A Study in Charlotte

Fiction | Novel | YA

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Drugs

Because of Charlotte’s addiction, drugs are found at multiple points in the story. They symbolize a loss of self-control and relate to the theme of Mind and Heart. As brilliant as Charlotte’s mind is, it can be either her greatest resource or her greatest weakness. She lacks the ability to turn off her thoughts. Since she has been trained from childhood to ignore emotion and focus intensely on observing everything around her, she has lost the ability to tune things out. At one point, she tells James, “I was too soft on the inside, you see. No exoskeleton. I felt everything, and still everything bored me. I was like…like a radio playing five stations at once, all of them static” (251).

When her boredom became too acute, she used cocaine as a stimulant, and when her thoughts raced too wildly or conjured painful memories, she used narcotics to calm herself. Heroin was initially her drug of choice until she switched to oxycodone, which allowed her to fall prey to Dobson, setting Bryony’s criminal plans in motion. Drugs and other chemicals also factor into the novel as plot devices. Dobson is poisoned with arsenic and snake venom. Later, Charlotte fabricates a poisoned box to throw the police off her trail. Finally, James is scratched by a lab-created viral toxin and nearly dies. In all these instances, Charlotte must use her mind as a resource to solve the toxic mysteries.

Relatives

A Study in Charlotte abounds with intrusive relatives. They symbolize the constraints and obligations that bind members of a kin group and support the theme of Family Legacies. Some family member or other continually reminds Charlotte and James of what’s expected of them because of their illustrious surnames. Charlotte’s mother and her brother Milo are instrumental in banishing her to a US prep school. Later, Milo sends his operatives to keep an eye on his young sister, presumably because he regards her as incompetent.

James receives direction from both his mother in London and his father in Connecticut. He resents his father’s interference more because he feels abandoned by Mr. Watson. His anger increases when he realizes that his father has conspired with Leander Holmes to bring the two youngest members of their respective families together.

Even the Moriarty family is prone to interfere in personal affairs. They disapprove of August’s association with Charlotte, yet Lucien helps his brother supply her with cocaine. At another point, Lucien joins forces with Bryony to exact vengeance on Charlotte. Presumably, they conduct this scheme without August’s knowledge or consent. The novel ends with even more family involvement as Charlotte invites James to spend part of the winter holiday at her family home in Sussex. This many family members under one roof suggests that another crime wave is approaching.

Holmes Stories

The novel’s title, A Study in Charlotte, is a thinly veiled homage to the very first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet. The novel contains many references to other Holmes stories. This recurring motif relates to the theme of Reality Versus Fiction. Bryony explicitly constructs her crimes to parallel various short stories in the Sherlockian canon. Although Dobson is poisoned with arsenic, the murder scene is peppered with clues that appear in the Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” The blue plastic gem shoved down Elizabeth’s throat reflects the jewel hidden in the crop of a goose in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” When Charlotte seeks to deflect suspicion away from herself and James, she sends a box laced with poison to her dorm room and arranges for someone to attack her roommate. That poisoned box derives from “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.”

Realizing that her scheme of implicating the amateur sleuths has been derailed, Bryony turns the tables by using the “Dying Detective” for her own purposes. She coats the spring handle of James’s dorm closet door with a lab-created viral toxin. When he scratches himself, he absorbs the toxin and has only 24 hours to live. Bryony constructs this elaborate charade with the express purpose of making Charlotte understand that her crimes are taking place in the real world, and people can die as a result. The adventures may seem enthralling in print, but living with the consequences is another matter entirely.