London — The Sign of Four — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
London
Themes
What you need to know
How Conan Doyle explores Victorian London as a foggy, sprawling and threatening city, from Baker Street to the Thames across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'See how the yellow fog swirls down the street', 'Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets', 'the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country', 'a questionable and forbidding neighbourhood', 'a row of shabby, two-storied brick houses in the lower quarter of Lambeth', 'the melancholy Plumstead Marshes', 'Somewhere in the dark ooze'.
Context: the coal-smoke fogs of Victorian London, the Thames as a working river, and the new suburbs spreading south.
