The Victorian readers thought that Holmes was a real person in those days. This realism is created because Holmes lived at a real address in the stories, at Baker St. 221B and the stories are written as real cases. Holmes is a very charismatic and mysterious. In one of the stories he is called “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine” in ‘A scandal in Bohemia.’ He is shown as the Victorian ‘new man’, who uses his brains and scientific deductions to solve things.
We are told how he makes “deductions as swift as intuitions.”
He is also chivalrous and often helps women in distress, and he never accepts payment for his heroics, whilst he helps people within the Victorian community. He seems to be a loner and is seen as an individual and he doesn’t seem to like other people.
Helen Stoner is the daughter of a tyrant of a stepfather where she is woman in anguish and agony. She is worried about becoming a victim as her sister was before her. Being a woman in distress is a key element in Victorian stories as well as the Holmes stories. She is seen as vulnerable and scared like a ‘hunted animal.’ Helen appears to be melodramatic, for example she wears a “black veil” when she visits Holmes, years after her sister’s death, and shows the audience that she is deeply distressed. She tells Holmes that he can see “deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.” This also shows her speech is hyperbole as well as her appearance.
Dr. Roylott is the main villain in the story who is presented as a very melodramatic villain. The thing that makes him melodramatic is when Conan Watson Doyle describes his appearance of him being ‘so tall was he that his hat actually brushed the cross-bar of the doorway’ Watson also describes him of being rough and very violent and his facial aspects as being hard.
We are told he has “large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles burned yellow with the sun…and the high thin fleshless nose, gave him some what the resemblance to a herce old bird of prey”
He has also beaten his nature butler to death and this shows he is easily capable of great anger.
Dr. Watson is a key element in the Holmes stories, he also narrates stories as real cases. Dr. Watson is so honest and dependable which makes Holmes even more eccentric, with his moodiness, violin playing and drug addiction. Watson is quite normal and down to earth, where we the audience can relate and empathise with him and where Holmes is perfect and really gifted. Holmes usually only comes to life when he is solving cases.
Realism plays a very important part in this story. To create this realism Conan Doyle uses real locations such as ‘waterloo’, ‘leatherhead’-in surrey. He has written this story in first person that creates realism too. There is also a part in the story about the family history of the Roylott. The family goes way back to the ‘Angelo Saxons.’ Holmes himself actually lives in a real place, 221B.