Sherlock_Holmes_Evaluations

Sherlock Holmes was incredibly popular in the 19th century, and still is today. The combination of twisting plots, strange settings, eccentric characters and Holmes’ unconventional but highly successful methods to solve crime make the stories interesting, exciting and realistic. Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh on 22 May 1859. After leaving school he went to study medicine in Edinburgh, where he met Dr Joseph Bell, who is believed to by Conan Doyle’s inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. When Holmes was first released, Victorian readers instantly fell for him. They despised the police and enjoyed Holmes’ modern and effective detective work. The locations where stories set are all very effective and each one is different. ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ is set in deepest, darkest London. Most of it is centred around an Opium den, called the ‘Bar of Gold’. This den is situated down ‘a vile alley’ and ‘between a slop shop and a gin shop’. This gives an image of a dark, miserable and secluded alley; a place where you would not wish to visit voluntarily. The den is reached by flight of steps, ‘worn hollow in the centre by the ceaseless tread of drunken feet’, and is a ‘low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium snake’. This shows that the ‘Bar of Gold’ is a depressing place frequented by the drunk and thick with the smoke from the opium pipes. In general, the setting of ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ is urban, miserable and hidden away. ‘The Speckled Band’ has a very different setting to ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’. It is set mostly in the country village of Stoke-Moran in Surrey. Holmes and Watson stay the night in the wealthy Dr Grimesby Roylott’s mansion. The house seems to be falling to pieces and has not been well looked after: ‘The windows were broken, the roof was partly caved in’. This shows that the condition of the house has deteriorated because it has been neglected. However, reparations are being carried out to improve its condition: ‘some scaffolding had been erected against the end wall, and the stonework had been broken into’. This suggests that parts of the wall are being repaired, possibly higher up which would explain the need for scaffolding. ‘The Final Problem’ is set in another different location. It is mostly set in Switzerland, which would be exciting to find out about for readers in the 19th century. At this time most people had never been abroad. It takes place in the Swiss Alps, and Watson describes it as a very beautiful place: ‘It was a lovely trip, the dairty green of the spring below, the virgin of the white winter above.’ This shows that the area is picturesque, with the lush green grass of spring and the white snow-capped mountains. Holmes and Watson visit the Reichenbach waterfalls which is a fearful but magnificent place: ‘The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The river flows quickly over the edge and falls a huge distance, before creating a gigantic splash. Conan Doyle always makes sure that Holmes solves the crime. Holmes always knows who the culprit is, and can explain anything. He knows who is responsible long before everyone else does, by studying the clues carefully and interpreting them in the way he does. He does not respect Watson very highly, seeing him as slow and naive, but appreciates him as a loyal sidekick. Holmes also does not approve highly of women, and sees them as weak and fragile, which was the common view among a society dominated by men at the time. For example, in ‘The Speckled Band’, Holmes says ‘”I shall order you a cup of hot coffee, for I observe that you are shivering”’. This shows him to have kindness and consideration towards women, but also shows that he thinks they should be protected. Conan Doyle deliberately makes his characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories to be different, and perhaps strange and eccentric. In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ the character Neville St. Clair (High Boone) is a very peculiar person. ‘He was a middle sized man with a coloured shirt protruding through his tattered coat. He was extremely dirty, but the grime which covered his face could not conceal its repulsive ugliness. An old scar ran right across it from eye to chin, and had turned up one side of his lip. A shock of red hair grew over his eyes and forehead.’ This vivid description by Watson shows Hugh Boone to be incredibly ugly and deformed, and would be a unique and shocking person to see. The character is made more interesting by the fact that he lives to separate lives, one as a beggar and one as a rich gentleman ‘”a gentleman, Neville St. Clair by name, who appeared to have plenty of money”’. ‘The Speckled Band’ features another one of Conan Doyle’s abnormal characters, this time in the form of Dr. Grimesby Roylott: ’His costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and the agricultural, having a black top hat, a long frock-coat, and a pair of high gaiters, with a hunting-crop swinging in his hand. So tall was he that his hat actually brushed the cross-bar of the doorway, and his breadth seemed to span it across from side to side. A large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, while his deep-set bile-shot eyes, and the thin fleshless nose’. This creates an image of a tall, wide and very strong man with unusual clothing, but also an old man, greatly affected by aging. Roylott is quite a dangerous and violent man: ‘”he beat his native butler to death.”‘ He is prone to fits of anger and can be very upredictable. He has a strange personality and chooses to hide himself away from the world: ‘”He shut himself up in his house, and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious quarrels with whoever might cross his path. He had no friends at all save the wandering gipsies.”