Sherlock Holmes Year 8 English Revision Guide

A Scandal in Bohemia

Plot Summary

At the start of the story we find the newly-married Watson returning on an impulse to his old

Baker Street quarters to see how Holmes is doing. Holmes once again shows his skill as a detective

by observing minute details about Watson’s appearance that proves he has served in Afghanistan.

Watson finds him with a royal client, the King of Bohemia, who requests Holmes’s help in his

private affairs. He is engaged to be married to a princess, but a former lover of his, the soprano

singer Irene Adler, has vowed to wreck the marriage. Irene threatens to expose the King’s former

affair with her by means of a compromising photograph. The King wants Holmes to try and get

this photograph away from her.

Holmes disguises himself as a groom and goes to the neighbourhood where Irene lives, to get

information. He learns that Irene is now seeing someone else. He arrives, coincidentally, when the

two of them are about to be married, and he is roped into attending the wedding as a witness. This

marriage increases the urgency of his quest to secure the photograph, as Irene and her new

husband are now about to leave the country.

For his next move, Holmes disguises himself as a clergyman and also enlists Watson’s help. He

goes to Irene’s house in his disguise and is, seemingly, caught up in an altercation in the street

outside, leaving him wounded. Irene has him brought into her house so that she can tend to him.

At this point Watson, having been instructed by Holmes, throws a smoke-bomb into the room, and

the people outside start crying fire. Holmes and Watson leave and Holmes explains what has just

happened.

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He arranged the scene outside the house and only pretended to be wounded, in order to gain entry

to Irene’s house. He further organised the false fire alarm to see where she would go in an

emergency. He knows that the photograph is one of her most important possessions and that in an

emergency she would rush to it first. Holmes has thus discovered where in the house the

photograph is hidden, and he resolves to return next day and take it for himself when Irene is not

about. During their walk home, a strange youth passes by and wishes Holmes goodnight. He is

surprised by this.

Next morning, on arriving at Irene's house, Holmes, Watson, and the King find that she has

already left, taking the photograph with her. Holmes is stunned at her ingenuity. She has left a

note explaining everything. Having been previously warned that the King might hire someone to

get the photograph from her, she guessed that Holmes was acting on the King’s behalf and had

deliberately gained entry to her house the night before in his disguise as a clergyman. Realising

this, she put on her own disguise as a young man and tracked Holmes and Watson back to Baker

Street before leaving the country. Although she has taken the incriminating photograph, she

declares that she will not use it against the King after all, as she now has married a better person

than he.

The King is relieved but Holmes is mortified, although also full of admiration at the way that Irene

has outwitted him. Watson makes Holmes's admiration for her quite clear at the very start of the

tale. To Holmes, then, Irene appears unique; in his eyes she holds a special place among women in

her rare combination of beauty, passion, intelligence and resolve.

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Characters

Sherlock Holmes

Dr Watson

Irene Adler

The King of Bohemia

What do we learn about this character?

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The Red-Headed League

Doctor John Watson steps into the home of his friend, the famous private detective Sherlock

Holmes. Watson, the story’s narrator, finds Holmes deep in conversation with Jabez Wilson, a

man who would be entirely unremarkable except for his blazing red hair. Holmes asks Watson to

stay and lend his assistance, claiming that he has never heard a case as bizarre as Jabez Wilson’s.

Wilson reveals that he is a pawnbroker and has an assistant named Vincent Spaulding, who is

working for half the usual salary to learn the business. Wilson says that Spaulding is a fine worker,

although he is interested in photography and often goes alone into the basement of the shop to

develop photos. About two months ago, Spaulding drew Wilson’s attention to an advertisement in

the paper for an opening in the League of Red-Headed Men.

According to Spaulding, the league is a foundation established by an eccentric and wealthy

American to promote the interests of redheaded men by paying them to perform small tasks.

Spaulding encouraged Wilson to apply, and the two went to the offices listed in the advertisement.

After fighting through a crowd of redheaded men waiting outside, Spaulding and Wilson made

their way to the manager, another redheaded man by the name of Duncan Ross, who promptly

hired Wilson. The league paid Wilson to copy pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, forbidding

him from leaving the office for any reason during his four-hour shifts.

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Wilson says that he worked for the league for eight weeks and was paid handsomely for his efforts.

The morning on which the story begins, however, Wilson arrived at the offices to find that the Red-

Headed League had been dissolved and that Duncan Ross was nowhere to be found. Wilson went

immediately to Sherlock Holmes, hoping that Holmes could help him find out whether he had

been the victim of a practical joke. Holmes asks Wilson a few questions about Vincent Spaulding

and discovers that Spaulding came to work for Wilson only about a month before the whole

mysterious affair began. Holmes tells Wilson that he will have an answer in a few days.

After smoking three pipes in a row, Holmes leaps up and asks Watson to accompany him to a

concert. Along the way, they stop in front of Wilson’s shop, where Holmes thumps his walking

stick on the pavement and knocks on the door to ask Spaulding for directions. After Spaulding and

Holmes finish talking, Holmes tells Watson that he believes that Spaulding is the fourth-smartest

man in London. Holmes also tells Watson that he saw on the knees of Spaulding’s trousers exactly

what he wanted to see. Even though Watson is mystified by these remarks, Holmes refuses to

explain them further and instead leads Watson around to a busy street behind Wilson’s shop.

