The Hound of the Baskervilles

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
1901-1902

INTRODUCTION

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was published in serialized form from August 1901 to April 1902 in the British magazine the Strand. The novel was wildly popular with the public, which had been waiting for a new Sherlock Holmes story for eight long years. The story's Gothic setting in Dartmoor, England, the murky depths of the Grimpen Mire bog, the supernatural overtones of the spectral hound, and the legend of a curse upon the Baskerville family all combined to make the novel one of the most loved Sherlock Holmes tales of all time. For over one hundred years, the book has never been out of print, and numerous film and stage versions have been produced worldwide.

The book was inspired by Conan Doyle's friend Fletcher Robinson, a Dartmoor native who told the author of the local legend of a huge phantom hound that haunted the foggy moors. Originally, the novel was not a Sherlock Holmes story. Conan Doyle had killed off the Holmes character in "The Final Problem" seven years earlier, but he decided the case was a perfect match for Holmes and Watson. However, Conan Doyle set the story two years before Holmes's tragic "death," thereby frustrating fans who had hoped the detective would be brought back to life. The Hound of the Baskervilles is narrated by Dr. John H. Watson, Holmes's faithful sidekick, and is reconstructed from his notes and recollections. The story is unusual in that Watson plays a central

role in the plot, while Holmes is off stage for much of the action. The book was illustrated, as were many Holmes tales, by Sidney Paget, whose depictions of the detective and Dr. Watson have become famous in and of themselves. The novel's success indeed prompted Conan Doyle to resurrect Holmes for subsequent adventures.

A recent edition of the novel may be found in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, W. W. Norton, 2006.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. His father was an architect who illustrated magazines and children's books in his spare time; his mother had been educated in France and was a voracious reader. Conan Doyle graduated from Edinburgh University in 1881 with a degree in medicine and received his doctorate from Edinburgh University in 1885. Despite several attempts to establish a medical practice, Conan Doyle was an unsuccessful doctor; in 1891, he gave up the medical profession to concentrate entirely on writing. One of his professors in medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell, was renowned for his ability to make accurate assumptions about people by observation alone. Bell was the inspiration for the character of Sherlock Holmes, along with C. Auguste Dupin, the inspector created by Edgar Allan Poe in what is commonly regarded as literature's first mystery story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Conan Doyle was an adventurer. Upon receiving his medical degree in 1881, he embarked on a six-month whaling voyage to the Arctic, serving as the ship's doctor. Several years later he sailed to the west coast of Africa, and in 1900 he traveled to South Africa during the Boer War to serve as a physician in a British field hospital. Despite his penchant for adventure and love of sports (he was rumored to have introduced downhill skiing to Switzerland), he was a devoted family man and made his living primarily as a writer.

Following his activities in the Boer War, he returned to London and wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was promptly published in serial form in the Strand from August 1901 to April 1902. That same year he was knighted for having written a propagandist pamphlet supporting the British position in the Boer War. The author's steadfast support of the British Empire, his staunch belief in stratified social classes, and his distrust of female suffrage, labor unions, and Mormons are evident in his fiction, especially in the character of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was uncommonly prolific, his sixty Sherlock Holmes stories amounted to a sliver of his oeuvre—an insignificant one, in his own estimation. He wrote them primarily for money and because he was unsatisfied with the inferior quality of his contemporaries' mystery stories. Holmes's reliance on logic and reason in solving crimes was a new idea, as was the idea of presenting enough clues for the reader to theoretically be able to figure it out for him or herself.

Conan Doyle wrote many other forms of fiction, from supernatural tales, science fiction, adventure, domestic comedy, horror, and historical novels, in nearly all formats, including plays, poetry, stories, and novels. His stories featuring the character of Brigadier Gerard, who was based on the real-life French General Baron de Marbot, are highly regarded, as are several other of his adventure novels, including The Lost World. None of these, however, matched the popularity of his Holmes stories, and he often bristled under the fame they brought him.

Conan Doyle was equally prolific in nonfiction. He wrote many works of history, biography, and spiritualism. Indeed, spiritualism—the belief that the dead can communicate with the living through a medium—was the central preoccupation in the last twenty years of his life; he was one of the movement's staunchest devotees in England. Having built his reputation on a belief in scientific advancement, rationality, and intellectualism, he lost considerable credibility among the public for his unwavering belief in the paranormal, especially after he was found to have been duped by the Cottingley fairy hoax, in which two Yorkshire girls were photographed cavorting with supposedly real fairies that allowed themselves to be photographed.

Conan Doyle married twice, fathered five children, and died of a heart attack on July 7, 1930, in Sussex, England. Interest in Sherlock Holmes has remained strong throughout the years, with many fans dubbed "Sherlockians" involved in organizations that promote the conceit that Holmes and Watson were real people and that Conan Doyle was merely Watson's literary agent. The Sherlockians' published criticism both pays homage to Conan Doyle's illustrious detective and provides the academic world with a healthy dose of gentle humor.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• A silent film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was made in 1920. It was directed by Maurice Elvey and stars Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes and Hubert Willis as Dr. Watson. The novel was adapted by William J. Elliott and Dorothy Westlake.
• A 1939 film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Ernest Pascal was directed by Sidney Lanfield and stars Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. John H. Watson.
• A 1959 film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Peter Bryan was directed by Terence Fisher and stars Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and André Morell as Dr. Watson.
• An abridged audiobook of The Hound of the Baskervilles was released by HarperCollins Audiobooks in 2000.
• A Canadian television production of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Muse Entertainment Enterprises was filmed in Montreal and aired on Canadian and U.S. television in the fall of 2000. It was directed by Rodney Gibbons and stars Matt Frewer as Sherlock Holmes and Kenneth Walsh as Dr. Watson.
• A 1968 unabridged audio recording of The Hound of the Baskervilles from a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio production was released by Random House Audio in 2000.
• The Hound of the Baskervilles was produced for the Public Broadcasting Service television series "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" in 2003. The adaptation is written by T. R. Bowen, directed by Brian Mills, and stars Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes.
• A humorous stage version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was written by Steven Canny and produced by the Peepolykus Theater Company at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in England in 2007.

PLOT SUMMARY

Chapter 1: Mr. Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson start the day at 221B Baker Street with an exchange regarding a walking stick left behind the day before by an unknown visitor. Holmes astounds Watson by determining that the stick belongs to a country doctor who received it as a retirement gift from Charing Cross Hospital. His pronouncement is verified by the appearance of Dr. James Mortimer, who returns for his walking stick and to consult the detective regarding the strange circumstances surrounding the death of his patient and friend, Sir Charles Baskerville, the baronet of an estate located in the Dartmoor region of Devonshire. Mortimer inadvertently insults Holmes by calling him "the second highest expert in Europe."

Chapter 2: The Curse of the Baskervilles

Dr. Mortimer produces a letter, dated 1742, outlining the legend of the Baskerville curse. The letter was written by Charles's ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, and recounts the legend of his great-grandfather, also named Hugo. The elder Hugo fell in love with a farmer's daughter, kidnapped her, and held her captive at Baskerville Hall. While Hugo and his cronies drank the night away downstairs, she climbed out a window and ran across the moor toward her home. Hugo quickly discovered her escape and chased after her in a drunken fury. His cronies followed in an attempt to prevent him from killing her. They stumble upon a shepherd who claims to have seen the young woman being chased by Baskerville, who was riding his black horse and was accompanied by a spectral "hound of hell." Soon after they find both the maiden and Baskerville dead; tearing at Baskerville's throat is "a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon." Since that day, the writer claims, subsequent generations of Baskerville men have suffered untimely sudden deaths.

Dr. Mortimer explains that his recently deceased friend was a philanthropist and childless widower who had moved to his inherited estate only two years earlier after returning from South Africa where he had sought his fortune in the region's gold mines. Sir Charles was terrified of the Baskerville curse and suffered from a weak heart; one evening he was found dead of a heart attack in an alley of the estate that bordered the moor. Dr. Mortimer, a man of science, was summoned by Baskerville's groom to examine the body and was terrified to discover nearby "the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

Chapter 3: The Problem

Holmes asks Mortimer a few questions about the weather on the night Sir Charles died, the position of his body, and characteristics of the hound's paw prints. It becomes apparent that Holmes does not believe in the curse but that Mortimer does. Furthermore, Mortimer states, several people have previously seen the spectral hound wandering along the moor at night. However, Mortimer states that he does not want Holmes's help in discovering what happened to Charles, but rather to counsel him on what to do about Henry Baskerville. Henry is the last of the Baskervilles, and Mortimer fears that if he meets a similar untimely demise, then the Baskervilles' long tradition of philanthropy in the region will come to an end. Holmes advises Mortimer to return in twenty-four hours with Sir Henry Baskerville, and then he will decide what to do.

Holmes spends the rest of the day contemplating the case and consulting detailed maps of Devonshire. That evening Holmes announces to Watson that Charles Baskerville must have been waiting for someone. He says little else, though it is apparent to Watson that Holmes knows more about the case than he lets on.

Chapter 4: Sir Henry Baskerville

Dr. Mortimer returns to 221B Baker Street with Sir Henry Baskerville, who brings with him a mysterious letter delivered to him at the Northumberland Hotel. The note is composed of words cut from a newspaper: "As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor." Holmes believes Baskerville is being followed; no one—not even Baskerville—knew he was going to be at that hotel until he arrived in London. Baskerville is also flummoxed by the theft of a brand new boot that he had set out to be polished. After Mortimer and Baskerville leave, Holmes and Watson follow them and discover Baskerville is being tailed by man disguised by a fake beard. Holmes hires a messenger boy, Cartwright, to scour through the garbage near the Northumberland Hotel in search of the cut-up newspaper.

Chapter 5: Three Broken Threads

Holmes and Watson meet Mortimer and Baskerville for lunch at the Northumberland Hotel. Baskerville is furious—another one of his boots has been stolen. Baskerville states that he intends to travel to Baskerville Hall that week; the curse does not faze him. Holmes informs Baskerville that he is being followed and asks if there are other possible heirs to Charles's considerable fortune. Charles's younger brother is presumed to have died childless in South America. Thinking that Mr. John Barrymore, Charles's loyal butler, may be attempting to scare Henry Baskerville from assuming his inheritance in an effort to obtain the manor for himself, Holmes sends Barrymore a telegram that must be hand delivered to the butler. If it does not reach him, they have uncovered the bearded man tracking Mortimer and Baskerville in London. Holmes announces he is working on a case and will not be able to accompany Baskerville to Dartmoor. He sends Watson instead with instructions to submit detailed reports of all goings-on.

Chapter 6: Baskerville Hall

Holmes bids Watson adieu and tells him the culprit behind Charles's death will be found among his acquaintances in Dartmoor. Holmes limits the pool of suspects to the Barrymores, the stable groom, the neighboring farmers, Dr. Mortimer and his wife, the naturalist Mr. Stapleton, his sister Beryl Stapleton, and Mr. Frankland. Watson, Mortimer, and Baskerville arrive in Dartmoor to find armed soldiers searching for an escaped murderer, Selden. When Baskerville arrives at his estate, Barrymore introduces himself and announces that shortly he and his wife will seek employment elsewhere or go into business for themselves with the money Charles has bequeathed to him.

