Part 2 of A Study in Scarlet begins with a flashback to Utah in 1846, when John and Lucy Ferrier, stranded in the wilderness and close to death, are rescued by a group of Mormons being led west by Brigham Young to found Salt Lake City. This is based on a real event in history, when Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, led a group of Mormons to Utah to escape religious persecution. This flashback happens right after Sherlock Holmes has caught and revealed Jefferson Hope, a cab driver, as the murderer of Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson. It takes up most of the second part of the novel.
This flashback gives context to Jefferson Hope’s emotions and his motivation to commit murder: revenge. While Part 1 of the novel is told from the first-person point of view of Watson, Part 2 switches to a third-person point of view that paints John and Lucy Ferrier as innocent victims, the Mormons who spared their lives on the condition that they convert to their faith as despicable villains, and Jefferson Hope as a hero avenging the tragic death of his beloved. This section of the novel encourages the reader to sympathize (at least temporarily) with John, Lucy, and Jefferson by centering them as the protagonists of their own story.
In Part 2, Chapter 5, for example, it is difficult not to feel some sympathy for Jefferson Hope when he has nearly helped John and Lucy escape from Lucy’s forced marriage to Enoch Drebber, only to fail. When Jefferson Hope leaves them alone for a short period of time to go hunting, he comes back to find John dead and Lucy kidnapped:
The same dead silence still reigned all round. With his fears all changed to convictions, he hurried on. There was no living creature near the remains of the fire: animals, man, maiden, all were gone. It was only too clear that some sudden and terrible disaster had occurred during his absence […] [H]is eye fell upon an object which made every nerve of his body tingle within him. A little way on one side of the camp was a low-lying heap of reddish soil, which had assuredly not been there before. There was no mistaking it for anything but a newly-dug grave.
By placing readers in Jefferson Hope’s perspective in this moment, detailing his fear and the sensation of the nerves tingling in his body when he sees the fresh grave, the narrative encourages readers to empathize with him and his motives.
Doyle uses flashback in this way in many of his Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. It makes the story more interesting by showing not only the detective’s side but also by murderer’s, giving insight into their psychology. It also creates moral ambiguity. Although murder is wrong, when the reader is presented with Hope’s story and the actions of Drebber and Stangerson, which are also wrong, the moral calculations become a bit more complex—some readers may even find themselves wishing that Holmes hadn’t caught him at all. Doyle solves this ethical dilemma by having Hope die in prison from a heart condition. He was going to die whether Holmes caught him or not and had accepted the fact, which makes the ending of the novel much less tragic than it might have been.
