SmartRemarks

At last, the grand finale! Over the course of several previous installments (all linked below), diligent effort and careful reasoning have allowed us to structure a timeline of all 60 cases in the Sherlock Holmes canon, to a degree of precision of at least a month or season and a likely year even for the most ambiguous of them. I have endeavored throughout to honor (rather than contradict) whatever chronological information Watson gave us to work with, and in only one instance (WIST’s reference to 1892) was this flatly impossible. The results illuminate a number of fascinating relationships among the cases as they progress over time.

However, there is more to Watson’s writings than just the chronicled cases (and for that matter, there is more to the life of Holmes and his biographer than just the writings). Watson alludes from time to time to other cases he had recorded in his notes but which for various reasons he never chose to put in print—many of which are mentioned with enough chronological information to allow one to place them in the timeline. (These tantalizing untold tales have inspired many a latter-day author, some of whom claim to have discovered lost notes or manuscripts in Watson’s own hand, and some of whose works ring with a sense of authenticity… but there is no way to prove them authentic, and it would be foolhardy to accept them as legitimate. The Canon is what Dr. Watson allowed to have published under the auspices of his agent, Dr. Conan Doyle, no more and no less. And the sad fact is that the vaults of Cox & Co. Bank at Charing Cross, wherein Watson in his later years preserved the “battered tin dispatch box” that held his papers (as he described in THOR), was destroyed by the London Blitz during World War II. No further reminiscences from Watson’s pen shall ever be forthcoming, so as to unrevealed details all we can do is speculate… which can, however, be fun in its own right.)

This, then, is the entire chronology of the career of Sherlock Holmes, as worked out in earlier installments, supplemented here with additional notes and observations on unchronicled cases and other pertinent matters of historical context:

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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, literature, Sherlock Holmes

At this point we have very nearly completed our chronology of the Sherlock Holmes Canon. We have spanned his entire career, from his earliest investigations through his disappearance and return to his retirement and beyond. We have determined along the way that his colleague and biographer Dr. Watson married twice, once in 1888 (to Mary Morstan, d. circa 1892-’93), and again in 1902. We have placed 52 cases on the calendar, all but a few with a considerable degree of certainty.

There remain, however, a few cases from among those published after the Hiatus in which Watson provides us with no clear dates. Included among these are cases that have posed some of the greatest difficulties to students of the Canon, and provoked the greatest debates among them. The texts are not entirely devoid of evidence, and in that regard we continue to trust Watson’s testimony, but they require close examination. It is to these that we now turn our attention.

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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, literature, Sherlock Holmes

We have reached the midway point of our chronological project, having dated and arranged all the cases of Sherlock Holmes prior to his apparent death in the spring of 1891. The time has come to turn our attention to the later part of his career. Thirty-two adventures of Holmes (novels aside) were published between 1903 and 1927, later collected in the volumes The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Of these cases, all but three (as discussed earlier) belong to the latter half of his career.

On “the night of March 30, 1894,” young Ronald Adair was mysteriously murdered in cold blood in his own home on Park Lane. Only days later, Sherlock Holmes returned to London, after three years traveling the world under an assumed name. He reintroduced himself to Dr. Watson and explained his deception at the Reichenbach Falls, where he had faked his death in order to elude the remnants of Prof. Moriarty’s criminal organization. He promptly enlisted Watson’s aid in capturing Col. Sebastian Moran, the last member of that organization, proving in the process that Moran had killed Adair. Watson was overjoyed to see his old friend, who, he noted, “in some manner… had learned of my own sad bereavement”: for although Watson never shared the details with his readers (thereby stimulating much later speculation), Mary Morstan Watson had apparently suffered an untimely death.

All this we learn from the adventure of “The Empty House” (EMPT), which appeared in print in October, 1903; Watson reports that he would have shared it with the public earlier, “had I not been barred by a positive prohibition from [Holmes's] own lips, which was only withdrawn upon the third of last month.” About all of this, there is almost no debate or controversy.

About the details of the following decade, of course, there’s more than a little.

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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, literature, Sherlock Holmes

In the endeavor to derive a comprehensive Sherlock Holmes chronology, we have at the outset resolved (to my satisfaction, at any rate) the question of the number of Watson’s marriages through a judicious application of Occam’s Razor. This has allowed us to set up a framework that covers the cases published up through the Great Hiatus of 1891-’94 (the period in which Holmes was presumed dead), and within that framework we have placed all those cases that can be easily dated—those in which Watson provides both a month (or season) and a year, or clear clues pointing to same.

There remain several cases from this period (nine, in fact) in which the clues are more opaque, and the reader must bring to bear more careful deductive abilities. In addition, the two later novels also fit into the pre-Hiatus phase of Holmes’s career (this is relatively uncontroversial), as do three of the later-published short cases (there’s more argument here, but I believe a strong case can be made for these three and no others, as I’ll discuss when we reach them).

