The Hound of the Baskervilles

Summary

The Hound of the Baskervilles brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to Dartmoor to investigate a family curse. It opens in Baker Street with a walking stick left by a visitor, from which Holmes deduces a young country doctor with a curly-haired spaniel. The owner, Dr. James Mortimer, reads them an eighteenth-century manuscript: the wicked Sir Hugo Baskerville, chasing a kidnapped girl across the moor, was torn apart by a huge spectral hound, and the family has suffered sudden deaths ever since. Mortimer then reports that Sir Charles Baskerville, a kindly man with a weak heart who lived in dread of the legend, has been found dead at the end of the yew alley at Baskerville Hall, his face distorted with terror, and near the body were the footprints of a gigantic hound. The heir, Sir Henry, arrives from Canada and in London receives a warning pasted from words cut out of The Times, loses first a new boot and then an old one from his hotel, and is shadowed by a bearded man in a cab. Holmes, claiming to be kept in town, sends Watson to Devonshire to guard him. Watson's reports describe the bleak moor and its people: the butler Barrymore and his wife, secretly feeding her brother Selden, an escaped convict; the naturalist Jack Stapleton and his beautiful 'sister' Beryl, who tries to warn Sir Henry away; the litigious old Frankland with his telescope; and a mysterious man living in a prehistoric stone hut. That man proves to be Holmes, who has been on the moor in secret all along. Selden falls to his death over a rock while wearing Sir Henry's cast-off clothes, and a family portrait of Hugo reveals to Holmes that Stapleton is a Baskerville, the son of Sir Charles's disgraced younger brother, plotting to inherit. Beryl is in fact Stapleton's wife, and he used Mrs. Laura Lyons to lure Sir Charles to the moor gate. Using Sir Henry as bait, Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade wait in the fog outside Stapleton's house, Merripit House; a huge dog smeared with phosphorus bursts out and attacks the baronet, and Holmes shoots it dead. Stapleton flees into the Grimpen Mire and is never seen again. The novel was serialized in The Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902 with Sidney Paget's illustrations and published as a book by George Newnes in 1902. Doyle set it before Holmes's supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls, and it remains the best-known Holmes story.

Top Lessons

• A legend explained is a legend defeated

  The hound seems supernatural from the first manuscript to the night of the fog, and even Mortimer, a man of science, half believes it. Holmes refuses to accept a ghost before he has ruled out every natural cause, and the creature turns out to be a real dog painted with phosphorus by a real man. The novel shows that fear thrives on what is only hinted at, as the old manuscript itself admits.

• Watson alone

  For most of the book Holmes is absent, and Watson must observe, report, and act by himself. He makes mistakes, but his letters are honest and his courage in following the light on the moor and stalking the man on the tor is real. Holmes later admits that Watson's reports were essential, even though he kept Watson in the dark.

• The past in the blood?

  Holmes recognizes Stapleton in the portrait of the wicked Hugo and calls him a throwback, both physical and spiritual. Dr. Mortimer writes papers on atavism and covets Holmes's skull. The book plays with the late Victorian idea that character is inherited, but Stapleton still chooses every step of his plot, and Sir Henry, of the same blood, is honest and kind.

• Hidden kindness and hidden cruelty

  Many people on the moor are not what they seem. The sinister Barrymores are only protecting a brother; the friendly naturalist is a murderer; the 'sister' is a wife who has been beaten and bound. Doyle uses the fog and the bog to picture a world where appearances mislead, and only patient attention sorts the true from the false.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Two medical men carry the case: Watson, the narrator, and Dr. James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., a former house-surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital now in country practice and serving as parish medical officer. Mortimer's listed publications, an essay asking whether disease is a reversion and papers on atavism and on whether humanity progresses, place him in the late nineteenth-century debate over heredity, degeneration, and criminal anthropology, and his wish to measure Holmes's skull belongs to the same craniometric fashion. The plot turns on that idea: Holmes reads Stapleton's descent in a family portrait and calls him a throwback. The death of Sir Charles is the novel's medical puzzle. The inquest accepts cardiac death in a man with long-standing heart disease, breathlessness, and attacks of nervous depression, and Mortimer had advised a change of scene in London because chronic dread of the legend was harming his health; Holmes concludes that Stapleton meant the hound to frighten a man with a weak heart to death. The book thus offers a Victorian picture of fright as a cause of sudden cardiac death, a reading that should be held as the period's understanding rather than a diagnosis. After the final night Sir Henry falls into delirium with high fever, attributed to shattered nerves, and recovers only after a long voyage in Mortimer's care, the standard prescription of a sea voyage for nervous collapse. Selden is described as a man of brutal appearance, again in the period's physiognomic language.

• Chapter 1

  Watson reads Dr. Mortimer's entry in the Medical Directory: Charing Cross house-surgeon, prize essay on whether disease is a reversion, papers on atavism in the Lancet and on progress in the Journal of Psychology.

• Chapter 1

  Mortimer admires Holmes's long skull and supra-orbital development and asks to run his finger along his parietal fissure.

• Chapter 2

  The newspaper account of the inquest: Sir Charles's heart disease, changes of colour, breathlessness and nervous depression, facial distortion explained as usual in death from cardiac exhaustion, and a post-mortem confirming organic disease.

• Chapter 2

  Mortimer describes Sir Charles's mounting dread of the legend and his medical advice to spend months in London for distraction.

• Chapter 13

  Holmes uncovers Stapleton's face in the portrait of Hugo Baskerville and speaks of a physical and spiritual throwback.

• Chapter 14

  After the hound's attack Sir Henry is revived with brandy; that night the shock brings on a delirious high fever, and Mortimer later takes him round the world to recover.