+ GAIN AN INTRODUCTION TOONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS

NOVELS EVER WRITTEN, ANDONE OF LITERATURE’S MOST

FAMOUS CHARACTERS+ START TO CONSIDER THECONTEXT SURROUNDING A

WORK OF LITERATURE+ CONSIDER ASPECTS OFGENRE, BOTH DETECTIVE

FICTION AND THE GOTHIC

YOU WILL NEED...+ THESE EXERCISES ARE

DESIGNED TO BE TACKLEDBEFORE STUDENTS HAVEGOT TO GRIPS WITH THE

NOVEL, BUT THE EDITIONUSED AS THE REFERENCEFOR THIS ARTICLE IS THE

VINTAGE EDITION WITH ANINTRODUCTION BY RUTH

RENDELL (2008)

TODAY YOU

WILL...

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If excuse were needed forapplying art and drama-basedapproaches to the teaching ofthe Hound of the Baskervilles,then one justification is thatseveral of the characteristicsassociated with Sherlock Holmeshave nothing to do with theoriginal stories and everything to do with the pictorial, theatricaland cinematic ‘after-life’ of thetales. It is thanks to SidneyPaget’s illustrations for thestories in The Strand magazinethat the character gained hisdeer-stalker and cape, and weowe the phrase ‘Elementary, mydear Watson...’ to the Americanactor William Gillette, who wasthe first to depict Holmes on thestage first in New York in 1899and London in 1901.

The Hound of the Baskervillesas an early 20th century work of fiction may present modernyoung readers with a number of challenges. It is couched inlanguage that may be quitearchaic and demanding forsome; relying for its atmosphereon some quite lengthy (thoughwonderful) descriptions ofDartmoor and Baskerville Hall.What follows then are somesuggestions as to how to getstudents engaged with thenovel in advance of theirreading it, and also aware ofsome of the circumstances thatsurrounded its creation.

ENGLISH | KS4

Learners will be desperate to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'sclassic work of detective fiction, following Jerome

Monahan’s engaging workshop activities based on the text...

HUNTINGTHE HOUND

Begin – paradoxically – with thedeath of Holmes in a story written in1893 called The Final Problem. In itConan Doyle fulfilled his dream ofgetting shot of a character that hadbecome burdensome to him; only inunderstanding the impact of this actof literary assassination canstudents come close to appreciatingthe joy and excitement at thedetective’s resurrection* in 1901 forthe Hound of the Baskervilles.

Get students into a circle andthen explain that they are to readthe following passage from the FinalProblem. The challenge is that eachstudent says only the next word insequence but that withconcentration and speed, theperformance must sound like asingle person reading. If there arelapses in concentration and gaps

then don’t be slow to take it back tothe beginning again – at least thatway students get a chance to hearthe language several times.

“An examination by expertsleaves little doubt that a personalcontest between the two menended.... in their reeling over, lockedin each other's arms. Any attempt atrecovering the bodies wasabsolutely hopeless, and there,deep down in that dreadful caldronof swirling water and seething foam,will lie for all time the mostdangerous criminal and theforemost champion of the law oftheir generation.” (The Final Problem – StrandMagazine, 1893)

Now invite the students to re-readthe passage around the circle, butthis time add an action to thespeaking of their word. This is easyenough for the ‘lexical’ words –verbs; nouns and adjectives that are

immediately image-generating, butstudents can also have fun with the‘functional’ language: the articles,conjunctions and prepositions. Thisshould prove a lot of fun, but it isalso a great way of engagingstudents with language, perhaps bygetting students to make the casefor one of their words being themost evocative or helping themspot where Watson’s shifts from amore factual tone to an emotionalone – possibly from the word‘hopeless’ onwards, as he recallsthe terrible nature of the site of hisfriend’s death.

*In the strictest sense Conan Doylewas not ‘resurrecting’ Holmes inThe Hound of the Baskervilles since the story is set before his death-plunge of 1893. Thecharacter’s actual revival would onlyoccur in The Adventure of theEmpty House (1903).

STARTER ACTIVITY

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written in crude block capitals.

If this is beyond the call of

duty, then provide simply the

facts as offered in the novel,

namely, that the letters were cut

with scissors from an article in a

previous day’s newspaper. They

were not neatly arranged in a line

but some ‘appear higher than

others’. Meanwhile, there is an

indication that the pen or ink well

were running short of ink as the

writer needed to renew the ink

on several occasions merely to

get through the simple address

on the envelope.

