The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes (25 page)

I wear mine when the formality of the occasion demands such splendid personal adornment and, for any one who inquires into the significance of the seal, I have prepared an answer.

‘It was given to me,’ I reply with an air of intrigue, ‘by a most charming and gracious lady whom I am afraid I am not at liberty to name.’

An
hypothesis
regarding
the
internal
evidence
as
it
relates
to
the
chronology
within
the
published
Holmes
canon

Students of the late Sherlock Holmes’ adventures will be familiar with the problems appertaining to the dating of certain events and deductive investigations which arise from Dr John H. Watson’s published accounts.

This has peculiar pertinence to the precise date when Dr Watson married Miss Mary Morstan and to those adventures which took place soon after the wedding. I refer in particular to the inquiry of the Five Orange Pips and those other cases which Dr Watson states occurred in the same year, 1887, namely that of the Amateur Mendicant Society,
*
the Camberwell Poisoning affair,† and the case of the Paradol Chamber
†
as well as the loss of the British barque
Sophy
Anderson
‡
and the adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa.
‡

It is quite clear that, at the time of the case involving the Five Orange Pips which took place in ‘the latter days of September’
of 1887, Dr Watson was already married for he accounts for his presence at his former lodgings by the following statement: ‘My wife was on a visit to her aunt’s,
*
and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters in Baker Street.’

However, in ‘The Sign of Four’, during the course of which adventure Dr Watson first met and fell in love with Miss Morstan, Miss Morstan herself, on consulting Sherlock Holmes on the fate of her father, Captain Morstan, gives the date of his disappearance from the Langham Hotel in London as occurring on ‘the 3rd of December, 1878 – nearly ten years ago.’

Furthermore, she adds that ‘about six years ago – to be exact upon the 4th of May, 1882’, an anonymous advertisement appeared in
The
Times,
requesting her address. Subsequent to her publishing it, she received through the post the first of six valuable pearls which were to be sent to her over the following years.

Later in the same account, Dr Watson states that it was on the evening of the same day that Miss Morstan consulted Mr Holmes, ‘a September evening’, that he and Holmes accompanied Miss Morstan when she went to meet her unknown correspondent outside the Lyceum Theatre.

It hardly requires a mathematical genius to deduce that the adventure of the Sign of Four must have taken place in September 1888 or, at the very earliest, September 1887. Miss Morstan would not have described the events which occurred prior to these dates as being ‘nearly ten years ago’ or ‘about six years ago’ if they had happened more than twelve months before the dating she gave to Sherlock Holmes.

However, as Dr Watson positively states, a fact which has already been noted, that the adventure of the Five Orange Pips occurred in ‘the latter days of September’ 1887, by which time he was already married, then even the least discerning reader
will be aware that there is some confusion not only over the dating of Dr Watson’s marriage but as to exactly when these cases already referred to actually took place.

Further complications arise on a careful perusal of The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk’ which, although undated, happened ‘three months’ after Dr Watson had purchased the practice in the Paddington district from old Mr Farquhar, a transaction which Dr Watson himself describes as having taken place ‘shortly after my marriage’.

Moreover, the case occurred in June of that year which, as Sherlock Holmes remarks, was ‘so wet’ that Dr Watson caught a summer cold.

On the evidence, the case involving the Stockbroker’s Clerk should therefore also be assigned to the year 1887 as it followed so closely after the marriage and the purchase of the Paddington practice.

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.                           

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