The Savage Subtext of The Hound

of the Baskervilles

David Grylls

The popular view of Sherlock Holmes is that he is a rational, scientific

detective whose cases are neatly and completely solved. The critical view of
the stories in which he appears was traditionally that they comprised genre
fiction – limited, rule-bound, lacking the complexity looked for in more
serious works of literature (in Conrad, for example, or James or even
Stevenson).1 Although both views are partly true, they fail to accommo-
date aspects of Doyle’s work that transcend rationality or the limits of
genre. This chapter uses The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) to contend
that the power of the Sherlock Holmes canon does not arise purely from
rational deduction or the pleasures of formulaic fiction. It argues that this
novella deploys themes and tropes that link it firmly to acknowledged
masterpieces of fin de siècle fiction.
The literary evolution of Sherlock Holmes as a particular type of
detective is a topic that has been comprehensively studied. Doyle was of
course acutely aware of the classic precedents in detective fiction, especially
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), which influenced not only The
Sign of Four (1890), in which the plot turns on pearls stolen from India
plus a murderous campaign of revenge and reparation, but also a novel
that he published a year earlier, in 1889, The Mystery of Cloomber (in which

D. Grylls (*)
Kellogg College, Oxford, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2017 149

S. Naidu (ed.), Sherlock Holmes in Context, Crime Files,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55595-3_9
150 D. GRYLLS

a trio of Indian assassins stalk their prey in England). Even more influential
than Collins, though, were the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the
French journalist Emile Gaboriau. Poe’s pioneering detective Auguste
Dupin anticipates many of Holmes’s characteristics. An expert in decipher-
ing clues, he uses methods of close observation (often noticing the most
unusual features of a case) and of carefully reasoned deduction (often
stretching the reader’s credulity). Like Holmes, he has an awestruck
simple friend who chronicles his astounding feats. And like Holmes, he
works independently of the police, for whom he expresses lofty contempt.
In The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) the very first page reminds you
of Holmes: here we have a closed-room murder mystery (the murderer
turns out to be an orangutan), an enigmatic and charismatic detective, and
a series of significant clues. Emile Gaboriau followed Poe in several
respects but offered more by way of suspense and intricate, sophisticated
plots.
Doyle was fascinated by both Poe and Gaboriau. But he wanted to
bring something new to the genre. As he wrote later, “Gaboriau had
rather attracted me by the neat dovetailing of his plots, and Poe’s master-
ful detective M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes. But
could I bring an addition of my own?” (Doyle, Memories 74). What he did
was put his doctor’s training to good use. Doyle had graduated from
Edinburgh University in 1881 as Bachelor of Medicine and Master of
Surgery. When he started to write, he recalled the dictum of his old
professor, Joseph Bell, that the basis of all successful medical diagnosis
was “the precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor
differences.” Remembering Bell’s “eerie trick of spotting details,” he later
recalled: “if he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but
unorganised business to something nearer to an exact science. I would try
if I could get this effect” (74–75).
Science was therefore the new element that Doyle brought to the
detective story. Holmes is pre-eminently a scientific detective. He first
appears in A Study in Scarlet (1887) running towards Watson with a test-
tube in his hand, shouting, “I’ve found it, I’ve found it . . . I have found
the re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin” (Complete Sherlock
Holmes 17).2 He is the author of numerous scientific and scholarly
monographs – in The Hound of the Baskervilles he draws attention to
his monograph on the dating of old manuscripts and his study of 75
different perfumes (673, 765). In other stories he mentions monographs
on the 140 different types of tobacco ash, on different types of tattoo
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marks, and on varieties of the human ear (written for the Anthropological
Journal).3 He also mentions at various times his attention to distinctive
typewriter imprints and the importance of classifying individuality in
pipes, watches, and bootlaces.4 His astoundingly detailed deductions
became the stuff of legend.
Doyle knew enough about science to create Sherlock Holmes but he
was not a scientist himself nor was he even particularly accurate about
scientific facts. As a sample of his casual way with facts, one might take
“The Speckled Band,” in which the sadistic Dr. Grimesby Roylott has a
collection of sinister exotic animals, including an Indian baboon (a tribute,
perhaps, to Poe’s orangutan) and also a swamp adder, which he uses to
commit murder by feeding it secretly on milk and training it to come at
the sound of a whistle by sliding down a bell-pull and biting its victim. As
it happens, there are no baboons in India and no such snake as a swamp
adder. Further, snakes are deaf and dislike milk, they cannot slide up or
down ropes, and a snake-bite would be easily detected by a coroner
(Green 361–67). Even in The Hound of the Baskervilles, as sticklers have
meanly pointed out, Cornish tin mines have been transported to Devon
and Neolithic huts wrongly given roofs.5 Actually Doyle did not care too
much about errors, for he wrote very quickly and saw the stories as
romances.6 Even between his first two novellas, Watson’s Afghan war
wound has traveled from his shoulder to his leg (15, 90).
Sherlock Holmes is scientific and precise. Doyle was by no means
always precise and indeed not wholly committed to science. As is well
known, in the latter part of his life, he became increasingly interested in
Spiritualism. As early as November 1893, about the time he attempted to
kill off Sherlock Holmes in his story “The Final Problem,” Doyle joined
the Society for Psychical Research, but it was another twenty-three years
before, in 1916, he announced his belief in Spiritualism. He toured
America and Australia, expounding the doctrine to vast audiences. He
believed the dead were in constant communication with him and brought
him news of the afterlife. Notoriously, too, when two girls from
Cottingley in Yorkshire claimed they had photographed fairies (one
admitted later it was a hoax), he believed them and sat in the woods
near his home with a camera, hoping for a similar breakthrough.7
One can only imagine what Sherlock Holmes would have said. Holmes
is a rationalist and materialist – or is he? In fact what is so powerful about
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the tension it sets up between science and
superstition. This involves not only explanations of the “spectral” hound
152 D. GRYLLS

