Arthur Conan Doyle and Photography: Traces, Fairies and Other Apparitions 1399502204, 9781399502207

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ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND PHOTOGRAPHY Traces, Fairies and Other Apparitions

Bernd Stiegler Translated by Peter Filkins

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Bernd Stiegler 2023 English translation © Peter Filkins 2023 Cover image: Illustration D of The Coming of the Fairies by Arthur Conan Doyle. Originally taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk First published in German © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2014 Satz: Dörlemann Satz, Lemförde Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12.5 Sabon by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 0218 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 0220 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 0221 4 (epub) The right of Bernd Stiegler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Figures vi Acknowledgementsxv Introduction1 1 Forays into the Wilderness: Conan Doyle as Amateur Photographer 13 2 Sherlock Holmes: The Detective as Camera 32 Digression: The Sherlock Holmes Exhibition, 1951 74 3 Photographs from the Heart of Darkness: The Congo Atrocities 79 4 A Fairy Tale of Science: The Lost World97 Digression: Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini 123 5 Photographs from the Shadowy Realm: Photography and Spiritualism137 6 Fairies and Gnomes: A Photographic Re-enchantment of the World 210 Epilogue: Strategic Realism 235 Index239

FIGURES

Illustrations taken from the Conan Doyle Lancelyn Green Bequest in Portsmouth are indicated by the archival abbreviation (ACD) throughout. I.1 I.2 and I.3 I.4 I.5 and 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

1.5

vi

Arthur Conan Doyle sitting for sculptor Jo Davidson in 1930 (ACD1_B_1_2_439) xvi Arthur Conan Doyle sitting for sculptor Jo Davidson in 1930 (ACD1_B_1_2_440) xvi Film stills from the Fox Newsreel, 1927 (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=XWjgt9PzYEM, accessed 8 December 2013) 3 Preparation for the Fox Newsreel, 1927 (ACD1_B_1_ 2_434)9 Description of the Kodak Camera (Amateur Photographer and Photography, vol. 8, 21 September 1888, 186f.) 16 A private snapshot by Arthur Conan Doyle of his children, 1927 (ACD1_B_1_11_1) 18 Model of Marey’s photographic shotgun (Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), Chicago, 1992, 58) 21 Marey shooting a series of photographs (Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), Chicago, 1992, 58) 22

list of figures

1.6

1.7 2.1

2.2

2.3 2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9

Birds in flight taken with Marey’s photographic shotgun (E.J. Marey. 1830/1904: La photographie du mouvement, Paris, 1977, 27) 23 Advertisement for “Watson’s Detective Camera” (British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1888, 596) 27 Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, 1862 (http://www.scott-eaton.com/wp/ wp-content/duchenne_expressions_page3.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013) 34 A page from The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume I: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York, 2005, 103) 37 Advertisement (Amateur Photographer and Photography, 10 January 1923, 27) 38 Sidney Paget’s illustration from “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Strand Magazine, 1904 (Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume I: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York, 2005, 39) 41 Sidney Paget’s illustration from “Charles Augustus Milverton,” Strand Magazine, 1904 (Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume II: The Return of Sherlock Holmes; His Last Bow; The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York, 2005, 1030) 46 Alphonse Bertillon, “Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Facial Traits” (http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ lxjwyns8TZ1qawyaco1_1280.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013)51 Francis Galton, in a photograph taken by Alphonse Bertillon (http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ lxjwyns8TZ1qawyaco1_1280.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013)52 Francis Galton, composite photographs (http://www. medienkunstnetz.de/assets/img/data/3834/full.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013) 53 Frontispiece to Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, London, 1883 (http:// collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/archive/files/

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c6b3ab93c774a09d292bf9309db8c449.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013) 54 2.10 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Moritz Nähr, composite photograph (Ludwig Wittgenstein and Moritz Nähr, “Komposit-Photo,” in Michael Nedo, “Familienähnlichkeit: Philosophie und Praxis. Eine Collage,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ingenieur – Philosoph – Künstler (Wittgensteiniana, vol. 1), ed. Günter Abel, Matthias Kroß and Michael Nedo, Berlin, 2007, 163–78, 174) 55 Illustration of possible identifications according to 2.11 and Bertillon’s method (Paris-Photographe, vol. 1, 1891, after 2.12 102. A similar photograph can be found in Alphonse Bertillon, Die gerichtliche Photographie, Halle/Saale, 1895, 33) 56 2.13 Sidney Paget’s illustration for The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Strand Magazine, 1902 (Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume III: The Novels: A Study in Scarlet; The Sign of Four; The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Valley of Fear, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York, 2005, 574) 57 2.14 Gustav Theodor Fritsch, ethnographic photographs from South Africa, 1863–5 (An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, 1863–1865, ed. Keith Dietrich and Andrew Bank, Auckland Park, South Africa, 2008, 73) 59 D1.1–D1.4 Reconstruction of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment in Baker Street as part of the Sherlock Holmes Exhibition at Abbey House, London, 1951 (http://www.vykortsmuseet. se/I823jIlIwzQ5/1002654.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013; ACD 1/J/1/113; ACD 1/J/1/1/16; ACD 1/J/ 1/1/24)76 3.1–3.3 Photographs in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (ed. Edmund D. Morel, London, 1907, after 18, after 28 and after 35) 82 3.4 The cover of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo (London, 1909) 84 3.5 Frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo (London, 1909. Also in Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, Samuel L. Clemens, n.p., 1905, 40) 85 3.6 A page from Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Samuel L. Clemens, n.p., 1905, 39) 88 viii

list of figures

3.7 3.8 3.9 4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5

4.6

4.7

4.8 4.9

4.10

4.11

The cover of “Force” . . . versus . . . the Kodak, 1906 Cover of Anonymous, An Answer to Mark Twain (n.p., 1907) An illustration in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (ed. Edmund D. Morel, London, 1907, after 59) The expedition group (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIII, April 1912, 487) The expedition group, reviewed by Conan Doyle and with instructions to the illustrator (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 248) E. D. Malone (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIII, April 1912, 364) Professor Challenger (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIII, April 1912, 371) Arthur Conan Doyle’s sketch for the photographic portrait of the expedition group (http://de.scribd.com/ doc/24389362/The-King-vs-the-Kodak, accessed 8 December 2013) E. D. Morel (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 248) Arthur Conan Doyle’s draft for an illustration for The Lost World (The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 250) Frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (Strand Magazine, vol. XLIII, April 1912, 362) Illustration for the American edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 24) Photographs of the high plateau in the American (above) and English (below) editions (above, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 78; below, Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIII, April 1912, 380) Cave painting: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (“The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIV, November 1912, 485)

90 91 93 99

99 100 101

102

103

103 105

108

110

112 ix

arthur conan doyle and photography

4.12

4.13

4.14

D2.1 D2.2

D2.3

D2.4

D2.5

D2.6

D2.7 and D2.8 D2.9 and D2.10 D2.11

D2.12

x

The pterodactyl escapes: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (“The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIV, November 1912, 480) 113 Photograph of a dinosaur’s footprint from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, new edition (The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 124) 115 An ape-man: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (“The Lost World,” Strand Magazine, vol. XLIV, November 1912, 127) 117 Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini (ACD1_B_1_2_255)126 Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini (William Kalush und Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, New York, 2006, 378)127 Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini with their wives underway in Denver (William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, New York, 2006, 384) 128 Poster for Harry Houdini’s lecture “Do Spirits Return?” (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rCJZWs4tHV0/UXK_tpdF89I/ AAAAAAAAerw/PXM0nIy8lx4/s1600/Houdini-spirits.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013) 129 William H. Mumler’s spiritualist photograph with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln (James Coates, Photographing the Invisible, London, 1920, 30) 130 Fabricated “spiritualist” photograph of Harry Houdini and Abraham Lincoln (http://www.americaslibrary.gov/ assets/aa/houdini/aa_houdini_fraud_1_e.jpg, accessed 8 December 2013) 131 Film stills from The Lost World, USA, 1925 132 Film stills from The Man from Beyond, USA, 1922

133

The alleged spiritualist photograph that Harry Houdini sent Arthur Conan Doyle (William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, New York, 2006, 401) Harry Houdini surrounded by spirits (William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, New York, 2006, 426)

134

135

list of figures

5.1

The appearance of Katie King: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist (Clémént Chéroux et al., Le Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 172) 138 5.2 Arthur Conan Doyle in The Psychic Bookshop (ACD1_B_1_2_366)141 5.3 Photograph of the Kluski séance, 1919 (Gustave Geley, Hellsehen und Teleplastik (with 106 illustrations in the text and in panels), Stuttgart, 1926, after 272) 142 5.4 Photograph of the Kluski séance, 1919 (Revue Métapsychique, Bulletin de l’Institut Métapsychique International, 1923, 37) 142 5.5 Explanation of different ways to produce “spirit” photography (Städtisches Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Kunsthalle Krems und Fotomuseum Winterthur [exhibition catalog], Im Reich der Phantome. Fotografie des Unsichtbaren, ed. Andreas Fischer and Veit Loers, Ostfildern, 1997, 25) 146 5.6 “The Pheneas Circle” ([Arthur Conan Doyle], Pheneas Speaks: Direct Spirit Communications in the Family Circle Reported by Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1927, frontispiece)149 5.7 The members of the SSSP with a spirit revealed when the picture is turned (James Coates, Photographing the Invisible, London, 1920, 205) 152 and Séance with Margery (Crandon) on 19 January 1925 (with 5.8 Eric Dingwall and L .R. G. Crandon) (Martyn Jolly, Faces 5.9 of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London, 2006, 78, 75) 156 5.10–5.13 William Crookes, photographs of Katie King/Florence Cook, 1874 (Clémént Chéroux et al., Le Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 170 (5.10 and 5.11); ACD1_C_1_1_240; ACD1_C_1_1_240a) 157 5.14 Materialization during a Kluski séance (Gustave Geley, Hellsehen und Teleplastik (with 106 illustrations in the text and in panels), Stuttgart, 1926, fig. 78) 158 5.15 Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ectoplasm materialization by the medium Stanislawa P., 25 January 1913 (Clémént Chéroux et al., Le Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 201) 159 5.16 Séance with Margery (Crandon) on 5 February 1925, ectoplasm materialization (Clémént Chéroux et al., xi

arthur conan doyle and photography

Le Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 222) 160 Ada Deane’s photographs of Reverend W. S. Irving, 5.17 and November 1921 (ACD1_C_1_1_211; ACD1_C_1_1_212) 162 5.18 5.19 Ada Deane’s photograph of Colonel Allerton S. Cushman and his wife with the “spirit” of their deceased daughter Agnes, 24 July 1921 (Clémént Chéroux et al., Le Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 87) 165 5.20–5.23 William J. Crawford’s photographs of Kathleen Goligher’s ectoplasm materialization, 1920 (ACD1_C_1_2_45; ACD1_C_1_2_48; ACD1_C_1_2_44; ACD1_C_1_2_43) 167 5.24 William Hope’s photograph of Conan Doyle with the spirit of his deceased son (from scrapbook A 23 of the Conan Doyle Archives in the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire (BCU) in Lausanne) 173 5.25 Picture postcard, First World War (Collection Stiegler) 174 5.26 Picture postcard from 1910 (Collection Stiegler) 175 5.27 William Hope (ACD1_C_1_2_120) 178 5.28 William Hope, photograph with Archdeacon Colley’s writing (Rolf H. Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten. Die Rolle der Photographie bei bestimmten paranormalen Phäno­menen – ein historischer Abriß, Marburg, 1992, 175)179 5.29 Ada Deane (Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London, 2006, 112) 182 5.30–5.33 Ada Deane, Armistice and Remembrance Day photos (ACD1_C_1_2_135; ACD1_C_1_1_251_1; ACD1_C_1_1_254_1; ACD1_C_1_1_254_1a) 184 5.34 Identification of those pictured in The Daily Sketch (Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London, 2006, 129) 186 Photographs by Ada Deane (Clémént Chéroux et al., Le 5.35 and Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 5.36 84f.)189 5.37 The Combermere Photograph (http://historicmysteries. com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/combermere.jpg, accessed 2 December 2013) 191 5.38 Album page with skotographs by Madge Donohue, ca. 1930 (Clémént Chéroux et al., Le Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 98) 198 5.39 Post-mortem message from Arthur Conan Doyle to William Hope (ACD1_C_1_2_115) 199 xii

list of figures

5.40

5.41

6.1 and 6.2 6.3

6.4 6.5

6.6

6.7

6.8

6.9 6.10

6.11

6.12

William Hope, photograph with Arthur Conan Doyle’s spirit, ca. 1931 (Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005, 89) 201 Thomas Glendinning Hamilton, ectoplasm materialization by the medium Mary M. with Arthur Conan Doyle’s picture, 27 June 1932 (Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005, 225) 202 Francis Frith, Fairy Glen, ca. 1870 (Collection Stiegler) 211 Unretouched and retouched photographs of Frances with fairies, July 1917 (unretouched, Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, London, 1997, 112; retouched, Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005, 96) 213 Elsie and a gnome, September 1917 (Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, London, 1997, after 112) 214 Sunbathing fairies (Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005, 96) 218 Elsie with a fairy that is handing her a Canterbury bell (Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005, 96) 219 Frances with a leaping fairy, August 1920 (Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005, 97) 220 Juxtaposition of Princess Mary’s Gift Book with a fairy photograph (http://starrtrekking.files.wordpress. com/2012/05/princessmarybook.png, accessed 2 December 2013)222 Letter from Conan Doyle to Elsie Wright (Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, London, 1997, after 112) 223 Map of the village of Cottingley in the year of the event (Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, London, 1997, xvi) 226 Illustration from an article about fabrication of fairy photographs (Amateur Photographer and Photography, 17 January 1923, 48) 227 Copy of The Lost World dedicated to Elsie Wright (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/OuFVdNqueGc/T0J8VgQj3BI/ AAAAAAAAUfE/jsfEShGVHkY/s1600/LostWorld, accessed 8 December 2013) 230 xiii

arthur conan doyle and photography

6.13

E.1

xiv

Photograph of the expedition group attached to the dedication copy of The Lost World (http://4.bp.blogspot. com/5bp9xrXRqsw/T0J7VKpoCfl/AAAAAAAAUe8/ QO90sEgy28A/s1600/ml-LostWorldIllus, accessed 8 December 2013) Frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Through the Magic Door (London, 1908)

231 237

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book owes a great deal to the rich holdings of the Conan Doyle Collection of the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire (BCU) in Lausanne and especially the spectacular Arthur Conan Doyle Collection Lancelyn Green Bequest in Portsmouth. My special thanks go to Michael Gunton for his fantastic support and Nick Thompson for creating numerous reproductions. For their reading of the manuscript and helpful suggestions, I offer my deepest thanks to Martin Baisch, Petra Büscher, Michael C. Frank, Alexander Roesler, Alexander Schmitz, Felix Thürlemann and Raimar Zons. For their wonderful support and help, I owe a great deal of thanks to the wonderful fairies who have human names: Nike Dreyer, Anna Feistel, IngeCathrin Hauswald, Christian Hillmann, Sophie Kircher, Ingeborg Moosmann and Maria Tittel. For the English translation, thank you very much, dear Daniel and dear Kathrin Yacavone, for proposing this book to Edinburgh University Press, and Michelle Houston for accepting it. Many thanks to Peter Filkins, a poet among translators, and Marie Quandel for her work on the manuscript. Finally, and thanks to Edinburgh University Press, this book dedicated to a very British (or even Scottish) author is now accessible to the English-speaking world.

xv

Figures I.1 and I.2  Arthur Conan Doyle sitting for sculptor Jo Davidson in 1930. xvi

INTRODUCTION

In the summer of 1927, three years before his death, Arthur Conan Doyle appeared on camera for the “Fox Newsreel,” and talked only about two things he was always asked about: how he came up with the character Sherlock Holmes and about his involvement with spiritualism.1 Today this seems completely shocking: we know him as the author of Sherlock Holmes, but as a proponent of spiritualism? Don’t the detective’s sharp intellect and the spiritualist’s dabbling in nonsense contradict one another entirely? Not for Conan Doyle, one has to say. Two souls, alas, are dwelling inside his breast, along with some more equally curious ones. My own astonishment about the strange coexistence of what would obviously not seem to belong together also forms the impetus for this book. For it is not a focus that grew smaller, but rather it led to ever new areas, such as Conan Doyle’s belief in photographs of fairies, as well as his efforts to publicize the horrors of the Congo (a crime against humanity committed through the colonialist politics of King Leopold II of Belgium), and the adventure novel The Lost World, which contains photographic illustrations of a journey through the world of the dinosaurs. Detective work as well as political commentaries and years of preaching the supposed revelations offered by spiritualism stand side by side with one another. The effort to explore and explain their specific logic is the task of this book. Indeed, one can ask, does Sherlock Holmes have something to do with spiritualism, and vice versa? And what does it mean when even now we visit his apartment at 221B Baker Street, which never existed, or when watching the new 1

arthur conan doyle and photography

“Sherlock Holmes” television series we are amazed at the miraculous explanation of hard-to-solve cases? Does that not also have something to do with magic? Conan Doyle scoffed at the widely held belief that Sherlock Holmes existed for real, and yet he was proud to have created this exceptional figure whom today everyone knows. We will also consider what he had to say to his readers almost a century ago, because in retrospect this short film, the only film of him that has survived, is remarkable. Conan Doyle, with his Scottish accent and his walrus moustache, is a reliable witness to his own story with no hint of taking on airs. He leaves his house with a book in hand and his dog at his side (Figures I.3 and I.4). He lays the book down on the garden table next to his hat, which he takes off as he begins to speak, pointing for his dog to sit while now and then petting him during his ten-minute monologue. At the end he says goodbye, picks up his book, and goes back inside the house with the dog. After him comes the afterlife. Certainly one that follows death. As well as the disappearance of Sherlock Holmes. That’s what he has to say. During the short film there are no questions, only information. The same amount of time is devoted to both themes. That does not mean that Sherlock Holmes is for Conan Doyle as important as what he has to say about spiritualism. The latter lies much closer to his heart and will in future take up more of his time, since the days of the detective are over, though the viewers likely still hoped for new Sherlock Holmes stories. For these he has no more time, because he has decided to spend all his time on what he called The New Revelation.2 This is what he is here to announce. Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism – and this is really what is strange about what he has to say – are presented side by side by Conan Doyle, each corresponding to the other. However, this does not mean at all that Sherlock Holmes has anything to do with spiritualism; above all he is only a rhetorical means through which to convince the audience, spiritualism being something that is entirely foreign to Holmes. This is made clear in “The Canon,” the name given by disciples to the ensemble of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, where in all cases spiritualism exists as an embattled and prohibited alien entity. Sherlock Holmes, remarkably enough, would have little to do with the spiritualist raptures of his creator and distances himself explicitly from supernatural apparitions. Here there are no ghosts, only the detective’s honed faculties. Such is the case in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”3 Conan Doyle respects these self-imposed guidelines and therefore puts up with the fact that his writing involves realms that have different rules that mutually cancel one another out. “The Canon” and the publications on spiritualism represent only two of numerous other fields. John Lamond, Conan Doyle’s first biographer and fellow follower of spiritualism, states that “There 2

introduction

Figures I.3 and I.4  Film stills from the Fox Newsreel, 1927.

3

arthur conan doyle and photography

were at least half a dozen different entities embodied in Arthur Conan Doyle.”4 His work is its own world, one in which, in curious fashion, highly different and highly heterogeneous continents of discourse with their own climates and habitats coexist. “The Canon” stands next to numerous historical novels, which Conan Doyle felt nonetheless were of higher literary quality than his Sherlock Holmes texts; spiritualist manifestoes, such as his comprehensive The History of Spiritualism; political commentaries and historical writings next to a defense of the existence of fairies; and literary essays next to articles on amateur photography and adventure novels. All of this and much more needs to be explored. And that is plenty in itself to take on, because these areas do not correspond to sharply distinct phases of his work.5 Yet the conflict discussed here does not seem to be one that he felt. Instead it seems more a matter of harmonious parallel universes. The postmodern jargon of the late 1970s heralded the discovery of the plurality of the self. “We are many,” it is programmatically stated in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in which rhizomatic multiplicity is offered as a new type of thinking.6 But already with Conan Doyle, who both in his bearing and aesthetics as an author belongs more to the nineteenth century and has nothing whatsoever to do with the avant-garde, one finds such plurality. Conan Doyle, “Britain’s last national writer,”7 is in his typical existence an incarnation of solid common sense, the epitome of the contradictions of his time. His overtly absurd and wayward fascination with spiritualist photography and pictures of fairies may look like a provocation. Yet even if Conan Doyle appears, to put it mildly, strange to us because of his defense of spiritualism and his enthusiasm for fairy photographs, he nevertheless shared such beliefs with ten million Americans, while through his lectures, which he gave all over the world, he reached some half million listeners, most of them having paid for the privilege to listen to him. Even if he seems to have taken extreme positions when looked at through today’s eyes, Conan Doyle is entirely ordinary. Therefore, when we talk about Conan Doyle, we are also talking in general about the time between 1880 and 1930, a period of half a century that oscillated between evidence-based notions of reality and spiritualist rapture, between interpretations of the here and the hereafter. Conan Doyle is like a seismograph of these swings back and forth; his work functions as a kind of fever chart for the times. When we read his texts, we roam about the imaginarium of this era, which was amply populated with Darwin, dinosaurs and detectives among its inhabitants, as well as phantoms, photographs and fantasies about the “Dark Continent.” This rich degree of multivalence characterizes not only his work but also the times. In the Fox film from the summer of 1927, Conan Doyle limits himself to Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism, describing only a part of his oeuvre. Nevertheless he reveals the matrix that supports it all, namely the conflicting 4

introduction

heterogeneity of fields that are transformed into a peaceful coexistence. How then did Conan Doyle characterize these two realms? Sherlock Holmes dedicates himself solely and alone to the precise scientific observation of facts, decidedly rejecting spiritualism. This also allows Conan Doyle to base his “extra-sensory experiences” nonetheless on facts – even if we no longer share such beliefs today. Thus it is not about belief but rather science. That is Conan Doyle’s strategy of confrontation: on the one side we have the fictional detective, who relies on facts, while on the other a supposedly fact-based movement, which all too often is pure fiction. Conan Doyle’s film interview therefore employs inverse logic: “The Canon” of the Sherlock Holmes texts on one side and the canonization of spiritualism on the other. Both are, in the guise of Conan Doyle before the camera, of equal origin. His first spiritualist experiences occurred in 1886/87, thus the very same time that he created the figure of Sherlock Holmes. However, he says nothing about the fact that he was critical of the séances that he visited at the time. In addition, he also published a polemical rejection of Reichenbach’s idea of an Odic force involving a magnetic life force which, it was claimed, could be detected through the medium of photography.8 Nevertheless, looking back at the séances, he sees the beginnings of his personal belief. He decodes with all his might his story and the movement now set in motion as parallel stories; and even if his life is overshadowed by this, it nevertheless holds meaning in world history. And so once again his life mirrors meaningful developments in world history. The story of Sherlock Holmes meanwhile is concluded. The other story, namely that of spiritualism, the history of which he reconstructed in two-volumes, points toward the future, while the other, namely that of Sherlock Holmes, is finished and thus is now a historical artifact.9 This appraisal, as is well known, did not prove true, as Sherlock Holmes lives on, appearing ever younger and younger, and like Proteus taking on ever-new manifestations, not least of which is the recent British television series Sherlock. Conan Doyle’s spiritualist writing is, on the other hand, entirely forgotten, while spiritualism itself, in favor of countless further esoteric trends, has long since disappeared. Today we continually revive Sherlock Holmes and have forgotten the “dark side” of Conan Doyle. Yet if we are to consider the inverse logic of Conan Doyle’s filmed comments, then we need to go a step further and recognize that Conan Doyle sees things in a peculiar manner. On the one side stands the detective, who according to the pronouncements and convictions of his creator was the first to solve cases scientifically. Neither luck nor happenstance plays a role in it, as had happened in previous crime stories, but instead logic and scientific deduction. Thus Conan Doyle is the first to successfully employ scientific methods to crime detection, and he is immensely proud of that. His former lecturer, Joseph Bell, served as a model in formulating case histories purely through important 5

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information gleaned from a patient’s background and history, demonstrating that any human being is a carrier of signs and a creature of habits.10 Thus we reveal unwittingly a great deal about ourselves, simply because we do the same things again and again. In Conan Doyle’s imagination life boils down to one thing: repetition. This method then shifts from illness to crime, the illness of the modern political body, without its essential form changing. On the other side stands spiritualism, which according to Conan Doyle has nothing to do with faith, luck or accident, but rather knowledge. Both – Sherlock Holmes and spiritualism – are constituent parts of the Evidential Paradigm which the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg proclaimed over forty years ago, using Sherlock Holmes as a prime reference.11 Both employ the logic used in considering facts and science. In addition, in contrast to having created Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle is neither the creator of the movement nor its most important proponent but instead its “gramophone.” He says what, purportedly, he has heard with his own ears and seen with his own eyes. He is, in other words, a Watson of the spiritualist movement. Watson does not possess the powers of observation of the master detective and is therefore relegated to the role of the concerned observer and chronicler. The same is true for Conan Doyle, who claims not to have psychic powers but instead has the ability to grant written form to apparitions. If then readers are willing to believe Watson and think Sherlock Holmes is a real person, they should do the same in regards to spiritualist matters conveyed to them by their author. That is the message of this long film monologue. The fact that Conan Doyle created the figure of Sherlock Holmes was often used by him and journalists as a means of supplying credibility to his ideas by transferring the qualities of the fictional character onto its author, as well as depicting rhetorically the wonder of his obfuscating devotion to fairies, gnomes and phantoms. “Doyle could not have created Sherlock Holmes,” states an uncritical article with the suggestive title “Is Conan Doyle Mad?,” “if he had not been deeply versed in the laws of evidence.”12 Nor is the selfcharacterization of being a “gramophone” made by chance. At séances that he attended, Conan Doyle had to above all trust his ears, as notoriously many things happened in the dark.13 Spiritualism begins not least of all with the sound of knocking at the house of the Fox sisters in Hydesville. Whoever has ears to hear, thus hears. The eyes have a tendency to lean toward skeptical doubt. The entirely unspiritual Sherlock Holmes therefore trusts above all his visual perception and has perfected that. Whoever has eyes to see, thus sees – and Sherlock Holmes does not just see, he observes, and from that arrives at a solution. The particular point of Conan Doyle’s answering familiar questions lies in its own striking rhetorical evidence: Conan Doyle steps before the camera just as he has been described by his critics: a serious, upstanding and believable man. 6

introduction

And he’s bemused by the fact that people take Sherlock Holmes to be real. This he states in the film, as well as in a later radio interview from the year he died. “To many he seems to be a real person; and I have had numerous letters from time to time addressed to him from all parts of the world.”14 Sherlock Holmes is a real-life celebrity, and what’s more, a worldwide one. The world is no stranger to him, nor he to it. Conan Doyle – albeit indiscreetly – has read the letters sent to Sherlock Holmes, as well as those to Watson. In them are offers to work as his housekeeper, as well as to marry him. Nevertheless Sherlock Holmes, as he smugly asserts, is a fictional character, even if many do not want to believe so. This is just the opposite of spiritualism, which many take to be unreal, a figment of the imagination, a product of the fancy of people inclined toward fantasy or who consciously cling to a delusion, but, according to him, it remains something deeply real. It, however, is based all on knowledge and facts. As a proponent for such matters he has also received many letters, in fact so many that he could fill an entire room with them, thus attesting to the comfort that spiritualism has brought to others.15 Both sides make use of letters, both sides employ supposedly scientific method and knowledge, nor is there a jot of faith, happenstance or luck involved. That is the point of the inverse logic of Conan Doyle’s intervention, which in the process also develops a surpassing logic, namely that the fictional is to be taken as true, that allegedly the fiction is true. Some letters to Sherlock Holmes are posited in a room full of letters about the comforts of the joyful new revelation. Thus fiction is reality; the bridge between fiction and reality thus ultimately creates a reality somewhere between here and the hereafter. Strategic Realism This unique strategy of constantly shifting between two strictly distinct realms while translating worlds or systems is characteristic of Conan Doyle’s oeuvre. It is the art of crossing back and forth on the river Acheron, the power of the imagination enabling the journey between factuality and fiction, the living and the dead, the present and the past. I call it strategic realism. This I understand as an altogether Manichean ordering of the world into opposing entities which on the one hand makes possible a clear separation between values and meaning (good and bad, true and false, here and beyond, and so on), while on the other remaining strategically permeable, allowing for the ability to wander between the two worlds. Fiction can and should feed upon facts, while in reverse fashion the realm of facts is served by tools of fiction. Novels become pamphlets, and supposedly writings based on science not only follow narratives but are riddled with layers of fiction. “I want these people to believe that there is communication.”16 That is the spiritual message that Conan Doyle conveys to the thousands and thousands of listeners during his many lecture tours: there are realms which can communicate with us. His strategic realism enables 7

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him to assert the happy coexistence of the differing worlds of his oeuvre. Out of multiple (writerly) personalities comes a wanderer between worlds. With seven-league boots, Conan Doyle covers the length and breadth of his world, leaping from continent to continent. He passes the morning with Sherlock Holmes, the afternoon with his spiritualist leader Pheneas, and in the evening he travels to the “lost world” of the dinosaurs with Professor Challenger. No matter where he is, he is at home. Conan Doyle continually constructs spaces that do exactly this: they make possible the ability to cross back and forth between worlds, allowing as well for the evidence of applied judgment to remain untouched. He operates with supposedly strict differentiations that order the world while making each simultaneously permeable, though at the same time both systems remain unaffected. These systems are – and this is crucial – narrative spaces that promise reliable versions of reality. Sherlock Holmes is undeniably not a real person, but among his readership he nonetheless possesses an effet de réel. And spiritualism is truly in the eyes of Conan Doyle not only a new science but also even a “new revelation” that needs to be manifested in stories and communicated through them. The same is true for the other realms in which he worked. Photography, which is at the center of this book, plays a central role in this, even though it is not mentioned in the film portrait of Conan Doyle, who was undoubtedly aware of the cinematic-photographic performance of his presentation (Figure I.5).17 The assertion that “although there are occasional references to photography in Doyle’s work, it does not have any prominence” is questionable.18 Worldwide there is no oeuvre by any writer of this time that uses photography in as widespread or complex a manner.19 Photography is much more a key that unlocks his work for us, as well as his era, turning it into a chamber of wonders from 1900. It is a medium that really serves this designation in both senses of the word. In regards to séances, it can sometimes take the place of the otherwise unreliable human medium and present apparitions from the beyond in the shape of pictures. It is also used in novels as well as political commentaries, therefore making it a central means of communication, a medium of the transference between worlds. Whenever Conan Doyle wishes to present to the eyes the fact that “communication” exists, photography is the favorite realm through which he does so. Therefore it holds within his work a strategic function that is not to be overestimated, which in another way advances the curious inverse logic as well as following the matrix of strategic realism. The Worlds of Photography A shortened overview and panoramic view of Conan Doyle’s worlds reveals something early on: in the Sherlock Holmes texts (see Chapter 2) photography surprisingly shows up only rarely or just marginally. It is supplanted by the 8

introduction

Figure I.5  Preparation for the Fox Newsreel, 1927. protagonist, who – whether it be cocaine consumption or gaps in his know­ ledge or peculiar aspects of his character – certainly has various flaws, but who, despite these flaws, remains distinguished by his special powers of perception. “He was,” so it says pointedly in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the first Sherlock Holmes story, which was published in the Strand Magazine, “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.”20 This is why there is no need for photography: Sherlock Holmes is already a camera and a photo lab in one. However, his insight needs to be expanded upon and proves itself to be more complex than it appears at first glance. In other works by Conan Doyle that are now forgotten, photography plays a special role as a medium of communication. While it plays a subordinate role in the historical novels, since they consistently deal with the distant past and therefore concern themselves with the pre-photographic centuries, such is not true for other kinds of works. First off there are the historical-political reports – whether about the Boer War or the First World War – as well as interventions, such as a sharp critique of the colonial politics of Belgium in the Congo. In his book The Crime of the Congo, Conan Doyle regularly incorporates shock-photos which, in terms of the history of photography, certainly belong to some of the earliest known (see Chapter 3). Here the photographs function as both a photographic source of enlightenment and a convincing body of evidence. 9

arthur conan doyle and photography

In addition, he also has a series of literary texts dedicated to a protagonist who carries the embarrassingly grandiose name of Professor Challenger. In these, photography is purposely employed, such as in the illustrations used in the adventure-cum-science fiction novel The Lost World, which at the beginning of the twentieth century tries to flesh out the world of the dinosaurs (see Chapter 4). This same Professor Challenger shows up some years later in a novel titled The Land of Mist in order to discover a further realm, namely that of spiritualism, employing photographic evidence as well in doing so. Conan Doyle grants him what remains denied to Sherlock Holmes: a conversion to spiritualism.21 With this we are back in the realm discussed in regards to the film interview. Conan Doyle has an exceptionally broad oeuvre consisting of books, pamphlets, stories and numerous smaller publications of letters from readers, as well as reams of articles, all of which are dedicated to the broad topic of spiritualism (see Chapter 5).22 Beginning with the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, and right up to his death, Conan Doyle mounted a veritable spiritualist campaign that involved lecture tours throughout Europe, the United States, and also Australia and New Zealand, in order to convince the world of what he held to be the most important event since the death of Jesus nearly two thousand years before.23 Conan Doyle opened a bookstore devoted to the occult near Westminster Abbey which he financed, since it ran at a serious deficit, with the proceeds from his books and above all the Sherlock Holmes texts. In addition he wrote a book about photographs of fairies, The Coming of the Fairies, which involves something different than matters of the spirit, since Conan Doyle was convinced that fairies are of this world, photography having proved their existence (see Chapter 6). And last of all, Conan Doyle was not only an eye doctor – and had even wanted to earn his living as one – but also an enthusiastic amateur photographer who in the 1880s published a whole series of texts in the well-known British Journal of Photography (see Chapter 1). With these now forgotten essays he began his literary career, one that began with photography and also ended with it. Thus there is a plethora of various texts and images, discussions, and kinds of perception and viewings to take up, all of which have photography at their center. Through them we will journey through Conan Doyle’s world. Sometimes he will take on the role of Cicerone by informing us about the sights to be seen and the stories they have to tell, such as in his earlier texts, which make travel recommendations to amateur photographers, but also in his lectures on spiritualist photography. Above all we need to look to the photographs themselves in order to use them as evidence of a decipherable order of things. In Conan Doyle’s world, photographs are not contingent 10

introduction

images that accidentally depict things but rather signs of an ordered world. However, now and again their function is to suggest a world, or above all to produce it. That is the function of photography in the sense of strategic realism. The six chapters to come follow a chronology, even though the differing times of their realms overlap. Therefore the chronology implies no specific evolution or teleology. Conan Doyle’s work cannot be laid out in any logical or biographical order but instead requires one to thoughtfully and playfully juxtapose one work next to another. At the same time it is not an unfathomable, rambling rhizome but instead a vibrant photo album with set patterns and pre-cut slits into which the photographs can be fitted precisely. The images present and sometimes even produce an ordered world. The remarkable stories told by these images, as well the nature of the texts, will be traced and recorded in the following pages. These stories will also provide a means for deciphering history. A half century is collected in this album. Notes 1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eq18U5btcg, accessed 26 February 2022. A transcription of a later radio interview containing substantial similar content can be found on pp. 203–5 of the first biography of Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Memoir (London, 1931), which John Lamond, Conan Doyle’s fellow traveler in spiritualism, published just a year after his death. The recording made on 14 May 1930 at the Queen’s Hall in London can be found at https://sounds. bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/Early-spoken-word-recordings/024M1CL0013693XX-0100V0 (Part 1) and https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-andperformance/Early-spoken-word-recordings/024M-1CL0013693XX-0200V0 (Part 2), both accessed 26 February 2022. 2. Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, New York, 1918. 3. See Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” 901. From here on, all quotes of Sherlock Holmes stories and novels are taken from The Complete Sherlock Holmes, available at https://archive.org/details/ SherlockHolmesComplete_201303, last accessed 18 January 2022. 4. Lamond, Arthur Conan Doyle, xiii. 5. This coexistence was also puzzling for biographers: “Conan Doyle has always been an enigma. [. . .] And how could a scientifically educated man embrace Spiritualism wholeheartedly, and be deceived by a hoax like the ‘Cottingley Fairy Photographs’?” (The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Thirteen Biographers in Search of a Life, ed. Jon L. Lellenberg, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 1987, 10). 6. “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us is several, there was already quite a crowd” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN, 1980, 23). 7. As recently characterized in Douglas Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice, Oxford, 2013, 1. 8. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The ‘New’ Scientific Subject,” British Journal of Photography, vol. XXX, 20 July 1883, 418. 9. See Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols., London, 1926.

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10. On Joseph Bell, see Ely M. Liebow, Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes, Madison, WI, 2007 (reprint of the 1982 edition). 11. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Notebook, vol. 9, 1980, 5–36. 12. James Douglas, “Is Conan Doyle Mad?,” Sunday Express, 25 September 1921. 13. In his spiritualist novel The Land of Mist it is explained thus: “It is purely chemical, like the darkness of the photographic room. It preserves the delicate physical substance which, drawn from the human body, is the basis of these phenomena. A cabinet is used for the purpose of condensing this same vaporous substance and helping it to solidify” (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Land of Mist,” in The Land of Mist, The Maracot Deep [and] other Stories, Crowborough Edition, New York, 1926 [London, 1926], 3–252, here 74f.). 14. Lamond, Arthur Conan Doyle, 204. 15. Some of these letters can be found in the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Lancelyn Green Bequest, Portsmouth, https://www.visitportsmouth.co.uk/conan-doyle, accessed 26 February 2022. 16. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the Welsh Séance,” Two Worlds, 1919. The magazine excerpt originates from Conan Doyle’s scrapbook, “Spiritualistic Press Cuttings from July 20th 1918,” which can be found today in the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire (BCU) in Lausanne, Switzerland. 17. In the Portsmouth Archive there is a series of photographs that document preparations for the interview. The dog and book are, as one can discern, not accidental accessories but rather calculated props. 18. See the introduction written by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green, eds., in Arthur Conan Doyle, Essays on Photography, London, 1982, vii–xxi, here xvii. 19. An overview of the relationship between literature and photography is provided by the comprehensive commentary found in two collections edited by Jane M. Rabb, The Short Story and Photography, 1880’s–1980’s, Albuquerque, NM, 1998, and Literature & Photography: Interactions 1840–1990: A Critical Anthology, Albuquerque, NM, 1995. 20. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 123. 21. Challenger is the protagonist of a number of texts. In addition to The Lost World and The Land of Mist, which will be taken up in greater detail later on, there are the stories “The Poison Belt,” “When the World Screamed,” and “The Disintegration Machine.” 22. Conan Doyle published nearly a dozen monographs or collections devoted to the question of spiritualism. These range from early collections of essays like The New Revelation (1918), The Vital Message (1919) and The Edge of the Unknown (1930), to autobiographical accounts like The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (1921) or Our American Adventure (1923), followed by Our Second American Adventure (1924), culminating in a comprehensive two-volume history of spiritualism, The History of Spiritualism (1926). 23. On spiritualism’s being “the most important event since the death of Christ,” see “The Happy Hereafter,” Light, 20 July 1918.

