Monthly Meeting Minutes - 16th May 2019

The Shingle of Southsea Holmesian Society

Monthly Meeting Minutes

Date of Meeting: 16^th May 2019

Location of Meeting:

The Sherloft, My House, Portsmouth, UK

Attendees:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller)

Apologies:

Invisible Tony apologised and was ejected from The Sherloft.

Presentation:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) presented his fascinating findings about beards in the canon:

Beards

By Paul Thomas Miller

There are 96 uses of the word "beard" in The Canon. A study of them can prove most illuminating. I conducted some research and discovered how the beards are distributed across the stories. Of course, we should expect some bias in the long stories compared to the short stories. The more words there are, the more chance there is that one of those words will be "beard". Therefore, a simple tally means very little. More interesting is the rate of beards per ten-thousand words.

Story	Number of Beards	Rate of Beards per 10K Words
A Study In Scarlet	5	1.15
The Sign of the Four	6	1.39
A Scandal in Bohemia	0	0.00
The Red-Headed League	0	0.00
A Case of Identity	0	0.00
The Boscombe Valley Mystery	1	1.04
The Five Orange Pips	0	0.00
The Man with the Twisted Lip	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle	1	1.28
The Adventure of the Speckled Band	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb	1	1.21
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches	1	1.00
Silver Blaze	1	1.04
The Yellow Face	0	0.00
The Stock-Broker's Clerk	1	1.47
The “Gloria Scott”	0	0.00
The Musgrave Ritual	0	0.00
The Reigate Squires	0	0.00
The Crooked Man	0	0.00
The Resident Patient	0	0.00
The Greek Interpreter	2	2.85
The Naval Treaty	0	0.00
The Final Problem	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Cardboard Box	0	0.00
The Hound of the Baskervilles	18	3.04
The Adventure of the Empty House	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Dancing Men	1	1.03
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist	10	12.74
The Adventure of the Priory School	5	4.35
The Adventure of Black Peter	5	6.15
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton	1	1.49
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Three Students	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez	1	1.12
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter	4	4.98
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange	2	2.18
The Adventure of the Second Stain	0	0.00
The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Devil's Foot	3	3.00
The Adventure of the Red Circle	3	4.09
The Adventure of the Dying Detective	0	0.00
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax	5	6.50
The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans	1	0.93
The Valley Of Fear	6	1.04
His Last Bow	1	1.65
The Adventure Of The Mazarin Stone	0	0.00
The Problem of Thor Bridge	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Creeping Man	0	0.00
The Illustrious Client	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Three Garridebs	3	4.83
The Blanched Soldier	7	9.05
The Adventure of the Three Gables	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Lion's Mane	1	1.39
The Adventure of the Retired Colourman	0	0.00
The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger	0	0.00
The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place	0	0.00

On their own, I think we can all agree that these figures are fascinating. But they become even more interesting when we look at the rate of beards by year. There are two types of year to consider: the year of publication and the year when the adventures took place.

By adding word counts and beard counts for each year I arrived at the following rates of beard mentions. (Where no data is given, there is no data for that year. Where a zero is given, there is data for that year but no mention of beards.)

Year	Beard Rate for Chronological Years	Beard Rate for Publication Years
1875	0
1877	0
1881	1.39
1883	0
1884	0.61
1886	0.61
1887	0.64	1.15
1888	0.93
1889	1.86
1890	0.42	1.39
1891	0.71	0.2
1892	0	0.63
1893		0.35
1894	1.73
1895	4.83
1896	0
1897	2.71
1898	1.03
1899	0
1900	0
1901	4.35	3.04
1902	2.04
1903	3.32	3.1
1904		2.34
1907	1.39
1908		0.45
1910		3
1911		5.32
1913		0
1914	1.65	1.04
1917		1.65
1921		0
1922		0
1923		0
1924		1.37
1926		3.01
1927		0

Perhaps the full impact of this information is not made clear until it is seen in graph form (click on it for a bigger version):

As you can see, peak beard rates are seen around and after 1910 in the publication dates. However, this data is skewed towards the 1890s in the dates of when the stories took place. Which is telling.

You see, beard popularity in the UK was high from 1850 to 1900 (more or less). After the turn of the century, though, beards went out of fashion. They were replaced for a time by moustaches and eventually by being clean shaven.

The chronology data reflects these trends, whereas the publication data is quite contrary.

Now, if we are to believe that the stories are fabrications of the infamous Arthur Conan Doyle, would it not be reasonable to expect his contemporary writing to reflect the contemporary facial fashions? We are told by Doyleites that he churned out the Holmes stories with nary a thought of accuracy or anachronism. How likely is it that such a man would bother to get the beards right? His characters would reflect the people around him.

But if the stories are real accounts of real events, we see a different story. Although Watson is writing the stories much later, he is writing them accurately and remembers how people looked at the time.

(Incidentally, the chronology I used when compiling this data was Watson Does Not Lie – an excellent book which will be published by Wildside Press later this year. It is by a Holmesian genius named Paul Thomas Miller.)

Any Other Business:

"The Entire Canon" (Paul Thomas Miller) suggested making use of his new Sherlock Holmes bottle-opener. All were in favour and set about the assembled beer bottles with an undignified fervour.