In today's class we discussed Sherlock Holmes, the iconic detective figure in the The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. We specifically discussed Sidney Paget's illustration of the text in The Man with the Twisted Lip" and "The Adventures of the Speckled Band" and how it worked with both the Victorian context and the text itself to create meaning. The discussions were informative as they opened my eyes to a variety of visual cues that I had not noticed. For example, in the vignette "At the foot of the stairs she met this Lascar scoundrel," it was interesting to see the black and white imagery that alluded to the gothic, mysterious and the unknown world of the "exotic" that was highlighted by placing dark shades of black behind the Southeast Asian character while placing bright white shades around the Victorian European women. The use of light and dark imagery to illustrate the British attitudes towards non-European people was astonishing and I wondered whether Paget included it to hint at this attitude towards the exotic or whether he himself associated non-Europeans as dangerous and aggressive. The ladder I believe is more likely as the way he depicted the man (how the man is viciously holding onto the women) hints at an aggressive assault towards the white women who is portrayed as rather submissive and innocent.