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1

FORAYS INTO THE WILDERNESS: CONAN DOYLE AS AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER

So I have the pleasant prospect of a roomful of photographers clamouring to see my negatives & my wonderful unipod stand—which has been described so often tho’ mortal eye has never seen it. Arthur Conan Doyle (ca. 1883) on meeting Henry Greenwood, the editor of Photographic News1 Conan Doyle began his literary career as an amateur photographer. He studied medicine in Edinburgh and then in 1882 settled in Southsea, practicing medicine there until 1890.2 During this time he discovered photography. Conan Doyle’s training was in ophthalmology. For some years the lens of the human eye and that of the camera were his passion. Their “writing of light” was then suddenly replaced by a slew of articles written and printed, which never ceased for the rest of his life. Later Conan Doyle produced nearly ten pages a day, all of it leading to hundreds of publications. But at the start of his career the central focus was on photographic images and the description of them. Here images and texts went hand in hand, and would do the same later on in different forms. Photography, which later on he no longer practiced himself, nevertheless was just as meaningfully employed to illustrate his stories and novels. Conan Doyle indeed wrote his first short stories by the end of the 1870s, publishing “The Mystery of Sasassa Valley” in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal in 1879, but the first set of related texts was a dozen essays that appeared between 1881 and 1885 in the prestigious British Journal of 13

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Photography.3 In 1880 he began to write a column for this, the most important organ of British photography, under the title “Where to go with the Camera,” which because of its success he continued to write for years.4 The subject of the columns was possible excursions for amateur photographers, which at this time were an important clientele for photo magazines, along with professional photographers. The magazines published diverse articles with technical content that covered numerous new developments in the world of photography, ranging from camera types to lenses to how to develop negatives and prints, all of it reported in detail, but also essays about aesthetic questions and recommendations in regards to questions about composing images and about possible motifs. Photo magazines established technical and aesthetic norms and pulled together the debates found in the genuinely heterogeneous field of photography. Today they seem the stuff of dry, nevertheless insightful lectures which compactly present to us the realm of photography with all of its innovations and phantoms, metaphors and dominant aesthetics, rules and practices.5 Whatever was happening in the world of photography could be found in these magazines: they were the photographic world. Like a trained craftsman, in this time you had to properly learn the process and then try it yourself in order to get used to it. Therefore photo magazines served as a helping hand, rather than providing aesthetic pleasure. The same was true for Conan Doyle’s essays. They are not among his most stimulating texts, no matter their good intentions, and they could have hardly impressed the reader with their numerous excessive technical details and their rather roundabout travel reportage laced with occasionally stale humor. At the same time, by seeking to speak the common sense of the day and still be original in their ostentatious approach, they end up extremely instructive. Readers are supposed to do what the articles tell them to do. They are to follow in the path of the author’s own photographic practice. That is the point of the essays. These then take up not only technical questions but also the “technology of the observer.” The technical nature of the lens stands on the one side, while the mental mindset of the observer stands on the other. Finally, however, they do not just concern themselves with technical questions, but also with what kind of world would be brought home by the photographer. This then had to do with versions of reality. “What always ends up in the prints,” writes Timm Starl in regards to the movement of the shutterbug, “is the eye of the photographer, which rises up from them, making them his own . . . In the end he has made his own image.”6 Photography, however, is not just the photographing subject’s search for appreciation but also a modelled mimesis of the world. Photo magazines are instructions as to how to copy reality and instructions for photographers; their message is: “This is how to record the world.” 14

forays into the wilderness

Photography in 1880 was rarely practiced by amateurs and required considerable expenditure on equipment, chemicals and technical knowledge. From taking the shot to producing a print, photographers had to complete every step themselves, and for this they needed, in addition to cameras, glass plates and chemicals, as well as a darkroom and above all a lot of time. In the English photo magazines from this era one often finds in each issue a directory of available darkrooms. That a photographer would eventually be able to delegate the development of a glass plate (as well as film later on) and the wished-for prints was first possible at the end of the nineteenth century. The Kodak camera became the symbol of this new development (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). This we will take up at different points as we proceed. In the 1880s everything from taking the shot to producing the print lay in the hands of the photographer. Moreover, photography was relatively expensive. The motifs had to be carefully selected, and ruined plates were a real misfortune. Conan Doyle’s series of essays had a clear purpose: they were meant to offer a wide array of places in which to hunt for good photographic opportunities. Each shot photograph – a major capture. Yet as presented in his essays, Conan Doyle’s amateur photography was above all something else as well: a battle with technology amid the wildest nature possible. Conan Doyle learned about photography with William (“Willie”) Kinnimond Burton, with whom he also undertook photo expeditions.7 Later he dedicated his novel The Firm of Girdlestone to him, which appeared in 1890. William had his own darkroom at the family estate, Morton House, where Conan Doyle also worked, and also came from a family of enthusiastic photographers. William was a friend of W. B. Bolton, then the editor of the British Journal of Photography, from which the contact likely originated that led to Conan Doyle’s essays being published there. Burton published numerous texts in it, and in 1885 was among the founding members of the Camera Club (unlike Conan Doyle, who seems never to have been a member of a photo club), which a few years later led to a real upsurge in amateur photography. This also dominated the magazines at the turn of the century. Factional disputes developed around photography. The mostly bourgeois amateur photographers wanted to establish themselves as artists and lead photography out of its limited guise as the craft of professional photographers. Consequently the appearance of the magazines also changed. They now celebrated the beauty of the photographed world. However, according to Conan Doyle, the world portrayed by photography, and which it should portray, was still wild. It was to be domesticated but still incorporate remnants of the wild, without which it would be stripped of its magic. The question about whether photography is an art is here subordinate and is never once mentioned in the essays. Instead, it is much more about the battle between (photographic) technology and nature. When twenty years later photography was first thought of as an art, Conan Doyle remained 15

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Figures 1.1 and 1.2  Description of the Kodak Camera in The Amateur Photographer and Photography, 1888.

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forays into the wilderness

17

arthur conan doyle and photography

Figure 1.3  A private snapshot by Arthur Conan Doyle of his children, 1927. what one calls today a “shutterbug.” He wanted nothing to do with the turn in favor of the pictorial taken up by the amateur photography movement, and during his extensive journeys only took snapshots and banal family photos at home. He also no longer had any photographic interest in “wild” nature. Art photography remained for him, as far as we can determine, something foreign, nor did it play – as it did for Robert Louis Stevenson or Henry James – any role in the illustrations made for his books.8 From this time one can find photo albums of Conan Doyle’s which look no different than albums of snapshots from his era (Figure 1.3).9 They are ordinary – yet in a certain sense that is also true of Conan Doyle. From the early days of his involvement with photography it seems that not a single image has survived. We have to turn to his texts and their odd loquaciousness in order to consider photographs only as literary images that transmit the imagination and mindset that lie behind them. This is how the photographic world should look. Yet this also involves aesthetic and social norms that are made apparent in the photographs themselves. This is how the world looks. That is the message of the wild. Conan Doyle probably owned no photographic equipment at the start but instead borrowed it from the Burtons.10 During his first photo expedition, which took him to the Isle of May, he already had his Meagher bellows camera that used half-sized plates, which he also used later on.11 This camera was relatively easy to use, though it nevertheless required a tripod, and was suited 18

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for the collodion wet plate process, later employing dry plates, which since the end of the 1870s were developed mechanically, thus making photography considerably simpler. Conan Doyle used dry plates and depicted himself in the early texts as the “plate cooker,” who with pride announced, “The plates were of my own manufacture.”12 One of his photo-technique texts is devoted to the preparation of such plates. The process he recommends – and also explains – came from his friend Willie: “I have found no method of emulsification so good as that recommended by Mr. W. K. Burton, but not, I believe, originated by him.”13 And so technical recommendations are good turns done between friends. Excursions in the Realm of Photography The roots of Conan Doyle’s enthusiasm for photography are easy to pin down. In 1881 he attended the funeral of John Hill Burton, where he met his already mentioned son Willie, who already was an enthusiastic amateur photographer and indeed came from a family of photographers from the earliest days of photography: Willie’s grandfather, the historian and lawyer Cosmo Innes, was one of the pioneers of photography in Britain.14 Along with Sir David Brewster and William Henry Fox Talbot, he and others were members of the Calotype Club in Edinburgh, one of the first photo clubs in the world, as well as the prominent Edinburgh Photographic Society. By 1860 Cosmo Innes had already published articles in photo magazines on photographic excursions to Spain, France and Italy that created the genre which his grandson and Conan Doyle would advance two decades later. Willie enthusiastically carried on the photographic tradition of his family in writing regularly for the British Journal of Photography, founding Japan’s first photo club, the Japan Photographic Society, after moving there, and documenting not only the aftermath of the great 1891 earthquake but also everyday life in Japan. Conan Doyle undertook with him a four-day tour of the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, which he wrote about in his essay “After Cormorants with a Camera.”15 This was the first text of his short series of articles that were the first of their kind to appear in the leading photo magazines of his day. Unlike Willie’s grandfather, his desired destinations did not make up a grand tour involving the art historical gems of Europe. Instead, excursions were meant to head much more “Into the Wild,” while also occurring simultaneously close to home. Not culture but rather nature was on the program. Conan Doyle wrote a series of texts that, in addition to taking up exclusively technical questions,16 also had as their subject such near and distant expeditions. Along with a hunt for cormorants on the Isle of May, he also reported on his photographic reconnaissance in Southsea, where he lived, about a field trip in neighboring Portsmouth, about excursions along the Waterford Coast, on the Isle of Wight, which lay across from Portsmouth, and on a wet moor on the 19

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Isle of Arran, and finally journeys throughout Africa, which he traveled to in 1881. Tapping his medical training, Conan Doyle applied to be a ship’s doctor with the African Steamship Company, and in autumn 1881 was assigned to the Mayumba, which sailed from Liverpool for West Africa on 22 October. He joined the crew with his camera and wrote a column titled “Up an African River with a Camera,” even though it was about a genuinely exotic place which other amateur photographers indeed would hardly ever have the chance to visit.17 The near and the far, Great Britain and Africa, belonged together in the essays. Respectively they were different forms of nature that were being tamed, and not just photographically. The photo essays, which later on Conan Doyle never mentioned, and which were first rediscovered and edited a century later, combine travel reportage with advice on developing, lighting, and choice of subject, and thereby occasionally take up important metaphors for the history of photography.18 His own experiments are also mentioned, for as a doctor Conan Doyle had already experimented on himself with a substance called “gelsemium,” and he wanted to try to do the same with “pyrogallic acid” in the field of photography.19 In many respects the series fulfills the protocol of a photographic self-experiment. Interestingly they appeared in the British Journal of Photography without illustrations, even though one would assume that they should have, since many of the reports mention photographs that were never taken and which exist only in their literary pseudo-ekphrastic form. They are a kind of phantom – and not one just of photography. The first text is an interesting start to a series that indeed mixes photo-technical questions with metaphorical, travel and literary history.20 At the center exists the double shooting of a cormorant, which the text describes: a photographic experiment whereby a photo is shot at the precise moment that the bullet hits the cormorant. The survey of “‘fresh fields and pastures new’ for myself and my camera” finds its real subject in the camera and its technical possibilities. Indeed it was possible to take a shot of a cormorant that was so “razor sharp” that individual feathers could be distinguished as the bird flew through the air, though even more impressive was the capability of photography that was expressed in the process. The hunt is here the quarry. In the era of snapshot photography that was then dawning, and which also produced genuine “photographic shotguns,” photography is associated with hunting from this time on. Photography is the visual equivalent of the hunt, it becoming above all clear through this text that the shot bird and the exposed plate together make up the day’s haul. At the start it’s a matter of setting out to photograph harmonious images, while on the other hand this leads to a bloodbath of sea birds, two of them killed per minute. After half a day the tally came, on one side, to forty-three cormorants, nine rock pigeons, two 20

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mallets, a curlew, and a bo’sun gull, and a half dozen photo plates on the other. In the end all were shot simultaneously: with the camera and the shotgun shooting together the result was a double haul and the books balanced.21 Photographs are hunting trophies, visual copies of reality, technical appropriations of wild nature. Characteristically, what remain of “original” and “wild” nature in the end are harmonious landscapes and dead birds. Conan Doyle was aiming at birds at the same time as the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey captured numerous birds with his photographic shotgun (Figures 1.4–1.6). “I have a weapon that has nothing murderous about it,” he wrote in 1882 to his mother,22 he being able to shoot twelve photos of birds in flight per second in order to study the principles behind their movement.23 It is the heyday of snapshot photography, which discovered the realm of quick movement. It also then mapped the realm of the visible not able to be perceived by the unarmed human eye, thus shifting the realm of the visible at the same time. Photography gradually became a source of absolute authority whose evidence is so striking that it seems pointless to question it. A humorous, but also eloquent example of this also can be found in Conan Doyle’s photo essay “After Cormorants with a Camera.” A member of the

Figure 1.4  Model of Marey’s photographic shotgun. 21

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Figure 1.5  Marey shooting a series of photographs. expedition secretly drank whisky from a bottle he had brought along and then replaced it with water, which he was photographed doing. “‘That’s a pretty conclusive piece of evidence,’ said the Doctor, as we quietly went back as we had come. ‘We’ll keep it as a little surprise for him.’” But when the culprit assures them nothing has been taken from the basket of provisions, that which they had seen with the naked eye – they had indeed personally seen it happen – was transferred to the photograph that had been taken, the accusation postponed until the plate was developed. “‘By Jove,” said the Doctor, “I 22

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Figure 1.6  Birds in flight taken with Marey’s photographic shotgun. feel we have acted brutally towards him. There are depths in Sinbad which we have not fathomed as yet. I declare we won’t be sure he did do it till that photograph is developed.’”24 In the end “Sinbad,” who was also a kind of sailor, was handed the “dumb accuser,” which the accused looked at silently. It is pointless to raise any objection to photographic evidence. Photography is the witness, accuser and judge all rolled into one. Conan Doyle’s short essay, although like the others of not particularly high literary quality, is also illuminating. He takes up what is being discussed in the world of photography and translates it into a simple story. This leads him and those who accompany him, who normally inhabit a kind of half-world between nature and culture, into quite a different world, for the Isle of May is wild nature. Here there still live “pre-Adamic cormorants,”25 and the only remnant of human civilization is the lighthouse keeper. Here photography, as in the other essays, is a social activity. It is practiced communally and at the same time brings together the community of the day-trippers. In this respect, photography also has an integrative function. It not only incorporates the wild into domesticated images but makes a collective out of single persons. Other texts by Conan Doyle take on the form of “forays into the ­wilderness.”26 Whether it involves a wet moor on the Isle of Arran or takes 23

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place in the heart of Africa, it does not matter. A “wonderful series of pictures” allows itself above all to be carried home, even when the photos stand in contrast to the everyday, when the photographs oscillate between appropriation and the foreign. Michael Taussig has expressed it in a beautiful formula for mimesis, whereby it “plays this trick of dancing between the very same and the very different.”27 As a result the photographer can capture thoroughly the curiosities of British life and prescribe an ethnography of inland life, ancient (best of all pre-Christian) towers, archeological artifacts or the captivating nature morte of a haul of caught fish, the most important thing being that the recorded world differs from that which the viewer comes from already and offers the appearance of the strange. Conan Doyle’s essays are just such explorations of the wilderness, found within or far away from civilization, and from this they draw their motivation and motifs. They depict for us pre-set versions of the foreign, which then determine what the camera shoots.28 Nature is presented in tame photographic renderings. Photography as a Colonialist Mirror This is most obvious when a journey is made to far-off lands and the author does not openly act out his “wild fantasies,” as Conan Doyle called them, but rather seeks to depict them and photograph them.29 This is the case with Africa, the dark continent. To start, there are the names that worked their magic on the future author: “Madeira, Teneriffe, Canary, Sierra Leone, Monrovia, Cape Coast Castle, Bonny, Lagos, Old Calabar, and a score of others, whose very names had hitherto been unknown to me. I had a beatific vision of strange negatives.”30 The journey proceeded from the known to the unknown and came to an end in Akwa Akpa, now known as Calabar in ­present-day Nigeria. During this journey the aim was to turn “strange negatives” into “harmonious positives.” However, in this case the negative is the natural state – as is the human race that perseveres within it, not having yet entered the realm of culture – and decidedly so. Finally, the cormorants on the Isle of May and the Africans in Old Calabar possess a similar status: in the photographer’s imagination they inhabit the realm of pristine nature, into which he not only introduces photography but also culture along with it, yet from which he disappears again, taking magical and enchanting images with him. This amounts to the phantasm of a photographic annexation which clearly carries colonialist and racist traits.31 Therefore the photographer is an observer who records the world in order to, as we shall see, hold up a photographic mirror to it. It should also see itself as it appears in the magic silver mirror of photography. It should also remain the other that is present in the image. It should also commemorate the celebration of the present through that which is pictured in the photo. Photography not only displays that which is pictured, it equates to and is bound up with it. It 24

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is present to it. Photography is all of this and so much more – but the wild and uncivilized cannot recognize the magic of photos. They are foreign to them. They cannot read them. Therefore they remain the wild who are captured precisely because of that. Conan Doyle formulates a photographic cabinet of mirrors that occupies a position between culture and nature, identity and alterity, near and far amid the play of images. Africa is for Conan Doyle a primitive world of agriculture which Europeans can travel through without danger: The inhabitants of the dark continent are really a quiet and inoffensive race of men, whose ambition is to be allowed to live an agricultural life, unmolested and in peace . . . Kings have, however, a very natural objection to large parties, armed to the teeth with formidable weapons, forcing their way through their dominions. This is why they begin to get their stew-pans and sauce-bottles ready when they see a Stanley or any other modern explorer coming down on them.32 Farmers, kings and cannibals These are the occupants of the world through which Conan Doyle traveled. It is the world of the already mentioned “untouched wild,” in which photography has a special purpose. Conan Doyle is meant to amaze the natives as the photographer showing them a reflection of themselves. “I had a great desire to ‘astonish the natives’ by representations of their own hideous faces.”33 Therefore Conan Doyle brought with him an entire photo studio in order to develop prints along the way, being firmly convinced that it would be better to develop the photos right away and not, as did others, to bring the exposed plates home and first work on them there. Yet what happens when one holds up the mirror of photography to pristine nature? It is curious to see the effect which a photograph has on the perfectlyuntutored mind. I have frequently observed it on the coast when showing natives prints of places with which they were familiar from their infancy. A portrait would be hailed with roars of delight, but landscape was a dead letter among them, and I have never known a savage recognize a place from its representation. Appreciation of perspective seems to be entirely a matter of training and cultivation.34 The photographically illiterate “creatures of nature” react to photographs hardly any differently than Europeans of 1839 who first set their eyes on daguerreotypes. It was a wonder, “pictures that fell from heaven” that one could hold in one’s hand,35 but they were not so sure what they were actually seeing, so strange did the picture and the world within it seem to them, and which really they should have been able to trust.36 People used magnifying 25

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glasses to help them study the pictures, discovering ever new details within them and thus restoring the magic spell. The death and rebirth of the world in a single image: that is the magic of early photography. And it is precisely this play between death and rebirth which the Africans neither could nor should find in photos. For this very reason they are creatures of nature, and conversely even noble subjects of photography. Thus the magic of photography becomes even more clear: The savage eye sees a large hut and a small one in the picture before it, but the undeveloped brain fails to draw the inference that the small one is small because it is further away. Children and artists in the early days of art always depicted every object as being on the same plane. I have frequently observed in Africa that the first thing a native does when you show him a landscape is to turn it round and look at the other side of it. What the exact object of this manoeuvre may be I do not pretend to know, but the action is so unvarying and universal – whether among Kroomen, Mandingoes, Houssars, Ashantees, or any other tribe – that there must be the same good reason for it. Oliver Wendell Holmes formulated the proposition that every equal brain with similar factors to work on will evolve the same product, and the remark seems to hold good among the wild tribes of the coast.37 Despite all differences they are the same. The same could also be said as true for all the ways of life, beliefs, myths and religions of the African tribes and peoples: in front of the incorruptible eye of photography they are all the same. That is pseudo-democratic photographic colonialism. Oliver Wendell Holmes is the American essayist and writer whose name some years later served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and who, like Conan Doyle, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer.38 He also celebrated the magic of photography and even more so images he found to be eloquent. In his essay “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” one finds a famous passage of early photographic history in which the magic of photography is expressed: Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in the loss of color; but form and light and shade are the great things, and even color can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct from Nature.   There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,—representatives of billions of ­pictures,—since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit 26

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Figure 1.7  Advertisement for “Watson’s Detective Camera” from British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1888. 27

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of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.39 One could not give a more precise description of the magical transformation of the world through photographs. Here the world is turned into a picture. Photographs are more than visual vestiges: they are physical-material manifestations of their subjects. They skin those subjects and therefore are genuine trophy pictures. Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, two years after his last essay on photography. Yet just as with his amateur photographic experiments, one finds ties between photography and criminology within it. The first of them is simply a matter of biography and bibliography: Willie’s father, John Hill Burton, a friend of the Doyle family, wrote a book titled Narratives from the Criminal Trials in Scotland, in which he traced how criminals always make use of the latest scientific and technological methods.40 A second is, however, more metaphorical: cameras, which with the arrival of dry plates at the beginning of the 1880s were used much more widely, carried descriptive names. Among these were “detective cameras” or “concealed cameras,” which by the end of the 1880s already could take snapshot photos one after another without having to change plates, and which were also advertised more intensively by photo magazines (Figure 1.7).41 Whoever did photography in a city sometimes made use of these, and not just secretly, but with the imaginative disposition of a detective, who in literature still had to find his role. Conan Doyle, however, explored for starters the wilderness amid the near and the far, but not in the city’s jungle. Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, extended his photographic activities to the city. The eyes of the detective and the lens of the detective camera survey the proliferous world of signs found in Greater London. The only detective camera advertised in the 380-page British Journal Photographic Almanac for 1888 stems from a firm that has a specially chosen name: Watson. And Watson’s camera is Sherlock Holmes. Notes 1. Quoted in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Fowley, London, 2008, 209. 2. Regarding this part of his life, see Geoffey Stavert, A Study in Southsea: The Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, Portsmouth, 1987. On photography during this time, see p. 38. 3. These texts are also referred to in his correspondence. See Lellenberg et al., A Life in Letters. On photography, see 77, 81, 126, 143, 171, 173, 177, 179, 186f., 209,

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211, 226, 228, 298, 301, 367, 580–3. The edited texts appear in Arthur Conan Doyle, Essays on Photography, ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green, London, 1982. 4. Such columns also appeared in other photo magazines. In Amateur-Photographer from 1888, one finds, for instance, the column “Holiday Resorts and Photographic Haunts.” 5. See Bernd Stiegler, “Orthofotografie. Kleine fotografische Fehlerkunde,” Fotogeschichte, vol. 122, 2011, 41–50. 6. Timm Starl, Knipser. Eine Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie und Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980, Munich and Berlin, 1995, 37–41. 7. Martin Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1997, 64. William Burton wrote many articles, as well as The ABC of Modern Photography, one of the best-selling instructional books on photography of his time. 8. Books by James and Stevenson appeared with illustrations containing pictorial photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn. 9. These albums can be found in the archives in Lausanne and Portsmouth. 10. In 1891, he sold the equipment he used as an eye doctor and bought a new camera from Erlös: “I sold my instruments for £6.10.0 with which I shall buy photographic apparatuses, so we have been able to start a hobby without any outlay” (To Mary Doyle, 14 October 1891, in Lellenberg et al., A Life in Letters, 298). See also Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 166: “Photography became one of his passions again and he took his camera with him whenever he went on trips, although most of his surviving photographs are of the family rather than far-flung countries.” The latter is not correct, as some travel albums have survived. 11. Arthur Conan Doyle, “After Cormorants with a Camera,” in Essays on Photography, 1–12. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Few Technical Hints,” in Essays on Photography, 38f. 14. Biographical details can be found at http://www.edinphoto.org.uk/3/3_pss_ members_innes_cosmo.htm, accessed 25 February 2022. 15. Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Homes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 2007, 81. 16. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Few Technical Hints,” in British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1883, 91f., as well as “Trial of Burton’s Emulsion Process,” British Journal of Photography, vol. XXX, 12 January 1883, 20. 17. In British Journal of Photography, vol. XXIX, 28 July 1882, 431f. A version of this text also appeared in 1885 under the title “With a Camera on an African River” (British Journal of Photography, vol. XXXII, 30 October 1885, 697). On the biographical context, see Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 82. 18. Conan Doyle, Essays on Photography. See also ibid., 65: “Why Conan Doyle excised these pieces [his essays on photography] from his past is something like [sic] puzzle.” 19. One of his first published texts had a scientific subject: “Gelseminum [sic] as a Poison.” Using it upon himself was part experiment. 20. “After Cormorants with a Camera” was also reprinted in its entirety in Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin. 21. The paralleling of camera and weaponry also turns up in anecdotal fashion in the essay “On the Slave Coast with a Camera” (in Conan Doyle, Essays on Photography, 13–22, here 19): “A rather amusing incident occurred at Accra,

29

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which was our first important port after leaving Cape Coast Castle. A large canoe full of negroes happened to be engaged fishing within twenty yards of the ship, as she lay at her anchorage. I thought the opportunity of getting a characteristic and lifelike group too good to be neglected. I therefore got up my camera and was engaged focusing them, when, to my astonishment they gave a united yell and sprang overboard. The effect of the row of woolly heads glaring at me from the other side of the boat was so ludicrous that I attempted to make good use of the opportunity and expended a plate upon the group. I am sorry to say, however, that the results exhibited little better than a chaotic mass of white foam, distorted faces, and waving paddles, hardly distinguishable from each other. I then hailed them and asked what was the matter. ‘Me know dem thing,’ shouted one of them. ‘Me serve in man-o’-war. Dem thing gatling gun – all same Queen’s ship have in tops. What you want point him at poor nigger for?’ It was only when I had carried off the obnoxious instrument that the unfortunate fishermen could be persuaded to creep into their boat once more.” 22. Quoted here from the entry titled “Waffe” in Bernd Stiegler, Bilder der Photographie. Ein Album photographischer Metaphern, Frankfurt am Main, 2006, 254–9, which contains further references. 23. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), Chicago, 1992. 24. Conan Doyle, “After Cormorants with a Camera,” 9. 25. Ibid., 1. 26. See Arthur Conan Doyle, “Dry Plates on a Wet Moor,” in Essays on Photography, 30–7. 27. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York, 1993, 129. 28. In Conan Doyle’s case, as the texts repeatedly observe, the lens is most often pointed toward the “endless.” 29. Conan Doyle, “On the Slave Coast with a Camera,” 13. 30. Ibid. 31. On this Conan Doyle is very explicit: “A great deal has been said about the regeneration of our black brothers and the latent virtues of the swarthy races. My own experience is that you abhor them on first meeting them, and gradually learn to dislike them a very great deal more as you become better acquainted with them. In spite of the epidemic which broke out among us, I succeeded in getting photographs of many of the men of light and leading among these interesting and primitive races. The majority of them are depicted as, to quote Mark Twain, wearing a smile and nothing more” (Conan Doyle, “On the Slave Coast with a Camera,” 19). 32. Arthur Conan Doyle, “Up an African River with a Camera,” in Essays on Photography, 23–9, here 27. 33. Arthur Conan Doyle, “On the Slave Coast with a Camera,” British Journal of Photography, 31 March 1882, 16. 34. Conan Doyle, “Up an African River with a Camera,” 26. 35. Kunstblatt, 24 September 1839, 306. 36. The concert of these voices can be found in First Exposures: Writings from the Beginning of Photography, ed. Steffen Siegel, Los Angeles, 2017. 37. Conan Doyle, “Up an African River with a Camera,” 27. 38. An album of his photos can be found in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Spiegel mit einem Gedächtnis. Essays zur Photographie, ed. Michael C. Frank and Bernd Stiegler, Munich, 2011, 153–92.

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39. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 3, June 1859, 738–48, here 747–8, https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/, accessed 22 July 2021. 40. Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, 120f. 41. See Starl, Knipser, 34f.

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2

SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE DETECTIVE AS CAMERA

A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic effect. Sherlock Holmes in “A Case of Identity” Sherlock Holmes’s world is a realm of signs. Humans are carriers of their visible and decipherable history, and the things they use manifest the same. Pieces of clothing, watches and many other things used daily bear witness to their owners, whose habits leave traces upon them. Yet the only one who can decipher them is the detective. All other figures in this world are either blind or illiterate. The new language of signs must be learned, as must the ability to perceive them, which is more than just seeing. In the realm of signs, for those who understand how to read them there is no present, since everything carries a history with it and upon it. Nothing can escape history, render it invisible or simply make it disappear. It relentlessly and ineluctably leaves behind its visible traces. Above all this historical index simultaneously grants artifacts, daily items and people their essential character. They are creatures of history and signs. The figure of Sherlock Holmes is, however, not just a reader of traces but also someone who teaches their meaning. Amid the jungle of the big city, the thicket of signs and flux of phenomena, he manages to find an explanation for things and gets others to likewise agree on their meaning. No matter how unfathomable and seemingly indecipherable the maze of modernity may 32

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seem, Sherlock Holmes reduces it to its essence. He as detective embodies and promises order within the modern world, where classic methods of explanation no longer apply and already the perceptual abilities of the individual are overwhelmed. The disorientation of the reader remains, but Sherlock Holmes always helps them find their bearings within this world and dazzles them with his secular magic. His realm is entirely of this world. “The Book of Life” is the title of an article published by Sherlock Holmes which lies open before him. Sherlock Holmes has no need to seek hidden meanings, all he needs is the surface nature of a thing, which provides him the links to the history it carries.1 Everything alive leaves behind traces, which like signs can be deciphered. That is the law of life that his text in “The Book of Life” has left behind. Even the invisible leaves traces within the realm of the visible. But it amounts to a magical inscription which only a magician can decipher. Thus Watson reads aloud an article to Sherlock Holmes because he finds what it says to be complete nonsense, not knowing that the author himself stands before him. “The writer claimed,” it says in the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, “by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man’s inmost thoughts.”2 Even though this presumption is a part of the tradition of physiognomy and already was in circulation in the eighteenth century, it is met by Watson with legitimate skepticism, “The Book of Life” remaining for him as well as many others a work closed off by seven seals. He is a stand-in for all who are illiterate, and without whom Sherlock Holmes could not perform his semiotic-­ hermeneutical magic. In addition, Watson is the one who reads forth the exegesis as the evangelist of the secular savior. Thus Watson sees in the face of each client a person, an individual whom he comes in contact with, whereas for Sherlock Holmes they are above all carriers of signs. He deciphers their thoughts from facial expressions, their history from their appearance, comparing their type with other stored-away images. Everything is a matter of signs, language and meaning – and even facial expressions, according to Sherlock Holmes, have a grammar, have strict rules that regardless pertain to the person and therefore, like signs, are able to be read. Holmes is not alone in this view. In his 1862 book Analyse électro-­ physiologique de l’expression des passions, Duchenne de Boulogne, to name a prominent example, developed the theory that every emotional feeling, every movement of the soul could be read from facial expressions (Figure 2.1).3 They should be readable and understandable to others, and therefore have certain precisely laid-out laws they must obey. What needs to be developed is a general, cultural and perennial language that in addition is not random but necessary. Here nature rules. Therefore Duchenne maintains that these movements of the soul can not only be expressed through facial muscles but also can be generated experimentally when muscles are stimulated electronically. 33

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Figure 2.1  Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, 1862. He no longer needs real feelings, electrical stimulation by itself is enough. His book is a kind of manual that allows the reader to understand this grammar of feelings, an atlas for the exploration of facial landscapes through which every furrow, every movement, every twitch means something. Sherlock Holmes appears to know this language already.

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The Magic Wand of Reading Signs “Sleuthing is the secular counterpart of theological speculations,” says Siegfried Kracauer in characterizing Sherlock Holmes’s talent for divination.4 Yet even in the secular realm of traces, Sherlock Holmes is a grandmaster of interpretation who alone rules over sovereign meaning, which also grants him unique power: he can turn any fiction into facticity and grant it a “realistic effect.”5 That is the specific transformation that can be observed. Should Sherlock Holmes touch anything with the magic wand of divination, thus the chain of deduction is transformed into a chain of life that hauls us into the world of facts, anchoring us there in the meantime. The indexicality of signs allows for an almost magical bond between an object and its sign – and this in itself gives rise to an effect when the realm of the sign is fictive, while nevertheless serving up the promise of a factual world. Sherlock Holmes’s realm is not only of this world, it is this world. The reader recognizes it anew, believes it, reading fictions as if they were true. The more unfathomable the modern world is, all the more attractive is the promise of deciphering what is real through signs alone. That is how strategic realism is deployed. Sherlock Holmes promises a bridge between two worlds: the thicket of signs amid the jungle of the modern big city on the one side, and well-ordered signs on the other. On the one side crime rules, on the other enlightenment. Hence the para-religious designation of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes texts as “The Canon,” as well as the unshakeable belief that the detective is a real-live person or that the stories are reality fiction. One must simply believe Sherlock Holmes, and therefore one should believe in him. This belief has led to remarkable things, such as exhibitions organized that reconstruct the rooms of 221B Baker Street – which actually does not exist in London – complete with objects steeped in the stories and manifesting the stories, or eventually the founding of a museum, in which even today (if you are willing to wait in line long enough) you can personally tour the imaginary realm of the detective and survey the things referred to in “The Canon,” or the fact that Conan Doyle’s texts have been written about as if Sherlock Holmes really exists.6 “I perpetuate the gentle fiction,” writes Leslie S. Klinger in his introduction as editor of an annotated edition of “The Canon,” “that Holmes and Watson really lived and that (except as noted!) Dr. John H. Watson wrote the stories about Sherlock Holmes, even though he graciously allowed them to be published under the byline of his colleague and literary agent Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”7 Accompanying the texts is a plethora of materials, including illustrations from the original publications, menus and pictures of particular objects, along with numerous photographs that show what London looked like at the turn of the century. The literary texts are surrounded by “primary sources.” Nor are these out of place with them. They reference what the reader already 35

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sees when reading the text: buildings and locales, trusted names and events. Welcome to the real world. What are striking in the annotated edition are the photographs, which are especially suited to produce “a sense of the real” necessary to turn a detective into a secular savior (Figure 2.2). What’s promised us is the real world. However, this is a world – which is thoroughly astounding – (almost) without photographs, as photographs are hardly referred to in the numerous texts, nor were they used to illustrate them in their own time. There is hardly any literary realm more suited to photography than that of the master detective, and yet photography seems to have been completely expunged from it. Even among the numerous illustrations in the Strand Magazine and the published books, photography is never used, for drawings are featured instead. That is striking in itself, since Conan Doyle, as we have seen, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer who directed that photographs be used as illustrations for some of his books, as well as for his crusade on the part of spiritualism, employing them as well in his defense of pictures of fairies, which is the subject of the last two chapters here. Hence, he had more than just passive and sympathetic leanings toward photography. It was much more a passion. Furthermore, photography belonged par excellence to the indexical signs, and therefore to the same rank as circumstantial evidence. Both are more than just congenial with each other and share essential qualities. The American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, who came up with a widely used classification of different types of signs, often invokes photography when he wishes to explain indexical signs. For Peirce, Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical ­connection.8 They represent the bridge from one world to another. If you want to get from the world of appearances to the world of facts, you only have to follow the traces of circumstantial evidence. They are the secure path to knowledge. Circumstantial evidence and photographs are therefore similar types of signs. Both guarantee materiality in the sense of an impression, be it a physical clue or a visual sign, while also requiring training in the proper knowledge of how to restore visual clues to language in order to use them as sources. Photographs thus have to be read in the same way as circumstantial evidence (Figure 2.3).9

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Figure 2.2  A page from the The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2005.

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Figure 2.3  Advertisement from The Amateur Photographer and Photography, 10 January 1923. Both are important elements of the so-called evidential paradigm, for which Carlo Ginzburg invokes Giovanni Morelli and Sigmund Freud as protagonists in his famous essay on Sherlock Holmes (though tellingly not on the author, Conan Doyle).10 Morelli discovered that supposedly insignificant details in paintings, such as hands, ears and noses, revealed who the painter of a painting was, that Sigmund Freud tied almost all clues to an individual and collective prehistory, and ultimately that Sherlock Holmes was a paradigmatic figure when it came to the shift of late to “visual literacy” as a form of cultural knowledge and the ability to attain a visual competence able to read perceptions like pictures.11 At the heart of the Sherlock Holmes texts stands above all the revealing act, which is for the most part visual. Sherlock Holmes transforms the world into a realm of signs whose language he alone speaks, but which to others feels like a promise that therefore will be understood. He transforms the gibberish of many disconnected individual observations into the grammar of a language of great clarity. He reads this language in the book of nature, while at the same time writing it. It is nature and culture in one. It portends the communication between history and nature through the medium of signs. This results in the fundamental constellation of Doctor Watson as the figure of blindness and Sherlock Holmes whose special ability to see is as precise 38

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as a camera. This is also noteworthy, since one of the models for the figure of the detective described by Conan Doyle himself was Dr. Joseph Bell.12 In “The Canon” the medical man Bell is transformed into the Sherlock Holmes of methodical perception, while Watson, the doctor, is forced to be blind. The patient is turned into a client, and the physical ailment is now one that affects the social corpus. Joseph Bell described the perfection of case histories: We teachers find it useful to show the student how much a trained use of the observation can discover in ordinary matters such as the previous history, nationality, and occupation of a patient. [. . .] For instance, physiognomy helps you to nationality, accent to district, and, to an educated ear, almost to country. Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual on the hands.13 Bell also gives the very same examples that Conan Doyle uses in “The Canon”: tattoos, which imply journeys and extended stays abroad, and to be sure not scratches on watches, which only indicate that they were brought to a pawn shop, according to Sherlock Holmes, but rather signs on the golden watchband that reveal where the wearer earned his living. “You will see,” says Bell, “that many a surgical case will bring his past history, national, social, and medical, into the consulting-room as the patient walks in.”14 This is exactly what happens with the clients who appear before Sherlock Holmes, albeit always in the most dramatic way. He not only always sees everything, he has perceived it and observed it. “You see, but you do not observe,” says Sherlock Holmes to Watson.15 But Holmes does. That is likewise the real reason why there are no photographs in the Sherlock Holmes stories: Sherlock Holmes is already a camera. He continually collects images and can also link them together with others. He manifests the skill of cultural “photosynthesis.” The retained photographic images of what has been perceived are, in addition, in no way technically inferior but even manifest further dimensions, such as information about smell and shape, structure and materiality. Since Sherlock Holmes is already a camera, who already more capably perceives than any camera and likewise is able to superimpose and associate one image with another, there really is no longer any need for photographs. In “The Canon” photographs are mentioned in no more than a dozen stories, and within them they play – with one significant exception – no important role.16 They are already a form of evidence which the detective presents first and foremost, thereby acting, when they refer to anything at all, as a substitute for reality or markers of visual phenomena.17

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A Perception Machine Nevertheless, the series in the Strand Magazine, in which the stories were published with great success, begins with a story in which a photograph features in the middle and at the end. It is the only meaningful photography to be found in the entire “Canon.” The appearance of the master detective and the disappearance of photography occur simultaneously. Photography takes place and is replaced by Sherlock Holmes. That is the narrative of this beginning. Hence, the crux of this first story is indeed a complex substitution of photography. It can be read and deciphered programmatically. “A Scandal in Bohemia” is nothing but a staging of what Sherlock Holmes is meant to be going forward: a master interpreter. We behold his transfiguration into the heaven of i­nterpretation – and this within a story that undermines his very powers. For in “A Scandal in Bohemia” the detective suffers a defeat. It remains the only instance in which he fails on the field of crime. Nevertheless, he receives a remarkable reward, a special gift: a photographic portrait of his counterpart, Irene Adler (Figure 2.4). Going forward, it remains always on his desk and can be found as well in the later reconstruction of his room at 221B Baker Street. To its proud owner it represents the beginning of the photo collection he would continue to expand. In this story Sherlock Holmes is hired by Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismund von Ormstein, the Grand Duke of Kassel-Falstein and the hereditary King of Bohemia, to get hold of a compromising photograph which shows him together with a woman named Irene Adler. Sherlock Holmes gains entry to her apartment, is present in disguise at her marriage to another man, and ultimately learns where the photograph is being kept, though he fails to get hold of it. His counterpart Irene Adler has indeed seen through his ploy, and departs the city, leaving behind an ordinary photo of herself and a letter to Sherlock Holmes in the safe where the compromising photograph had been kept. In this story Irene Adler supplies the narrative frame in which the portrait of the master detective is displayed and shown to the public for the first time. “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.”18 This is how this story begins, and it ends with almost the very same words: “And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.”19 In between, the king of detectives, who would later be known as the detective, is introduced through a case to a no less notable figure than the future King of Bohemia. It’s a story of substitution. To it belongs as well the compromising photograph stowed away in cabinet fashion, which nevertheless cannot be presented openly in the detective’s cabinet, since it has been switched out for another. Nevertheless he is rewarded, yet he requests that, instead of the valuable emerald snake ring that the king has already slipped from his finger, he be given this photo of Irene Adler as compensation for his services. 40

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Figure 2.4  Sidney Paget’s illustration from “A Scandal in Bohemia” in The Strand Magazine, 1904.

