OKAY HERE’S THE THING ABOUT THE FUCKING POCKET WATCH.
Pocket watch keys were not disposably easy to get. You couldn’t walk into any Her Majesty’s Royal Station of the Petrol and have a rack of them waiting for you. They had to be purchased from a watchmaker, and by virtue of being literally part of a piece of jewelry, they were not cheap. That’s why a lot of contemporary drawings of the period will show the key hanging on the watch chain, and also why you’d want to take a great deal of care with using one—bend it and your watch is useless until you can get to a watchmaker. Likewise, the watch itself would be delicate. They were items for the well-to-do. One reason watches were carried outside, on the front of the body, was to protect them from being thrown around in your pocket with keys and coins. (Being in front protected from pickpockets and also let people see you were wealthy enough to own a fancy watch. Think of it as similar to the person who carries the absolute latest iPhone…without a case on it.) Yes, they were sturdy by modern standards—a 150-year-old pocket watch may still run and keep accurate time, if you can find a jeweler to maintain it for you!—but that doesn’t mean they were super-tough. They WERE, however, made of metal—brass or pewter for the less-moneyed element, silver or gold for the gentleman—and thus not easy to scratch if you weren’t really jamming the key in there. MOVING ON!
During this period, how you looked and presented yourself was ridiculously important and narrow; you can walk into a gas station for a new charger and be like “yeah I got drunk last night and forget whose car I left mine in” and the clerk will be like “oh that’s a mood,” but try going to a watchmaker and saying “ah yes, I tried to wind my watch after a bottle of wine” and you’re going to get SUCH A SIDE-EYE. Your reputation will go right down the gutter and along with it, your family’s; note how many times in contemporary Victorian literature you see people saying stuff like “he’s well-bred” or “from a fine family background.” Reputation was everything and it was incredibly fragile.
So when Holmes looks at Watson’s watch, what he sees is: a piece of expensive jewelry shot to shit by being carelessly thrown in a pants pocket rather than a watch-pocket, which would have held the watch firm and protected it from other metal objects. The watch also was not worn on the waistcoat in absence of a watch-pocket, implying its owner did not give a damn how he looked—UNTHINKABLE for a Victorian gentleman. Why not? Well, either he’d have to be a wild eccentric or suffering from a terrible illness. The main way to treat things like Parkinson’s at the time was “politely ignore it until it’s impossible to ignore, and then the person will take to his bed, and then he will die.” Watson’s brother was likely not an eccentric—even an eccentric would have taken care of a delicate piece of custom machinery—therefore he was probably ill. But his illness hadn’t prevented him from going out and about—hence the dinged-up appearance of the watch. A man who was bedridden would have kept the watch on his bedside table.
So we have a sick man who’s still able to get up and about, and he’s pawned this watch not once, not twice, but four times. Remember what I said before about reputation? Today shows like Pawn Stars have done a lot to destigmatize pawnshops, but in Victorian times they were…not looked on kindly. They meant you’d had Some Kind Of Misfortune and Needed Money, and to the Victorian mind, you’d probably Brought It On Yourself, which meant you’d been doing something Quite Disgraceful. (Notice the only two appearances of a pawnshop in the ACD canon are “The Pawnbroker’s Assistant,” in which said assistant is a criminal mastermind and the pawnbroker himself a greedy idiot, and the story of Watson’s watch.)
So: a damaged piece of expensive jewelry that’s only moderately easy to damage; spends frequent time in places of ill-repute; sick, but mobile; never mentioned by Watson, and thus likely embarrassing.
The modern version doesn’t fall apart because lots of things cause hand tremors. The modern version falls apart because IT’S EXTREMELY EASY TO SCRATCH PLASTIC AND CHARGING CORDS ARE A CHEAP, COMMON ITEM.
There. I’ve wanted to get that off my chest for AGES.
