Works · Novel · 1901

The Hound of the Baskervilles

First appeared Aug 1901 – Apr 1902 in The Strand Magazine

Nocturne plate · illustration (AI-generated, 2026)

Dr James Mortimer calls on Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street with an old family manuscript about a spectral hound said to have hunted the Baskervilles of Devon since the seventeenth century. His friend Sir Charles Baskerville has just been found dead on his own estate, and the heir, Sir Henry, has come from Canada to take up Baskerville Hall. Holmes, claiming other business in London, sends Dr Watson to Dartmoor to watch over Sir Henry and report. Watson finds fog, a convict loose on the moor, a mire that swallows ponies and neighbours with reasons of their own. The question is whether the legend is a story or a method.

“A man’s or a woman’s?” Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered. “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

Chapter 2 (The Curse of the Baskervilles). Checked against Project Gutenberg ebook #2852 (Gutenberg file does not name its source edition; text follows the book (15 chapters), not the 1901-02 Strand instalments)

Attribution and scope

Part of the Sherlock Holmes canon (see sherlock-holmes).

Part of Sherlock Holmes, which has its own entry on the timeline.

Facts

Doyle dedicated the book to his friend Fletcher Robinson: ‘It was to your account of a West-Country legend that this tale owes its inception.’[3]
The Strand serial ran in nine monthly numbers from August 1901 to April 1902 with 60 illustrations by Sidney Paget; the Newnes book followed on 25 March 1902 with 16.[1][2]
The novel was written after ‘The Final Problem’ (December 1893) had apparently killed Holmes, but is set in 1889, before that story’s events; his return in ‘The Empty House’ came in October 1903.[1][4][5]

Setting

1889 (per the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia), before ‘The Final Problem’[1][3]

Dartmoor
Baskerville Hall
Grimpen Mire
London

Themes

Notes on dates 1 note on disputed dates and attribution

The novel was written after ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) but is set in 1889, before that story; the 1889 setting rests on the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia summary (the Gutenberg text does not state the year).

Threads

Threads in

Descends from a West-Country (Dartmoor) hound legend told to Doyle by Fletcher Robinson (outside this timeline)
Doyle’s own dedication credits Robinson’s account of a West-Country legend with the book’s inception.[3]

Threads out

No sourced relation from a later work on this timeline is recorded.

Contemporaries

Works on the timeline that first appeared within three years of 1901, and the other writers alive when The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared (ages computed from sourced dates).