46 pages • 1 hour read
Arthur Conan DoyleA Study in Scarlet
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1887A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Country of the Saints”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “A Flight for Life”
Ferrier goes into town to send Hope a letter. When he arrives home, the sons of Elders Stangerson and Drebber are there. The young men immediately start making their case for why Lucy should pick one over the other. Stangerson claims to be the better pick because he only has four wives, while Drebber has seven, but Drebber claims this does not matter as he has more money and can support them all regardless. Enraged, Ferrier threatens them not to come back unless invited. As they flee, Stangerson and Drebber warn that Ferrier will pay for going against the will of the Elders. No one has ever gone against Mormon authority this way, and others have been killed for less.
The next day, Ferrier finds a small square of paper pinned above his bed, warning that he has 29 days left to make amends. The threat is open-ended, which terrifies Ferrier more than if it had been specific. He also wonders how the paper got there, as he had carefully locked all the doors and hired a lookout. Each subsequent day, the countdown continues as a new number appears somewhere in the house. Ferrier cannot catch the culprit.
The days go by, but Hope does not appear. Ferrier begins to lose hope, knowing that he cannot navigate the wilderness around them if they try to escape on their own. Hope appears on the final night, having crawled over Ferrier’s land to avoid being spotted by any of the posted sentinels watching over the property. He advises they leave immediately. They gather whatever food, water, and money they can manage, and sneak out of the house.
They are nearly spotted by one of the cornfields, but Hope manages to hide them. They overhear a sign and countersign their pursuers are using. Once they reach the mountains, Hope leads them on a treacherous path, but the thought of safety and freedom pushes them onward. They come across one final sentinel, but Ferrier and Jefferson trick him using the countersign they heard earlier.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Avenging Angels”
Hope, Ferrier, and Lucy continue to travel across the mountains throughout the night, stopping rarely and briefly. The next day, their provisions run out, so Hope leaves Ferrier, Lucy, and their horses in a small cave and goes to find food. He wanders for miles in search of game and eventually stumbles across a bighorn. He brings it down with his rifle and then cuts off some meat because the entire thing is too large to carry. On his way back to the caves, he gets lost; by the time he finds his way, five hours have passed.
When Hope nears the cave, he panics when no one answers his calls. The cave is deserted, but there are signs a large party of men have been there. He assumes Ferrier and Lucy must have been captured and taken back to Salt Lake City, but notices a fresh mound of dirt nearby. A stick planted in the dirt holds a piece of paper saying “John Ferrier, Formerly of Salt Lake City, Died August 4th” (99). There is no second grave, so Hope concludes they must have just taken Lucy so that she could fulfill their plans to make her a wife.
Hope’s despair quickly turns to a desire for revenge. It takes him six days to walk back to the outskirts of Salt Lake City, where Cowper, a Mormon he previously worked for, quickly tells him that Lucy has been married to Drebber and that the entire ordeal has put her on death’s door. As Hope camps in the mountains, Lucy dies a month later. Drebber is not concerned, however, because all he really wanted was to inherit Ferrier’s property.
Before Lucy is buried, Hope descends from the mountains and takes the wedding ring off her finger, refusing to let her be buried with it. He then attempts to kill Drebber and Stangerson when opportunity strikes. They increase security, send hunting parties after him, and stop going outside at night. Eventually, the attempts on their lives stop, so they believe Hope has given up. In reality, he is more resolved than ever, but needs to find more comfortable living arrangements to regain his health. He realizes it will take years to enact his revenge and that he will need money. After five years of working in the mines in Nevada, he returns to Salt Lake City, only to discover that a schism has fractured the church, and the younger Drebber and Stangerson have left.
Hope pursues them around America, and eventually finds them in Ohio. However, Drebber recognizes him and flees to Europe with Stangerson, now his secretary. Resolved to catch them, Hope raises the funds needed to make the journey to Europe. From there, he tracks them to London.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.”
The novel shifts back to the present, and Watson’s first-person narration resumes.
Hope calms down, apologizes for struggling, and admits that he admires how well Holmes was able to pursue him. In Scotland Yard, Hope asks to tell his story now, rather than at his trial; he has an aortic aneurism from the extreme conditions he endured during his wilderness period and may not survive much longer. Watson confirms that Hope’s heart could give out at any moment.
Hope claims that he is not a common cutthroat and that Drebber and Stangerson deserved to die because they were responsible for killing John and Lucy Ferrier. Because so much time had passed and no court would convict them, he took matters into his own hands. Twenty years ago, he and Lucy were engaged to marry, but she was forced to marry Drebber, which caused her to die of a broken heart. Hope then took her wedding ring to ensure it was the last thing Drebber saw before he died.
In London, he took a job as a cab driver, and spent his days following his targets, waiting for them to slip up so that he could strike. His opportunity came when he overheard them arguing at a train station after missing a train to Liverpool. Drebber was determined to go back to their boarding house alone. Hope followed him there, observed him enter several drinking houses on the way, and then witnessed him being chased away by Arthur Charpentier. Drebber then hailed Hope’s cab, and Hope took him to the vacant apartment on Brixton Road. When they arrived, Drebber was too drunk to realize it was not his hotel and needed to be helped inside. Hope revealed his identity to Drebber, terrifying him.
At one of his past jobs as a janitor at a laboratory, Hope obtained two poison pills that he has carried around with him since. He kept the pills in little boxes, each accompanied by a harmless pill. He forced Drebber to pick one of the pills, and ate the leftover himself—this way, fate would decide who lived and who died. As Drebber died, Hope showed him the ring and headed out. Soon after, he realized that he had dropped the ring and went back to get it, only to run into a police officer. He pretended to be drunk to get away.
