Watson in the dog-house

For some weird reason this 2-part post has been languishing as a Draft since I started re-reading the (un-annotated) Holmes canon last year! So, better late than never, may I humbly present these notes on Dr Watson - the early years!

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'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' relate the saga of a man who positively danced with danger, threw caution to the winds and found himself skating on increasingly thin ice.

That man is our friend John H Watson!

Dr Watson, as all his readers know, is the most noble and romantic of men. He makes this wonderfully clear throughout SIGN. Immediately smitten with Holmes' latest client Miss Mary Morstan, he nevertheless keeps his feelings silent out of the belief she'd think him something of a male gold-digger (for of course she is the apparent heir to a horde of Andaman jewels). When he wins her hand in marriage at the novel's end we cheer his good fortune.

And yet, in setting down his first impressions of the woman who is to later become his wife, what do we read?

Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but - 

To be sure, what immediately follows is an appraisal of her positive attributes, her sweet and amiable expression, etc - yet I fear that any woman, and more to the point any wife, would only hear the words quoted above; whatever Watson may have put after that "but" would be likely drowned out by the grinding of female teeth and the sudden descent of a red mist.

As the 'Adventures' proper begin Watson places us firmly post-marriage, either with him being dragged away from hearth and home by Holmes or relating a tale 'in flashback' of the time he still lived at 221b Baker Street. BOSC and TWIS furnish us with valuable insights into the Watsons' married life and domestic scene. Any slip committed during the writing of the earlier novel SIGN has obviously been forgiven and forgotten.

And yet...  when Watson is dragged off by Holmes to Herefordshire he meets one of the principal figures in the Boscombe Valley case:

there rushed into the room one of the most lovely young women that I have ever seen in my life. Her violet eyes shining, her lips parted, a pink flush upon her cheeks - 

He goes on, but again, could Mrs Watson pick up her copy of The Strand and read any further without casting some rather hard glances her husband's way?

TO BE CONTINUED!! 

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