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Given the fact that this story in particular is about the retrieval of a photograph which in the end is replaced by another, and therefore is no longer a threat, it’s not by chance that within it Sherlock Holmes becomes “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.”20 We are witness to his magical transformation. Just as one photo is replaced by another and Irene Adler (meaning ‘eagle’ in German) becomes the woman, Sherlock Holmes obtains his photographic eagle eyes. From his defeat he learns to perceive with the precision of a camera and to know how to interpret the images. Irene Adler’s portrait is the photographic testimony to this transformation. When at the end it stands before him on his desk, it reminds him of not only his defeat but also his task: he needs to turn himself into a camera and become “impassible,” devoid of feeling, to “take on” each case in both senses of the word. “So I got the idea for Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock is utterly inhuman, with no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect,”21 writes Conan Doyle. That is likewise a classic topos found in early crime literature. In her historical crime novel The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, in which she reconstructs a famous child murder that occurred in 1860, Kate Summerscale has delicately and materially shown in what ways the sharp gaze of the detective sheds light on the darkness to be found in mysterious cases, and how it can be compared to a camera. From Wilkie Collins to Charles Dickens to Edgar Allen Poe and all the way up to the largely unknown Mary Elizabeth Braddon of today, we find numerous examples of the use of such a metaphor as a stand-in for the detective’s gaze.22 The eagle eyes of photographic perception are, however, more than just a sensory aspect: they also grant Sherlock Holmes a particular habit. He must observe the world from a necessary distance and transform it into perceived data. The photo of Irene Adler is therefore likewise the only involvement with a female – and also a photograph – that Conan Doyle imagined for him. Yet Sherlock Holmes desexualizes her, frames her as a picture, and thus turns her into a fetish. His emotions regarding the female are directed from then on only at the photographic image, finding in this the object of desire. “He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent,” it says in the story “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.”23 In the same story his room is also described. The photo of Irene Adler is in fact not mentioned but instead “the pictures of celebrated criminals with which every wall was adorned.”24 Sherlock Holmes has turned into a collector of photos. He glues photos of his opponents – and not just those with whom he already had something to do – into albums. More on this later. Such an album is mentioned earlier in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Irene Adler’s portrait was also meant to be placed in the same kind of album. Yet what matters most is that the photo of her embodies the female sex. An entire family album is therefore contained in one picture. The scrapbooks 42

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help Holmes, on the other hand, to know more than others do within his chambers, the camera obscura of the detective’s camera. Sometimes he does not even need to leave his rooms at all in order to identify the culprits. He already knows who they are. He has seen their pictures. They have left behind clues as to the things they have been involved with, thus remaining captured by them, and through them now allowing themselves to be captured. Indeed, in English the phrases “to expose a crime” and “exposure” have been in use since 1839, the very same year in which photography was invented.25 When later on in the stories photographs are presented, Sherlock Holmes plays a game with his interlocutors: “I see something that you do not see,” or more precisely, “I have long seen what you are only just now seeing.” Photography only presents to them what he has already perceived and noted. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a photograph is presented to Mrs. Lyons, whom the murderer has promised to marry. “‘Here is a photograph of the couple taken in York four years ago. It is indorsed “Mr. and Mrs. Vandeleur,” but you will have no difficulty in recognizing him, and her also, if you know her by sight.’”26 The same happens in further adventures. The transformation of Sherlock Holmes into a camera is perpetuated consistently throughout the cycle of the stories. The second story of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which directly follows “A Scandal in Bohemia” and was published one month later in the Strand Magazine, ostensibly has to do with an enthusiastic amateur photographer. Yet his darkroom is in fact a cellar from which a tunnel is dug in order to rob a bank. We learn that “Never was such a fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought to be improving his mind, and then diving down into his cellar like a rabbit into its hole to develop his pictures. That is his main fault; but on the whole he’s a good worker.”27 In essence, that is his main fault, and the metaphor of the cellar as a rabbit hole hides already the solution to the case that Sherlock Holmes will make clear as someone who really knows something about photography – a solution he has presumably known all along. And one also finds in the last story of the first volume the same theme taken up again. In “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” a would-be darkroom serves as camouflage for a crime.28 Thus the detective as photo camera is sufficiently ushered in: from this point forward he can make his own “exposures” and ignore photography. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the already discussed and probably most interpreted of “The Canon,” Holmes has not quite succeeded at accomplishing this.29 He cannot even catch anyone with photography. As is amply made clear, it is plainly visual material that serves as evidence, but its status changes in the course of the story. A signature can be forged, one’s private 43

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writing paper stolen, the seal copied, a photograph purchased – but a photograph in which can be seen both the future king and Irene Adler, that is beyond all doubt. It is no “double exposure,” no superimposition, but rather a “straight and single shot,” a snapshot of a double image, a double portrait. “‘We were both in the photograph,’” admits Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismund von Ormstein, the Grand Duke of Kassel-Falstein and the hereditary King of Bohemia, to the detective.30 “‘Oh dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion,’” Holmes replies.31 We will encounter again the motif of the coexistence of two people in one picture. It is also later for Conan Doyle a form of visual evidence of the “Thathas-been” of photography (Roland Barthes) which is authenticated through its indexical character.32 No one can therefore deny that both stand before the lens simultaneously. This bears witness to photography as irrefutable evidence. Years later Conan Doyle would identify his dead son within his own portrait photo, in which both of them appear. However, this no longer had anything to do with any kind of indiscretion – but rather with photographic solace. His son, Conan Doyle concluded decisively, had to have been physically present when he himself had his portrait taken by the spiritualist photographer Hope. In the story “A Scandal in Bohemia” the status of the image changes through the sudden marriage of Irene Adler to someone else. The future king belongs to a past romance. “‘The photograph becomes a double-edged weapon now.’”33 One could imagine that her husband might be a little upset about the compromising photo. Sherlock Holmes had – ironically enough – attended the wedding as a witness dressed in the clothes of a stable hand, which the priest had provided, though no one else was present.34 If we can assume that photos were taken, he sneaked them into the front of the family album. The coin, a sovereign, which he received as a reward, he drills a hole into in order to carry it henceforth on his watch chain, a further fetish in addition to the photograph. During the surprise attack in Irene Adler’s apartment he appears as a clergyman and tries to find, if not with incense but rather a smoke bomb, the hiding place of “the thing which she values the most,” which is of course the photograph.35 However, she takes the compromising photograph with her when she flees the city, leaving behind an obviously banal portrait photo of herself. As for the photo of herself and the king, she tells Sherlock Holmes in a letter, “I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he [the king] might take in the future. I have a photograph which he might care to possess; and I remain very truly yours, Irene Norton, née Adler.”36 The photograph serves as an emblem of his existence as a detective. It is simultaneously the object of desire, an affirmation of life and an anchor in reality.

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An addendum: in the first story, not only is the detective introduced as a camera, a matrix is also presented that makes possible other narrative developments. Two other Sherlock Holmes stories follow the model of “A Scandal in Bohemia” while slightly varying it. This is true of “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” which appeared in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” from The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. The first has to do with a blackmailer who gets hold of compromising documents and seeks money for them. When Holmes and Watson try to take back Milverton’s documents, they are not alone: a woman in disguise is in the room and shoots Milverton. Holmes and Watson throw the papers into the fire. The next day when they are walking on Oxford Street they stop before a shop near Regent Circus: Here on the left hand there stands a shop window filled with photographs of the celebrities and beauties of the day. Holmes’ eyes fixed themselves upon one of them, and following his gaze I saw the picture of a regal and stately lady in Court dress, with a high diamond tiara upon her noble head.37 Her identity remains unknown and unnamed.38 We see in the illustration that appeared in the Strand Magazine only the two men gazing into the shop window and know that they know what we do not know: Then I caught my breath as I read the time-honoured title of the great nobleman and stateman whose wife she had been. My eyes met those of Holmes, and he put his finger to his lips as we turned away from the window.39 The identity of the lady, however, is not disclosed – not even in the annotated edition (Figure 2.5). The second story involves an album that, according to a person affected, should carry the title “Souls I have ruined.”40 It amounts to a trophy album in which the criminal philanderer lists his conquests – and probably photographs of them as well.41 Sherlock Holmes and Watson seek to get hold of this album, but a woman beats them to it by splashing acid on the face of the culprit and disfiguring him. The Search for Photographic Clues I: Family Resemblances and Photo Albums Sherlock Holmes not only takes photos, he also archives them and works to affix them in albums. This represents the album of positives, versus that of the criminal Bluebeard in “The Illustrious Client.” It’s not “Souls I have ruined” that are collected there but rather “criminal souls.” They are another kind of visual trophy which is much less a fetishistic acquisition and much more 45

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Figure 2.5  Sidney Paget’s illustration from “Charles Augustus Milverton” in The Strand Magazine, 1904. 46

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a systematic archive, which then enables the ability to identify and compare, and makes future investigations considerably easier. These albums are initially mentioned in “A Scandal in Bohemia” and are frequently referred to in “The Canon.” “My collection of M’s is a fine one,”42 remarks Sherlock Holmes in “The Empty House,” while in a different setting he concerns himself with “cross-indexing his huge book of references,”43 in order after successfully solving a case to round out his many-volumed album of criminals. In “The Sussex Vampire,” there is also mention of a “record of old cases, mixed with the accumulated information of a lifetime,” and at the end of “The Resident Patient” he takes away a photo of the criminal, as it might possibly be useful in his future investigations.44 It is now a part of his collection once the case has been solved. Therefore, at the beginning and end of each story there is the photo album, which grows with each new case. At 221B Baker Street a kind of family album of criminals is therefore created. Through the logic of the detective, we see that they are in fact related to one another. All of the cases that he takes up are, according to Sherlock Holmes, in no way unique, but rather belong to a set of comparable and also anticipated models, for that is what family resemblances display. In the cosmos of signs of the master detective, repetition and re-emergence rule. This is also true for the photographic images that in a curious way reflect Sherlock Holmes’s philosophy. To these belong as well some references to readings which indirectly link to the universe of signs found amid circumstantial evidence and indexical images. For instance, he recommends to Watson (and to us along with him) William Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man, saying, “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”45 What is handled here as an abstraction finds its concrete expression in the cases. They are in every respect individual case studies, but general laws always apply to them. Therefore their destiny is a place in Sherlock Holmes’s photo album, in his case-book, which is also a “Book of Life.” Particularly illuminating is The Hound of the Baskervilles, the third and also the most successful of the Sherlock Holmes novels, which appeared as a book in 1902. This story is about an alleged ancestral curse which evidently has claimed its most recent victim on the moorland of Dartmoor. Sir Charles Baskerville has been found dead, and his friend and neighbor James Mortimer now fears for the life of Sir Henry Baskerville, who has traveled from Canada in order to 47

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deal with his inheritance. Sherlock Holmes says that he has matters to attend to in London and sends Watson to the sparsely populated landscape in order to sort out the circumstances. Watson then writes to Holmes to keep him abreast of events as they unfold. However, Sherlock Holmes has hidden himself on the moor and taken up the investigation. He discovers that the Baskervilles’ neighbor, Stapleton, who is supposedly a harmless natural scientist, also is a member of the Baskerville family and wants to get rid of all of his relatives in order to become the sole inheritor of the estate. To accomplish this he invokes the family legend of a huge dog that kills, by painting a mastiff crossbreed with a phosphorescent color that glows in the dark, thus causing fear, horror and heart failure. The novel begins with a notable appearance. James Mortimer, an amateur scientist, whom Sherlock Holmes wrongly addresses as Dr. Mortimer, is not only interested in Holmes’s skull, which “would be an ornament to any anthropological museum,” but also thinks that he is only – what a narcissistic insult! – the second-best criminal expert in Europe.46 Supposedly the best, scientifically speaking, is the renowned criminalist Alphonse Bertillon, who indeed existed in real life and who is introduced later in the novel in greater detail. Nevertheless Sherlock Holmes as a “practical thinking man of facts” remains unrivaled. When he first shares his suspicions he reads from a 1742 manuscript that relates the legend of the Baskervilles in which a monstrous hound killed the family’s founder. Then he reports on the death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the arrival of his heir Sir Henry, whose life he thinks is in danger. First Bertillon is mentioned, followed by a dark, murky family history full of foreboding, all of which first identifies the individuals involved without a doubt, followed by the dark power of the family and its remarkably fateful curse. This scene is as programmatic as the landscape in which the novel is set, since we, as Watson notes, step out of modern England into a realm in which “you are conscious everywhere of the homes and work of the prehistoric people.”47 As a result, the back story manifests itself amid the present. Sherlock Holmes for his part is not at all unprepared and has already discovered that Mortimer has published essays pertaining to atavism, the return of mostly anatomical traits of evolutionary predecessors. “‘Is Disease a Reversion?’, [. . .] ‘Some Freaks of Atavism’ (Lancet, 1882), ‘Do We Progress?’” are some of the titles.48 The past rears up amid the present and does so for the long term. The solution to the case involves posing a disturbing answer to this question and also demonstrating what atavism looks like from the perspective of a criminalist, and what can be accomplished through it. In other words, Sherlock Holmes answers the denigration of his skills as a criminal scientist by demonstrating that Bertillon’s theory, which supposedly provides a rock solid means of identifying criminals, is in crucial ways 48

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inadequate and needs to be supplemented. This is linked to a name familiar to Sherlock Holmes (and to Conan Doyle in any case), even though it does not appear in “The Canon”: Francis Galton.49 Conan Doyle corresponded with him about fingerprints, since Galton (rightfully) asked him how it could be that in “The Norwood Builder,” with the help of a wax model, a misleading impression could be lifted from a wall.50 He had performed his own experiments through which he found that wax and blood do not bind with one another, and that good impressions of fingerprints are not possible to lift from hard, uneven surfaces.51 Within the story Sherlock Holmes taps his photographic memory: the fingerprint in fact leads to the conviction of the criminal, yet only because it was not there earlier but appeared at the crime scene after the fact. The police thus followed the wrong (dactylographic) clue, while the master detective already knew what the impression really revealed. Fingerprints were not widely used among criminologists in the nineteenth century. Sir William Herschel had indeed discovered in the 1850s that fingertips contain a unique configuration of lines and suggested using them as a means of identification for illiterates in India in order to battle against fraud.52 Their use, however, remained sporadic. In the 1880s, Henry Faulds advocated the use of them in identifying criminals, and it was finally Francis Galton who, in his 1892 book Finger Prints, formulated the forensic use of them. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the use of fingerprints expanded, replacing Bertillon’s photographic method of identification, which was used during the time of The Hound of the Baskervilles. This places us in the middle of a photographic paradigm, of which Sherlock Holmes is the last iteration. His answer to Mortimer’s suggestion that Bertillon is the more important criminologist therefore is an abstract expression of a single name that, though it does not appear in the novel, is certainly part of its narrative program: that of Galton. However, he sees to it that, like a camera, this develops out of alternative photographic practices, and has less to do with fingerprints. This involves not only atavism, on which Mortimer made his scientific reputation, but also the family and its curse. Likewise this opening scene already contains the solution to the case in a nutshell. It also follows Galton’s logic. Sherlock Holmes not only takes photographs, he is also able to combine the photos with one another. The investigation is then the result of this kind of comparative photography. Or in other words and seen distinctly: Bertillon’s photographic method of identification is alone not enough, for it also requires the combinatory approach of the composite photography done by Galton. As a camera, Sherlock Holmes creates photos that make identification possible. These, however, need to be combined with others in order to formulate valid images. In this sense The Hound of the Baskervilles is a programmatic manifestation of Sherlock Holmes’s practice 49

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of photographic identification – even though photography does not play a thematic role within it. It is much more about the photographic process becoming, in a sense, flesh and blood, and thus transformed into a genuine habitus. In order to appreciate the implications of this remarkable coup de théâtre we need to turn to Bertillon and Galton. They are both protagonists in the development of photographic criminology at the end of the nineteenth century. Francis Galton’s pursuits complemented the nearly simultaneous experiments made by Bertillon. The latter sought to systematically utilize photography for police purposes and to develop a proper system of identification and facial recognition.53 His procedure, which came to be known as Bertillonage after him, involves the use of visual and statistical data to identify with certainty criminal offenders (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). Two photographs are taken of each at the same time: one from the front and one from the side. Therefore both must meticulously follow a precise dispositive in order to make a comparison of the images possible. Bertillon developed for this purpose his own device that made sure that all photos were taken from the same identical position. From him came so-called anthropometric photography as a means of identifying criminal offenders in many countries, leading as well to its use – with decidedly racial overtones – in ethnographic photography and research.54 This procedure also led to nuanced differences in the descriptive categories. Bertillon identified eleven different features – which were then sorted into three larger groups – and then constructed a cabinet with eighty-one drawers, in which the files could be stored as in a card file. Through the combination of different identifying attributes (precisely noses, ears or extremities, which already stood at the center of Morelli’s art historical search for identifying clues) any one person could then be identified. Bertillon called this procedure portrait parlé, “a speaking portrait,” its language constructed from a grammar of identifying characteristics and recognizable attributes. This language could and should be learned. Around 1900, when Sherlock Holmes solved most of his cases, police schools were organized, in which this system of identification was studied and later adopted. Sherlock Holmes understood this language, as numerous stories demonstrate, and above all had built his own substantial archive for the very purpose of saving himself trips to Scotland Yard, looking into his card files when needed, as happens in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.” “‘I found his chubby face,’” it says there, “‘smiling up at me from the Rogues’ Portrait Gallery,’”55 making it likewise clear that this story, in which allegedly three people must be found who share the same rare name of Garrideb, in order that a substantial inheritance be passed on, is really not about family resemblances but rather has to do with a criminal who had assumed the name in order to carry out his crime. He does not indeed 50

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Figure 2.6  Alphonse Bertillon, “Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Facial Traits”.

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Figure 2.7  Francis Galton, in a photograph taken by Alphonse Bertillon. belong to the Garrideb family but rather to the family of criminals. Bringing a family into such pictures is what Galton intended and Sherlock Holmes does so in The Hound of the Baskervilles. For there an extended family also plays an important role, namely that of the Baskervilles. When Sherlock Holmes discovers that Stapleton is a member of the Baskervilles, the case is solved. While Bertillon sought a standard system for classifying photos of criminals which would make it possible to recognize their individual traits later on (and thus lead to the conviction of repeat offenders), Galton undertook the visualization of generally trans-individual traits.56 The individual portrait was only material for another form of depiction, which it led to. Galton utilized the technical procedure of multiple exposures which drew upon individual traits in order to allow a general and supposedly “typical” appearance to emerge (Figures 2.8 and 2.9). He often explained how many portraits he had used to form the collective image. The individual thus disappears in order to allow the visual image of a “type” to come forth. Just as all taxonomies also follow such firm presuppositions and theoretical strategic interests, Galton sought to exploit photography for the purposes of social eugenics and a decidedly racial means of identification. Photographic types are in no way the result of neutral technical procedures; rather, they result from the explicit attempt to authenticate the existence of races, criminal types and other marginalized groups through the very process that at the same time was considered the highest form 52

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Figure 2.8  Francis Galton, composite photographs. of objectivity: photography.57 It is nothing more than visual ideology. Galton was out to find a means of objective normalization – with all of its corresponding down sides.58 Many further attempts followed which tried to outdo Galton.59 Pauline Tarnowsky’s Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses60 sets out with the help of countless mug shots of female Russian criminals and prostitutes to formulate a systematic means of “early detection,” much like how Jenness Richardson and Alice C. Fletcher used composite photography to objectify Native American women.61 And even the famous and notorious Cesare Lombroso, whom Conan Doyle frequently quotes in his spiritualist texts, undertook with Giuglielmo Ferrero a typification of women as criminals and prostitutes.62 Many more examples could be cited, but in the context of this book the strategic function of composite photography is more important than a detailed reconstruction of its history.63 A last example leads us back to Sherlock Holmes again. The presumably most surprising composite picture is from none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein (Figure 2.10). Not only did Wittgenstein include a reference to Galton in his “Lecture on Ethics,” he also made a composite photo of his 53

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Figure 2.9  Frontispiece to Francis Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1883. family à la Galton. For him it was about the visualization of a concept that he developed in his philosophy in another theoretical form, namely family resemblances.64 This, utilized now in regards to crime, is exactly what stands at the center of Sherlock Holmes’s solving of the murder of the Baskervilles. Wittgenstein superimposes his photographic portrait onto that of his sisters in order to create a “median image” of the Wittgensteins, while Sherlock Holmes observes the pictures in the gallery of the Baskervilles’ ancestors in order to see for himself what a Baskerville looks like. Thus he discovers in the picture gallery the family resemblance of the supposed natural scientist Stapleton to the ancestors. “‘My eyes,’” says Sherlock Holmes, “‘have been trained to examine faces and not their trimmings. It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise’”65 (Figures 2.11 and 2.12). As the comparison of the illustrations shows, the approach he uses in the novel corresponds in fact with manuals showing how with a little trick one can see through someone’s disguise.66 When in the gallery of ancestors Sherlock Holmes stands before the picture of “the cause of all the mischief,” 54

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Figure 2.10  Ludwig Wittgenstein and Moritz Nähr, composite photograph. the wicked Hugo, whom the Baskervilles have to thank for the murderous hound, he detects a family resemblance (Figure 2.13): He [Sherlock Holmes] stood upon the chair, and holding up the light with his left hand, he curved his right arm over the broad hat, and round the long ringlets. “Good Heavens,” I [Watson] cried, in amazement. The face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas.67 A detective should be able to recognize family resemblances. Sherlock Holmes, the camera, thus can also construct composite pictures exactly as did Galton. And Mortimer’s teachings on atavism also find in this their concrete manifestation, leading indeed to an “interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation.”68 Now Stapleton, alias Baskerville, no longer pursues the “subtle hunt” after butterflies, but 55

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Figures 2.11 and 2.12  Illustration of possible identifications according to Bertillon’s method. 56

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Figure 2.13  Sidney Paget’s illustration for The Hound of the Baskervilles in The Strand Magazine, 1902. 57

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rather will be caught like one by Sherlock Holmes and stuck in an album when with “‘A needle, a cork, and a card we add him to the Baker Street collection!’”69 In doing this the detective likewise identifies comparable criminal cases that have a family resemblance with “‘one of the most singular and sensational crimes of modern times.’”70 In solving the case in the gallery of ancestors, Sherlock Holmes more than convincingly shows that he is superior to Bertillon and that Mortimer’s assessment was wrong. There is a further photographic postscript to Bertillon’s remarkable appearance at the beginning of the novel: Mortimer’s expressed interest in Sherlock Holmes’s skull also receives a photographic-criminalistic resolution. Mortimer and the murdered Sir Charles Baskerville had spent, as we are told, “‘many a charming evening . . . discussing the comparative anatomy of the Bushman and the Hottentot.’”71 This racist pursuit has a photographic equivalent, for Gustav Theodor Fritsch undertook an expedition to South Africa in the 1860s, in order to complete an immense photographic collection of portraits of indigenous people, in which, as with Bertillon later on, he followed a strict visual dispositive of frontal and side profile photos (Figure 2.14).72 Sherlock Holmes ironically presents his own version of Mortimer in the novel, such that the difference between the typeface of the Times and the Western Morning News is just as obvious to Holmes as the difference between “the skull of a negro [and] that of an Esquimau” is to the amateur naturalist.73 That sounds like an enlightened stance, but throughout it remains trapped in a racist paradigm, just as above all Galton’s composite photos set race at the forefront. Even newspapers cannot avoid the clutches of comparative ­photographic visualization. The Logic of Repetition or Cross the Border, Close the Gap Family resemblance, which in The Hound of the Baskervilles leads to the identification of the murderer, is upon further review programmatic within the universe of Sherlock Holmes. “The Book of Life” that Sherlock Holmes speaks of is one that really is already written – for everything continually returns. It only needs to be deciphered. It’s just like history repeated. Strictly speaking, it is a holistic universe in which nothing new appears, which the detective sometimes affirms. “‘There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.’”74 And on the other side, we learn, “‘Everything comes in circles, even Professor Moriarty.’”75 “The Science of Deduction,” the programmatic title of the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet and the first of The Sign of Four, touches further upon the notion that there exists an unbroken chain of phenomena. “‘So all of life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.’”76 The family resemblance that he sees in the portrait gallery is in this sense a visual form of expression of “the wonderful 58

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Figure 2.14  Gustav Theodor Fritsch, ethnographic photographs from South Africa, 1863–5. 59

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chains of events, working through the generations, and leading to the most outré results.”77 The life of the individual is also an expression of this logic, for all individual stories repeat those that have occurred before. That is the logic of atavism that Sherlock Holmes adopts from Mortimer and applies to criminology. The portrait of an individual finds its individual form amid the other pictures, which when taken together make clear a family resemblance, which Galton experimentally sought through his photographs. “‘I have a theory,’” Holmes expounds, “‘that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree.’”78 Everything returns, including the order of things and the script of our lives. We find ourselves inside a giant replication machine. It is probably this curious logic which Conan Doyle followed as well in supplying his texts with a particular underlying structure that involves closing a circle. When the structure of the world amounts to a holistic repetition, then this same circling back can be used to formulate stories. Thus the composition of the first novel, A Study in Scarlet, is readily apparent in the last, The Valley of Fear, just as the first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is quoted in the final story, “The Last Case.” Hence the circle is closed. Conan Doyle supplied his first Sherlock Holmes novel with a highly peculiar structure, one divided into two nearly symmetrical halves, and it approaches a kind of religious quality that is not insignificant in meaning. A Study in Scarlet consists of two parts, each composed of seven chapters. Not only do the two parts take place on different continents, Europe and America, but each has its own narrator and order of events – and thus at first glance they would seem to have nothing to do with one another. One could say that the book is split into two distinct halves that only can be put back together again with some degree of effort. At first it appears that they have no desire to function as a whole. The first part consists of the “reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department,” and paradigmatically lays out the narrative weight of future Sherlock Holmes stories (along with the essential aspects of their heroes, to which also belongs the fact that Watson does not accede to the Copernican Revolution and is simply and completely clueless about a broad swath of modern science). The second part, which is titled “The Country of the Saints,” is told from “offstage,” in regards to its events, by an unknown and unnamed narrator, who hovers above the story like a narrative angel and announces that “avenging angels” are headed for London. The guardian angel of “deduction” encounters the avenging angels of the story. Nor could the two parts be any more different. This is made clear above all by their peculiar symmetry, making the structure itself seem meaningful. Meanwhile, a few observations among many. While the first part takes place in the jungle of the big city, the second part takes place in the Utah desert, and 60

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while the protagonists of the first are genuinely misogynistic young lads, the Mormons, which the second part is about, practice polygamy. Furthermore, while the first part fits the genre of the crime novel, this is true in another way for the second, for it takes up the programmatic traits of the western. And while the first part extols the strengths of the legal system, the second condemns tyranny. And while finally in the first part the visible prevails, darkness is many ways governs the second part.79 The schematic as well as erratic structure of the novel has been criticized many times, not least of all because the solution of the case by Sherlock Holmes requires a set of information from the second narrative, which has as its subject the prehistory, even though he has not received any knowledge of it in the context of the novel.80 The sharp edge of the “Science of Deduction” must in fact actually be dulled, since its analytical sharpness is dependent on awareness of the prehistory, and not just in the sense of sharply observed present events.81 Only within the logic of repetition does it at last gain its sharp-sightedness. Behind the macro-structure of the novel’s order of signs there lies a real narrative that spells out an engagement with signs that tries to link together an epistemic program which Conan Doyle would remain true to for the rest of his life. That’s also true in particular for the entirety of his works, in which he separates neatly ordered worlds from one another. In 1891, Conan Doyle attempted already in “The Last Problem” to get rid of Sherlock Holmes when together with his arch enemy Moriarty he drowned in the Reichenbach Falls. Why in this story he has to travel to Meiringen in Switzerland, when otherwise he never leaves England and always prefers to be in his apartment at 221B Baker Street, is quite remarkable. Perhaps the name of the falls should be taken literally. Reichenbach’s theory of the Odic force and its application to photography occurs at the beginning of Conan Doyle’s quarrels with spiritualism.82 Though during this time he maintained a decidedly critical stance against the movement, later he would become probably one of its most prominent proponents. Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, does not belong to this world – and thus disappears in the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle knew the rules of each genre and maintained a strict separation between them. In the Sherlock Holmes “Canon” one can certainly find thematic ventures into the dark realm of spirits, but their existence is firmly denied by the famous detective: “‘I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world,’” he says for example in The Hound of the Baskervilles.83 In the world of detective deduction, spiritualism has no place. The solution for the peaceful coexistence of these parallel universes is the construction of parallel worlds for each. The unbroken chain of deduction can and should also be applied to the invisible. The tenet of two worlds which distinguishes between the deserts of America and the jungle of the big city of London, spiritualism and the detective, the present world and 61

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the hereafter, provides for a homologous structure, and through it transitions from one realm to another. Thirty years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet, and outlining his world-view in distinctly spiritualist terms, Conan Doyle said: but my point is that the whole of this system, from the lowest physical phenomenon of a table-rap up to the most inspired utterance of a prophet, is one complete whole, each link attached to the next one, and that when the humbler end of that chain was placed in the hand of humanity, it was in order that they might, by diligence and reason, feel their way up it until they reached the revelation which waited in the end.84 When Conan Doyle, as we have seen in A Study in Scarlet, associates the world of signs with that of an imagination composed of a chain of logical links, he likewise implies an anthropology in which humans are in essence a set of signs that is located in the visible and invisible cosmos of signs. In Sherlock Holmes’s universe, the chain of being and the chain of logical deduction are transposed upon one another. These chains therefore reach way back, the detective even claiming, “‘There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.’”85 The threads taken up by observation and its logic of signs, which here is elevated to the level of science, travel not only back in history but also deep into the realm of the invisible in order to make it visible, illuminating finally the purpose of the detective’s work of elucidation. “‘You see the whole thing is a chain of logical sequences without a break or flaw,’”86 he says at the end of A Study in Scarlet, which seeks to justify itself as a Study. Seen in this light, the seemingly broken structure of the Christmas detective story which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 looks like a veritable intellectual and moral exercise that seeks to bring light to the darkness of American history. The regimen of terror conducted by the Mormons, which through its invisible means imposes its reign of terror, must be illuminated. Criminal examination and philosophical-moral elucidation go hand in hand. The organization of these realms mirrors in nuce a metaphor of light that is programmatic in nature. The evidential paradigm seeks to realize itself through enlightenment – and in both senses of the word. Its incarnation is the detective as a camera. The structure of the text of A Study in Scarlet, with its so obviously staged meaning, dominates the events and supplies the signs with an implicit message, which it is left to the reader to deduce. In reading the photos, the reader is the only one who has all of the pieces of information that they now begin to put together. Only they can recognize the unbroken chain of narrative signs. Through the novel’s peculiar construction, the reader takes on the role of the detective and is meant to bring together that which in the story does not initially seem to belong together, for the realms presented, and neatly separated 62

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from each other, are so different. That is the narrative of signs that Conan Doyle develops in nearly puzzling, yet didactic manner. When later on Sherlock Holmes postulates in “A Case of Identity” that life is more fantastic than fiction, that is a meaningful indication that ultimately this gap must be closed. The aim of the avant-garde to translate art into life finds here its somewhat avant-garde complement. As a camera, Sherlock Holmes is meant to transform fiction into factuality in order to manifest an effet de réel. That is the narrative program which Conan Doyle consciously, in all irony, plays out. The first chapter of The Sign of Four, titled “The Science of Deduction,” is lifted word for word from A Study in Scarlet in order to comment on the novel as a work of fiction. Sherlock Holmes speaks with Watson about the latter’s report about events that have transpired: “I glanced over it,” said he. “Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.” “But the romance was there,” I remonstrated. “I could not tamper with the facts.”87 From the science of deduction a romantic love story evolves over the course of the story. The narrative has transformed facts into fiction and thus betrayed the story’s logic, since, according to Sherlock Holmes, “‘The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes by which I succeeded in unraveling it.’”88 The only remaining noteworthy thing was the world as traces and appearances, evidence and photography. The Search for Photographic Clues II: Elective Affinities or the Name of the Bearer of Clues Names are more than hollow words. They are carriers of meaning that not only describe social realms but also in other ways pass on history and, when they are read and interpreted, allow for its rebirth. That’s also true for Sherlock Holmes’s fictional universe, which employs in multiple ways the names of real people and places in order to authenticate the factuality of the fiction. These are then intricately reconstructed in the commentaries, accompanied by photographic evidence or interpreted as a palimpsest of other names which the author did not reveal or at least did not wish to reveal. Names are, metaphorically, social photographs. They depict a past whose traces are made readable. This is equally true for the name “Sherlock Holmes.” The patronymic part repeatedly harks back to the American doctor and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes. Along with Edgar Allan Poe, he was one of Conan Doyle’s 63

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most important models and is mentioned earlier in his essays on amateur photography. Harder to pin down, however, is “Sherlock.” Here all efforts lead to nothing. What we know is that Conan Doyle at first thought of using the name “Sherrinford Holmes” but then reconsidered.89 Sherlock then is related to Patrick Sherlock, the name of a schoolmate from Conan Doyle’s time at Stonyhurst, or that of a cricket player or a violinist.90 If one takes seriously the idea that Sherlock Holmes is a kind of literary camera, then there arises another possibility, which to my knowledge has never been previously mentioned: William Sherlock (b. 1813).91 There is relatively little known about him, though he is among the early pioneers of photography in England. He sought to work with William Henry Fox Talbot in vain, but also was already himself experimenting with calotypes in the 1840s, a photographic method that Talbot developed which used paper negatives. In 1852, William Sherlock brought over forty pictures for display to the Society of Arts in London and then became a professional photographer. Later, in the 1880s, he worked as a photographer in Devon. Some of his portraits have survived, as well as his studies of country life, clouds and architecture. He was evidently active in almost all aspects of photography.92 In regards to Sherlock the photographer there is (Oliver Wendell) Holmes, who was in fact an amateur photographer, and above all dedicated some wonderful essays to photography. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94), who like William Sherlock is hardly known today, was one of the greatest American essayists and poets of the nineteenth century, and remained for a long time one of the greatest of all American writers – until his work was forgotten. He was best known above all for his Breakfast-Table series of books.93 However, he also developed a stereophonic photo viewer which made the three-dimensional perception of photographs possible, and wrote numerous essays on photography between 1859 and 1869 that remain some of the most beautiful and informative documents of their kind.94 Like a florilegium of early photographic history, one finds in them metaphors and images which today still inform theoretical writings on the new and exciting medium of his time, as well as finding their way into “The Canon” in different guise. There photography is not the concern but rather the detective. As a perception machine, Holmes the detective brings together all of the qualities Holmes the essayist ascribed to photography. For Oliver Wendell Holmes, photography combined in special ways fiction and factuality, the everyday and the marvelous, the visible and the invisible. In his essays Oliver Wendell Holmes invokes the literary and mythological tradition in speaking of “Prometheus’ gift” and of Acheron, celebrates Aladdin’s ring and the wonders of Arabian fairy tales, discusses theories of perception and the protean transformation of representation through photography, reinterprets the myth of Marsyas, gazes at Jerusalem through the eyes of 64

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Jesus, and even suggests one might still be able to find traces of Shakespeare’s skin on the door of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, left there much like eidola rendered onto a photographic plate. Yet while the traces of Shakespeare’s skin are no longer visible, that is not true of photography, for photography in the essayist’s view is a new technological archive of forms and bodily surfaces for which he finds ever new and different images, sometimes describing it as “visible films” or “exuviae,” then again as a “cortex” or “cutis,” and finally as a “fossilized shadow,” as a “never fading artificial network of skin,”95 indeed as “God’s gift” and as a “revelation of the shadow world.” Such secular revelations speak as well, as we have seen, to the detective’s gaze. For Oliver Wendell Holmes, photography is a new coincidentia oppositorum, which brings together that which supposedly does not belong together. It is fairy tale-like and magical and at the same time a technology, and a “natural art,” both nature and art, and finally both revelation and science in one. Just as Conan Doyle strategically positions Sherlock Holmes on the border between factuality and fiction, and thus establishes a new order of signs, Oliver Wendell Holmes does the same with photography. He infers its double nature directly from photographic technology as such, it being both negative and positive alike. Thus does Oliver Wendell Holmes behold within photography a picture of reality. The world he imagines “is only the negative of that better one in which lights will be turned to shadows and shadows into light, but all harmonized.”96 The essence of photography is itself the same as that of reality. For Conan Doyle it was the same – certainly so in his later texts on spiritualist photography, in which he saw an allegory for such an order. Oliver Wendell Holmes holds a special position in the history of photography. While in the nineteenth century photography was regarded by its viewers and their epistemic moorings as generally a part of nature or of art, this was not true for him. Instead, for him photography is factuality and fiction, reality and the picture of it at the same time. Conan Doyle shared this position – and not just in “The Canon” of Sherlock Holmes texts. The “classic” definition, however, is different. Writers and artists from Charles Baudelaire97 to Eugène Delacroix,98 and from Rodolphe Toepffer99 to Ludwig Pfau100 criticized in unison the superficiality of naturalistic depiction and pled for the power of the artist’s imagination, which sought to transcend the contingency of superficial appearances in favor of a symbolic representation of what was essential, while scientists conceptualized their notions of the objectivity of natural science through photography and equated the two.101 In Sherlock Holmes we find both realms combined, systematically transposed upon each other. That is the particular photographic-literary realism of “The Canon.” This is true as well for his photographic father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who consistently sought to think of the two arguably epistemically incompatible fields as one and the same. On the one side he invokes the theologoumena and 65

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the literary and mythological tradition, while on the other he imagines anew strictly scientific practices. On the one side, photos are invoked which can be found in the earliest documents of the history of photography, from those by Jules Janin to others by Alexander von Humboldt,102 such as the description of the sun as the master of chiaroscuro “in the manner of Rembrandt,” or how the paintings are reproduced by the “God of light.” On the other, he looks already to photography, and much else, for the scientific appreciation of family resemblances, which promise “new physiognomic insights” for physiologists and philosophers, and ideally might lead to scientifically useful images of a life from cradle to grave. Both of these also exist in “The Canon.” Oliver Wendell Holmes also applied this method of coincidentia oppositorum to how images were viewed. This led to the virtual inexhaustibility of an image thanks directly to the contingency and transformation of a single photograph into an inexhaustible source of the imagination’s powers through the natural needs of the method itself. As Sherlock Homes notes, from a single drop of water “one can infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagra”;103 one can conjure an entire history from any object. For Oliver Wendell Holmes these are “accidental observances of life and death” which lead to a “dreamlike increase in the ability to perceive”: “The more evidently accidental their introduction, the more they take hold of the imagination.”104 With him the glances are long since calculated, and already are an analog of photography. The conditio sine qua non of this method of photographic re-enchantment of the world is the transformation of reality into a pure surface of images. This involves a gradual material turn which makes his essays some of the most frequently quoted from the early history of photography, thus creating a modern counterpart to the indexical character of photography.105 Here we arrive at the center of Sherlock Holmes’s universe. Through Oliver Wendell Holmes we are given the diagnostic–prognostic formula, “form in the future will be separate from substance,” in which he more ironically than seriously considers the possibility that a photographed object could quietly disappear, since in the truest sense of the word it had already been transmitted into a material object.106 However, what is less ironic about this assertion is that in future these photographic skins would be collected in libraries, not only in order to archive them and look at them in peace, but also to be able to compare them. Photography then turns into an indispensable medium of communication which not only develops new forms of transmission but also provides a system of exchange, bringing together, in another twist, the coincidentia oppositorum of the far and near – in regards to time and space simultaneously. And with this come countless new modes of application which together find highly concrete implementations as photos of criminals, war, the cosmos and spiritualist photography, and last but not least, the application of photography as a reliable means for copying documents. “We are beginning to realize what capabilities 66

