besleybean wrote:

I dion't think any of that was at issue, I take all of the above to be a givern.
I think it's the being kept from other children that was the stumbling block for some.
Living in the country with a home tutor, may be the only explanation!
If we take it Mycroft is 4-5 years older than Sherlock: maybe they both got put in boarding school when Mycroft was 11-12, just as he started secondary school. Sherlock would be 7-8, just going into the 'juniot' section of primary school.

Sounds good to me... headcanon accepted.
 

ok couple of points

first, not only am I around the same age as Sherlock, not only am I, like him, British (and English) but my parents are teachers, so I know pretty well what the education system looked like all those years ago.

First, no one in Britain has or had home tutors. At least I have never heard of such a thing. British kids have them with about the same frequency as kids in American or Germany ie never.

Home education I think is a very reasonable alternative, there was (and is) a big home education community in the UK and I knew a lot of home educated kids when I was growing up. Done well, my experience was that it produced lovely individuals. It wouldn't be unusual for a family to home educate to secondary age, ie 11, then send the kids off to school because that's when you start getting much more serious in the UK education system.

Its entirely possible for a bright kid to get a full scholarship to a very posh school, ie attend for free. All the posh British schools have endowments etc for bright kids from poor backgrounds. Of course both Mycroft and Sherlock would have got places under this criteria. Generally, these really posh schools are secondary schools-the ones you attend before are known as "prep" schools and are a lot less high powered. Home educating to age 11 then sending the kids off to boarding school at 11 seems quite plausible actually.

When Sherlock went to university, our universities were free to attend, no fees, nothing. Even now, the size of the fee is not linked to the prestige of the university, and there is a loan scheme which makes it free at the point of delivery. But when Sherlock went-which is when I went-university was free. So that isn't an issue and he could have gone wherever he liked. 

the "other children" comment just makes very little sense really. I think the only way I can work it is that Mycroft and Sherlock have very different ideas about their childhood, both to each other and to their parents, that they are not the most reliable witnesses being rather prone to histronics and all. Ditto the "I'll be mother" comment. It just makes no sense.unless you accept it not as a literal description of Sherlock's childhood but as a barbed comment. 

I do think the writers have changed what they want to do with Sherlock's family and that is in fact behind the discrepancies. I am sure that in previous interviews they have said that they had planned to follow the story in - iirc the 7 % solution?- where Holmes' mother had an affair with his maths teacher and Holmes ' father killed her as a result. It was in Young Sherlock Holmes too. . 

Last edited by beekeeper (January 5, 2014 3:46 pm)

besleybean wrote:

But what Moriarty revealed was about Sherlock, not his parents.

Well it was information he got from Mycroft, so I assume it was about his childhood and so on. If you have a newspaper article about someone you normally say where they grew up, what their parents did, etc.