Doyle was among the first generation of writers to earn great sums of money writing for mass-circulation magazines, as opposed to smaller, more literary journals.

This story was published in Harpers's Magazine in 1892. His techniques are really quite similar to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald who published in American magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Both men wrote simply and clearly about characters who were recognizable social types in a very realistic social environment. In fact, until the late nineteenth century, English writers generally refrained from setting stories in their own time-period. Doyle may have been one of the first to do so. And if his characters now seem to us to be cliches, it may be because other writers have been influenced by Doyle's attempt to fuse social realism with elements of the adventure and gothic tale.

Although it is not set in a remote time and...