On my lunch hour at work, I like to watch videos on YouTube and check out whatever strikes my fancy for that day. I’ll watch just about anything, but I try to find something that will cause me not to get too involved in the subject. I know me, and I will become very distracted for the rest of the day and my mind will torture me if I don’t investigate more. Now, working for the government means that some people think we take three-hour lunches and at least ten coffee breaks a day. That may or may not be true, but as a federal employee I’m afraid I can say no more. One video I watched recently on my actual sanctioned break caught my attention, and it inspired this post. Let’s visit 1983, shall we?
That year a man named Mistuaka Oshima (who was working at the Panasonic Corporation) put the finishing touches on an idea about image stabilization in video and photographic form. It soon became an accepted science, and just five years later the system was first put into use in a mass-produced video camera. It’s been perfected over the years and is now a standard. It’s used in movie cameras, cell phones, crime fighting technology, and Bigfoot videos. (Watch an example here.) I know about that last one because that’s what I was watching while enjoying my canteen fare, and it got me to thinking - but not necessarily about Squatches.
The idea of stabilization around a single item made me recall something I had mentioned in my talk at the Minnesota conference in 2016 about new and unique ways to try and construct a chronology of the Sherlock Holmes cases. One was to make a timeline using the dining table at 221B. See, if you look at the Paget drawings, you’ll notice that said table had rounded corners in some cases, while other illustrations show a sharp corner. I figured someone could use the (obviously) two different tables and make a chronology. You take the cases that have the rounded corners and group them together and then work all of the others out from that locus. Then you do the same with the ones with a sharper-cornered one. I know it sounds silly, but to me it's viable. I truly doubt the occupants of that famous flat had numerous tables they changed out from time to time, so it means they would’ve used one for a while, and then maybe got another one later for whatever reason. See what I’m getting at?
My thinking after the Bigfoot video was about applying the table logic to other things in the canon that would lend themselves to such a thing. Using a “fixed point,” if I may. It has been done with John Watson’s wives for about a hundred years, but I don’t have much faith in that. I don’t believe he was married at all before 1903, and the canon itself offers enough evidence to support it. Thus, I find it necessary to look elsewhere to build a timeline because the wife thing doesn’t work for me. (I’ll post about my claims someday, don’t worry.)
The question becomes, however, what else do we have to use besides the merry wives of Watson? Well, we also have the other detectives and/or Inspectors that appear from time to time in the cases. (Brad Keefauver did some great work on this in the latest issue of TIMELINE, the fantastic newsletter of the Sherlockian Chronologist Guild, where he laid them out by case.) I know it’s possible that those folks were on their forces for a long time, but what if they weren’t? What if one of them was only around for a short time, and yet appears in numerous cases? I think it would be okay to make the leap and then pin those cases together.
But what about grouping all of the cases where Holmes quotes Shakespeare? Maybe he was going through a phase and fanboying on the Swan. Maybe he found a copy of the First Folio at a pawnshop. Heck, he did with a Stradivarius violin! Or perhaps one could gather up all of the times when The Dynamic Two only worked certain areas of London. Maybe it was because Dr. Watson was courting a lady friend on that side of town. And speaking of Watson’s zest for life, what about clumping the cases where he used a color in the title? Was he going through an artful phrase where he decided to use more flourishes in his writing?
I’d say any assumption is okay. The gloves are off. After all, chronologists have to ignore some things in order to make other things work. They also have to twist some facts, or make huge jumps in logic, to accommodate their findings. And I realize we only have a small part of the two men’s lives to work with, and that there were potentially thousands of cases, but it reinforces the idea that any idea is a workable one since it can’t be debated too heavily given our lack of information.
Allow me to reel this in by saying that I know just how foolish it all sounds. But think of it this way – there isn’t a definitive chronology. Some of the big names (Baring-Gould, Zeisler, Dakin) are important and loved, but I wouldn’t go anywhere near calling any of them “the one.” Shoot, we don’t even have two chronologies that perfectly match each other. So, it’s all up for grabs. And I don’t think any way of doing it is foolish. It makes it more fun for anyone to attempt their own timeline by taking some of the starch out of the process, and as I like to say - all chronology is good chronology.