but the different types of effect in the story. On the one hand are the
quasi-scientific elements: the story is a masterpiece of rational method,
involving skillful plotting and suspense, carefully positioned clues, and
detailed explanations. On the other, it activates sub-rational terrors by its
use of atmosphere, setting, and description and its invocation of primitive
myth. Let us take a close look at the narrative to examine this central
tension.
On the face of it, The Hound of the Baskervilles seems to endorse
rationality and materialism at the expense of the supernatural. It seems
to set up a conflict between the superstitious past and the scientific pre-
sent. It starts with the ancient legend of the Hound of the Baskervilles,
with its references to profane passions, moonlight, the number thirteen,
the appearance of “a hound of hell,” and warnings about “those dark
hours when the powers of evil are exalted” (675). All of this taps into the
kind of archetypal fears provoked by myths about monsters (Beowulf, for
example). Holmes initially dismisses the legend as only interesting to a
collector of fairy tales (somewhat ironically, perhaps, in view of Doyle’s
later interests). But then the first installment of the story concludes with
Mortimer’s dramatic declaration: “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of
a gigantic hound!” (679).8 Discussion ensues between him and Holmes as
to whether a trained man of science could possibly believe in the super-
natural. When Sir Henry joins the discussion, he says to Dr. Mortimer:
“You don’t seem quite to have made up your mind whether it’s a case for a
policeman or a clergyman” (689).
Now the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles arranges not only for the
apparently supernatural effects to be explained (right down to the dog’s
phosphorescent muzzle) but for superstition to prove suicidal: the death
of Sir Charles, after all, is due not merely to his weak heart but also to his
superstitious fear regarding the family legend, which Stapleton exploits.
Having succeeded with Sir Charles, Stapleton tries the same ploy with Sir
Henry. Credulity, we gather, is potentially fatal. Since Holmes dismisses
the legend as a fairy tale, it might seem that he stands wholly for science
and rejection of the supernatural. But in fact a close reading of the text
does not entirely back this up. When Sir Henry asks him: “Do you mean
danger from this family fiend or do you mean danger from human
beings?” Holmes replies: “Well, that is what we have to find out”
(689). And at the end of the story he declares that he only concluded
that they were dealing with a real hound when he heard about the second
boot.
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Occasional moments of this kind might imply that the novella is not
unequivocally dismissive of the supernatural: parts of it, in fact, are sug-
gestive of a debate within Doyle himself. But in any case, the tension
between rational control and supernatural horror goes beyond the argu-
ment about the nature of the hound. It controls the whole structuring of
the story, particularly the contrast between plot and atmosphere. The plot
is a masterpiece of skillful control, something constructed by the scienti-
fically trained side of Doyle. From the compressed handling of time in the
third chapter (the interview with Dr. Mortimer)9 to the dexterous place-
ment of red herrings (especially the Selden–Barrymore subplot)10 to the
mapping of moments of suspense onto the serialization structure,11 the
plot offers the pleasures of logic, timing, and carefully phased exposition.
It offers a feast for the rational mind. And of course some parts of the
descriptive writing enhance the element of ratiocination by using meta-
phors that remind us of the emergent conventions of the detective story –
conventions of pursuit, inquiry, and inference and the notion of an intel-
lectual contest between a dazzlingly intelligent detective and a ruthlessly
ingenious villain. And so we get images taken from chess and fencing
(Holmes senses a “foil as quick and supple” as his own) or from combat on
the battlefield (“a foeman who is worthy of our steel”) (698). Even more
pervasive are metaphors of hunting: the centrality of the spectral hound
leads to endless talk of people being “dogged” or “tracked” or putting
each other off the scent (693, 696, 705, 727). Stapleton’s butterfly net is
turned back on him when Holmes says, “My nets are closing upon him
even as his are upon Sir Henry” (739) and the metaphor is elaborated to
include fishing nets.12 In all these ways the descriptive writing draws
attention to the carefully controlled plotting on the part of both characters
and author.
However, there are other kinds of description in the story that operate
on a quite different level: not offering satisfaction to the rational mind but
provoking primitive fears and horrors. These are the descriptions of the
Dartmoor landscape, especially of the fearsome Grimpen Mire. As soon as
we leave London for Devon, a creeping horror is powerfully emphasized.
And of course this apparently coincides with Holmes being left behind in
London: this story is highly unusual in the oeuvre in that Holmes is absent
for six consecutive chapters, or for roughly 40% of the narrative. And
during his absence the novel elaborates the terrors, suspicions, and chilling
uncertainties that lie beyond the reach of his rational mind. The effect of
this change of atmosphere can be seen in Sir Henry: after talking hopefully
154 D. GRYLLS

