A230BThe Sign of Four

•Throughout the chapter the writer will consider the relationship between ideas about home and abroad in the novel and the importance of reading for Victorians.

•Creating a safe and morally righteous home was the most important expression of Victorian social values.

• The family home was idealized , from Queen Victoria’s own household at Osborne House, to the millions of newly built town houses in London.

•The Sign of Four is a domestic and a detective novel. We are taken on a tour of a number of London interiors as part of the story.

•The episodic structure of the novel keeps bringing us to 221B Baker Street which is where the story starts and finishes. The narrative repeatedly introduces us to the rituals associated with comfortable bourgeois life: a convivial dinner with fine drinks, reading the newspaper over breakfast, practicing the violin, taking afternoon tea would have been familiar to many readers in late Victorian Britain.

•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. One of the reasons for the great success of the novel has been the visual appeal of the illustrations that accompanied the events.

•The description of 221B Baker Street is cluttered with details of a domestic interior that readers grew to think of as real, rather than imaginary. The address embodies much of the cosines that Victorian readers would have known from their own homes.

•As the story unfolds,221B 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-lasting theme in the novel, in which domestic space repeatedly doubles as a crime scene.

• Baker Street is not at all what it seems. We are told that that Holmes is a drug addict, and injects himself three times a day with a seven percent solution.(p.50)..of cocaine in the drawing room that has become the familiar home of the most famous consulting detective in the world.

•Detective novels•Detective novel is a modern genre. In the form

,of both the novel and the short story, it is very much a development of the Victorian age. It depends from its beginning on a single criminal case almost always a murder or a theft or both and the effort to solve it through the whole work.

•The earliest detective fiction in the English-speaking world was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841)written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was in France and in the hands of Emile Gaboriau(1832-1873) that detective fiction began to assume something more like its modern form. Detective fiction was becoming very popular with magazines and newspapers readers by the end of the 19th century.

•The form of the detective story and the central personality of the private consulting detective did not fully mesh together until the appearance of the first of the Holmes and Watson stories, the short novel

•(A study in Scarlet( 1887.•Central to the plot development of the detective fiction

is the ability of the detective to amass data from the case, distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, eliminate scenarios that are illogical or implausible, and draw the correct conclusion: THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE CONCLUSION.

•When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth p.84.

•Deduction for Holmes is an infallible methodology , and as readers we are encouraged to adopt it ourselves as we work our way through the story. Detective fiction is evidence –based, empirical and factual. Detective fiction abounds in significant and insignificant detail.

•The reader of detective fiction is forced to pay attention to small details in the text. The readers must be careful not to let anything slip by their attention.

•The first Holmes and Watson narrative, the short novel A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887.The first publication of The Sign of Four was in Feb.1890.The turning point in Doyle’s literary career was a novel that appeared in 1891..Known as A Scandal in Bohemia.

•The detective fiction genre, together with the short story form, the illustrations and the personality of Holmes proved to bear irresistible combination for readers offering a thrilling outcome each month. Unlike the realist novel, detective fiction is driven by the resolution of the plot, rather than the gradual development of character. The structure is repetitive and predictable with the narrative offering a resolution in the end.

•Most of the stories open with Holmes and Dr.Watson in their cozy rooms in Baker Street and most end with them back there again, with the mystery solved and the status quo

restored .•The genre was inseparable from the popular magazines and

newspapers phenomenon. Detective fiction was written for urban world inhabitants who were filled with anxiety about crime.

• Consuming detective fiction like Holmes stories in bite-sized, small and regular chunks provided readers with a sense of engagement with the threat of crime while offering them a comforting reassurance that all was indeed well.

•How the novel is structured?•It is divided into twelve parts and each part is given a summary

title. Each is roughly 3000 words in length except for the last chapter.

•Why is the text organized in this way? What does this indicate about the way Victorian read detective fiction?

•The short chapter structure is designed to facilitate easy serialization in the pages of a newspaper or magazine .

•The episodic character of the narrative indicate the type of readership and reading experience: mass market, readers who read small chunks of fiction(detective fiction) for thirty minutes or so at a time..Check the second paragraph on page 424.

•England in the Victorian age was entering what is known today as an information economy. An increasing number of people were literate and had access to information. Information of all kinds, educational, vocational and entertainment-related was available through cheap fiction, magazines, and newspapers, as well as through membership of public and lending libraries and other institutions such as working men’s clubs and guilds.

•This is a very different world from that presented a generation earlier in the novels of Charles Dickens in which illiterate and semi literate characters exist in larger numbers.

•The Victorian information economy was not simply restricted to Britain.

•References to Indian place names, events, objects and people abound throughout the text and suggest that many of the book’s intended readers would have been familiar with these terms.

•Mrs. Watson was born in India before being sent home to start schooling in Edinburgh. Captain Mors tan spends many years serving as an officer in the British army in India in Agra and in another place.

•Although he is not an ex-colonial, Holmes is well aware of the importance of India in the British imagination and its relationship to crimes committed in London. In the novel, readers can come across a number of Indian servants and characters. Major Sholto brought three Indian servants with him to England upon his retirement and after the disappearance of the Agra treasure.

•Holmes reminds us early in the novel that Watson is an ex-colonial .He is a veteran of a war on British Indian’s borders. If London represents on the surface the comfortable world of domestic interiors, India is depicted as its polar opposite: a land of extremes of wealth and poverty, danger,lawlessness and above all financial opportunity. Both the wealth and the danger of India constantly threaten to destabilize London life.

•The Mutiny..•One historical event that shapes the narrative

of the novel is the outbreak on 10 May 1857 of the violent rebellion of Indian soldiers and civilians against British East India COMPANY RULE. Usually referred to as the Indian Mutiny and it lasted until 8 July 1858 and was the first serious challenge to British control in India.

•Literary responses to the Mutiny..•The cultural impact of the events of 1857-8 on the

British public was wide and long standing. In the following decades, dozens of novels were written and published on this theme, as well as scores of histories, memoires, paintings ,poetry, and volumes of correspondence. More than any other event of the British presence in India, the rebellion was the single favorite subject for metropolitan and Anglo-Indian novelists.

•Even writers without family connections to India responded to these events .The poem 'In the Round Tower at Jhansi,8 June 1857 by Christina Rossetti(1830-1894), is one of the most vivid literary responses to the newspaper reports of atrocities committed by mutinous Indians. Check pp.431-435.

•Conclusion

•The Victorian age was Britain’s greatest period of imperial expansion abroad and economic and social development at home. The two processes were mutually interdependent, although not always acknowledged as such. Doyle's novel provides us with a perfect snapshot of this uneven influence of the empire on the metropolis. The novel assumes an unproblematic relationship between Britain and India, never questioning the legitimacy of British rule.

•The entire narrative plot depends upon the chaos brought about by the Indian mutiny of 1857 as well as individual greed, treachery and criminality of a range of British colonialists..Jonathan Small, captain morstan,major Sholto, the prison guards on the Andaman Islands and Bartholomew Sholto.

•The novel is driven by the plot and not by the development of characters.

•The texture of reality is provided by the writer’s careful attention for significant and insignificant details..real places, objects, times, and the geography of London that are plausibly referenced.

•Though it was written about home, it shows an interest in the Victorian abroad by showing the anxiety about the empire felt at home.

•Doyle’s politics were uncomplicated; he was a supporter of the empire. Many Victorians were uncomfortable with the complicated relationship with India and its negative impact on their home.

•Detective Fiction