justtwomushrooms

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“i’m your man” oh i’m sure you are

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audience who is hyperfixated on the series vs. creator who cant remember shit

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For All Your ACD Canon Needs: The Agony Column.

Today in Adventures in Victorian Fic, I learned about the agony column from this book here: Alice Clay’s The Agony Column of the ‘Times,’ 1800-1870. This book was published in 1881 and it’s available on GoogleBooks and HathiTrust (where you can download the whole thing for free). Regardez:

If you are an avid reader of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, as you probably are if you made it this far, you will remember that in many stories mention is made of Holmes reading the “agony columns.” The agony column was a nickname given to a feature of the London Times for which the closest equivalent in modern American print culture would be the personal or “classified” ad sections you used to see in local papers before the advent of Craigslist and e-dating. For a small fee, anyone could place an anonymous advertisement in this column of the Times, where it could be read by anyone who bought that day’s Times. 

In a fic I just posted (entitled “The Agony Column”), Holmes and Watson have to use the agony column to communicate with each other while he’s hiding out during the hiatus. I must thank @oldshrewsburyian and her lovely and poignant story “In The Time of This Mortal Life,” in which she imagines Holmes trying to get word to Watson of his survival during the winter of 1891, for giving me this idea. In my “Missing Pages” series the hiatus plays out very differently, but there’s still a period of time when they’re stuck in London but can’t see each other. I was thinking about how they would handle that and suddenly it occurred to me: they’d use the agony column. 

Because I’m me, I decided I had to find out more about this form of nineteenth century social media, and a little Googling pointed me to Alice Clay’s anthology of agony column advertisements from 1800 to 1870. I found it online and…

Wow.

It was nothing like what I expected. It was far, far weirder.

Keep reading

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"Dr Watson, this is Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, this is Dr Watson. You're going to spend the rest of your days together and your lives will be so intertwined and profoundly changed by the other that your very names will feel incomplete when spoken separately, and your story will become a paradigm of human love for generations. Also, enjoy saving on rent."

-Stamford, 1881

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Jeeves doodles

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From Ship To Sherlock: Doyle's Whaler Journals

Two very special and unexpected journals that could also pass for logbooks. And they were written by someone you wouldn’t really expect and would you believe me if I told you that the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes and other stories once served on a whaler? And yet it is true.

The Journal of Sir Conan Arthur Doyle, 1880 (x)

In 1880, Conan Arthur Doyle was a young medical student in his third year at Edinburgh University. He had never been to sea, let alone on a whaling ship. But he was about to board such a ship and embark on one of the most dangerous ventures a young man could undertake. Actually it was lucky because by law every whaling ship had to have a surgeon on board, and when one of Conan Doyle’s friends found at the last minute that he could not join an expedition, he offered Conan Doyle the job.

He was to receive two pounds and ten shillings a month in wages and a bonus of three shillings for every ton of whale oil the ship won. The ship was a whaler called The Hope, built of heavy oak and with an iron-clad hull to traverse the ice floes of the north. Robust as she was, she was still vulnerable - in 1871 alone the Arctic ice had destroyed 34 whaling ships.

The Hope left Peterhead on 28 February 1880 under Captain John Gray - “a truly great man, a great sailor and a serious Scot”, as Conan Doyle wrote in his journal. The journal, which consists of two parts, was written during his six-month voyage and later adapted into his ghost story “The Captain of the Pole-Star,” and nonfiction articles “The Glamour of the Arctic” and “Life on a Greenland Whaler. He describes his daily life on the Whaler and how he experienced the crew, what he experienced in the Arctic itself and how he even hunted whales but mainly seals.

It may not have been a financial success as a whaling trip, as the crew only managed to kill two whales, but Conan Doyle would profit from the experience. It was his first great adventure, and his account of it was a glimpse of his literary career.

He did indeed qualify as a doctor, practising in Southsea, near Portsmouth, but soon realised his true ambition to be a writer. And that’s where he stayed.

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1897 portrait of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, painted by the illustrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sidney Paget.

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It seems like Watson is rather used to Holmes touching him rather frequently, but I like to think that sometimes he still can get surprised (and flustered)

random thoughts

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Holmes: Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of Watson

Watson: 👍🏻

Holmes: Watson, it makes me nervous to bring you on this dangerous adventure, but I know you well enough to know you’d never let me go alone

Watson: 👍🏻

Holmes: Watson, do you want to go to a concert with me? And then maybe a nice walk and a night cap?

Watson: 👍🏻

Holmes: If this guy had killed you, I would have straight-up murdered him in cold blood

Watson: oh my god he loves me

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I don't think people are aware of the meta-ness of Sherlock Gnomes (2018).

The IMDb page for this film states that “Sherlock Gnomes was modelled after Basil Rathbone, who played Sherlock Holmes in fourteen movies between 1939 and 1946.” These films are of course eminent in the long line of Holmes adaptations, and it's no surprise that Rathbone and Bruce were used as models in contemporary adaptations. Their modelling goes beyond simply their appearances, however.

Paramount's film directly opposes the characterisation set up by the Rathbone saga, of their bumbling Bruce-Watson alongside the omnipotent Rathbone-Holmes (to say that these films is lacking in friendship would be quite false). Sherlock Gnomes takes this dynamic (while somewhat embellshing it) and directly opposes it, pleading justice for Watson's intelligence, while also bringing to light the character flaws in Doyle's Holmes. While I have nothing against Bruce-Watson personally, I agree it doesn't feel a spitting portrait of his source material, and so this film takes a perfectly fair stance in wanting to right the poor reputation Watson has received on screens.

And the only people who have any interest or appreciation for this film are Holmesians like us! God bless Sherlock Gnomes ♥ ♥

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in case you haven’t noticed, holmes has long, thin fingers

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fem!narumitsu (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)

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tfw you’re doing some spying and forget that personal space is a thing and that your colleague is head over heels in love with you.

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holmes log 1

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People need to stop making Sherlock Holmes adaptations and then being surprised when people ship Holmes and Watson, it’s been happening since the 1800s I don’t know what you were expecting. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself experienced it. There were ESSAYS published in the NINETEENTH CENTURY about Holmes and Watson being gay. It’s baked into their characters that they will have homoerotic undertones no matter how hard you try. Even if you change the gender of one of them to make them m/f they still somehow have homoerotic undertones. Just accept that if you make a Sherlock Holmes adaptation— no matter how loosely based— people WILL want Holmes and Watson to kiss.

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When the yaoi so fire they have a memorializing plaque

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Do you like my creatures