BA English 4th Semester

Popular Literature (BELS403)

2023-24

Study Material
(Popular Literature – BELS403)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), perhaps the greatest of the Holmes tales, illustrates Doyle’s deployment
of these plot elements as well as the highest level of his artistic achievement in this series. Watson introduces
Holmes’s powers by means of a friendly competition that becomes an important structural and thematic element.
Watson examines a walking stick left by a client and makes inferences about the client’s identity, concluding that Dr.
James Mortimer is a successful elderly country practitioner. Holmes notes that while Watson is partly correct, he is
mostly wrong. Mortimer is a country doctor, but he is city-trained, young, active, and unambitious, and he owns a
dog. Holmes is careful to point out that Watson’s errors helped him to find the truth. This pattern is repeated in the
central portion of the novella, the investigation. This introduction of Holmes, Watson, and their relationship
emphasizes the relative power of Holmes to get at the truth in tangled and fragmentary evidence. Watson’s attempt
is well done and intelligent, but it cannot match Holmes’s observation and reasoning. This difference becomes much
more important thematically when the duo is trying to prevent a murder.

Doyle artfully handles the description of the crime. Mortimer presents three accounts of events that set up an
opposition between supernatural and natural explanations of the recent death of Sir Charles Baskerville at
Dartmoor, his Devon estate. The first is a document telling how a remorseless ancestor brought a curse on the
Baskervilles in the shape of a hound from Hell that kills those who venture on Dartmoor with evil in their hearts.
The second is a newspaper account of the inquest into Sir Charles’s death. The coroner concluded that he died of
his weak heart while on an evening stroll, but Mortimer has noted details of the scene he investigated that suggest
foul play. Sir Charles’s behavior was un- usual, and there was at least one footprint of a gigantic dog at the scene.
Mortimer has come to Holmes to ask what should be done to protect the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, soon to
arrive from Canada. After illustrating Holmes’s incredible powers, Doyle presents him with a problem that may be
beyond those powers: dealing with a supernatural agent.

One consequence of Doyle’s development of the potential of Watson as a character narrator is the ex- tension of
the investigation section of the story. As it becomes possible to extend this section in an interesting manner, the
story can become longer. In A Study in Scarlet and in his later novella, The Valley of Fear (1914), as well as in several
stories, Doyle stretches the narrative by interpolating long adventures from the past that explain the more recent
crime. Though such attempts seem clumsy, they point toward the more sophisticated handling of similar materials
by writers such as Ross Macdonald and P. D. James. In The Hound of the Baskervilles Doyle prolongs the story while
exploiting the gothic aspect of his theme by making Watson the investigator.

After several clues and mysteries develop in Lon- don, Holmes sends Watson with Mortimer and Sir Henry to
Dartmoor. The brief London investigation sets up another theme indicative of Doyle’s art. The man who shadows
Sir Henry proves to be a worthy adversary of Holmes, using an effective disguise and successfully evading Holmes’s
attempts to trace him. On his departure, this suspect name himself Sherlock Holmes. This doubling of Holmes and
his adversary continues throughout the tale.

At Dartmoor, Watson studies the few local residents and encounters a number of mysteries. His investigation
successfully eliminates the servants as suspects and discovers the secret relationship between them and Selden, an
escaped convict in hiding on the moor. On the whole, however, Watson is bewildered by the mysteries. The moor
Kunal Barman
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Literary Studies
Brainware University, Kolkata 1
BA English 4th Semester
Popular Literature (BELS403)
2023-24

becomes a symbolic setting; Watson often reflects that the landscape of the moor, with its person-swallowing muck,
mirrors the danger and impenetrability of the mystery. Though he can see and understand much of what happens,
he cannot fit together all the pieces. The only master of the landscape appears to be Mr. Stapleton, a naturalist who
has come to know the area in his pursuit of butterflies.

Holmes, however, has also mastered the moor by studying maps and, without Watson’s knowledge, hiding on the
moor to investigate the situation secretly. Almost as soon as Watson learns of Holmes’s presence, the rival masters
of the landscape prove to be rivals in crime as well, for Holmes has concluded that Stapleton is the man responsible
for Sir Charles’s death and for the attempt on Sir Henry that the two sleuths witness that evening. Within a day of
Holmes’s arrival, the whole crime has been solved. Holmes learns that Stapleton is really a lost Baskerville relative
who can claim the inheritance when Sir Henry dies, and he learns how Stapleton tricked a woman into luring Sir
Charles outside at night, where he could be frightened to death.