The time has come to start fitting the more ambiguous pieces into the puzzle. The game is afoot!…

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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, literature, Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes

So, the project is this: to construct a reliable, chronological reading order for the Sherlock Holmes canon, as written by Dr. Watson. The goal is clear: to glean a more complete and robust sense of the life of the Great Detective, and of his friend and colleague, than afforded by any single tale. The methodology is straightforward: when seeking clues, trust Watson first and foremost. And beyond that, the resources are ample, as many other Sherlockians have trod this path before… without ever reaching any serious consensus.

What do we know as a starting point? There is relatively widespread consensus on a few basic facts, and I see no reason to disagree with the statement that Sherlock Holmes was born in 1854, while John Watson, slightly older, was born in 1852. Neither date is ever stated outright in the Canon; but Holmes is described without reservation as a “man of sixty” in 1914 in “His Last Bow” (LAST), and we know from A Study In Scarlet (STUD) that, in the very first words from Watson’s pen, “In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London,” which places the good doctor’s birth 26 years earlier given the typical duration of a British medical education of the day.

We know very few facts about either man’s childhood, family, or upbringing (although speculation is rampant). The next definitive information comes in a pair of “flashback” tales describing two of Holmes’s earliest cases, before he met Watson:  “The Gloria Scott” (GLOR) and “The Musgrave Ritual” (MUSG), which appeared in print back-to-back in consecutive months in 1893. (It’s interesting to note, in passing, that departures from the usual narrative structure of the Writings seem to come in pairs; the only two cases told in the third person also appeared consecutively, in 1917 and 1921 respectively, as did the only two written by Holmes himself, both in 1926.) Thus, it is time to begin delving into the details of the cases.
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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, Irene Adler, Lestrade, literature, Mary Morstan, Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes has been much in the public eye of late, thanks to the big-budget Hollywood movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law. (And it’s an enjoyable picture; if the overall style is a bit too frenetic and overblown, and a few obvious liberties are taken with the source material, still the filmmakers at least seem familiar with that source material… and the cast, especially Downey, does a terrific job of capturing the subtle quirks of their characters.)

Of course, Holmes has been a cultural icon for well over a century, and I’ve been a fan for some years. As it happens, around the same time my girlfriend and I acquired the DVD box set of the 1980s-’90s TV series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes, and have been watching it from beginning to end. It offers more faithful adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories than any other filmed version before or since, in a style that’s a closer match for the original sensibilities of the material (i.e., fewer chase scenes, fistfights, and explosions)… and Brett does an uncanny job of capturing the persona of the Great Detective (although in some scenes he seems, perhaps, just a bit too caustic and antisocial), ably abetted by first David Burke and later Edward Hardwicke as Dr. Watson. It’s a fantastic series, well worth watching.

Even the best adaptation is a mere interpretation of the original, though, and I found myself moved to turn my attention back to “The Canon,” the original four novels and fifty-six short stories by Conan Doyle, published between 1887 and 1927. I’m fortunate enough to own both annotations of the complete works, William Baring-Gould’s classic Annotated Sherlock Holmes from 1967, and Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated edition from 2004-’05. Both offer not only the original texts but a fascinating treasure-trove of scholarly exegesis, analysis, background information, and speculation about the characters, settings, and myriad other details of the stories.

The Holmes canon has been peculiarly attractive to armchair scholars almost from the beginning, perhaps due to the natural appeal of applying the Master’s own analytical methods to the source material in which we discover them. And the exercise is more enjoyable for the distinctive rules of the game, the set of underlying premises observed with scholarly solemnity when possible and with tongue clamped firmly in cheek when necessary: namely, that the Canon represents a true and genuine (if tantalizingly far from complete) account of the life and career of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first consulting detective, as recorded by his friend and colleague Dr. John H. Watson, published under the auspices and (for reasons lost to history) under the name of Watson’s literary agent (and occasional editor), Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. I respect and observe these rules.

There are as many facets of Sherlockian scholarship as there are enthusiasts ready to undertake it, but one area of longstanding controversy that I find particularly engaging (given my own deep-seated and frankly self-evident interest in narrative chronology) is the matter of how to date the cases. I’m coming late to the game, of course; there have been well over a dozen books published on the matter of chronologizing the Canon. Nevertheless, I think I have some insights and observations worth exploring… and this is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll share that exploration.