‘ He is a secluded man, hiding away in his house, and is argumentative and quarrelling. He only associates himself with gypsies, whom he allows to camp on the family land. Professor Moriarty plays an important role in several of the Sherlock Holmes stories (especially ‘The Final Problem’), as he is a mastermind criminal and Holmes’ sworn enemy. He is very clever and has many academic qualifications but uses his intelligence and knowledge in criminal activity: ‘”His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endured by nature with phenomenal mathematically faculty. He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.”’ Holmes can clearly see that he has great power and is somewhat a genius. He is responsible for half the crime in London, and nearly all of it remains secret and undetected. He thinks ‘outside of the box’ and this is what helps him to be so intelligent and strategic. He has tried to kill Holmes several times, but has always failed. These things are what makes Professor Moriarty so interesting to readers, even more so in the nineteenth century. Dr Watson is another integral character in the stories. He is not only the narrator in the stories, describing everything in detail and in his own unique way, but a very trustworthy and reliable companion to Holmes. He can sometimes be slow and dim-witted, such as in ‘The Final Problem’ where he fails to recognise Moriarty sneaking after Holmes. However, he also proves to be very useful in assisting Holmes in his investigations: ‘He was up again at a moment, and with conclusive strength he seized Holmes by the throat, but I struck him on the head with the butt of my revolver, and he dropped again upon the floor.’ In this case he is shown to be very useful to Holmes, and it could be argued that he even saved his life! Watson is very respecting and appraising towards Holmes: ‘working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any other investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic’. Watson approves greatly of Holmes and sees him as an intelligent and successful detective, but appreciates that he does it for the reward of happiness he gets out of it for money. He also knows that Holmes tends to investigate the cases that are particularly unusual and fantastic. Watson has a similar attitude to women to Holmes: that they are weak and fragile and must be sheltered. Dr. Watson’s naivety combined with his important role in solving the crime, and also his attitudes to Holmes and women, make him an easily likeable and interesting character. Of course, the Sherlock Holmes stories would not exist without Sherlock Holmes himself. Like Moriarty, he is very intelligent and intellectual; he always suspects the right people, solves the case and outwits his opponents. This makes Holmes highly likeable as a character, especially for the Victorians to whom morality matters greatly. Holmes does not show a great deal of emotion, but occasionally portrays his happiness with the odd smile or laugh: ‘When I turned again Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table’. Even when he is reunited with his best friend after several years, Holmes just makes a casual smile. This lack of emotion makes Sherlock Holmes interesting because it is hard to tell what he is thinking about, for both readers and characters. The language used in the stories is very different from that which we use today. There are many words that hardly exist (in their contexts) in modern English, such as ‘sottish’ (drunken), ‘trap’ (a type of cart), ‘mendicants’ (beggars) and ‘capital’ (death). This language makes the story interesting, more so for modern readers, because the words and the way they are used seem very strange. Watson as a narrator makes the stories quite personal for the reader. He includes small details, particularly when describing surroundings and characters: ‘seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun’. Instead of making short, casual descriptions, Watson describes things vividly and with figurative language for effect. This makes the stories more realistic and interesting. The stories are written autobiographically and almost like a secret diary. This is very true in the first few paragraphs of each story, as Watson speaks directly to the reader: ‘In glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes’. This style of writing makes stories personal, realistic and entertaining. The plots have some similarity but are very different. They all feature Holmes and Watson, but the rest of the characters only appear in one of the stories (except for Moriarty who is mentioned in both ‘The Final Problem’ and ‘The Empty House’). ‘The Speckled Band’ is a straightforward crime mystery, in which Holmes investigates the suspicious death of one person, in order to prevent it happening again.’ In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, no actual crime is committed but nevertheless a mystery is solved, because of the suspicion of a murder. ‘The Empty House’ and ‘The Final Problem’ are centred around Holmes’ life (and alleged death), and his activities and affairs with Moriarty. The similarities in the stories give the reader sense of familiarity and keep things fairly constant, but the variations create suspense, engage the readers’ interest and make the stories entertaining. Twists in the plot also keep the reader interested, such as in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ where Watson meets a disguised Holmes in an opium den. This unexpected change causes the event of Watson seeking one of his patients into an exciting mystery that he must solve with Holmes. In conclusion, Conan Doyle engages readers’ interest with his exceptional and entertaining use of settings, characters, language and plots. Holmes was and is still is an interesting character, because of his ability to solve any mystery, his intelligence, and his attitude and interaction with other characters. Numerous TV programs have been made about him and almost anyone would instantly recognise his name, ensuring that he will always be a familiar character.