#I don't blame Holmes for avoiding it or Watson for not portraying it

[quill-of-thoth]

Letters from Watson, Catching Up

The Gloria Scott part 2:  the fun bits

- Trevor is going out of his way to spend time with his teenage son and his son’s only friend. He’s an involved dad, and that’s both sweet and tragic given that he does not survive this tale. - Holmes is not staying with family during the rest of vacation... or at least, he says he’s staying in “my rooms in london” where he was previously staying on or near campus during the school year, probably. The victorian equivalent of a just-off-campus apartment could fit both living situations, but having to sign a year’s lease, prove months of income, and include a deposit was not really a thing then. He could have moved. It’s possible that he was staying with Mycroft, who is both older than him and likely already starting his london career, but I have no data on that. - Based on his organic chemistry experiments and the fact that Watson’s list of his “limits” in study in scarlet probably includes his courses of study in college and university, I think Holmes intended to become a chemist (NOT a pharmacist, brits, a person who studies chemistry for a living), possibly specifically an organic chemist, before he decided to become a detective.  - Organic chemistry was a fairly new and exciting field at the time: The synthetic dye industry had kicked off in the late 1850′s, when Holmes would have been a child, medicines were being synthesized, and plastics were about to become actually useful. (Holmes would have been exposed to them in his course of study, ACD probably knew a little bit about the first few attempts from his own studies or popular science media because the first plastic, Parkesine, was exhibited at the 1962 International Exhibition in London, where it won the bronze medal.) - He could also have intended to become a pharmacist (chemist, to speakers of UK english) but again. No data to suggest it’s likely. - Back to poor Victor, whose father is dying of apoplexy (stroke) or nervous shock (more vague but probably referring to sudden changes in behavior... read stress, trauma, probably also hypertension given the stroke.) Remember that Victor is still legally a child, with no adult relatives other than his father, and no friends besides Holmes, also a child (even by Baring-Gould’s timeline, though then as now the late teens are socially and legally a transition period into adulthood,) but one living more independently than Victor. He probably seemed very worldly, living on his own in London for the summer! - Hudson follows the pattern of many of the villains of Holmes’ adventures by making the maids at Trevor’s estate feel unsafe via crude language and public drunkenness. If you learn one thing from these stories, it’s that you should sack anyone who makes female servants feel uneasy, no questions asked. Victor doesn’t have any recourse if his father lets Hudson stay, other than physical violence. 

- That “grotesque” letter sure looks less silly now. Especially since it’s a very trivial cypher, which also a feature in these stories, almost always employed by somewhat-organized criminals, almost always ludicrously simple for the severity of the crimes alluded to. Still, the Victorians had SO MUCH correspondence, and the easiest way to hide a cypher is for nobody to think the cyphertext is important. Given the rest of the context, the postmark probably gave Trevor as much information as the message itself.