Kidnapped: a timeline

Robert Louis Stevenson's father originally intended that his son should follow his own profession, lighthouse engineering, and was disappointed when Louis chose instead to pursue a literary life. However, RLS made the right decision in not becoming an engineer; as an inspection of the text of Kidnapped reveals, he could not do maths.

As with my Raffles and Flight of the Heron timelines, I'll make another post detailing how I worked all this out and the various problems involved. I'm putting this on Dreamwidth before publishing it on the website partly because it is so difficult, and I'm afraid I may have missed things, lost count or made errors in logic somewhere. If you would like to, I'd much appreciate any criticism of the counting and reasoning detailed in these two posts!

( The timeline... )

Kidnapped timeline: logic and problems

Here is the draft timeline, and here is the logic of how I worked it out and the problems encountered. It's a tricky one; as I remarked earlier, there are five exact dates in the book and every one of them is at least difficult to reconcile with other information given about the timeline, if not definitely contradictory. Again, I would much appreciate any thoughts you have here on the counting, reasoning, decisions made or anything else.

( Bit of a tl;dr here, I'm afraid... )