#which makes watson's desire to be at the seaside make wayyyyy more sense

[skyriderwednesday]

If you hear me hooting in the distance, it's because my arbitrary decision to base my chronology on the original Strand versions of the stories has just paid off.

So it briefly came up through Letters From Watson that there are two openings to The Resident Patient, since when he decided to omit The Cardboard Box from Memoirs, ACD rescued its opening and grafted it onto Resident Patient. We read the 'grafted' opening with LFW, which makes the setting an unusually hot and muggy October.

However, in the original opening, it's instead cold and windy, and Watson notes that it was "towards the end of the first year during which Holmes and I shared chambers in Baker Street".

Therefore, as originally published, The Resident Patient takes place in October 1881.