Within the story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, some of the true thoughts of Victorian people about other cultures and ethnicities are brought to light. A topic constantly mentioned within the story is the topic of foreign people, especially Indian people. The act of traveling to \u201cthe tropics\u201d was thought by the female protagonist to have changed her stepfather, making his behavior more violent and strange, and the \u201cIndians\u201d in the backyard are also thought to be uncivilized (Doyle, 42). As well, the \u201cspeckled band\u201d was really a snake from India, further continuing the idea that Victorians did not find comfort in things considered to be foreign. As the Victorian Era was also known as an age of conquest in Britain, many of the citizens believed that their country was the only country that was truly civilized, and looked down upon other peoples as being savage. This idea is explored within Doyle\u2019s story, as characters such as Helen say lines that are unkind towards others, such as \u201cIt must have been those wretched gypsies in the plantation\u201d (Doyle, 44). The sensation genre was known to try to elicit strong reactions within the readers of these stories and novels, and so a story involving foreign people from a different continent may have elicited fear and a sense of wonder about these people. The story involves the notion held by many that foreign people and their lands were uncivilized, and so including a foreign animal as the murder weapon may have caused the people reading in Britain to further validate their opinions that foreign lands were dangerous and their people uncivilized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Within the story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, some of the true thoughts of Victorian people about other cultures and ethnicities are brought to light. A topic constantly mentioned within the story is the topic of foreign people, especially Indian people. The act of traveling to \u201cthe tropics\u201d was … Continue reading Victorian Opinions in Sherlock Holmes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125359],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}