Context — The Sign of Four — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of The Sign of Four: Victorian London, the British Empire in India and the 1857 rebellion, the Andaman Islands, detective fiction,
drugs in the 1880s, and the attitudes to empire and race the novel shows, and how to read them critically.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
Publication: Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel, commissioned at a London dinner in 1889 by Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, published there in February 1890 and as a book that October.
Victorian London: the thick yellow fogs made by coal smoke, the Thames as a working river, and poor streets such as Lambeth beside the new suburbs.
The British Empire in India: rule by the East India Company, the rebellion of 1857 that Small calls 'the great mutiny', the Sikh soldiers who fought for the British, and the end of Company rule in 1858.
The Andaman Islands: the penal settlement at Port Blair, used after 1857 for rebels sentenced to transportation, where Small, Sholto and Morstan meet.
Detective fiction: Poe's Dupin as the first fictional detective, the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell's observation as a model for Holmes, and Holmes's claim that detection should be 'an exact science'.
Drugs in the 1880s: cocaine and morphine were legal, cocaine was a new medicine, and opium was widely taken as laudanum, a cheap medicine.
Empire and race: the novel's descriptions of Tonga, the Andaman Islanders and the Indian characters use the racial stereotypes of Victorian Britain, which the lessons explain and question rather than repeat.
