🤝 The Meeting (1881)
Stamford introduces two men who each need someone to split rent with: a wounded army doctor and a stranger who identifies him at a glance. They inspect rooms at 221B the next day. Nothing in fiction is the same afterwards.
“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
Two men who each needed a flatmate
Invalided home from the Afghan campaign, wounded and adrift on a small pension, Dr Watson runs into an old dresser named Stamford, mentions he is hunting affordable lodgings, and is warned — half in jest — about an eccentric acquaintance in the same predicament. Minutes later, in a laboratory at Barts, that acquaintance turns from his experiment and greets Watson with a fact about Afghanistan he could not possibly know.
The hinge of the whole saga
They take the Baker Street rooms together the next day. It is the least dramatic and most important event in the canon: without this chance introduction there is no chronicler, no friendship, and no sixty stories. Everything else in the saga radiates from a shared rent and a single impossible deduction.