"The Cardboard Box"

The Cardboard Box.

The case begins Friday, August 30, 1889.

Why?

THE STATEMENT OF THE MONTH:
"It was a blazing hot day in August."

THE STATE OF WATSON’S FINANCES:
"A depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday ..."

SOME CURRENT EVENTS:
"Parliament had risen. Everybody was out of town, and I yearned for the glades of the New Forest or the shingle of Southsea.

THE DAY OF THE CASE:
"To-day is Friday. The packet was posted on Thursday morning. The tragedy, then, occurred on Wednesday or Tuesday, or earlier."

WATSON’S PUBLISHED WORKS:
"The case," said Sherlock Holmes as we chatted over our cigars that night in our rooms at Baker Street, "is one where, as in the investigations which you have chronicled under the names of ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and of ‘The Sign of Four,’ we have been compelled to reason backward from effects to causes."

THE BOAT SCHEDULE:
"It had been ascertained at the shipping offices that Browner had left aboard of the May Day, and I calculate that she is due in the Thames to-morrow night."
"I went down to the Albert Dock yesterday at 6 P.M., and boarded the S. S. May Day, belonging to the Liverpool, Dublin, and London Steam Packet Company."

A PREVIOUS CASE WITH LESTRADE:
"He is a big, powerful chap, clean-shaven, and very swarthy—something like Aldridge, who helped us in the bogus laundry affair."

WHAT THE BARING-GOULD ANNOTATED SAYS:
August 31, 1889. 

WHAT ZEISLER, THE KING OF CHRONOLOGY, SAYS:
August 10, 1888.

THE BIRLSTONE RAILWAY TIMETABLE:
The curious thing about "Cardboard Box" is the way Watson is living the bachelor life at Baker Street, complaining of his weak bank account and reminiscing about his days in the military, yet he’s already written both STUD and SIGN. That fact alone means the tale could not have occurred before August of 1889 (according to my own dating of SIGN), but however you date it, Watson did pick up a wife in SIGN, and that wife is now absent.

As CARD was originally published as the second story of the Memoirs series, during Holmes’s 1891-1894 hiatus (in the beginning of which, Watson also had a wife), the latest August in which the events could have taken place would be that of 1890.

So when was it, August 1889 or August 1890? And why was Watson at Baker Street while his wife was obviously a part of the "everybody" who was out of town? For the answers, we need only look to Cox and Company, and the sadly empty account Watson kept there along with his tin dispatch box.
In "The Sign of the Four," when Watson met Mary Morstan, he complained of being "an army surgeon with a weak leg and a weaker banking account." And once he let romance sweep him into marriage and active medical practice, his fortunes did not immediately change. By August of 1889, the good doctor needed an influx of capital and, as luck would have it, an opportunity presented itself. This opportunity, however, would require him both to stay in town during his planned holiday *and* require him to curry Holmes’s favor a bit, so a stay at Baker Street would definitely be in order.
Using that rationale, I would have to place this case’s beginning on Friday, August 30, 1889 — the day Watson’s literary agent signed to contract to publish The Sign of the Four.

P.S. The brisk and capable Dr. Wood has pointed out to me that the possibilities for a train ride between Liverpool and New Brighton weren’t likely before 1891. Yet with "Cardboard Box" being published in January 1893 and the whole Holmes hiatus thing, that fact seems to leave us with another Watsonian faux pas. But in pondering this conundrum, it suddenly struck me that Watson isn’t the man who claimed a train went from Liverpool to New Brighton. The man who made that statement was Jim Browner, a drunkard whose head was known to "have all Niagara whizzing and buzzing" in it. Maybe the kill-crazed Browner *thought* he was on a train instead of a river ferry, with all the noises in his head. Maybe he like to refer to seats as "cars." Whatever the case, I must trust Watson over a madman transcribed by a Scotland Yard clerk of unknown abilities.