Talk:Professor Challenger: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added
Line 18:
 
The chronology of the Challenger stories is complicated by the fact that Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) prescinds from identifying the years in which their events supposedly took place. In terms of its internal dates, you are correct that "Tuesday, August 18th" would require the events of The Lost World to have taken place in 1908 (or 1914, the next nearest year in which August 18th fell on a Tuesday). However, the next Challenger story, The Poison Belt, takes place on Friday, August 27 – Saturday, August 28. These dates comport with the following years: 1909, 1915, 1920. According to ACD, The Poison Belt takes place on the THIRD anniversary of the circumambulation of Maple White Land, which renders 1908 an impossible time frame for The Lost World since 1909 is only one year later and 1915 is seven years later. Alternatively, if we set The Lost World in 1912, 1915 meets the required three-year interval. This would necessitate jettisoning Malone's collocation of Tuesday with August 18. May we perhaps assume that, in the midst of the jungle heat, Malone mistook which day of the week it was? The contradiction is there, regardless of which interpretation we choose. On balance, I would note that the precision of The Poison Belt's chronology is central to that narrative - Malone calls it "a date forever memorable in the history of the world" - to a degree that "Tuesday, August 18th" is not to The Lost World. Also, the fact that The Lost World presents itself as a series of dispatches published from late spring through November aligns nicely with its actual serialization in The Strand magazine from April through November of 1912. <!-- Template:Unsigned IP --><small class="autosigned">—&nbsp;Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|unsigned]] comment added by [[Special:Contributions/2600:1700:82D0:2430:7805:9550:A5ED:B2D|2600:1700:82D0:2430:7805:9550:A5ED:B2D]] ([[User talk:2600:1700:82D0:2430:7805:9550:A5ED:B2D#top|talk]]) 14:50, 7 November 2021 (UTC)</small> <!--Autosigned by SineBot-->
:I think we need not erect apologetic arguments for Doyle's characters but rather recall that Doyle was notorious for failure to maintain continuity in his serial fiction. The most famous example, of course, is that in ''A Study in Scarlet'' Watson has been demobbed after receiving a bullet wound in the leg in Afghanistan, but in a story in ''The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'' the wound is in his shoulder. The gist is that Watson received a medical discharge for a wound that caused him continued discomfort, and the exact location of the unease was not important to Doyle. Likewise, Doyle did not refer to his earlier work but charged on ahead because the exact date of a fictional event was less important to him than its chronology relative to an earlier fictional event. [[User:Canonblack|Canonblack]] ([[User talk:Canonblack|talk]]) 13:46, 23 September 2022 (UTC)
 
== Different Challenger in 'Land of Mist?' ==