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are revealed,” concludes Oliver Wendell Holmes in noting the potential for both discovery and revelation at once. “We are beginning to see what it will reveal.”107 The “enchanted door (of pasteboard)”108 had opened, allowing us to discover a realm full of the enchanting forms of surfaces. In this magical land, the entrance to which can be found in the clue buried in his name, lives Sherlock Homes. Notes 1. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, London, 1887, 12. 2. Ibid. 3. Duchenne de Boulogne, Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions, Paris, 1862. 4. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Oxford, 1960, 365. 5. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, London, 1922, 56. 6. On the 1951 Sherlock Holmes exhibition, see the “Digression” at the end of this chapter. For the museum, see https://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk/, accessed 25 February 2022. The question of whether Sherlock Holmes really exists is a central theme of the debates carried out by his fans. As early as 1932, T.S. Blakeney published a study titled Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction? (reprinted Morristown, NJ, 1954), which was followed by many others. 7. Leslie S. Klinger in Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume I: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York, 2005, xii. 8. Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justin Buchler, New York, 1955, 106. 9. On this group of themes, see Spur. Spurenlesen als Orientierungstechnik und Wissenskunst, ed. Sybille Krämer, Werner Kogge and Gemot Grube, Frankfurt am Main, 2007. 10. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Notebook, vol. 9, 1980, 5–36. 11. Such as found in Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Understanding the Visual, London, 2004, 2: “In other words, he understands the rules and conditions of seeing a particular thing in a particular context; he takes an analytical and reflexive attitude to how and why he might be seeing it in a particular way; and consequently he will be able to extract a staggering amount of information from what is, to Watson, just a room.” 12. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Fowley, London, 2008, 243f. Joseph Bell also wrote an introduction to the fourth edition of A Study in Scarlet, London, 1893, which first appeared as “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” Bookman, vol. 3, no. 15, December 1892, 79–81. 13. Jessie M.E. Saxby, Dr. Joseph Bell, An Appreciation of an Old Friend, Edinburgh and London, 1913, 17. On Bell, see also Ely M. Liebow, Dr. Joe Bell: Model for Sherlock Holmes, Madison, WI, 2007 (reprint of the 1982 edition). 14. Saxby, Dr. Joseph Bell, 18. 15. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 124. Also “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. I, 4–40, here 10. 16. Photographs are mentioned – besides those introduced in later editions – in the following stories: “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” 237–48; “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” 185–94; “The Red-Headed League, 135–48; “The

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Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” 263–77; “The Resident Patient,” 361–72; “The Yellow Face,” 293–304; “Silver Blaze,” 279–92; “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” 429–42; “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” 569–81; “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” 497–506; “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” 507–18; “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” 761–72; “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” 957–64; “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” 975–83; “The Illustrious Client,” 853–66; “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” 945–56; and “The Three Garridebs,” 909–18. Since for the most part the references hold no great relevance for the stories, I do not examine the texts closely. 17. In the following I limit myself for the sake of clarity in the main body of the text to central examples, which I then expand upon in the notes. 18. Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 123. 19. Ibid., 133. 20. Ibid., 123. This characterization can be found in modified form regularly in “The Canon,” as well as the first novel, A Study in Scarlet: “‘You are a regular machine, an adding machine!’ I [Watson] exclaimed. ‘Sometimes there is something decidedly inhuman about you’” (Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 72). 21. Lellenberg et al., A Life in Letters, 244. 22. Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House, London, Berlin and New York, 2008, 82ff. 23. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” 805. 24. Ibid., 806. 25. This according to Hilary Grimes, The Last Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2011, 37–60. 26. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, London, 1902, 648. The same goes for the story “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in which the inspector identifies the man with the aid of a photograph. Sherlock Holmes, however, has naturally identified him already. In the story titled “Silver Blaze,” a portrait photo serves the later identification of someone not present and at the end reveals the double life of the suspect. And finally, in “The Six Napoleons,” the case begins with a body, next to which nothing is found except an apple, a cord, a map of London, and indeed a photograph. “It was evidently a snap-shot taken by a small camera. It represented an alert, sharp-featured simian man with thick eyebrows, and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face like the muzzle of a baboon.” Sherlock Holmes keeps the photograph and uses it as part of his ­interrogation – but it is not especially meaningful to solving the case (“The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” 511). 27. See Conan Doyle, “The Red-Headed League,” 138. 28. See Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” 265–76. 29. See Ronald R. Thomas, “Making Darkness Visible. Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction,” in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan, London, 1995, 134–68; J. Decker, Reflections on a Scandal in Bohemia, New York, 1986; and Regina Stinson, “A Quite Exceptional Woman,” Baker Street Journal: An Irregular Quarterly of Sherlockiana, no. 55, 2005, 38–41. 30. Who the real person is possibly hiding behind this name has become a particular challenge for Sherlock Holmes researchers. “The ‘King of Bohemia’ may be a thin disguise for another historical personage,” it says in Klinger’s commentary. “Suggestions include Archduke Rudolf, only son of Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria-Hungary; Prince Alexander of Battenberg, Monarch of Bulgaria; Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Kaiser Wilhelm II; the ‘Iron Chancellor’ Otto

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von Bismarck; Milan Obrenovich IV, first King of Serbia; Ferdinand of SaxeCoburg-Gotha, Second Prince and first tsar of Bulgaria; Edward Albert, Prince of Wales, son of Queen Victoria, later King Edward VII; ‘mad’ King Ludwig of Bavaria: Oscar Wilde (because of his relationship with Lillie Langtry, often identified with Irene Adler, and the subsequent scandal surrounding Wilde’s homosexuality); the ‘Count of Luxemburg’, immortalised in the eponymous musical comedy by Franz Lehar; Albert Wilhelm Heinrich von Hohenzollern, King of Prussia; and Count Herbert von Bismarck” (The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, vol. I, 16). 31. Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 126. 32. This traditional interpretation has not remained uncontested. The French historian of photography André Rouillé published in folio essais (the famous series produced by Gallimard) a 700-page-long book with the somewhat humble title, La Photographie, which reads like a polemic against a tradition in photographic theory, which in his opinion has prevailed throughout and dominated the debates of the last two decades, namely the theory of indexicality, which was developed by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and was taken up in multiple ways by sign and cultural theory, semiotics and semiology, as well as media theory. Rouillé calls a spade a spade: riding on the same horse as Peirce’s theory of signs are Rosalind Krauss, Philippe Dubois, and above all Roland Barthes, whose book Camera Lucida, in Rouillé’s opinion, led to a theoretical “monoculture” (André Rouillé, La Photographie, Paris, 2005, 14). Rouillé’s own plan amounts to a theoretical exorcism that seeks to expunge the ghost of the real from photographic theory. This in his view arose particularly with Peirce’s theory of the index and became a supposed certainty that distorted the view of photography. Rouillé sets against this tradition the triad of “historicité, pluralité, devenirs.” For him, in other words, it is not about an ontology of photography but rather a history of photography grounded in cultural theory, which should be seen as being in constant transformation. For him it is about cultural practices, about historical contexts, and – even though he hardly uses this term – the discourse of photography. The “cultural turn” presents itself as a radical departure from the ontology of the photographic image, which in French photography after André Bazin’s book Qu’est-ce que le cinema?, Paris, 1958, became the dominant theory and was associated with Peirce. 33. Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 130. 34. The motif of wearing a disguise plays an important role in the story, for the king appears earlier with a mask, which Sherlock Holmes removes. Also Irene Adler is disguised as a “slim youth” (ibid., 132) and wishes Sherlock Holmes “Good Night.” 35. Ibid., 131. 36. Ibid., 133. Irene Adler is also mentioned in other texts. See the explicit mention in Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” 151. 37. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” 506. 38. See Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Volume II: The Return of Sherlock Holmes; His Last Bow; The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York, 2005, 1031f. 39. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” 506. 40. See Conan Doyle, “The Illustrious Client,” 859. 41. Gene Simmons, the bassist for the band KISS, also has such an album, which contains the 4,000 women he allegedly has slept with, along with photographs of them. 42. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” 417–28, here 427.

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43. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” 787–803, here 789. 44. See Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” 899–908, here 901. 45. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, 102. 46. See Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 589f. 47. Ibid., 618. 48. Ibid., 588. 49. Bertillon is later also mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Naval Treaty,” 385–402, and “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” 761–72. 50. Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 2007, 120 and 298. 51. Ibid., 298. 52. Ibid., 119. 53. See the exhaustive presentation found in Susanne Regener, Fotografische Erfassung. Zur Geschichte medialer Konstruktionen des Kriminellen, Munich, 1999. Alphonse Bertillon produced a whole host of publications; particularly pertinent to the points made here are Identification anthropométrique: Instructions signalétiques, Melun, 1893, and La Photographie judiciaire, Paris, 1890. 54. For an overview, see Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, New Haven, CT and London, 1992. 55. Conan Doyle, “The Three Garridebs,” 916. 56. Allan Sekula refers to these different approaches with the fitting terms “nominalist system of identification” for Bertillon and an “essentialist system of typology” in regards to Galton (Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, vol. 39 (1986), 3–64, here 55); and Elizabeth Edwards names the visual types in Galton’s approach simply as “‘lived concepts’”: “They are a taxonomic essence within a dialectic of the visible and the invisible” (Elizabeth Edwards, “Ordering Others. Photography, Anthropologies and Taxonomies,” in In Visible Light: Photography and Classification in Art, Science and the Everyday, ed. Chrissie Iles and Russell Roberts, exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1997, 54–68, here 57). In regards to Galton there are meanwhile a large number of essays with exemplary comparisons: Roland Meyer, “Kartophien der Ähnlichkeit, Francis Galtons Kompositphotographien,” in The Picture’s Image. Wissenschaftliche Visualisierung als Komposit, ed. Markus Buchhaus and Inge Hinterwaldner, Munich, 2006, 160–79; Gunnar Schmidt, “Francis Galton: Menschenproduktion zwischen Technik und Fiktion,” in Wissenschaftlicher Rassismus. Analysen einer Kontinutät in den Human- und Naturwissenschaften, ed. Heidrun KaupenHaas and Christian Saller, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, 327–45; and Gunnar Schmidt, “Mischmenschen und Phantome. Francis Galtons anthropologische Fotoexperimente,” Fotogeschichte, vol. 11, no. 40, 1991, 13–30. Numerous further recommended readings can be found online at https://galton.org/compos​ ite.htm, accessed 20 November 2013. 57. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, Princeton, 2010; and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Das Bild der Objektivität,” in Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit, ed. Peter Geimer, Frankfurt am Main, 2002, 20–99. 58. In Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, London, 1883, there are numerous examples of anomalous types of physiognomy that are construed as a so-called normality. 59. The history of the photography of types is thoroughly discussed in Bernd Stiegler, “Eine kleine Geschichte der Typenphotographie,” in Randgänge der Photographie, Munich, 2012, 27–50, upon which I am drawing here.

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60. Pauline Tarnowsky, Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses, Paris, 1889. 61. Jenness Richardson and Alice C. Fletcher, “Individual and Composite Photographs of Three Dakota (Sioux) Women,” Science, 7 May 1886 (reprinted in From Site to Sight, exhibition catalog, n.p., 1988, 102). 62. Cesare Lombroso and Giuglielmo Ferrero, Das Weib als Verbrecherin und Prostituierte. Anthropologische Studien – gegründet auf einer Darstellung der Biologie und Psychologie des normalen Weibes, Hamburg, 1894. However, Lombroso here follows Bertillon’s approach. In the photographic history of the nineteenth century there are completely scurrilous attempts, such as that of Bowditch, who used the same approach to construct a composite portrait (and therefore a type) of professors of physics in Boston. See H.P. Bowditch, “Are Composite Photographs Typical Pictures?,” McClure’s Magazine, August 1984, 331–42. 63. See three accounts from very different disciplines: Arthur Batut, La Photographie appliquée à la production du type d’une famille, d’un tribu ou d’une race, Paris, 1887 (in addition, see Christian Phéline, L’Image accusatrice, Paris, 1985); Georg Treu, “Durchschnittsbild und Schönheit,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 9, 1914, 433–48; and finally – as social criticism – Lewis Hine’s composite photos of female child laborers from 1913. 64. See the wonderful lecture by James Conant, “Family Resemblance, Composite Photography, and Unity of Concept: Goethe, Galton, Wittgenstein”, available as an audio file at http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/podcasts/, accessed 25 February 2022; Ralf Goeres, Die Entwicklung der Philosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Logikkonzeptionen, Würzburg, 2000, 259 (as well as further arguments made there); and especially the chapter by Michael Nedo, “Familienähnlichkeit: Philosophie und Praxis. Eine Collage,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ingenieur – Philosoph – Künstler (Wittgensteiniana, vol.  1), ed.  Günter Abel, Matthias Kroß and Michael Nedo, Berlin, 2007, 163–78. In regards to typical photography and Wittgenstein, see Ulrich Richtmeyer, “Zur Logik der Phantomgesichter,” Rheinsprung 11 – Zeitschrift für Bildkritik, no. 1, March 2011, 117–38; and Carlo Ginzburg, “Familienähnlichkeiten und Stammbäume. Zwei kognitive Metaphern,” in Generation: Zur Genealogie des Konzepts, Konzepte von Genealogie, ed. Sigrid Weigel, Munich, 2005, 267–89. 65. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 646. 66. This is concretely demonstrated in Félix Hément, “La Photographie judiciare,” Paris-Photographie, vol. 1, no. 3, 25 June 1891, 102–8. 67. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 646. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 648. 71. Ibid., 593. 72. An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, 1863–1865, ed. Keith Dietrich and Andrew Bank, Auckland Park, South Africa, 2008. 73. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 600. 74. Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, New York, 1904, 17. 75. See Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear, 670. 76. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 12. 77. Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” 151. 78. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” 427.

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79. For more extended discussion, see Joseph McLaughlin, “Holmes and the Range. Frontiers Old and New in A Study in Scarlet,” in Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot, Charlottesville, VA, 2000, 27–51. 80. The Valley of Fear, the last Sherlock Holmes novel, repeats the structure twentyfive years later with only minimal changes. Once again we are presented with two symmetrical parts, both of which contain seven chapters and involve a story set in England that touches on a prior story set in a different part of America. And once again, in the second part a story (“The Scowrers”) is told, without which the “mystery of the past” (698) could not be solved. This time it is not the Mormons but rather the Freemasons which supply the counterstory to the one set in presentday London, and not the Utah desert but rather the beginnings of industrialization in a Pennsylvania valley. 81. On the question of science and the relationship of Sherlock Holmes to the semiotics of Peirce and Sebeok, see Alessandra Calanchi, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson: Interfacing Science and Fiction in the ‘Sacred Canon,’” in The Case and the Canon: Anomalies, Discontinuities, Metaphors between Science and Literature, ed. Alessandra Calanchi, Gastone Castellani, Gabriella Morisco and Giorgio Turchetti, Göttingen, 2011, 137–44. 82. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The ‘New’ Scientific Subject,” British Journal of Photography, vol. XXX, 20 July 1883, 418. 83. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 596. 84. Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, New York, 1918, 50. 85. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 23. 86. Ibid., 61. 87. Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, 67. 88. Ibid. In regards to the conflict between “romance” and “facts,” see Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 2011. At the center of his explications, Sherlock Holmes is able to see things others cannot precisely because of his attachment to both realms. 89. Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, 121. See also Vincent Starrett, “Oliver Wendell Holmes and Conan Doyle,” American Notes and Queries, vol. 194, 42–3. 90. The last theory also stems from the London Sherlock Holmes Society and can be found online at http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/world/conan_doyle.php, accessed 25 February 2022. 91. A detailed biographical sketch can be found online at http://www.luminous-lint. com/app/photographer/William_Sherlock/, accessed 25 February 2022. 92. Biographical information on him can be found in Roger Taylor and Larry J. Schaaf, Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1 ­ 840–1860, exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007. 93. The Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table (1858), The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860) and The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872). 94. The essays are edited and commented on in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Spiegel mit einem Gedächtnis. Essays zur Photographie, ed. Michael C. Frank and Bernd Stiegler, Munich, 2011. In the following I will refer to the Afterword of this edition. 95. See the history of these metaphors in Bernd Stiegler, Belichtete Augen. Optogramme oder das Versprechen der Retina, Frankfurt am Main, 2011. 96. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 3, June 1859, 738–48, here 741, https://www.theatlantic.com/mag​ azine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/, accessed 22 July 2021.

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97. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg, Albuquerque, NM, 1981, 123–6. 98. Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, ed. Hubert Wellington, London, 1995. 99. Rodolphe Toepffer [also Töpffer], Da la Plaque Daguerre, Paris, 2002 (first published in 1841). 100. Ludwig Pfau, “Die Heliographie,” in Kunst und Gewebe, First Part, Stuttgart, 1877, 89–270. 101. See, for example, Daston and Galison, Objectivity, especially 125–37. 102. See Jules Janin, “Le Daguerrotype,” in La Photographie en France. Textes & Controverses: une Anthologie. 1816–1871, ed. André Rouillé, Paris, 1989, 46–51 (first published in L’Artiste, November 1838–April 1839, 145–8). 103. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, 12. 104. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 745. 105. See Charles Sanders Peirce, Semiotische Schriften, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main, 1986; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, New York, 1981; Rosalind Krauss, Das Photographische. Eine Theorie der Abstände, Munich, 1998; and Philippe Dubois, L’Acte photographique, Paris, 1990. 106. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 747. 107. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture: With a Stereoscopic Trip across the Atlantic,” Atlantic Monthly, no. 8, July 1859, 13–29, here 14. 108. Ibid., 24.

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DIGRESSION: THE SHERLOCK HOLMES EXHIBITION, 1951

The greatest riddle in regards to Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes himself. J. B. Boothroyd, “Baker Street Revisited, or the Case of the Unexplodable Myth”1 The entire “Canon,” that is, the collected Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, appeared in the Strand Magazine and then later in book form – Sherlock fans might think I’m wrong on this – but without photographic illustrations. Nevertheless, the illustrations in curious ways generated later ones that not only depicted contemporary London, familiar interiors and other recurring motifs, but also provided images for the literary microcosm that later led to countless reconstructions of the same, many of them also photographic. The curiously realistic feel of the texts goes hand in hand with the illustrations that were created for them. In actuality the illustrator for the Sherlock Holmes stories was not supposed to be Sidney Paget, who as a result of them became famous, but rather his brother, Walter, whose drawings had impressed the artistic director of the Strand Magazine, W. H. J. Boot. However, neither he nor the editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, could recall his first name, and so a strange turn of events occurred, since Walter served as Sidney’s model (for the character of Sherlock Holmes), and sometimes when he was out and about in London, people came 74

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up to him, thinking he was Sherlock Holmes.2 Sherlock Holmes thus could be seen walking the streets of London. One of the most remarkable reconstructions of Sherlock Holmes’s world is the 1951 exhibition that was mounted at Abbey House, Baker Street, London NW1 from 22 May to 22 September. It was accompanied by a catalog which went into great detail about the exhibition.3 In addition, several series of postcards and also numerous press photos were published worldwide.4 The space depicting the now actual fictional 221B Baker Street was reconstructed by Michael Weight (Figures D1.1–D1.4). The catalog, which took as its epigraph the quote “Moonshine is a brighter thing than fog” from “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,”5 also included a drawing by Ronald Searle next to a list of the items exhibited, which included numerous photographs. Next to a photo of Conan Doyle were photos of Dr. Joseph Bell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sidney (dressed as Sherlock Holmes) and Walter Paget, as well as a “Photograph by Anthony D. Howlett of the actual spot where Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty had their fatal struggle at the Reichenbach Falls on 4th May, 1891.”6 Also on display were a soil specimen from the Reichenbach Falls, though not the footprints of the Hound of the Baskervilles, as these were unfortunately “no longer available, but New Scotland Yard has prepared especially for this Exhibition a cast of the footprint of the largest dog on police service. The dog, Black Boy, weighs 93 lbs.”7 According to Bernard Darwin’s preface to the catalog: This world-wide familiarity Holmes conferred on his London home. The Borough of St. Marylebone contains other celebrated places but it cannot be doubted that 221B Baker Street is the shrine to which the great majority of pilgrims will desire first to turn their reverent steps. A house so numbered they will not find, but the house in which the Exhibition is being held (kindly lent by the Abbey National Building Society) is believed by some of the best authorities, after much research, to be on the site of 221B.   In any case this sacred abode has long since been pictured in the imagination of all the faithful. How well we know the “Couple of comfortable bedrooms and the single large, airy sitting room cheerfully furnished!”, likewise the two broad windows through which Watson would descry a hesitating client on the doorstep, through which Jefferson Hope tried to hurl himself and Colonel Sebastian Moran with his air gun spoilt Holmes’s beautiful bust. No glimpse of reality could make them more real than they are, nor the seventeen steps (Watson had never counted them) from the hall to the sitting room, up which pattered the dirty little street Arabs called the Baker Street Irregulars, to the disgust of Mrs. Hudson.8 75

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Figures D1.1– D1.4  Reconstruction of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment in Baker Street as part of the Sherlock Holmes Exhibition at Abbey House, London, 1951.

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The table as well as the chair that were selected and displayed were those of Conan Doyle from the time in which he wrote most of the stories. On the other hand, others had been owned by Sidney Paget and had been used by him as models for his drawings, thus amounting to a kind of floating realia. In his preface, Darwin really leads the reader along in stating that “it cannot be doubted that 221B Baker Street is the shrine to which the great majority of pilgrims will desire first to turn their reverent steps” and that “No glimpse of reality could make them more real than they are.” Then he differentiates between two classes of followers: those who can be dubbed “straightforward worshippers, who may be termed fundamentalists” and who are true believers, and a second group who utilize every precious moment to study “The Canon” and “devote treasures of minute and scholarly research to these questions of chronology.”9 Both support Sherlock Holmes and his literary manifestation with the reality of his existence. And neither can be disappointed with the objects on display, be they Sherlock Holmes’s publications or Miss Violet Smith’s bicycle from “The Solitary Cyclist,” or to discover his gold-plated snuffbox and marvel at it. Furthering the tenor of the exhibition, one can also find press articles from the time that debate the question of whether Sherlock Holmes actually had lived, or those that, next to a photo of the rooms in which he lived spread across two pages, investigated the matter and decided it on behalf of readers.10 The fiction of the Sherlock Holmes who really existed is a part of his myth, even when, as J. B. Boothroyd remarks, “The greatest riddle in regards to Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes himself.”11 Yet it is not only since 1951 that one can carry home Sherlock Holmes’s world in the form of photographs. Notes 1. J. B. Boothroyd, “Baker Street Revisited, or the Case of the Unexplodable Myth,” Punch, 20 June 1951, 738–9, here 739. 2. Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 1999, 124. 3. Catalogue of An Exhibition on Sherlock Holmes Held at Abbey House Baker Street London NW1 May–September 1951, London, 1951, https://www.westminsteron​ line.org/holmes1951/catalogue/catalogue_text.htm, accessed 3 February 2022. 4. Among these were those credited to the Associated Press, which along with others appeared in the 2 June 1951 issue of the Sphere. 5. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” 167. 6. Catalogue, 4. 7. Ibid., 5. 8. Catalogue, i. 9. Ibid., ii. 10. Herbert Kupferberg, “Sherlock Holmes Exhibit ‘A’. Did Holmes Really Exist?,” New York Herald Tribune, 6 April 1952; “Speaking of Pictures. U.S. Gets Look at Room Where Sherlock Holmes Lived,” Life, 7 July 1952; and S.C. Roberts, “Pilgrims at 221B,” Listener, 23 August 1951, 303–5. 11. Boothroyd, “Baker Street Revisited,” 739.

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3

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE HEART OF DARKNESS: THE CONGO ATROCITIES

But it is true – and I defy any man to read it without rising with the conviction of its truth. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo1 Conan Doyle used his popularity, for which he was indebted primarily to the character Sherlock Holmes, to also take up journalistic and political positions. Much like his detective, he sometimes did so by investigating matters on his own or giving Scotland Yard advice. He also unsuccessfully ran for a seat in Parliament. Sometimes he was asked to appear in person in the hopes of drawing attention to a campaign. This was the case in regards to the protest against the atrocities committed in the Congo, which indeed was the first ever international human rights campaign. They are part of the terrible colonial history of Africa that took the lives of many millions of Congolese, estimates today being a minimum of five million, though probably there were as many as fifteen million victims. With his 1909 book, The Crime of the Congo, Conan Doyle took a public stance, sharply criticized Belgium, and labeled it “the greatest crime in all history.”2 His intervention occurred relatively late, as Leopold II, who was responsible for the atrocities, died in 1909. In 1900 the British journalist Edmund Dene Morel published a series of articles in the magazine Speaker that denounced the architects of the Belgian horrors, as well as calling for an open investigation into the crimes. Morel worked for an English shipping company which had a monopoly on business with the 79

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Congo, and he insisted that his business had nothing to do with the trading of goods. In Antwerp ships arrived with elephant tusks and rubber, but then they were loaded with weapons and munitions before returning to the Congo. Morel undertook massive amounts of research, had the chance to look at account books and exposed the perverse use of supposed philanthropy as outright exploitation. In 1903 Roger Casement, the British Consul in Boma, also investigated events in the Congo and one year later produced a report that corroborated Morel’s accusations. Morel and Casement founded the Congo Reform Association and appealed to Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle for support. Conrad had already taken up the exploitation of the Congo in Heart of Darkness, but declined to take a journalistic-political position, since he was only a “measly writer of novels.”3 Kipling feared political consequences, specifically an intervention on the part of Germany in support of Belgium. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, willingly agreed and, in 1908 wrote a 45,000-word comprehensive account over the course of eight days while hardly sleeping at all and consuming vast amounts of coffee.4 With King Leopold’s Soliloquy in 1905, Mark Twain had already presented clearly the most important and most widely read public intervention.5 Doyle and Twain used the publication of shock-photos that showed mutilated Congolese. Though they used almost identical photographs, their approach was different. Twain’s book appeared in several editions. In probably the most widely distributed edition the photographs are retouched or even turned into drawings printed among numerous illustrations. In another edition a good dozen photographs appear on their own page (Figures 3.1–3.3). In contrast, Conan Doyle only used shock-photos on the cover and at the beginning of the book, refraining from the use of other images (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). The use of such images during this time was quite unusual. Shock-photos of this type were not the norm and did not appear in newspapers. Conan Doyle took such images to be an express violation, which potentially, given the atrocities, did not spare the reader, but “felt strongly that his hard-edged reporting and the graphic photographs that accompanied it were absolutely necessary. ‘There are times,’ he declared, ‘when violence is a duty.’”6 Photography as Performative Evidence For Doyle, as for Twain, the effects of photography hold special meaning. Photography is consciously set forth as performative evidence. It should not just be used as an irrefutable witness of horrific incidents but should also have an intended effect upon the viewer. Moreover, photography took up a conscious positioning amid the war of images that quickly ensued. Members of the Congo Reform Association, as well as Belgium’s colonialist government, presented their own respective slideshows in order to convince the public of their view of things.7 Thus “LANTERN LECTURE ON THE CONGO 80

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ATROCITIES” could be found on the advertisement for one event, which also featured “60 excellent Photographic Lantern Slides from Photographs taken by Mrs. Harris, late of Baringa, Congo Free State. Descriptive lecture, revised by the Rev. J. H. Harris & Mr. E. D. Morel.”8 Leopold II, for his own purposes, had arranged his own sources of propaganda which produced numerous counter publications and also organized slide show lectures. More than two dozen brochures, as well as entire books, were published.9 In addition, travel writers such as Mary French Sheldon were invited to the Congo in order to portray a positive picture – which indeed happened.10 All of a sudden photography became a “double-edged weapon.”11 Interpretation was pitted against interpretation, photo against photo. In order to better understand and assess the meaning of photography, the colonial history of the Congo needs to be briefly presented.12 In 1884/85 the Congo Conference was held in Berlin, during which the Congo basin was promised to Leopold II, King of Belgium. The Free State of the Congo, which Leopold II founded himself with its own constitution, was nothing other than a country held as private property organized under international law. For years Leopold had already sought to benefit himself and the Belgian colonies, and therefore followed a strategy that hid horrible exploitation under the blanket of scientific exploration and philanthropic support. He became king in 1885 and dreamed of Belgian colonies in Africa or Asia. After diverse failed attempts, his Congo strategy finally came to fruition. He had promised to develop a region that had hardly been explored, founding a philanthropic society and in 1876 setting up a conference concerned with the geographic exploration of the Congo. In 1879 he was even able to tap Henry Morton Stanley, the horrible and racist adventurer, to claim areas for the Belgian Crown.13 Earlier Stanley had already unsuccessfully sought to awaken Great Britain’s interest in annexing Central Africa, and now in a very short time signed hundreds of contracts on behalf of Leopold II in which not only the land but also the labor of the people was signed over to the Belgian king. The colonial annexation of the Congo was thus at the time of the conference already a fait accompli. Leopold, who never once during his life visited the country he had plundered, went after ivory at first but later especially the rubber trade, over which the Congo had almost a monopoly at that time. The firms that organized such exploitation mostly employed native overseers who carried out the harvest through the de facto enslavement of laborers, punishing the failure to fulfill quotas or the supposed refusal to work with death or with severed hands. They were armed and fitted out with ample ammunition. For every bullet used it was expected that the dead person’s severed hand would be produced in order to function as evidence, and it was sometimes kept mummified. If the overseer shot an animal with his weapon, which happened often, a hand still had to be produced, thus leading to countless mutilations and murders. 81

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Figures 3.1–3.3  Photographs in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy.

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Figure 3.4  The cover of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo. 84

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Figure 3.5  Frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo. 85

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E. D. Morel and Roger Casement were able to evidence and make public this horrific system of exploitation. Photography played a big role in their doing so, most of it undertaken by missionaries.14 The first photos were taken by Rev. W. D. Armstrong, who led Casement through the Congo in 1903. Other missionaries also took photos, such as Rev. B. J. Lower, who sent them to Morel.15 Famous were the photographs of Alice Seely-Harris, which had already appeared in newspapers in 1905, and which, upon her return in 1905/06 with her husband, a missionary to the Congo, she used for slide show lectures in support of her political-photographic investigatory work.16 Six hundred presentations were given over the course of two years in order to convince the public of the atrocities that were occurring: A central part of almost every Congo protest meeting was a slide show, comprising some sixty vivid photos of life under Leopold’s rule; half a dozen of them showed mutilated Africans or their cut-off hands. The pictures, ultimately seen in meetings and the press by millions of people, provided evidence that no propaganda could ­ refute.17 After the publication of his widely read book, of which some 25,000 copies were sold in one week, Conan Doyle gave some lectures in large halls, with 2,800 people showing up in Edinburgh, 3,000 in Plymouth and 5,000 in Liverpool.18 In 1905 Alice Harris had to sign an affidavit that her photos were “bona fide,” that is, that they were neither staged nor retouched. With her husband she supported Morel and Casement, who tried to find their own way to make known the atrocious acts and sought to organize an international campaign against them.19 Casement and Morel gathered the photographic exposures and offered them to writers to use in their publications. In one of the numerous magazine articles through which he hoped to attain a wider audience for his published book, Conan Doyle describes writing while surrounded by a mountain of photographs: As I write, my study table is covered with photographs of these unhappy people. They bear the marks of the tortures they have endured. Some have their feet lopped off, some their hands. One is a child, surprisingly beautiful and intelligent even by European standards. His arm has been hacked off. Another with his right foot and left hand missing stares before him with a strange, thoughtful puzzled face. These are the people whom “in the name of Almighty God” we guaranteed. Under each of the mutilated frames might, in all truth, be printed “I was guaranteed by you.” The dreadful story is a commonplace now. It is impossible to deny any part of it. Its authenticity comes from many sources, from missionary 86

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reports, Swedish, Belgian, and American, as well as British, from official Consular dispatches, from the report of the Belgian Commission of 1903, from the memoirs of returned officers, above all from the incorruptible evidence of the kodak.20 The Kodak rises above all others; its testimony is that of the truth. It is the light of enlightenment amid the dark of the Congo. Speaking of the resemblance of the mutilations to the wounds inflicted by boars, Conan Doyle writes in his book, “There must be many wild boars in Congo land, and their habits are of a singular nature. It is not in the Congo that these boars are bred.”21 With “boar,” Conan Doyle alludes to a White Paper in which King Leopold tried to whitewash the mutilations by ascribing them to attacks by wild boars. The Kodak in the Congo and the King Most likely the pictures submitted were the same that Mark Twain used in the edition of King Leopold’s Soliloquy published in London in 1907. Like Conan Doyle, Mark Twain had underscored in an interview the programmatic meaning of the photographs in his book: Thank God for the camera, for the testimony of the light itself, which no mere man can contradict. The light has been let in upon the Congo, and not all the outcries of Leopold can counteract its record of the truth.22 In the book there is a long excerpt in which King Leopold identifies the most effective weapon against the reign of terror. It is the Kodak, which is seen as a symbol of enlightenment. “The Kodak,” notes King Leopold in his monologue, “has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed.”23 Photography is the irrefutable testimony of light that delivers more than any eyewitness testimony, and the little Kodak box camera is its embodiment. In one of the drawn illustrations it hangs like a shining sun above Leopold, who looks as if he wants to escape it (Figure 3.6). Leopold describes it in Twain’s text as “the incorruptible kodak” and the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe. Every Yankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one; and now – oh, well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them.24 Ten thousand voices, he complains, can lift up and speak on demand of the very best of his reign in the Congo, and another ten thousand can be bought to do the very same, but then a few little pictures come along and the whole image is destroyed. “Then that trivial little Kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!”25 Leopold cannot escape the light of the pictures and revelations supplied by the Kodak. It’s even 87

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Figure 3.6  A page from Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy.

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worth noting that the camera name “Kodak” became an emblem of the entire campaign. Morel titled the February 1906 edition of “The Official Organ of the Congo Reform Association” as “‘Force’ . . . versus the . . . Kodak” in reaction to a polemic titled “‘Calumny’ versus the Kodak.”26 In the Congo the Kodak battled the king (Figure 3.7). Just as the Kodak became a symbol of shedding light upon crimes, the pictures focused above all on a single aspect: severed limbs. Already in Roger Casement’s report, whose style could be described as “photographic,” there are pictures of severed hands and arms.27 The Kölnische Zeitung reported in 1896 that “1308 severed hands had been turned over to the notorious District Commissioner Léon Fiévez in a single day.”28 Both Conan Doyle and Twain use a composite photograph, which consists of nine single exposures. Doyle used it for the frontispiece of his book, which presented in words what the image had already made plain to the eye (Figure 3.5). “Narratives and photographs of hand dismemberment,” Robert M. Burroughs sums up, “became the most famous icon of the Congo reform movement, with Casement’s description of the torture of Epondo one prominent (and controversial) example of these”29 Casement’s depiction of Epondo’s mutilation was sharply criticized by those who wished to defend Leopold’s Congo politics. Pars pro toto, the veracity of this and other reports was discredited. Epondo, as he had stated on record, was in no way a victim of torture but instead had been wounded by the bite of a boar in a hunting accident. Later Morel reportedly no longer used the photo, while Conan Doyle and Twain, however, used it in their books. Meanwhile in 1907, a pamphlet appeared that strongly reacted to Twain’s attack and tried to whittle down its many charges to a single one: Lies (Figure 3.8).30 The argument here is for long stretches of a photographic nature in putting pictures next to texts. Here as well the defense of the regime rests on the evidence of photographs. Twain’s depiction (as well as Conan Doyle’s) sets forth, according to the accusation, the dark image of a land to which the king has brought the light of culture and advancement; however, Truth shines forth in the following pages, which summarily shows what the Congo State is – not the hell as depicted by a morbid mind – but a country which twenty years ago was steeped in the most abject barbary and which to-day is born to civilization and progress.31 Following this are fourteen two-page spreads, each of them containing four photographs that supposedly refute Twain’s central claims. In the caption to each there is a quote from Twain that stands in direct contradiction to what appears in the photographs. “The Congo State has barred all foreign traders,” Twain says, whereas the picture shows the busy docks in the harbor at Leopoldville and the equally active shipyard in Stanleyville, both of them places named after their conquerors, as so often happens. On the following two pages there 89

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Figure 3.7  The cover of “Force” . . . versus . . . the Kodak, 1906. 90

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Figure 3.8  Cover of Anonymous, An Answer to Mark Twain (1907). 91

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are pictures of steamers. Twain’s statement “The Congo State does not build roads” accompanies pictures of roads and cars, while those of the “devastated regions” show large gatherings of people. Twain’s “lying words” are contrasted with the supposed truth of the photographic images. You should construct your own image, namely the one shown here, is the message of this text. To attest to general characteristics is much easier than that which the shockphotos of mutilation attest to, which is incomparably more difficult. Yet the strategy remains the same. According to the pamphlet, the photographs of mutilations are in fact documents that lay out the gruesome customs of the Congolese that King Leopold’s regime has sought to prevent: Epondo’s case is not the only example of such dealings. Several photos of other mutilated natives have, for instance, also been reproduced in this pamphlet and are cited as examples of cruelty of the Congo agents, although it has been proved, beyond all doubt, that such is not the case.32 Epondo’s mutilation is supposedly the tragic result of an accident, says the explanation for this shock-photo. But then how can the numerous photos be explained that are in circulation? It has always been the custom in the Congo, comes the answer, to cut off the hands of dead enemies. This custom, however, has been banned by the king’s government. The photographs are therefore horrible relics of a previous era which, thanks to Leopold, is now past: This ancient barbarous custom afforded the missionaries with another opportunity of taking a photo which has already been reproduced on several occasions, and once again in Twain’s pamphlet. This photograph, calculated to induce a feeling of horror, represents a native contemplating a human hand and foot cut off.33 Now it appears from the report of the Commission of Enquiry that this native committed the mutilation himself, as it is stated in the report that “the natives who desire to furnish a tangible proof of the death of one of their number, and who cannot or will not produce the body itself, are still accustomed to exhibit the hands or the feet of the deceased.”34 The missionaries have plainly succumbed to falsifications and just saw what they wanted to see. The photos are real, but what they depict are not the facts, because not a single one of the pictures has anything to do with the collection of debts. The pamphlet continues: Now, it is always these same photographs which we see reproduced in connection with the rubber question in the West African Mail and in all the books written by Mr. Morel or inspired by him. Such is the value of the photographs produced, and as it is not proved by specific dates and places that these acts of cruelty can be directly or indirectly imputed to Belgians having resided in the Congo, they must be considered as slanderous.35 92

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Figure 3.9  An illustration in Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy. This is the extent of the cynical defense mounted. It is disturbing, for now the Kodak sun has been dimmed a bit. In each case the performative effect of the photographs is calculated. The Kodak sun also shines in the propagandistic realm of Leopold II. Shock-photos should not forget their impact and should determine a precise reaction on the part of the viewer. “That the statement about the cutting off of living hands is correct is amply proved by the Kodak. I have photographs of at least twenty such mutilated Negroes in my own possession.”36 This statement by Conan Doyle is unquestionably correct, yet it provides no evidence that the regime of the Belgian king had carried out the horrific deeds, even if Conan Doyle claims that they did. The evidence of the photographs is enough for him. Or might he want to use them as a kind 93

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of evidence with which to confront the readers of his book just as Sherlock Holmes used the irrefutable evidence of the visible? In fact, things are even more complicated than that. Casement and Morel were rightly of the view that the Europeans had encouraged hand amputations, though in fact the practice had been widespread previously.37 This in no way changed the barbaric practice implemented by Leopold’s appointed henchmen and the reign of terror on the part of his regime. The photographs were visible evidence of horrible deeds, but they alone did not amount to proof that would allow suspects to be accused and convicted. Therefore further pieces of evidence were necessary which Morel and Casement could amass and Conan Doyle and Twain could cite. These could also then be used for the slide show lectures as slides that showed the control of property and profits.38 Morel and Casement meticulously reconstructed the history of the repression and the system of oppression and murder. They collected eyewitness accounts, as well as documents on trade and business ties, while reconstructing the “chain of events,”39 written testimonies, statistics on inhabitants and export quotas, and much more. These documents – together with the photographs – trace the history of the reign of terror. Photographs make history captivating and irrefutable before our eyes. But the Kodak camera is not “the testimony of the light itself, which no mere man can contradict.”40 It is a speechless accuser that in addition requires eloquent witnesses. “And all of this has been tolerated in an age of progress,” Conan Doyle asserts in melancholy fashion.41 He then concludes: “What is progress? Is it to run a little faster in a motor-car, to listen to gabble in a gramophone?—these are the toys of life. But if progress is a spiritual thing, then we do not progress.”42 In his next book, The Lost World, Roger Casement and Edmund Dene Morel, transformed into fictional characters, put progress to the test. And in a new way photography also plays an important role within it. And just a few years later Conan Doyle would describe himself as the “gramophone” of the spiritualist movement, though no longer meaning it as a sign of progress in the technical sense. Notes 1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo, London, 1909, 121. 2. Ibid., 126. 3. Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 2008, 282. 4. Ibid., 282. 5. Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, Boston, 1906. An exhaustive bibliography can be found online at https://www.amnh.org/research/research-library/search/ research-guides/congo, accessed 26 February 2022. 6. Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 1999, 321. 7. The critical stance can be found in W. R. (revised by John H. Harris and E. D. Morel), The Congo Atrocities: A Lecture to Accompany a Series of 60 Photographic

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Slides for the Optical Lantern, n.p., 1909. The opposite position can, for example, be found in Anonymous, A Reply to “King Leopold’s Soliloquy”, Brussels, 1907. 8. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Boston, 1998, 305. 9. Ibid., 239. 10. Ibid., 235–52. 11. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 130. 12. For a thorough presentation, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, New York, 1998. 13. On his gravestone his wife carved the words Buka Matari (He Who Breaks Stones) next to his name, birth date and date of death. Stanley’s Africa was black and dark, and only the white Europeans could bring light into its heart of darkness. This is made obvious in the titles of his books: Henry Morton Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, London, 1890; and Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa; or The Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, 2 vols., London, 1890. 14. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 191. 15. Robert M. Burroughs describes photography as the possibility of positioning the missionary anew: “Photography provided a form in which missionaries could reinterpret their role as guardians of the populations of the Congo by emphasizing their passive ‘presentation’ of locals’ viewpoints” (Robert M. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, London, 2011, 91). 16. [Alice Seeley Harris], “The Kodak on the Congo,” Special Congo Supplement of the West African Mail, September 1905; [Alice Seeley Harris], “The Inconvenient Kodak Again,” Official Organ of the Congo Reform Association, February 1906; and [Alice Seeley Harris], Enslaved Womanhood of the Congo: An Appeal to British Women, London, n.d. See also James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire, London, 1997. 17. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 215. 18. Ibid., 271. 19. Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, 281ff. 20. Arthur Conan Doyle, “England and the Congo,” letter to the editor in The Times, 18 August 1909, https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=England_ and_the_Congo_(18_august_1909), accessed 3 February 2022. 21. Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo, 67. 22. Mark Twain, “What I Am Thankful For,” New York World Sunday Magazine, 26 November 1905. “Photographs,” comments Robert M. Burroughs, “may have appealed to Morel and other secular commentators for their presentation of supposedly unmediated evidence: as the camera becomes the eyewitness, protest is free of subjectivity” (Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities, 88f.). 23. Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 39. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. Ibid. 26. Documentation can be found at http://de.scribd.com/doc/24389362/The-King-vsthe-Kodak, accessed 26 February 2022. 27. Morel writes in presenting Roger Casement’s report that it could have been written by a machine: “Casement’s style of reportage pre-empted the use of the camera as the favoured ‘machine’ with which to record Congo atrocities” (Robert M. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities, 70). See, however, the sparsely illustrated edition: Roger Casement, The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement’s Congo Report and 1903 Diary, ed., commentated upon and published by Séamas Ó Síocháin and Michael O’Sullivan, Dublin, 2003.