Chapter 7: The Stapletons of Merripit House

The next morning Watson and Baskerville discuss having heard a woman's sobs during the night. They quickly discover it was Mrs. Barrymore, whose red, swollen eyes are apparent as she serves them breakfast. Afterward, Watson visits the postmaster and discovers the telegram Holmes sent was delivered to Mrs. Barrymore—not Mr. Barrymore as was instructed. On his way back to Baskerville Hall, Watson is greeted by name by Mr. Jack Stapleton, a neighbor and naturalist who is out scouting butterflies. Stapleton grills Watson about whether or not the new baronet is superstitious or believes in the legend of the hound. Stapleton asks Watson point blank if Sherlock Holmes will be visiting to investigate the legend; Watson is taken aback by his directness. Stapleton seems relieved to hear that Holmes will remain in London, and he invites Watson to Merripit House to meet his sister. Watson obliges. Along the way Stapleton delights in telling Watson about Dartmoor's dangerous moors, its Neolithic stone ruins, and the nearby Grimpen Mire, a vast bog known to swallow large animals whole. Just then, an ominous howl from a distant, unseen creature rolls across the landscape. Stapleton explains the townspeople believe it is the hound of the Baskervilles, but that he, a man of reason, believes it is settling mud or a rare bird. Watson finds Stapleton's explanations insufficient.

Stapleton rushes off after a butterfly and Miss Beryl Stapleton appears, a dark beauty wholly unlike her brother. She issues Watson a dire order: "Go back! … Go straight back to London, instantly." When Stapleton reappears, he introduces Watson to his sister and she apologies profusely, explaining that she thought Watson was Henry Baskerville.

Chapter 8: First Report of Dr. Watson

The chapter takes the form of Watson's letter to Holmes from "this most God-forsaken corner of the world." He tells Holmes that Henry has become enamored of the exotic Miss Stapleton, who seems equally interested in him. Her brother, however, seems upset by their attraction and tries to keep them apart. Watson writes of Mr. Frankland of Lafter Hall, a litigious landlord whose spiteful lawsuits prove entertaining. Frankland is an amateur astronomer and has lately used his telescope to scan the moor for evidence of the escaped convict. Then Watson explains the peculiar behavior of the Barrymores. In the middle of the night, Watson witnessed Barrymore sneak into an unused room and send candle signals through a window to someone on the moor.

Chapter 9: Second Report of Dr. Watson

Watson writes of his theory that Barrymore was sending signals to a lover, which would account for why Mrs. Barrymore has been so upset lately. Watson and Baskerville agree to spy on him the following evening to verify their hunch. Also, Henry is planning to expand the manor and is thinking of asking Miss Stapleton to marry him. Watson had promised Holmes he would guard Henry steadfastly, but Henry has begun strolling the moor alone, ostensibly to rendezvous with Miss Stapleton. Watson follows Baskerville during one such occasion and discovers the couple is also being tracked by Stapleton, who rudely interrupts the couple's dalliance. Watson reveals himself to Henry, and Henry states that Stapleton is out of his mind to prohibit his marriage to Miss Stapleton.

Later that day Stapleton appears at Baskerville Hall to apologize for his outburst, explaining that if his sister were to marry, he would be unbearably lonely. Then Watson relates what happened the night he and Henry confronted Barrymore about his midnight candle signals: Barrymore refused to come clean in the matter, and Henry fired him. But then Mrs. Barrymore appeared, horrified at the trouble she had caused and admitting that her brother is Selden the murderer, and he is hiding out on the moor. Barrymore's signals alert Selden to the food they have left for him. Henry, convinced the Barrymores were not plotting against him, forgave the couple and reinstated their employment. Nevertheless, Henry and Watson, alarmed that a murderer was in their midst, armed themselves and took off across the moor to capture the criminal. They were stopped cold by the bloodcurdling howl of a beast coming from the Grimpen Mire. Eventually they found Selden, a savage hulk of a man, but he escaped. As they made their way back to Baskerville Hall, they spotted a tall, lone figure upon the tor; Watson was inclined to believe he had seen the ghost of Hugo Baskerville. Watson concludes his letter asking Holmes to join him and stating that "the moor with its mysteries and its strange inhabitants remains as inscrutable as ever."

Chapter 10: Extract from the Diary of Dr. Watson

The chapter takes the form of Watson's diaries and are augmented by his recollections. He considers rational explanations for the hound he has heard twice on the moors. He is not as gullible as the "poor peasants" who believe in a supernatural, fire-breathing fiend-dog. But he wonders, where is the dog during the day and what does it eat? As for the stranger he saw on the tor, he believes it is no one he has met before. Henry and Barrymore argue over whether or not Selden should be turned over to the authorities. They agree to let Selden remain until he can escape on a ship to South America. In gratitude, Barrymore reveals what he knows about the night Charles Baskerville died. Having recovered a partially burned letter from Sir Charles's study, Barrymore learned that Sir Charles was to meet a woman with the initials L. L. by the gate at 10 o'clock that night.

Watson writes Holmes immediately about this development, and wishes once again the great detective were at Baskerville Hall to make sense of the matter. He also wonders why Holmes's correspondence has been so vague and sporadic. Later, Watson braves the rain and searches the tor for signs of the man he saw the previous night. He finds nothing, but Dr. Mortimer happens by and offers him a ride back to Baskerville Hall. Watson asks him if he knows an L. L., and Mortimer mentions Laura Lyons, who happens to be Mr. Frankland's daughter, whom he has disowned because he disapproved of her marriage. That evening Barrymore tells Watson that Selden has seen a second man on the moor, camping out in the Neolithic ruins and having food brought to him by a boy from Coombe Tracey.

Chapter 11: The Man on the Tor

Watson visits Laura Lyons the next morning. The woman is wary of Watson's motives and his supposed connection to her father. She denounces her father and states that her only friend was Charles Baskerville. She is incensed with Watson's questions regarding her relationship with Charles; he merely gave her financial assistance to spare her from becoming destitute. She finally admits to having written Charles with a request to meet him in the Yew Alley the night he died. All she wanted was his assistance in paying off her estranged husband so she could get a divorce. Time was of the essence; Baskerville was leaving for London the next morning. However, she states that she never showed up at the appointed time. Watson cannot get her to explain why.

On his way to investigate the man on the tor, Watson is intercepted by Mr. Frankland, who invites him to Lafter Hall for a drink. Frankland then tells Watson that through his telescope he has spied a boy taking food to the convict on the moor. Watson realizes it is not the convict the boy is helping, but his mysterious intruder. Watson leaves Lafter Hall and proceeds to Black Tor, which he has just viewed through the telescope. He locates the ancient stone hut that is sheltering the stranger; he also finds a sheet of paper on which is written "Dr. Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey." Watson realizes that he—not Henry—is being followed. He hears footsteps behind him. The man speaks: "It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson." It turns out that the man on the tor is Sherlock Holmes.

Chapter 12: Death on the Moor

Holmes has nearly all the information he needs to solve the case. Yet Watson complains that Holmes has simultaneously used him and not trusted him. Holmes assures Watson that his detective work has not been in vain. Indeed, Holmes has already divined that Laura Lyons holds the key to solving the puzzle and that Miss Stapleton is really Mr. Stapleton's wife, not his sister. Thus, it was she who warned Henry in London to stay away from the moor. Furthermore, Stapleton led Laura Lyons to believe he was a bachelor and would marry her once she obtained a divorce.

Holmes tells Watson to return to Baskerville Hall and guard Henry. Just then the two men are interrupted by a piercing wail that shatters the twilight stillness. Fearing the hound, they sprint across the moor and discover a body sprawled out on the ground, the man's head bashed in from a fall off a cliff. It appears to be Henry Baskerville. They begin dragging the body back to the manor when they discover it is not Baskerville—it is Selden the convict, dressed in Baskerville's old clothes, which the Barrymores gave him. Stapleton appears, and his disappointment is palpable when he learns the man is Selden, not Baskerville. He asks if the two had heard the spectral hound that so haunts the locals' imaginations. Then Stapleton calls Holmes by name, even though the night is dark and he has never before met the detective. After they part, Watson wants to turn Stapleton into the police. Holmes refuses, saying they have not yet sufficiently established their case.

Chapter 13: Fixing the Nets

Back at Baskerville Hall, Sir Henry welcomes Holmes and Watson breaks the news about Selden's death to the Barrymores. Holmes is entranced by a portrait of Hugo Baskerville and later tells Watson that the portrait bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Stapleton. It is the last piece of evidence Holmes needs to put the pieces together: Stapleton is Charles Baskerville's previously unknown nephew, and he has come to England from South America to get rid of Charles and Henry and to claim his inheritance. Holmes laughs as he realizes "the nets are all in place, and the drag is about to begin."

The next morning Holmes tells Henry that he and Watson must return to London and that Henry must drive to Merripit House, have dinner with Stapleton, and then walk home alone across the moor. Being a man of courage, he agrees. Meanwhile, Holmes calls for Lestrade, a Scotland Yard detective, to meet him in Coombe Tracey with an unsigned warrant.

Chapter 14: The Hound of the Baskervilles

That evening Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade sneak over to the grounds of Merripit House. They watch Henry and Stapleton through a window. At one point, Stapleton leaves the room, and soon the three men hear footsteps on gravel. Stapleton, unaware he is being watched, unlocks an outbuilding and enters it. "A curious scuffling noise from within" ensues, and several minutes later Stapleton reemerges and returns to the house. Finally, Henry appears and nervously makes his way to the moor for the long walk home. Suddenly, "an enormous coal-black hound" emerges galloping from the fog. "Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame." Holmes and Watson fire their guns simultaneously. The beast is struck, howls, yet pounces on Henry. Holmes fires five shots at it. The dog dies and Henry is spared. They gather around the dead animal. Its glowing eyes and fiery muzzle are due to a prepared concoction of phosphorus.

Holmes orders Henry to stay put and the three men run to Merripit House in pursuit of Stapleton, where they discover Mrs. Stapleton bound and gagged. They untie her, and she shows them the bruises that prove Stapleton abused her. She says he may have escaped to an abandoned mine on an island in Grimpen Mire. The fog is too dense for them to chase after him and they must wait until morning. When at last they search the bog, they discover Henry's lost boot, but uncover no trace of Stapleton. "Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is for ever buried."

Chapter 15: A Retrospection

As an epilogue, Watson provides Holmes's summary of the case. In conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, Holmes learned that Stapleton was indeed the son of Rodger Baskerville and the nephew of Charles Baskerville. Rodger had fled England, emigrated to South America, married, and sired a son, also named Rodger. Rodger was as nefarious as his father; he married a Costa Rican beauty, Beryl Garcia, and absconded to England with stolen money and changed his name to Vandeleur. For a while he ran a school in Yorkshire, but when he had courted enough trouble he changed his name to Stapleton and moved to Devonshire. He disguised his wife as his sister in order to use her as a decoy in an elaborate scheme to inherit Baskerville Hall. When he learned of Charles Baskerville's weak heart and his fear of the Baskerville curse, he procured a big dog, hid it on Grimpen Mire, and waited for the proper time to carry out his plan. When Stapleton learned that Henry Baskerville was the next heir to the manor, he traveled to London—taking his wife with him because he no longer trusted her—possibly for the purpose of disposing of Henry before he reached Baskerville Hall. Stapleton was the bearded spy; Mrs. Stapleton was the author of the note. Holmes admits the tip-off was the note's jasmine scent, which would only be worn by an exotic woman of good standing. Thus, he suspected the Stapletons before he even reached Devonshire. However, because Stapleton had already seen Holmes with Mortimer in London, the detective knew he could not be seen in Devonshire—Stapleton was already on to him. So Holmes sends Watson instead. As for how Stapleton would claim his inheritance after Henry's death, Holmes offers several suggestions but concludes that "what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer."

CHARACTERS

Mrs. Eliza Barrymore

Mrs. Barrymore is the housekeeper of Baskerville Hall, the wife of Mr. Barrymore, and the older sister of Selden, the escaped murderer. She is secretly aiding her brother with the help of her husband, but comes clean when Henry Baskerville threatens to fire her husband for his subterfuge. She takes pity on her brother and his plight. Her nocturnal sobs are Watson's first indication that something is amiss at Baskerville Hall.

Mr. John Barrymore

The butler of Baskerville Hall, Mr. Barrymore is faithful to the recently deceased Sir Charles Baskerville and tells Henry Baskerville that he and his wife intend to leave their positions as soon as replacements are found. Barrymore's midnight activities look suspicious to Watson and Baskerville, who follow the butler one night and discover him sending signals to the escaped convict on the moor.

