221B Recs

Title: All We Ought to Ask
Author: achray
Pairing: Sherlock/John
Length: 56,027
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: None
Verse: Sherlock BBC

Author's summary:1860. Change is in the air. John is a clergyman and former army chaplain, attempting to settle down in a country parish and lead a quiet life. But with Sherlock Holmes, reputed to be England's most dangerous religious controversialist, as the local aristocrat, what are his prospects of success?

Reccer's comments: Below is my history!fan squee, but I should let fans of English literature know that this AU was inspired by and plays with the conventions of the Victorian religious novel. Yep, it does that and earns its rating! :)

History AUs, particularly those that aspire to at least some historical authenticity, are an especial challenge for the writer. Cultural differences can have an enormous impact on a character, making it difficult to balance the core aspects of the personality with the inevitable changes that arise when a person is raised in a different time. For example, how do you make Sherlock and John come alive in the 1860s, rather than having Holmes and Watson grow up a few decades earlier? To do so well requires a strong grasp of the BBC versions of Doyle's characters as well as the period in question. Achray achieves this particularly well with her John Watson, who from the first is clearly not content with his new position as a rural parson in a quiet English parish:

Birds called in the trees outside, and there was the distant lowing of some cows, but otherwise all was silent. To John, used to the noise of London and before that, the cheerful and frantic bustle of a garrison full of soldiers, the quiet was oppressive. He laid his hands on his books and thought about how far they’d come, by land and sea and rail. He’d spent most of his life running away from precisely this scenario, and now here he was.

Achray's representation of contemporary bigotry is particularly skillful, for she allows even her main protagonists to say and do things that today many of us find unpleasantly reactionary, yet avoids making these characters unsympathetic. Assigning such prejudices to villains would be too easy and shortchange the complexity of the past, where you can find legions of thoughtful, engaging people writing of their love for their family or relatives in one sentence and expressing racist/sexist/classist sentiments in the next. John in this story is kind to women (he clearly enjoys working with Molly and asks her opinion on matters where she is the expert), but he is no supporter of equal rights or suffrage for the fairer sex (though by the end of the story one can envision him eventually thawing under the influence of the right company). Moreover, his letters to Mary show contempt towards what he considers "less interesting" work, the very work she would be handling if she became his wife:

I had expected to spend much of my time engaged in sermon-writing and in reading – as you told me, I am sadly behind after my years away – but my parishioners are determined to entertain me and tell me of their troubles. An astonishing number of them wish to be married, or have their children christened, or take communion classes. I see more than ever how invaluable your assistance could be, as I am unaccustomed to dealing with ladies’ charitable committees and the other smaller concerns of the parish.

For his part, clever, sharp-tongued, iconoclastic Sherlock forgets the realities of everyday life for the middle class and poor, not foreseeing that altering an individual's worldview may cause them not just spiritual anguish, but also destroy their economic stability. And Mary Morstan is an earnest, patient, talented, and faithful woman, but she shares the deep religious prejudices towards unbelievers expressed by many European Christians. It's these imperfections that make the characters more human, as well as situating them realistically in England of the mid-nineteenth century.

In short: come for the Victorian worldbuilding and dialogue, stay for the characters and a certain passionate, heady romance.