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28. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 226. 29. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities, 54. 30. Anonymous, An Answer to Mark Twain, n.p., 1907. 31. Ibid., 6. 32. Anon., An Answer to Mark Twain, 43. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 44. 35. Ibid., 44f. 36. Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo, 61. 37. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities, 55. 38. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 215f. 39. Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo, 25. 40. Twain, “What I Am Thankful For.” 41. Conan Doyle, The Crime of the Congo, 86. 42. Ibid.

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4

A FAIRY TALE OF SCIENCE: THE LOST WORLD

Many strange tales have come out of the jungles of South America. [. . .] Some have arisen from a confusion of fact and fancy. Others have been based on reality; and often these more purely factual narratives have been among the strangest. Paul A. Zahl, To The Lost World1 Roger Casement and Edmund Dene Morel soon reappeared in Conan Doyle’s universe in literary form. They served him as real-life models for participants in a fictional expedition that sought to prove the existence of a “lost world” in South America, located on a high plateau on which dinosaurs supposedly had survived. The degree to which a fictional portrait that transforms human rights activists into dinosaur hunters is politically incorrect is also what marks the length of the shadow cast upon the Congo book. While photography was used to bring to light the horrors of the regime of Leopold II, now it served to establish the plausibility of a more than just remarkable discovery: the preservation of an era long thought to have disappeared in the middle of an ancient forest. Dinosaurs could now not only be reconstructed from fossils, as had occurred since the middle of the nineteenth century with ever advanced methods, but they could also be seen in the flesh, according to this narrative conjecture. The past is the present, and even within that there exist different layers of time as well. One nevertheless needs neither the theory of atavism nor Sherlock Holmes’s art of interpreting signs in order to reanimate the past, but 97

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instead one need only penetrate the wilderness deeply enough. What awaited there were really fruitful, photographic hunting grounds. These had been the goal of Conan Doyle’s essays in the British Journal of Photography. Therefore photographs have their role here as well, their meaning for the shape of the book and its particular program now being more significant. In this regard it is notable that photographs are not only mentioned in the text but also used as illustrations in the various editions. As archival materials show, Conan Doyle oversaw the work on photographs and drawings in a highly personal manner, and he also made extensive suggestions.2 The illustrations were clearly a constitutive part of the novel’s project right from the beginning. The difference between the selection of pictures in the first appearance in the Strand Magazine and those of the different English and American editions is remarkably strong.3 It almost seems that a different way of using images was developed for each different type of publication. Yet in each of the illustrated editions there is one picture that has to be present: that of the members of the expedition. It consists of Professors Challenger and Summerlee, Lord John Roxton and the journalist E. D. Malone (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). This photograph actually is a photomontage created out of a series of negatives. The illustrator Patrick Forbes, who completed the illustrations for the edition published in England, posed as two figures found in the picture, namely Summerlee and Roxton, while the photographer W. H. Ransford slipped into the role of Malone (Figure 4.3), and Conan Doyle himself into that of Professor Challenger. Conan Doyle disguised himself with a fake beard that made him look like a hairy ape-like creature. He wrote in a letter to the illustrator: Your friend errs in the direction of amiability, good looks, and all that is nice. If he would consent to act the human gorilla he would lose his identity but get Challenger’s . . . We must add greatly to the beard, conceal the ear with hair, bring hair nearly up to the eyes, bring the hair of the head lower on the forehead, and if we could bring him down lower in his chair and widen his shoulders so as to give the idea of a very broad short man, all the better.4 Along with the group picture a solo portrait of Challenger was also prepared. A somewhat less “hairy” photograph, which had been taken first, thus fell out of consideration. In addition, the real-life photographer W. H. Ransford was also named in the book. He is a part of the program as a model, but as a real-life photographer he can also be visited in his studio. In the edition that began to appear in an American magazine in March 1912, Conan Doyle even appears in costume as Professor Challenger on the title page.5 The picture was also used for the one printed in the Strand Magazine (Figure 4.4). Conan Doyle was openly proud of both these pictures and the illustrations used in the novels. He wrote to Mary Doyle on 3 December 1911, “I am better 98

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Figure 4.1  The expedition group.

Figure 4.2  The expedition group, reviewed by Conan Doyle and with instructions to the illustrator. 99

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Figure 4.3  E. D. Malone. now and quite enjoying life. My book is done and I am very busy superintending the making of some pictures which will purport to be photos of this lost world which the discoverers have found.” And to his mother he wrote, “I hope your Strand has reached you. [. . .] Do admire the pictures. The photos were all my idea and carrying out.”6 The staged photographs are purposefully used 100

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Figure 4.4  Professor Challenger. to create a realistic effect that will then make the fantastical story believable. They are the effet de réel, the semblance of reality, created by Conan Doyle – along with various explicit references to actual natural science research, mixed together with images from travel accounts and also quotes from debates with which many of his readers would have been familiar.7 He brings about a performative realism to the pictures. An additional letter speaks to this: In rather an impish mood I set myself to make the pictures realistic. I and two friends made ourselves up to resemble members of the mythical exploring party, and were photographed at a table spread with globes and instruments. . . I had an amusing morning in London in a cab and calling upon one or two friends in the character of their lost uncle from Borneo.8 A rumor also circulated that Conan Doyle donned this disguise and posed as a German doctor while chatting with his friend the journalist E. W. Hornung, the physiologically short-sighted, but intellectually sharp Hornung eventually realizing that he had been had and calling him out on it.9 101

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No matter if this happened or not, what’s interesting is the composite nature of such a photograph in three respects. First, the photograph is staged a certain way in order to fool the reader. It is a crucial part of the hoax that Conan Doyle had in mind. Second comes the pictorial conception that oscillates between drawings and photographs. In regards to the group portrait, the photograph follows a drawn-up sketch that already presents the scene and therefore harks back to portraits of discoverers like Stanley, but also to a picture of E. D. Morel (Figures 4.5 and 4.6). In the book, then, it is often reversed in such a way that the photographs serve as templates for the drawings. Sometimes the drawing is meant to transpose several pictorial sources onto one another in order to arrive at the picture Conan Doyle wants. The illustration “The Swamp of the Pterodactyls” shows this splendidly. It consists of a photograph of a “Boggy Place on Dunkery” combined with a page from Lankester’s Extinct Animals to create a “composite drawing” (Figure 4.7). This is also true for the description of the ancient creatures. That of the Plesiosaurus in chapter 14 corresponds to a photograph of a model that part of a 1910 exhibition mentioned in an article in the Strand Magazine.10 The borders between photography, drawing and description have become fluid. All of the figures found in The Lost World are the result of a narrative and visual composite process that become the central compositional principle

Figure 4.5  Arthur Conan Doyle’s sketch for the photographic portrait of the expedition group. 102

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Figure 4.6  E. D. Morel.

Figure 4.7  Arthur Conan Doyle’s draft for an illustration for The Lost World. 103

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of the novel. The transformation of Morel and Casement into participants of the fictional expedition is at one with the adoption of a photomontage for the ­frontispiece. In the Congo book this displays a montage of mutilated Congolese as evidence of horrific acts, whereas in The Lost World it serves as a visualization of the discoveries made at various stages of the journey’s adventure (Figure 4.8). In order to imagine and create an ideal ancient ­landscape, Conan Doyle reaches for contemporary sources. The dinosaurs and their habitat are not inventions, but rather conjurations of the early twentieth century.11 The present shapes the image of the past. How this works for real is shown in a letter of Conan Doyle’s to the illustrator of the English edition: Dear Pat – I feel that we shall make a great joke out of this. I have been hunting for photos to help you but got nothing very good. I think it would be best if you went to some photo shop like the one in the Strand [. . .] and got such a selection of lake & woodland photos as would help. Please note all expenses. The little photo enclosed gives a good idea (has the moonlight) of the Central Lake effect desired. The larger one of the Swamp would be splendid if you could get it as here designed. It is one thing to design & another to do such novel work. I look forward with great interest to see your first studies of fakes. Yours very sincerely, Arthur Conan Doyle.12 The ancient landscape of the dinosaurs thus is copied from English models. Therefore it should come as no surprise that they resemble those counties with which Conan Doyle was familiar, and that also in England one can find traces of ancient and early times.13 In The Hound of the Baskervilles the moor is depicted as just such an ancient landscape. We step from modern England into a realm where “you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people.”14 English landscapes can, without much effort, be modified to appear like those of ancient times. All one needs is some photos and the county of Devon is then transformed into the ancient Devon in which the first animals roamed the Earth’s surface. And also the dinosaurs found in England then show up again in living form upon the high plateau of South America. Thus is paleontology subject to colonialism.15 Third, the figures themselves are already a kind of composite construction. Conan Doyle modeled his protagonists on real-life persons. The connection between E. D. Morel and E. D. Malone already exists in their names. One of the drafts of the illustrations for Conan Doyle’s The Lost World makes use of a portrait of Morel with only the map of Africa turned into that of South America in the background. His ally in the struggle for the Congo, Roger Casement, was by contrast the model for Lord Roxton, though Colonel P. H. Fawcett, who had undertaken an expedition in this region, was also considered as a source 104

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Figure 4.8  Frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

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for this character.16 Percy Fawcett was the leader of the Bolivian Boundary Commission, which had undertaken an expedition to South America in order to explore the Amazon delta between Brazil and Bolivia. When on 13 February 1911 he gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, Conan Doyle was present and showed great interest in the description of the Ricardo Franco Hills in Mato Grosso.17 Roxton is then described as a “composite” within the novel. Malone was indeed “familiar . . . from many photographs,” reminding people of “Something . . . of Napoleon III, something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman.”18 Interestingly, the characters of the novel are composed of persons whose narratives serve as sources for their depiction. In real life they had in fact visited South America and had in fact seen the mesa, which is being explored in the novel, with their own eyes. That is also a means by which to authenticate what is being described. The characters are types which make possible identities and attributions. Conan Doyle knew many of the models for his novel personally and asked them for information in order to validate the depictions.19 He wrote to Roger Casement, who at the time was in Peru while investigating a brutal conquest of the indigenous population of the Putumayo Region, asking him to send him “anything weird & strange” that he might be able to use for the book.20 Casement’s report, which depicted unimaginable cruelties inflicted upon, and simultaneously defended the superiority of the Indians both impressively and argumentatively, would certainly not have been of any use to Conan Doyle.21 The Putumayo Region is, however, frequently referred to in the novel, though it is an open question if the expedition even takes place in this region. There one finds the Ricardo Franco Hills, which had been explored by Fawcett.22 More likely is that Mount Roraima is the geographic model for them, which had already been described by Boddam-Whetham in 1879, and at the start of the 1880s had been explored by Everard Im Thurn. Conan Doyle was familiar with the latter’s descriptions. Already Im Thurn had imagined in his travel accounts the existence of a “lost world,” which Conan Doyle then proceeded to spell out. Im Thurn writes: On the supposition that the summit is really inaccessible, not only to men, but to all unwinged animals, there are those who hold that on this table land, cut off as it must be from all communication with the rest of the world, very possibly animal forms of a primitive type exist which have undergone no modification under the influence of new-­ coming forms since the plain was first isolated in mid-air.23 In the picture, along with Casement and Morel, there is also Joseph Bell, with whom we are already familiar as one of the models for the character of Sherlock Holmes. Following his death in 1911, Conan Doyle wanted to 106

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create a literary memorial to him in the figure of Professor Challenger. To this end he had Frank Caird specifically photograph the character who had been created from different sides.24 In the American edition one indeed finds illustrations that show Challenger from several sides, though none resembles Bell (Figure 4.9). Another model for Challenger explicitly mentioned in Conan Doyle’s autobiography was William Rutherford, Professor of Physiology in Edinburgh.25 Edwin Ray Lankester, the head of the London Natural History Museum, whose book Extinct Animals was the inspiration for the descriptions of the ancient creatures, was also a possible model for the character. He is even quoted in the book when Challenger takes a book down from the shelf in order to show Malone pictures of the Stegosaurus.26 The pictures in the book from which this depiction stems, as well as that of The Lost World, are themselves contrafacts of depictions and pictures from Lankester’s book.27 That book draws on a series of lectures given to a youthful audience over the Christmas holidays in 1903/04 at the Royal Institution in London. Slides were used for them that often made use of original photographs of objects from exhibitions and from the collections of the Natural History Museum. “My desire was,” writes Lankester, “as far as possible, to illustrate what I said by photographs taken from actual specimens.”28 In total, no fewer than 218 pictures appear among 300 pages. Given that they show that “extinct animals are animals which no longer exist in a living state,”29 this leads to the realization of “fairy tales of science.” “One knows that the things one examines, however astounding and incredible they seem, really exist, and are not mere imagination or fancy.”30 That is precisely the strategy of Conan Doyle’s novel in boldly shortcircuiting the reality of the past with the fiction of the present. Lankester feels inspired and even offers up an idea for a sequel: What about introducing a gigantic snake sixty feet long? Or a herd of pygmy elephants two feet high? Can four men escape by training a vegetarian pterodactyl to fly with them one at a time? Will some ape-woman fall in love with Challenger and murder the leaders of her tribe to save him?31 However, this never came about. A different kind of transformation and application was in store for Challenger. We will meet him again in the next chapter. In short, it seems that Conan Doyle transferred Bowditch’s method to literature in formulating his novel’s protagonists, for we will recall that Bowditch used single portraits of physics professors in Boston to create a composite photograph of the Boston physics professor. Out of different natural scientists who meant something to him, Conan Doyle creates the Professor who rightfully carried the name “Challenger.”

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Figure 4.9  Illustration for the American edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

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Ancient Slides Challenger does not in fact carry us through his expedition into the heart of darkness but indeed into the middle of the deepest jungle of South America. There one finds high plateaus, the so-called Tepui, which even to this day are some of the most unexplored regions of the Earth. Since it’s very difficult to reach them, they not only lie among ancient forests, they also sometimes tower 1,000 meters above them as table mountains with overhanging cliffs that float in the clouds.32 Supposedly, as a result of their isolation, dinosaurs have survived there. In the novel this is established through the discovery of notebooks, drawings and even photographs taken by an American named Maple White, in whose footsteps the expedition follows, eventually landing on the roof of the prehistoric world, which “ape-men” and ancient peoples (“Indians”) whom they battle, along with the dinosaurs, have long known. Thus a double dynamic unfolds. On the one hand, the researchers aim to carry away evidence of the “lost world” in the guise of drawings, gathered leaves and fruits, compiled scrap-books and countless notes, photographs of the plateau, and worked over sketches and maps, in order to substantiate the existence of this parallel world upon their return. Photographs thus play an important role. They come into play at the beginning of the expedition and at the end. Because of the notes made by the aforementioned Maple White, Challenger has already led an expedition on which he brought along “some damaged photographs, said to be fakes.”33 He presents Malone with one of these photos, “9 × 12 centimeters in size,” which is then described: The photograph was certainly very off-colored. An unkind critic might easily have misinterpreted that dim surface. It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like an immense cataract seen in the distance, with a sloping, tree-clad plain in the foreground.34 This photo is used as an illustration in the book in order to allow readers to judge for themselves (Figures 4.10a and b). With a magnifying glass one can see what is not a pelican, as one might suppose, but rather a Pterodactyl, a “flying reptile of the Jurassic period.”35 This is then encountered for the first time by the expedition, while later they take a not yet fully grown specimen of the “Bird from Hell” back with them to London. That is the chain of evidence which the novel lays out like a snare. However, once it reaches the plateau, the expedition not only encounters dinosaurs for the first time, but also ape-men whom they have to defend themselves against when they attack the group and carry off Challenger and Summerlee. The struggle against them accelerates the process of acculturation in a social-Darwinist manner by which the humans in the battle against their 109

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Figure 4.10  Photographs of the high plateau in the American (above) and English (below) editions 110

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adversaries are supported and in the end are victorious. They follow the logic of a kind of miniature revolutionary model in nuce, in which they almost arrive like aliens, firmly engage in the conflict, and then disappear once it is over, leaving the “lost world” to itself – freed of ape-men and with a humanity that they had once had at the beginning of their own development. This corresponds with the first development of media which led to caves being decorated with drawings (Figure 4.11). Meanwhile the members of the expedition also leave behind willy-nilly – as is common in a Robinsonade – their records and gathered samples. They return to Great Britain with only a few pictures. The photographic plates are also broken, and the living evidence to the expedition’s success, a live Pterodactyl, escapes through the window of the lecture hall and is seen, so it is said, for the last time flying over the Atlantic. We are left with only the novel and its images in our hands (Figure 4.12). The Lost World outlines a no-man’s-land between culture and nature in which the process of acculturation is allowed to play out as in a narrative experiment. Consequently the elements of the story are heterogenous, on the one hand being taken from scientific publications and on the other satisfying the genre requirements of adventure stories, thus tying together research and initiation.36 What’s worth noting about Conan Doyle’s influential novel (which not only has been turned into several films but also was the forerunner of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novel The Land That Time Forgot, the King Kong movies, as well as Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel and the movies based on it) is not only its use of photography but also its peculiar adaptation of Darwinist theory. Here we find it simultaneously in both its forms, namely the classic biological variety as well as the social-Darwinist one, which also gave birth to the narrative setting of H. G. Wells’s famous novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The end of the bloody battle between the ape-men and Indians in The Lost World results in a eugenics worthy of Galton. The male ape-men are killed and the women and children are made slaves of the troglodytes, whose cave dwellings remain inaccessible to the raptors. Conan Doyle’s ironic play upon Darwinian theory also holds true for the character of Professor Challenger. In actuality, he is the only one of the ape-men who survives, his family resemblance to their leader being an open secret. The novel plays upon different kinds of origin in regards to The Origin of Species. One involves the Indians, the other the ape-men that are introduced when Malone climbs a gingko tree. The gingko represents the dioecy of reproduction as a “living fossil.” Malone climbs up one of its branches only to come face to face with a remarkable creature from one of the branches of his own evolutionary tree: It was a human face – or at least it was far more human than any monkey’s that I have ever seen. It was long, whitish, and blotched with 111

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Figure 4.11  Cave painting: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. 112

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Figure 4.12  The pterodactyl escapes: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

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pimples, the nose flattened, and the lower jaw projecting, with a bristle of coarse whiskers round the chin.37 It’s a description that sounds like it comes from a textbook. What we have here is Pithecanthropus erectus, better known as Java Man.38 The animal-human disappears, but the impression remains that the “rare appearance” meant something. Malone enjoys “the panorama of this strange country in which we find ourselves,” perhaps while being able to consider one of two possibilities in regards to his own origins.39 Malone is an Irishman – albeit a darkhaired one – who stands across from his red-haired ancestor. After returning to London, Challenger will describe the ape-men as “an advance upon the Pithecanthropus of Java,” which could be “nearer than any known form to that hypothetical creation, the missing link.”40 With this we find ourselves in the middle of the debates on evolutionary biology of the time.41 Notable is the fact that Conan Doyle was also an avid paleontologist, and that in the same year that The Lost World was published he had something to do with the discovery of the so-called Piltdown Man,42 who supposedly represented precisely the “missing link” which the ape-men in the novel resembled most of all. He was found – or more exactly buried and then dug up – by the amateur archeologist Charles Dawson only seven miles from Conan Doyle’s house. The discovery made in Sussex was then named Eoanthropus dawsoni, but in 1953 was proven to be a hoax. Much as the characters of The Lost World were a mixing together of different models, the skull was a composite product of a human skull and that of an orangutan. Notable is the fact that in The Lost World the archeological site Weald Clay is explicitly mentioned. It is therefore not so surprising that Conan Doyle has been connected to the forgery. Among Conan Doyle scholars there is the theory that he was the mastermind behind it, while others say that the novel set forth the model for the forgery which Dawson then could have followed through on.43 Absent documentation, neither can be proven true finally or refuted. However, there is clearly a kind of correspondence inherent to the treatment of documents. While Dawson suggests a fiction as science (and succeeded at doing so), Conan Doyle tries to make a fiction appear plausible as factuality. The novel commits itself to doing so quite openly and in fact states how to do so: “If you are clever,” the editor-in-chief McArdle tells the journalist Malone, “you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph.”44 This is exactly what Conan Doyle tries to bring about: docufiction in the shape of an adventure novel.45 Photographs, Fossils and Fakes Photographs and fossils are also indexical signs and are also related to one another metaphorically. In the American edition there is a photograph of the footprint of a dinosaur, which is identified as an Iguanodon (Figure 4.13).46 Yet 114

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Figure 4.13  Photograph of a dinosaur’s footprint from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, new edition. photographs can also be viewed as a type of fossil. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the namesake of Sherlock Holmes, spoke of photographs as “fossilized shadows”: A photograph of one of them is like one of those fossilized sea-beaches where the raindrops have left their marks, and the shellfish the grooves in which they crawled, and the wading birds the divergent lines of their footprints, — tears, cares, griefs, once vanishing as impressions from the sand, now fixed as the vestiges in the sandstone.47 With this, a topos of the history of photography is forged which appears again in different ways, such as prominently with Ernst Jünger, who finds it very 115

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handy, as in many of his books he used it to characterize the special form of the paleontological description of history. Through it he seeks to reveal an elementary event that occurred beneath the surface of reality, one that can be categorized as timeless and governs the course of time. As the fine impression of external events, [photographs] resemble the impressions of the existence of strange animals left inside of rocks. Indeed they present the material of what is seen – but to know the life of the large animal in its mysterious movements, to understand this requires our fantasy.48 In Jünger and in Conan Doyle the events of the past break into the present. For one it occurs in the form of the First World War and technology, for the other through the ironic re-emergence of the past into the present. “And there we were, the four of us, upon the dreamland,” we read as they arrive at the plateau.49 Quickly the dream becomes a nightmare, the dreamland now Dante’s Hell, as it says in the text, and the members of the expedition must look down on the far-reaching land of the Amazonas and remind themselves that they are in the present, “that we really were upon this earth in the twentieth century, and had not by some magic been conveyed to some raw planet in its earliest and wildest state.”50 It is indeed a planet of the apes, but one wholly of this world.51 When they are overrun by ape-men who kidnap Professors Challenger and Summerlee, it becomes apparent that the king of the apes and Challenger bear more than a casual resemblance to one another. “In all things he was [. . .] the very image of our Professor [. . .] The same short, broad figure, the same heavy shoulders, the same forward hang of the arms, the same bristling beard merging itself in the hairy chest.” He was “an absurd parody of the Professor”52 (Figure 4.14). Challenger, the “Columbus of science who has discovered a lost world,” is, as we see, an ape-man who has survived, and therefore is an obvious incarnation of atavism, of a “racial memory,” of a theory that is also touched upon numerous times in the novel.53 Such a suggestive construction of atavistic family resemblances is a part of Conan Doyle’s ironic play with clichés of facticity and fiction, of science and adventure stories. The illustrations are also part of this play, and are heterogeneous to it. They are even a part of the story, appearing as notebooks or drawings which are referred to and then – now pictured – as illustrations for the first edition and also in the advance publication in the Strand Magazine, as well as in other editions. There we find different media gathered together: photographs of the expedition crew, as well as drawings of them (whose resemblance to the figures in the fake photos is unmistakable); inscribed photos from the pages of Maple White, the American whose discovery was the inspiration for the expedition; a map of the high plateau; and finally multiple drawings of dinosaurs and some settings where events occur. The photographs oscillate 116

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Figure 4.14  An ape-man: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. between an ironic reflection of the medium and a purposeful means for misleading the audience. And they meticulously follow traditional models of presenting images with which the reader would be well familiar. For instance, travel books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make use of a mixture of photographs and drawings, such as the immensely successful books of Stanley, which are also mentioned in The Lost World. Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi notes that the photomontages in the novel are comparable in the way they are chosen, as well as the way that images with illustrations from accounts of explorers are preserved: the frontispiece presents people [. . .] surrounded by maps and plans, the images are of a high plateau on which the encounter of The Lost World plays out, 117

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etc.: the visual return of the imaginary (in all senses of the word) through the account of the explorer.54 Stanley’s books lead the reader into what for him is always a dark, black, deeply black Africa – and most of all into the Congo.55 Conan Doyle makes use of Stanley’s strategy in regards to images, in order to carry the reader off into a realm sublimely enthroned in the middle of this world, one which opens our eyes to our origins and simultaneously enthrones us as lords of the world. “Man was always the master.”56 Despite all its irony, this is a dark, sinister commentary on the photographs of the Congo book. Here, as there, the photographs serve to produce visual evidence aimed in the first book toward explication, and in the second book toward deception. In his Congo book Conan Doyle believes the images; in The Lost World he plays with the belief in images. Later his own beliefs would be duped by spiritualist images, taking them as the kind of evidence which in The Lost World he had, ironically enough, manufactured. Even if from today’s vantage point this strategic use of images appears totally transparent and recognizable as a way of fooling the reader, some were taken in by it. An American magazine reported around 1914 on the ­expedition of a research team from the University of Pennsylvania which was sent to South America to discover and explore the high plateau depicted in Conan Doyle’s novel.57 The article indeed appeared on April Fool’s Day, but nevertheless many readers assumed that there really was an expedition led by a certain Dr. Farrable, whose name was a play upon a real research expedition led by Prof. William Curtis Farabee. As we have seen, photography is consciously used as a deceptive medium in Conan Doyle’s novel.58 Through it, different means of illustration are amalgamated, which when taken together indeed would appear to make the events seem hardly believable, and yet kept open is the fundamental possibility of certain elements being true. That is the strategy that Conan Doyle follows, a narrative experiment in which the entire story in no way has to be taken at face value in order to accept its essential features. Quite the opposite, in fact, for while parts are recognized as fantastical and are declared as such, others appear plausible and self-evident. Photography is an element used in works that employ fiction and reality fiction to create the scientific novel.59 In addition, it functions as a means of transfer between two worlds that blithely coexist. In this way The Lost World exercises in miniature what in general is characteristic of Conan Doyle: the coexistence of the supposedly incompatible orders of space and time, of fictionality and facticity. Even if the dinosaurs have not survived in South America, the ancient times have nonetheless left behind their traces. One need only observe Challenger in order to see a figure from the ancient horde. And one need only appreciate the life of Conan Doyle in order to look at the 118

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dinosaurs with different eyes. Conan Doyle was convinced of the survival of the dinosaurs. When he went on his honeymoon to the Aegean, he thought he saw a young, four-foot-long Ichthyosaurus during the journey across.60 He was also a passionate amateur paleontologist and discovered the fossil of an Iguanodon near his apartment in Crowborough, Derbyshire.61 In his apartment he surrounded himself with prehistoric artifacts, A. St. John Adcock reporting in a magazine article about “two huge fossil feet of the prehistoric Iguanodon on the floor of the billiard room.”62 These he had published in the cloth-bound luxury edition of The Lost World. His fiction also lives within the nomenclature of dinosaurs, as a subspecies of the Pterodactyl discovered in Brazil in 1995 was named Arthurdactylus conan-doylei.63 The Pterodactyl can be found, as we shall recall, at the beginning and the end of the expedition in The Lost World. There is also one in Jurassic Park years later. Notes 1. Paul A. Zahl, To The Lost World, London 1940, 5. 2. The manuscript and materials attached to its production can be found in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. 3. The first publication was in the Strand Magazine, vol. 43, 1912, 363–82, 483–500 and 603–22; vol. 44, 1912, 3–14, 123–37, 243–5, 363–75 and 483–96. The American edition appeared in the Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Press and was published in the following editions: 31 March 1912, 3–5 and 18f.; 19 May 1912, 8f. and 14–17; 7 July 1912, 8f. and 16f. A reprint in Boy’s Cinema Weekly, vols. 12 and 13, 21 November 1915 to 20 February 1926, was already illustrated with film stills. Along with the illustrated American and English editions there also appeared a large format luxury edition. The copy that is in the British Library has only seven illustrations and panels but also an engraved drawing in the book that shows Challenger sitting at his desk, writing his dedication to the reader: “Yours truly (to use the conventional lie) George Edward Challenger.” 4. “Appendix B. Relics from The Lost World: The Berg Collection,” in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 247. 5. Martin Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1997, 286. 6. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Fowley, London, 2008, 580. 7. Such as that between Darwin and Weissmann. Darwin later argued for a genetic basis for what he called “pangenesis,” while Weissmann supported the genetic continuity of “germplasm.” It had to do, in other words, with a Lamarckian position versus a strictly Darwinian one. See also Stefan Lampadius, “Evolutionary Ideas in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost Worlds,” Inklings. Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik, vol. 29, 2011, 68–97. 8. Lellenberg et al., A Life in Letters, 583. 9. Ibid. 10. H.J. Shepstone, “A Prehistoric Zoo,” Strand Magazine, vol. 40, 1910, 654–9. The reference can be found in Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, 196. 11. The invention of the paleontological past within the present is the central theme of a book by W.J.T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, Chicago and London,

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1998, in which he mentions Conan Doyle, 169f. Following it – with some slight variance – is Alan Dworsky’s Dinosaurier! Die Kulturgeschichte, Munich, 2011. In it can be found numerous literary references and a good overview of the history and debates. 12. Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, 252. 13. “Maple White Land, indeed, appears to be the author’s own, antediluvian Sussex, miraculously intact in the middle of South America” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, ed. Ian Duncan, Oxford, 1998, xii). Ian Duncan also notes a further prototype for the plateau, namely Milton’s Paradise Lost, which argues the fact that the first ancient creature that was discovered was the snake (ibid., xiv). 14. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, London, 1902, 618. 15. See David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology, Boston, 1996, which establishes the hegemony of British taxonomy, which turns regional aspects into global standards. This includes typically British and American dinosaurs: the Megalosaurus, Ichthyosaurus and the Iguanodon are British, the Allosaurus is American. See also Conan Doyle, The Lost World, 197; and Mark Jaffe, The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science, New York, 2000. 16. See P. H. Fawcett, Exploration Fawcett, arranged by Brian Fawcett, London, 1953, 122: “Monsters from the dawn of man’s existence might still roam these heights unchallenged, imprisoned and protected by unscalable cliffs. So thought Conan Doyle when later in London I spoke of these hills and showed photographs of them. He mentioned an idea for a novel on Central South America and asked for information, which I told him I should be glad to supply. The fruit of it was his Lost World in 1912, appearing as a serial in The Strand Magazine, and subsequently in the form of a book that achieved widespread popularity.” 17. Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 2007, 347. 18. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Lost World,” in “The Lost World” and Other Stories, Wordsworth Editions, Ware, 2010 [1912], 3–163, 41. 19. He met with Morel and Casement on 24 June 1910 in London and went with them to see the staged version of “The Speckled Band.” 20. Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, xii. 21. See Roger Casement, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, ed. Angus Mitchell, London, 1997. See also Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 26, no. 3, July 1984, 467–97. 22. Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, x. 23. Everard F. Im Thurn, Among the Indians, London, 1883, 82, quoted in Conan Doyle, The Lost World, 195. 24. Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, 353. 25. See Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 286; and Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, 55. 26. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 286, also cites further sources: the travel accounts of P. H. Fawcett that describe the region of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil and the Ricardo Franco Hills; and the Serra dos Parecis region described in H.W. Bates’s book The Naturalist on the River Amazon. 27. “In fact, several of the illustrations in The Lost World are virtually direct copies of Illustrations in Lankester’s work” (Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, xix). 28. E. Ray Lankester, Extinct Animals, new edition, London, 1909, v. 29. Ibid., 1. 30. Ibid., 59–61.

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31. Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 2008, 305. 32. Twentieth-century expeditions also suggest the possible existence of ancient creatures. Especially interesting is the film The Real Lost World (2006), a documentary by Peter von Puttkamer that explicitly refers to Conan Doyle. 33. Conan Doyle, “The Lost World” and Other Stories, 9. With Maple White a further theme of the novel arises: a tendency to paint the world as black and white. Maple White is in fact an albino, a white person whiter than any white. 34. Ibid., 55. On the notebooks and photographs, see also 116. On the photo of the coastal cliffs, see also 124. 35. Ibid., 58. 36. The epigraph of the novel is pertinent here. It reads, “I have wrought my simple plan / If I give one hour of joy / To the boy who’s half a man, / Or the man who’s half a boy.” This refers explicitly to H. Rider Haggard’s novel King Solomon’s Mines and speaks to the genre as a whole. 37. Conan Doyle, “The Lost World” and Other Stories, 100. 38. He is referred to twice more in the text. See ibid., 120 and 154. 39. Ibid., 101. 40. Ibid., 154. 41. Close in nature to Conan Doyle is the painter Gabriel von Max, who like him was not only interested in paleontology but also was a supporter of spiritualism. Through the medium of painting he brought out similarities between them. See the exhibition catalog Gabriel von Max. Malerstar, Darwinist, Spiritist, Munich, 2010. 42. See Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, 305. 43. John Winslow and Alfred Meyer support the first theory in “The Perpetrator at Pittdown,” Science, vol. 83, September 1983, 32–43; the second is held by Miles Russell, Pittdown Man: The Secret Life of Charles Dawson, Stroud, 2003. See also Lampadius, “Evolutionary Ideas in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.” 44. Conan Doyle, “The Lost World” and Other Stories, 32. 45. Or another option would be that The Lost World is a natural history version of H. Rider Haggard’s She. 46. Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, 124 (the photo can be found in chapter 10). 47. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” in Soundings from the Atlantic, Boston, 1864, 228–81, here 256f. 48. Ernst Jünger, “Krieg und Lichtbild,” in Das Antlitz des Weltkriegs, ed. Ernst Jünger, Berlin, 1930, 9–11, here 10. 49. Conan Doyle, “The Lost World” and Other Stories, 78. 50. Ibid., 91. 51. In this way The Lost World anticipates the plot of the prequel of the Planet of the Apes series, The Planet of the Apes: Prevolution (2011). The ironic presence of dinosaurs in London was a topos of literature and is given prominent place by, among others, Charles Dickens at the start of his novel Bleak House: “As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill” (quoted in Conan Doyle, The Lost World, viii). See also Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Paleontology in Victorian London 1850–1875, London, 1982; Susan Shatto, “Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and the Monstrous Efts,” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 6, 1976, 144–55; Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire, New York, 1979; and Brian Stableford, Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950, London, 1985. 52. Conan Doyle, “The Lost World” and Other Stories, 123. 53. Ibid., 58.

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54. Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi, “De l’Atlas au roman. L’Album bleu de Henry M. Stanley,” Études photographiques, no. 14, January 2004, http://etudesphoto​ graphiques.revues.org/376, accessed 26 February 2022. 55. In regards to The Lost World and the Congo book, see Douglas Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice, Oxford, 2013, 118. 56. Conan Doyle, “The Lost World” and Other Stories, 112. 57. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 288. 58. His first biographer also felt the same. See John Lamond, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Memoir, London, 1931, 112: “His creative imagination had full scope, and becomes so realistic that the reader for the time being is actually living in that extraordinary country with its ceaseless adventures and hair-breadth escapes.” 59. In regards to this, we need to underscore the position of The Lost World between the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard, on the one side, and the so-called Scientific Novels of H. G. Wells on the other. Conan Doyle takes important e­ lements from both. The reminiscence in regards to Rider Haggard is clear in the book’s epigraph, while the reverence he held for Wells is made implicit in the choice of themes and the quoted clichés of scientific discourse. In the end, The Lost World is both an adventure and an initiation story, as well as a fictional manipulation of theories and discoveries from natural science. 60. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 285. 61. Conan Doyle wrote to Mary Doyle on 19 May 1900 about “huge lizard’s tracks” that he had found and which he allowed an expert from the British Museum to inspect. In relation to the novel, see also R. Dana Batory and William S. Sarjeant, “Sussex Iguanodon Footprints and the Writing of The Lost World,” in Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, ed. David D. Gillette and Martin G. Lockley, Cambridge, 1989, 13–18. 62. A. St. John Adcock, “Doyle’s Crowborough Home,” Bookman, vol. 36, 1913, 604f. 63. Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, 38.

