The moor complements Baskerville Hall perfectly, the hall representing safety and warmth and the moor danger and cold, the two locations are very much interlinked and I could not imagine Baskerville Hall on any other place than the lonely, windswept moor. Speaking of a particular spot on the moor Seldon says, “even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place”. We then see a pony walk into the mire and drown, emphasizing how dangerous it is. To allude to the danger of Seldon’s company his house is far out on the dangerous, desolate moor at the end of a long dirt track in the middle of nowhere.
To a certain extent our views are coloured by a popular conception of Holmes’ apartments as the refuge of the notorious detective and it is hard to try and read the book without preconception, However the conventional view of Holmes’ flat is remarkably accurate to the little description provided in the book and so the feelings and language used to describe it is only heightened by this prior knowledge.
Baskerville Hall is a very feudal kind of name it conjures up an image of a giant rambling place in the middle of the country full of people in pink coats hunting foxes; this image is pretty similar to Sir Conan Doyle’s description of the place. A sense of foreboding is added to people’s feelings about the hall when the story of evil Lord Hugo is told “Hugo...was a most wild, profane and godless man“ this adds atmosphere to the description of the Hall every shadow in the corner and every flickering of a lamp begins to seem dark and meaningful.
The moor in The Hound of the Baskervilles is very much where we get our stereotypical image of country moors from, along with a whole raft of classic 18th and 19th century novels set on moors. It is the classic moor, windswept and desolate the moor appears dangerous even without the added terror of the Hound and its brutal killings. To help emphasize this danger the writer writes about the horrible howling of the hound almost every time one of the characters is on the moor, because of this image of the moor the writer creates you expect bad things to happen when people go out on the moor and this helps to add tension to those scenes.
Holmes himself seems at ease anywhere and this is played off against other characters’ feelings to make him seem even more the cool, calm detective. Watson on the other hand, though by no means a coward, is often disconcerted by the harsh realities of the moor,
“It turned me cold with horror”, says Watson on seeing a pony drown in the mire. While Watson is terrified Stapleton seems almost happy to see the poor animal die, calling it a “blasted creature”, this gives us something of a clue to his dark nature, but at the time it can be dismissed as no more than a foible since apart from that he seems quite normal, he talks enthusiastically about his hobbies and seems to love his wife, it is only towards the end of the book that he is revealed as the murderer and all his actions can be pieced together to reveal his true personality.
The landscape and buildings of the moor negatively affect Sir Henry and he says about Baskerville Hall, “it’s no wonder my uncle felt as if trouble were coming on him in such a place as this”. The terror the moor holds for our two of the main characters, Watson and Sir Henry, shapes the plot in a few ways, for example if Sir Henry had not been as apprehensive of the moor as he was then he may have visited Stapleton when invited nearer the end of the novel and would almost certainly have been killed by the Hound just as the unfortunate man wearing his clothes was.
Merripit House as the setting for the final scene of the mystery and a lot of the meetings with Stapleton plays a crucial role as the clichéd evildoer’s lair. It is especially crucial to the plot as the place where Holmes, Watson and Sir Henry ambush Stapleton to finally capture him and with the fog swirling around it in the night it perfects a very dramatic ending to a suspense-filled novel. Stereotypical
The places this novel is set in complement and complete the writing and I think that, in a different setting, not only would it be a completely different novel but it would also be a worse one because the setting adds crucial background to the story and without a setting of such depth of character the story would certainly be altered to its detriment. The moor especially is crucial to the mix of mystery and terror the writer has created. The settings contribute greatly in terms of language, mystery and atmospheric details to the novel and without them this book would not be the great literary classic it is.