of how he will “have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months,
and you won’t know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and
Edison right here in front of the hall door” (702), he is increasingly
overshadowed by the horror of the legend and eventually, after his ordeal
with the hound, has to go on a round-the-world trip to recover his health.
Let us look at one or two descriptive passages that build up these
sinister effects. The first is from chapter six, “Baskerville Hall,” and it
describes the view from the carriage as Watson, Mortimer, and Sir
Henry arrive: “Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of
a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange
jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic land-
scape in a dream” (700).
The word “fantastic” is used twice more (730, 738). It signals a move
from the world of facts and science to a realm of fantasy and fear.
The moor is treacherous and deceptive; it can suck people in. Doyle
makes extensive use of the pathetic fallacy to make descriptions of the
moor relevant to the mystery story. This is from near the end of chapter
seven:

“Please, please, be frank with me, Miss Stapleton, for ever since I have been
here I have been conscious of shadows all round me. Life has become like
that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which
one may sink and with no guide to point the track.” (711)

Or consider the phantasmal description as Holmes and Watson wait for Sir
Henry to emerge:

As we watched it the fog-wreaths came crawling round both corners of the

house and rolled slowly into one dense bank, on which the upper floor and
the roof floated like a strange ship upon a shadowy sea. (756)

And when they go looking for the doomed Stapleton:

We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which
tapered out into the widespread bog. From the end of it a small wand
planted here and there showed where the path zigzagged from tuft to tuft
of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires which
barred the way to the stranger. Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants
sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour onto our faces,
 THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 155

while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-deep into the dark,
quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet.
Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into
it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene
depths, so grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us. (759–60)

In one sense this is a description of nature, but in another it is almost

supernatural, animating nature in so sinister a fashion as to recall the
murky horrors of the legend (“those dark hours when the powers of evil
are exalted” [675]). “Foul,” for instance (repeated twice shortly after-
wards), harks back to the “foul passions” (674) and “foul” beast (675)
described in the eighteenth-century manuscript. “Malignant hand,”
together with “grim and purposeful,” credits the quagmire with quasi-
human malice. “Miasmatic” is not simply nature description, since
“miasma” (from the Greek for “defilement”) has long carried connota-
tions of both physical and moral pollution.
The Hound of the Baskervilles, then, is built on a contrast between
science and superstition, the rational and the pre-rational parts of the
mind. An important aspect of this contrast is the treatment of the past,
and more specifically the treatment of atavism – the unwelcome return of
the past. The moor is not only treacherous and evil: it is also prehistoric. As
Watson says in chapter seven:

