Red Slippers: The ‘Detection’ of Foreign Evil and the Celebration of Domestic Tradition by Jim Blankenship

Critics have habitually seen in the evil Dr Roylott a product of ‘Orientalisation’. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ (1892), he is attributed a variety of Eastern traits and motives that signal his contamination through exposure to the malevolent influence of the colonies. As a threat from the outside, Dr Roylott must be removed by Sherlock Holmes to preserve the superior social integrity of England. A notably different creative expression of East-West engagement is provided by John Frederick Lewis’s 1856 watercolour A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Sinai, 1842. Although clearly ‘Orientalised’, the painting’s original patron, Lord Castlereagh, presides over a harmony of cultures, complacently upholding the older traditions of a structured society. When reread in consideration of this painting, ‘The Speckled Band’ offers an alternative impression. Rather than a victim of physical and moral disease from the tropics, Dr Roylott is exposed as an indigenous danger, a home-grown threat to the society and traditions that are his responsibility. The cultural markers that conflate him with Western ideas of the pernicious East become transparent and anaemic. By killing Dr Roylott, Holmes transforms from a defender of the domestic status quo to a metaphorical agent of social transformation.