Doyle creates a characteristic sensation by having Holmes suddenly appear on the scene and show that he has
effectively mastered the situation. The gothic mystery and ambiguity of the moor pushes men of common sense
such as Sir Henry and Watson toward half belief in the supernatural, toward confusion and irrational fear. Like a
gothic villain, Stapleton feeds these weaknesses, using his superior intelligence and the power of his knowledge of
the landscape. Only Stapleton’s good double, Holmes, can understand and thus resist this power. Even Holmes has
difficulty, though, when the moor seems to help Stapleton (a dense fog develops on the night of the capture), and
Stapleton succeeds in surprising the generally unflappable Holmes. Stapleton does this by smearing glowing
phosphorus on his killer hound’s muzzle to give it the supernatural appearance of a hound from Hell. The sleuths
are surprised that the dog is able to attack Sir Henry before they can shoot it.

Both the fog and the dog work against Stapleton finally, showing that nature is, in reality, a neutral force in human
affairs, as it must be if Holmes’s scientific art is to triumph in finding the truth and bringing justice. Stapleton’s wife,
an unwilling accomplice, finally rebels against using the hound to kill and reveals Stapleton’s hiding place. Stapleton
apparently loses his way in the fog and sinks into the mire.

In this novel, the explanation of the crime coincides on the whole with its solution. These are the most important
and dramatic parts of a classical detective story because they satisfy both the reader’s anxiety for the fates of the
possible victims and the reader’s desire to understand the mystery. Bringing them together as Doyle does produces
a sensational and dramatic effect appropriate to a detective story with a gothic setting and gothic themes.

The denouement belongs partly to Holmes and partly to Watson. Watson deals with the human interest, explaining
something of the fates of the important characters. Holmes clears up a few remaining mysterious details, including
the one clue that led him from the first to suspect the Stapletons, the brand of perfume that so slightly emanated
from the anonymous warning note they received in London at the beginning of the case.

The Hound of the Baskervilles illustrates Doyle’s more important contributions to the familiar conventions of the
classic detective story. His invention and exploitation of the relationship between Holmes and Watson enable him
to engage the reader more deeply in the human interest as well as in the intellectual problem of the tale.
Furthermore, the relationship enables Doyle to extend the investigation portion of the plot, forging an effective
structure for longer tales.

One element of Doyle’s art in these tales that ought not to go unmentioned is his wit and humor, of which this novel
offers many examples, not the least of which is Holmes’s successful deducing of the breed of Mortimer’s dog by
observing it from his Baker Street window. The thematic oppositions Doyle establishes between Watson and
Holmes, the natural and the supernatural, and Holmes and Stapleton are evidence of Doyle’s art as well. Doyle
knowingly develops these oppositions within his gothic setting, making a symbolic landscape of the moor and
Kunal Barman
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Literary Studies
Brainware University, Kolkata 2
BA English 4th Semester
Popular Literature (BELS403)
2023-24

creating ambiguous images of nets, tangles, and the detective himself to underscore what Cawelti has identified as
the central thematic content of the classical detective genre.

According to Cawelti, one characteristic of the classic formula is that the frightening power of the gothic villain is
brought under control and used for the benefit of society. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, that struggle for control
is directly reflected in the doubling of Stapleton and Holmes, as it was in the earlier Holmes works through the
doubling of Moriarty and Holmes. Furthermore, Cawelti observes that classic detective fiction addresses the issue
of middle-class guilt over repressed sexuality and aggression and over exploitation of the lower classes. The
detective rescues ordinary characters from irrational fear and superstition and discovers that one person, a criminal
or out- sider, is the real enemy. This pattern of removing generalized guilt and pinning it onto an outsider is clear in
The Hound of the Baskervilles—even though the victim has a title. Sir Henry, a modest Canadian farmer suddenly
elevated in status by his uncle’s death, in- tends to benefit his community with his new fortune. Stapleton’s
opposition threatens to frustrate this noble purpose and to turn the power of the estate toward the pure selfishness
of the originally cursed ancestor; he would reinstate the old, evil aristocracy at the expense of the new, socially
responsible aristocracy toward which the middle class aspires.

Doyle’s achievements in the Sherlock Holmes series include creating memorable characters and stories that have
remained popular throughout the twentieth century, expanding the classic detective formula invented by Poe into
an effective popular genre, and bringing considerable literary art to a form he himself thought subliterary.

Kunal Barman
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Literary Studies
Brainware University, Kolkata 3