When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern
England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of
the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you
walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge
monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at
their gray stone huts against the scarred hill-sides you leave your own age
behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the
low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would
feel that his presence there was more natural than your own.13 (712)

Later, of course, Selden does emerge in this way:

Over the rocks, in the crevice of which the candle burned, there was thrust
out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile
passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair,
it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the
burrows on the hillsides. (725)
156 D. GRYLLS

Selden is a throwback, an atavistic reversion to primitive, pre-civilized

man. And he is not the only example in the story. We are alerted to the
importance of atavism very early in the novel when Holmes and Watson
read about Dr. Mortimer:

Mortimer, James, M.R.C.S., 1882, Grimpen, Dartmoor, Devon. House-

surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital. Winner of the
Jackson prize for Comparative Pathology, with essay entitled “Is Disease a
Reversion?” Corresponding member of the Swedish Pathological Society.
Author of “Some Freaks of Atavism” (Lancet 1882). “Do We Progress?”
(Journal of Psychology, March, 1883). Medical Officer for the parishes of
Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow. (671)

“Some Freaks of Atavism”: the title of Mortimer’s paper applies not only
to Selden but also to Stapleton, who turns out to be a direct descendant of
old Sir Hugo. Just as Sir Henry has the fiery temperament of the
Baskervilles, so Stapleton has inherited their viler passions. One of the
key revelations in the story is the moment in chapter thirteen when
Holmes recognizes his features in the portrait of old Sir Hugo: “The
face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas” (750). As Watson marvels,
Holmes coolly comments:

“Yes, it is an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both

physical and spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man
to the doctrine of reincarnation. The fellow is a Baskerville – that is evident.”
(750)

It is interesting that here Holmes should equate the modern scientific

doctrine of atavism with the ancient religious doctrine of reincarnation. It
perhaps suggests once again that he is not wholly committed to the
scientific perspective and it fits the dualistic nature of the story. Indeed,
given the novel’s double focus on the scientific and the prehistoric, mod-
ern rationality and primitive instinct, one can see why atavism was a
tempting theme for Doyle. Considered as a scientific theory, atavism
represents a triumph for the human mind and its systems of control and
classification. But considered as a natural phenomenon, it shows how the
mind can be in thrall to savagery. Dr. Mortimer, like Holmes, is a student
of atavism; Stapleton, like Selden, is an instance of it. The presence of both
kinds of character in the story is a proof of its mixed appeal.
 THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 157

The Hound of the Baskervilles is a highly imaginative fantasy written in

an era of scientific prestige. In this respect it resembles a number of other
fin de siècle novellas that combined Gothic horror with scientific trappings,
for example Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or H. G. Wells’s The Time
Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau. One obvious feature it has in
common with such works is its exploitation of Darwinian theory. The
imaginative use of evolution in the romances of Wells,14 who studied at
the Normal School of Science under T. H. Huxley, is well established. The
Time Machine, published in 1895, in effect fuses Marx and Darwin by
envisaging a future society in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
have evolved into two separate species, the Eloi and the Morlocks. The
Island of Doctor Moreau, published in 1896, centers on a megalomaniac
scientist who accelerates the process of evolution by turning animals into
humans, only to be confronted by the problem of reversion.15
Stevenson’s debt to Darwinism is less well documented but he too was
alert to theories of atavism.16 In 1887, for instance, he published an essay
called “The Manse” in which he speculated about his “minister-grand-
father”: “as he sat there in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented
gentleman,” his mind must have contained “tree-top memories,” as mon-
key-like ancestors “gambolled and chattered in the brain of the old divine”
(quoted in Mighall xxxvii). In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published just the
year before, in 1886, the concept of reversion runs all through the story.
Hyde is constantly described in animal terms. He strikes one observer as
“hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?” (Stevenson 16). In
the course of the novella Hyde cries out “like a rat” (41), screeches in
“mere animal terror” (44), develops an increasingly hairy hand and begins
to “growl for licence” (65). Most suggestive of all are comparisons with
primates. Jekyll’s butler describes Hyde as jumping “like a monkey” (42)
and the compound adjective “Ape-like” appears three times in the story
(22, 69, 70). In the context of post-Darwinian panic all such references
seem significant, but Stevenson takes care to strengthen the notion that
submission to evil is a form of reversion. Just before the crucial moment
where Dr. Jekyll undergoes an involuntary transformation into Hyde, he
talks of sunning himself on a bench, “the animal within me licking the
chops of memory” (66). The next morning, returned to Jekyll once again,
he hates and fears the thought of “the brute that slept within me” (68). In
view of these allusions, the human evil in the story seems not so much
theological as biological. Its explanation lies less in original sin than in the
origin of species.
158 D. GRYLLS

