Conan Doyle Influenced By The World Around Him
...Him
The entire Sherlock Holmes series isn't just about Holmes solving impossible mysteries. Doyle originally was a doctor, but found that his life was leading him in a more literary profession. Everything that happened around Doyle, historically and personally, influenced his novels. Religion had always been a major part of his life, even in his education. The Hound of Baskervilles was a sort of biographical response to what the spiritualism movement was metaphorically, and what the people who followed it had to put with.
Born Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, Doyle never knew he would later in life become the author of one of the most beloved mystery characters in all of literary history. He was educated at Stonyhurst a preparatory school, but he soon afterwards became an agnostic. From there he went on to Edinburgh University, and it was there that he met a man that he would use as the base of the Sherlock Holmes character on-a professor named Joseph Bell. While still in the field of medicine, he spent a majority of his free time writing stories. His first major work was A Study in Scarlet written in 1887, which is where he first premiered his character Sherlock Holmes. While he was working as an eye doctor he killed off the Holmes in "The Final Problem" written in 1893, to have more time to work on.
The basic breakdown of the novel's plot is rather simple. Mr. Jack Stapleton wanted the wealth of the Baskervilles' for himself, so he evoked an old curse supposedly placed on the family to arouse mystery to cover his trails so that he could get away clean. From there, the novel revolves around the mystery of an old curse, and this mysterious hound that seems to be plaguing the Baskerville family. In the end, Holmes uses a young member of the Baskervilles family as bait to lour Stapleton out of his facade and incriminate him. The hound itself was never really a...
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