Blog Post #2

My group was assigned to put The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on the timeline. Through this experience I was able to see a clear connection between image, text and context. It is clear that the illustrator and author share their individual interpretation of the text. This means that the illustrator creates based on the idea he believes the author is trying to convey, similarly to what the reader does when encountering the text for the first time. This is important because it is often the illustrations that determine how people envision the character. For example, the images Sidney Paget created of Sherlock Holmes went on to influence the way mainstream media views him to be today: a tall white man with mysterious dark features. Although one could come to that conclusion through Doyle’s description, there would be a lot more room for interpretation without images. 

The images we were exposed to did not give much insight into deeper issues, but rather they were very repetitive in which we saw Sherlock smoking his pipe, or simply looking for clues with Watson. I overall enjoyed doing a close reading of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, particularly because I feel as though Holmes is such a well-known figure and it is interesting to see the origin of this.

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