“The Red-Headed League” is set in London, England in the late 1800s. At this time in English history, the general public did not entirely respect the police force, as heinous crimes like the Jack the Ripper murders in the 1880s largely went unsolved. This collective frustration with incompetent detectives was perhaps the motivating force behind Conan Doyle’s creation of a fictional private detective gifted with superior rational and observational skills who solved every case that came before him. While Conan Doyle did not write “The Red-Headed League” as an overt work of social critique, his depiction of characters like the inept Detective Jones suggest that he did have some misgivings about the police force.
Another important aspect of the setting is the dark bank cellar where Holmes, Watson, Detective Jones, and the bank owner Merryweather sit and wait for Clay and his accomplice to arrive as part of their attempted bank heist. Importantly, Holmes is the only one with a lantern in this scene. Conan Doyle constructed this setting intentionally, trusting that readers would understand the darkness to be a metaphor for how everyone but Holmes is “in the dark” about the criminal act that is about to take place.