Sir Charles Baskerville

The former head of Baskerville Hall, Charles's suspicious death sets the events of the novel in motion. Charles Baskerville was a philanthropist who assisted many residents of the local village with the fortune he acquired from investing in South African gold mines. He had a weak heart and was extremely superstitious, especially when it came to the supposed curse of the Baskervilles. As a rule, he did not wander beyond the gates of the estate at night, which made his presence in the Yew Alley the night of his death suspicious.

Sir Henry Baskerville

Sir Henry Baskerville is a robust, outdoorsy man around 30 years old who has inherited Baskerville Hall upon the death of his Uncle Charles. He has just arrived in England from Canada, where he was a farmer. He quickly becomes embroiled in the mystery when his boot disappears from his hotel the first night he is in London. He is not superstitious and readily assists Watson in the investigation into Charles's death. He becomes nervous only when Holmes instructs him to walk home from Merripit House alone in the dark along the moor. Henry falls in love with Beryl Stapleton, believing her to be Stapleton's sister, and considers proposing to her. He is an honest man of enterprising spirit who appreciates the Dartmoor landscape of his ancestors. He is also a forward-thinking man who hopes to modernize Baskerville Hall with electric lights.

Sir Hugo Baskerville

Hugo Baskerville is the unscrupulous ancestor responsible for the curse of the Baskervilles. As the legend goes, in the 1640s Hugo became infatuated with a young maiden from a nearby farm and kidnapped her. He imprisoned her in a locked room, but she escaped. On horseback, Hugo pursued her and was later found dead—along with the girl—in a shallow ravine, his neck gnawed on by a "great, black beast" with "blazing eyes and dripping jaws."

Cartwright

Cartwright is the messenger boy Holmes pays to track down the newspaper used in the threatening message to Baskerville. Holmes brings Cartwright to Coombe Tracey in Dartmoor as his errand boy and charges him with keeping tabs on Watson. Cartwright disguises himself as an urchin and delivers goods to Holmes when he is camped out in the ruins of the stone huts on the moor.

Mr. Frankland

Mr. Frankland is a litigious landlord who serves as the story's comic relief; he lives in Lafter Hall and is an amateur astronomer who uses his telescope to spy on a man hiding out on the moor. He is a bitter man intent on suing people out of spite. He has disowned his daughter, Laura Lyons, because he disapproved of her marriage to an artist.

Mr. Sherlock Holmes

An eminent detective, Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street in London is sought after for his considerable skills of deduction, logic, and reason. He does not believe for a minute that the Baskerville curse has anything to do with the supernatural. He is an intellectual, a connoisseur of tobacco and violins who enjoys astounding his friend and partner, Dr. John Watson, with his investigative skills. He examines Dr. Mortimer's walking stick—not knowing who had left it behind the previous day—and determines it belongs to a doctor who left London's Charing Cross Hospital to establish a country practice, someone who is "a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff." Holmes enjoys the status quo, is cultured nearly to the point of snobbery, and does not like to share his thoughts regarding cases currently in progress. In fact, he tells Watson that he will remain in London while Watson travels to Baskerville Hall to investigate Sir Charles's death; instead Holmes also travels to Dartmoor in order to collect evidence on the case without being seen. He has a healthy ego and can be somewhat prickly; when Dr. Mortimer refers to him as the "second highest expert in Europe" Holmes cuts him off mid-sentence and says "I think, Dr. Mortimer, you would do wisely if without more ado you would kindly tell me plainly what the exact nature of the problem is in which you demand my assistance."

Conan Doyle modeled Sherlock Holmes on a professor from his medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell, and on Edgar Allan Poe's character C. Auguste Dupin. Holmes is courageous, as shown by his bravery in taking down the giant hound, and he persists in solving his cases logically, waiting until all the evidence is collected before making allegations. On the other hand, Holmes likes to work alone; he frequently does not tell Dr. Watson what he is up to, especially when he has Watson believe he is in London working on a case, when in fact Holmes is in Dartmoor collecting evidence. He is able to spend an entire day in solitude, as he does after Dr. Mortimer approaches him with the strange death of Charles Baskerville, doing nothing more than smoking and looking at maps.

Inspector Lestrade

Inspector Lestrade is the Scotland Yard detective whom Holmes summons from London to assist with the plan to capture Stapleton. On the night they plan to capture Stapleton after he releases his hound on Henry Baskerville, Lestrade assures Holmes he is armed, but instead of a gun he carries a flask in his pocket. When the hound appears he hits the ground; he is not as brave as Holmes.

Mrs. Laura Lyons

Laura Lyons is the disowned daughter of Mr. Frankland. Having married an artist against her father's wishes, Laura has been abandoned by her husband and lives alone in the nearby village of Coombe Tracey. She makes a meager living as a typist and seeks a divorce from her husband so she can marry Mr. Stapleton, whom she believes is a bachelor. Stapleton, acting as Charles Baskerville's financial consultant, has Laura arrange a secret meeting with Baskerville the night he dies to ask for the money she needs but makes sure she does not keep the appointment. Thus, she becomes an unwilling pawn in Stapleton's game.

Dr. James Mortimer

A country doctor in Dartmoor, Dr. Mortimer was Charles Baskerville's personal physician and friend. Knowing that Charles was much too fearful about the Baskerville curse to wander alone on the moor at night, Mortimer is instantly suspicious of Charles's death. Convinced foul play is involved, he seeks out Sherlock Holmes when he travels to London to welcome Henry Baskerville, who has just arrived from Canada. Even though Mortimer presents himself as a man of reason and science (like Holmes himself), it is clear that he is rattled by the seemingly supernatural appearance of "the footprints of a gigantic hound" at the scene of Charles Baskerville's death. Mortimer is also an amateur phrenologist who believes he can determine a person's character from the shape of his skull.

Selden

Selden is the infamous Notting Hill murderer who has escaped from prison and is presumed to be hiding out on the moor. Selden is Mrs. Barrymore's younger brother, and she and her husband supply him with food and clothing while he plots his escape to South America. In preparation for the journey, Selden disguises himself in one of Henry Baskerville's old suits, which proves fatal when Stapleton's hound tracks Henry's scent to Selden and causes his death. Holmes believes that Selden's misshapen head reveals his evil nature, and Mrs. Barrymore herself admits that Selden was spoiled as a child and has always wanted more from life than a person from his social class had a right to expect. His sense of entitlement above his social status caused him to turn to a life of crime.

Mrs. Beryl Stapleton

Beryl Stapleton is Stapleton's wife, a natural beauty and a native of Costa Rica, whose exotic jasmine perfume tips off Holmes that she is the author of the note warning Henry Baskerville to stay away from the moor. She is forced to pose as Stapleton's sister as part of his plan to inherit Baskerville Hall. She is physically abused by her husband, who ties her up in Merripit House the night he sets the hound loose on Henry Baskerville. Mrs. Stapleton is sympathetic toward Henry Baskerville; knowing that her husband plans to kill him, she composes a note to scare him away from Dartmoor. When Dr. Watson arrives in Dartmoor, she mistakenly believes he is the new heir to Baskerville Hall and beseeches him to escape before it is too late. She seems genuinely interested in Baskerville when he courts her, only to be cut off from him when her husband becomes jealous. She is a woman trapped, and yet she does what she can to change her situation.

Mr. Jack Stapleton

Jack Stapleton is the alias of Rodger Baskerville, Jr., the son of Charles Baskerville's younger brother Rodger, a ne'er-do-well who fled to South America as a young man and was presumed to have died childless. Rodger married Costa-Rican-born Beryl Garcia, absconded with a large amount of money, immigrated to Yorkshire, assumed the name Vandeleur, and started a private school. When the school went bankrupt, he moved to Dartmoor and began anew with the name Stapleton, posing as a naturalist. Upon learning of the Baskerville curse, he came up with a plan to scare Charles Baskerville to death and somehow assume his inheritance as the last remaining member of the Baskerville family. He uses his knowledge of nature and animals to learn the ins and outs of the moors and the great Grimpen Mire, where he stashes a vicious hound he has trained to kill. Thus, Stapleton is intelligent but cocky, befriending the Baskervilles while plotting to kill them. His intelligence, however, makes him a good match for Holmes, who uses all of his deductive reasoning skills to capture Stapleton in the act of trying to murder Henry Baskerville.

Stapleton is a villain without any redeeming qualities. He kills without remorse, abuses his wife, lies, and assumes fictitious identities to get what he wants. In the end, after his plan to kill Henry Baskerville goes awry, Stapleton disappears into the Grimpen Mire, never to be seen again. He is presumed to have drowned in the bog.

Dr. John H. Watson

Dr. Watson is Sherlock Holmes's informal business partner and the narrator of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Though he is ostensibly married and has his own medical practice, Watson eagerly decamps for Dartmoor to collect evidence on Holmes's behalf. Watson represents a typical middle-class Englishman, someone who is intelligent, good-natured, hard-working, loyal, but no match for Holmes' superior intellect. Watson, however, realizes he will never be Holmes's intellectual equal and is content to play second fiddle to the master, exhibiting bravery, stamina, and understanding in the process. For example, when waiting for the hound to appear on the moor as the fog rolls in, Watson is right behind Holmes with his gun drawn and readily fires at the beast in order to save Henry Baskerville.

Watson is eager to please Holmes, constantly amazed at the detective's skills, but irritated when he discovers Holmes has been in Dartmoor all along. He feels that Holmes does not trust him. All the same, the events that mark his stay at Baskerville Hall baffle him. Watson is almost childlike in his allegiance to Holmes. Though annoyed that Holmes has not taken him into his confidence regarding his plan to travel to Dartmoor, when Holmes praises Watson's investigative efforts: "I must compliment you exceedingly upon the zeal and the intelligence which you have shown over an extraordinarily difficult case," Watson writes that "the warmth of Holmes's praise drove my anger from my mind."

Watson acts as a sort of Greek chorus for the audience, highlighting the astonishment the reader is supposed to feel over Holmes's genius. At the same time, he comes across as slightly naïve and fawning.

THEMES

Science versus Superstition

The main theme of The Hound of the Baskervilles is the superiority and triumph of science—represented by Sherlock Holmes—over superstition, which is represented by the Baskerville curse. Sir Charles Baskerville was so consumed by superstition that he is manipulated into an untimely death. Holmes, in contrast, states definitively from the outset that a logical explanation is possible to explain Charles's death and "the footprints of a gigantic hound."

Holmes's sense of logic and reason, while evident in the way he handles cases, is also repeatedly pointed out by the narrator. In the beginning of chapter 15, Watson writes of Holmes: "he would never permit cases to overlap, and … his clear and logical mind would not be drawn from its present work to dwell upon memories of the past." Holmes solves much of the case while secluded in his study, poring over detailed maps. He draws upon his vast knowledge of perfume to uncover Beryl Stapleton's complicity in the case, and he uses his knowledge of newspaper fonts to determine the origins of the note that threatens Henry in London.

