” ‘The moor is very sparsely inhabited, and those who live near each other are very much thrown together. For this reason I saw a good deal of Sir Charles Baskerville. With the exception of Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, and Mr. Stapleton, the naturalist, there are no other men of education within many miles. Sir Charles was a retiring man, but the chance of his illness brought us together, and a community of interests in science kept us so.” (Conan Doyle 19).<\/p>\n
Within this sentence, there is a great contradiction. This comes from Dr. Mortimer’s relaying of information about the case to Holmes, and so this description of Sir Charles’ social circle functions as a cast of suspects, but there is a crucial flaw: Dr. Mortimer does not actually list out all potential suspects. In the first sentence, he defines that because of the population of the moors, everyone<\/em> who lives there knows each other (and thus, hypothetically, would know of Sir Charles’ habits of going on a walk every night). However, Dr. Mortimer does not actually list everyone. He specifically lists all ‘men of education’ in the area, which is not only limits the pool in terms of gender, but one of class, as having a higher education has a consistent correlation with having the level of wealth accesible only to the upper class, and this was certainly true in victorian england as well. There are obvious implications to this exclusion: upper class (white) men are the only people worth noting, at least to Dr. Mortimer’s eyes. This is not exactly surprising, considering that Dr. Mortimer is a devout phrenologist. What is more fascinating is that this personhood blindness directly interferes with any investigation attempt, because Sherlock Holmes is unaware of anyone else who resides near Sir Charles, and it is highly likely that any women or people of lower class or people of color in the area would have a greater chance of having a grievance with Sir Charles than the deceased’s pseudoscience friends. Dr. Mortimer’s inability to see anyone who does resemble him as a person hurts his chances of solving the death of his friend. Potentially, if Sherlock Holmes were to point this out, it could be intentional, but he the usually astute detective makes no mention of it. Considering how much Arthur Conan Doyle wants Sherlock Holmes to look correct, we must imagine this inability to see people who are not wealthy white men as people extends to the author as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ” ‘The moor is very sparsely inhabited, and those who live near each other are very much thrown together. For this reason I saw a good deal of Sir Charles Baskerville. With the exception of Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, and Mr. Stapleton, the naturalist, there are no other men of education within many miles. … Continue reading Sherlock Holmes And The Case Of The Old Boy’s Club<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2023-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499","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\/5354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}