Indeed, a combination of his financial strain (and his greed in the face of it) and his psychological disturbance leads him to commit murder so that he can keep the last of his ex-wife’s funds.Ī physical embodiment of the Roylott family’s decline in fortune and respectability, the Stoke Moran Manor itself is visibly crumbling after many years without upkeep. By telling Holmes and Watson all of this, Helen is trying to emphasize that the precipitous decline in this family’s wealth and status could lead its last surviving member to desperation.

Roylott shuts himself inside of the house and gets angry with the townspeople who cross his path. When Roylott and his two stepdaughters return from India to live at his family’s decrepit country manor, the neighbors are excited “to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat.” But rather than make himself a prominent figure in the community, as his family once did, Dr. Roylott as someone who has undergone a psychological decline from the days in which his family was respectable.

In addition to the Roylott family’s financial decline, Helen also depicts Dr. Roylott’s father was reduced to living as “an aristocratic pauper,” as there was no family fortune left for him. Due to this decline in family wealth, Dr. Over the course of a century, though, a few different heirs slowly drained the family wealth with their wasteful lifestyles and gambling habits.

This shows that desperation in the face of decline-especially in the absence of meaningful social and familial ties-can lead to depraved and immoral behavior.Įarly in the story, when Helen Stoner first appears at the apartment of Holmes and Watson, she notes that she is living with her stepfather, who is “the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of Stoke Moran.” The Roylott family was once one of the richest families in all of England, with a series of vast estates and a massive fortune. Roylott’s moral decline into greed and murder. Therefore, the Roylott family’s decline in wealth and status leads directly to Dr. His greed leads him to murder one of his stepdaughters, Julia, and attempt to murder the other stepdaughter, Helen, in order to protect his claim to monthly payments from his late wife’s wealth. Roylott-the last remaining member of the Roylott family-still feels entitled to the life of an aristocrat in which he lives well without working. The murder in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” takes place in a crumbling and isolated manor belonging to the once-noble Roylott family whose wealth is now gone.

The adventures of the speckled