1. Sherlock Holmes Victorian LONDON
To understand the context of Victorian London and its influence on Doyle’s stories

2. Creative Reading
In addition to being introduced to the Sherlock Holmes stories, you will learn how to creatively read a text.
Reading a text creatively means to look for in-depth and creative interpretations, usually found in the language, structure, and ideas of the text.
One of the four English exams in Year 11 – Language, Paper 1 – will assess your creative reading skills, and will include questions similar to the ones in the assessment you will complete.
The paper will require an analysis of an extract from a text. For your assessment, the questions will deal with extracts from the short story The Speckled Band.

3. The following stories are set in Victorian London:
Based on the images and your general knowledge, what common themes, atmospheres and images do these share?
Oliver Twist (1838)
Jekyll & Hyde (1886)
Dracula (1897)
A Christmas Carol (1843)

4. Watch the GCSEPod, and answer the following questions:
Victorian London
Watch the GCSEPod, and answer the following questions:
What does “urbanization” mean?
What positive impact did trading (importing/exporting) have on Victorian London?
What negative impact did the arrival of foreign traders have?
Who was a well-known murderer in Victorian London?
Why was it difficult to tackle crime in Victorian London?
How did social class impact the police work?
How did Holmes represent the changes in Victorian society?

5. London in Sherlock Holmes
It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to her mother's, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker Street.
Most of the action in Sherlock Holmes takes place in the city of London.
Read over the following extract from the short story, The Five Orange Pips, and answer the following:
What type of mood does the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, present using pathetic fallacy?
What other techniques does Doyle use?
Pick two images used in the extracts, and illustrate them. What could they suggest about Victorian London?

6. Descriptive London
Based on the following illustrations of Victorian London, come up with the following:
2 metaphors about Victorian houses
3 similes about the fog/smoke
1 personification of the moon
1 imagery describing the light

7. Descriptive London
Imagine yourself being a visitor to Victorian London. During your stay, you write a letter to your family.
Using the imagery inspired by the illustrations, write a letter describing your visit, and comment on:
The mood and atmosphere
The weather
The architecture

8. Home Learning
Read the handout on Contextual Factors, and answer the following questions:
What inventions were introduced in the Victorian Era? How would they have affected London?
How did the British Empire influence the Sherlock Holmes stories? What effect might it have had on the readers?
What is empiricism, and what was Darwin’s connection to it?
What was Sherlock’s relevance to science and empiricism?
How did the social classes in Victorian London increase Doyle’s popularity?