Sherlock Holmes — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Sherlock Holmes
Characters
What you need to know
How Conan Doyle presents Sherlock Holmes, and how the character develops across the text: a brilliant, cold reasoner who lives for work, solves the case by science and disguise, and ends the novel reaching for the cocaine-bottle.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I crave for mental exaltation', 'I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection', 'I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?', 'The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning', 'like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent', 'what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law', 'I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely', 'There is something positively inhuman in you at times', 'there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer'.
Context: Joseph Bell's observation as a model for Holmes's method, and cocaine as a legal drug in the 1880s.
