Chronology part 2

Now the next part:

• STUD - March 1881, see my notes on the Orontes troopship and the weekday.
• RESI - October 1881 based on the original Strand text, before the mind-reading scene was grafted on from CARD. Or October 1886, if Watson is fibbing to protect Trevelyan. The Worthingdon bank gang were sentenced to 15 years and got out way too early.

Written in 1886 and published in December 1887, A Study in Scarlet is the first novel in which we ever meet Holmes and Watson. It's greatly entertaining in the beginning chapters, but it has a structural flaw. Half the novel breaks off from the Brixton mystery to suddenly flashback to America to explain a motive for the murderer; he apparently wanted revenge on two Mormons, but all Mormon society in general is depicted as an evil murderous cult. This is not even framed as a flashback from Jefferson Hope's point of view; it's an omniscient 3rd person narrator describing events happening to John Ferrier and his adopted daughter Lucy, survivors of a wagon train to the West. Some readers are fine with the Mormon section while others prefer to skip over it to get back to Holmes and Watson. Whatever suits you. It's just a melodrama derivative of other anti-polygamy novels of the time period, and Doyle eventually gave an apology to Mormons. Unfortunately, the break in the London narrative allows Conan Doyle to lose the thread of his plot and forget about the dead dog in the sitting-room.

Chronology-wise, the main problem of the novel is not the Mormon section. It's that, after mentioning his 1878 medical degree, and the battle of Maiwand in July 27, 1880, Watson is vague on other time passing in the story. (And he makes no mention of the month-long siege at Kandahar following Maiwand, but I covered that already in researching the Orontes troopship.) Watson says he ended up in Peshawar hospital where he recuperated from his shoulder wound but suffered from enteric fever for months, before he recovered and got shipped back to England. Historically speaking, he would have to land at Portsmouth in November 1880, though if you change the troopship to a different ship the Malabar, he could have come back on February 1881 instead with the rest of his regiment. In any case, Watson drifted to London, where he stayed in a hotel until his funds ran low and he decided to seek lodgings elsewhere. Watson gives no date for when he meets Sherlock Holmes and is also vague about some weeks passing when they first move into Baker Street together. Some Sherlockians like to imagine that they met on January 1, 1881 but other Sherlockians I've met online say that's wrong. They haven't given me an alternate explanation, though. Brad Keefauver thinks the Brixton Mystery took place in 1884, but doesn't say the date for Holmes and Watson meeting, which he separates to a different time. I found out on his "Gloria Scott" page that he thinks they met in summer 1881, but he does not elaborate further on why. Some discussion on the Hounds of the Internet listserv that I don't remember all these years later. For the purposes of my chronology I will go with the November date tied to the Orontes and shrug off the meeting date as unimportant. Sherlockians already celebrate January for Holmes's birthday, and that's flimsy evidence as well.

Anyway, Watson learns that Holmes is a detective, and he gives the date of March 4th for when he unwittingly reads Holmes's "Book of Life" magazazine article. Then Gregson sends a note to invite Holmes to a case, and Holmes invites Watson along. That's fine, if a little coincidental. But as they investigate the Brixton mystery, a newspaper article says that the 4th is a Tuesday, but in reality March 4th, 1881 is a Friday. So we can either resolve it the way Keefauver did by moving the entire case to 1884, or we can argue that the newspaper article is wrong about the date or the weekday. I personally think that maybe the case started on March 7th instead, but that's still a Monday. It's just hard to justify March 4th being mistaken for March 8th, and then March 9th is a Wednesday. No good options unless we say that Watson deliberately messed up the date. But why did he draw attention to the date in the first place, when he had been so vague on dates since Maiwand? On the subject of weekdays, after they've caught the murderer, Holmes and Watson are told that they need to show up at court on Thursday, when the prisoner is brought to the magistrates. (The prisoner dies before Thursday, so the court date never happens. Holmes and Watson just discuss the mystery and who gets credit for solving it in the last chapter.) Anyway, this means that the 2nd day of the Brixton mystery is not Thursday; if it was, the phrase would be, "show up next week on Thursday." But there's still no resolution. Anyway, the Mormon section atypically has no problems contradicting the rest of the novel. Most of the Mormon section takes place in 1860, and Hope refers to that time as 20 years ago, which is close enough to 1881 being the present day.

Now onto the short story the "Resident Patient". When it was originally published in the Strand magazine, Watson said it happened in October, at "the end of the first year during which Holmes and I shared chambers in Baker Street." Traditionally, that would mean October 1881, but if other Sherlockians prefer other years, it might be 1882 or 1883. Unfortunately, when "Resident Patient" was collected in the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes book, Doyle messed up the story, transplanting a mind-reading passage from "The Cardboard Box" and since then, the story is often published with the wrong text, omitting Watson's mention of the year.

Chronologists accept October but use other dates in the story to determine the year. Holmes says that the Worthingdon bank gang were arrested in 1875 and got sentenced to 15 years each. They got released early, and it was announced in a newspaper, causing Blessington aka Sutton to fear for his life. After somehow discovering his alias, the gang impersonated Russians to get into the house and killed him for betraying them. So, if the story occurs in 1881, then the gang somehow got released after only 6 years. By law, sentences could only be shortened to 3/4 the original length. So 15 years should have been reduced to 11 years and 3 months; thus the year should be 1886. That's logical. Normal logic doesn't work when faced with Watson's contradictory dates. I could argue that Watson deliberately reported the 1875 date wrong or the sentence wrong in his effort to disguise the case and avoid embarrassing the client Percy Trevelyan. Maybe it was 1870 instead with 15 years sentence, or maybe it was 1875 with only 8 years sentence. I don't care really but am charmed by a story set in their first year in Baker Street. So I'll keep it as 1881 for my chronology, but as I said, it could be 1886.