regshoe

Part 1; Part 2

E. W. Hornung never did anything as egregious as making it June on one page and October three pages later in the same scene, but there are nevertheless a few difficulties in working out the timeline of the Raffles stories.

GIFT takes place from June to July; the year can be found from either the stories preceding it or those following, but unfortunately these contradict each other. Raffles states in RETU that GENT was ‘last year’ and in GIFT that RETU was ‘last November’; this ought to put GIFT in 1893. On the other side, the Maturin era stories take place in 1897 (SINE and JUBI can be definitely dated to this year), and this together with the eighteen-month term of Bunny’s imprisonment would seem to imply that GIFT was in 1895. The solution of a longer gap between GIFT and SINE is made impossible by the later ‘first innings’ stories: besides the general impression of a period longer than two years, the sequence of RETU-REST-BADN all in different years means that GIFT can’t be earlier than 1895. The ‘last November’ statement must therefore be false. Bunny may have done this deliberately to simplify the timeline of the first book: he seems to have picked early stories—perhaps to leave open opportunities to write more later on while keeping things roughly chronological—while also ending with GIFT straight away to reassure readers that he got his just deserts, and in this case it might make sense to smooth over the resulting gap.

The various pieces of information used to date CHES don’t quite add up. It’s ‘early April’, and shortly before Easter; the fairly plot-crucial references to Crawshay and police suspicion place it after RETU, so it can’t be earlier than 1893; Bunny’s statement that it is ‘the year after that of my novitiate’ appears to point to 1892 but could stretch to April 1893, not much more than two years after IDES. The final day of the story can’t be later than the Thursday before Easter Sunday, since the bank wouldn’t open on Good Friday. Easter Sunday was on 2 April in 1893, so it can’t quite be April yet. This one makes reasonable sense as a mistake: Bunny might well have remembered that Easter that year was in April and that it was just before Easter, and combined these two facts without checking the precise dates.

Probably the most glaring and baffling inconsistency in the short stories involves the cricket match in BADN. The details given (the Second Test Match of the Australian Tour, played at Old Trafford in Manchester, ‘on the third Thursday, Friday and Saturday of July’) very clearly point to a specific match that took place in July 1896, but this date is entirely incompatible with the timeline of the later stories. No other real-world cricket match fits the description. It’s possible that Bunny was trying to muddle the timeline by referring to the wrong match, but surely the cricket fans among his readers would have remembered that Raffles didn’t play in that match. The only tenable solution I can come up with is to suppose that this match took place in a different year in the fictional world of the stories. The other details given seem to suggest 1894, which works well as the closest year to 1896 that does fit with the established timeline.

JUST is a complete headache, so I’ll start by pointing out that Bunny had even more than the usual reason to confuse the dating of this story: the final chapter mentions the need for him to conceal Teddy Garland’s real identity, and ‘the Cambridge wicket-keeper in X year’ would be a single, easily identifiable person. The main clues are as follows:

The story opens on ‘the Tuesday before the Varsity match’, and the characters later attend the match; this places it in early July, and also means it can’t be the same year as FIEL (1894 in my timeline, but fairly uncertain).
Raffles refers to the events of GENT in chapter 1, and in chapter 17 Bunny recognises Mackenzie; this places it after August 1891.
Raffles has a bank account (mentioned in chapter 2 in the context of Teddy trying to forge a cheque from him, and opened ‘only that year’), which he didn’t in CHES, and he uses the telephone in his rooms, installed during CHES, several times; this places it after April 1893.
Raffles’s map of their past adventures in chapter 9 has the locations of IDES, TRAP, CRIM, COST and REST marked, implying it’s after all of them; my date of March 1895 for TRAP is reasonably certain, but with GIFT in 1895 it’s impossible for it to be after that story.
The wrongs of which Raffles accuses Levy in chapter 13 took place ‘between 1890 and 1894’; this ought to place it after 1894, which is likewise impossible, but could stretch to during 1894.
At the end Raffles and Bunny flee the country, and it’s implied they’re going to be away for some time; it therefore can’t be the same year as BADN (mid-July 1894) and would make the same year as REST (August 1893, implies that Raffles was playing cricket as usual in July) somewhat awkward.
Thanks to the-prince-of-professors and oscartame on Tumblr for pointing this one out: Raffles and Bunny’s relationship seems to be still in its early stages—Bunny didn’t know much about Raffles’s relations with Teddy and Camilla, and says at one point that this was the first time he really trusted Raffles without much reason. This could be a more reliable clue if Bunny is deliberately falsifying the dates!

I think July, 1893 is the best compromise: this only explicitly contradicts the two fairly minor details of the map and the dates of Levy’s crimes, which are both impossible on the face of it anyway. The relation to REST is a little difficult, though given the sensitive nature of the events of JUST Bunny might have had good reason to avoid referring to them in the earlier story.