The Hound, the Treasure, and the Ice: Empire Undone by Its Own Terrain Environment and Empire in Victorian Detective and Sensation Fiction

Abstract

This thesis explores how nature and empire collide in three well-known Victorian stories: Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles. While these works are often read as detective or adventure fiction, they also reflect deeper concerns about British colonialism and humanity’s troubled relationship with the environment. Using ideas from post-colonial theorists like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, alongside ecocritical thinkers such as Greg Garrard and Cheryll Glotfelty, the study examines how landscapes like the Arctic, colonial India, and the English moors challenge the characters’ belief in imperial control. In each story, nature is more than just a backdrop, it acts almost like a character itself, resisting domination and exposing the limits of human power. The thesis shows that these texts, while rooted in imperial ideology, also question it. The Frozen Deep presents the Arctic as a place where British ambition fails. In The Sign of Four, India’s colonial legacy haunts the present through violence and loss. And in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the moor becomes a space where mystery and fear unravel the illusion of order. By looking at these works through both ecological and post-colonial lenses, this project highlights how Victorian fiction was already wrestling with issues we still face today, environmental crisis, cultural inequality, and the consequences of empire

This thesis explores how nature and empire collide in three well-known Victorian stories: Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles. While these works are often read as detective or adventure fiction, they also reflect deeper concerns about British colonialism and humanity’s troubled relationship with the environment. Using ideas from post-colonial theorists like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, alongside ecocritical thinkers such as Greg Garrard and Cheryll Glotfelty, the study examines how landscapes like the Arctic, colonial India, and the English moors challenge the characters’ belief in imperial control. In each story, nature is more than just a backdrop, it acts almost like a character itself, resisting domination and exposing the limits of human power. The thesis shows that these texts, while rooted in imperial ideology, also question it. The Frozen Deep presents the Arctic as a place where British ambition fails. In The Sign of Four, India’s colonial legacy haunts the present through violence and loss. And in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the moor becomes a space where mystery and fear unravel the illusion of order. By looking at these works through both ecological and post-colonial lenses, this project highlights how Victorian fiction was already wrestling with issues we still face today, environmental crisis, cultural inequality, and the consequences of empire