Sherlock Holmes stories

That seems very plausible speculation, Extollager.

I've often wondered why freshmen literature classes I was aware of seldom used the Holmes stories or something similar as a way to introduce the concepts you list. There's a comfort level in reading about a character you may be familiar with -- and this is still true, in spite of the changes rung on the Holmes stories, through through two TV variations and the Robert Downey Jr. movies, cringe-worthy as they are -- which could help ease a student unfamiliar with literature into works they might not have been so willing to try. I'm a bit surprised Kipling became difficult, but less so about Hawthorne.


Randy M.
 
The Kipling stories I might assign included "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes," "Without Benefit of Clergy," "Wee Willie Winkie," and "The Phantom 'Rickshaw." I think the Imperial India setting was unrecognizable to students, although the notes I supplied should've helped. Also, Kipling sometimes used unfamiliar slang -- and that may have put people off even with notes. Anyway, I gave up on Kipling for freshman comp...but what a great writer.

The Hawthornes I might assign included "Roger Malvin's Burial," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Young Goodman Brown," & "The Birthmark." Again, with notes to help with vocabulary, references, etc.

Great stories!
 
Just reread "The Five Orange Pips" from The Adventures. I'd forgotten that this one, too, is something less than a victory for Sherlock Holmes. So that's at least three stories out of The Adventures in which Holmes fails to a considerable degree (along with "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Engineer's Thumb").
 
Still reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes if anyone's still interested. Up to The Five Orange Pips, I think it's called. Really good so far. As well it should with five pips. Dickens only managed one.
 
Yes, let's get back to The Adventures. I'll figure on posting something soon about "The Man with the Twsited Lip."

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How many times have I read "The Man with the Twisted Lip"? One of the great stories for evoking that sense of late-Victorian London as a vast metropolis in which any kind of strange caper might occur. The actual details of the story may be improbable, but I think most readers will feel that the notion of a man becoming psychologically trapped in his departure from conventional life is believable. Doyle could have built up a sense that the disguised "beggar" derived great gratification from fooling the charitable. I wondered how much the opium den setting was all too believable as something that would have operated with police knowledge -- I suppose "recreational" opium was available then -- ? It, like begging, not respectable, but not illegal?
 
One could take "The Man with the Twisted Lip" as a satire about the condition of what Orwell might have called the lower middle class -- the guy can make more money begging than by his respectable work. There's also play with the idea of the public world of work as mostly male, with the married woman not knowing much about its realities -- in this case, not knowing where their money really comes from. I suppose if the story were adapted for TV today there would have to be an added-on scene in which the wife tears into her husband for his secret-keeping and the phoniness of their facade of respectability or something like that. And certainly his deception of his wife is deplorable, the more as you think about it more.
 
Extollager, I'm going to hold off reading the above two posts all the way through since "The Man With The Twisted Lip" is the next story I'll be starting tonight and I'm afraid too much information might be revealed. I'll see what you have to say after I finish it.
 
A desire to reread The Hound of the Baskervilles took me by the throat this morning. Anyone else feel similarly beset?
 
I’ve been listening to the complete Holmes on Audible, read by Stephen Fry. Just finished The Speckled Band.
 
Doyle sets up a science-vs.-superstition motif at the story's beginning, but he subtly compromises the prestige of science by making James Mortimer, a physician, unsure about whether or not the supernatural is, after all, involved, and by making him an eager practitioner of skull measurement for racial typing, etc., who expatiates about the great detective's dolichocephalic skull, supra-orbital development, and parietal fissure, and admits he covets Holmes's skull for a museum piece.
 
From Chapter 6 of The Hound of the Baskervilles:

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood

there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a

strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some

fantastic landscape in a dream. ...
in a

few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road.

Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old

gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but

behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark

against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor,

broken by the jagged and sinister hills.



The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward

through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on

either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue

ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light

of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a

narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed

swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both

road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak

and fir. ...

I believe that this novel was one of the first things I read that stirred my imagination with an attraction for scenes of ferns, brambles, moor, bare hills, etc. Perhaps before then had come the passage in The Fellowship of the Ring about the Barrow-Downs. After both Tolkien and Doyle came passages in some of Arthur Machen's writing. Indeed, the quoted passages might almost have been written by Machen.

