The Sign of the Four is a detective novel in which Sherlock Holmes solves a locked-room murder and traces it back to a treasure stolen in India during the 1857 rebellion. Mary Morstan comes to 221B Baker Street because her father vanished in London in 1878 and an anonymous sender has posted her a pearl every year since 1882. The trail runs from a sealed laboratory in Norwood to a steam launch chase down the Thames, and ends in the confession of a one-legged convict who made a blood pact in the Agra fortress and was then cheated out of the treasure by the officer he trusted. Published in 1890, it is the second Holmes novel, the book in which Watson falls in love with Mary, and the one that fixed most of the rules the detective genre still follows.
Quick Info
Plot Summary
Main Characters
Key Themes
Historical Context
Key Quotations
See it unfold
The shape of the whole text, each key moment in turn, and how the people in it connect.
Tension arc
How tension rises and falls. Select a point to open that moment.
Tension is a reading of the text, not a fact about it: use it for the shape, and argue with it.
Key moments
“I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
Moment 1 of 16 · Chapter 1
The seven-per-cent solution
Setting: The sitting room at 221B Baker Street, with yellow fog in the street outsideTension
At 221B Baker Street, Watson watches Holmes inject cocaine, as he has three times a day for months, and at last protests as a doctor. Holmes replies that his mind “rebels at stagnation”: given problems and work, he can do without “artificial stimulants”.
“I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
Who
SHSherlock Holmes
JWDr John Watson
Why it matters
It introduces a detective whose brilliance and self-destruction come from the same restless mind, and the last page returns to this bottle.
Reason versus emotion (Holmes and Watson)
Chapter 1: The seven-per-cent solution. At 221B Baker Street, Watson watches Holmes inject cocaine, as he has three times a day for months, and at last protests as a doctor. Holmes replies that his mind “rebels at stagnation”: given problems and work, he can do without “artificial stimulants”. "I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation." It introduces a detective whose brilliance and self-destruction come from the same restless mind, and the last page returns to this bottle.
Chapter 1: The test of the watch. Watson hands Holmes a watch to test his methods. Holmes reads from its marks that it belonged to Watson's elder brother, a careless man, often poor, who took to drink and died, and Watson is hurt until Holmes apologises. With no case on hand, Holmes asks what else there is to live for, and calls Watson to the window to see the yellow fog. "Viewing the matter as an abstract problem, I had forgotten how personal and painful a thing it might be to you." Deduction is shown working and shown hurting: the gap between reason and feeling that the whole novel keeps returning to.
Chapter 2: Miss Morstan's statement. Mary Morstan, a governess, explains that her father vanished in London in December 1878 and that since May 1882 she has been sent a pearl every year. A letter now calls her “a wronged woman” and summons her to the Lyceum Theatre. "You really are an automaton,—a calculating-machine!" Watson is drawn to Mary at once while Holmes calls a client “a mere unit”, so the romance and the reasoning begin in the same chapter.
Chapter 3: Into the fog. Mary shows Holmes a plan kept among her father's papers, marked “The sign of the four” with four names, among them Jonathan Small. The three then drive through a dense fog from the Lyceum to an unknown house south of the river. "Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets." The title's phrase appears for the first time, and the fog turns the familiar city into a place where nothing, and no one, can be seen clearly.
Chapter 4: Thaddeus Sholto's story. In a room crowded with Eastern luxuries, Thaddeus reveals that his father confessed on his deathbed to hiding Captain Morstan's body and keeping the treasure, then died on seeing a face at the window. In the cab to Norwood he explains that his twin, Bartholomew, has found the treasure in a sealed garret. "The cursed greed which has been my besetting sin through life has withheld from her the treasure" A confession inside a story inside Watson's narrative: the first of the novel's nested accounts, each told by a man explaining what the treasure made him do.
Chapter 5: The locked room at Pondicherry Lodge. In the dark grounds, Watson and Mary find their hands joined. Upstairs, Holmes and Watson break down a bolted door to find Bartholomew dead in his chair with a fixed grin, a poisoned thorn above his ear, a note reading “The sign of the four”, and the treasure gone. "There is something devilish in this, Watson" The mystery of a missing father becomes a murder, and the love story begins at the same moment, in the same grounds.
Chapter 6: Holmes gives a demonstration. Holmes reads the room: a wooden-legged man climbed a rope to the window, and a tiny barefoot accomplice came in through the roof. Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard arrives, scorns theories and arrests Thaddeus, and Holmes names the wooden-legged man as Jonathan Small. "when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" Private reasoning and official procedure are set side by side, and the police arrest the wrong man within minutes.
Chapter 7: Toby and the trail of creosote. Watson takes Mary home, keeping his love to himself above all because the treasure would make her rich, then fetches the dog Toby from Pinchin Lane. At dawn Toby follows the creosote across south London, only to lead them to a barrel in a timber-yard. "This Agra treasure intervened like an impassable barrier between us." The comic anticlimax of the novel, and the clearest statement of the obstacle to the romance: money, not feeling, keeps Watson silent.
Chapter 8: The Baker Street Irregulars. The true trail ends at Mordecai Smith's wharf, where Holmes coaxes from Mrs Smith that her husband went off in their steam launch, the Aurora, after a wooden-legged man called for him in the night. At Baker Street, Holmes sends a gang of street boys to search the river and reads out a gazetteer's hostile account of the Andaman Islanders. "They can go everywhere, see everything, overhear every one." Holmes's network reaches places the police cannot, and the gazetteer shows colonial prejudice, printed as fact, shaping how the novel sees Tonga before he appears.
Chapter 9: Mary's indifference to the fortune. Watson tells Mary and Mrs Forrester about the case. Mrs Forrester thrills at the romance of it and pictures Mary rich, but Mary shows no elation, to Watson's quiet delight, and says her only anxiety is to clear Thaddeus of the charge. "It is for Mr. Thaddeus Sholto that I am anxious" Mary is the one character the treasure does not tempt, which is why the novel can make her its moral centre.
Chapter 9: The old sailor. When no news of the launch comes, Holmes paces through one night and works at chemistry into the small hours of the next, then leaves at dawn in a sailor's disguise. That afternoon an old seaman arrives at Baker Street, fools both Watson and a humbled Athelney Jones, and turns out to be Holmes, who now plans a trap on the river. "You would have made an actor, and a rare one." Disguise lets the detective pass unseen among the river's working people, and the official police now agree to take orders from the amateur.
Chapter 10: The chase down the Thames. A police launch chases the Aurora down the Thames at night. Tonga raises his blowpipe, Holmes and Watson fire, and he falls into the river; Small runs the launch aground and is trapped when his wooden leg sinks into the mud. "never did sport give me such a wild thrill as this mad, flying man-hunt down the Thames" The action climax, which Watson calls sport, and in which Tonga, who is never given a line of his own to speak, dies in the river.
Chapter 11: The empty box. Small blames Tonga for the murder and calls the treasure a curse. Watson carries the iron box to Mary, forces it open with a poker and finds it empty; Mary says calmly that the treasure is lost, and Watson, relieved, declares his love. "Whoever had lost a treasure, I knew that night that I had gained one." The emotional climax comes before the explanation: the romance is resolved by the treasure's absence, a chapter before anyone learns where it went.
Chapter 12: Small's story of Agra. Small admits he has scattered the jewels along the Thames. His confession goes back to 1857: a young ex-soldier who had lost a leg to a crocodile, he helped three Sikh partners murder the merchant Achmet in the fort at Agra for a rajah's jewels, and all four were convicted. "We only ask you to do that which your countrymen come to this land for. We ask you to be rich." The crime behind the whole plot happened about thirty years earlier, thousands of miles away, and began as a murder for loot in a war of empire.
Chapter 12: Sholto's betrayal and Small's revenge. In the Andaman Islands convict settlement, Small sold the secret to two officers in debt, Major Sholto and Captain Morstan, in return for the four men's freedom. Sholto took the treasure and never came back; Small escaped with Tonga's help, striking down a guard with his wooden leg, and spent years hunting him. "From that day I lived only for vengeance." The respectable officer, not the convict, breaks his sworn word first, which gives weight to what Holmes said before the story began: that justice may once have been on Small's side.
Chapter 12: The division of rewards. After Jones takes Small away, Watson announces that Mary has accepted him. Holmes cannot congratulate him, since love is opposed to “true cold reason”; Watson has a wife, Jones the credit, and Holmes reaches for the cocaine. "there still remains the cocaine-bottle" The ending shares out the rewards unevenly and returns to the opening image, so the book closes on Holmes alone with the bottle.
Character map
Select a person to see their relationships. Rings mark who is in the moment above.
Sherlock Holmes · friends and fellow lodgers; detective and narrator · Dr John Watson
Watson admires and records Holmes but is not his echo: he protests at the cocaine, is hurt by the watch deduction and falls in love with a client, although Holmes holds that “the emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning”. At the end he fears this may be the last case he shares.
Dr John Watson · love, then engagement · Mary Morstan
Their hands meet in the grounds of Pondicherry Lodge in Chapter 5, the treasure keeps Watson silent in Chapter 7, and its loss frees him to speak in Chapter 11. By Chapter 12 she has accepted him.
Sherlock Holmes · amateur and official detective · Athelney Jones
Jones calls Holmes “the theorist” and arrests Thaddeus; by Chapter 9 he is meek, calls Holmes “a wonderful man” and takes his orders. Holmes lets him keep the official credit.
Jonathan Small · fugitive and devoted companion, on unequal terms · Tonga
Small nursed Tonga through an illness and calls him faithful, but he also exhibited him at fairs for money and beat him with a rope's end after the murder. The novel never lets Tonga speak for himself.
Jonathan Small · betrayed partner and avenger · Major John Sholto
Sholto broke the bargain made in the Andamans and sailed home with the whole treasure. From then on Small lived “only for vengeance”, though Sholto died, as Small watched through the window, before Small could reach him.
Major John Sholto · brother officers and friends, then rivals · Captain Arthur Morstan
Small calls them “bosom friends”, yet they quarrel over dividing the treasure on the night Morstan reaches London, and Sholto hides his friend's body rather than face an inquiry.
Thaddeus sends Mary the pearls and wants to share the treasure with her; Bartholomew, who Thaddeus says shared a little of their father's fault, resists. The quarrel sends Thaddeus to live apart, and suspicion falls on him when his twin is murdered.
Thaddeus Sholto · guilty heir and wronged heiress · Mary Morstan
Thaddeus sees the brothers as her “trustees” and writes the letter that draws her into the case. Mary repays him: in Chapter 9 her only anxiety is to clear his name.
Jonathan Small · sworn partners in the sign of the four · Abdullah Khan
Abdullah Khan and Mahomet Singh seize Small at his post and draw him into the plot, and all four men swear to act together. Small says he kept that oath to the end, throwing the jewels into the river rather than let anyone else have them.
Mary Morstan · governess and employer, treated as a friend · Mrs Cecil Forrester
Watson sees that Mary is “no mere paid dependant, but an honoured friend”. Mrs Forrester's delight in the case as “a romance” sets off Mary's calm indifference to the fortune.
Captain Arthur Morstan · father and daughter · Mary Morstan
He sent her home to school in Edinburgh as a child and vanished on the night he arrived in London. The whole plot begins as her need to know what happened to him.
Sherlock Holmes · employer and leader of the street boys · Wiggins
Holmes pays the Irregulars a shilling each a day, with a guinea for whoever finds the boat, because they go where police cannot. He calls Wiggins his “dirty little lieutenant”.
Characters as described
Each portrait is drawn from the words of the text, not from a film or a stage production. The numbers on the picture point to those words.
Sherlock Holmes
Holmes rubbed his hands1, and his eyes glistened2. He leaned forward in his chair3 with an expression of extraordinary concentration upon his clear-cut, hawklike features4. “State your case,” said he, in brisk, business tones.
Chapter 2
This is how Holmes comes alive in the novel: not in his rooms with nothing to do, but the moment a problem is put in front of him. Watson’s words for him are all sharp edges, “clear-cut”, “hawklike”, and later “aquiline”.
The book never describes his clothes, so he is drawn in the plain dress of a London gentleman in 1888, with none of the costume later illustrators gave him.
Dr John Watson
I sat in the window with the volume in my hand1, but my thoughts were far from the daring speculations of the writer. My mind ran upon our late visitor2,—her smiles, the deep rich tones of her voice, the strange mystery which overhung her life. If she were seventeen at the time of her father’s disappearance she must be seven-and-twenty now,—a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience. So I sat and mused, until such dangerous thoughts came into my head3 that I hurried away to my desk and plunged furiously into the latest treatise upon pathology. What was I, an army surgeon with a weak leg and a weaker banking-account, that I should dare to think of such things? She was a unit, a factor,—nothing more. If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o’-the-wisps of the imagination.
Chapter 2
Watson tells the story, and he is its man of feeling. Here he tries to argue himself out of love with Holmes’s own words (“a unit, a factor”), and fails: the novel’s conflict between reason and emotion is going on inside its narrator.
Watson never describes his own face or clothes, so he is drawn plainly, in the dress of a London gentleman in 1888. The red on his cheek is the flush of the thoughts he calls dangerous.
Study guide sections
The rest of the guide, section by section: analysis, vocabulary and exam practice for this text.
Key passages for close reading
Mary Morstan
Miss Morstan entered the room with a firm step and an outward composure of manner. She was a blonde young lady1, small, dainty, well gloved2, and dressed in the most perfect taste. There was, however, a plainness and simplicity about her costume which bore with it a suggestion of limited means. The dress was a sombre greyish beige, untrimmed and unbraided3, and she wore a small turban of the same dull hue4, relieved only by a suspicion of white feather in the side5. Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes6 were singularly spiritual and sympathetic.
Chapter 2
Watson reads her clothes the way Holmes reads a watch: plain and untrimmed, they tell him of “limited means”. Then he lingers on her face and her eyes, and the romance begins in the same paragraph as the case.
The print has no blue, so her blue eyes are left to the words. The greyish beige of her dress and turban is cut as fine pale lines over the black, the way this print shows grey.
Athelney Jones
As he spoke, the steps which had been coming nearer sounded loudly on the passage, and a very stout, portly man1 in a grey suit2 strode heavily into the room. He was red-faced3, burly and plethoric, with a pair of very small twinkling eyes4 which looked keenly out from between swollen and puffy pouches5.
Chapter 6
Jones enters the novel as a body before he says a word: heavy, loud and red. Set beside the lean, quiet Holmes, he is the official police in one figure, all weight and confidence, and he arrests the wrong man within minutes.
His hair is not described, so it is plain; the watch-chain, the collar and the tie are the ordinary dress of a London man in 1888. Grey is cut as fine pale lines over the black.
Jonathan Small
Our captive sat in the cabin opposite to the iron box which he had done so much and waited so long to gain1. He was a sunburned, reckless-eyed fellow, with a network of lines and wrinkles all over his mahogany features2, which told of a hard, open-air life. There was a singular prominence about his bearded chin3 which marked a man who was not to be easily turned from his purpose. His age may have been fifty or thereabouts, for his black, curly hair was thickly shot with grey4. His face in repose was not an unpleasing one, though his heavy brows and aggressive chin gave him, as I had lately seen, a terrible expression when moved to anger. He sat now with his handcuffed hands upon his lap5, and his head sunk upon his breast, while he looked with his keen, twinkling eyes6 at the box which had been the cause of his ill-doings. It seemed to me that there was more sorrow than anger in his rigid and contained countenance. Once he looked up at me with a gleam of something like humour in his eyes.
Chapter 11
The villain the whole book has hunted is described with more sympathy than anyone expected: a hard life written on his face, “more sorrow than anger”, even humour. Small is about to tell his own story, and Watson’s description prepares us to listen to him.
The print has no brown, so his sunburned, mahogany skin is left to the words. His face is drawn in repose, as Watson sees it here, not in the anger the passage remembers. His wooden leg is not in this passage, and is out of the picture.
Tonga
Tonga—for that was his name—was a fine boatman1, and owned a big, roomy canoe of his own2. When I found that he was devoted to me and would do anything to serve me, I saw my chance of escape. I talked it over with him. He was to bring his boat round on a certain night to an old wharf which was never guarded3, and there he was to pick me up. I gave him directions to have several gourds of water4 and a lot of yams, cocoa-nuts, and sweet potatoes5.
Chapter 12
Tonga is never given a word of his own in the novel: everything we know of him is what other men say. These are the kindest words in the book about him, and even they describe him by what he could do for Small. Elsewhere Watson and Holmes describe him in the racist language of their time, which an answer should analyse, not repeat.
Small’s words are the only description of Tonga in the novel that is not written in the racist language of the time, so the markers point only to them. His hair is drawn as the panels of this novel draw it, so that he is the same man in every picture, and his face is cut in the same way as every other face in these portraits.
Major John Sholto
Well, there was one thing which very soon struck me, and that was that the soldiers used always to lose and the civilians to win. Mind, I don’t say that there was anything unfair, but so it was. These prison-chaps had done little else than play cards ever since they had been at the Andamans, and they knew each other’s game to a point, while the others just played to pass the time and threw their cards down anyhow. Night after night the soldiers got up poorer men, and the poorer they got the more keen they were to play. Major Sholto was the hardest hit1. He used to pay in notes and gold2 at first, but soon it came to notes of hand and for big sums3. He sometimes would win for a few deals, just to give him heart, and then the luck would set in against him worse than ever. All day he would wander about as black as thunder4, and he took to drinking a deal more than was good for him5.
Chapter 12
Sholto’s ruin at cards is why he listens when Small offers him the Agra treasure: the respectable officer is already a desperate man. On his deathbed in Chapter 4 he names his own fault: “The cursed greed which has been my besetting sin through life”.
The novel never describes Major Sholto’s face or uniform, so he is drawn plainly, as an officer off parade. The red is the lamp’s flame, and on the cards their pips.
Captain Arthur Morstan
My father was an officer in an Indian regiment who sent me home when I was quite a child. My mother was dead, and I had no relative in England. I was placed, however, in a comfortable boarding establishment at Edinburgh, and there I remained until I was seventeen years of age. In the year 1878 my father, who was senior captain of his regiment, obtained twelve months’ leave and came home1. He telegraphed to me from London that he had arrived all safe2, and directed me to come down at once, giving the Langham Hotel as his address. His message, as I remember, was full of kindness and love3. On reaching London I drove to the Langham, and was informed that Captain Morstan was staying there, but that he had gone out the night before and had not yet returned. I waited all day without news of him. That night, on the advice of the manager of the hotel, I communicated with the police, and next morning we advertised in all the papers. Our inquiries led to no result; and from that day to this no word has ever been heard of my unfortunate father4.
Chapter 2
Captain Morstan is gone before the novel begins: his daughter has only the facts of his last journey and one loving telegram. His disappearance is the first mystery Holmes is asked to solve, and Chapter 12 shows that he too had bargained with Small for the treasure.
The novel never describes his face or his clothes, so he is drawn plainly, as a gentleman travelling in 1878. It never gives the words of his telegram either, so the form carries only lines.
Thaddeus Sholto
A blaze of yellow light streamed out upon us, and in the centre of the glare there stood a small man with a very high head1, a bristle of red hair all round the fringe of it2, and a bald, shining scalp3 which shot out from among it like a mountain-peak from fir-trees. He writhed his hands together4 as he stood, and his features were in a perpetual jerk, now smiling, now scowling, but never for an instant in repose. Nature had given him a pendulous lip5, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness, he gave the impression of youth. In point of fact he had just turned his thirtieth year.
Chapter 4
Thaddeus is written as a comic figure, nervous, vain and fussy, yet he is the one Sholto who tries to give Mary her share. The novel lets an odd, absurd man be the honest one.
The print has no yellow, so the yellow light is cut as rays and its colour, like his blue eyes, is left to the words. His red hair is the text’s own colour.
Abdullah Khan
The words the numbers point to
1both old fighting-men who had borne arms against us at Chilian-wallah
2They could talk English pretty well
3We ask you to be rich.
4a small, driving rain
Chapter 12
Small describes the two troopers in the hostile shorthand of the British in 1857, and admits he “could get little out of them”. Abdullah Khan’s own words cut deeper than anything Small says of him: “We only ask you to do that which your countrymen come to this land for.”
The novel never describes his face or his dress. Small calls the two troopers Sikhs, so he is drawn as a trooper of that time and place, in a turban, a long coat and a sash, with a beard. The card prints the phrases alone, because the paragraphs they come from also hold a threat of killing and Small’s mockery of the troopers’ speech.
Mrs Cecil Forrester
It was nearly two o’clock when we reached Mrs. Cecil Forrester’s. The servants had retired hours ago, but Mrs. Forrester had been so interested by the strange message which Miss Morstan had received that she had sat up in the hope of her return. She opened the door herself, a middle-aged, graceful woman1, and it gave me joy to see how tenderly her arm stole round the other’s waist2 and how motherly was the voice in which she greeted her3. She was clearly no mere paid dependant, but an honoured friend. I was introduced, and Mrs. Forrester earnestly begged me to step in and tell her our adventures. I explained, however, the importance of my errand, and promised faithfully to call and report any progress which we might make with the case. As we drove away I stole a glance back, and I still seem to see that little group on the step, the two graceful, clinging figures, the half-opened door4, the hall-light shining through stained glass5, the barometer, and the bright stair-rods6. It was soothing to catch even that passing glimpse of a tranquil English home in the midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us.
Chapter 7
Mrs Forrester is Mary’s employer, but Watson sees “no mere paid dependant, but an honoured friend”. Her lit doorway is the one “tranquil English home” in a night of murder and stolen treasure.
The novel says nothing more of her looks, so she is drawn plainly, in the dress of 1888, as the panel of Chapter 9 draws her. The stained glass is printed red, the warmth of the home; its true colours are not given.
Wiggins
There was some show of discipline among them, despite their tumultuous entry, for they instantly drew up in line and stood facing us with expectant faces1. One of their number, taller and older than the others2, stood forward with an air of lounging superiority3 which was very funny in such a disreputable little scarecrow4.
Chapter 8
Wiggins leads the Baker Street Irregulars, street boys Holmes pays a shilling a day because “They can go everywhere, see everything, overhear every one.” Watson finds the boy’s swagger funny, but the description also shows how poor these London children are.
The novel says nothing of his face, so he is drawn plainly, as the panel of Chapter 8 draws him: a flat cap and a coat far too big for him. The other boys are not described either, so they are drawn as plain children of the London streets in 1888.
The opening: Holmes and the syringe
Chapter 1, The Science of Deduction
Where to find it: The first five paragraphs of the novel, from “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle” to Holmes asking Watson “Would you care to try it?”
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers1 he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks2. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction3.
Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me4 at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion5 which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him6.
Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch, or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
“Which is it to-day?” I asked,—“morphine or cocaine?”
He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. “It is cocaine,” he said,—“a seven-per-cent. solution
1“long, white, nervous fingers” Three adjectives build a portrait of a delicate, artistic, highly strung man. “Nervous” is the telling word: the hands that will solve the case are also restless, and the hero is introduced as fragile before he is shown as brilliant.
2“dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks” Holmes's own body is the first piece of evidence in the novel. The hyperbole of “innumerable” shows a long habit, not an experiment, and a reader who knows that Holmes reads bodies for clues is invited to read his.
3“a long sigh of satisfaction” The sensual close of the paragraph shows the drug giving Holmes the pleasure that work usually gives him. It prepares his later confession that he craves “mental exaltation”, and it makes the reader uneasy about how much he enjoys it.
4“my conscience swelled nightly within me” The first person arrives with a moral response. Watson is a doctor and a friend, and the verb “swelled” makes his unspoken guilt grow like a symptom, setting him up as the conscience beside Holmes's detachment.
5“the cool, nonchalant air of my companion” Holmes's calm is the opposite of Watson's agitation. The adjectives anticipate his claim later in the chapter that detection should be “cold and unemotional”, and they explain why even a soldier hesitates to challenge him.
6“diffident and backward in crossing him” Watson admits his own timidity, which makes his protest, when it comes, feel costly. The friendship is unequal at the start, and by the end of the novel Watson has found a life, and a voice, of his own.
The question: How does Conan Doyle use this opening to present Holmes as brilliant but troubled, and Watson as the voice that judges him?
. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan’s manner that she was suffering from the same feeling.
Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences6
. He held his open note-book upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-lantern.
1“a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city” The alliteration of “dense drizzly” thickens the air, and the fog “lay low” like a weight on the city. London is presented as vast and smothered, a place where clues, and people, are easily lost.
2“Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets” Pathetic fallacy: the sky seems to share the characters' gloom. Repeating “mud” in two forms makes sky and street the same dirty colour, so there is no clean light anywhere in the scene.
3“misty splotches of diffused light” Even the lamps fail to light the way. The ugly noun “splotches” turns them into stains, a fitting image for a case in which every clue so far is blurred.
4“something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces” Gothic vocabulary turns an ordinary evening crowd on the Strand into spectres. The “endless procession” makes the city anonymous, so that anyone could be watching, which suits a chapter in which the three are led by strangers to an unknown house.
5“they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more” The sentence moves from dark to light to dark, as the faces do. Watson links it to “all human kind”, briefly making the street an image of human life passing between two darknesses.
6“Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences” The paragraph ends by setting Holmes apart. Watson and Mary are “nervous and depressed”, while Holmes jots down figures: the weather has power over feeling, but it stops at the edge of his mind.
The question: How does Conan Doyle use the setting in this passage to create a mood of mystery and unease?
It was selfish, no doubt, disloyal, wrong6
, but I could realise nothing save that
the golden barrier was gone from between us5
. “Thank God!” I ejaculated from my very heart.
She looked at me with a quick, questioning smile. “Why do you say that?” she asked.
“Because you are within my reach again,” I said, taking her hand. She did not withdraw it. “Because I love you, Mary, as truly as ever a man loved a woman. Because this treasure, these riches, sealed my lips. Now that they are gone I can tell you how I love you. That is why I said, ‘Thank God.’”
“Then I say, ‘Thank God,’ too,” she whispered, as I drew her to my side. Whoever had lost a treasure,
I knew that night that I had gained one7
.
1“wrought in the image of a sitting Buddha” The hasp is a sacred image on a box of Indian work, and Watson forces it with Mrs Forrester's poker. One reading is that the moment stages the collision of empire and English home that runs through the novel: an Indian box broken open in a Camberwell drawing-room.
2“The box was empty!” The short exclamatory sentence delivers the novel's great anticlimax. After the chase and the capture, the prize that men have killed for is simply absent, and the paragraph break lets the shock land.
3“absolutely and completely empty” Two adverbs doing the same work insist on the absence. The heavy iron walls, measured to two-thirds of an inch, make the emptiness more striking: a chest built for things of great price holds nothing.
4“said Miss Morstan, calmly” The adverb is the key to Mary. She has just lost a fortune, and her calm confirms that she never wanted it, which is why she is the one character the treasure cannot corrupt.
5“the golden barrier was gone from between us” The metaphor completes an image from Chapter 7, where the treasure “intervened like an impassable barrier between us”. Wealth has been the wall between them, so its loss is the romance's release.
6“It was selfish, no doubt, disloyal, wrong” Watson judges himself in a list that grows harsher word by word. His honesty about his own selfishness makes him a narrator we trust, and it contrasts with the self-excusing confessions of Major Sholto and Small.
The question: How does Conan Doyle use this moment to set love against wealth?
Semantic field of science and machinery
Example: Holmes calls detection “an exact science” to be treated in a “cold and unemotional manner” (Chapter 1); Watson calls him “an automaton,—a calculating-machine” (Chapter 2); at the crime scene he speaks like “a clinical professor expounding to his class” (Chapter 6).
Effect: The vocabulary of science and engineering makes Holmes's method sound modern and reliable, but Watson's “automaton” turns the same language into criticism: a mind that works like a machine may also feel like one. The novel keeps both readings open, admiring the method while doubting the man it produces.
Detective story, romance and adventure
The Sign of Four mixes several forms. It is a detective story, with a locked room, footprints, a false arrest and a reasoned solution; a romance, in which Watson falls in love with the client; an adventure, with a night chase on the Thames; and an imperial tale of treasure, oaths and revenge in India. The novel knows it. In Chapter 1 Holmes complains that Watson tried “to tinge it with romanticism” when writing up their first case, and in Chapter 9 Mrs Forrester delights that the case is “a romance”, its villains taking “the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl”. Conan Doyle lets his characters name the genres the book is combining.
A narrator who writes about Holmes
In Chapter 1 Watson calls his account of their earlier case, “A Study in Scarlet”, a “small brochure”, and Holmes criticises it. In Chapter 9 Holmes says criminals have begun to recognise him since Watson “took to publishing some of my cases”. The Sign of Four is only the second Holmes novel, after A Study in Scarlet (1887), yet it already plays with the idea that the detective is famous because his friend writes about him. The effect is to make Watson's narration part of the story: we are reading exactly the kind of romantic account Holmes disapproves of.
Pace: waiting, anticlimax and climax
The present-day action takes only a few days, but its pace varies sharply. Chapters 3 to 6 run through a single evening and night, from the fog outside the Lyceum to the discovery of the body and Jones's arrest of Thaddeus. Chapter 7 ends in comic anticlimax when Toby leads the hunters to a barrel of creosote. Chapters 8 and 9 deliberately slow down as the trail goes cold and Holmes paces through the night, which builds frustration before the chase of Chapter 10, the fastest writing in the book. Then Conan Doyle springs a second anticlimax, the empty box, and places the emotional climax there rather than at the arrest.
Publication, title and chapters
The novel first appeared in the February 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine as The Sign of the Four, and as a book from Spencer Blackett in October 1890. Editions still vary between that title and The Sign of Four. Inside the novel the phrase is usually “the sign of the four”, but Small twice says “the sign of four”, in Chapter 12. The twelve chapters are short and titled, from The Science of Deduction to The Strange Story of Jonathan Small, and several titles work as signposts or jokes: The Episode of the Barrel names the anticlimax before the reader reaches it.
Dates, and a slip worth knowing
Conan Doyle gives precise dates that make the case feel documented: Captain Morstan vanished on 3 December 1878, Major Sholto died on 28 April 1882, and on 4 May 1882 an advertisement asked for Mary's address. The first pearl arrived on the day she answered it, which Holmes reckons was within a week of Sholto's death. But the letter in Chapter 2 is postmarked July 7, while that same evening, in Chapter 3, is “a September evening”. The inconsistency is in the text itself, so do not build an argument on the month.
Sahib
A term of respect for a European man in colonial India, from a Hindustani word meaning lord. Thaddeus's servant uses it (Chapter 3), Lal Chowdar uses it to Major Sholto in the deathbed story (Chapter 4), and Abdullah Khan and the merchant Achmet use it to Small at Agra (Chapter 12).
Feringhee
An old word used in India for a European, a foreigner. Abdullah Khan explains that he trusts Small because “an oath is binding upon a Feringhee” (Chapter 12).
sepoy
An Indian soldier serving a European power, here the East India Company. The uprising of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys, which is why Small complains that the British were fighting “our own picked troops” (Chapter 12).
the Mutiny
Small's name for the uprising of 1857 against the rule of the East India Company, which he calls “the great mutiny” (Chapter 12). It is also known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and, in India, as the First War of Independence. Afterwards the British Crown took over the government of India from the Company.
penal servitude
A prison sentence with forced labour. The three Sikhs receive “penal servitude for life” for the murder of Achmet, and Small's death sentence is reduced to the same (Chapter 12).
creosote (creasote)
An oily, strong-smelling liquid distilled from tar and used to preserve wood. The small accomplice treads in creosote that has leaked from a cracked carboy in Bartholomew's room, and Toby follows the smell; the edition spells it both creosote and creasote (Chapters 6 to 8).
risus sardonicus
A fixed, grinning spasm of the face muscles, caused by tetanus or by strychnine-like poisons. Watson sees the “horrible smile” on Bartholomew's dead face through the keyhole (Chapter 5), and Holmes names it, “as the old writers called it”, while examining the body (Chapter 6).
chaplet
A circlet or string of beads, here of pearls. Major Sholto keeps back a “chaplet dipped with pearls” meant for Mary (Chapter 4), and Thaddeus later sends her its pearls one at a time. In Chapter 12 Small mentions twelve pearls “set in a gold coronet” that were missing from the chest when he recovered it, which suggests where they came from.
street Arab
A dated Victorian term, no longer used, for a homeless or ragged child who lived on the streets. A street Arab leads up the cab outside the Lyceum (Chapter 3), and Watson uses the word of the Baker Street Irregulars when they burst into the sitting room (Chapter 8).
wherry
A light boat used on rivers and inland waters. Holmes and Watson cross the Thames in one after leaving Mrs Smith's wharf (Chapter 8).
agony column
The personal advertisements in a newspaper. Holmes places a notice there asking for news of Mordecai Smith and the Aurora, which Watson recognises as his friend's work (Chapter 9).
half-pay
Reduced pay given to an army or navy officer who is not on active service. Watson calls himself “a half-pay surgeon” when he doubts he has the right to speak to Mary (Chapter 7).
In the extract, analyse the precise, almost surgical verbs of the injection, such as “adjusted”, “thrust” and “pressed”, and the evidence written on his body: the forearm “dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks”.
Use Watson's reaction as the moral frame. His “conscience swelled nightly within me”, yet Holmes's “cool, nonchalant air” silences him. Comment on why we first see the hero through a worried friend.
Move to the rest of Chapter 1: Holmes's mind “rebels at stagnation”, and he treats Watson's brother's watch as “an abstract problem” until he sees that he has hurt his friend.
Across the novel, trace how the case changes him: the hunting similes of Chapter 6, the sleepless pacing of Chapter 9, when the problem is “consuming me”, and the return to “the cocaine-bottle” on the last page.
Bring in context where it sharpens the point: Watson objects “as a medical man”, and Conan Doyle, who trained as a doctor at Edinburgh, gives him a doctor's vocabulary of “pathological and morbid” effects.
Conclude by weighing two readings: Holmes as a warning about intellect cut off from feeling, or as an admired eccentric whose drug is one more oddity. Say which the ending supports, and why.
It analyses single words, such as “calmly” and the paired adverbs in “absolutely and completely empty”, and names their effect, rather than labelling a technique and moving on.
It links the extract to a precise moment elsewhere, the barrier image in Chapter 7, which shows knowledge of the whole novel and of how its imagery develops.
Its whole-text sentence covers three characters in one sweep with short embedded quotations, which is efficient in a timed, closed-book exam.
It ends by complicating its own argument with an alternative reading of the last line, which is what turns a clear answer into a perceptive one.
7“a seven-per-cent. solution” The exact, clinical figure shows Holmes treating his habit as chemistry. His offer, “Would you care to try it?”, is so casual that it shocks, and Watson's blunt refusal in the next line, on the grounds of his own health, shows how far apart the two men stand.
7“I knew that night that I had gained one” The last sentence turns on antithesis: lost a treasure, gained one. Mary becomes the true treasure, a romantic idea that still keeps the language of ownership, so love replaces wealth without leaving the vocabulary of possession behind.
Trace the barrier metaphor back to Chapter 7, where the treasure “intervened like an impassable barrier between us”.
Across the novel: Major Sholto's “cursed greed” and his admission that he never even used the treasure (Chapter 4); Bartholomew, murdered almost as soon as he finds it (Chapter 5); Small calling it “a curse” on everyone who owned it (Chapter 11); and the jewels scattered in the Thames (Chapter 12).
Context: the treasure is loot seized during the uprising of 1857, and Abdullah Khan's words to Small, “We ask you to be rich”, can be read as linking private greed to the reasons the British were in India at all.
Evaluate: does the novel condemn greed, or simply exchange one treasure for another when Watson says he has “gained one”?
Look at Holmes's reply, that “we cannot tell how far justice may originally have been on your side”: the detective, unlike Jones, is willing to hear the criminal's case.
Across the novel: the letter promising Mary that she “shall have justice” (Chapter 2); Jones's confident, wrong arrest of Thaddeus (Chapter 6); Holmes's reading of the sign left on Major Sholto's body as, from the four men's point of view, “an act of justice” (Chapter 7); and Major Sholto's betrayal (Chapter 12).
Context: Small's “Twenty long years” as a convict were spent largely in the Andaman Islands, where the British had set up a penal settlement at Port Blair in 1858, mainly for prisoners from the uprising. That places his story inside imperial punishment.
Evaluate: Small is sympathetic but no innocent. He helped to kill Achmet, and he struck down a guard with his wooden leg to escape. Decide whether the novel finally sides with the law, with Holmes, or with nobody.
Compare how the same scene presents Small, “a good-sized, powerful man” whom Watson calls “the white man”. He too is briefly dehumanised moments later, in the same paragraph as Tonga's fall, hauled aboard “like some evil fish”, but he is later given a face “not an unpleasing one” and a whole chapter of speech. Tonga is never given a line.
Widen out to the gazetteer Holmes reads aloud in Chapter 8, which he calls “the very latest authority” and quotes without question, and to Small's admission in Chapter 12 that he exhibited Tonga at fairs for money.
Include the Indian characters: Abdullah Khan, who draws Small into the plot; Lal Chowdar, the servant who helps hide Captain Morstan's body; and Lal Rao, the butler whom Holmes identifies as Small's confederate inside Pondicherry Lodge. Ask whether any is given the inner life of Small or Watson.
Context: the novel appeared in 1890, when the British Crown ruled India directly and held convicts in the Andaman Islands, so the prejudices of the gazetteer were those of a ruling power describing the people it ruled.
Evaluate: one reading is that the novel simply shares its period's racism; another is that by making English officers the real betrayers, it turns part of the charge of savagery back on the British. Argue which is more convincing, with evidence.
Check every quotation's speaker and chapter against the novel. Several lines that circulate in revision materials are misattributed: Mrs Forrester, not Athelney Jones, calls the case “a romance” (Chapter 9); Mary, not Small, says “The treasure is lost” (Chapter 11); and Holmes says “Women are never to be entirely trusted” in Chapter 9, not Chapter 2. A line in which Holmes calls himself the last and most unworthy of detectives is not in the novel at all; his real claim is to be “the last and highest court of appeal in detection” (Chapter 1).
Use the chapter titles as a map. Twelve short chapters are easy to learn, and a reference such as Chapter 7, The Episode of the Barrel, shows command of the whole text.
Bring in context only where it explains the text. The uprising of 1857, the East India Company and the Andaman convict settlement are the facts behind Small's story, and they matter most when you write about justice, greed and empire.
