The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

Published 1902 · 59,443 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Horror, Mystery & Crime

How hard is The Hound of the Baskervilles to read?

The Hound of the Baskervilles scores 38 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
Doyle writes clean Victorian prose. Some period language and Dartmoor geography require attention. The vocabulary is accessible; the pleasure is in plotting.
Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
Well-made sentences of moderate length. Doyle's style is efficient, serving mystery and atmosphere. No syntactic challenges.
Abstraction: 32 out of 100
Concrete detection and Gothic setting. Themes about reason versus superstition operate in background. The novel is entertainment first.
Information density: 45 out of 100
Clues, suspects, and moor geography require tracking. The plot is intricate but manageable. You're meant to play along with the detection.
Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
Watson narrates; Holmes conceals. The misdirection is genre-appropriate. You're shown what Watson sees; you must deduce what Holmes deduces.
Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
The hound as ancestral curse, the moor as primordial chaos—Gothic symbols do their work. Doyle deploys conventions skillfully without deep originality.
Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
Holmes's superiority provides gentle irony. The Gothic atmosphere is played straight. Doyle entertains rather than subverts.
Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
The mystery resolves completely. Holmes explains everything. Genre expectations are satisfied. No loose ends.
Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
Linear narrative with Watson's investigation preceding Holmes's revelation. The structure is classical mystery: problem, investigation, solution.

How The Hound of the Baskervilles is regarded

The Hound of the Baskervilles holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where The Hound of the Baskervilles sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (107 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Hound of the Baskervilles scores 58 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
"I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world," said he.
Symbol: Formal
The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime
Mythos: Romance iii (romance iii)
A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen.
Genre: Romance + Novel
From this point onward I will follow the course of events by transcribing my own letters to Mr. Sherlock Holmes which lie before me on the table.

Where the story of The Hound of the Baskervilles takes place

  • Dartmoor and Baskerville Hall, autumn 1889, the main setting
  • Baskerville Manor in the Great Rebellion, the legend of Hugo (1642 to 1649)
  • Baker Street and London, 1889

5 things that are true of The Hound of the Baskervilles, with the passage for each

  1. The Baskerville family manuscript is dated 1742, and its story is set in the time of the Great Rebellion.

    "The exact date is 1742."

  2. Holmes sends a boy to search twenty-three hotels for the cut-up page of the Times.

    there are the names of twenty-three hotels here, all in the immediate neighbourhood of Charing Cross.

  3. Sir Henry inherits a residue of £740,000 from Sir Charles.

    "Seven hundred and forty thousand pounds."

  4. Holmes reveals that the woman passing as Miss Stapleton is Stapleton's wife.

    The lady who has passed here as Miss Stapleton is in reality his wife.

  5. The 'supernatural' glow of the hound is revealed to be phosphorus.

    "Phosphorus," I said.

Scenes in The Hound of the Baskervilles that Frye would name

21 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
The face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas. The portrait of Hugo reveals Stapleton's identity as a Baskerville, pivoting the plot.
Demonic imagery, untitled
Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. The hell-hound in its fullest form, a blazing animal demon out of the fog.
Anagnorisis, untitled
"It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson," said a well-known voice. Holmes is revealed as the lurker on the moor, transforming Watson's understanding of the case.
Displacement, untitled
"Phosphorus," I said. The hell-hound myth is displaced into realistic motivation: a mastiff-bloodhound cross painted with phosphorus.
Sparagmos, untitled
the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville The legend's demonic epiphany: the beast tears the ancestor's body apart.
Anagnorisis, untitled
"A beard! A beard! The man has a beard!" The shattered body is discovered to be Selden's, not Sir Henry's, which reverses the apparent tragedy.

Books that share these scenes with The Hound of the Baskervilles

About the author

Arthur Conan Doyle