I think of this kind of writing as something given to us by some late Victorian and Edwardian authors, and authors in their tradition (such as John Buchan, to name someone I haven't mentioned in this posting). I wouldn't be surprised if back of them all is Robert Louis Stevenson. Lovecraft picked up something of this style for a few paragraphs here and there, probably derived especially from Machen.

I don't know if we will get this kind of writing any more, since so many of us grow up indoors and in cities, and if we visit such locales we do so with other trippers around us, etc. There is a lot of new nature writing out there, but I wonder if a lot of it doesn't aspire, rather, more to a kind of chiseled poetic style, rather more self-conscious than the Doyle passage.
 
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Then in Chapter 8 you have Watson musing on the ancient stone dwellings of the prehistoric dwellers on the moors, which suggests Machen's "Black Seal" and Tolkien's Barrow-Downs folk of long ago. So Doyle is writing an antiquarian ghost story -- compare M. R. James -- except, of course, there's a naturalistic explanation after all.

But I took to that sort of thing as soon as I encountered it, as a youngster.
 
Such reading interacted in my imagination with scenes in Oregon when I was growing up. This picture of one of the Table Rocks in southern Oregon is from an Internet source. Shadows on the slopes... not the same as what Doyle & Co described, of course, but I think their writing enhanced my ability to enjoy my short hikes.

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Extollager said:
From Chapter 6 of The Hound of the Baskervilles:

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood

there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a

strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some

fantastic landscape in a dream. ...
in a

few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road.

Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old

gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but

behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark

against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor,

broken by the jagged and sinister hills.



The wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward

through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on

either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue

ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light

of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a

narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed

swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the grey boulders. Both

road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak

and fir. ...

I believe that this novel was one of the first things I read that stirred my imagination with an attraction for scenes of ferns, brambles, moor, bare hills, etc. Perhaps before then had come the passage in The Fellowship of the Ring about the Barrow-Downs. After both Tolkien and Doyle came passages in some of Arthur Machen's writing. Indeed, the quoted passages might almost have been written by Machen.

I think of this kind of writing as something given to us by some late Victorian and Edwardian authors, and authors in their tradition (such as John Buchan, to name someone I haven't mentioned in this posting). I wouldn't be surprised if back of them all is Robert Louis Stevenson. Lovecraft picked up something of this style for a few paragraphs here and there, probably derived especially from Machen.

I don't know if we will get this kind of writing any more, since so many of us grow up indoors and in cities, and if we visit such locales we do so with other trippers around us, etc. There is a lot of new nature writing out there, but I wonder if a lot of it doesn't aspire, rather, more to a kind of chiseled poetic style, rather more self-conscious than the Doyle passage.
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When I was young I always found this description, and that of the Grimpen Mire to be very effective and eerie, no doubt reinforced by the atmospheric Basil Rathbone movie. I think that you are correct: this is a slightly archaic way of describing the country. Likewise the period descriptions of the grandeur of the Scottish highlands in John Buchan type thrillers seem to use words like “bosky” to describe the light.
Personally I love walking country fields and lanes in the misty twighlight or moonlight, but that is very much a minority experience nowadays. When Conan Doyle was writing most people were using candles and oil lamps, so darkness was much more part of life.
 
And another element of the Sherlock Holmes stories' appeal to me as a kid was that you knew the solution would always make sense in naturalistic terms. I was then and am now a religious believer, but I was aware, I think, from early years, though I would not have been able to put it into words, that the Bible -- both Testaments -- is not a book of wonder-tales; its accounts of miracles are not promiscuous; people didn't ride flying carpets, put on rings of invisibility, wield enchanted swords, turn into trees, and so on. So, though I loved good fairy tales, for reasons even including religious ones I appreciated the Holmes stories in which the detective uses his knowledge and cleverness to dispel the seemingly insoluble, and, of course, bring villains to justice most of the time. The stories were atmospheric and suspenseful, but they related to the way I knew I would find the world to be, that is, a place in which, as a rule, things just had to be figured out using observation, induction, etc.; you needed data, painstakingly gathered, rationally arranged, carefully interpreted. Of course, I didn't foresee the way, when I was middle-aged, much of society would reject reason and promote preposterous notions enabled by postmodernism, etc. How very old-fashioned Sherlock Holmes is! But then that is a reason why the stories are refreshing now.
 
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