A couple of Christmases ago, I went on at great length about the Johnny Ludlow papers written by Mrs Henry Wood, and noted that compiling a definitive chronology of Johnny's life and times is something I'm going to do one of these days. It still is, but it's more a thing to do when I've won the lottery and have nothing better to do with my time for months or years on end.
But as I said in that essay, the lynchpin for establishing Johnny's timeline is the story in which Easter Monday falling on April 24th is an essential part of the plot. Since the whole point of this game is to pretend Johnny is a real person, telling true stories, he can't have been mistaken about the year there, and it must have happened in 1848. Which makes the story "Roger Bevere", featuring a well-established London underground railway, rather problematic. And there's another story which gets anachronistic in the other direction...
"Anne", a three-part story published in the Argosy Magazine from October to December 1876, is a good one for tying all the stories together in one coherent chronology. Johnny tells us it's the year when Jacob Lewis, the old rector of Timberdale, died and was replaced by his stepson Herbert Tanerton (who goes on to appear in many other stories). And Johnny the narrator is even kind enough to remark parenthetically that "This year that I am now telling of was the one that preceded the accident to King Sanker." - so we can set this as early in Johnny's life, and prior to the other stories involving the Sanker family and the people they interact with.
Johnny doesn't tell us how old he is during this story - he's clearly a youngish boy, "years and years" younger than the heroine Anne Lewis, but still able to have mature conversations with her about her problems. Which are, basically, the plot of Cinderella. Mrs Henry Wood loved the Cinderella story and told it over and over in her works, but never more so than in this story. And it's when Anne acquires her wicked stepmother and two ugly sisters that the date of the story comes into question.
"St. Michael's Church stood in a nook under the cathedral walls: it is taken down now. It was there that the wedding took place." says Johnny the narrator. And the unusually-located church was indeed a real place in Worcester. And it was 'taken down' in 1843. A replacement church nearby had been built in 1839, and you wouldn't think the old place was still being used for weddings right up to its demolition. So does this story, and by implication all of Johnny's youthful adventures, take place so far back as 1840 or so?
You wouldn't think it could be. It's ambiguous exactly how old Johnny is here, but we can't really put it five or more years before "Watching on St. Mark's Eve". Let alone twenty years before the London Underground opened, if we're to believe "Roger Bevere".
And speaking of trains, when Anne and her father first come to the (fictional) village of Crabb, they're collected from "the station". All the other stories set in and around North and South Crabb have a very busy train station, Crabb Junction, in South Crabb - it's explained that the little place happens to be on the intersection of multiple train lines, which is reasonable enough, but surely must mean that the station was built during the "railway mania" of the 1840s. Shifting Johnny Ludlow's childhood back early enough to set that wedding in St Michael's throws everything just that little bit askew. It's surprising how "Victorian times" actually encompasses a whole lot of rapid change and development once you start looking at railways.
I think Johnny's getting his churches confused and misremembering. The unfortunate Dr Lewis and the awful Mrs Podd got married in the new church, and all those years later when he comes to write the story for the magazine Johnny thinks it was the old one. This is the kind of thing you have to read into the text if you want to be a chronologist. I'll write that full Johnny Ludlow history one day, and it'll all make sense, you'll see!