There is no doubt that in many respects Doyle shared the concerns of

his post-Darwinian contemporaries. His first book, The Narrative of John
Smith, written in 1883 but not published until 2011, features a protago-
nist who applies Darwin’s theories even to questions formerly reserved for
religion. He argues, for instance, that “original sin” must have an evolu-
tionary explanation and that barbarous behavior might therefore be mod-
ified by later evolutionary developments (John Smith 31–32). But the links
between The Hound of the Baskervilles and other works of fin de siècle
fiction go further than the use of Darwinism. There are two further forms
of similarity: the use of doubling and hints of sexual horror.
A curious feature of much late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is not
only that it concentrates on savagery beneath the surface (often treated in
Darwinian terms) but that it brings together the savage and civilized, often
by a form of doubling. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Hyde and Jekyll are twin
aspects of a single person, the former the dark double of the latter. In
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous hero, both murderer
and socialite, feels keenly “the terrible pleasure of a double life” (167). In
The Time Machine the Eloi and the Morlocks are branching forms of a
single humanity, while in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the hero-villain,
who uses vivisection to make creatures in his own image, is both a merci-
less torturer and an analogue of God.17 The theme continues in many
other works of the period. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in
1898, Kurtz is both an imperial idealist (an “emissary of pity, and science,
and progress” [30]) and a murderous voluptuary presiding over “unspeak-
able rites” (60). In James’s The Turn of the Screw, serialized in the same
year, the evil Peter Quint, who terrifies the governess, first appears in the
clothes of the handsome Master, the object of her wistful dreams.
Despite the obvious differences between these novels, in all of them
doubling is used to suggest the linked nature of good and evil, either by
pairing embodiments of each or by fusing them in a single person. In The
Hound of the Baskervilles the use of doubling is much less radical. The
most literal instance of a double in the story is Stapleton’s resemblance to
his forebear Sir Hugo, a resemblance that sharpens our understanding of
the nature of Stapleton’s cruelty. Stapleton is also paired with Selden:
both, as already seen, are savage throwbacks, examples of hereditary
criminal types; both are familiar with Dartmoor, where they have lairs
and someone to assist them; both are wantonly violent. But there is of
course a third person hiding out on the moor, a black figure silhouetted
against the tor, who “might have been the very spirit of that terrible place”
 THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 159

(726). This is Holmes who, as often in the canon, is paired throughout

with his villainous antagonist. An early pointer to this pairing comes when
Stapleton gives his name to the cabman as “Mr Sherlock Holmes” (697).
Holmes, momentarily amazed, immediately frames their contest as a duel.
“I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own,” he says, adding: “this time we
have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel” (698) – a phrase he repeats
later (747). Like Holmes, Stapleton thinks ahead, manipulates others to
his advantage and remains cool under pressure. Like Holmes, he has areas
of specialized knowledge (he is a “recognised authority” on entomology
[762]). But just as Stapleton’s butterfly nets take on sinister connotations,
Holmes metaphorically turns his weapons against him. “My nets are
closing upon him, even as his are upon Sir Henry,” he declares (743)
and, as his counter-plot ripens: “I dare swear that before tomorrow night
he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of his own butterflies”
(750). However, despite this reciprocity, nothing in the use of doubling in
the tale undermines the distinction between good and evil, as it does in the
other novellas mentioned. It goes no farther – perhaps not as far – as the
earlier pairing of Holmes and Moriarty, pre-eminent exponents in their
contrary fields.18 Morally, it is no more subversive than when Selden is
found dead in Sir Henry’s clothes – a moment that, unlike Quint being
seen first in his employer’s clothes, is purely one of visual misperception.
Nevertheless, there is one verbal echo in the text that hints, if only for a
second, at a sinister link between Holmes and Stapleton. As Holmes bends
over the body he thinks is Sir Henry’s, he suddenly cries out and is
“dancing and laughing.” He has of course realized that the corpse is
Selden’s but Watson’s temporary shock is instructive: “Could this be my
stern, self-contained friend? These were hidden fires, indeed!” (745). That
last phrase echoes Watson’s earlier account of Stapleton, who, he has said,
“gives the impression of hidden fires . . . There is a dry glitter in his eyes
and a firm set of his thin lips, which goes with a positive and possibly harsh
nature” (713). Holmes was not in fact gloating sadistically over the
smashed body before him, but the parallel suggests such potential in
Stapleton. And this raises the final topic of this chapter: the implied sexual
subtext of the novel.
Among the novellas already mentioned, there is not only a common
theme of savagery beneath a civilized surface and, in some cases, hints of
atavism. There is also, in several of them, a murky implication of sexual
malpractices that are never clearly specified. In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for
instance, the reader’s imagination is made to work overtime fleshing out
160 D. GRYLLS