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DIGRESSION: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND HARRY HOUDINI

From a logical, rational point of view, spirit photography is a most barefaced imposition and stands as evidence of the credulity of those who are in sympathy with the superstitions of occultism. Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits1 The counterpart to the master interpreter is the magician. In Conan Doyle’s world he is both the closest friend and the greatest enemy. No one matches him for his artful realism and none is more dangerous when it comes to exposure, for the magician works consciously and in a highly controlled manner with fakes. He mounts a false-bottom world of appearances, which for this very reason unfolds its special magic. We are trapped in the world of magic tricks and stunts, disappearance and resurrection, magical transformation. Bodies are split in two and put together again, that which is fixed suddenly flies off in the form of a bird, and the thoughts of the audience can be read by the magician from the stage. Houdini’s legendary escape acts so captured his audience that he had to repeat them for the silver screen. In more than one film Houdini performed them and enchanted his audience in other ways.2 If a magician stands upon the stage, we follow spellbound the play of appearances and are happy to be fooled by them. The same holds true for The Lost World, the master interpreter Sherlock Holmes and the photographic images that denote the world. Therefore it is no wonder that in Conan Doyle and Houdini we have two grandmasters of illusion who henceforth could not 123

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be separated from one another – in good times and in bad.3 First the good times: both report enthusiastically on their first meeting, celebrating their friendship in private and in public, and writing countless letters. Photographs show them together on the thresholds of both their houses, another shows the two of them together with their wives in a car in Denver (Figures D2.1–D2.3).4 Yet the bad times soon followed: despite Conan Doyle’s assessment that Houdini had special powers as a medium and paranormal abilities, Houdini wanted nothing to do with his crusade for spiritualism. Worse yet, when Conan Doyle launched his lecture tour through the English world, the magician to whom Conan Doyle had also ascribed the skill of “photographic perception” reacted by mounting a counter lecture in which he eloquently and jokingly denounced spiritualism as nonsense and a complete aberration (Figure D2.4).5 While one was presenting his capacity for the “new revelation,” the other followed behind and invested his time in refuting it. While one wrote the exposé A Magician Among the Spirits, in which step by step, chapter after chapter, he convicted the protagonists of the spiritualist movement of chicanery, the other answered two years later with a two-volume history of spiritualism, with which he sought to completely rehabilitate it.6 Houdini later engaged no less than H.P. Lovecraft to write a further book about superstition. For Houdini, as for Conan Doyle, there was much at stake. Houdini had to defend his magical art and to show that despite all of its deception it was wholly of this world, a secular magic, while in contrast Conan Doyle did not wish to give up any of his heightened stature as a writer, which allowed him to wander elegantly between both worlds, a new one having been added after the portal to the hereafter had been opened for him. In addition the two traveled during the same time across the country, even showing similar photographs, though coming to entirely different conclusions. For Conan Doyle the photographs were irrefutable evidence of the existence of a transcendent world; for Houdini they were equally evidentiary proof that it all had to do with simple tricks and counterfeits, and that spiritualism could be completely discredited. One of them identified the images as a single exposure of a negative and saw a snapshot of a single moment, while the other saw in them clever double exposures and other tricks. While one daily sought ever new photos with which to harden his theory, the other created his own staged photos which demonstrated compellingly the possibilities for fakery. Conan Doyle showed a slide that pictured Abraham Lincoln’s spirit in a lecture intended as popular enlightenment, while Houdini countered with a photo in which he could be seen with Lincoln (Figures D2.5 and D2.6). And last but not least, they both appeared before committees set up to examine the authenticity of spiritual manifestations. One was convinced of their authenticity, the other held it to be complete nonsense. And as a magician Houdini had at his command knowledge about what made experiments forgery-proof and about countering such assertions. He worked as a magician 124

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himself with many tricks and feints, and whenever that was not the case, he quickly mastered them. Their friendship was more than once tested, and they were not above mutual sharp attacks and accusations. Yet at the same time they stayed in touch right up until Houdini’s death in 1926. Each probably hoped to win the other over to his side. As soon as Conan Doyle found interesting new material, he would let Houdini know – even including the photos of fairies. Houdini was in fact one of the first to see them. When Conan Doyle launched his first lecture tour of the United States, Harry Houdini had organized a special reception for him. He invited him to attend and speak at the banquet of the Society of American Magicians, on 2 June 1922. This probably happened in the hope that Conan Doyle’s views on spiritualism would be discredited and he would call off his lecture tour after having lost all credibility. But Conan Doyle imagined a different kind of debut. At the gala held in the McAlpin Hotel, the after-dinner program took up the theme of spiritualism. Who else but Conan Doyle could have been more appropriate to ennoble the evening with his prominence and to turn his curious spiritualist convictions into the very best of conversations, for the certainty of one’s own superiority also belongs to magicians. The audience could marvel at card artists and clairvoyants, escape artists and conjurers before Conan Doyle stepped before them and with somewhat grave words announced that there was something just as remarkable that he had to show them: “If I brought here in real existence what I show in these images, it would be a great catastrophe . . . The pictures are not occult [. . .], but they are psychic, like everything that emanates from the human spirit or brain is psychic. It is not supernatural. Nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses.”7 Conan Doyle showed the obviously quite stunned audience for the first time a clip from the completed film of The Lost World in which, with the help of stop-motion technology, animated photos of dinosaurs had been created.8 Conan Doyle had already enthusiastically shown off the models to his children and now chose a sample of the same magic to show to his audience (Figures D2.7 and D2.8). The showing was in fact so spectacular that even the New York Times reported on it at length, saying that the pictures were presented without titles or speech of any kind, and the audience was left strictly to its own conclusions [. . .] whether the sober-faced Englishman was making merry with them, or was lifting the veil from mysteries penetrated only by those of his school who know the secret of filming elves and ectoplasm and other things unknown to most minds.9 The New York Times noted further that the images were shown after Houdini’s famous “Transformation” Trick, in which he freed his chained wife Bess from 125

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Figures D2.1 and D2.2  Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. 126

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Figure D2.3  Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini with their wives underway in Denver. a container, sometimes even filled with water, titling the article: “Spiritist Mystifies World-Famed Magicians with Pictures of Prehistoric Beasts – Keeps Origin a Secret – Monsters of Other Ages Shown, Some Fighting, Some at Play, in Their Native Jungles.”10 Clearly Conan Doyle had achieved the desired effect: the hoax of The Lost World had worked a second time and even the magicians were enchanted. Conan Doyle later said to Houdini that the purpose of [the film] was simply to provide a little mystification for those who have so often and so successfully mystified others . . . The dinosaurs and other monsters [were] constructed by pure cinema art of the highest kind, and are being used for The Lost World, a picture which represents prehistoric Life upon a South American plateau. Having such material at hand, and being allowed, by the courtesy of Mr. Watterson Rothacker to use it, I could not resist the temptation to surprise your associates and guests. I am sure they will forgive me, for a few short hours, I had them guessing.11 128

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Figure D2.4  Poster for Harry Houdini’s lecture “Do Spirits Return?”

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Figure D2.5  William H. Mumler’s spiritualist photograph with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Houdini’s transformation at the reception was followed by others that were overtly and equally impressive. The ongoing and public exhibition bout had begun and would last until Houdini’s death. Both knew how to use the competition for their own goals. It was part of their marketing strategy, however much it now headed in different directions. Part of it was also another film from the same year, one in which Harry Houdini appeared as the protagonist: The Man from Beyond.12 At the end of this film we see Howard Hillary, played by Harry Houdini, reading Conan Doyle’s spiritualist pamphlet The New 130

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Figure D2.6  Fabricated “spiritualist” photograph of Harry Houdini and Abraham Lincoln. Revelation (Figures D2.9 and D2.10). This appeared so important to the director that he devoted a camera shot to the title of the book. The film is a real cock-and-bull story that contains an amalgamation of highly different depictions and genres. It starts at the beginning of the 1920s with an Arctic expedition that supposedly has come to a tragic end, the supplies exhausted and the wind mercilessly whistling around both researchers and their sled-dogs. One researcher plays with the thought of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” as is explicitly shown in a subtitled frame, thinking in fact to follow through on it by abandoning his companion. But then he discovers a few meters away a towering ship, in which he supposes there are provisions, thus allowing him to save his comrade. When they board the ship they make a remarkable discovery: a man frozen in a block of ice is standing before them. They release him from the ice and he returns to life. With the support of documents, he is able to explain that he is Howard Hillary who in 1820, meaning a whole century ago, had been shipwrecked and lost his fiancée. Without her, the researchers establish, the world feels empty, and Hillary flees naked over the white ice floes until they catch up with him, calm him down and return with him to England. Once there, Dr. Gregory Sinclair, the leader of the expedition, seeks out advice from his colleague Professor Strange, yet he finds not Strange 131

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Figures D2.7 and D2.8  Film stills from The Lost World, USA, 1925. but his daughter at her wedding to a Dr. Trent, who has imprisoned the Professor for a year in order to claim both his property and his daughter. Felice Strange in fact looks so much like Hillary’s fiancée, dead now for a hundred years, that Hillary can’t help but disrupt the wedding and is committed to a psychiatric hospital by Trent. He escapes from there, clears everything up and in the end finds his new love. The sister of Felice Strange’s grandmother had been Hillary’s fiancée. Thus the family resemblance. Mad scientist, Darwinism, metempsychosis and expeditions are mixed together here, with elements from The Lost World also thrown in. What’s clear is that Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini love to achieve effects with moving pictures. 132

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Figures D2.9 and D2.10  Film stills from The Man from Beyond, USA, 1922. 133

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The show must go on. This of course also means tricks. In 1921 Houdini sent Conan Doyle a photo that was taken during one of his shows, and in which “something unknown or occult” could be seen (Figure D2.11). However, the enthusiastic spiritualist Conan Doyle then put him in his place, saying that there must be a rational explanation and writing to him in spring 1921: “I am a cool observer and I don’t make mistakes.”13 Houdini was likely holding back an explanation with which he could expose Conan Doyle, should the latter claim the picture as authentic. On the other hand, Conan Doyle always wrote to him whenever he thought he had evidence in hand or he wished to note an unfair attack, such as in October 1921: “The Hope case is more intricate than any Holmes case I ever invented. [. . .] I am sure there was a trickery [by] the investigators.”14 We will encounter this particular case again in the next chapter and learn something highly remarkable about it. Tricks and trickster – that is the stuff by which photographs emerge from the world of shadows (Figure D2.12).

Figure D2.11  The alleged spiritualist photograph that Harry Houdini sent Arthur Conan Doyle 134

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Figure D2.12  Harry Houdini surrounded by spirits.

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Notes 1. Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits, New York, 1972 (reprint of the original 1924 edition), 136. 2. Between 1909 and 1922 a total of six films were shot which were not at all just focused on documenting his stage show. Harry Houdini can also be seen in adventure and crime movies, mainly taking on the roles of protagonists whose names carry the initials H.H. 3. For a complete and detailed discussion, see Christopher Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Great Magician and the Inventor of Sherlock Holmes, London, 2011, which also contains numerous references and further literature. 4. Houdini collected the photos used by his spiritualist adversaries like trophies, exposing them as double exposures. See Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle, 212 and 216. 5. Ibid., 58. 6. Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits. Conan Doyle’s History of Spiritualism appeared in 1926. 7. Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle, 132f. Here the quote is from the somewhat longer one found in Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 1999, 388. 8. For more on this, see “Appendix A. A Silent Masterpiece. The Landmark 1925 Film of The Lost World,” in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Annotated Lost World, annotated and with an introduction by Roy Pilot and Alvin Rodin, Indianapolis, 1996, 240–6. 9. Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle, 133. Ectoplasm was a widely held concept in spiritualism and represented material that exuded from a medium, and which could be photographed. See Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing. Materialisationsphänomene. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der mediumistischen Teleplastie, Munich 1914. 10. Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 2008, 419. 11. Ibid. 12. The Man from Beyond, directed by Burton L. King, USA, 1922, 61 minutes. 13. Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle, 118. 14. Ibid., 117.

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5

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE SHADOWY REALM: PHOTOGRAPHY AND SPIRITUALISM

To know is better than to believe . . .. The age of faith is past. The age of knowledge is here. “Photographs of Ghosts – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Audience Wept,” Sunday Express1 The Lost World was a part of a series of stories with Professor Challenger as their protagonist. When in 1915, three years after the appearance of the novel, Conan Doyle announced publicly his belief in spiritualism, he sought another possible way of allowing his new-found belief, which would soon turn into a veritable worldwide campaign, to be expressed in fictional form. For a long time he contemplated seriously whether to have Sherlock Holmes convert to spiritualism, but decided against it, since he knew – rationally enough – that this “was a major source of income and therefore not something he should jeopardise or compromise for the sake of spiritualism.”2 Professor Challenger was incomparably more suited to making spiritualism acceptable and promulgating a message about it. Thus The Land of Mist appeared in 1926, a genuinely long-winded and schematic spiritualist novel, which originally carried the title “The Psychic Adventures of Edward Malone,” and large excerpts of which had already been published in October 1924.3 In the title Conan Doyle played off of the cloud- and fog-bedecked high plateau of The Lost World, though here he refers to the realm beyond death. Into the place of Darwinism and Social-Darwinism, of evolutionary 137

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Figure 5.1  The appearance of Katie King: illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Land of Mist. biology and paleontology, stepped spiritualism, complete with its new redefinition of science, though photography’s indexical ability to convince remained.4 In the mist it was not dinosaurs who waited, but rather photos of the living dead (Figure 5.1).5 Yet dinosaurs are also photographically present in the realm of spiritualism, illustrating indeed, as speculated about by more than just a few spiritualist writers, the Earth’s own history and that it can be seen once more in the form of photographs. The French astronomer and acknowledged spiritualist Camille Flammarion, whom Conan Doyle met in Paris, suggested there was a 138

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cache of photos existing in space, while others postulated a “Biography of the Earth.”6 According to William Denton in his book Nature’s Secrets: From the first dawn of light upon this infant globe, when round its cradle the stormy curtains hung, Nature has been photographing every moment. What a picture gallery is hers! There is the heaving crust, as the fiery tides pass under it; the belching volcanoes, the glaring lava torrents, the condensing waters, the rushing floods, and the terrible struggles of the early stormy times; the watery expanse unshored; the new-born naked islands peeping upon the waves; the first infusorial points, too small to leave a fossil trace behind them; the earliest fucoids that clung to the wave-washed rocks. Every radiate and mollusc of the Silurian era, every ganoid of the Devonian, has sat for its portrait, and here it is. Not a leaf that grew in the carboniferous forests, not a beetle that crawled nor a frog that hopped, not a monster of the Oölite nor a beast of the Tertiary wanting. These are the great panoramas of the past, containing all that man ever did . . . the history of all nations and peoples from the cradle to the grave.7 Evolution is thus presented as a photographic novel.8 It is as easily accessible as the realm of the living dead. Conan Doyle therefore does not look back at earthly events but instead forward into the realm beyond death. This can, according to his belief, be illuminated through photos and as a result its existence verified. In the Mist, or Come, Great Black Bird The story of The Land of Mist involves the gradual conversion of Professor Challenger. Many of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist texts return to this narrative and rhetorically depict the turn toward spiritualism as a conversion from the Saul of science and the skepticism of Paul to a new religion of reality. Conan Doyle becomes the so-called John the Baptist of a “New Revelation.”9 The Messiah remains that of the old. Catholicism – agnosticism – spiritualism are the three stages of Conan Doyle’s life.10 At the end he returns to the beginning in order to indicate a new version of it that is now secular. The history of Christianity must be written anew, since of course spiritualism is “the most important event since the death of Christ.”11 Early Christianity had, so Conan Doyle speculated, an intense relation to spiritualist experiences, which over the course of centuries it relinquished until it was entirely lost. The abundance of origins could now be regained. The future is the past, and the past was much closer to the future than the present. Such paradoxes of time logic can occur when, as we will see more precisely, past, present and future become interchangeable images of one another. They can be found, as already has been seen, in similar forms in the Professor Challenger and Sherlock Holmes texts. 139

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The transformation of Conan Doyle’s personal convictions, so he admits, is also a sign that defines a dawning new age. His life is the visible evidence of a new orientation of Western culture. Despite all gestures of humility in relation to his own role, it means something to world history. Conan Doyle describes the transformation in his beliefs as a movement away from materialism, which the Victorian era had formulated extensively, toward belief in a future life that was at once compatible with scientific knowledge and indeed, what’s more, could lead to a unified science. It would not involve relinquishing science but instead using it much more to reconcile reason and belief, and the world of the here-and-now with that of the hereafter.12 These are bound together with one another like communicating fields. “I want these people to believe that there is communication,”13 Conan Doyle gives as the reason for his extensive lecture tours, which for years took place through half of Europe, Australia, South Africa, Australia again and the United States. He perhaps wanted to tear down the walls between both worlds, but in the form of a “systematic science” that would maintain an “unbroken chain” of evidence.14 Also, though the secular realm of Sherlock Holmes was to remain free of spiritualist beliefs – even after the author’s conversion to spiritualism there appeared two volumes of detective stories without reference to s­piritualism – the chain of deduction extended far into the dark realm of the hereafter. Therefore spiritualism had moved into the evidential paradigm. The Land of Mist tells the story of the ascent of secular science into the misty land beyond death. Unlike as in The Lost World, now Professor Challenger brings home photographs that are mentioned in the text and which are then displayed in Conan Doyle’s spiritualist bookshop. If one doubts literary fiction, one has only to visit Conan Doyle’s store near Westminster Abbey in the heart of London in order to be able to study them. There one can also at the same time take out relevant literature from the lending library (Figure 5.2).15 In regards to Challenger, it is much less about a spiritualist revival of ancient Christian religious experience than it is about an altogether new orientation of science. At the start of the novel, Professor Challenger is more than skeptical of the spiritualist beliefs of his former expedition partner Malone, though at the same time he visits many séances with him and is in the end converted. That is a short version of the novel’s plot. Playing a special role is the report of an event at the Metapsychic Institute of Paris, which not only existed in real life but for Conan Doyle harked back to a well-known and publicized conference.16 The meeting depicted in the novel included the most famous members of the Metapsychic Institute, namely Charles Richet, the Count de Gramont and Camille Flammarion, though the actual historical meeting comprised Polish spiritualists. “Well, from my point of view,” Challenger comments, “it is like sitting at the edge of a pond which may have harmless frogs in it, or may have man-eating crocodiles.”17 From this 140

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Figure 5.2  Arthur Conan Doyle in The Psychic Bookshop. pond there arise more than a few pseudo-aquatic creatures that also are photographed. Conan Doyle remarks upon this in a footnote – which in itself is remarkable in a novel: “Specimens of these moulds may be inspected at the Psychic College, 59, Holland Park, London, W., or at the Psychic Museum, Abbey House, Victoria Street, London, S.W.”18 In fact one can find prints of photographs taken during séances in his archive, though they were also published in other pertinent books, like Gustave Geley’s L’ectoplasmie et la clairvoyance (Figures 5.3 and 5.4).19 In his novel Conan Doyle continually describes such apparitions: In this short span of time [in which the flashbulb illuminated the dark – author’s note] the visitors presented a wonderful appearance . . . In that sudden glare of light the visitors had a momentary glimpse of a marvelous sight. The medium lay with his head upon his hands in apparent insensibility. Upon his rounded shoulders there was perched a huge bird of prey, a large falcon or an eagle. For one instant the strange picture was stamped upon their retinas even as it was upon the photographic plate. Then the darkness closed down again, save for the two red lamps, like the eyes of some baleful demon lurking in the corner.20 141

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Figures 5.3 and 5.4  Photographs of the Kluski séance, 1919.

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An ape-man also appears, announcing his presence with a strong odor, though he does not need to be defeated or domesticized, as in The Lost World, but instead licks the hands of those present and strokes the length of their legs. Present at the actual event, according to the records, were the medium Franek Kluski; the photographer Lieutenant Dluzynski and Frau L. Sokolow; Herr S. Germand and his wife, Frau Hertner; and Colonel Okolowicz and his wife. The meeting occurred on 30 August 1919 with the goal of “taking photographs of materializations.”21 The first to appear was a bearded creature that looked like an animal or a primitive person. It did not speak, but instead grunted, gnashed its teeth and clucked its tongue in order to make itself heard. When it was called, it came nearer so that its fur could be stroked. Though it tended to follow the instructions of the medium, it tried to lick the face of the assistant, who was hardly pleased. Then a man named Charles appeared who, according to his own words, had been dead for thirteen years, and finally an Indian woman from Calcutta named Rhéri. The séance was interrupted at a quarter to three and then continued again around 4 p.m. As the group sang Marie Konopnicka’s patriotic song “Rota” and three Polish military songs, a point of light suddenly appeared and the medium knocked on the table to indicate that photos could be taken, a bird of prey later appearing on the photographic plate. It appeared again in a séance on 7 September of the same year, along with an unfortunately photo-shy primitive person who insistently turned away from any photographic exposure to light. In another report, which can be found in hectographic form in Conan Doyle’s archive, the relation between The Land of Mist and The Lost World is made even clearer, as in it the visitors to the séance call this primitive person by the plainly familiar term “Pithecanthropus”: He is a rather frequent visitor to the Kluski séances. It is hard to examine him more closely, as he appears only in darkness. He gives the impression of being a hairy man or a huge ape. His face is hairy, but his forehead is rather high; he has long, strong arms and behaves rather roughly with regard to the sitters, trying to lick their hands or faces, and usually either he breaks up the séance or the sitters are obliged to do so, as they cannot control him. I have seen, or rather felt, him only once, when he rubbed against me and I smelled a peculiar odor which I could not identify at the moment, and which was explained to me by sitters more familiar with him as that of a wet dog.22 During one of the séances the apparition came closer to a woman, taking her hand and rubbing it the length of his face. She in turn screeched so loudly that the sitting had to cease. There then appeared frequently, according to the report, an old man with a long grey beard who spoke in a guttural, unintelligible tongue that supposedly was Assyrian. Swinging back and forth between 143

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Java Man, the Pithecanthropus of paleontology and the time of the Old Testament, ancient times reared their head again. In the novel only the appearances of the ape-man and the bird are carried over – and thus two of the figures that could be met on the high plateau in South America. The narrative circle closes, or in the words of the novel, “The old wheel goes round.”23 And science should also take into account the ancient history of the Earth as part of its post-mortem post-history. “‘All nature is the field of our study, Mr. Mailey. It is not for us to choose. Shall we classify the flowers but neglect the fungi?’”24 At the end of the story of The Land of Mist, the family circle comes to a magical close when Challenger’s daughter Enid turns out to be a “powerful medium” and receives a message from her dead mother and from two others for whose deaths Challenger thinks he was responsible. He had used them as human guinea pigs in trying out medicine on them that “supplies deadly poisons as well as powerful medicines.”25 In other words, a real “pharmaceutical.” The next day both are dead and Challenger thinks it is his fault – until news arrives from the hereafter. Fortunate are those who have photographs of the apparition at their disposal. And blessed are those who believe and have seen something. “Alas, my poor cerebrum!” Conan Doyle’s turn toward spiritualism, which he made public with an article in the magazine Light on 4 November 1916, came at the end of a long process and was met by the public with surprise and astonishment. Even fellow travelers made hay with the seeming package deal of Sherlock Holmes and his author. For example, “The creator of Sherlock Holmes a spiritualist! [. . .] The man who had shown himself facile princeps of all detectives could not surely be deceived,” wrote Reverend Lamond, an adherent of Christian spiritualism.26 Or the journalist James Douglas, who took an important role in the debate about the truthfulness of spirit photography that was titled “Is Conan Doyle Mad?” but nevertheless struck a blow for him: “Doyle could not have created Sherlock Holmes if he had not been deeply versed in the laws of evidence.”27 In plain talk: anyone who has created the character of a sharp-thinking detective and has so carefully thought through numerous stories about him cannot be so stupid as to fall for something completely nonsensical. Hence, there must be something to spiritualism. This reaction reads a bit like that of Conan Doyle when in 1883 he discovered an article about photographs of supposedly Odic force emanations in the renowned British Journal of Photography: I read with some interest and considerable surprise an article which appeared, under the above heading, in The British Journal of Photography 144

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last week. I then read it again. After a short lapse of time, and a medical examination which reassured me as to the state of my intellect, I perused it for the third time; but I felt it would be a tempting of Providence to go deeper into the matter.28 W. Harding Warner had proposed the thesis that the Odic light, whose existence in all bodies had been posited by Baron von Reichenbach, should also be able to be photographed. Warner called it the photosphere. Conan Doyle reacted to this in a letter to the editor dismissing such assumptions and ­conjecturing that there had been a mix-up. “Om” rather than “Od” would be more correct. And nevertheless the right reaction to such nonsense should be the claim: “Alas, my poor cerebrum!”29 In 1891 he had Sherlock Holmes die in the Reichenbach Falls but then later return to life, thus validating through fiction that he had never been dead. The same thing happened with spiritualism, though there it was not a matter of resurrection but rather of living on. The dead are not dead, and they are even upset that we assume that they are. The title of a spiritualist magazine says it all: Two Worlds. Once again it has to do with two worlds that are not simply separate from one another and coexist, but instead there is “communication” between them. Conan Doyle’s attraction to the beliefs of the new revelation of spiritualism, which until his death consumed a large part of his time and wealth, unfolded in several stages and can be precisely reconstructed. Quite early on he was interested in mesmerism and took up the theme in two stories, “John Barrington Cowles” and “The Great Keinplatz Experiment.” Conan Doyle was also in contact with the hypnotist George Albert Smith, who later on adapted his staged séances by making two early films titled The Mesmerist and Photographing a Ghost, in which double exposures and other technical tricks were used to achieve ghostly effects.30 The trick techniques of this film made possible a slew of supposedly spiritual apparitions that were notably good enough to be described and interpreted in other contexts as supernatural phenomena. Additionally at the time, instructions for successfully taking “spiritualist” photos through trick techniques were widely available in photo magazines, and quite popular books presented such “photographic conversations” (Figure 5.5).31 By the end of the 1880s Conan Doyle was already taking part in spiritualist séances, but he did not believe in them, claiming instead that the movement of the table was done by manipulations carried out by the attendees. To the investigation into a supposed poltergeist in Dorset in June 1894, to which he was invited, he brought his camera, though he took no pictures. In any case the event took place mainly at night, and therefore darkness prevented photos from being taken. Alfred Drayson, who was both an eccentric astronomer and a recognized spiritualist, was a friend of Conan Doyle and 145

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Figure 5.5  Explanation of different ways to produce “spirit” photography.

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introduced him to A. P. Sinnett, the author of the books Esoteric Buddhism and Occult World. Like him, Conan Doyle was interested in the theosophical movement, though without adhering to its beliefs.32 Conan Doyle was also, as he later stressed, one of the earliest members of The Society for Psychic Research, which was founded in 1882 by Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney. Together with Frank Podmore, they investigated hundreds of supposedly paranormal events and reported on them in the two-volume book Phantasms of the Living, which appeared in 1886, Conan Doyle evidently being one of its readers. Furthermore, Conan Doyle was acquainted with Henry Ball, who like him was interested in telepathy. From January to July of 1887 they undertook a series of experiments with a medium by the name of Horstead, the results of which, although not conclusive, were continuously so ambivalent as to cause Conan Doyle to abandon his strict repudiation of spiritualism, reassessing it as “too rigid.”33 He understood his own role as that of an observer, since he had to concede, to his own great regret, that he had no “transcendental powers” of his own. He also constantly made this clear later on in letters and articles. He was not suitable as a medium for messages from the hereafter, but as a promulgator of such communications he was perfect, and thus became the great communicator for the movement. The news also got out about his wife, who in 1921 discovered her spiritualist sensibility and abilities as a medium, after which she delivered an endless stream of messages every day. A decided influence on Conan Doyle was Lily Loder-Symonds, who as a spiritualist practiced automatic writing, and who received messages from her three brothers who had fallen at Ypres that she then shared with Conan Doyle. While the first of these messages could have easily been taken from reports in newspapers and magazines, a later communication between Conan Doyle and Malcolm Leckie, who had also fallen in the war and now was present in a message received through a séance, was considered to be different. The words, which in due course could have been changed, were repeated exactly and convinced him to give up his hostile position. From a change in words to a change in views, it was only a short step. Between September 1915 and spring 1916, the remainder of his skepticism disappeared. Just before this, Conan Doyle had read a series of “classic” spiritualist books, such as Frederic Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, which appeared in 1903, or Oliver Lodge’s Raymond, or Life and Death, with Examples of the Evidence for Survival of Memory and Affection After Death from 1916.34 Later he was to be responsible for one of the most comprehensive collections of Great Britain. This was also true of spirit photography, which he systematically collected and used in his own lectures.35 Spiritualism had found a prophet who could not be ignored.

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Pheneas is on the Telephone And when there are no photographs, writing and speaking will do. Just as in The Land of Mist the family circle encompasses the entire world – including that of the otherworldly – the same was true for Conan Doyle’s family, because when in 1921 his wife was discovered to be a medium and practiced automatic writing, spiritualism made its most concrete entrance into Doyle’s family life. The family adopted an additional member named Pheneas (Figure 5.6). The “home circle” now became the “wider circle.”36 Pheneas, who was first invoked during a séance on 10 December 1922, from then on essentially determined the life of the family, and for the children was also considered “an older and elder brother.”37 He now appeared daily and even at the dinner table a place was set for him. He had made his presence known at a séance, then called and did so daily. “If you heard a telephone bell ring you would not sit and ask who rang the bell. The thing we are meant to do is take down the receiver as the wise spiritualists have done and receive the message.”38 Conan Doyle, or more precisely his wife, picked up the receiver and listened each day to what was dictated supposedly from the hereafter. Notebook after notebook was filled with Conan Doyle’s small, precise handwriting. Many of them have survived. The famous author later published, after he got Pheneas to agree to it, a selection of the communications from this spiritualist leader, whom he compared to Francis of Assisi or Vincent de Paul.39 Pheneas is an Arab, came from Ur and, according to his own account, was born long before Abraham. His name, according to Conan Doyle, is “Egyptian, and means Negro, according to him. [. . .] It is semitic, biblical and honourable, being one of the leaders of Israel.”40 Even though he appeared to spring from the Old Testament, he nevertheless gave concrete recommendations in regards to travel plans, the purchase of a house and other everyday matters. Honi soit qui mal y pense – and maybe the same applies in this case, for Conan Doyle’s wife perhaps sought to express her own interests through Pheneas. He knew well Conan Doyle’s newest publications, commented on them thoroughly and shared information from the world beyond. This was a copy of this world – only changed, its ugly elements missing. More flowers exist there (in the texts the talk is constantly about flowers and blossoms), no shadows, and most of all it is composed of images. Earthly existence is also now metaphorically transformed into a photographic existence. “Every man when he comes upon earth,” says Pheneas, “is like an unexposed cinema film. He has his picture to make.”41 If he succeeds at this, he belongs to the higher spheres, and if he does not, then the lower. The film images must, however, after having attained the shadowless realm of light, be obliterated again. At a lecture in New York in April 1922, Conan Doyle postulated a double existence within this world. “He described the actual 148

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Figure 5.6  “The Pheneas Circle.”

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process of death, and said he would show them a photograph of the ‘etheric body’, which has resided in the human body and was an exact duplicate of it down to the pores of the skin.”42 Pheneas saw Conan Doyle’s role as that of a recording medium: “Be like soft wax on which I can write.”43 He remained loyal to this task until his death. Another Day in Paradise Pheneas was not the only one who reported on his life in the hereafter. The depiction of “Summerland,” which is what the hereafter was called, belonged to a topos of spiritualist literature. Quickly certain stereotypes had been formed and entire books and magazines concerned themselves with the canonization of the imaginarium. Notably Reverend George Vale Owen published numerous books in which he painted The Life Beyond the Veil, the title of one of his books. Conan Doyle’s impact on the description of this imaginary world was quite important. Unfortunately there are no photographs of “Summerland,” since spiritualist photography specialized in portraits and otherwise offered completely non-representational images created without a camera. But the depiction of “Summerland” was nevertheless so detailed and repetitive that we can well imagine it. It is in fact a copy of this world – but only absent its shadowy sides. In the supposed realm of shadows there indeed awaits us a mirror image of this world full of light, flowers and no rain. Indeed, England without rain. “Summerland” was first coined as a term by Andrew Jackson Davis and then was extensively described by Sir Oliver Lodge in his book Raymond. Many mentions of it followed, leading to, as Joseph McCabe commented, “Summerland” being better known than Central Africa or Tibet.44 The world beyond, according to Conan Doyle’s view, is a world of ether in which each of us has a double that is a copy of our earthly manifestation. An ethereal avatar. According to this theory, every object of the earthly world has an ethereal double. “Summerland” is the lit-up side of the earthly vale of tears. What awaits us there are flowers, flowers and more flowers – as well as music. Also when Conan Doyle remarks, “We cannot look upon this coming world as a tiny Dutch garden of a place so exact it cannot easily be described,”45 the garden metaphor is well chosen, for that is exactly what “Summerland” is: an eternally blossoming hortus conclusus. Joseph McCabe glosses the descriptions when he writes, “Undulating meadowland bespangled with flowers, and stretching away into far distance were, here and there, hill and dale; coppice and thicket; plantation and wood; and away on the horizon purple hills footing a range of majestic snow-clad mountains.”46 A place that is so distant, but which appears so near, and which appears to us as remarkably familiar. Whether expeditions are undertaken to the high plateau of South America or the “Summerland” of the hereafter is explored through reports from it, the world always looks like England. That is genuine colonialism: the adaptation of a world that always 150

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is transformed into the same world. “The earth has been explored, the stars have been analysed,” says a commentator on Conan Doyle’s conversion. “The one great unknown region is the mysterious land of the living dead.”47 Even this is cast as British. Could there be a more far-reaching colonialism? Not even zombies dwell there, but rather it offers a deeply bourgeois existence. It all falls in line: one lives in a household, goes to work and establishes a life for himself. Unused bounties from this realm will be provided in the hereafter: music, theatre, but also science. Age swings clearly back and forth: the young age – even the babies, the old grow younger, and the ethereal body remains elastic.48 These then are some answers to the numerous questions that were posed. Do children grow? Is there still work? What happens to animals, for example Sir Walter Scott’s dog? Do people wear clothes? Are there poor people and wealthy? Does one have to sleep and eat? And what about pain and illness? And how about literature, art and music? And sex?49 Simple questions, simple answers. There everything is really like here, just brighter, easier and more ethereal. As far as alcohol goes, there is none ­(alcohol-free beer had not yet been invented) and the bodily pleasures are reduced to the soul’s existence. In the realm of the “simulacra,”50 of “absolute reproduction,”51 and the copy of this world in the hereafter, it is all indeed like life in a Dutch garden. “This is our place of trouble; that is our place of rest and of recuperation – where we get our reward.”52 In Society Spiritualism was – and it’s important to make this clear – a broad social practice. Séances were always conducted among groups, and also the effort to spread and implement “the greatest thing in the world since that great revelation two thousand years ago”53 was organized throughout the society, as was the critical examination of the apparitions who made themselves known. One can really speak of a spiritualist mass movement. In the United States there were at the time ten million followers of spiritualism, and Great Britain was also covered with a thick net of spiritualist congregations.54 Along with these there existed a multitude of small and large magazines, publishers and numerous books on the subject. In addition, the movement set up its own research institutes in order, amid the twilight of science and esoteric spiritualist apparitions, to conduct their own investigations and advance countless experiments. In general the acceptance of spiritualism was in fact much broader than one might have supposed. When Conan Doyle professed himself an adherent, he at least remained on the margins of common sense, even if we no longer might believe so today. Conan Doyle was the president of several different spiritualist organizations, such as the British College of Psychic Science, the London Spiritualist Alliance and the Spiritualist Community, as well as a leader of the Spiritualist Congress of Paris in 1925.55 He also in 1925 founded The 151

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Psychic Bookshop on the ground and first floors of Abbey House at 2 Victoria Street, London, not far from Westminster Abbey. The heart of the spiritualist movement in Great Britain beat near Big Ben. Next to the bookshop, a small museum and lending library with the relevant literature were set up.56 In front window of The Psychic Bookshop, Conan Doyle displayed the photographs used in The Land of Mist. However, the cost of running the shop far outpaced what it took in, and so Conan Doyle had to realize in 1925 that not only had he traveled 50,000 miles in order to convince the world of the new revelation, he had also exhausted a good part of his not inconsiderable wealth. Nor could the continued gush of royalties from the Sherlock Holmes texts, which he used to finance his spiritualist activities, change any of that. Clearly the most noteworthy institution of spiritualist photography was the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures (SSSP). Among its members were Colonel E. Baddeley, James Coates, Major Spencer, Henry Blackwell, Felicia Scatcherd, Dr. Abraham Wallace, Mr. Hewat McKenzie and a Mr. Spencer. The photographer William Hope, to whom Conan Doyle was especially devoted and whom he defended openly on several occasions, took a number of group portraits of the society. In one of them there appeared a so-called extra: a lit-up illumination that first appeared when the plate was developed, revealing a group portrait with a spirit, which those present probably didn’t gaze upon ironically (Figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7  The members of the SSSP with a spirit revealed when the picture is turned. 152

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The SSSP studied photographs sent to it that supposedly contained paranormal phenomena. That was their self-imposed mission. In Conan Doyle’s archive there are numerous such photos, which were circulated among the members. From them photographic copies were made which were stamped with “SSSP.” When we look at these photos today, we are presented with a Who’s Who of spiritualist photography: Deane, Hope and the Crewe Circle, Schrenck-Notzing – all of them represented with prints. A controversy flared up around these pictures that was much like that of the Congo photographs. Here too a speaker traveled the land with a slide show in order to reveal the truth about what was depicted. That speaker was Conan Doyle. But there was also pushback and competing versions. This controversy arose in the middle of the spiritualist movement. On each side there stood an organization: the SSSP on one and the Society for Psychic Research (SPR) on the other. While, to put it delicately, the members of the SSSP were rather open-minded about the authenticity of the photos, this was not the case for the most renowned British organization in the broad field of the paranormal, the Society for Psychic Research. Founded in 1882, the SPR held spiritualist or occult photographs to be fakes, conscious deceptions, and entirely misleading. Conan Doyle was completely right in assessing that “The S.P.R. (or their present spokesmen) are against psychic photography”57 and therefore had a vital interest in undermining its existence and discrediting its plausibility. This was in contrast to the SSSP and its president Dr. Abraham Wallace, who sought evidence and proposed theories about how these images could manifest themselves. Conan Doyle proposed they were controlled from the hereafter: The evidence is strong that there is on the other side an intelligent control for each photographic medium, whose powers are great but by no means unlimited and who endeavours to give us convincing results each in his own characteristic way. The results are sometimes obtained by actual materialisations, sometimes by precipitations of pictures apart from exposure, sometimes, as I believe, by the superposition of screens which have the psychic face already upon them, and which may be the image of someone who is still alive, or may produce upon the plates facsimiles of pictures and portraits which do at present exist, but which are entirely beyond the normal reach of the medium.58 The Shadowy Realm of the Slide Show For Conan Doyle spirit photos were important evidence for his spiritualist convictions. He owned an enormous collection of photos, from which he, if we are to believe his assertions, culled photographs whose authenticity he no longer believed. The others he tapped above all for the purposes of his 153

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exceeding powers as a lecturer. He often gave two lectures simultaneously, one that was photographic and another that was more broadly philosophical. In a sense, the first rolled out visual evidence, the second drew more farreaching conclusions. In his study there hung a map of Great Britain on which was marked every town in which he had delivered a lecture on spiritualism. Not even the death of his son prevented him from continuing the round of lectures on the very same day. As if expressing his gratitude, on 7 September 1919, shortly after his death, his son let him know that he was doing well in the hereafter – a message which, shared with the audience, leant a personal note to the lectures that followed.59 The text of the lectures was then collected in books titled The New Revelation and The Vital Message, as well as in various small magazines and his comprehensive History of Spiritualism. The first comprised an actual slide show with photographs from his collection. He constantly updated his lectures with new slides he received in significant quantities from members of the audience. A biographer described the effect of the lectures upon the audience as follows: “Once the audience, which in those days generally believed in the veracity of the camera and considered that it could never lie, was curious and interested, the second lecture kicked in.”60 In other words, Conan Doyle relied on the performative effect of photography as a medium of the real in order to underscore it with a clear message. Within it there existed a wondrous encounter between two systems of belief, with invisible reality and beings on one side and photography’s undoubtable ability to depict reality on the other, which for a short moment was able to lay hold of that which really was invisible. In many respects photography became a kind of “magic science.”61 Thanks to a magazine article, we can reconstruct precisely the photographs that Conan Doyle selected and presented – at least during this period.62 Many of the photos were also used in other reports. The core collection, however, remained clearly the same. Conan Doyle showed a total of forty-seven images, a cluster that amounted to a history of spiritualism that drew upon spirit photography in particular. Here is the contents of the slide show:   1. The Fox cottage at Hydesville.   2. An artist’s conception of the scene at the first raps in this cottage.   3. Three Fox sisters.   4. Sir Oliver Lodge.   5. A Hope “extra” of Raymond Lodge; sitters, Lady Lodge and Mrs. Osborne Leonard.   6. Dr. Schrenck-Notzing.   7. Madame Bisson.   8. Dr. Geley.   9. Artist’s conception of “gloves” with Kluski. 154

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10. One of Kluski’s psychic “gloves”. 11. Ectoplasm in formation. Mrs. Irving the medium. 12. Ectoplasmic vapour round Mr. Hope. 13. Ectoplasm on shoulder of lady sitter. 14. Ectoplasmic rods. 15. Ectoplasm with Danish medium. 16. Tiny materialised hand on phosphorescent slate (Eglinton). 17. Ectoplasmic face building up (Eva C.). 18. Copy of oil painting (Italy) with beautiful materialised form. 19. Materialisation (Katie Cook, medium). 20. Strings of ectoplasm (Hope, Mr. Jeffrey and lady, sitters). 21. Completion of No. 20, showing “extra”. 22. Hope “extra”. Mr. and Mrs. Coates the sitters. 23. Alfred Russel Wallace and “extra” of his mother (Hudson). 24. Extra with the Staveley Bulford Group. 25. Ectoplasmic figure, West Coast of Africa. 26. Hope extra, Rev. C. Tweedale and wife the sitters. 27. Miss Scatcherd with extra of Sir Hiram Maxim (Hope). 28. Sir William Crookes. 29. Artist’s conception of Crookes and Katie King. 30. Crookes and Katie King arm in arm. 31. Miss Scatcherd with extra of Crookes (Hope). 32. Sir A. Conan Doyle with writing of Archdeacon Colley (Hope). 33. Sample of Colley writing and signature, for comparison. 34. Sir Arthur with extra of his son (Hope). 35. Extra with Malcolm Bird (Hope). 36. Mrs. Deane’s extra of Agnes Cushman. 37. Lady Palmer’s extra at Domremy. 38. Spirit picture of Lord Combermere. 39. Madame d’Espérance and materialised figure. 40. Tissot’s “Apparition Médianimique”. 41. Extra of Ruskin, sitter Mrs. Blackwell (Boursnell). 42. Extra of Dr. Joseph Bell with “Morning Post” correspondent (Mrs. Deane). 43. Extra of Joseph Conrad (Mrs. Deane). 44. Extra of Abraham Lincoln (Mumler). 45. Extras at the cenotaph (Mrs. Deane). 46. Extras at the cenotaph (Mrs. Deane). 47. Symbolic Group of the three Apostles on the mountain top. Thanks to the – extremely scattered – archive, further photographs that were presented can be identified. Some are shown in Figures 5.8–5.18. 155

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Figures 5.8 and 5.9  Séance with Margery (Crandon) on 19 January 1925 (with Eric Dingwall and L. R. G. Crandon).

