The Hound of the Baskervilles is set in London, England and Devonshire County, where Baskerville Hall and the Moor are located.
London is described as confined and crowded, but it also represents familiarity and modernity. It’s Sherlock Holmes’s home base and where he has influence and connections, for example Inspector Lestrade, who comes to Baskerville Hall to assist in catching Jack Stapleton, and the young boy Holmes recruits to bring him supplies. These details have a basis in historical reality. The first modern police force, the Bow Street Runners, was established in London in 1849, and private detective agencies worked with such early police forces.
Baskerville Hall, the site of Sir Charles Baskerville’s death, is a bridge between the ordered, dignified realm of the Baskervilles, who feel safer in modern London, and the overrun, vast Moor. The Moor is a dangerous, unruly landscape, containing both quicksand and fog. Its remoteness also allows for secrecy and deception, a characteristic Jack Stapleton takes advantage of when planning and executing his crimes. It’s full of “primitive” ideas about ghosts and hounds, and where murder and secrecy occur. The story uses the contrast between these two worlds to suggest that the city, for all its crowded clamor, is superior to the backward, deadly realm of the remote country.
