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It is at university that his abilities as a solver of puzzles came to the fore. Two of the recorded cases throw some light on Holmes’s University days. “The Gloria Scott”, Holmes tells us, was the first case in which he was engaged. He refers to the case again in “The Musgrave Ritual” saying that the Gloria Scott case “first turned my attention in the direction of the profession which has become my life’s work.” It is thus of some importance to date this investigation, but it is here that we first encounter Watson’s masking of facts. We could put a rough dating on it on the assumption that Holmes went to university when he was about eighteen or nineteen, which would place it in the period 1868 to 1872, and he talks about it occurring after two years at university, or between 1870 and 1874. In “The Veiled Lodger” Watson tells us Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years. Since he retired in 1903, counting back would bring us to 1880, but we must also deduct the years of the Great Hiatus between “The Final Problem” in April 1891 and Holmes’s return in “The Empty House” in early 1894, a gap of three years. So he established himself as a consulting detective in 1877. We know from “The Musgrave Ritual” that Holmes set up his practice soon after university, so we can imagine he finished his university years around 1876. A span of university education from 1872 to 1876 therefore sounds realistic in the chronology and would place the Gloria Scott case in about 1874.

However, in the course of “The Gloria Scott” Holmes refers to events aboard the ship having taken place thirty years earlier in 1855, which would place the story in 1885. This has to be wrong, because Holmes and Watson met in 1881 by which time Holmes had been in practice for four years. Clearly there is some deliberate shifting of dates in this story, perhaps through Holmes’s faulty record keeping (always possible, as he was not a great record-keeper of things he regarded as unimportant), or Watson’s erroneous transcription of the case or, we should not forget, through Watson trying to hide the time of Holmes’s university years.

In fact my own research has revealed two episodes that happened to Holmes while at university that have previously gone unrecorded. They reveal that Holmes’s years at university were not without incident and it is not surprising that it has been difficult to tie him down, since he spent time at two universities. I am grateful to Peter Tremayne and Derek Wilson for their help in bringing the record of the episodes into their final form from scraps of evidence left by Watson. I have deliberately set the stories in reverse order of internal events because of the relative discovery of the episodes by Watson. The first happened during the period of Holmes’s apparent death, whilst Watson learned of the second after Holmes’s return. Here then, for the first time ever, are the earliest records of Sherlock Holmes.

The Bothersome Business of the Dutch Nativity

Derek Wilson

The death of my dear friend, Sherlock Holmes, affected me more than a little and had I not had the demands of a growing medical practice and the care of a loving wife the loss which I, and indeed the nation, had suffered must have seriously undermined my constitution. For a long time I could scarcely bear it when my affairs took me to places where some of Holmes’s greatest triumphs had been enacted or where together we had faced dangerous villains or petty scoundrels. As for Baker Street, I avoided it completely; always ordering cab drivers to proceed by some roundabout route when conveying me through that part of London.

Yet time, as has often been observed, is a healer. I shared that experience common to all bereaved people: the transformation of memories from dreams almost too painful to be endured into visitations of consolation. Increasingly I found myself turning over the leaves of my journals and the printed accounts of Sherlock Holmes’s cases which I had been privileged to record. Much of the material I had garnered about my friend consisted of tantalizing