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A while ago, Rachelle did this and made up backstory for Holmes to replace the almost nothing that Doyle gave us. And I've been sort of jealous of this, bizarrely, because while yes, I've been playing Watson for like two years without doing something similar, Watson gets even less backstory than Holmes does.
This is what's canon for Watson's background:
1. His father's name seemed to have been H. Watson. No idea what the H stood for.
2. He had an older brother, who was probably also an H. Watson, who inherited an extremely expensive watch from their father, but treated it like shit and pawned it several times and eventually drank himself to death by about 1888, looks like.
3. He played rugby for the Blackheath Football Club as a young man. Incidentally, I love so much that Watson gets mentioned on the wikipedia entry, there. There is no real reason for it.
4. He seems to have lived in Ballarat, Australia at some point, and probably during the Victoria gold rush (which began in earnest in 1851 and stretched out through the 1860s) because he mentions the gold fields specifically.
5. He claims to have an experience of women spanning many nations and three continents.
He's most informative in the very first paragraph of A Study in Scarlet, in which he also informs us that:
6. He attended the University of London and graduated in 1878.
7. He joined the army, and served in India and Afghanistan, assistant surgeon for this regiment and this regiment.
8. He got shot at the Battle of Maiwand and nearly died and then got better and then got typhoid and nearly died again and then he got sent back to England, where, as of 1881, he had "neither kith nor kin" and also pretty much no money to speak of, despite coming from a family that has fifty guinea watches to be inherited. In fact, Watson's military history is highly based upon the military history of the actual surgeon-major of the 66th Foot, who was shot at Maiwand and invalided out of the army.
That is... more or less all I have been working with for the last two years. Almost nothing is known about Watson's life before he got his medical degree, and what there is has no order to it. We don't know what his family was like (presumably there was money at some point), we don't know how much of his youth he spent in Australia and how much in England and at what point or why he might have made the move. We don't know which three continents. Europe's a given, as is Asia. Does Australia count? If he was only a boy when he lived there, can he really be said to have had much experience of women at all while he was there?
For a while I've been dodging around a lot of this stuff, but sometimes... what actually happened would really make a difference to how Watson might feel about something.
( Today, I'm going on an adventure to make a lot of shit up. )
There. That was... enjoyable, if a slightly silly exercise.
This is what's canon for Watson's background:
1. His father's name seemed to have been H. Watson. No idea what the H stood for.
2. He had an older brother, who was probably also an H. Watson, who inherited an extremely expensive watch from their father, but treated it like shit and pawned it several times and eventually drank himself to death by about 1888, looks like.
3. He played rugby for the Blackheath Football Club as a young man. Incidentally, I love so much that Watson gets mentioned on the wikipedia entry, there. There is no real reason for it.
4. He seems to have lived in Ballarat, Australia at some point, and probably during the Victoria gold rush (which began in earnest in 1851 and stretched out through the 1860s) because he mentions the gold fields specifically.
5. He claims to have an experience of women spanning many nations and three continents.
He's most informative in the very first paragraph of A Study in Scarlet, in which he also informs us that:
6. He attended the University of London and graduated in 1878.
7. He joined the army, and served in India and Afghanistan, assistant surgeon for this regiment and this regiment.
8. He got shot at the Battle of Maiwand and nearly died and then got better and then got typhoid and nearly died again and then he got sent back to England, where, as of 1881, he had "neither kith nor kin" and also pretty much no money to speak of, despite coming from a family that has fifty guinea watches to be inherited. In fact, Watson's military history is highly based upon the military history of the actual surgeon-major of the 66th Foot, who was shot at Maiwand and invalided out of the army.
That is... more or less all I have been working with for the last two years. Almost nothing is known about Watson's life before he got his medical degree, and what there is has no order to it. We don't know what his family was like (presumably there was money at some point), we don't know how much of his youth he spent in Australia and how much in England and at what point or why he might have made the move. We don't know which three continents. Europe's a given, as is Asia. Does Australia count? If he was only a boy when he lived there, can he really be said to have had much experience of women at all while he was there?
For a while I've been dodging around a lot of this stuff, but sometimes... what actually happened would really make a difference to how Watson might feel about something.
( Today, I'm going on an adventure to make a lot of shit up. )
There. That was... enjoyable, if a slightly silly exercise.