Trust and Betrayal

Though Stapleton, as the villain, dishes out a fair amount of betrayal—against his wife, Charles Baskerville, Laura Lyons, and nearly everyone else he comes into contact with—the theme of trust and betrayal is most evident in the relationship between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, claiming business in London prevents him from traveling to Dartmoor, instructs Watson to travel to Baskerville Hall to gather information on the case and has him send progress reports back to 221B Baker Street. He does not tell Watson he will also be in Dartmoor, working undercover while camping out in the Neolithic ruins on the moor. However, this apparent lack of trust is necessary in order for the mysterious "man on the tor" portion of the story to work. If Watson knew Holmes was in Dartmoor, that Gothic element of the story would not work, and the cliffhanger at the end of chapter 11 would not be possible, thus robbing the story of much of its atmosphere.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• After reading The Hound of the Baskervilles, name three instances in which Holmes's deductive reasoning relies on stereotypes. In an essay, note what each instance reveals about Holmes himself.
• Mystery writer Ronald Knox formulated "The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists," in 1928. Number nine on the list is, "The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader." Name three instances in The Hound of the Baskervilles in which Watson's intelligence could be deemed below that of the average reader. Lead a class discussion to determine whether this helps or hinders the plot.
• Jack Stapleton exploits the legend of a supernatural, fire-breathing beast by using a phosphorus compound to achieve the effect of blazing eyes and jaws. Research phosphorus and its properties. Would it really have been possible for Stapleton to have concocted such a substance? List three dangers that such a substance might have presented, either to Stapleton or the dog, and present your findings to the class.
• The Great Grimpen Mire of the story is a fictional bog modeled on the Fox Tor Mire near the Grimspound ruins in Dartmoor. List three ecological characteristics of an English mire, or bog. Create a visual aid that illustrates and discusses these traits.

When Watson realizes Holmes's failure to disclose his whereabouts, he feels slightly betrayed: "‘Then you use me, and yet do not trust me!’ I cried with some bitterness. ‘I think that I have deserved better at your hands, Holmes,’" Watson writes. Even after Holmes explains his reasoning for the deception at length, Watson is perturbed but able to convince himself, once again, that Holmes is the better man:

I was still rather raw over the deception which had been practised upon me, but the warmth of Holmes's praise drove my anger from my mind. I felt also in my heart that he was right in what he said, and that it was really best for our purpose that I should not have known that he was upon the moor.

Appearance versus Reality

The spectral hound, with jaws and eyes ablaze, at first appears otherworldly. But as a man of reason, Holmes knows that appearances can be deceiving. Even Dr. Mortimer is inclined to believe in the Baskerville curse; having a man of science taken in by superstition makes that element of the story particularly convincing.

The story's other elements of deception heighten its Gothic tone: Mr. Stapleton appears to be a cheerful naturalist who lives with his sister; Selden falls to his death while appearing to be Henry Baskerville; the Barrymores' strange behavior appears to link them to Charles's death; Beryl Stapleton appears to be a fetching maiden but is really an abused wife. In the end, Holmes uses logic to decipher reality hiding behind false appearances, thus revealing how ordinary events masqueraded as supernatural occurrences.

Social Class

Sherlock Holmes is firmly entrenched in Victorian society and is comfortable with the status quo. He respects those of the professional class, such as medical doctors like Watson and Mortimer, and is inclined to hold their opinions in high esteem. As for members of the landed gentry, such as the Baskervilles, he is likewise inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and take their concerns seriously. Conversely, servants such as the Barrymores receive cordial but distant regard from Holmes, as do cab drivers, street urchins, and even Lestrade—a Scotland Yard detective. Both Beryl Stapleton and Laura Lyons are endangered by Stapleton's scheme, but Holmes does not go out of his way to express his sympathy or to aid them. Selden, as a member of the lower class—a murderer and a convict to boot—is destined to pay for his sins. By assuming Henry Baskerville's clothing in an attempt to pass himself off as a member of a higher class, he pays the ultimate price—his life.

Holmes is satisfied when the case is solved and social order is restored to its previous state; he and Watson can return to London and Henry Baskerville can live in peace. Those of the lower classes—Beryl Stapleton, Laura Lyons, and the Barrymores—are regarded as weak. Beryl Stapleton is imprisoned by her husband; Mrs. Barrymore aids a criminal and cries at night; Laura Lyons pays for marrying beneath her by being deserted and forced to work for a living. After Holmes solves the case and order is restored to Baskerville Hall, the fate of these characters is of no interest to him.

STYLE

Gothicism

The Gothic novel, which relies heavily on elements of horror and romance, originated in 1764 with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, flourished in 1818 with the publication of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and culminated in the 1847 publication of both Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. In the late Victorian era, Gothic literature was popularized by lurid "penny dreadful" stories, published serially in cheap booklets and magazines. But, in the emerging literature of the United States, Gothicism was gaining a new foothold. Edgar Allan Poe, whom Conan Doyle greatly admired, filled his writings, such as the 1839 story "The Fall of the House of Usher" with Gothic overtones, unexplained phenomena, strange noises, and characters descending into madness.

The Hound of the Baskervilles exhibits many Gothic elements, including a decrepit ancestral home, a local legend, supernatural elements, and a sense of doom and danger evoked through detailed descriptions of time and place, and the disintegration of both physical surroundings and the characters' mental states. Gothicism is perhaps most notably apparent in the description of the desolate Dartmoor landscape, with its rocky tors, thick fog, prehistoric stone ruins, the mysterious "man on the tor," and the dangerous Grimpen Mire—a bog so treacherous that it traps and drowns a horse. Baskerville Hall itself is also described in Gothic tones:

The whole front was draped in ivy, with a patch clipped bare here and there where a window or a coat-of-arms broke through the dark veil. From this central block rose the twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes. To right and left of the turrets were more modern wings of black granite. A dull light shone through heavy mullioned windows, and from the high chimneys which rose from the steep, high-angled roof there sprang a single black column of smoke.

Despite these trappings, the novel remains firmly in the world of logic and reason, as good detective stories must. Every seemingly inexplicable happening ultimately has a logical explanation. Conan Doyle, then, uses Gothicism purely as a way to enhance the mood of his story and to demonstrate that Holmes's talent for reasoning is superior to ignorant superstition.

Cliffhanger

Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes stories for the masses, and The Hound of the Baskervilles was no exception. Because the novel was published serially in the Strand, it was important to keep readers excited enough to buy the next issue. Hence, the cliffhanger. Conan Doyle ended each chapter with an exciting revelation that made readers want to know what happens next. The most famous of these cliffhangers comes at the end of chapter two, after Dr. Mortimer has recounted the legend of the Baskerville curse for Holmes and Watson. When Holmes asks Dr. Mortimer about the footprints Mortimer found at the scene of Charles Baskerville's death, he replies: "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Chapter eleven, "The Man on the Tor," also includes another famous cliffhanger. As Watson is investigating the hiding place of the mysterious stranger on the moor, the stranger returns: "‘It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson,’ said a well-known voice." The unexpected appearance of Sherlock Holmes startles the reader and raises many questions that will be answered only in the next installment—readers must buy the next issue.

Cliffhangers are common practice in contemporary literature; authors must use every trick they can to keep readers turning the page or risk losing them to other forms of entertainment. However, in the Victorian era, when the emerging leisure class had considerable time on its hands and literacy rates were steadily increasing, novels were a primary source of entertainment and tended to be long, rambling works filled with many characters, subplots, and lengthy descriptive passages. Contrary to that, nearly all the Holmes stories are just that—stories. Conan Doyle wrote only four Holmes novels, and it is no surprise that he used the traits common to short stories—brevity, clarity, and a fast pace—in those four books. A cliffhanger serves to set up the next installment and to maintain the story's forward momentum.

Folklore

The Black Dog is a mainstay of British folklore, a beast who signifies evil and imminent death. The Black Dog is invariably nocturnal and sometimes associated with storms or the sea; often it is said to have red eyes. Different regions have developed different myths, many of which probably arose from ancient Celtic or Germanic traditions. In Yorkshire the black dog is named Barghest, in Lancashire Gytrash, and in Wales Gwyllgi. The central mystery of The Hound of the Baskervilles concerns a real-life legend of a devil hound that was said to haunt the foggy moors in Devonshire. The legend was recounted to Conan Doyle by Fletcher Robinson, a friend from his sea-faring days who was a native of the area. Conan Doyle credited Robinson with the inspiration for the story in the foreword to the first printing of the novel. A supernatural black beast with blazing eyes was believed to be an omen of misfortune for anyone unlucky enough to encounter the creature. Some believe that small horses native to Devonshire, heath ponies, when viewed through the fog that often blankets the region, appear to be large dogs—a possible logical explanation for the supernatural legend.

Conan Doyle borrowed the Baskerville name from Robinson's groom, but the house, the curse, and Hugo himself are strictly figments of the author's imagination. Many folktales, however, include elements of ruthless ancestors, pacts with the devil, and curses that plague subsequent generations. By building his story on such time-honored traditions, and in including the stone ruins of prehistoric peoples in a windswept region far removed from civilized London, Conan Doyle signaled to readers that the story would be a Gothic ghost story, steeped in the unpredictable elements of nature (fog and the Grimpen Mire) that harkens back to the oral tradition.

Neat Resolution

Many mysteries are not solved until the final chapter, sustaining suspense and interest throughout the entire story. The Hound of the Baskervilles is notable for citing the guilty party in chapter twelve, three chapters before the end of the book—and even by the end of chapter four Holmes is fairly certain of the culprit. The last two chapters are more of a thriller, focusing on the capture of Stapleton and his dog.

The final chapter consists entirely of resolution, providing a myriad of background details that flesh out the story and provide motive for Stapleton's elaborate scheme. This long resolution provides satisfaction to the reader in neatly tying up all loose ends (except for the question of how Stapleton planned to claim Baskerville Hall after Henry's death). The resolution takes place in the cozy environs of 221B Baker Street, back in rational, modern London where everything has a logical explanation; Gothicism has been vanquished and fanciful legends left behind in rural England. Conan Doyle has shown that superstition is no match for civilization.

Mystery Conventions and the "Locked Room" Mystery

The Hound of the Baskervilles belongs to the Golden Age of detective fiction, a period that also includes works by Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and P. D. James. They are among the most well-known writers of the "locked room" genre—traditional mysteries that usually involve a small pool of suspects thrown together in a particular setting (in this case the area around Baskerville Hall). Suspects emerge, motives are uncovered, and the brilliant detective is the only one who can make sense of it all. Crime writer Fr. Ronald Knox, a writer and charter member of the Detectives Club, a group of writers who promoted the emerging genre, developed the "The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists" in 1928, first published in his book Essays in Satire. Though the list postdates most of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories, it is evident that Knox and the other members of the club were inspired by many conventions that Conan Doyle established over the course of his career. Rule number one reads "The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow." Though Conan Doyle violated this rule in his first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, while the detective genre was still evolving, he later adhered to it faithfully. Rule number two reads "All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course" and seems almost to have been inspired by The Hound of the Baskervilles.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Victorian Era and the Rise of the Popular Novel

The Victorian era in England commonly refers to the reign of Queen Victoria, which lasted from 1837 until 1901. The period coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a middle class in England that enjoyed more leisure time and wealth than at any previous time in history. During this era, social stratification was strictly enforced. Wealthy people—the landed gentry especially—did not socialize with those who labored for a living. The underclass, mainly those who toiled in factories or who worked as servants, remained marginalized by the social order and rarely escaped from their station in life. Sherlock Holmes adhered to these social conventions. Though he sometimes relies on the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of urchins, to do favors for him (and in The Hound of the Baskervilles he pays Cartwright to be his gopher), Holmes keeps his social circle tight, preferring instead the company of Dr. Watson and Dr. Mortimer, middle-class men such as himself, and Henry Baskerville, whose title of baronet automatically confers status upon him. The Barrymores, Selden, and Laura Lyons, however, as members of a lower class are beneath Holmes's concern apart from being suspects in his case. Holmes is nothing if not a purveyor of the status quo.

In the Victorian era, the growing middle class spawned a new interest in mandatory education for their children. In 1870, the Education Act required all children between the ages of five and thirteen to attend school. This resulted in a rising literacy rate and a better educated population overall. As a result, novels and magazines became a popular form of entertainment for a wide cross-section of people. Charles Dickens and many poets were popular, as were magazines featuring "light" fiction. Light fiction was designed merely for entertainment, not moral teaching, and Conan Doyle's detective stories, with their accessible language, lack of dogma, and thrilling plots, were immensely popular with the literate middle class, who eagerly purchased successive editions of the Strand and other magazines that featured his work.