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Figures 5.10–5.13  William Crookes, photographs of Katie King/Florence Cook, 1874.

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Figure 5.14  Materialization during a Kluski séance. 158

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Figure 5.15  Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, ectoplasm materialization by the medium Stanislawa P., 25 January 1913. 159

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Figure 5.16  Séance with Margery (Crandon) on 5 February 1925, ectoplasm materialization. The reaction of the audience can also be well traced because of the numerous articles Conan Doyle collected in his scrap books. He almost continually stood before very large audiences, speaking in 1925 alone before 1,200 in Cardiff, 1,500 in Newport, 2,500 in Swansea and 10,000 in the Salle Wagram in Paris.63 The hall was darkened in order for the slide projections to have their full effect. And that they had. The audience simply could not sit still and not say a word, but instead reacted to what was said. Sometimes heckling erupted, and now and then some fainted or fell into a trance. One report depicted the audience’s sense of shock, Conan Doyle using personal accounts of his own in order to add an emotional element to his message: The vast audience [. . .] were unable to repress their feelings when spirit photographs of his own son, taken through ectoplasm by the intervention of the famous English medium Hope, of Sir William Crookes, and of Lady Lodge, the wife of Sir Oliver Lodge, and their son Raymond killed in the war, and other persons were thrown on the screen.64 160

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And when Conan Doyle lectured at a sold-out Carnegie Hall in 1923, the audience was particularly fascinated with a specific photograph: It was taken by a medium called Mrs. Deane at the Cenotaph in Whitehall on 11 November 1922, during the annual remembrance service for the war dead. It clearly showed spirit faces hovering over the crowds. The dead of the Great War, it seemed, had come to pay their respects to themselves and their fallen comrades.65 This photo, to which I will return in greater detail later on, is from a special day, Armistice Day, of a special place meant to memorialize fallen soldiers never buried, and for whom a cenotaph had been erected on the spot. Visible above the crowd who attended the ceremony were numerous faces. When Conan Doyle displayed this photo in April 1923 in New York, a highpitched voice was heard within the darkened hall: “Don’t you see them? Don’t you see their faces?,”66 called out a woman who during the lecture at Carnegie Hall had fallen into a trance. After being revived, she said that she had been possessed by the spirit of a mother of one of the fallen soldiers who had shared with her and the other mothers what had happened to their children. Other accounts report the particular impression made by photos of the ectoplasmic materializations and séances held by William Crookes with Katie King: Sir Arthur showed two pictures illustrating the development of a spiritual body from a mass of ectoplasm. In the first plate the ectoplasm appeared as a vague mass rising from the head of the medium while the second plate showed the mass opened, revealing the face of the dead wife of the man who had been sitting with the medium.67 The most remarkable photo was likely the one that showed Crookes arm in arm with Katie King. To this one people reacted with “astonishment and terror.”68 Not only did Conan Doyle present the history of spiritualism for the eyes to see, he also used the history of the reception of his own lectures to impress the audience. At the start of the published version of an often held talk titled “Death and the Hereafter” he remarked, “We have now travelled a good 50,000 miles upon our quest. We have spoken face to face with a quarter of a million of people.”69 Even when what was said seems peculiarly phrased and doesn’t appear to align with common sense, the impressive resonance itself is a sign of the movement’s meaning. For Conan Doyle this meant no more and no less than a sea change: “All modern inventions and discoveries will sink into insignificance beside those psychic facts which will force themselves within a few years upon the universal human mind.”70 And once again Conan Doyle 161

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Figures 5.17 and 5.18  Ada Deane’s photographs of Reverend W. S. Irving, November 1921.

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presented his conviction as a conversion, quoting Reichenbach, whose Theory of Odic Light he had criticized clearly in an article as “a new scientific thing.” However, here the same Reichenbach is used as a straight man for the value of the spiritualist movement: “I think also of a dictum of Baron Reichenbach: ‘There is a scientific incredulity which exceeds in stupidity the obtuseness of the clod-hopper.’”71 Extras and Ectoplasm: Spirit Photography If one looks at the list of photographs that Conan Doyle presented, it becomes clear that, along with historical documents, there are two types of images: the photographic documentation of ectoplasm materializations on the one hand and photos of so-called extras on the other. These are understood to be apparitions that become visible only when the photo plate is developed. Usually they were faces which could then be identified from portraits. The photographs of “extras” were characteristic of the early times of the spiritualist movement from the 1860s to 1880s, but also were created in the years following the First World War by photographers such as Ada Deane and William Hope, whom Conan Doyle valued highly and supported – even after serious evidence was produced that showed both had made use of double exposures. In Deane’s archive there is an image that reveals a carefully done alteration that was prepared but not yet carried out (Figure 5.19). After Conan Doyle’s death, Hope managed, as expected, to create a portrait that contained an “extra” of the deceased. Meanwhile, large parts of Conan Doyle’s collection of spirit photography consist of these kinds of images. Photos of ectoplasm materializations, however, mainly appear after 1910. These involve the photographic documentation of events occurring at a séance. The photographic medium displays what the spiritualist medium brings forth or in fact discharges. Ectoplasm is mostly a gauzy or gelatinous substance which is exuded by the bodily orifices of, for the most part, female mediums. Conan Doyle knew the powerful effect of the occasionally obscene images, drew on them in The Land of Mist through a detailed description of a séance, and displayed them purposefully during his slide shows. For example, one newspaper reported: “I intend to show for the first time tonight,” continued the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, “photographs of the results of experiments, carried out under the control of the Scientific American, and conducted with Marjorie, the medium, who is the wife of Dr. Crandon, a well-known Boston physician. These photographs show ectoplasmic emanation from various parts of Mrs. Crandon’s body, which should definitively establish the phenomena on a scientific basis, even for the sceptical professors of the Sorbonne.”72 164

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Figure 5.19  Ada Deane’s photograph of Colonel Allerton S. Cushman and his wife with the “spirit” of their deceased daughter Agnes, 24 July 1921. To the audience he then presented a series of photos of the so-called Goligher Circle, which documented the flow of ectoplasm from between the legs of a female medium clearly in a trance (Figures 5.20–5.23). The ectoplasm flowed from Marjory’s genitals and then moved through half the room. In light of the 165

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fact that the séance took place in the dark and was only illuminated by the flash of the camera, one can imagine somewhat the effect which this supposed materialization had upon the onlookers at the séance and the listeners in the darkened hall. Yet in Conan Doyle’s lecture there were no photographs made without cameras, although there were prominent examples, such as photos by Madge Donohoe, which can be found in his archive, while elsewhere he also mentions, for example, Darget.73 Also, so-called fluid photographs and thought or mental photographs were supposedly attempted.74 Conan Doyle’s slides from the spiritualist studios are almost uniformly – exceptions proving the rule – completed in a traditional manner in the camera obscura of the camera, and then turned into spiritualist documents through the use of double exposures. And there is a reason for that. Conan Doyle remained true to classic camera photography, and he saw in it the medial means of authenticating the apparitions manifested by the medium. When he writes that he has seen “the ‘dead’ glimmer upon a photographic plate which no hand but mine had touched,” this shows that photographs for Conan Doyle were also still written with “the pencil of nature” (to quote the title of William Henry Fox Talbot’s book) and therefore could not be doubted.75 His belief in photography as a medium for authentication is indeed quite traditional for the times. Other voices saw in photography the most dodgy and problematic source of evidence and regarded it with deep skepticism. Hereward Carrington, who in his book The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism distinguished between white and black sheep, speaks of evidence that was “genuine” or was “fraudulent,” photography belonging to the second group, while he also tapped a prominent voice, namely that of Sir Oliver Lodge, whose book Raymond, or Life and Death was considered the canonical description of the “Summerland” of the hereafter:76 In Proceedings S.P.R. [Society for Psychical Research], Vol. X., p. 23, Sir Oliver Lodge made the remark that he would rather trust his own powers of observation [. . .] than any number of printed records, backed up by any number of photographs. In this he was, I think, very wise.77 At the start of the twentieth century, skepticism regarding photography as a medium of evidence can be clearly found. In shorter articles and entire books one can learn how beautiful “spiritualist” effects can be achieved without much effort. Even when one brought a marked plate to a photographer, there were various means of deception. With the help of traced or cut-out ghosts or other figures imposed on transparent material, such as celluloid, which was then attached to the lens, one could literally achieve fantastic results. Mostly the ghost was placed cleverly inside the camera, which was prepared ahead of time. Plates could also be switched or the ghostly apparition could 166

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Figures 5.20–5.23  William J. Crawford’s photographs of Kathleen Goligher’s ectoplasm materialization, 1920.

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be inscribed on the plate by using sulphate or quinine. In addition, a photographer could operate with an additional plate placed in front of the others, or during the developing process one plate could be held up against another for a brief moment. Even radium was applied.78 Hereward Carrington sums it up by saying, “The whole history of modern spiritualism has probably contained no more bitter contests than have arisen over this question of the possibility and the reality of ‘spirit-photographs.’”79 In other words, all controversies can be found here in nuce. Yet Conan Doyle remained loyal to his convictions and his belief in the authenticity of the photographic process. He had seen, as he testified, only three cases of falsified plates, and in his History of Spiritualism he himself defended photographers like Mumler and Buguet who had been convicted of creating counterfeit photos. Hence, he operated with a strategy of reversed evidence: Conan Doyle was of the view that it was enough to present a single photo that was beyond suspicion in order to verify the possibility of all spirit photography, while critics were of the entirely opposite view in thinking that all photos were incriminated when even one counterfeit was proven. Following this logic, Conan Doyle felt that, due to the huge, and for them regularly overwhelming, demands from the public, Mumler and Buguet had produced counterfeits but also photos that were indeed authentic. Mumler’s famous photo with Lincoln as an “extra” therefore belonged to the standard repertoire of Conan Doyle’s lecture. Nor did that change when his friend and counterpart Harry Houdini, as we have seen, had a photo done up of himself with Lincoln. The photo was one thing, the credibility of the photographer another. Thus he replied to sharp criticism of spiritualism made by Jerome K. Jerome, the author of the famous novel Three Men in a Boat: All these works [from Crookes, Crawford, Geley and Schrenck-Notzing] have been accompanied by photographs. Does he [Mr. Jerome K. Jerome] accuse all these distinguished scientists of faking these photographs, without the faintest personal object, and indeed with risk of incurring professional ruin?80 While the scientists risked their reputations, the spirit photographers were so sympathetically received that they simply had to be believed. In defending Ada Deane and William Hope, Conan Doyle mounted elaborate descriptions of their physical appearance, their religious convictions and their character. In the end all there was to say was: In Hope we trust. Conan Doyle’s photographic convictions followed the nineteenth-century position that found in this technical medium an irrefutable means of evidence. One of the most quoted protagonists of the spiritualist movement, Alfred Russel Wallace, devoted to “Spirit Photography” an entire chapter of his 1874 book A Defence of Modern Spiritualism, edited by Alexander Aksákow, the 168

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author of Psychic Studies.81 Spirit photography is presented here as a subject “which furnishes perhaps the most unassailable demonstration it is possible to attain, of the objective reality of spiritual forms, and also of the truthful nature of the evidence furnished by seers when they describe figures visible to themselves alone.”82 When apparitions appear at séances, there can be only one goal: “Photograph them, and you will have an unanswerable proof that your human witness are trustworthy.”83 Wallace then lays out criteria for authenticating photos that should henceforth remain valid.84 In his essay “Are There Objective Apparitions?,” photography alone is able to discern between subjective hallucinations and objective reality.85 Conan Doyle’s defensive strategy can be studied wonderfully through three examples to which he devoted an immense amount of space in his scattered writings on spirit photography: the already referred to William Hope and Ada Deane, as well as the so-called Combermere Photograph, which he heartily dubbed “the best case on record of supernormal photography.”86 In Hope We Trust An article by Conan Doyle’s comrade James Douglas, whose publications appear often in the scrap books, gives a highly vivid account of how we might imagine one of Hope’s photographic séances to look like. Here is an extensive quote from the report: Sir Arthur arranged a sitting for me at the British College of Psychic Science. He called for me at my house at ten o’clock. [. . .] We found Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton waiting for us in the studio at the top of the house. [. . .] I had been asked to bring my own plates, and to keep them near me, and sleep beside them for a few days before the experiment. Last Monday I bought a dozen quarter plates. I carried them every day in my pocket, and slept with them every night under my pillow.   I shall now describe the experiment. We sat round a small oblong table, Sir Arthur facing Mr. Hope, and Mrs. Buxton facing myself. Mr. Hope asked me to place the packet of plates on the table. I did so. He then asked me if they had been opened or exposed to the X-rays. “People have played tricks on us,” he explained, “with faked plates.” I assured him that the plates had never left my possession, and the experiment proceeded. We sat for some time with our hands on the table, and touching each other. That is to say, Mr. Hope’s right hand was resting on my left hand, Sir Arthur’s left hand on my right hand, his right hand on Mrs. Buxton’s left hand, and her right hand clasping Mr. Hope’s left hand. [. . .] Then Mr. Hope asked me if there was any special hymn I would like them to sing. On my saying I had no wish for any special hymn, Mr. Hope suggested that we should sing “Lead, kindly light.” 169

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Mrs. Buxton led the singing in a clear, musical voice, Mr. Hope singing with her. They sang the whole hymn. Then Mr. Hope prayed. It was a simple, ordinary, reverent prayer. Then Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton sang a spiritualist hymn, the refrain of which was, “I know, I know.” This simple religious service was closed by a brief, simple little prayer from Mrs. Buxton. Throughout the service the packet of plates remained in the centre of the table. Mr. Hope then put the packet between his hands, Mrs. Buxton put her hand on his hands, Sir Arthur put his hands on hers, and I put my hands on his. For a minute or two the packet was held in the air by our eight hands. Then all was ready for the experiment.   Mrs. Buxton and Sir Arthur remained seated at the table, with their hands touching, in order to “hold the force” while Mr. Hope and I went into the dark room. Before we did so Mr. Hope asked me to examine the camera. It is a very old Lancaster camera, standing on a tripod. [. . .] I carefully examined the camera. Mr. Hope offered to let me take out the lens. If I had chosen I could have done so. I could have washed it. I was satisfied, however, that there was nothing on the lens. There was no cover on it. I examined the old wooden frame into which I subsequently put the plates. It contained nothing but the worn bit of cardboard used to keep the two plates separate. [. . .] Before we entered the dark room Mr. Hope asked me to open the cardboard box of plates myself. He produced a knife, and helped me to cut the paper round the edge of the lid. Holding the packet tightly in my hand, I entered the dark room. There was nothing visible except the two china baths and some bottles of chemicals. Then Mr. Hope closed and bolted the door. [. . .] “Take out any two plates you please,” said Mr. Hope. I made no choice. “Take the first and third,” said he. I took out the first and the third. “Close the box,” said Mr. Hope, “and put it in your pocket.” I did so. He then asked me to put the two plates into the wooden frame. I again examined the frame under the red light. I placed the first plate in it, then the cardboard, and then the second plate. Mr. Hope then asked me to write my name on both the plates with an indelible pencil. He held the frame and pushed back the sliding sides for half an inch in order to enable me to do so. We then returned to the studio. Mr. Hope asked me to put the wooden frame into the groove of the camera. I did so. He then posed Sir Arthur and myself side by side and took two photographs. There was a long exposure, during which Mr. Hope and Mrs. Buxton, with closed eyes, bent their heads over the camera. Mr. Hope then took me into the dark room again. He said: “I will put in the next two plates, but before you give them to me I want you to sign them.” I took two plates out of the cardboard box and signed them in turn. Mr. Hope then put these two plates into the wooden frame. He then asked me to sign them again, moving the 170

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slides back to enable me to do so. He explained that I would thus be able to distinguish between the two plates each of which I had signed once, and the two plates each of which I had signed twice. That is to say, the two plates which bore one signature would be identifiable as those I had myself put into the wooden frame, and the two plates which bore two signatures would be identifiable as those which Mr. Hope has himself put into the frame. Mr. Hope then unbolted the door, and we returned to the studio. He said he would take two photos of me alone. I sat down. This time Mr. Hope himself put the frame into the camera. After taking the two photos in the same manner as the others, Mr. Hope and I returned to the dark room. He asked me to develop the plates with my own hands. [. . .] I held the bath in my hands an washed the four plates. We were all watching the development when Mrs. Buxton suddenly cried, “There is an extra on one of them.” I saw a faint cloud near the top of the plate under the signature. After the four plates had been developed I placed them in the fixing bath. We then took the four plates into the studio and a face appeared on one of the plates.87 We must then imagine the visit to a spirit photo studio as a combination of a devout, private religious ceremony and the technical work of the darkroom. Between light and shadow, sleeping and waking, events and the photo plates shuttle back and forth. Photographic technique is depicted here as revelation. Not only was Cardinal Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light” intoned, just as it had been on board the Titanic shortly before it went down, the plates were also held up like a host and presented to the rapt congregation. Perhaps the luminal exposure from the hereafter had already occurred in sleep, Douglas having slept with the unopened case under his pillow. Or as the congregation raised its hands aloft. Or at the moment of the signature. The report infers different explanations through which photographic technique is imbued with pseudoreligious practice and magical thinking, but above all makes no attempt at actual explanation. The “extra” first appears afterward in the developing tray, but at the moment the photo was taken, it was not visible, appearing in a manner of speaking and becoming visible in the portrait itself, as if this were the emergence of another, more important photo. In any case, one did not come to Hope in order to have oneself photographed, but came rather with another portrait in hand, which in the best case was a good resemblance of someone remembered, as “extras” functioned only as identifiable portraits of those deceased or no longer present. Without this attribution, they are only diffuse halos amid the dark background of the portraits. Whereas in former times the studio decorations and backdrops placed the depicted in a sumptuous, bourgeois, dreamlike realm, now a light appeared in the background, usually a round countenance with an aura. We have now 171

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entered the religious dream world of photography, which can show what the sitter did not see but perhaps was what he was thinking of. His dreams come true. This may be the reason for the strange idea of sleeping on the sealed cassette. It is a purely photographic apparition with which we are dealing here, and it is nourished by the imagination of the one whose portrait has been taken. Its indexical connection to reality is drawn from it. The fuzziness of the “extra” is part of the strategy. Only the imagination of the observer is needed to turn the aura into a person. This is made clear through a historical example. When the spirit photographer Buguet was accused, piles of half-exposed plates were found in his studio, as well as a doll with interchangeable heads; he used a new one for each customer. When during his trial many of his clients testified to their resemblance to deceased loved ones, Buguet asserted, most likely to earn a lighter sentence, that he had always used the same group of heads. Conan Doyle did not stop insisting that the customers were convinced of the realness of the “extras,” and that such testimony was evidence of blackmail. In support of the authenticity of spirit photos, he identified his son in a fuzzy and obviously printed image, by William Hope, as an authentic photographic portrait: “The result obtained under all the precautions which I could adopt (it would only weary the reader if I gave every point of detail) was a photograph of the face of a young man beside my own. It was not a good likeness of my son, though it resembled him as he was some eight years before his death.”88 However, why his dead son showed up post mortem and used an eight-year-old plate in order to make himself visible remains unanswered (Figure 5.24). Notably a type of iconography had developed in the photography of this period, which also could be found in photos that explicitly made use of double exposures but in no way were meant to be viewed as spiritualist. When the wife of a soldier went to a photographer, she could get, should she wish, a portrait made on which her husband also appeared, even though he might be deployed or perhaps had already fallen in battle. But he, too, magically appears. That is another kind of photographic magic, but one that is in no way spiritualist. Photographic lies were very sought after in a time of war. They granted a kind of comfort, thanks to a picture (Figures 5.25 and 5.26). Conan Doyle was not at this sitting, but he was present at numerous others conducted by Hope, which he described at some length. For him the authenticity of the photos was unquestionable. That which is described here also appears in his texts: the signing of the plates, the sealed carton brought along, the examination of the camera, the physical presence of the observer when the photo is developed – and also the singing of religious songs. It is all part of a syncretic-photographic ritual, which also requires that it be repeated. The same procedure as last year? The same procedure as every year! And the absent and dead appear in the developing tray once again. 172

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Figure 5.24  William Hope’s photograph of Conan Doyle with the spirit of his deceased son. 173

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Figure 5.25  Picture postcard, First World War. 174

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Figure 5.26  Picture postcard from 1910. 175

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However, James Douglas was one of the sharpest critics of Hope. In November 1921 a special experiment was carried out by the British College of Psychic Science. “We invite any expert in photography who claims to be able to produce a photo like Mr. Hope’s to do so under the conditions of my experiment” – with these words James Douglas, who was also a reporter for the Sunday Express, announced a competition.89 Douglas’s contention that Hope’s photos were fakes rested above all on his discovery that one of the “extras” from Hope’s pictures later appeared in a competing newspaper. For the experiment Hope’s instructions were followed. The presentation of the experiment followed very precisely – including the intonation of religious songs – the report of the “regular” séance that James Douglas had attended. The plates were laid on the table, carefully inspected, then signed. Hewat McKenzie and William Marriott succeeded in producing under test conditions some pictures in which appeared a “poor parody of one of the famous fairy photographs taken by Elsie Wright” (more precisely “Conan Doyle alone with a ring of fairies dancing round him”),90 which we will encounter again in the last chapter, and one of a woman standing between Douglas and Conan Doyle, her eyes raised toward the heavens.91 William Marriott outlined afterward in detail in the Journal of the Society of Psychical Research what kinds of opportunities there were to be able to manipulate the photo plates.92 Yet this did not dissuade Conan Doyle from his belief in Hope. When in February 1922 the Society for Psychical Research in the figure of Harry Price and a magician named Seymour undertook further examination of Hope, he once again stepped in to help, declaring the investigation to be a scheme.93 Price had marked the plates he had brought with him with x-rays, which then disappeared when the photographs with “extras” were developed. Conan Doyle’s theory was that the x-rays disappeared during the long exposure time, as Hope commonly practiced, but he conceded that the plates were from the hand of a stranger, though he immediately claimed they had been switched with Hope’s. That plates had been exchanged was irrefutable, since they were of different thicknesses. The plate with the “extra” was of a different consistency to the marked plate. How then to explain the existence of this plate? Conan Doyle repeated the experiment rhetorically by slipping another plate to Price. Apparently one of the marked plates developed by the Society had been mailed in. It was wrapped and unexposed, came from the same series, but carried an inscription that it should be developed – and look at that, it had an “extra.” Hope, therefore, had not switched his plates with those of Price – even if, as Conan Doyle admitted, the consistency of the plates was quite similar; rather, Price had managed to slip one of his own plates into Hope’s, on which supposedly an “extra” had been found. Obviously, it all involves a double switch; one switches with another a manipulated plate, while the other does the same. Conan Doyle deduced from it nonetheless that Hope was now the 176

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accuser, rather than the accused. Yet what seems obvious, so far as the sources are to be trusted, is that it’s a matter of a double double exposure. Both sought to slip the double-exposed plates to each other – but for different reasons. Conan Doyle then published an entire book titled The Case for Spirit Photography in order to defend Hope. Along with the already developed theory about a scheme, he laid out in familiar manner characteristic qualities and other successful photographic evidence, which together presented an “overpowering weight of evidence.” One could not help but trust a man who worked for the rich as well as the poor, who was obviously not led by economic interests, and who with his “old-fashioned instrument” had taken photographs in the style of the Salvation Army (Figure 5.27). To these Conan Doyle could add more photos that would free Hope from any accusation of fraud. The first is one that he describes as follows (Figure 5.28): There is a hazy cloud covering us of what I will describe as ectoplasm, though my critics are very welcome to call it cotton-wool if it eases their feelings to do so. In one corner appears a partial materialisation of what seems to be the hair and forehead of a young man. Across the plate is scrawled, “Well done, Friend Doyle, I welcome you to Crewe. Greetings to all. T. Colley.”94 Archdeacon Colley was the founder of the Crewe Circle and he had also placed his camera at Hope’s disposal, but the latter did not wish to exchange his for a more modern model.95 In order to test the authenticity of the photo, which presented the particular tradition of a kind of spiritualist family picture, the writing on the photograph was compared with the subject’s handwriting. As expected, it was the same handwriting. And so Colley had sent his greetings written in light from the hereafter. The second photo is the one already discussed, namely that in which Conan Doyle identifies his son (Figure 5.24), while the third, also “the most remarkable of all,” is an example of camera-less photography, which supposedly is the only one which was produced as a result of those present together laying their hands on the camera. While this photo was in the developing tray, a disc the size of a shilling, perfectly black, sprang up in the centre of it. On development this resolved itself into a luminous circle with the face of a female delicately outlined within it. Under the chin is a disc of white, and two fingers which are pointing to it. The disc is evidently a brooch, and the pointing seemed to indicate that it was meant to be evidential. The face bore a strong resemblance to that of my elder sister, who died some thirty years ago. Upon sending the print to my other sisters they not only confirmed this, but they reminded me that my sister had a very remarkable ivory brooch in her lifetime and that it was just the one object 177

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Figure 5.27  William Hope. 178

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Figure 5.28  William Hope, photograph with Archdeacon Colley’s writing.

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which might best have been chosen as a test. I regret that this picture is so delicate that it will not bear reproduction.96 Ada Deane or the Photos of the Living Dead In 1925, Estelle W. Stead published a book titled Faces of the Living Dead, which above all was dedicated to a defense of Ada Deane, in which Conan Doyle played a prominent role.97 It begins with probably the photographer’s best-known photograph, which is part of an entire series: the so-called Armistice Photographs, which from 1922 to 1924 were taken on 11 November, Remembrance Day, at the Cenotaph in London for those who had died in the war: In this campaign [for spiritualism] the impressing of photographic plates by those on the Other Side of Life is no mean weapon, and, up to the present, the Armistice Photographs show some of the finest, most bewildering and wonderful achievements in this direction.98 Everything began on 7 November 1920, when Estelle Stead, the daughter of W. T. Stead, the spiritualist who died on the Titanic, perceived her father’s presence amid a small circle of friends who were talking with one another. This perception was followed a day later by a written message delivered through the medium Mr. Woodman. W. T. Stead quoted in literary fashion Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It. For his part, Stead sent a richly poetic message: Tramp. Tramp. Tramp . . . To the end of all form of physical life. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp. That is the keynote of earth life. Tramp. Tramp.99 This and a more thorough account appeared in the spiritualist magazine Light, and then was also printed as a small pamphlet that was distributed to the crowd who gathered at the Cenotaph on 11 November 1921. Beforehand it was read aloud in full voice in a famous London Street: Baker Street – however, at the house at 30A and not at the still non-existent house at 221B. Out of the day of the reading and the proclamation of the joyful news among the sad and ruminating crowd came the first Armistice Photographs. Above the mass of gatherers they depicted a group of people afloat, which Conan Doyle would claim was ectoplasm, among which a multitude of faces can be made out. The dead were alive – that is the message of the picture, which was supposedly sent from the other side. According to Estelle Stead, The Armistice photographs were probably prepared beforehand in groups, and either impressed upon the plates before, during or after the 180

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two minutes’ silence. With reference to the two minutes’ exposure, I was told that light makes no difference. The picture is not developed as a normal photograph is; it is worked entirely from their side, not ours. The only need is the medium and the necessary materials – the sensitive plate or film – to use to get their impressions through.100 The deceased Stead shared that the mass of lighted figures could be explained by the fact that on the other side there was always such a press to share their presence, and that it was difficult to use mediums to do so. The photographer was nevertheless human, all too human. Ada Deane, according to Conan Doyle, was “a little, elderly charwoman, a humble white mouse of a person, with her sad face, her frayed gloves, and her little handbag which excites the worst suspicions in the minds of her critics” (Figure 5.29).101 Two days a week she worked at the British College for Psychical Research, where, after filling out a form, one could make an appointment to meet with her in the library of the Stead Society on a given Friday.102 Photography was, in order that its special meaning be underscored, the fulfillment of a prophecy. Just a few days before 11 November 1921, it was predicted that something would happen on that day. Estelle Stead explained that Mrs. Deane was to finish preparing some photographs and in a predetermined and preplanned manner: We were also told that they wanted Mrs. Deane to focus her camera on the platform, and to expose the plate for the full two minutes. They told us that they had prepared a group of “Tommies” and “Hearts of Oak Men” (sailors) who had passed on in the Great War.103 The result is a photograph in which, amid milk-white clouds, sixteen faces can be made out, among them the face of an Indian, who was the medium from the hereafter, and Estelle Stead’s father, who of course had to be there, while the rest were soldiers and seamen. Year after year this photo was repeated, a “Flood of Faces” and an “Aerial Procession,” as Stead’s father called it, leaving their traces on the plate.104 In 1924 the bar was raised and those involved faced close scrutiny. Miss Stead gave up smoking in order to achieve clearer results, and for her part Mrs. Deane decided to give up meat. Photo reporters approached them, wanting to know when and where the photos would be taken. As always, Mrs. Deane had “magnetized” the plates some days ahead of time, and she spoke to the reporters while carrying them in before they were presently loaded into the camera by Miss Stead and Miss Scatcherd. They were inspected further by Mr. Speaight, as well as by people from Kodak, so that nothing would be missed. The people from Kodak helped Mrs. Deane with practical advice about her photographic work, since she gave 181

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Figure 5.29  Ada Deane.

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off the obvious impression of not being particularly familiar with the process. Estelle Stead reported: Certain members of this firm are very interested in this supernormal ­photography, and are most helpful in giving technical advice on ­negatives etc. They were particularly interested in the Cenotaph negatives, and have since taken prints and made excellent enlargements for us.105 The prints made by Kodak also then appeared in the press – but this time in a different form, since on 20 November 1924, the Daily Sketch printed next to one photograph a list of people, as well as pictures, who according to journalists could be recognized for real (Figures 5.30–5.34). In their opinion they did not involve soldiers who had fallen but rather famous athletes, such as the boxer “‘Battling Siki’, Jimmy Wilde, and several well-known footballers.”106 The test that followed was much more rigorous than any renunciation of cigarettes and meat. Now it was a matter of survival. And that was the very moment when Conan Doyle took to the public stage. As expected, Estelle Stead was not convinced by such contentions. Though she admitted that some of the portraits were in fact similar, she also maintained that was in no way the case for others. A quote from Conan Doyle’s Memories and Adventures lays out the basis of the argument: While we should be most critical of all psychical assertions if we are to get at the truth, we should be equally critical of all negatives and especially of so-called “exposures” on this subject. Again and again I have probed them, and found them to depend upon prejudice or upon an imperfect acquaintance with psychic law.107 From this point on the author functioned as a guardian angel for the trinity of women consisting of Scatcherd, Stead and Deane. On 17 November, he wrote to the Daily Sketch: Sir. – I examined with interest your Cenotaph “exposure,” but was unable to agree that the faces in the photograph of Mrs. Deane were the same as those of the boxers or footballers. In some cases the type was the same; in others even this was wanting. Siki, for example, is a man with a square upper head; in the Deane photograph the negro’s upper head is round. Jimmy Wilde is a man with a short face; in the Deane photograph the face you label as Wilde is long compared to its breadth. Some of them have hardly a remote resemblance.   Fearing that I might be prejudiced, I covered the reference numbers on the large photo with little slips of paper, and added a few more slips between the faces, so as to broaden out the choice. I then asked a friend 183

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Figures 5.30–5.33  Ada Deane, Armistice and Remembrance Day photographs. 184

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Figure 5.34  Identification of those pictured in The Daily Sketch of high intelligence and impartial judgment to spot from the footballers, etc., which were their counterparts in the Deane picture. He did not spot one. Even the negro he could not pass. I suggest that the same experiment be tried with some other really independent people and the result noted. 186

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  Where faces are so shadowy it is easy to match them in rough way. I think that with a hundred portraits of young clean-shaven men to draw upon, one could hope to choose quite as many as you have done which should bear some likeness to Mrs. Deane’s faces.   But the main consideration in my mind is that if the faces had been there beforehand, they would most certainly have been blackened out by the long exposure. After that exposure there could be no question of fraud, since the whole charge was taken by two ladies whose honour is above reproach.   There are other considerations, such as Mrs. Deane’s total want of technical ability to rig up so complex a photograph, and the fact that she has on other occasions, such as the famous Cushman case, obtained results which could by no possibility have been fraudulent. Taking all these things together, I think that her complete innocence is manifest. Yours faithfully, Arthur Conan Doyle108 This was the first act of a memorable battle. Conan Doyle set the direction it would take. Though considered a virtue among other spirit photographers, the complete lack of sharpness of the faces that appeared in their photos, and which had to be compensated for by the aid of the imagination, was now considered a shortcoming. Resemblance, so he supposed, was only something ascribed. One sees what one wants to. The second act quickly followed his striking reply. On 18 November 1924, Mrs. Deane was given a remarkable kind of challenge: should she on the following day create a spirit photo under fair test conditions, she would win £1,000. The conditions were: the camera was provided by the editors, the plates would be selected by Mrs. Deane from those available at the office, and they would be loaded by someone from the Daily Sketch, this person and others accompanying her to the site where the photo would be taken. The newspaper then developed the plates in the presence of Mrs. Deane. Everything was followed by two independent observers, one of which was selected by the newspaper and the other by Mrs. Deane.109 The following day Mrs. Deane replied by asking for the three photographs to be returned, which had been promised to her, and turned down the challenge by saying, “Do you not understand that I cannot do one [psychic photograph] under any conditions. They do not come from me. They come from some power which works through me, and over which I have no control.”110 The reply three days later was a real circus. On 22 November 1924, Mrs. Stead sent the Daily Sketch a “counter-challenge”: Mr. W. R. Lord, a photographer from the Daily Sketch, should for his part, and under the same test conditions laid out by the newspaper, make a photo like Mrs. Deane’s Cenotaph photo. Should he succeed, £100 would be devoted to the Vincent 187

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Square Children’s Hospital. A higher reward was unfortunately not possible due to the limited funds of the Society. The challenge was rejected in a letter in which it was recommended that Mrs. Deane seek legal redress, if the ­allegations in her view were unjustified. Along with Hewat McKenzie and Oliver Lodge, who in letters to the editor vouched for the authenticity of Mrs. Deane’s photos, Conan Doyle wrote again to the newspaper on 25 November 1924. This was the fourth act of the battle: Sir, – You commented recently in an adverse sense upon the photograph produced in the presence of Mrs. Deane which represented shadowy faces round the Cenotaph. The assertion has been made that these faces correspond with those of certain footballers, etc., the two sets of faces being published in the Daily Sketch which made the damaging comparison. These two sets of faces have now been submitted by me to Sir Arthur Keith, a non-Spiritualist and probably the greatest authority in the world upon anthropometric matters. He says in reply: “Not one of the photographs reproduced by the Daily Sketch is identical with any of the representations or photos reproduced in the spirit photographs.”   In justice to Mrs. Deane, I hope that you will submit this evidence on her behalf. Yours faithfully, Arthur Conan Doyle111 Now the trump card was played: the issue would be taken up by science. Arthur Keith was a conservator of the Royal College of Surgeons, director of the Hunterian Museum in London, a Professor of Physiology and a distinguished expert in his field. Whether anthropological scrutiny of faces the size of a pin could produce a completely credible scientific result was anyone’s guess. In any case, it depended more on the rhetoric, and the production of evidence. H. G. Lane, the editor of the Daily Sketch, answered on 25 November 1924, and took into account the experience of journalists with photography, thus allowing him to state, “I do not accept without question his views on the identity of portraits as against those of people who are dealing with hundreds of photographs every day.”112 Journalists could read photographs better and more reliably than could scientists. Conan Doyle responded by return post a day later, resuming the entire debate, which was now headed for its final countdown and the fifth and last act: Sir,– In answer to your note, I have already understood that your opinion was that Mrs. Deane was “a mean fraud”. As, however, the various reasons upon which that opinion was founded have one by one broken down, it is surely right that the opinion itself should revised.   1. You said that she was expelled from the Psychic College. This you know to be false. 188

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Figures 5.35–5.36  Photographs by Ada Deane. 189

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  2. You said that the two minutes’ exposure was borne by putting a darkened glass in front of the plate. You know now that one of the photographs was, as I understand it, produced in a single plate camera, so that no extra glass could be inserted.   3. You said your staff could produce similar results in similar conditions and yet you refused Miss Stead’s ₤100 challenge.   Your original assertion that the heads were the same is flatly denied by the greatest authority on such matters.   What, then, is your case? Yours sincerely, Arthur Conan Doyle113 The Case of Spirit Photography, to invoke the title of his book, was Conan Doyle’s view formulated long ago. He was an indirect witness to it, for among the faces he had recognized that of his nephew. And his most important spiritualist witness, Pheneas, allowed Alec, a distant relation, to appear with his son Kingsley in order to admit: I was at the Cenotaph, and so was Kingsley. We went together with some of our dearest pals. I don’t know if I was photographed. But you go to Mrs. Deane and be photographed, and I will be with you. Then you will know how close I am with you in all that you do.114 Others too had recognized their dead relatives, such as a certain Mrs. McCormel from California, who could identify her son. The evidence was at least as telling as the supposed resemblance with well-known athletes. In a letter that appeared in Light and Two Worlds, Conan Doyle said such events were typical of the realm of spiritualism: “A false case is started, and then is repeated and severely commented upon by Truth, The Star, The Evening Standard, and other papers which are always ready to disseminate anything about Spiritualism without examination as to its truth or falsehood.”115 Wait, Just Wait, Soon You Will Sit There Too A third and last example: the so-called Combermere Photograph (Figure 5.37). It was done in December 1891 and supposedly showed the deceased 2nd Viscount Combermere at ease and sitting in a chair on the day of his funeral. Conan Doyle took up a debate over this with the avid photographer A. A. Campbell Swinton, whose aunt had been married to the deceased. Conan Doyle’s article appeared in numerous publications: the Morning Post, Daily Sketch, Sunday Times and also in Nature. Swinton was convinced that as an example of spirit photography it was a fake, whereas Conan Doyle felt the photo was “the best case upon record of supernormal photography 190

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Figure 5.37  The Combermere Photograph. in ordinary life, without the use of the peculiar atmosphere of a developed psychic photographer,” even if the facts could not confirm it, since “how few things are absolutely final in this world!”116 In regards to supposed certitude, from which death is also not exempt, photography promises relative certainty. Conan Doyle made use of the photo in his lectures, where it regularly appeared. On the back of the photograph is written: The Ghost of Combermere Abbey. This photograph was taken of the Library by Miss Corbet, on Dec. . . ., 1891, on the afternoon of the funeral of Wellington Henry, 2nd Viscount Combermere. The figure in the chair on the left of the photograph (legless) is supposed to be a likeness of him.117 The genesis of the picture is oddly all that is needed. After the death of Lord Combermere, another family, the Corbet family, lived in the abbey. The wife of Hubert Astley, the former Lady Sutton, wanted a photograph of the library, which was then taken by Mrs. Sybil Corbet. Since the photo was taken in winter and also was done in an interior room, the time of exposure was long, and it appears that Mrs. Corbet, or so Conan Doyle assumed, must have left 191

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the room while it was being taken. The photo was developed for the first time months later, the family having moved, but when it was pulled out of the developing tray, a figure appeared in a chair. Mrs. Corbet, astounded, sent the photo to Mrs. Alexander Paget, who identified the figure as her father through the figure’s clothing, though she also remarked that “the features are not distinct,” but rather were, as Conan Doyle admitted, rather vague, only a high forehead and the appearance of a beard being able to be made out. Referring to a portrait, which interestingly enough did not appear in the article, Conan Doyle insisted that the dead lord possessed such features. The question was only whether it was the lord who could be seen in the picture, or whether a butler or a servant had briefly sat in the chair. But Mrs. Astley could not recall anyone who had such a physiognomy. In addition there was the question of why the legs were missing, as well as why only a partial materialization had occurred. Conan Doyle, who was convinced of the authenticity of the depiction, doubted the date of the photo and suggested that the photo was not taken on the day of the funeral but instead on the following Sunday afternoon. The idea that the photo had been subject to some kind of manipulation by Mrs. Corbet, or that it was the result of a “photographic defect,” was rejected. The suggestion that an “interloper” could have entered the room during the time of exposure was also thrown out, for according to Conan Doyle this person surely would have turned up once he learned of the controversial debates about the picture’s validity.118 Since thought photographs had nothing to do with light exposures, the length of the exposure time, which had caused objects in the photo to blur, and also would explain the missing legs, played no role in the discussion. This could be accounted for, according to Conan Doyle, by the failing powers of the medium or a sign that “their absence in the photograph may be symbolical and evidential. [. . .] So there the matter must rest and the reader use his own judgement.”119 One thing was clear to Conan Doyle: it was nothing less than “the best authenticated incidence [. . .] in the history of psychic research.”120 According to this logic, countless photographs of the nineteenth century were possible half-materializations of someone who had died, passersby having left hazy shadows behind them because of the long exposure time. Everything that moves too quickly for the long exposure time of the camera appears in the pictures only as a shadowy creature. This had already been chalked up in early texts of photographic history to a new medium: that of turning living beings into dead ones. As such, photography became an art of the dead. Conan Doyle turned it into a totemic art. The shadowy beings no longer had to be resurrected, since now they had been within photography’s realm of light. The exposure time of this world became the hereafter of life itself.