Hope then went to find Stangerson. Stangerson refused to go outside after Drebber disappeared, so eventually Hope climbed in the window. Stangerson attacked him, and Hope stabbed him in the heart in self-defense. He then went back to working as a cabby again, until a young boy hired him for 221B, which brought him to Holmes.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Conclusion”
Hope dies before his trial. Holmes comments that Lestrade and Gregson will be disappointed because they will not get the same publicity now. Watson can’t see why they would get any kind of credit for solving the case, but Holmes assures him that what you actually do matters less than what you can convince people you’ve done. Nonetheless, Holmes is happy—the case as it is one of the most interesting ones he’s seen.
Holmes then explains how he solved the case, claiming it was quite simple when one can reason backward. From his examination outside the Brixton apartment, he knew that the murderer arrived in a cab and deduced the type by looking at the tracks left in the road. He then measured the murderer’s stride to determine his height. He concluded that Drebber died by poison—and knew it—based on the look of fear on his face and the smell of poison on his lips. The wedding ring meant that the crime was carried out by a past lover that had been wronged. Holmes telegrammed the police in Cleveland to enquire about the involved parties by using the letters found at the scene of the crime; Cleveland authorities confirmed that Drebber and Hope were old rivals in a romantic dispute. With all of the information available, Holmes saw no reason why the murderer would not go back to driving his cab, so he enlisted the help of Wiggins’s gang to track him down and bring the cab to 221B Baker Street, so Holmes could make the arrest.
Watson is astonished and decides to publish his account of the case to provide the public with the true versions of events, and so that Holmes gets the credit he deserves.
Part 2, Chapters 4-7 Analysis
The final chapters reiterate the importance of Perspective and Interpretation. By narrating the full context of what Hope has gone through, he becomes less a bloodthirsty murderer and more a tragic and sympathetic figure. The novel has thus avoided the mistake made by the newspapers Doyle mocked earlier—relying on only one narrow lens to present its story. Instead, the novel literally shifts perspective, by moving from Watson’s first-person account to an omniscient narrator. Doyle thus resorts to one of the features of the realist novel, which often uses third-person narration to clarify to readers to take the depiction as objective and factual. By telling Hope’s sad tale, the novel thus veers away from the as-yet unformed detective genre. Most future Holmes stories would prevent readers’ emotional investment in the victims or perpetrators of the crimes Holmes solves, but here, Doyle attempts the wider, more worldly scope that non-genre novels of his time often had.
As befits a tale hinging on doomed love, hearts become an important symbol in the novel, representing love, desire, anger, and life. Stangerson is stabbed in the heart, an unusually precise attack that hits exactly the organ associated with passion. Meanwhile, Hope, the man deprived of the love of his life is so fundamentally altered by tragedy that befalls Lucy and Ferrier at the hands of the Mormons that his heart literally changes sizes due to an aortic aneurism—an ailment he picks up from spending too much time in the harsh conditions of the wilderness, no longer functioning correctly and bleeding so much that Hope can use arterial spray to write the word “RACHE” on the wall. Prior to Lucy’s death, Hope was kind and helpful, with an optimistic outlook in life (as his name implies); now, even Drebber barely recognized him. After the murders, Hope’s heart almost immediately gives out, suggesting that his desire for revenge and justice was the only thing sustaining him. Finally, Lucy too dies a month after her forced marriage, of the romantic diagnosis of a broken heart.
Lucy’s depiction highlights the novel’s stereotypical presentation of women and their lack of agency. At no point does Lucy assert any power, and instead is used as a plot device. Initially, she exists as merely as an object of desire for passers-by: “Many a wayfarer upon the high road which ran by Ferrier’s farm felt long-forgotten thoughts revive in their mind as they watched her lithe girlish figure tripping through the wheatfields” (77). Then, although she is rides a horse with “the ease and grace of a true child of the West” (77), she becomes a damsel in distress for Hope to rescue from a drove of cattle. Drebber and Stangerson see her as an object—a means to acquire her father’s property. Finally, she is forcibly married off and dies, providing Hope with the motivation behind his revenge arc.
With Hope finally captured, Holmes is willing to fully explain how he solved the case through The Power of Observation, Logic, and Deduction. His flair for the dramatic means that this reveal comes when it has the biggest impact. Holmes’s claims that the solution is actually quite simple teases both Watson and the reader, who have ostensibly observed the same clues as Holmes but cannot understand how to connect them. As he walks step-by-step through his thought process, he makes use of details that his colleagues failed to notice, explaining that all of these facts make “a chain of logical sequences without a break or flaw” (120). The process illustrates the importance of observation in Holmes’s method of deductive reasoning because it makes each observation crucial to the final conclusion; without a single one, the chain would break down. This endgame disambiguation of the crime would become a mainstay of the detective genre, often resulting in the classic scene of the investigator calling all the suspects together in a room to take them through the solution and reveal the perpetrator. One of the important features of this kind of mystery novel is the fact that every single detail fits neatly; the detective’s main function is to restore social order by organizing the seeming chaos of clues into a complete schema.
Hope’s dogged pursuit of Drebber and Stangerson mirrors Watson’s description of Holmes at the crime scene: “I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent” (28). This further aligns the two as equals and explains why they both have such high admiration for one another. Despite operating on different sides of the law, they recognize something of themselves in each other and appreciate the mental duel.
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