New Scotland Yard and the Rise of the Detective

By 1890, Scotland Yard was well established as the headquarters of the metropolitan London police, and it had just moved to larger quarters, a brand-new Victorian-style building just down the street from the Houses of Parliament. The organization employed many inspectors, or detectives, and prided itself on adopting the state-of-the-art Bertillon procedure used to identify criminals, which was based on anthropometry, a series of bodily measurements designed to eliminate unreliable eyewitness reports. Despite this, Scotland Yard detectives had not been able to solve the Whitechapel murders, attributed to Jack the Ripper, that ceased in 1889. As an independent investigator, Sherlock Holmes has an ambivalent relationship with Scotland Yard and believes his talents are superior to their sometimes bumbling behavior. He gives a backhanded compliment to Inspector Lestrade when he says to Watson, "he is the best of the professionals, I think."

In 1901, the year The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialized in the Strand, Scotland Yard adopted the United Kingdom Fingerprint System, known as the Henry Classification System, as a forensic tool for investigating crimes. But Scotland Yard detectives were not required to carry a revolver until 1898, which may account for Holmes inquiring whether or not Lestrade has a gun as they prepare to face the hound. Wanting to appear professional, Lestrade assures Holmes he does but it is almost certainly a flask of liquor he is hiding, not a weapon.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• Late 1800s: The premiere U.S. research and publishing firm for the study and practice of phrenology (the interpretation of character through studying the shape of the skull), Fowler & Wells in New York City, closes after more than fifty years in business. The firm's founders, brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler and their partner Samuel Wells, promoted phrenology as a way to gain self-knowledge.

  Early 1900s: London psychiatrist Bernard Hollander publishes Scientific Phrenology, an influential book that established the methodology for measuring the skull.

  Today: Though phrenology has been long discredited, it is still considered a significant theoretical development because it initiated the belief that the brain contains certain areas that control various human functions and emotions. Contemporary disciplines such as cytoarchitecture, which examines the arrangement of cell bodies in the cerebral cortex, can trace their origins to phrenology.

• Late 1800s: French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon's system of anthropometry, a scientific method of identifying criminals based on measurements of the head and body along with identifying tattoos and scars, is used in France and England to help identify criminal suspects.

  Early 1900s: The United Kingdom Fingerprint System, known as the Henry Classification System, is adopted by Scotland Yard as a forensic tool for investigating crimes.

  Today: Fingerprints are still used to gather evidence at a crime scene, but DNA profiling, also known as genetic fingerprinting, is used increasingly to identify suspects in criminal cases.

• Late 1800s: Queen Victoria reigns in Great Britain and the British Empire extends across five continents, including Canada, where Henry Baskerville has been a farmer, and portions of Central America and the Caribbean, where Rodger Baskerville lived.

  Early 1900s: Queen Victoria—England's longest reigning monarch—dies, and her son becomes King Edward VII, ushering in the Edwardian era. The British Empire is still growing and peaks in landmass around 1918.

  Today: Queen Elizabeth II, has reigned for fifty-five years, second only to Queen Victoria and George III. The British Empire is much smaller than in Queen Victoria's time, consisting of sixteen countries and a total of 128 million people.

The British Empire

The Hound of the Baskervilles takes place during the height of the British Empire's power, which spanned so many countries that, literally, the sun never set on it. Among the British upper class, this position of political superiority fostered great pride and often arrogance. Criminals, such as Selden, or wayward members of the ruling class, such as Rodger Baskerville, freely

traveled to foreign lands such as Canada, Australia, or South Africa in order to escape persecution at home or seek their fortune by plundering resources or establishing exploitive business ventures. Henry Baskerville was a resident of Canada, which had been part of the British Commonwealth since 1867. This would have made his immigration back to England to claim his inheritance from the motherland a natural, expected occurrence.

In their conquest for Africa, British troops won the Second Boer War, during which Conan Doyle, who was too old to serve in the military, volunteered as a field hospital doctor in South Africa. In the novel, Charles Baskerville gained his fortune in the gold mines of South Africa, a fortune that he used benevolently upon returning to Dartmoor. He supported the less fortunate residents of Coombe Tracey, such as Laura Lyons, who, abandoned by her husband and forced to work for a meager living, would have been seen as a charity case.

Stapleton, the son of Charles Baskerville's brother, was born and raised in Central America, where he met and married the fiery Latin beauty Beryl Garcia. Though the British controlled several Caribbean islands, Beryl Stapleton's native Costa Rica was a Spanish colony, which may account for her reputation as an exotic (i.e., not British) beauty, prone to unpredictable behavior as opposed to characteristic British reserve. Selden, the murderer who dresses in Henry Baskerville's clothes in preparation for his escape to South America, would most likely have escaped British law and culture altogether if he had been successful. Much of South America was under Spanish, Portuguese, and French influence; only Guyana was ruled by England. It would have been easy for Selden to disappear into the vast continent.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The Hound of the Baskervilles remains as popular in the twenty-first century as it was when it was first published. Holmes himself has proven to be one of the most enduring characters in modern literature, more famous even than his creator. Indeed, Holmes's cap, houndstooth coat, Calabash pipe, and magnifying glass have entered the popular consciousness as representative of the clothing for a stereotypical English detective. Watson's discovery of the mysterious "man on the tor" is one of the genre's most famous moments, as is Dr. Mortimer's exclamation of having found "the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

Admirers have praised the book's Gothic setting, the supernatural elements that turn out to have a logical explanation, and Conan Doyle's deft use of Watson's narration to create suspense and provide the public with a Holmes story even after the great detective's supposed death at Reichenbach Falls. Indeed, the only serious criticism of the book comes from those who note chronological inconsistencies within the story's timeline. It is thought to take place around 1889, but that date conflicts with the timeline of previous Holmes cases, none of which are alluded to in the text. Conan Doyle affixed no date in the story, so its place in time must be deduced from hints given within the text. Critics give estimates as early as 1886 and as late as 1900, according to Leslie S. Klinger's chronology chart in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

Furthermore, many Sherlockians, those Holmes fans who create mock criticism based on the fallacy that Holmes and Watson were real people, have long argued over the supposed whereabouts of Baskerville Hall and the identity of its diabolical ancestors. Writer James Branch Cabell claimed that his ancestor Richard Cabell, a British Lord from Buckfastleigh, Devon, was the model for Hugo Baskerville, reports Klinger in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Klinger also observes that the Conan Doyle expert William S. Baring-Gould argues that Lew Hall at Lew Trenchard in Devon was the model for Baskerville Hall because its features match those described in the novel. Others dispute this theory on the basis that Lew Hall was too far from Grimspound and Fox Tor Mire, which are thought to be the inspiration for Grimpen Mire, comments Howard Brody in the Baker Street Journal. According to Brody, these critics believe the real Baskerville Hall was Hayford Hall, due to its proximity to Fox Tor Mires and to the fact that the manor boasts its own hound legend. Another inconsistency concerns the Cyclopides butterfly that Stapleton chases; it would not have been found in the Dartmoor region of Britain, claims Klinger.

As for the story itself, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a favorite with critics. Critic Donald J. Watt, as quoted by Benjamin F. Fisher in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, summarizes the story as "a ripping good yarn, which is related by means of some astutely manipulated conventional literary devices … [including] structure, mood, and metaphor." Author and critic Francis O'Gorman believes that the novel represents Conan Doyle's ambivalence about the supernatural world, having been written while the author was involved in spiritualism. "At the height of his career, neither intolerant nor wholly a believer," says O'Gorman in the Yorkshire Post, "Conan Doyle was sufficiently immersed in a search for reliable facts about ‘the other side’ and some now argue The Hound of the Baskervilles, written from the midst of this process, is an emblem of these beliefs."

CRITICISM

Kathleen Wilson

Wilson is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she comments on the discrepancy between the male characters in The Hound of the Baskervilles, who represent rationality and self-involvement, and the female characters, whose moral dilemmas give their conflicts more nuance but who are nevertheless pushed to the margins of the story.

Among critics and fans alike, The Hound of the Baskervilles is praised for its Gothic, foreboding setting in which superstition and legend ultimately give way to logic and reason. In the figures of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. James Watson, Henry Baskerville, and Dr. Mortimer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle exhibits his superlative grasp of characterization; he places these upstanding Victorian men in the "locked room" of Dartmoor to make sense of Charles Baskerville's death and the legend of the spectral hound. Shunted to the margins of the story are the women: Beryl Stapleton, Laura Lyons, and to a lesser extent Mrs. Barrymore, all of whom suffer at the hands of men and yet remain powerless to help themselves. Holmes seems less interested in their misfortune than he is in demonstrating his own tremendous powers of deductive reasoning. Indeed, he spends more time analyzing Beryl's perfume than he does trying to save her.

It may be asking too much that Beryl Stapleton and Laura Lyons muster the fortitude to escape their predicaments. As Victorian women they are constrained by laws both social and legal. Social constraints mire them in a psychological struggle between what they want (freedom from the men who control them), and their desire to adhere to Victorian norms that discourage such freedom. Along with Mrs. Barrymore, whose familial devotion to her brother—an escaped convict—leads to her nocturnal wailing and the hand-wringing crime of aiding and abetting a murderer, Beryl and Laura are the only characters in the novel who suffer cognitive dissonance due to their moral entrapment.

Conan Doyle was adept at creating fallible characters, even those who served as heroes and protagonists. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most loved characters in all literature, and yet he is not necessarily lovable. He is egotistical and presumptuous in a way that connotes a sense of masculine entitlement. He is confident in his abilities—he balks when Dr. Mortimer refers to him as the second greatest detective—and he sees no need to tell Watson of his plans to travel surreptitiously to Dartmoor. His failure to disclose this crucial information under the guise that he is "protecting" Watson is demeaning, because it presumes that Watson, a medical doctor and a gentleman, needs to be protected.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• "Murders in the Rue Morgue," published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841, is commonly regarded as the first detective story, even though the work predates the concept of a "detective" as such. The detective figure in the story, C. Auguste Dupin, on whom Conan Doyle modeled Holmes, is an aristocratic and brilliant eccentric who lives in Paris and astounds the unnamed narrator, a close friend, with his powers of deductive reasoning.
• A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887, was Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story—and one of only four Holmes novels—and introduced the characters of Dr. Watson and Scotland Yard inspector Lestrade. Because the book predates established conventions of the detective novel, it violates many of these stylistic rules and relies partly on supernatural events. In the story, Holmes pays homage to Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. The story concerns two murders in England that are linked to a Mormon settlement in the United States.
• The Coming of the Fairies, published in 1922 by Arthur Conan Doyle, reprints the Cottingley fairy photographs that depict miniature winged fairies cavorting with two girls from Yorkshire. Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist, outlines evidence for the photos' authenticity with the methodical detail for which he was known. Conan Doyle, however, had been duped; the photos were later proven to be a hoax.
• The Moor (1998), by award-winning author Laurie R. King, is a continuation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. In this sequel, Mary Russell, Holmes's plucky young wife, a detective herself and narrator of the story, travels with Holmes to Dartmoor in 1924 to investigate yet another murder attributed to the spectral hound.
• Sayers on Holmes (2001) is a collection of essays by critic and detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers. Among other topics, the book includes pieces on the importance of Holmes to the detective genre.
• The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases (2007) was written by forensics expert E. J. Wagner. Using Conan Doyle's various stories, Wagner traces the rise in forensic science from the turn of the century onward, delving into cases that may have inspired Conan Doyle and later crimes that may have been inspired by Conan Doyle.
• Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought (2005) was written by Stephen Tomlinson, a professor of education studies. The book covers the rise of phrenology, such as is practiced by Dr. Mortimer, and how it sparked a beneficial education reform movement in Europe and North America, but also lent a false scientific credibility to racism and eugenics.
• The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, by Michael Chabon, is a novella first published in the Paris Review in 2003. Sherlock Holmes, living out his days in Sussex, England, as a beekeeper during World War II, becomes involved in the case of a stolen parrot that belongs to a mute boy.
• Walk Dartmoor (2006), by Kate and Alan Hobbs, presents numerous walking tours around the Devonshire region, most taking several hours. The tours take hikers past notable landmarks, from the highest tors to the deepest mires, to various bridges, waterways, ancient ruins, and abandoned quarries. In addition, the book presents many historical details and maps.

