Five-minute digest
The Sign of the Four
Summary
The Sign of the Four, the second Sherlock Holmes novel, opens with a scene that has troubled readers ever since: Holmes, bored for lack of work, injects himself with cocaine while Watson protests that he is ruining a great mind. Rescue from boredom arrives in the person of Miss Mary Morstan, a young governess. Her father, an officer in an Indian convict regiment, disappeared ten years before; for six years she has received a single large pearl every year from an unknown sender, and now a letter asks her to meet a stranger that night and bring two friends. Holmes and Watson go with her. They are taken to Thaddeus Sholto, a nervous aesthete, who explains that his late father, Major Sholto, and Captain Morstan had brought a great treasure home from India and that Morstan died suddenly during a quarrel over it. Thaddeus wants to give Mary her share. When the party reaches Pondicherry Lodge, home of his brother Bartholomew, they find Bartholomew dead in a locked room with a poisoned thorn in his neck, the treasure gone, and a paper bearing the words 'the sign of the four'. Holmes follows a trail of creosote with the help of the dog Toby, sets the Baker Street Irregulars searching the river, and after a wild night chase down the Thames brings down the steam launch Aurora. The one-legged convict Jonathan Small is captured, but his companion, the islander Tonga, is shot, and the iron treasure box proves to be empty: Small has scattered the jewels in the river. Small then tells his story of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, of a fortress at Agra, a murdered merchant, a pact among four men, and Sholto's betrayal. Watson's romance with Mary, freed from the barrier of her wealth, ends in their engagement. Written quickly for Lippincott's Magazine, the novel is a fast adventure that also shows Doyle's medical eye and his era's imperial assumptions, including a crude, prejudiced description of Tonga that teachers should name honestly.
Top Lessons
A gifted mind and a bad habit
Holmes defends his cocaine use as relief from boredom; Watson calls it ruin. Doyle lets the doctor have the last moral word, and later stories show Holmes giving it up.
Treasure and its cost
Nearly everyone touched by the Agra treasure is destroyed or corrupted by it. Watson is glad when it is lost.
Empire seen from London
The backstory brings the violence of British India into a London drawing room. Students should note both the drama and the period's prejudices.
Verified Quotes
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
“Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.”
“love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things.”
Medical Lens
The opening is a classic literary portrait of recreational cocaine use, written when cocaine was a new, legal medical drug; Watson, a doctor, warns of tissue damage and lasting harm. A plant-alkaloid poison causes Bartholomew's death.
- Ch. 1
Holmes injects a seven-per-cent solution of cocaine; Watson objects on medical grounds.
- Ch. 5-6
Bartholomew's rigid death grin from a poisoned thorn.