The Hound of the Baskervilles

For 500 years, ever since a huge dog ripped out the throat of Hugo Baskerville on the moorland of his estate, tales of a gigantic hound that roams the territory have haunted Baskerville Hall. Fear of this creature gets the better of the ailing Sir Charles Baskerville, who dies of a heart attack when he witnesses a spectral beast.

Stories of this creature inflame belief in the supernatural, and the hound becomes the centerpiece of a debate between those of a superstitious nature, such as Dr. Mortimer, and the rationalist Sherlock Holmes. He figures out that the hound is actually a large dog kept underfed by Stapleton, who also paints its head with phosphorus to add visual terror to the hungry, howling creature. The hound’s purpose is to terrify the owners of Baskerville Hall into leaving, or, failing that, to kill the current resident so that the wealthy estate may fall into the hands of Stapleton, a distant relative.

Stapleton springs the hound on Sir Henry as he walks home, but Holmes shoots the beast dead before it can kill the baronet. The great dog “was not a pure bloodhound and it was not a pure mastiff; but it appeared to be a combination of the two—gaunt, savage, and as large as a small lioness” (63). A hound that nightly patrols the eerie wilds of the moorland that surrounds the gloomy Baskerville Hall makes the tale into a horror story as well as a crime mystery.

The moor—a vast, desolate area of flatlands, rolling hills, and occasional craggy hilltops, mostly covered in low shrubs and grasses—surrounds Baskerville Hall and extends for miles. It is a lonely, sparsely populated place where death can come quickly, and murders remain unsolved. In the story, a great hound roams the moor and kills hapless visitors. In the moorlands, strange events quickly grow into supernatural legends. The moor, with its residue of prehistoric walls, represents ancient times when gods and demons must have roamed the Earth. Watson says, “As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you” (31).

Holmes’s penetration of the moor, his revelation of its murderous resident Stapleton, and his defeat of the mysterious hound symbolize the victory of modernity over the superstitious past.