![]() Sherlock always seems more imagined than flesh and blood to me, but I still loved the character. What Doyle did was take it a step beyond ‘real’ I think, while still grounding it in a time and place. Your quote from Elliot hints at the issue and it plays out weekly in Hollywood, in TV and films. I think the issue of Doyle’s use of Poe’s plot is very intriguing – in A Sherlock Holmes way! It turned out to be one of the most serendipitous mistakes in the world of literary illustration.Ĭontinue to explore the world of Sherlock Holmes with our analysis of the classic Holmes story, ‘The Speckled Band’. The publishers had meant to hire his younger brother, Walter, but they inadvertently addressed the letter to the wrong brother. Curiously, he only got the job because of a clerical error. The Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand would be illustrated by Sidney Paget, the man who, after Conan Doyle, probably did more than anyone else to create our idea of the great detective. The plot of ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ may be heavily indebted to Poe, but what makes it a fine story in its own right is that key ingredient which would make Doyle’s stories so popular: Sherlock Holmes himself. Like Poe’s Dupin, he is a master of rational analysis and somebody who can solve cases that leave everyone else scratching their heads.īut Doyle’s breakthrough was to take inspiration from his real-life university lecturer, Dr Joseph Bell (who could diagnose patients as soon as they walked into his surgery, merely by observing them), and make Holmes an analytical ‘machine’, who can make ‘deductions’ about people, and discover their inner secrets, from merely glancing at them. The key catalyst in the transformation is the central character, Sherlock Holmes. Eliot observed, sometimes genius is a matter of being ‘original with the minimum of alteration’, and what makes ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ more than just a pastiche of Poe is the way in which Doyle transforms these plot features and makes them his own. In both cases, the personage whose reputation is threatened by the incriminating item is noble or royal (though in Poe’s story the precise status or identity of the personage is unstated).īut as T. In particular, several plot features of ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ bear a close resemblance to Poe’s story ‘The Purloined Letter’: in particular, the incriminating item (a letter in Poe’s story, a photograph in Doyle’s), the previous unsuccessful attempts by other parties to recover the item (the police in Poe, the King and his hired burglars in Doyle), and the use of a diversion to allow for the recovery of the item (Dupin’s hired accomplice in Poe, and Holmes’s faithful Watson in Doyle). ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, like many of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, carries the strong influence of Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering detective stories featuring C.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |