Modern day reader Essay

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were written over a hundred years ago. They are antiquated and out dated and have nothing to offer a modern day reader. Discuss.  One hundred years ago the lifestyle in England was very different. Queen Victoria was in power, the quality of living was at a lower standard, and the technology was not as updated, compared to today’s modern world. Crime was rife in this period, with thieves and pickpockets everywhere. The police force weren’t much help either. They were considered corrupt and unsuccessful in their investigations. This gave them a bad reputation, and made them unpopular with the local public. This helped to make crime as high as it was, and it also made people feel unsafe. The citizens within the community wanted somebody who could solve the toughest crimes, and somebody who wasn’t riddles with corruption. Sherlock Holmes matched this criterion perfectly. That is why Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of the Sherlock Holmes stories were tremendously admired back then. The book itself was designed for an audience of that time period, and because certain things have changed, for example literature, there will be definite difficulties presented to us in the text. For one, the sentence structure used in the stories was very peculiar, because in quite a few occasions there were uses of extremely long, descriptive sentences that went on for over 3 lines. This is very strange because modern day writes tend to lengthen their sentences up to, maximum, two lines. Also when you were reading it you were running out of breath because of the limited spaces to breathe whilst you were reading. Another problem that we encounter whilst reading this piece of text is the reference to things that existed in the old times, but not today. This may interrupt the reader in understanding what is going on. Vocabulary is one other major a factor which could present the modern reader difficulties. The choice of words used in the older time is not vastly different, but there are some differences, as the modern reader may struggle to interpret the definition of words.  Modern day writers use Doyle’s texts so that they can illustrate some of the techniques Doyle uses in their writing. They use Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes book because the techniques used in the book grasped the attention of many people with the description, and other various techniques. I believe that the books are still popular (not as much as when they were first introduced though) because the Sherlock Holmes series still appear today, most recently on television. The techniques used in the Sherlock Holmes stories are key to bringing the characters to life, and creating a tension-gripping atmosphere. The techniques used also gain and maintain the reader’s interest in a number of ways: through suspense and making the reader question his or her mind, through excitement of what is happening and the thrill of the investigation, or through some of the interesting, unusual characters that some of the stories present us with, for example Dr Roylott in â€Å"The Speckled Band†. One of the predominant reasons why I believe that Doyle can capture and maintain the reader’s interest, not only in the time period it was wrote, but now is because of the structure. Each story has a set structure, which the stories follow, although Doyle has tended to adapt some of them as he feels necessary. The structure is effective because the way that all of the stories are set out, they still leave us with many inquiries in out head, such as how Holmes worked out the case. For example, in â€Å"The Speckled Band†, Holmes discusses to Watson how he figured all of the traps out, how he figured out about the snake, and what he found out about certain features of the bedroom to make him come to certain conclusions. He says â€Å"I had come to these conclusions before ever I had entered the room. An inspection of his chair showed me†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . What this illustrates is that the questions that the audience had developed whilst reading the book are answered by Holmes in his description of the events that occurred and the discoveries he made. It also indicated to us some of the points that we may have missed out in the book, or some of he points that we didn’t seem to think were important. For example when Helen Stoner in â€Å"The Speckled Band† says that she has a ventilator in her room, we make nothing of it. We eventually find out though, that it is essential to the case.