CHAPTER 7
Arthur Canon Doyle, The sign of Four
At home with the
Victorians: London life
·
Creating a
safe and morally righteous home was the most important expression of Victorian
social values.
·
The Sign of Four is a
detective novel, and also a domestic novel: Thaddeus Sholto's house in Brixton; Mrs
Forrester's in Camberwell; Bartholomew Sholto's 'Pondicherry Lodge' in Upper
Norwood; and, most prominentiy of all, Sherlock Holmes's and Dr Watson's
bachelor home at 221B Baker Street, which is where the story starts and
finishes.
·
Domesticity
of 221B Baker Street: The episodic structure of the novel keeps bringing us
back to this address, and the narrative repeatedly introduces us to the rituals
associated with comfortable bourgeois life: a convivial dinner with fine wines,
reading; the newspaper over breakfast, practising the violin, taking afternoon tea. Holmes's padded, book-lined and cluttered drawing
room, filled with the material objects of an increasingly prosperous society,
would have been instantly familiar to many readers in late Victorian Britain.
Activity 1
read in the book
The first time Holmes
speaks in the novel, he looks up from an 'old black-letter volume'
(p. 49) that he has been reading.
As well as describing a
domestic interior familiar to many of
its readers, the level of domestic detail in The Sign of Four is designed to
'flesh out' the character of Holmes, and make him a realistic and believable
personality.
Holmes undertakes
a similar chemistry experiment in The Sign of Four (p. 113), designed to
keep his mind occupied during a hiatus in his detective work.
The descriptions of 221B Baker Street are cluttered with
details of a domestic interior that readers grew to think of as real, rather
than imaginary.
***221B Baker Street
embodies much of the cosiness that Victorian readers would have known from
their own homes.
-
22IB
Baker Street serves as a marker of domestic security in an unpredictable and
sometimes frightening world.
-
The
threat that the outside world presented to the home is an ever-present theme in
The Sign of Four, in which domestic space repeatedly doubles as a crime
scene.
-
Even
the comforting, cluttered world of 22IB Baker Street is not all that it seems.
We are told at the very beginning of the novel that Holmes is a drug addict,
and injects himself three times a day with a 'seven-per-cent solution' (p. 50)
of cocaine in the drawing room that, for millions of readers, has become the
familiar home of the most famous consulting detective in the world.
COMPLETE IN THE FILE
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ما من عبد مسلم يدعو لأخيه بظهر الغيب إلا قال الملك ولك بمثل.
لم أسجل المادة. ووفر المادة العلمية لي الاخ برنارد شو فلا تنسوه من الدعاء
لم أسجل المادة. ووفر المادة العلمية لي الاخ برنارد شو فلا تنسوه من الدعاء