Invite students to come up

with as many questions as they

can. No solutions are necessary,

since the point of this is to

suggest how much evidence

might be derived from so

seemingly ordinary an item. It has

been said that the Sherlock

Holmes stories are not really

Invite students to practise saying

the following line to one another,

experimenting with different

registers or trying to make it

sound as sinister as possible: “Asyou value your life or your reasonkeep away from the moor.”

Explain that this is the

mysterious message received by

Sir Henry Baskerville at his

London hotel. The challenge is

then to come up with as many

possible ‘questions’ about the

note and its envelope that might

generate clues as to its writer. If

time and patience allow it would

be great to create a facsimile of

the message with the words cut

from a copy of the Times

newspaper apart from the word

‘MOOR’, which should be printed

in capitals in ink, presented in an

envelope with the address SIRHENRY BASKERVILLE,NORTHUMBERLAND HOTEL

HOLMES’METHOD

1

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ENGLISH | KS4

+ ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jerome Monahan hastaught for over 20 years. In 1999, after adecade working inLondon secondaryschools – both state andindependent – hebecame a freelanceteacher, educationalwriter and journalist. Hisbackground is English,drama, humanities andfilm/media studies.Borrowing from all thesedisciplines, he has since2000 devised anddelivered a broadprogramme of primaryand secondary inset andstudent workshopsacross the UK andinternationally. An ActiveApproaches To TheHound of the Baskervillesworkshop is one of themost recent additions to his repertoire.

End the lesson by distributing a list of ten possible candidates,with thumbnail sketches of their characters, for the principle evil-doer in the Hound of the Baskervilles (clearly, this will onlywork if the class is unaware of the solution!) An active approachmight be to get the students to take responsibility for acharacter individually or as a pair or three and then line up inorder of suspiciousness – ‘least’ to ‘most’. Having decided theirposition in the pecking order of potential evil, students have tojustify their allocation of guilt based on the slim character studywith which they have been provided.

SUMMARY

HOME LEARNINGStudents might like toinvestigate the story behindThe Hound of theBaskervilles. There are anumber of on-line sites where students can begintheir investigations, including History Today(tinyurl.com/tshound2); BBCDevon (tinyurl.com/tshound3);and Wikipedia:(tinyurl.com/tshound4)

ones in which the reader isinvited to play detective, spottingclues themselves that might leadthem to a solution – after all theirmain pleasure is beingastonished at Holmes’ powers ofdeduction and his ability to callupon obscure, cataloguedinformation, be it train timetablesor cigarette brands. And this maybe just your pupils’ view whenthey read the inferences thatHolmes draws from theBaskerville letter (Chapter 4,pages 33-34).

In an article in Sherlock magazine(Issue 53, 2003), Bert Coules –the adaptor of the tales for BBCradio – describes the Hound ofthe Baskervilles as less adetective story and more ‘a novelof landscape and atmosphereand weather and raw nature thana simple whodunit’. Conan Doylecame to know Dartmoor thanksto a tour he took of it with ayoung journalist called BertramFletcher Robinson. He described

HOLMES’LANDSCAPE

2

it in a letter to his mother: “It is avery great place, very sad andwild, dotted with the dwellings ofprehistoric man, strangemonoliths and huts and graves”(April 2, 1901). Students need tograsp how the Moor almostcomes to be a character in thenovel; an untamed region inwhich the legend of a hell houndmight be thought to havesubstance and which stands in contrast to modern civilisationas represented in the earlyLondon-set scenes and alsoHolmes’ rationality.

It is in Chapter 6 that Watson

first sees the Moor and BaskervilleHall. An active approach to thenumerous descriptive passagesmight involve breaking them up intosingle lines and giving these out tostudents to learn in a pair – thechallenge being to then perform theline as a chorus but with actionsadded, giving particular expressionto key words or capturing theunderlying mood. It is fascinatinghow this exercise can really helpstudents measure ‘the pulse’ of apiece of writing. It is highly likely thatthe line: ‘The road in front of us grewbleaker and wilder over huge russetand olive slopes, sprinkled withgiant boulders...’ will generategestures that suggest the openhorizon plus the occasionalinterruption posed by the word‘boulders’. The activity might alsohighlight the word ‘sprinkled’ whichrather counterpoints the scene’smenace in a way that may seempoor judgement on Conan Doyle’spart or carrying a suggestion ofWatson’s inherently positive(unimaginative?) outlookrepresented by so ‘domestic’ a term.

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