The Speckled Band - Arthur Conan Doyle :: English Literature

The Speckled Band - Arthur Conan Doyle â€Å"What appeal would the story ‘the speckled band have had for a Victorian audience† The story â€Å"The Speckled Band† was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and published in â€Å"The Strand Magazine† in 1892. The story contains the very famous and popular character Sherlock Holmes. In this essay I will discuss the popularity of the Holmes stories for a Victorian audience. To do this I will look at the use of realistic locations, the originality of the Holmes character and the use of a first person narrator (Dr. Watson). â€Å"The Speckled Band† is a story that portrays life in the Victorian audience. In this story a woman pleas for help from Holmes about the death of her sister Julia. The story goes on to look for the audience to convict the woman’s stepfather. Holmes finds out the stepfather is planning to kill her and finds out that the stepfather was the cause of her sister’s death. The only motive Holmes had foe the stepfather for killing his stepdaughter was for the inheritance. He also commits the murders by cleverly training a snake to climb down a rope bell and on to the bed and poisoning the victim. The Victorian readers thought that Holmes was a real person in those days. This realism is created because Holmes lived at a real address in the stories, at Baker St. 221B and the stories are written as real cases. Holmes is a very charismatic and mysterious. In one of the stories he is called â€Å"the most perfect reasoning and observing machine† in ‘A scandal in Bohemia.’ He is shown as the Victorian ‘new man’, who uses his brains and scientific deductions to solve things. We are told how he makes â€Å"deductions as swift as intuitions.† He is also chivalrous and often helps women in distress, and he never accepts payment for his heroics, whilst he helps people within the Victorian community. He seems to be a loner and is seen as an individual and he doesn’t seem to like other people. Helen Stoner is the daughter of a tyrant of a stepfather where she is woman in anguish and agony. She is worried about becoming a victim as her sister was before her. Being a woman in distress is a key element in Victorian stories as well as the Holmes stories. She is seen as vulnerable and scared like a ‘hunted animal.’ Helen appears to be melodramatic, for example she wears a â€Å"black veil† when she visits Holmes, years after her sister’s death, and shows the audience that she is deeply distressed.