Watson himself is a bit too eager to please; Dr. Mortimer is forgetful and not particularly hardworking; and Henry Baskerville is unnecessarily harsh on Beryl Stapleton when her real marital status is revealed.

Interestingly, Holmes's masculinity does not necessarily entail chivalry. He exhibits no particular sympathy toward Beryl Stapleton or Laura Lyons though they too are victims of the nefarious Jack Stapleton, the mastermind who procures a big black dog and co-opts the curse of the Baskervilles to drive Sir Charles to an early grave. Holmes's natural habitat is the male bastion of 221B Baker Street, and his avocational pursuits are solitary: cocaine, tobacco, rare violins. That his detective skills might rescue a woman from a life of misery is beside the point, the point being the ego boost that comes from solving the mystery.

If Holmes's solipsism is his flaw, the women of the story suffer the opposite affliction. Beryl, forced by her husband to pose as his sister and to seduce Henry Baskerville, suffers public humiliation and worse when Henry takes the tantalizing bait. But Beryl does what she can. She puts herself in danger by selflessly constructing a warning letter to Henry—a complete stranger—upon his arrival in London. She then accosts Watson in Dartmoor, thinking him to be Henry, and begs him to leave England at once to spare his life. She apologizes when the mistaken identity is revealed, but as clear as her message is—and the fact that she obviously knows something about what is going on—Watson is more interested in her peculiar behavior than in what she is saying. One heart-to-heart talk with Beryl Stapleton and the whole case would be solved. Watson squanders his opportunity to best Holmes, in part because he is unwilling to listen.

Instead, Watson clings to his role of second banana while Holmes crafts a risky caper to catch Stapleton in the act of setting his hound loose. After they (and Inspector Lestrade) slay the hound and rescue Henry, they proceed to Merripit House in search of Stapleton, only to discover a bound and gagged Beryl. Her rescue is merely a happy accident in their quest to bring down her husband; once her gag is removed, she reveals that Stapleton has probably escaped onto his island in the Grimpen Mire, and they are off and running. Holmes shows more compassion to the terrified Henry Baskerville, whom he reassuringly tells to stay put on the moor until help arrives. Beryl merits no such comfort.

Though Stapleton is never found and is presumed dead, thereby freeing Beryl to marry Henry, the otherwise reasonable bachelor simply cannot forgive her sins. Instead, he teams up with Dr. Mortimer and travels the world. Having been dragged across the Atlantic Ocean from her home in Costa Rica and abused mentally and physically by a sociopath, all while trying to warn those targeted by said sociopath, Beryl's heroism is invalidated by her gender and thus she is of no interest to Holmes, Watson, Mortimer, or Baskerville. Her fate as a widow without the means to support herself is not their problem, even though they have caused it. Henry, especially, has reason to thank her for her valiant effort to spare him and no reason to believe her affection toward him was not genuine. Yet his masculinity necessitates saving face in the matter by shunning her.

Laura Lyons suffers a similar fate. She has been abandoned twice, first by her father—the litigious Mr. Frankland of Lafter Hall—and then by her husband, a ne'er-do-well artist. She has no means to obtain a divorce from her absent spouse and is thus forced into a life of workaday drudgery as a typist, albeit a proper one who is alarmed and cautious when strange men show up at her door. Such a precarious social position makes her prime fodder for Stapleton's evil plan. He prompts her to arrange the ill-fated meeting with Charles Baskerville, ostensibly to seek his financial help in obtaining a divorce (which at the time would have cost more than she would have made in a year), by implying that he will marry her afterward. Desperation renders her blind to his manipulation, and she arranges a late-night rendezvous with Sir Baskerville in the Yew Alley. Stapleton then makes sure she backs out of the meeting so he can send his "spectral" hound in her place. One is almost surprised that Stapleton spares her life; after all, the original Baskerville curse included two bodies—Hugo's and the escaped maiden's—a reprise with Sir Charles and Laura might have proven irresistible.

In the end, both Beryl and Laura gain some measure of freedom, but it is only a collateral effect of Holmes having solved the case. The detective exhibits no outward pleasure in having made the women's lives better. He is mostly concerned with triumphantly revealing that the hound was a mortal canine dowsed in phosphorus. Conan Doyle keeps his male characters firmly in the realm of rationality and objectivity (the exception being Watson's girlish irritation upon discovering Holmes's subterfuge). The author delegates emotions, particularly stormy feelings of hopelessness and doom, to his female characters who, in concordance with Victorian values, are by turns hysterical and skittish. The tempestuous Gothic moors, with their foggy nights, mysterious animal howls, and treacherous terrain, are personified in the book's female characters, who themselves are moody, forbidding, and temperamental. In the end the glory goes to the men, while the struggles of the women elicit as much interest as the forgotten ancient ruins scattered along the Dartmoor hills.

Source: Kathleen Wilson, Critical Essay on The Hound of the Baskervilles, in Novels for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Jesse Oak Taylor-Ide

In the following excerpt, Taylor-Ide examines Sherlock Holmes's ability in The Hound of the Baskervilles to deftly cross the line between mysticism and rational Victorian ideals. According to Taylor-Ide, he does this through a symbolic ritual transformation on the moor.

The Late-Victorian Period presented the need to confront an increasing dissolution of boundaries that had once been more concretely defined. In 1859 (the year Conan Doyle was born) Darwin published The Origin of Species, removing the concept of a solid divide between humans and animals. Similarly, the increasing flow of people to and from the far reaches of the globe turned London, the seat of British power, culture, and identity, into what Watson called a "cesspool in which the loungers and idlers of empire are inevitably dredged." Many

of these "loungers and idlers" were British, many were foreign, and many seemed to blur the line between these two categories, either being of mixed blood, or having acquired foreign tendencies through sojourns in Marlow's "dark places of the earth." Within this "cesspool" of ontological uncertainty, Sherlock Holmes is generally understood, and indeed presents himself, as the ultimate rational being—the champion of the solid, masculine, British mind in the face of foreign mysticism and irrationality …

Unlike many of the criminals he pursues, Holmes rarely leaves Britain. Instead he highlights the degree to which "Britain" was becoming an increasingly hybridized entity through the influx of foreign influences. In order to counter these threats, Holmes goes through transformations similar to those associated with sojourns abroad through the use of ritual process. Social theorist Victor Turner describes such ritual processes as symbolic dissolutions of the self, departures from the societal structure. This leads to a period of liminality, or anti-structure, where the individual is "betwixt and between" worlds. Eventually, a reintegration into structured society follows, with the individual assuming a new identity and role within that structure. The liminal world into which one crosses is often seen as somewhat magical, certainly polluting, and in this case analogous to the "dark" foreign spaces of the empire. The individual is altered by this transition, and is often seen as somehow tainted by the experience, bringing back shards of the darkness like the dust clinging to a traveler's clothes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles illustrates how Holmes's passage between the world of society and the dark, polluting world outside it through ritual transformation is in fact the central theme that enables his solving of the mystery. By contrast, in The Sign of Four, similarly ritualized scenes are given an inverted position in the structure of the narrative, framing the main action, which takes place within the societal structure of London. Despite their distinctions, both of these novels pit Sherlock Holmes in an explicit battle with figures corrupted by time spent in foreign lands. In this light they may be read as allegories of the Victorians' battle to affirm their civilization, and by extension their humanity, in the face of dark, regressive influences that threaten to drag them back into a precivilized state …

Nowhere is Holmes's ritual transformation as apparent or as fully developed as in The Hound of the Baskervilles, arguably the most complex and deeply allegorical of the Holmes stories. The mystery of the hound is brought to Holmes's attention by Dr. James Mortimer. Mortimer is continually referred to as a "man of science," in distinction to Holmes "the specialist in crime," thus highlighting both the degree to which pure science is unable to come to terms with the threat of the hound, and the degree to which Holmes's methods are something other than scientific. Mortimer in fact attempts to cover his inadvertent offence in calling Holmes "the second highest expert in Europe" by saying, "To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly." Bertillon was a criminal anthropologist who devised a complex system of measurement to identify "criminal types"—an area of study very similar to Mortimer's own passion for phrenology. The unscientific elements of Holmes's methods are further illustrated immediately upon Mortimer's departure. Holmes suggests that Watson leave him alone for the rest of the day, a request which Watson honors immediately, noting: "I knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other …" Watson's observation is true in many instances, but here it is erroneous. Holmes repeatedly notes the danger of forming theories when one does not have enough evidence. Since the amount of evidence that he has been presented with at this point is quite small, hardly enough fodder to sustain his immense reasoning power through an entire day of intense concentration, it would contradict his own counsel to spend the afternoon engaged as Watson suggests. Holmes spends the day collecting evidence, not weighing it.

The room is so choked with heavy smoke upon Watson's return that he can barely get through the door. It is not only the smoke that isolates Watson from the rooms at 221B, however. Holmes is barely visible—"a vague vision … coiled up in an armchair with his pipe between his lips." Terms like "vague vision" and "coiled" characterize Holmes as other worldly, almost reptilian. He seems to have undergone a ritual transformation—passed into a dark, liminal world outside the societal structure, and has returned cloaked in that darkness, which is manifested in the close, smoky atmosphere of the room. Though both this and the cocaine ritual take place in their shared rooms, Watson seems removed from the scene in both cases. This distance is maintained as Holmes alludes to his changed state of mind in direct opposition to Watson's immersion in the solid British masculinity of his club:

"Where do you think I've been?"

"A fixture also."

"On the contrary, I have been to Devonshire."

"In spirit?"

"Exactly. My body remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you left I sent down to Stamford's for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor, and my spirit has hovered over it all day."

This is an ambiguous statement—especially in Holmes's use of the word "it." Does "it" refer to the moor or to the map? Based on Holmes's use of the word "spirit," "it" can be read in reference both to the moor and to the map; or, more precisely, to the moor through the map. According to the OED, spirit can, among other things, refer to the soul, essence, or immaterial part of a corporeal being, to the immaterial intelligent part of a person, or a matter of the mind or mental activity. These are closely related, but subtly and significantly different connotations—the difference lying in the faculty of reason.

The spirit as the soul is the place of religion and mysticism, the realm that traditionally defies reason. Spirit also means, however, the aspect of a person that is sentient, thoughtful, and reasoning. Holmes employs both of these meanings in the above passage. It is the incredible reasoning faculty of his mind that hovers over the map all day. It is his essence, the immaterial aspect of himself that perceives on a level other than reason, which travels to Devonshire, aided in its liberation from his body by huge quantities of caffeine and strong tobacco in Doyle's version of a shamanistic trance.

