COVE

Sidney Paget’s black and white watercolour illustration, “At the foot of the stairs she met this Lascar scoundrel” is one of several of the artist’s drawings for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Adventures of the Man With the Twisted Lip”. The story was first featured in an 1891 issue of The Strand Magazine, then later published alongside a series of other short stories entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in 1892. Paget (1860-1908) grew notorious from his illustrations for the Sherlock Holmes stories, visually canonizing the character based off Doyle’s basic descriptions, which led to the character’s increased infamy as an icon within the detective genre. The aforementioned vignette is skewed to the right of page 136 of “The Adventures of the Man With the Twisted Lip”, and follows an iterative model of narratological theory, in that it repeats the events that the author describes in the accompanying text. In this instance, the image is an exact depiction of the following passage, also found on page 136: “At the foot of the stairs, however, she met this Lascar scoundrel of whom I have spoken, who thrust her back (. . .)” Visually, readers see Mrs. St. Clair engaged in a physical struggle with an unnamed dark-skinned man. He appears menacing as he attempts to force her backwards. Paget’s decision to depict this part of the text is an interesting one, as the image does not feature Holmes or Watson; rather, it illustrates a scene between an upperclass Victorian woman, and a ‘Lascar’—a period term used to describe those of Southeast Asian identity. Readers know little of this man, other than his ambiguously termed race, and the fact that he owns an opium den—a drug whose origins are also found in the Eastern portion of the world. Considering the period in which this story was published (at the height of British colonialism), the image (and textual detail) arguably acts as a visual representation of how the expanding British Empire was being perceived by the Victorians. New lands acquired abroad meant those in Victorian Britain were now in contact with cultures and nationalities previously unfamiliar to them. The caption “At the foot of the stairs she met this Lascar scoundrel” beneath the vignette emphasizes this notion even further, as it reiterates the text and is denotive of the man who is apprehending Mrs. St. Clair. As such, one might read the image as Paget’s expression of Victorian Britain’s fear—and simultaneous fascination—with the lands and peoples of the ‘exotic Orient’.

Sources:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"At the foot of the stairs she met this Lascar scoundrel"

"Lascar" Definition

Illustrations of Sidney Paget

Introduction to Sidney Paget

British Imperialism