the “monstrous” but inexplicit pleasures of Hyde (60). What did Hyde
actually do? Enjoy prostitutes, commit murders, desecrate corpses? Part of
the power of the text is the way that – unlike the various film versions – it
leaves readers to wonder, conjecture, and extrapolate. Likewise with The
Turn of the Screw, which famously creates an atmosphere of sexual corrup-
tion by employing strategic ambiguity. As James remarked in his 1908
preface:

Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own
experience, his own imagination . . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all
the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and
you are released from weak specifications.19 (128)

Similar intimations, achieved by similarly oblique methods, can also be

found in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Heart of Darkness.
One reason why the Sherlock Holmes stories would not normally be
placed in such company is that they operate within generic conventions at
odds with the complexity and indeterminacy now recognized as character-
istic of modernist and proto-modernist fiction. By the end of The Hound of
the Baskervilles, for instance, all mystery, all ambiguity, is removed – or at
least this is suggested by Holmes’s final statement: “I have had the
advantage of two conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, and the case has
now been so entirely cleared up that I am not aware that there is anything
which has remained a secret to us” (761). No one speaks like this in Heart
of Darkness and certainly not in any work by James. Yet just as The Hound
of the Baskervilles shares certain preoccupations with contemporary clas-
sics, so too does it have a sexual subtext that leaves a penumbra of doubt.
Consider, for example, the crimes of Stapleton and especially his former
career as a teacher. Stapleton, as Holmes says, is “an interesting instance of
a throwback,” both physically and morally: that is, he not only resembles
his ancestor Sir Hugo physically but has inherited his criminal tendencies.
Sir Hugo’s crime was undoubtedly sexual. As the eighteenth-century
manuscript says, “Learn then from this story not to fear the fruits of the
past, but rather to be circumspect in the future, that those foul passions
whereby our family has suffered so grievously may not again be loosed to
our undoing” (674). Hugo “came to love (if, indeed, so dark a passion
may be known under so bright a name) the daughter of a yeoman” (676).
Thwarted in his attempt to rape her, he set the dogs on her and died for his
crime. Old Sir Hugo was a sexual sadist.
 THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 161