Holmes's preoccupied state in pondering the map is quite similar to Buddhist monks who meditate over mandalas, spiritual maps that serve as guides on the journey to enlightenment. A literary example can be seen in Rudyard Kipling's Kim, in which the lama is one of the few still living that can both draw and explicate the mandala, "the Wheel of Life." Distinctly different from a scientific use of the imagination, this "mental mapping meditation" involves a literal projection of the spirit through the mandala. Holmes in his fashion adopts the principal and applies it to a British Ordinance map: "Yes the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men—." He trails off, unable or unwilling to finish the sentence and convey what his spirit encountered on the moor, and then says, "The thing takes shape Watson. It becomes coherent. Might I ask you to hand me my violin, and we will postpone all further thought on this business …" This ability to detach his mind from cases at will, usually through his hypnotic violin playing, is another characteristic that Watson marvels at on numerous occasions. Holmes's solitary, tobacco-filled vigils may often provide the solutions to his cases; these periods of musical self-hypnosis provide the tranquility to allow him to recognize understanding when it comes to him. This sense parallels a yogic tenet: "knowledge is not something external to us to be received like a gift, nor a mental construction either, to be built up from scratch by logical reasoning. … it is in reality a hidden treasure, something waiting in the very depths of ourselves to be discovered." Holmes certainly does not carry his detachment this far and would be appalled at the dismissal of logical reasoning, but the idea that too much reasoning could obscure the truth that will come in tranquility speaks to yet another connection to Eastern religion …

Like the foreign lands of the empire, [the Dartmoor] landscape is not unpopulated. Nor are the hound, with its disembodied cry like the voice of the moor itself, and the escaped convict, Selden, the only mysterious figures loose upon the moor. The night that Watson and Sir Henry attempt to capture Selden, Watson catches sight of "the figure of a man upon the Tor": "He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place." This figure is, of course, Sherlock Holmes. It is not enough for Holmes to ponder the case from Baker Street, amassing clues like puzzle pieces until he eventually fits them all together. In order to solve the mystery of the hound he must enter into its domain on the moor, not merely as a visitor as Watson does, but as one who lets the moor permeate his own being. He must live in the ancient dwellings, meditating on the roots that connect civilized humanity to its darker origins. He must breathe the air tainted by Grimpen Mire, and listen to the call of the hound. He must, in short, pass through a ritual transformation and become the "spirit of the moor" that Watson saw that night on the Tor.

Holmes seems to be eerily unaffected by the harshness of the moor. Watson notes, "he had contrived with that cat-like love of personal cleanliness which was one of his characteristics, that his chin should be as smooth and his linen as perfect as if he were in Baker Street." Christopher Clausen writes that this is the moment when we know that civilization must ultimately triumph. There is certainly something reassuring in the ease with which Holmes seems to be able to transport the civilization of Baker Street out onto the moor, fulfilling an ideal which caused British explorers to sacrifice their lives in order to carry dress uniforms and fine china on expeditions deep into the Arctic. But it also calls Baker Street's solidity into question—if civilization can be so easily carried into the darkness, could the reverse not also be true? If the boundaries between these worlds are so permeable, how easy might it be for another such figure, one more affected by the darkness, to transport that darkness back to civilization?

These fears are central to the significance of the hound, and indeed to many of the crimes that Sherlock Holmes investigates. Stapleton is just such a figure, who returns from South America to conjure the hound. Jonathan Small's return from the Andaman Islands with the devilish Tonga is another example, as are "The Devils Foot" and "The Speckled Band," in which knowledge attained overseas, of an African poison and an Indian snake respectively, is put to murderous purposes. Similar power and danger surround other figures such as Stoker's Dracula and even Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The most obvious example of the danger of the moor provided here, however, is the convict, Selden.

Given the allegorical connection between the moor and foreign lands, Selden is placed in a very similar situation to the "poor whites" of the empire, who often return home as the criminals (or apparent criminals) in the Holmes stories …

Just when Holmes's liminality as "the man upon the Tor" has been highlighted, Selden's death illustrates the precariousness of that liminality. Holmes's reaction upon realizing the identity of the dead man they had believed to be Sir Henry establishes an instant connection: "It is not the baronet—it is—why, it is my neighbor, the convict!" Claiming the convict as a neighbor reminds us of the similarity between Selden's position on the moor and his own. Both have been living in the abodes of pre-civilized humanity in this world of darkness. This fits within Turner's description of the interconnectedness between people who inhabit the ritual space of anti-structure, something he refers to as "communitas." Selden's demise, being literally overrun by the spirit of the darkness manifest in the hound, strikes home the danger lurking around those who exist outside the social order. An even more specific warning in Selden's death clarifies this danger: "‘Then the clothes have been the poor devil's death,’ said he. ‘It is clear enough that the hound has been laid on from some article of Sir Henry's—the boot which was abstracted in the hotel in all probability—and so ran this man down.’" It is putting on Sir Henry's clothes that leads the hound to Selden, a fact that speaks directly to the explanation given for the origins of his criminality. His sister, Mrs. Barrymore, says that he felt entitled to more than his due because he was spoiled as a child. This feeling of entitlement is literalized in his assuming garb far above his lower-class station in order to escape to Latin America. In doing so he presents an even stronger challenge to the social order than he has up to this point, and it brings his doom upon him. The attempt to rise above one's social standing outside the societal structure of the metropole brings about ruin and death—a clear warning to Sherlock Holmes or anyone else who passes into the dark space outside structured society.

The threat presented by Selden, however, is dwarfed by that of the other figure in the novel who has been corrupted by the darkness—Stapleton. Before his guilt (and identity as a illegitimate Baskerville) is revealed, Stapleton represents an imperial icon—the European naturalist/explorer. Since he (supposedly) acts only out of the desire to gain knowledge, the scientific researcher is often viewed as one of the noblest and most benign of colonial figures, one whose explorations are removed from the exploitive elements of his capitalist or military counterpart. Holmes demonstrates a similar fixation on knowledge, and is himself an amateur scientist—often occupying himself with chemical experiments unrelated to his professional investigations.

In Stapleton, however, this ideal is perverted to malevolence through the witchcraft and voodoo associated with his Latin American roots, an association seen in the novel through his frequent sojourns and comfort on the moor. Especially as it immediately follows the discussion of Selden's death, Stapleton's appearance, strolling nonchalantly across the moor on the heels of his hound while contentedly puffing a cigar, mimics Holmes's civilized appearance on the moor, and presents yet another instance of Turner's "communitas." Thus we see a similar marriage of the scientific and the mystical, the British and the foreign, and the ability to move between them, in both Holmes and Stapleton. In challenging Stapleton, then, Holmes is in effect serving almost as a conscience, reigning in a dark doppelganger that he might become himself if, like Conrad's Kurtz, he succumbed to the darkness.

The degree to which Stapleton has been absorbed by the darkness, meanwhile, is fully revealed as his dark power seems almost indistinguishable from that of the moor itself as the final scene unfolds. The fog moves in off the moor, shrouding the path as if the devil's own breath is behind it—suggesting that Stapleton may be only a pawn in the power of a deeper evil. It is from this deathly shroud that the apparition bursts:

A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its mussle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the fog.

The hound is a manifestation of all the fears at work throughout the novel. It is an animal seeming to cross the boundaries between myth and reality, conjured from the days before science had explained that no such creature could possibly exist. The hound is all the more terrifying, because while it seems so other-worldly, it is also so very British. It was born in London, and turned to evil by the foreign-born but British-blooded Stapleton. Unlike Stoker's Dracula, it is not a foreign being that must be invited in—it is only coming home.

Watson's portrayal of the hound reflects the ambiguity seen in his depiction of Holmes in his liminal state, both when he is sitting in Baker Street enveloped in smoke, and when he sees him as "the figure of a man upon the Tor." In each of these instances, the figure portrayed cannot be fully defined—"a vague image," "the figure of a man," "not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen," "the delirious dream of a disordered brain…." The similarities between these characterizations return to Holmes's connection with both Selden and Stapleton through the moor, and reflect Turner's "communitas," the affinities between figures inhabiting the darkness that is central to Holmes's success. Both Watson and Lestrade are petrified with amazement and fear. It is only because Holmes has been prepared and transformed through ritual of his time on the moor like a priest before a sacrifice that he can kill the hound.

In fact, the ritual is even completed by a sacrifice—Sir Henry is offered up to the hound and then resuscitated once it is dead. Holmes's emptying his revolver into the hound's body with a fervor bordering on possession, meanwhile, is an inverse of the common image of a witch or heathen priest using ritual to bring a magical force into the rational world. In this case, Holmes's ritual transformation brings his technological British weapon into the darkness …

Source: Jesse Oak Taylor-Ide, "Ritual and the Liminality of Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles," in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 48, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 55-71.

James Kissane and John M. Kissane

In the following excerpt, Kissane and Kissane argue that The Hound of the Baskervilles portrays Sherlock Holmes as a folk hero—one who uses scientific reasoning instead of brute strength to vanquish seemingly supernatural evil.

It is no mystery why Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles should be regarded as a classic of its genre. Most of its elements have since become virtual requirements for a satisfactory detective novel, and nowhere else do these characteristic features appear in such distinguished, one might say quintessential, form. The bizarre crime is not only conceived with ingenuity, it exudes the mystery and horror of the supernatural. The circumscribed society confines suspicion within strict limits; and Doyle not only keeps the list of suspects to a daring minimum but comprises it of such classic types as the Family Doctor (Mortimer), the eccentric (Frankland), the Naturalist (Stapleton), and of course the Butler (Barrymore). There are not one but three atmospheric settings: London, a gloomy ancestral hall, and a desolate moor. Doyle stages his climax, at which evil is at last confronted and exposed, with great showmanship. As Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade await the appearance of the murderous hound, the threat of a concealing fog adds a full measure of suspense to the unique uncertainty of the peril. Finally, there is the master detective—or rather detectives, for in addition to Holmes, whose supremacy among the breed finds no serious challenge, Watson also qualifies, since in this adventure he plays an unusually important role by doing much of the sleuthing himself.

Doyle's specific achievement, however, argues for more than mere representative status. The Hound of the Baskervilles stands above its author's other works at the same time that it stands for his predominance in the field of detective fiction. One obvious feature that sets this tale apart offers a clue to its particular excellence. Anyone familiar with the Holmes stories will recognize The Hound of the Baskervilles as the only one of the four novel-length works that includes no separate, retrospective narrative. In each of the others the events underlying the mystery and leading to the crime form a distinct tale—a tale that does not involve Holmes and Watson and has its setting far from Baker Street and even outside England. In A Study in Scarlet it is the account of Jefferson Hope and the Mormons; in The Sign of Four it is Jonathan Small's story of the Agra Treasure; and in The Valley of Fear there is the episode of labor union terrorism among the Allegheny coal miners. In each case the purpose of the "flashback" is to provide colorful incident and exotic atmosphere beyond that contained in the crime and its solution. In The Hound of the Baskervilles the Baskerville legend which Dr. Mortimer reads to Holmes and Watson may seem similar to the episodes mentioned, but in fact it performs a quite different function. The legend is a beginning to the action rather than a clarification at the end; it is essential to the actual crime, and its atmosphere permeates the enveloping mystery.

What this means, of course, is that by developing his tale out of the "west country legend" mentioned in the acknowledgment Doyle created a work of greater unity than he managed to do in his other longer efforts. The difference in effect is obvious. In A Study in Scarlet, for example, our interest in the solution of the crimes and the apprehension of the criminal has been satisfied before the account of Hope's adventures among the Mormons begins. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, on the other hand, the exposure and thwarting of Stapleton's scheme is also, in a sense, the last chapter to the Baskerville legend. The melodrama and the problem in detection are woven into a single narrative; in the other novel-length adventures they are separate.

The unified fable that results is a classic embodiment of the abstract form of the detective story as it has been entertainingly and instructively delineated by W. H. Auden ("The Guilty Vicarage," Harper's, May, 1948). In essence the fable concerns the freeing of an ancestral house from a contaminating curse. The crime, Sir Charles's death, is identified with the curse that has plagued the Baskerville family, and it jeopardizes the heir, Sir Henry, and casts suspicion upon the society gathered around Baskerville Hall. In solving the crime and exposing the criminal, Sherlock Holmes performs the traditional heroic function of purging the hall of its ancestral blight and the society of the presence of guilt. Conan Doyle brings out these elements of his fable with thoroughness and solidity and rises to heights of mastery in the way he uses this material to dramatize a struggle of scientific reason against superstition and irrationality. It is common to regard the detective story as having been born of nineteenth-century "scientism"; The Hound of the Baskervilles is the example of the genre in which the implications of that origin are given their most vivid and their richest artistic realization.

