12th Night Giveaway, Day 8

Stonyhurst College, where Conan Doyle attended from 1868 to 1875, ages 9 to 16.

The  other night on the way home, my older son asked us an interesting question: do kids at Hogwarts have the same schedule all year, or does it change after the holidays?

Never having received our admissions letters, we couldn’t say.* But at some point during Christmas break, one of them might figure it out. As much as I have tried to make young Sherlockians of them, and my husband has tried to introduce them to Tolkein and Dr. Who, our kids are quite enraptured with the world of Harry Potter right now, reading the books and watching the movies, over and over and over and….  And why not? After all, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are their ages, and dealing with school, as much as they are playing Quidditch or looking for Horcruxes. One of the appeals of the Harry Potter series is its school setting–a world where many children spend so much time, away from parents, learning to deal with others and to manage themselves–lessons which will stay with them much longer than lists of states and capitals.**

Teacher conferences. Sooooo not fun.

When we meet Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, they’ve been out of school for several years. We know about Watson’s medical education, but we know very little about Holmes’s formal schooling. We know he went to university, but not which one, and while Baring-Gould and Meyer believe that Moriarty was once his (pre-college) tutor, there’s no hard evidence for that.

This doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t school stories in the Canon. “The Adventure of the Priory School” is one, along with “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter” and “The Adventure of the Three Students.” The latter two seem to be less well-known than the former, probably because PRIO was made into a Granada episode and bits of it were incorporated into “The Reichenbach Fall.” So, in an attempt to live up to this blog’s title, I thought today’s question should require us to do a little review of 3STU.***

Someone has tried to cheat on the Fortescue Scholarship examination. Which of the three students did Watson believe to be the culprit? Was he correct? And if not, who did it?

All students need good reference materials; you can’t google everything! And so today’s prize is a hardbound set of William S. Baring-Gould’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. They are, of course, second-hand, and are actually from different sets: Volume 1 is from the 2nd edition, 16th printing, while Volume 2 is from the 2nd edition, 12th printing, but they are clean copies in good shape, and you should get good use out of them.

Baring-Gould. Everyone needs one.

For your chance to win, just submit your answers via the blog comments, FaceBook PM or Twitter DM!

Day 7 Winner!

Congratulations to Betsy, who knew that the slimy, wicked, nasty Baron von Gruner collected Chinese pottery. I would not be at all surprised if those vases from “The Blind Banker” were smuggled in for his collection. Betsy’s name was drawn for the DVD. Claire Daines, however, made the excellent point that von Gruner also collected women, so it would not have been a shock to find his name on a certain phone in “A Scandal in Belgravia.” I truly hate the Baron, and I’d love to see Sherlock and John take him on, possibly in S4.

Footnotes:

*Perhaps one of  you can enlighten us.

**And since, as adults, we remember those lessons, it’s always a little troubling when you realize your children’s lives go on in places where you can’t watch over them.

***Yeah, I had to read it, too.