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Tags: chronology, Dr. Watson, genre, history, literature, Sherlock Holmes

Open sewers run through the streets. Disease is rampant, up to and including recurring outbreaks of the plague. Criminals are routinely castrated, disemboweled, and hacked to pieces in public executions. The rotting heads of political enemies are mounted on public gates. The bloody torture of animals is a popular form of entertainment. Wretched poverty is commonplace. Literacy is not. Deference to a rigid caste system is expected of everyone. Weekly attendance at a church of the official religion is mandatory, with crippling fines imposed on those who abstain. Government censorship is taken for granted. Prejudice against foreigners and indeed against anyone even slightly divergent from the norm is encouraged.

Is this some third-world hellhole? Some imaginary world of dystopian fantasy?

No. This is England at one of its greatest historical moments, under the reign of its most esteemed monarch, Elizabeth the First. This is the England we romanticize and glorify and consider the forerunner of our own modern liberal democracy.

And astonishingly, almost miraculously, this is also the world that shaped the most brilliant literary mind in human history. This culture that would be alien and repulsive to us were we suddenly to find ourselves in it, stripped of the cleansing distance of centuries, somehow gave rise to a visionary who crafted timeless works that speak to us today every bit as much as they did to audiences four hundred years ago. A man whose artistic insight encompassed not just linguistic invention but social dynamics, personal psychology, and humanist philosophy.

How is this possible?

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Tags: history, literature, philosophy, progress, psychology, Shakespeare, writers

As a prominent public figure, Robert McNamara was before my time. He had stepped down as Secretary of Defense well before I was even born. But the man who died Monday had a more profound influence on our country’s politics and policy than any number of more recent, more familiar, and more famous names.

McNamara was 93 years and one month old. He was born in 1916, before the U.S. was involved in World War I, and the strongest influence on his worldview was almost certainly World War II, in which he served under Gen. Curtis LeMay helping plan bombing strategy before the age of 30. But his rise to fame (and infamy) was certainly his management of the Vietnam War from 1961-’67.

And the results of that war had a negative impact on the politics and culture of this country that was both immediate (undermining the effectiveness of Johnson’s Great Society programs and polarizing the American electorate) and lasting (paving the way for Reagan-era feel-good revisionism, and teaching all the wrong lessons to the phalanx of neoconservatives who took us into Iraq).

McNamara certainly had second thoughts about his role in history, and in later years he expressed them, most notably in his 1995 memoir. But for all the media scrutiny to which he was subjected, in the ’60s and the ’90s, I still don’t find it (quite) possible to get inside his head.

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Tags: Dick Cheney, history, international, Iran, Iraq, neoconservatives, Robert McNamara, Vietnam war

There’s been a lot of interesting political commentary going on this past week (just check out the industrious writers on my blogroll), but I admit that I haven’t felt inspired to chime in on it. Sometimes the weight of public affairs just seems overwhelming, and it helps to step back and focus on personal matters. However, there is one political meme that keeps recurring lately, in the public discourse and thus, also, in the back of my mind. It’s ubiquitous in the establishment press and on the internet; it came up repeatedly last week in Obama’s second press conference, and again today on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. And it’s certainly prominent in Congress.

Here’s the meme:  that Obama’s budget is too ambitious, since it dramatically increases the national debt (by what the CBO projects to be $9.3 trillion over ten years, as has been widely reported). That we’re all “fiscal conservatives” who naturally agree that deficit spending is A Bad Thing, and therefore that Congress clearly needs to scale spending back from what Obama has proposed.

There’s a simple question going unasked here:  why? Nothing about this meme is as self-evident as those who echo it seem to assume. 

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Tags: conservatism, Depression, economy, FDR, federal budget, financial crisis, Galbraith, history, Obama

I’ve already alluded to the right wing’s attempts to spread misinformation about the New Deal and the Great Depression. The mass media echo chamber has been full of them lately, and I’ve linked to a couple of items that have been rowing against the tide. I have perhaps been too casual about assuming that everyone is familiar with the real story, however. A careful look at some empirical truth is called for here, if we are to learn the correct lessons applicable to our current situation.

So let’s revisit those two links in greater detail. A few diligent scholars and journalists have done their homework so you and I don’t have to.

First, from economist Charles McMillion’s essay entitled “The ‘FDR Failed’ Myth” (emph. mine):

[I]t is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy.

This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth. Just this past Sunday, The Washington Post featured on Page One of its Outlook section an article by Amity Shlaes headlined “FDR Was a Great Leader, But His Economic Plan Isn’t One to Follow.” …

The basic economic facts from the 1930s—according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources—are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.

GDP, only available as annual averages, plunged 25.6 percent from 1929-1932, including by 13.0 percent in 1932. It stabilized in 1933, and then soared by 10.8 percent, 8.9 percent and 12.0 percent, respectively, in 1934, 1935 and 1936. Real GDP surpassed its 1929 peak in 1936 and never again fell below it. After-tax personal income, consumer spending, real private investment and jobs all reached or surpassed their 1929 peaks by late 1936.

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Tags: Depression, economy, FDR, history