The murder of Sir Charles Baskerville confronts us with the family curse in two ways. Most immediately the death, because of its circumstances, raises the spectre of the legendary hound; but it raises also the question of the fate of the new heir. Doyle gives careful emphasis to Sir Henry's situation. A Canadian, he is really a newcomer as yet untouched by the sinister aspects of his inheritance. Still, he accepts his role as the "last of the old race" and Baskerville Hall as "the home of his fathers" (chapter iii). We are clearly made to feel that there is a family as well as a personal fate involved in the mysterious circumstances Sir Henry encounters. Indeed, Stapleton's scheme to gain the inheritance makes explicit the connection between the personal peril and the family one. Moreover, the effect of the Baskervilles' fortunes upon the more general welfare is also stressed. The revival of the Baskerville legend causes "a reign of terror in the district" (chap. iii), and were Sir Henry to avoid the curse by remaining away from the Hall the results would be still more serious: "‘… the prosperity of the whole poor, bleak countryside depends upon his presence’" (chap. iii). Even Sherlock Holmes in all his rationalism cannot help seeing the successful completion of the case in the context of the Baskerville curse. Over the body of Stapleton's giant dog Holmes pronounces his version of the hero's vaunt: "We've laid the family ghost once and for ever" (chap. xiv).

Thus in this particular adventure Sherlock Holmes earns in a special sense the title "folk hero" that one recent writer has given him (Dwight Macdonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," Diogenes, Summer, 1952, p. 11). One has in fact only to substitute Grendel, Hrothgar, and Heorot for the Hound, Sir Henry, and Baskerville Hall to see Holmes playing Beowulf's epic part. Naturally these heroes' methods are as vastly different as their personalities. Holmes, who concedes that "in a modest way I have combatted evil" (chap. iii), does so mainly by his powers of observation and reason rather than by the strength of his hand, and he overcomes his inhuman adversary by showing that what appears to be supernatural is but the agent of a human master whose designs can be discovered and foiled by scientific deductions. The scientific character of Holmes's famous method is perfectly evident in any of his numerous adventures, but what The Hound of the Baskervilles almost uniquely presents is the hero-detective acting specifically as the champion of empirical science, facing its crucial challenge, the challenge of the seemingly supernatural. Hence, in solving this case Holmes does more than expose crime and defeat a criminal, he expunges heroically a family curse and demonstrates reassuringly the sufficiency of reason.

Doyle takes pains to emphasize that the Baskerville crime is an especially severe test of Holmes's method. The detective himself repeatedly remarks upon the unmatched complexity of the case, but its formidableness is chiefly suggested through the agency of Dr. Mortimer, who brings the affair to Holmes's attention. Many times Holmes stresses the similarity between Mortimer and himself with respect to their devotion to science. "This is a colleague," he remarks to Watson, "after our own heart" (chap. iii), and he compares Mortimer's knowledge of human skulls to his own ability to identify newspaper type (chap. iv). Thus when Mortimer reflects that "There is a realm in which the most acute and most experienced of detectives is helpless" (meaning the supernatural), it carries considerable dramatic weight. Holmes's reaction adds to this effect. He is struck that "a trained man of science" should entertain a supernatural explanation of Sir Charles's death: "I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world … to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task" (chap. iii). Holmes is speaking facetiously of course, but the scene does place squarely before us the possibility that there may be limits to the ways of reason.

Dr. Mortimer puts Sherlock Holmes on trial in yet another way. At the outset Mortimer does not seem quite ready to grant Holmes's scientific pretensions. In the delightfully comic conclusion to the opening chapter he offends Holmes by referring to him as "the second highest expert in Europe."

"Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the

    honor to be the first?" …

"To the man of precisely scientific mind the

    work of Monsieur Bertillon must

    always appeal strongly."

"Then had you not better consult him?"

"I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But

    as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged

    that you stand alone. I trust, sir,

    that I have not inadvertently—"

"Just a little," said Holmes.

Throughout the novel Conan Doyle is careful to show that his detective is as "precisely scientific" as Dr. Mortimer and to free him from the stigma of being merely "a practical man of affairs." Watson's description of Holmes's procedure is unmistakably the traditional portrait of an experimental scientist in action:

… hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial (chap. iii).

Holmes himself defends one of his conclusions against Mortimer's charge of "guesswork" by labeling it "the scientific use of the imagination" (chap. iv). And when Inspector Lestrade arrives on the scene he is designated "the practical man" as contrasted to Sherlock Holmes, "the reasoner" (chap. xiii).

But if the case is a test of Holmes personally, it is even more a test of what his method ultimately represents: that is, the ability of reason to reduce even the most baffling mystery to a commonplace. This theme is presented in miniature in the very first page of the novel. Watson is scrutinizing Dr. Mortimer's stick. "Well, Watson," says Holmes, who has his back to him, "what do you make of it?" Watson is, of course, astonished and affirms that his companion must have eyes in the back of his head. But Holmes's explanation is, as usual, elementary: "I have, at least, a well polished silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me."

This little exchange may be seen as a kind of synecdoche for the Holmes-Watson relationship. The detective is perfectly in character here, but his friend is not less so. It is Watson's regular function to register bafflement in the face of mystery and to express wonder as Holmes solves it. Perhaps it should be emphasized, however, that though Watson is a foil he is not a burlesque character, as the radio and motion picture dramatizations have portrayed him. His bewilderment is intended not so much to reveal him as the butt as to add luster to Holmes and his deductions. If Watson does play Sancho to Holmes's Quixote, the joke, when there is one, is as likely to be directed toward the eccentric knight of nineteenth-century rationalism as made at the expense of his faithful squire. It is probably most accurate to regard Watson as a kind of chorus. We may patronize him somewhat, but we also take our cue from him on how to react.

But, as has been mentioned, Watson's role in The Hound of the Baskervilles demands special notice. Throughout the middle section of the novel it is he, not Holmes, whom we observe conducting the investigation. This is in one sense an entertaining turnabout, similar in effect to those two adventures in which Holmes, acting as narrator, becomes his own Watson. More important, however, Watson's activities as investigator neatly solve a major technical problem faced by all detective-story writers who depend upon hero-detectives. How is one to preserve mystery through the length of a novel without casting doubt upon the superior intelligence of the master sleuth? The detective must remain in the dark nearly as long as the reader, for to have him reach a solution early and not disclose it is both irritating and implausible. Yet to fill a book with clues which the detective fails to penetrate until near the end implies a certain amount of ineffectual groping in the part of the hero. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, however, Holmes yields the stage to Watson and withdraws behind the scenes. Thus when the reader must experience uncertainty he shares it with Watson as he follows his diligent but rather unenlightened maneuvers; when the time comes for an éclaircissement, Holmes, his supreme intellect uncompromised, reappears to provide it.

The suddenness of Holmes's return to the action is the dramatic anticipation of the decisiveness with which reason triumphs over mystery. His virtuosity in unraveling the web in which Watson has been toiling dazzles us as it does the good Doctor, but there is no mistaking the source of Holmes's power. "The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes," he remarks to Watson on one occasion (chap. iii). This, then, is the explanation of all mystery and wonder; and it is through his refusal to acknowledge any other and by a steadfast pursuit of his rigorous empiricism, as the "scientific expert," that Holmes's particular heroism is defined …

The figure of Selden, a Cain-like outcast from society, adds an important note to the novel. It is significant that he is a brother of the harmless domestic, Mrs. Barrymore, to whom "he was always the little curly-headed boy that I nursed and played with" (chap. ix), for we are thus shown the unexpected emergence of malignant and retrogressive tendencies in the very midst of an innocence that cannot even recognize them. Selden exemplifies this dark side of human nature in a way that the actual villain Stapleton, as long as he must remain unidentified with the crime, cannot. But Stapleton, at the proper point, completes the picture of a vaguely yet fundamentally imperiled civilization. After all, he is not less a descendant of the Baskerville line than is Sir Henry; and although the brutishness of Hugo Baskerville may be refined in him, the marks of violence upon Mrs. Stapleton show it is still present. The scene in which Stapleton's Baskerville blood is revealed makes this clear. The portrait of Hugo is discovered by Holmes to bear a resemblance to the naturalist Stapleton, and the detective's comment on the similarity places the whole matter in a specifically biological context. "It is," he says, "an interesting instance of a throw-back, which appears to be both physical and spiritual" (chap. xiii). Legend, as Doyle's contemporary Henrik Ibsen also knew, is not the true source of the ghosts that haunt humanity: man's natural inheritance furnishes its share …

Source: James Kissane and John M. Kissane, "Sherlock Holmes and the Ritual of Reason," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 4, March 1963, pp. 353-62.

SOURCES

Brody, Howard, "Location of Baskerville Hall," in Baker Street Journal Vol. 29, No. 4, December 1979, pp. 229-34, 247.

Cavendish, Richard, "Publication of The Hound of the Baskervilles: March 25th, 1902," in History Today, Vol. 52, No. 3, March 2002, p. 57.

Clausson, Nils, "Degeneration, Fin de Siècle Gothic and the Science of Detection: Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Emergence of the Modern Detective Story," in Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 35, No. 1, Winter 2005, pp. 60-87.

Conan Doyle, Arthur, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, W. W. Norton, 2006, pp. 383-627.

Favor, Lesli J., "The Foreign and the Female in Arthur Conan Doyle: Beneath the Candy Coating," in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, No. 4, April 2000, pp. 398-409.

Fisher, Benjamin F., "The Hound of the Baskervilles 100 Years after: A Review Essay," in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 47, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 181-91.

Frank, Lawrence, "The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 54, No. 3, December 1999, pp. 336-72.

———, "Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Conan Doyle," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 44, No. 3, December 1989, pp. 364-87.

Hall, Jasmine Yong, "Ordering the Sensational: Sherlock Holmes and the Female Gothic," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 3, Summer 1991, pp. 295-303.

Kendrick, Stephen, "No Ghosts Need Apply," in Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes, Pantheon Books, 1999, pp. 89-96.

Kissane, James, and John M. Kissane, "Sherlock Holmes and the Ritual of Reason," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 4, March 1963, pp. 353-62.

Klinger, Leslie S., ed., The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, W. W. Norton, 2006.

Knox, Ronald, "The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists," http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html (accessed June 20, 2007).

O'Gorman, Francis, "A Whole New World in the Story of Conan Doyle's Famous Hound," in the Yorkshire Post, February 27, 2006.

Taylor-Ide, Jesse Oak, "Ritual and the Liminality of Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles," in English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Vol. 48, No. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 55-71.

FURTHER READING

Baring-Gould, William S., ed., The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Crown, 1967.

This book is the definitive edition of Holmes stories and novels, annotated by a notable expert.

Harrison, Michael, "As Famous as Baker Street," in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, Drake Publishers, 1972, pp. 36-39.

This piece demonstrates the minutia with which Holmes fans are consumed. Building on the mention of the Northumberland Arms in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Harrison presents the factual information of the real Northumberland Hotel in London and how it meshes with the events of the story.

Moss, Robert A., "Old Frankland: A Case of Identity," in Baker Street Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 27-32.

This essay attempts to connect the character of Mr. Frankland with the British chemist Edward Frankland.

Schama, Simon, A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire 1776-2000, Hyperion, 2002.

The third volume of Schama's work focuses on the transition of Britain from an oligarchy to a more participatory government, especially during the Victorian era.

Weller, Philip, ed., The Hound of the Baskervilles: Hunting the Dartmoor Legend, Devon Books, 2001.

This book offers an exploration of the novel's setting, with details regarding real legends and locations that may have inspired Conan Doyle, along with other tidbits of interest to fans of the story.