Sign of Four Context

•He was born in Edinburgh in 1859 to Irish parents.
•Like Watson he was also a surgeon, having qualified in medicine in 1881, he went on to work on Steamers and a whaling boat.   •He lived in Portsmouth and divided his time between Writing and Medicine. •His son, brother and two nephews all died during WW1. This lead him to become interested in spiritualism later in life.
•He was knighted in 1902, not for his stories, but for a pamphlet he wrote in support of the Boer War.
•He introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” in 1887; “The Sign of Four” was written in 1890.
•He died of a heart attack in 1930. 

•There are some features of a typical Victorian crime novel in ‘The Sign of Four’. The ‘locked room’ murder and the theft of treasure are both common themes. •One seems impossible to solve and the other suggests a real threat to Holmes’ readers. •Conan Doyle based Holmes on a real doctor called Joseph Bell and a fictional detective called Dupin, created by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe in 1841. 

The text is written in 1890 but is set in 1888.

1887 saw Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee celebrations in the summer months.... but by the Autumn of 1888 the Autumn of Terror was just beginning.. 

In London's East End, Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper, a serial killer of women haunted the streets... he was never caught, 

Although the novel is set in 1888 predominently, it also features flashbacks to the 1882 and 1857. 

 1882-  is the year Captain Morstan went “missing”/died; Major Sholto died of Fright and theyear the pearls started arriving for Mary

1857-  Is the year of the Indian Mutiny and the uprising against colonial rule and when Jonathan Small was serving in India. It is also the year The Sign of Four were formed and the Year they stole the Agra treasure. 

•In the Victorian period the population increased and many people began to move from the countryside to the towns and cities to work in factories.
•Living conditions were often cramped with one family per room and the whole street would share an outside toilet and a water tap.
•There was a great divide between the rich and poor. •Sherlock Holmes knows his way all over London.  When Watson is lost in places he has never visited Holmes is always certain of his location. Holmes’ knowledge of London is another way of showing that he is like a human computer. •Conan Doyle uses the different areas of  London as a way of mapping what sorts of people we might expect to find in each place. Charles Booth, a philanthropist, took a map charting the poverty levels in London. 

Arthur Conan Doyle used Sherlock Holmes to explore new methods of detection.

Fingerprints

Sherlock Holmes was quick to realize the value of fingerprint evidence. The first case in which fingerprints are mentioned is The Sign of Four, published in 1890. Scotland Yard did not begin to use fingerprints until 1901.

Handwriting

Conan Doyle, a true believer in handwriting analysis, exaggerates Holmes’s abilities to interpret documents. Holmes is able to tell gender, make deductions about the character of the writer, and even compare two samples of writing and deduce whether the persons are related. This is another area where Holmes has written a monograph (on the dating of documents). Handwritten documents figure in nine stories.

Footprints

•Holmes also uses footprint analysis to identify culprits throughout his fictional career, from the very first story to the 57th story (The Lion’s Mane published in 1926). Holmes analyses footprints on quite a variety of surfaces: clay soil, snow, carpet, dust, mud, blood, ashes, and even a curtain. • Yet another one of Sherlock Holmes’s monographs is on the topic (“The tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of Plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses”).  Notice how he analyses Tonga’s footprint, he deduces that it cannot belong to a Hindu or a Muslim.

Dogs

Conan Doyle provides us with an interesting array of dog stories and analyses. In two cases Holmes employs dogs to follow the movements of people. In The Sign of Four, Toby initially fails to follow the odour of creosote to find Tonga, the pygmy from the Andaman Islands. And of course, Holmes mentions yet another monograph on the use of dogs in detective work.

•The Sign of Four has a heavy theme of Justice and Injustice permeating its pages. •Sherlock Holmes has the cryptic mystery to solve for Mary Morstan whilst Conan Doyle also presents the ineffectiveness of the Police force within his novella.
•He does this as he wants the reader to be empathetic to Sherlock and his incredible skills – Sherlock is portrayed to be even more intelligent then Athelney Jones and the police force.
•This view point towards the police was typical of the time as in 1888, Jack the Ripper prowled the streets of Whitechapel, and unfortunately Inspector Frederick Abberline and his men of H division did not manage to capture the villain… It remains a cold case to this day and is, itself shrouded with mystery.

•Jonathan Small refers to ‘the great mutiny’ in India.  Not surprisingly the British made enemies among the Indians who were supposed to submit to their rule without question. 
•This uprising was crushed by the British army in 1858 but it demonstrated the strength of the Indian population and the British introduced reforms to improve conditions for those whose country they had invaded and colonised.

Despite the fact that there was a woman on the throne women in Victorian England had a very restricted life.  They had no vote and could not own property.  There were few jobs available to them and they usually had to rely on marrying a man to gain financial stability. 

•This comes from a poem which celebrates what a Victorian woman should be: a devoted mother and a submissive wife.  Mary Morstan is a strong character but she is still following Victorian conventions by choosing to be a governess. • In the novel she is shielded from some of the most disturbing parts of her own mystery.  She comforts the hysterical house keeper (two stereotypes of women) while Holmes and Watson discover the victim and the crime scene. •Watson comments that Mary behaves ‘after the angelic fashion of women’ and in the way she presents her story and the clues in her possession.  However Sherlock, generally has a low opinion of women and of marriage: ‘Women are never to be entirely trusted – not the best of them.’

•There are some uncomfortable attitudes towards Indians and those from other parts of the world in the novel.  The reader isn’t supposed to see Sherlock Holmes as racist, he is reflecting the attitudes of Victorian society.
•Tonga is described as a ‘black cannibal’ and a ‘savage’.
•Jonathan Small describes India when ‘two hundred thousand black devils let loose, and the country was perfect hell’.  He preferred it when it was ‘still and peaceful, to all appearance, as Surrey or Kent’.

•Researchers have traditionally defined pygmies as populations with an average adult male height of no more than 155 centimetres, or about 5 feet 1 inch. •Hunter-gatherer groups classified as pygmies live in various regions including the Andaman Islands. •There exists an age-old belief that all Andaman Island tribes were cannibals. The Greek astronomer Ptolemy wrote of an "Island of Cannibals" somewhere in the Bay of Bengal in the second century AD.
•Marco Polo didn't help matters in the 1290s when he described the Andamanese as "a brutish and savage race… [who] kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon.“
•There is no evidence that any of them were, except that some tribes wore the bones of their ancestors as jewellery (including the skulls), which they wore strapped to their backs. It would have been easy to mistake such people for cannibals. Who'd stick around long enough to find out that they weren't?