The same seems to be true of Stapleton. Resembling in appearance his

prim-looking ancestor, he also harbors dark passions like Sir Hugo. As Dr.
Watson notes, he is “a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling
face and a murderous heart” (742). His wife, whom he met in Costa Rica,
is an exotic creature as completely pinned down by him as the butterfly
specimens in the room in which she is eventually discovered, gagged by a
towel and bound to a beam, with “the clear red weal of a whiplash across
her neck” (758). Later it is confirmed that he had intimidated her with
blows and controlled her with “a fear founded upon brutal ill-treatment”
(763). Yet she continued to love him and declined to leave him or to
betray him openly. That their relationship was sexually passionate is sug-
gested by Stapleton’s violent jealousy when Sir Henry pays attention to
her, despite the fact that luring Sir Henry was part of Stapleton’s plan.
Clearly in some sense Beryl Stapleton has participated in an abusive and
sadistic relationship. When she is found tied to the post, her two dark eyes,
above the confining towel, stare out “full of grief and shame and a dreadful
questioning” (758). As she says, “It is my mind and soul that he has
tortured and defiled” (759). She adds: “I could endure it all, ill-usage,
solitude, a life of deception, everything, as long as I could still cling to the
hope that I had his love, but now I know that in this also I have been his
dupe and his tool” (759). Holmes is acute on this ambivalence. In his
review of the case, he says: “There can be no doubt that Stapleton
exercised an influence over her which may have been love or may have
been fear, or very possibly both, since they are by no means incompatible
emotions” (765–66).
Stapleton’s sexual manipulation of his wife is not an isolated instance of
abuse. He has also deceived and exploited Laura Lyons, the unhappily
married woman “of equivocal reputation” (731) who declares in words
that anticipate Beryl’s, “But now I see that I was never anything but a tool
in his hands” (753). Like Beryl, she too is isolated and vulnerable (she has
been rejected by her father [731]). She too is exploited by Stapleton with a
mixture of seductive promises and threats. As Holmes says, “both of them
were under his influence, and he had nothing to fear from them” (763).
All this is clearly established in the text and suggests that Stapleton’s
form of sexual cruelty was subtler than that of his murderous ancestor. But
what it might prompt speculation about is the nature of Stapleton’s failed
school. Stapleton has run a school in Yorkshire, a county likely to be
associated in this context with the Dotheboys Hall of Wackford Squeers,
Dickens’s sadistic schoolmaster in Nicholas Nickleby (1839). According to
162 D. GRYLLS

Stapleton, “A serious epidemic broke out in the school and three of the
boys died” (710). He lost most of his capital but he could have borne this
were it not for what he calls “the loss of the charming companionship of
the boys” (710). Given his later proven propensity for sexually exploiting
the lonely and vulnerable, one wonders what might lie behind this remark.
Holmes’s formal investigations show that the “school had come to grief
under atrocious circumstances” (742). This could refer to the epidemic or
to appalling sanitary conditions. But in Holmes’s final summing up he
adds that it was only after an able tutor called Fraser had died of con-
sumption that “the school which had begun well sank from disrepute into
infamy” (762). This seems a very strong statement to make about a school
that closed simply for medical reasons (it is in fact the only use of “infamy”
in the whole of the Holmes canon). So infamous in fact was Stapleton that
he was forced to change his name. What also seems significant is a detail
that Holmes adds at the end of the story when he states his conviction that
a number of unsolved burglaries in the West Country were probably the
work of Stapleton: “The last of these, at Folkestone Court, in May, was
remarkable for the cold-blooded pistolling of the page” (764). Cruelty to
boys as well as women appears to be part of Stapleton’s pattern. The
sinister backstory about the school lingers on after Stapleton himself has
been sucked down into what the story calls the “obscene depths” of
Grimpen Mire (760).
Was Doyle aware of such implications? It is impossible to say – though it
is worth noting that a murky sexual subtext occurs in other Holmes
stories, for example in the late story “The Veiled Lodger,” in which a
Mrs. Merrilow has a bestial husband who abuses her: “When I became a
woman this man loved me, if such lust as his can be called love, and in an
evil moment I became his wife . . . He deserted me for others. He tied me
down and lashed me with his riding-whip when I complained” (1100).20
In The Hound of the Baskervilles Holmes suggests that even if Stapleton
had survived, his doom would have been sealed by his jealous wife. What
she might have done can perhaps be glimpsed from Mrs. Merrilow’s
vengeance in “The Veiled Lodger”: “I heard the crash as the club smashed
my husband’s skull. My heart leaped with joy at the sound” (1100).
Doyle’s stories have darker depths than their surface rationality might
suggest – something that links them powerfully with other great works
of the period. Of course the larger question for literary historians is why so
many classics of late Victorian fiction should deal with buried horrors, with
atavism, with evil doubles, and with sexual crimes that are never made fully
 THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 163

explicit. Many possible answers suggest themselves: contemporary fears

about Darwinism; anxiety about the abuses of empire (Doyle, like Conrad,
denounced the atrocities in the Congo [Lycett 315–17]); even newspaper
exposés of sexual scandals, especially those described at Oscar Wilde’s trials
in 1895.21 But these are inquiries for another essay. For now, it is sufficient
to suggest that Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles be included in the list
of such classics.

