The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes
Page 22
Counting back approximately three months from June of that year, the actual wedding ceremony must have taken place in April, or at the latest, May of 1887.
This is quite evidently impossible.
It would have been a whirlwind romance indeed which allowed Dr Watson not only to meet Miss Morstan in September 1887 and to purchase the Paddington practice but also to have married her four or five months before he first became acquainted with her!
How, then, has such confusion arisen?
To quote Sherlock Holmes’ own words in ‘The Red-Headed League’: ‘It is quite a three-pipe problem.’
Having made a study of the great consulting detective’s methods, I have applied the same principles which he would have brought to bear on the problem and have come to the following conclusion – that the dating in ‘The Five Orange Pips’ must be incorrect and that this adventure, as well as the others referred to in the same account, together with the case of the Stockbroker’s Clerk, should be assigned to the year 1889.
The mistake could have easily been made.
Medical practitioners are notorious for the illegibility of their handwriting and as Dr Watson wrote the accounts of the adventures he shared with Sherlock Holmes from hand-written notes, sometimes at a much later date as is clearly the case in ‘The Five Orange Pips’, it is perfectly feasible that a carelessly formed figure ‘9’ could have subsequently been read by him as a ‘7’, thus giving rise to the error of dating, a mistake which quite understandably he failed to notice.
He was, after all, an exceedingly busy man, being fully occupied with carrying out his duties as a general practitioner as well as assisting Sherlock Holmes in the many investigations they undertook together.
Alternatively, the mistake could have been made either by a secretary who may have been engaged to produce a typescript from Dr Watson’s handwritten manuscript and who misread the date 1889 for 1887 or, if that were not the case, by a typesetter at the printer’s who made a similar error, a mistake which Dr Watson himself passed over when he came to read the proofs; that is, if he indeed checked them himself and did not leave this chore to his publisher’s reader.
This revised dating scheme would place Dr Watson’s first meeting with Miss Morstan, during the investigation of the Sign of Four, in September 1888 with the purchase of the Paddington practice and his marriage shortly before this event occurring in the spring of 1889, to which same year such cases as the Five Orange Pips and those already referred to, including that of the Stockbroker’s Clerk, would also be assigned; a more satisfactory chronology than that apparent from Dr Watson’s own – and, in my opinion, incorrectly dated – records.
A spring wedding would also accord with Dr Watson’s statement that it was in July ‘immediately succeeding’ his marriage that he was associated with Mr Sherlock Holmes in three memorable investigations, two of which he later recounted under the titles of ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’ and ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’. The third, ‘The Adventure of the Tired Captain’, has not so far been published.
If my dating scheme is correct, these three cases may be assigned to July 1889.
The same explanation regarding Dr Watson’s handwriting may be applied to the problem of dating another later adventure, that of Wisteria Lodge, which Dr Watson states occurred in 1892.
This, too, is clearly an error. As fellow students of the canon will be well aware, after Sherlock Holmes’ apparent death at the hands of his arch-enemy, Moriarty, at the Reichenbach Falls in May 1891, he was absent from England for three years, not returning until the spring of 1894. It is therefore quite out of the question that he investigated this particular case in 1892.
I suggest that Dr Watson’s handwriting was again responsible for the mistake and that the case should be assigned to 1897, the last figure being so hastily written that it was later misread as a ‘2’.
This would place the adventure of Wisteria Lodge in the same year as those of Abbey Grange and the Devil’s Foot which took place respectively in the winter of 1897 and March of that year, the same month in which the Wisteria Lodge case would have taken place according to my theory.
This change of dating conforms with Dr Watson’s comment in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’ that ‘due to hard work of the most exacting kind’, Sherlock Holmes’ health began to deteriorate and he was advised by Dr Moore Agar of Harley Street to seek a ‘complete change of scene and air’.
If, as I suggest, the investigation at Wisteria Lodge occurred in March 1897, not 1892, then Sherlock Holmes would have indeed undertaken a particularly complex inquiry of a ‘most exacting kind’, to use Dr Watson’s own words, and one which Sherlock Holmes himself referred to as ‘a chaotic case’.
It was, moreover, conducted under peculiarly difficult conditions. The weather was most inclement and could well have contributed to the breakdown in Sherlock Holmes’ health. Dr Watson describes them setting off for Wisteria Lodge on ‘a cold and melancholy walk’ of two miles across a ‘wild common’ on a ‘cold, dark March evening with a sharp wind and a fine rain beating upon our faces’.
It is little wonder then that, shortly afterwards, Sherlock Holmes should have been forced to consult Dr Agar and, on his advice, to rent a cottage near Poldhu Bay in Cornwall in order to recuperate. It was, however, hardly a restful retreat for it was here that Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson became involved in the adventure of the Devil’s Foot.
Although I am personally convinced of the correctness of my theory regarding the dating within the canon of these aforementioned cases, I should not wish, in all modesty, to force my ideas on other Sherlockian specialists and I therefore remain open to any alternative suggestions which fellow students of the great consulting detective’s life and times, and those of his chronicler, Dr John H. Watson, may care to put forward in rebuttal of my own hypothesis.
John F. Watson, D. Phil. (Oxon),
All Saints’ College,
Oxford.
24th June 1930.
* This investigation was published in The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes under the title of ‘The Case of the Amateur Mendicants’. (Aubrey B. Watson)
† These investigations are published in this second collection, The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, under the titles of, respectively, ‘The Case of the Camberwell Poisoning’ and The Case of the Paradol Chamber’. (Aubrey B. Watson)
‡ These cases have not so far found their way into print. (Aubrey B. Watson)
* In some editions, the word ’aunt’s’ is given as ’mother’s’. However as Miss Mary Morstan states quite categorically in ‘The Sign of Four’ that her mother is dead, one must assume that this latter reading is either a slip of the pen on Dr John H. Watson’s part or a printing error left uncorrected by either a publisher’s editor or by Dr John H. Watson himself. (Dr John F. Watson)
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About the Author
JUNE THOMSON, a former teacher, has published over thirty novels, twenty of which feature her series detective Inspector Jack Finch and his sergeant, Tom Boyce. She has also written seven pastiche collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Her books have been translated into many languages. June Thomson lives in Rugby, Warwickshire.
By June Thomson
THE SHERLOCK HOLMES COLLECTION
The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes
The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes
The Secret Journals of Sherlock Holmes
Holmes and Watson
The Secret Documents of Sh
erlock Holmes
The Secret Notebooks of Sherlock Holmes
The Secret Archives of Sherlock Holmes
THE JACK FINCH MYSTERIES
Going Home
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain in 1992.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2014.
Copyright © 1992 by JUNE THOMSON
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1672–2