollars. In the Doyle quote, he’s employing a common idiomatic trick of replacing the local currency with a foreign one, the way an American might substitute pesos or sheckles for dollars when talking casually about money.
It’s still - occasionally - used as slang for cash in the UK.
Well, you ought to know, with that user name.
Speaking of which, “greenback” is also a word that, at least originally, referred to US currency. Is “greenback” also current in the UK to refer to money in general, not US currency?
I don’t think so, although the term is fairly well-known for US dollar notes.
Note that my username is that of a megalomaniac cartoon toad, rather than anything directly currency-specific. 
Penfold and I suspected as much. I’m surprised the good Baron isn’t your avatar.
The James Bond films in the 60’s and 70’s sometimes did this, which makes me curious if the scripts were written with American audiences in mind or if there’s still some imperial standard stuff that was still left over, like referring to stuff measured in inches and using Fahrenheit temperatures instead of Celsius.
Right. The Holmes books were notoriously edited for American audiences to use more familiar terms.
Don’t you guys also use “penny” as a slang term, even though there are no official pennies in American currency?
As in “That must have cost a pretty penny!”
Yes, but that expression goes way back, and pennies were discontinued in the US fairly recently.
I’ve been Googling for the text of the story, and as far as I can tell, the word dollars was in the original. (Ideally, I’d like to see the text as it appeared in The Strand Magazine but haven’t been able to find that yet.)
terentii writes:
> . . . pennies were discontinued in the US . . .
No, they weren’t.
Greenback is specific to the US, as the US is the only place (so far as I know) where the banknotes are all greenish.
Most places have different colours for different denominations, and have had for so long that the colours are now “traditional” for those denominations.
Greenback dates back to the paper currency issued during the Civil War, when just the reverse side was green. Later paper money was green on both sides, but the slang expression had taken hold.
AIUI “penny” is just a slang term for “one cent” - right? Like “nickel” is for “five cents”
Yes, and neither the penny (one-cent coin) or the nickel (five-cent coin) have been discontinued in the US, even though they actually cost more than face value to produce and are essentially worthless.