Holmes notices aloud that there’s a bank behind Wilson’s shop, and, finished for the day, he and

Watson go to the concert.

After the concert, Holmes asks Watson to meet him at his office at ten o’clock that night, saying

that a serious crime is about to be committed. Watson agrees but is entirely bewildered by

Holmes’s actions. Watson notes that he and Holmes have seen and heard exactly the same

information about the case but that Holmes seems to have arrived at some conclusions that he

himself has failed to draw.

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That night, Watson meets up with Holmes, along with two other men—a Scotland Yard detective

named Peter Jones and a bank manager named Mr. Merryweather. Holmes says that the four men

are about to have a run-in with John Clay, a notorious criminal. The men depart in carriages to Mr.

Merryweather’s City and Suburban Bank—the same bank Holmes and Watson had discovered

behind Wilson’s shop. The four men wait for an hour in the darkness of the cellar filled with

French gold.

Suddenly, they notice a light shining through a crack in the floor. The light gets brighter and

brighter, until the crack finally widens and a man’s hand breaks through. The man climbs out of

the opening the floor and begins to help another man through when Holmes and Detective Jones

leap on the two men. They capture the first man, John Clay, also known as Jabez Wilson’s

hardworking assistant, Vincent Spaulding. The other man escapes through the crack in the floor.

Later that night, Holmes tells Watson how he solved the case. Holmes realised from the beginning

that the Red-Headed League was simply too preposterous to be real and that it must therefore

have been a ploy to get Wilson out of his shop for a few hours every day. The fact that Spaulding

was willing to work for so little money and spent a lot of time alone in the basement suggested to

Holmes that Spaulding was doing something illicit in the cellar. When he noticed the bank nearby,

Holmes had suspected that Spaulding was digging a tunnel to the bank. Holmes pounded on the

sidewalk outside Wilson’s shop to determine whether the ground was hollow underneath, and he

knocked on the door for directions so that he could see whether the knees of Spaulding’s pants

were worn away. The fact that the league dissolved so suddenly suggested to Holmes that the

robbery was imminent, and he was therefore able to prepare and capture John Clay.

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Characters

Sherlock Holmes

Dr Watson

Jabez Wilson

Vincent Spaulding/John Clay

Peter Jones

What do we learn about this character?

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The Police in Victorian London

Before the police

Before 1829, there was no proper police force in England. If someone wanted to investigate a crime

or find a criminal, they would have to do it themselves or pay someone to do it for them. If there

was a big problem with crime, then the army could be called up to help.

By 1829, this system just wasn’t working, particularly in London. London was such a big place and

so many crimes were being committed, that people realised there needed to be a better way of

investigating and preventing crime.

The Metropolitan Police – the first proper police force

In 1829, a politician called Sir Robert Peel came up with the idea of the Metropolitan Police, which

would be a police force for London. The Metropolitan Police would be made up of paid police

officers who would work together and follow rules about how they could investigate crime.

People were worried that the police would act like the army. To help make people feel better about

the new police force, their uniform was deliberately made in blue, rather than red which was then

an army colour. Police officers were only armed with a wooden truncheon.

London and the Police Force grow and grow

Over time, the Metropolitan Police became bigger and more important. They were set up in 1829,

not long before Oliver Twist was written. At this time, the Metropolitan Police had just 1,000

officers. By 1885 they had grown to have 13,000 officers. The police were still stretched though, as

over the same period of time, the population of London had exploded from around 1.5 million to

over 5 million.

Crime in Victorian London

Even though London now had a police force, people could still get away with crime. In 1888,

people from across London were horrified by the Whitechapel murders, when eleven women were

killed gruesomely in east London from 1888 to 1891. The police investigated this crime, but despite

all their efforts, the killer – known as Jack the Ripper – was never caught, and the murder cases

remain unsolved to this day.

Forensics

Unlike today, the police of Victorian London did not have access to the type of criminal forensic

investigative techniques we are used to. Instead they had to rely on simple clues, circumstantial

evidence, and their experience to solve a crime.

In the assessment, CHECK YOUR WRITING

•Are all your sentences accurate? Check that there are no run-on sentences or fragments. •Have you used capital letters correctly? You must use them at the start of a sentence and for proper nouns. •Have you used the correct tense throughout? •Do the subjects agree with the verbs? •Have you used apostrophes correctly? •Have you used quotation marks correctly? •Check your spelling, particularly common errors such as there/their and to/too

How to structure a paragraph:

Point> Evidence> Technique> Analyse> Link

Introduction

The primary purpose of an introductory paragraph is to identify the topic and purpose of the essay.

In your introduction, include:

The name of text you are studying: ………………………………………………………………………………..

Who wrote the text: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A brief sentence saying what the text is about: ………………………………………………………………..

The purpose of the essay: (what character will you be focusing on)……………………………………

For the best introduction, try to:

Include a bold opening statement

Give a brief overview of the story

List at least three points that will be analysed in the main body of the essay

Writing a paragraph

When you write a paragraph, it is important to make sure your point matches with your

explanation.

Your explanation must also match up with the evidence!

You must also try not to repeat yourself. Your explanation shouldn’t say the same thing as

your first point.

Conclusion

Write a conclusion where you sum up all the evidence and make a final judgment about the

character.