Dr Grimsby Roylott seems to be the all time villain for Holmes, he is said to be of an abnormal mixture of the qualified and the rural. Wearing a black top hat, a long frockcoat why he was swinging a hunting crop at Holmes and Watson. Holmes says when the intruder had left that he is not as strong as he seems. I think the readers will think that Dr Grimesby Roylott is irrational.
Sherlock Holmes is a sharp man with the cunning of a fox. He behaves like he is showing of in front of Miss Stoner to make her think that she had mad the right decision by coming to him. The Victorian public loved the ‘gentleman’ and when Sherlock Holmes came out with good manner. How Holmes goes to solve the mysteries is by looking at the smallest clue and working on that like in ‘The Red Headed League’ he works upon the young servant Vincent Spaulding, and his photography hobby in the cellar. Holmes always is one step ahead of his ‘Dear Watson’.
The setting in ‘The Speckled Band’ is the most important part in the plot because of the way it is described, “Gathering darkness” and lonesome, half damaged, half kept as it should, and the wild animals that roam free around the palace of wilderness. The reader visualises the house, Stoke Moran, as a forbidden, dangerous place to be” The building was grey…stone..with..two curving wings, like the claws of a crab..the windows were broken.”.
‘The Red Headed League’ on the other hand is more mysterious but not in the same way as ‘The Speckled Band’. This is where a pawnbroker is drawn away form his shop, why his assistant was secretly digging a tunnel from the cellar of the pawnshop to rob the bank directly behind the shop. Mr Jabez Wilson comes for Sherlock Holmes’ reflection to the problem of what Mr Wilson says a ‘prank’ of making him copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Holmes looks the young servant Vincent Spaulding, and his photography hobby in the cellar to work out he is trying to steal French bullion from the bank next door. Holmes joins up with the police force, who at the time were unfaithful, and the banks manager, Mr Merryweather, to try and stop this crime before it is committed.
The character Jabez Wilson is quite strange he seems to be the smart Victorian but he is easy manipulated by others such as Sherlock Holmes and Vincent Spalding. Duncan Ross is the backbone of ‘The Red Headed League’ and always is never around while Mr Jabez Wilson is copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica. John Clay is the master criminal behind ‘The Red Headed League’ he is said to be baby faced and clean-shaven.
In ‘The Six Napoleons’ a man is going around smashing statues of Napoleon. But Holmes does not know why this is happening yet. He finds out the statues are only smashed were no one would find him and he always did it in the light. Inside one of the statues is the pearl of Borias. Holmes knows the breaker to hit at the closer of the two left over statues.
Inspector Lestrade is the comic policeman that never gets it right. He takes the opposite way of doing things than Holmes. But he works out the dead man, but not the breaker. In this time the police were not very helpful.
In ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shows how the Victorians lived in the last decade of Queen Victoria’s reign. He describes exactly the dense network of East London streets frequently used by ‘Jack the Ripper’. “Dark and dim. It is unnerving and scary and disorientating, like being enveloped in fog” and “Holmes’s shrill whittle, the clink of the horses hoofs, silence broken by occasional policeman’s footfall or songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers
In 1893 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle grew bored to death with his alter ego Sherlock Holmes, and in ‘The Final Problem’ killed him off. He was last seen fighting his archenemy Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. But with the outcry for Holmes he devised a method for him to have survived and in ‘The Empty House’
I think that Sherlock Holmes is still well liked by the British public because he gives a way of life to the old Victorian era. I liked all the stories I had read because I like a problem with as little clues at all so I can work it out myself. Arthur Conan Doyle must have been over skilled in English to write such complex stories with such calibre.
Mike Baines 10H Sherlock Holmes essay page
