Fictional Characters and Their Creators: Notes

The Scottish writer and physician Arthur Conan Doyle, who introduced the detective in A Study in Scarlet and went on to write four novels and more than fifty short stories about him, narrated by his friend Dr John Watson. Holmes is given the address 221B Baker Street in London, and his method of reasoning from small physical details is the model for almost every detective in fiction since. He is not and never was a real person.

Feluda, whose full name is Pradosh Chandra Mitra, was created by the film-maker and writer Satyajit Ray, who also created the scientist Professor Shonku; both appeared first in Bengali magazines for young readers. Byomkesh Bakshi, who calls himself a truth-seeker rather than a detective, was created earlier by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, also in Bengali. Swapping these two names is the commonest error in this part of the syllabus.

They are the peasant husband and wife at the centre of Godan, the Hindi novel by Munshi Premchand, whose whole life turns on the wish to own a cow. The novel is the best known work of the writer born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, and it is read as the classic account of debt, caste and landlessness in the Indian village. Premchand also created Hamid of the story Idgah and Halku of Poos ki Raat.

No. Victor Frankenstein is the scientist in Mary Shelley s novel who assembles and gives life to a creature; the creature itself is never given a name in the book and is called the creature, the being or the monster. Using Frankenstein for the monster is so common in everyday speech that examiners set the question deliberately. The novel, published in 1818, is often described as the first work of science fiction.

Robin Hood, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and Sindbad the Sailor are legendary figures that grew through centuries of retelling, so no writer can be named as their creator; Sindbad comes from the Arabian Nights, itself a collection assembled over a long period. In India, Vikram and Betal come from the Baital Pachisi, and the Tenali Raman and Akbar and Birbal stories are folk cycles. The talking animals of the Panchatantra are the exception, being credited to Vishnu Sharma.

A quixotic scheme is a hopelessly idealistic one, from Don Quixote of Cervantes, who charged at windmills believing them to be giants. A scrooge is a miser, from Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. A Jekyll and Hyde personality is one with two opposed natures, from the story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Such words are asked both in the general knowledge section and in the vocabulary section of the English paper.