NOTES
1. The inclusion of Doyle among “purveyors of romance” (1501) in Albert C.
Baugh’s (ed.) A Literary History of England is echoed, for example, by
Michael Wheeler in English Fiction of the Victorian Period (162).
2. All page numbers given in the text and footnotes to Holmes stories and
novellas are to The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. is echoed, for exam-
ple, by Michael Wheeler in English Fiction of the Victorian Period (162).
3. These references occur in The Sign of Four (91), “The Red-Headed League”
(177), and “The Cardboard Box” (896).
4. These references occur in “A Case of Identity” (199) and “The Yellow
Face” (352).
5. See Mark Campbell’s The Pocket Essential Sherlock Holmes (39).
6. As David Cannadine has noted, even the accounts of London in the Holmes
stories are “littered with descriptive and topographical errors” (18), Doyle’s
image of the metropolis being “every bit as selective and impressionistic as
Manet’s contemporary canvases” (25).
7. See Andrew Lycett’s Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
(384, 389). See also the excellent account of the Cottingley case in Douglas
Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (234–49).
8. The novella was serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to
April 1902.
9. During a conversation with Holmes that occupies no more than a page, Dr.
Mortimer explains that Sir Henry Baskerville is due to arrive at Waterloo
Station “in exactly one hour and a quarter,” “in one hour and five minutes”
and “in fifty minutes” (681, 682).
10. A witty account of this feature of the plot occurs in Mark Haddon’s The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which the fifteen-year-old
narrator, solemnly listing the “Red Herrings” in The Hound of the Baskervilles,
writes: “Selden, the Notting Hill murderer – This is a man who has escaped
from a prison nearby and is being hunted down on the moors, which makes
you think that he has something to do with the story, because he is a criminal,
but he isn’t anything to do with the story at all” (91).
164 D. GRYLLS

11. For example, as noted above, Dr. Mortimer’s awed whisper, “Mr. Holmes,
they were the footprints of a gigantic hound” (679) came at the end of the
first installment in The Strand Magazine, while the tremendous description
of the emerging hound, culminating with the phrase, “broke upon us out of
the wall of fog” (757), completed the eighth installment.
12. Chapter thirteen is called “Fixing the Nets.”
13. Compare the descriptions of the “flint knives” (180) and “stone arrow-
heads used by the old tribes on Egdon” (342) in Thomas Hardy, The
Return of the Native.
14. In the 1890s Doyle exchanged ideas with Wells, who also wrote for The
Strand Magazine. Later, they became competitive, Doyle declaring to an
unnamed correspondent that, “much as I admire Wells, I am not conscious
of being at all in his debt” (Lycett 243, 350–51). Nevertheless, as Russell
Miller points out, The Lost World (1912) was influenced by Wells’s The War
of the Worlds (1898) and The First Men in the Moon (1901) (Miller 304).
15. On the centrality of Darwinian theory in the work of H. G. Wells, see Peter
Kemp’s H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape. On Doyle’s imaginative use
of science in the Challenger narratives, especially The Lost World (1912), see
Kerr’s fourth chapter, entitled “Science” (80–132).
16. As Lycett notes, Stevenson was Doyle’s literary “role model” (140) and
“one of his literary heroes” (100); in January 1890 he expressed his admira-
tion for the older man in an article entitled “Mr Stevenson’s Methods in
Fiction” in the National Review (461 n.). See also Miller (96–97, 175). In
1907 Doyle told Bram Stoker that Stevenson had been “a strong influence”
on his style (Orel 160).
17. Compare McArdle’s description of Professor Challenger in The Lost World:
“In my opinion he’s just a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science”
(17).
18. Moriarty first appears in “The Final Problem,” 1893, in which the “personal
contest” between “the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion
of the law of their generation” ends with them apparently dying, “locked in
each other’s arms” (480).
19. In 1894 Doyle told an interviewer, Robert Barr: “James, I think, has had a
great and permanent influence upon fiction. His beautiful clear-cut style and
his artistic restraint must affect everyone who reads him” (Orel 112).
20. Holmes himself sometimes uses a riding-crop – described in “The Six
Napoleons” as “his favourite weapon” (591) – but never against a woman.
21. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (409–49).
 THE SAVAGE SUBTEXT OF THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES 165

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166 D. GRYLLS

David Grylls is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford and a tutor at Oxford

University’s Department for Continuing Education, where until 2013 he directed
the programs in literature, creative writing, and film studies. He is a specialist in
nineteenth-century literature but teaches a range of courses from Shakespeare to
the present day.