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The Science of the Hereafter Around spirit photography (and naturally other phenomena as well) there arose an actual science of the hereafter, which through several different methods tried to establish the authenticity of pictures. In contrast, there were also numerous efforts to expose spirit photos as fakes. While the science of the hereafter carried out experiments with photography which tried, as is shown in James Douglas’s report, to exclude the influence of photographers, the other side showed the numerous ways in which this could be brought about unnoticed. On the one side, photography was portrayed as an objective, quasi-natural means of chronicling reality, each image drawn with “the pencil of nature,” never having been touched by human hand. On the other side it was argued that spirit photography was a matter of human, all too human, technical manipulation.121 Often the critics resorted to particularly public methods by proposing a challenge in which a spirit photo taken under verifiable test conditions would be rewarded with a large monetary prize. The panels of judges often consisted of partisan critics and followers, which then led to ­controversial debates outside of the actual events, which also then lasted way after the competition was over. Both would then alternately attest to the fakeness of the photos or the misunderstanding of them. The most prominent challenge took place in 1921. Scientific American had first offered $2,500, and then $5,000, for an “authentic” spirit photo taken under strictly controlled test conditions.122 Conan Doyle was a member of the jury, but it was his friend and counterpart Harry Houdini who set the agenda, working out adapted test methods he was familiar with as a magician for each new session. He brought along wooden crates, which were installed around the subjects, or he bound their limbs with large leather coverings that he constructed himself. As a magician he knew how to free himself from any kind of handcuff, and therefore also knew how to prevent the same. And thus at none of the challenges was the authenticity proven of either the photographs presented or those taken. What occurred was a ritualized method of verification, which despite being carried out under the aegis of a commission of experts, was meant for the public. These challenges took place just at the time when spiritualism had become an immense social phenomenon. Their point was to be a secular exorcism. The rational, enlightened social powers wanted to expunge anti-enlightened spiritualism. The opposition reacted with a flood of publications. Countless experiments were presented in great oratorical detail in order that there could be no doubt about the facticity of the phenomena. A central role in this fell to photography, and on three levels at once, in order for the clap-trap theories of spiritualism to be manifested in a visually performative manner. First of all it documented séances and presented to the public unquestionably 193

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powerful images from the darkened chambers. Tables hovered in the air, women expelled ectoplasm from almost all of their orifices, strange figures stood behind the participants of the séance, and mediums in a trance turned their eyes inward, only their whites visible. Photography was therefore the means of authenticating spiritualist mediums. Without it a séance could not be held: it was the priest of the new revelation. Secondly, at the time photography was the actual medium of spiritual apparitions which only appeared on the photo plate post hoc. In the developing tray an already existing presence in the hereafter was manifest in the here-and-now. And thirdly, photography also did not always need a camera in order to produce a picture. It recorded thoughts, rays and even distant events. The invisible world was made visible. The photo plate was a medium spread like a screen between two worlds. From the positive turned into a photographic negative, new prints could be made continually. While the avant-garde discovered the photogram as a new experimentalaesthetic method that could first and foremost create a new visual reality, for spiritualism it was a visible revelation of another reality that was actually invisible, but now was turned into a picture. For the avant-garde, photography was, next to film, the most prized medium on which to found their thesis that tradition had hindered the unobstructed perception of reality, thus allowing it to be used for a “new vision.” For the spiritualists, on the other hand, it was at the same time a material manifestation, irrefutable testimony that we are surrounded by invisible rays and apparitions which include those who arrive from the hereafter and make themselves known in the here-and-now. In any case, it was a “new vision.” When observing these three realms of spirit or occult photography – the photograph as documentation, as double exposure and as a camera-less photo – one sees that at the time they inform a history of photography that was not yet a hundred years old. Spirit photography repeated in essence the history of photography and recapitulated some of its decisive stages. Photography was first a means of documentation, then one of production, which then developed its own means of depiction, and then finally a means of revealing the invisible. In other words, spirit photography was in tune with the times, following successively the history of photography and then rapidly assimilating new technical achievements and scientific discoveries. Just as in syncretic ways it took on religious practices, it also adopted and integrated the newest scientific findings. Quantum physics and the Theory of Relativity were as welcome as x-rays, astrophysics and radioactivity. Just as in the nineteenth century photography shuttled between art and science, the same was true for spiritualism, which is both a religion and a science. It is a realm of the scientifically laden numinous. One stands astonished before the achievements of science and technology. And astonishment in the face of spiritualist phenomena was comparable, according 194

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to Oliver Lodge, to that of the “savages” when first encountering electricity.123 But just as with scientific phenomena, only one thing was of value: “Only by facts! Facts! Facts! [and] without adulteration of fiction”124 must spiritual phenomena be described and explained. “What is needed first is demonstration of fact – of fact without any admixture of fiction. It is wonderful how small a trace of fiction spoils the taste of a whole bushel of fact.”125 The methods are similar to those of Sherlock Holmes, who, as we will recall, was depicted in Conan Doyle’s film interview as the counterpart of spiritualism. He is fictitious, but people believe in him, while the apparitions of spiritualism are indeed real, though people take them to be fictions. Facticity and fiction are the two poles between which the debates swung. Especially successful were podium discussions at which a prominent member of one camp sat across from someone from the other. These debates were often an occasion for carving out even more precisely the respective positions, and then publishing them in book or pamphlet form. A brief example: on 11 March 1920 Arthur Conan Doyle argued with Joseph McCabe at the Queen’s Hall about spiritualism. McCabe was a remarkable figure. He had been a Catholic priest but then lost his faith, publishing 250 books as a free thinker. He translated Haeckel’s Welträtsel, wrote about religion, natural science, politics and history, and knew how to mount a pointed and sharp attack through rhetorical means.126 As McCabe presents it in his text, before him lay two spirit photos. The first shows Conan Doyle and “a strange form,” which according to the description shows “a general but not very exact resemblance to [his] son.” The second is of Rev. W. Wynne and shows “the ghostly faces of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone.”127 Both photos were from the Crewe Circle. Given such remarkable pictures, it should be possible, according to Joseph McCabe, to remember what is highly inherent to photographs: Everybody to-day has an elementary idea what taking a photograph means. A chemical mixture, rich in certain compounds of silver, is spread as a film over the glass plate which you buy at the stores. The rays of light – which come from the sun (or the electric lamp) are reflected by a body upon this plate, through the lenses of the camera, and form a picture of that body by fixing the chemicals on the plate.128 Yet spiritualists themselves often are not familiar with this elementary knowledge and instead make absurd claims, such as being able to capture the head of an apparition just by putting their hands on a plate or in some other way depict an apparition without a camera. Spirits, however, are either material and can leave behind a photographic trace, or they are not, and therefore the point is moot. McCabe is especially critical of Conan Doyle’s identification of his son in the photo taken by Hope already discussed, for he personally scanned it with a 195

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magnifying glass, claiming that it revealed a half-tone of a lit-up photographed face. Even when Conan Doyle personally purchased the plate, inspected the camera and loaded the plate into it himself, the faking was still evident, as the halftone was undeniable evidence that the picture was printed and the photograph was a reproduction of this reproduction. Finally, there are supposedly no periodicals in the hereafter, meaning that the question of actuality and novelty does not pertain. McCabe therefore concludes that the photograph by no means is an apparition taken in the moment but instead is a cut-out from a magazine. “The marks are infallible.”129 It is undoubtedly a half-tone. In the second photo, which shows Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the apparitions of spirits stand upon their heads. Perhaps, Joseph McCabe remarks ironically, spirits can do that, but most likely not. Conan Doyle, however, again repeated continually that he had inspected everything in detail and himself had looked at the photo with a magnifying glass: I repeat here that when I received a photograph purporting to be my son, another of a lady, and a third containing a long written message from Archdeacon Colley, in each case no hand but mine touched the marked plate at any point of the process. I put it in, I took it out, I developed it – I did everything except printing it, and I saw the extra upon it when I held the plate up against the red lamp before I left the dark room. [. . .] As to the curious markings upon it, I am inclined to think that they represent some psychic process, for I have seen them in others where there had certainly been no newspaper publication, nor, so far as I know, was there any in the case of my son.130 Since there were no pictures of his son ever published in a newspaper or magazine, McCabe’s argument is faulty. But the fuzziness of the beaming face makes multiple attributions possible, even if no evidence can be found for them. The agreed-upon psychic process, for which Conan Doyle couldn’t find any established term, quickly became a “form of thought” which could be materialized in a picture, photography thus being transformed into a typology. Two possibilities offered themselves. Firstly, the “semi-materialisation of the figure, visible perhaps only to the eye of the clairvoyant, but sufficiently tangible to impress the sensitive plate.”131 This then becomes a touching example of a father–son story manifested for the eyes to see. “‘If you had looked over your shoulder,’ said the dead son to his father, ‘you would have certainly seen me.’”132 But the photo plate took the position of the father and looked on. Secondly, the photo could also be the result of a skilled control upon the other side. [. . .] This would explain how often it is an impression rather than an exact photograph. There is 196

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ample evidence that the impression is not always made at the moment of exposure; and indeed, in some cases [. . .] there was never an exposure at all. Such pictures are called psychographs by Spiritualists, and they are proof positive that the effect is an impression rather than a reproduction.133 This satisfied the chemical-physiological rules of photography, or so the argument went, as it was only a matter of an impression that was comparable to a beam of light issued from the shadowy realm. Thus thoughts could turn into figures. Beyond the Camera In Conan Doyle’s collection of spirit photography there are numerous examples of camera-less photos, which he admittedly did not use as slides for his lectures, even though he did talk about them.134 As was reported in a magazine article, Sir Arthur emphasised that the ordinary standards of photography should not be used to judge psychic photography. In fact, a camera was not necessary; and results had proved that the spirit photographs obtained were not emanations from the brains of persons present when they were taken.135 Conan Doyle sought to dismiss the thought forms of those living in the present world in order to account for those from the hereafter. This is also the reason for his renunciation of the thought photos of Darget and Donohoe that he owned. He felt they were indeed remarkable photos, but they belonged to this world. They were entirely of this world. Only when thoughts are a medium of the hereafter do they fall into the realm of apparitions. How might we imagine such photos? Let us take an example: in Conan Doyle’s archive there are so-called skotographs.136 This term comes from the Greek skotos (darkness) and was coined by Felicia Scatcherd, a member of the London SPR as well as the SSSP, who died in 1927.137 She was convinced that the photos had come into existence without any use of “natural” light. Arthur Conan Doyle owned some of these photos taken by Madge Donohoe (Figure 5.38). The plates completed without a camera were stored in a folder or a box. Donohoe reported that she held them in her hands and pressed them against her face until some knocks or rumblings inside the box were audible. For her it was the sign that the spirit photographer wanted to speak to her. From now on they communicated through knockings and light vibrations. The spirit photographer told Donohoe when and how long the sitting would last, and so on. Donohoe often gave her very abstract images actual names. For example, she sent Conan Doyle photos called “North Pole” and “South Pole,” and a series called “In the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” 197

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Figure 5.38  Album page with skotographs by Madge Donohue, ca. 1930. Such camera-less photographs were widely distributed for a number of years. The Frenchmen Louis Darget and Hippolyte Baraduc completed numerous photos and conceived of ever new experimental situations, one of which involved Baraduc depositing an undeveloped plate in the Lourdes grotto and observing its hourly changes, both with and without religious processions.138 He had even built his own aperture, called the radiographe portatif (portable radiographer), which he placed before his forehead in order to leave mental impressions on the photo plate.139 Yet Conan Doyle remained attached to the here-and-now of the camera, which had access to the hereafter. Through it he found the evidence of concreteness that was central to him. When it came to that, he had no use for abstraction. Beyond Death: Post-mortem Photographs Even after his death Conan Doyle communicated through texts and pictures – and of course to those closest to him. Thus he shared with Hope and his circle during the taking of a photo in the “Weston Vicarage” (Figure 5.39): My dear Hope, I have every respect for you and admiration for your character and I agree that you have been tested too often and I sympathise 198

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Figure 5.39  Post-mortem message from Arthur Conan Doyle to William Hope. with you [&] Mrs Buxton. I am glad to see you with friends. Tell Mrs Buxton not to worry because this cloud will pass and all will be well. Good wishes to all A Conan Doyle.140 He appeared to Marjorie on 23 August of the year of his death and to Charles L. Tweedale several times as well, along with the comforting news, “I have arrived in paradise.”141 A further article about Tweedale’s séances reported that Sir Arthur appeared on 14 July and said, “I got through to you on the photographic plate,” and added, “What will you say now to our bishop?”142 On 17 July Tweedale developed the plates. “I cried out with conviction ‘It is he.’”143 Conan Doyle promised to appear again the next time they visited Hope. The resulting photograph itself appeared in the popular newspaper Querschnitt in a special issue dedicated to spiritualism.144 Lady Doyle also made contact: I am in constant communication with my husband. We seek his advice on many intimate matters, and generally, as in his life-time, his advice proves good. [. . .] I have spirit photographs of him, appearing exactly in his unchanged human form. I have also taken a group photograph of 199

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myself, with the spirits – most clearly recognizable – of my husband and son, my son standing beside me, my husband hovering above our heads. I have taken photographs of myself when I knew that my husband’s spirit was present, and the photograph reveals him standing beside me as if he were in the flesh. Two remarkable photographs were taken in the garden. In one, of myself and two sons, my husband appears quite plainly, standing over us. No hands touched this photograph except ours and those of a well-known chemist, who developed them, and the chemist will testify there was nothing done to the negative except that it came in contact with the normal chemicals in its development.145 He is once again and always there (Figures 5.40 and 5.41). Nor was his house free from his presence. The Bignell House at Wittensford in the vicinity of Minstead, which on the advice of spiritualist friend Pheneas he had acquired in 1925, underwent an exorcism after his death. A ghost walked abroad there, it was said, who looked like Conan Doyle and was searching for a red notebook with a black rubber band. When alive, Conan Doyle had kept a secret diary that had looked like that, but which had disappeared.146 Some years ago it even became the subject of a spiritualist book.147 A last post-mortem postscript. A certain Elizabeth M. Thompson was certainly not aware that shortly after his death Conan Doyle had on numerous occasions expressed himself in great detail. His communications were collected like Pheneas’s had been and published as a book in 1933, three years after his death.148 To Elizabeth M. Thompson he complained thirty years later about the lack of appreciation of his spiritualist writings and the inordinate preference granted the character of Sherlock Holmes.149 “I have waited for many, many years for this chance to speak my words, as I wished to be known for my Spiritual work, but alas, I am known only for my works on ‘Sherlock Holmes’.”150 Nor in the battle for appreciation did the realization that “Dying is a wonderful thing” at all help.151 Elizabeth M. Thompson, alias Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, illustrated anew the pastoral happiness to be found in “Summerland.” One passes the time while experiencing the beauty of the world, meeting friends again from the here-and-now while also being able to continue one’s own studies. All earthly books, “fact and fiction,” are also available there.152 And always, as in Cloud Cuckoo Land, the trees always bear fruit. Conan Doyle attends a production of Hamlet with a friend. To be, or not to be, that is no longer the question. There are also movie houses, but since the films are always about earthly matters, they do not find them particularly interesting. Nor is there a lack of pubs, in which of course you do not drink beer but instead share some fruit. So the day goes in “Summerland.” Conan Doyle goes for a walk with a friend’s dog, watches a football match and ends his stroll with a swimming gala. And naturally there is an art gallery. 200

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Figure 5.40  William Hope, photograph with Arthur Conan Doyle’s spirit, ca. 1931.

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Figure 5.41  Thomas Glendinning Hamilton, ectoplasm materialization by the medium Mary M. with Arthur Conan Doyle’s picture, 27 June 1932.

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Most of the pictures depict the life of Jesus, who, so it is said, often looks on and sees the schoolchildren at their work. It is hoped that he will grant them a blessing. Notes 1. “Photographs of Ghosts – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Audience Wept,” Sunday Express, 13 September 1925. 2. Martin Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1997, 336. 3. Even magazines that supported spiritualism were at first critical of the book. See particularly the review of the German edition in Zeitschrift für kritischen Okkultismus und Grenzfragen des Seelenlebens, vol. 2, 1927, 163. 4. On spirit and occult photography there are several overviews that exist, such as the following thoroughly informative volumes: Rolf H. Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten. Die Rolle der Photographie bei bestimmten paranormalen Phänomen – ein historischer Abriß, Marburg, 1992; John Harvey, Photography and Spirit, London, 2007; Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, New Haven, CT, 2005; Im Reich der Phantome. Photographie des Unsichtbaren, ed. Andreas Fischer and Veit Loers, Ostfildern, 1997; and Martyn Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography, London, 2006. In addition to these, there are numerous spiritualist publications not mentioned here. 5. However, with this the series of imaginary expeditions did not come to a close. Conan Doyle explored an undersea Atlantis in a later novel, The Maracot Deep, which appeared in 1929. In regards to photography, see p. 41. In deep-sea Atlantis there is also a movie house and naturally telepathy and television as well. 6. Camille Flammarion, Lumen, Paris, 1872. On the biography of the Earth, see James Coates, Seeing the Invisible: Practical Studies in Psychometry, ThoughtTransference, Telepathy, and Allied Phenomena, London, 1917. See also Karl Clausberg, Zwischen den Sternen: Lichtbildarchive. Was Einstein und Uexküll, Benjamin und das Kino der Astronomie des 19. Jahrhunderts verdanken, Berlin, 2006. There one can also find a lengthy, remarkable text by Felix Eberty, which Clausberg edited: Die Gestirne und die Weltgeschichte: Gedanken über Raum, Zeit und Ewigkeit. 7. Quoted in Coates, Seeing the Invisible, 64f. There Hitchcock’s The Religion of Geology is also quoted: “It seems, then, that this photographic influence pervades all nature; nor can we say where it stops. We do not know but that it may imprint on the world around us our features as they are modified by various passions, and thus fill nature with daguerreotype impressions of all our actions that are performed in daylight. It may be, too, that there are tests by which nature more skillfully than any human photographist can bring out and fix portraits, so that acuter senses than ours shall see them on the great canvas, spread over the material universe. Perhaps, too, they may never fade from that canvas, but become specimens in the great picture-gallery of eternity” (ibid., 73f.). 8. Paleontology also plays an important role. It is reported that Agassiz had a dream in which appeared a material image of a fossilized fish which he was at work on. It appeared numerous times and helped him reconstruct the fish. Or Professor Denton lays down fossils before his psychometrically gifted sister so that she can reconstruct their history (ibid., 84f.). 9. Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, New York, 1918, 40.

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10. See “My Religious Evolution,” Daily Express, 17 September 1925. There he poses his new beliefs in a lovely formula: “It is simple. It is reasonable. Above all, it is extraordinarily comforting.” 11. “The Happy Hereafter,” Light, 20 July 1918. The syncretic nature of spiritualism is obvious. Particularly important, when it comes to details, is the description of séances or the compilation of circulated texts. The texts gathered together by Conan Doyle should be read as a new religious “service” (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Spiritualists’ Reader: A Collection of Spirit Messages from Many Sources, Specially Prepared for Short Readings, Manchester, 1924). On Conan Doyle and spiritualism, see Antoine Faivre, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle et les esprits photographiés,” Ethnologie française: Revue trimestrielle de la Société d’ethnologie française, vol. 33, no. 4, 2003, 623–32; and Jeffrey L. Meikle, “‘Over There’: Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism,” Library Chronicle of the University of Texas, New Series, no. 8, 1974, 23–37. 12. Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, 58. 13. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the Welsh Séance,” Two Worlds, 1919. 14. Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, 42. 15. In the Portsmouth archive there is an index of the contents of the library. 16. The Institute was founded in 1919 and exists to this day. See https://www. méta­psychique.org/, accessed 29 November 2013. In Conan Doyle’s time its most important representatives were Gustave Geley and Charles Richet. 17. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Land of Mist,” in The Land of Mist, The Maracot Deep [and] other Stories, Crowborough Edition, New York, 1926 [London, 1926], 3–252, here 172. 18. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Land of Mist,” Strand Magazine, vol. 70, 1925, 3–610, here 610. 19. Gustave Geley, L’ectoplasmie at la clairvoyance, Paris 1924. 20. Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist, The Maracot Deep [and] other stories, 173. 21. “Expériences de Société Polonaise d’Etudes Psychiques avec Monsieur Franek Kuski,” Revue méta­psychique, 1923, no. 1, 27–39, here 29. 22. F.W. Pawloski, “The Mediumship of Franek Kluski of Warsaw,” typescript with original photography (Portsmouth ACD1/C/2/9/1). 23. Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist, The Maracot Deep [and] other stories, 139. 24. Ibid., 175. 25. Ibid., 236. 26. Reverend John Lamond, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Home,” Christian Spiritualist, vol. 1, no. 12, 21 October 1995. 27. James Douglas, “Is Conan Doyle Mad?,” Sunday Express, 25 September 1921. 28. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The ‘New’ Scientific Subject,” British Journal of Photography, vol. XXX, 20 July 1883, 418. 29. Ibid. 30. Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 2007, 148. 31. See especially Frank R. Frapie and Walter E. Woodbury, Photographic Amusements, Boston, 1931 (reprinted New York, 1973). The book begins with “Composite Photography,” “Double Exposures,” and “Spirit Photography,” 1–9. Such tricks can also be found in photo magazines of the time. 32. Kelvin I. Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits: The Spiritualist Career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wellingborough, 1989, 61. 33. Ibid., 64. 34. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 310f.

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35. This collection can be found today at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. 36. [Arthur Conan Doyle], Pheneas Speaks: Direct Spirit Communications in the Family Circle Reported by Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 1927, 5. 37. Ibid., 9. 38. A Full Report of a Lecture on Spiritualism Delivered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Connaught Hall, Worthing, on Friday, July 11th, 1919, Cambridge, 1997, 4 (reprint of the 1919 Littlehampton Edition). 39. Pheneas had advised writing down everything precisely and to disperse the communications as cheaply as possible in book form, whereby, with the exception of the United States, the result was a waiver of the copyright. 40. Arthur Conan Doyle, “Why H.G. Wells is Peeved,” Sunday Express, 8 January 1928. 41. Conan Doyle, Pheneas Speaks, 147. 42. Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits, 177. 43. Ibid., 162. 44. Joseph McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud? The Evidence Given by Sir A.C. Doyle and Others Practically Examined, London, 1920, 50. 45. Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, 71. 46. McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, 94. 47. Douglas, “Is Conan Doyle Mad?” 48. Conan Doyle, A Full Report of a Lecture on Spiritualism, 8. 49. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Spiritualists’ Reader: A Collection of Spirit Messages from Many Sources, Specially Prepared for Short Readings, Manchester, 1924. 50. Conan Doyle, The New Revelation, 78. 51. Ibid., 74 and 21–4. 52. Conan Doyle, A Full Report of a Lecture on Spiritualism, 8. 53. Ibid., 9. 54. This according to Stashower, Teller of Tales. 55. In the Portsmouth archive there is an undated letter marked “confidential” in which Conan Doyle steps down as president of the L.S.A. He thought it unwise to separate the movement into two organizations, one called the National Spiritual Union, led by President E. W. Oaten, which produced the magazine Two Worlds, and the other the much better funded L.S.A., which published the magazine Light. 56. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 332. In the Portsmouth archive there is a list of the library’s holdings. 57. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography, London, 1927, 27. 58. Ibid., 51f. 59. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 316. 60. Ibid., 315. 61. In German letters there exists a remarkable debate between Alexander Aksákow, the editor of Psychische Studien, and the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. In the end it takes up almost 1,000 pages. See Alexander Aksákow, Animismus und Spiritismus, vol. 2, Leipzig, 1919; and Eduard von Hartmann, Der Spiritismus, Leipzig, 1898. 62. “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at Queen’s Hall,” Light, 17 April 1926. 63. In Paris he clearly had problems with projecting the images, some of which were fuzzy, while others were turned upside down, and hardly any were shown as planned (“Spiritualist Congress. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lecture Difficulties,” Yorkshire Post, 8 September 1925). 64. “Audience Moved to Tears. Spirit Photographs of Sir A. Conan Doyle,” Sunday Express, n.d.

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65. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 329. 66. Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits, 193. 67. “Spirit Photos. Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Plates,” South Wales Evening News, 14 September 1925. 68. Ibid. 69. Arthur Conan Doyle, Psychic Experiences, London and New York, 1925, 96. 70. Ibid., 99. 71. Ibid., 100. 72. “Survival After Death. Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Claim. Fight Against Lies,” Daily Express, n.d. 73. In the Portsmouth archive there are letters and prints which Darget sent directly to Conan Doyle. “The question is further complicated by the existence of thought forms. I have seen two photographs, one of an old woman’s head, and the other of a bottle, where the operator, Commandant Darget, without a medium was able roughly to impress these two forms by concentrated thought upon an exposed plate” (Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism and Rationalism, With a Dramatic Examination of Mr. Joseph McCabe, 1920, 22). 74. Those who attempted them were Darget, Baraduc, Durville, Majewski and Narkiewicz-Jodko. 75. Conan Doyle, Psychic Experiences, 105. 76. The second part (“Genuine”) also took up “Raps,” Telekinesis,” “The Mediumship of D.D. Home,” and “Trance.” In regards to Lodge, see Oliver J. Lodge, Raymond, or Life and Death, London, 1916. Also Gustave Geley states, “Above all photographic documents cannot prove the pure realness or unrealness of any phenomenon. The photographic document is only meaningful in regards to the testimony that accompanies it” (Geley, Hellsehen und Teleplastik, 24). 77. Hereward Carrington, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism: Fraudulent and Genuine, London, 1907, 76. On spirit photography, see pp. 202–23. 78. This list follows McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud? and an article in Person’s Weekly from 31 January 1920. 79. Carrington, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, 206. 80. Arthur Conan Doyle, “Mr. Jerome and Spirits,” letter to the editor, Common Sense, 16 August 1919, 101. 81. Alfred Russel Wallace, A Defence of Modern Spiritualism, Boston, 1874, 37–47. 82. Ibid., 37. 83. Ibid., 38. 84. Ibid., 44. Five points need to be observed: 1. Control of the complete process. 2. The resemblance of the “extra” to the photograph of an unknown deceased person. 3. The closeness of the figure of the “extra” with the portrait of the person. 4. The apparition of a white figure behind the person portrayed which partially covers the print. 5. The description of the figure by a medium independent of the photographer. 85. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Are There Objective Apparitions?,” Arena, January 1891; also in Alfred Russel Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, London, 1896, 231–54. Here again he lays out five criteria: 1. The apparitions can be seen by more than one person. 2. These can observe the apparition from different angles. 3. Animals take in the apparitions as if they were real. 4. The apparitions can make something occur in the real word, i.e. move an object. 5. The apparitions can be photographed. 86. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Combermere Photograph,” Quarterly Transactions of the British College of Psychic Science, vol. 5, no. 3, October 1926, 190–2, here 190.

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87. James Douglas, “Are the Dead Alive? Is Spirit Photography Genuine?,” Sunday Express, 6 November 1921. 88. Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography, 19f. 89. Compare this and the detailed presentation of the entire affair in Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten. 90. Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. 20, 1921/22, February 1922, 218–23, here 222. 91. Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits, 166. 92. Ibid., 263f. 93. See the report of Henry Price, Cold Light on Spiritualistic “Phenomena”: An Experiment with the Crewe Circle, London, 1922. 94. Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography, 19. 95. This according to James Douglas’s report: “It is a very old Lancaster camera, standing on a tripod. I asked Mr. Hope why he used this ancient camera with its head-cloth. ‘It was given to us,’ he said, ‘by Archdeacon Colley, and it’s a part of us.’ Modern cameras had been given to him, but he preferred the old one, although he had got results with other cameras” (Douglas, “Are the Dead Alive?”). 96. Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography, 20. In another text Conan Doyle uses these three images as evidence: “I repeat here that when I received a photograph purporting to be my son, another of a lady, and a third containing a long written message from Archdeacon Colley, in each case no hand but mine touched the marked plate at any point of the process. I put it in, I took it out, I developed it – I did everything except printing it, and I saw the extra upon it when I held the plate up against the red lamp before I left the dark room. [. . .] As to the curious markings upon it, I am inclined to think that they represent some psychic process, for I have seen them in others where there had certainly been no newspaper publication, nor, so far as I know, was there any in the case of my son” (Conan Doyle, Spiritualism and Rationalism, 20f.). 97. Estelle W. Stead, Faces of the Living Dead: Remembrance Day Messages and Photographs, Manchester, 1925. 98. Ibid., 7. 99. Ibid., 14. 100. Ibid., 22. 101. Conan Doyle, The Case for Spirit Photography, 53f. 102. Portsmouth ACD1/C/2/9/16. 103. Stead, Faces of the Living Dead, 7. “Heart of Oak” is the official march of the Royal Navy. 104. Ibid., 31. 105. Ibid., 42. 106. The first report appeared in the Daily Sketch on 15 November 1924 and in the edition of Light on 29 November 1924. On the second printing, see Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits, 190. 107. Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead, 45. 108. Ibid., 48f. 109. Ibid., 48. 110. Ibid., 49. 111. Ibid., 54. 112. Ibid., 55. 113. Ibid., 56. 114. Conan Doyle, Pheneas Speaks, 41. 115. Stead, Faces of the Living Dead, 57.

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116. Conan Doyle, “The Combermere-Photograph,” 190. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 192. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. See especially McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?; Edward Bush, Spirit Photography Exposed, Wakefield, 1920; R. Penlake (a.k.a. Paul Salmon), Trick Photography, London, 1906; Harry Price, “Psychic Photography: The Hypothesis of Fraud,” Light, vol. 12, nos. 13 and 20, 1924; Frapie and Woodbury, Photographic Amusements; and pars pro toto of numerous magazine articles, Henry Sidgwick, “On Spirit Photographs: A Reply to Mr. A.R. Wallace,” Proceedings of the Society of Psychical Research, vol. VII, 1891/92, 268–89. 122. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 329. See also Christopher Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Great Magician and the Inventor of Sherlock Holmes, London, 2011. 123. Oliver Lodge, “How Should Spiritualists Regard Scientific Men?,” Borderland, vol. IV, 1897, 160–6, here 161. 124. Ibid., 162. 125. Ibid. 126. The texts that were published are McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?; and Conan Doyle, Spiritualism and Rationalism. 127. McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, 63. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 64. 130. Conan Doyle, Spiritualism and Rationalism, 20f. 131. Ibid., 20–1. 132. Ibid., 21. 133. Ibid. 134. In the Portsmouth archive one can find among others the following pictures: ACD1/C/1/2/17 “Birthday greeting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from Fletcher, X, Martin Donohoe & Gert Clunies-Ross, Fletcher’s design”; ACD1/C/1/2/15 Donohoe: “‘The Valley of the Shadows of Death’ – given the week before Easter. A very beautiful one, I think”; ACD1/C/1/2/162 Donohoe: On the back: “Maroubra.” In a folder that states: “Moroubra & Maroubra 2”; and ACD1/C/1/2/173 [Madge Donohoe] “Another pair of twins. Also eyes which were given at the same time as the North Pole.” See also in general Madge Donohoe, “Spirit Photos without a Camera,” Psychic News, 11 June 1932, 4 and 11; and “Psychic Pictures without the Camera,” Borderland, vol. IV, 1897, 26–36. 135. “Anxious Belfastman: ‘Is There Such a Place as Hell?,’” Belfast Telegraph, 16 May 1925. 136. Fischer and Loers, Im Reich der Phantome, 88f. 137. See the entry for “skotograph” in Leslie A. Shepard, Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 2nd edition, Detroit, MI, 1985. 138. Hyppolite Baraduc, La Force curatrice à Lourdes et la psychologie du miracle, 3rd edition, Paris, 1909. See also Hyppolite Baraduc, L’Âme humaine. Ses mouvements, ses lumières et l’iconographie de l’invisible fluidique, Paris, 1896. 139. Clémént Chéroux et al., Le Troisième Œil: La Photographie et l’occulte, Paris, 2004, 120. 140. Quoted in Portsmouth ACD1/C/1/2/115. 141. Portsmouth ACD1/C/2/9/29 “Script Message given to Marjorie by the spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle, Saturday Evening, 23rd August 1930”; and ACD1/C/2/9/33 “Newspaper excerpt from Daily Dispatch.”

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142. ACD1/C/2/9/33. 143. Ibid. 144. The edition appeared under the title, “Querschnitt durch den Okkultismus,” Querschnitt, vol. 12, no. 12, December 1932. The photo of Conan Doyle appears on p. 868. 145. “Lady Doyle’s Many Proofs,” Psychic News, 19 September 1932, 3. See also “Conan Doyle at the Jubilee,” Psychic News, 8 October 1932, 3: “John Myers exposed a plate during the M.S.A. diamond jubilee service at Queen’s Hall, last Sunday. ‘Tell them I am with them,’ he heard Sir Arthur Conan Doyle say. Doyle spoke at the fiftieth anniversary service, ten years ago. When the plate was developed, it showed – as is seen above – Doyle, Dr. Lamond and a five-pointed star.” 146. Booth, The Doctor, the Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle, 343. 147. Patrick McNamara, Conan Doyle’s Wallet: The Creator of Sherlock Holmes, London, 2012. 148. The postmortem communications are collected in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Book of the Beyond: A New Edition of Ivan Cooke’s “The Return of Arthur Conan Doyle” with two White Eagle Teachings, Liss, 1994, in which photographs appear on pages 98, 116f., 121f. and 125. The first edition with the title Thy Kingdom Come had appeared in 1933. 149. Elizabeth M. Thompson, Life in the Hereafter: Automatic Writings and Dictations from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Raleigh, Mary, Queen of Scots, Lady Jane Seymour, Catherine of Aragon, London, 1969. On Conan Doyle, see pp. 11–34. 150. Ibid., 9. 151. Ibid., 11. 152. Ibid., 12.

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6

FAIRIES AND GNOMES: A PHOTOGRAPHIC RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD

There are few realities which cannot be imitated. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies When in the 1920 Christmas edition of the Strand Magazine Conan Doyle’s text appeared with the pithy title “Fairies Photographed – An Epoch Making Event,” more than one reader no doubt rubbed their eyes in amazement.1 While Conan Doyle’s spiritualist convictions had met with relative acceptance, he having indeed shared them with numerous fellow citizens, the same was not true for the idea that fairies existed and one could photograph them. Even if in Iceland there is still today a commission in support of fairies, and also in Great Britain there are places known as “Fairy Glen” (which were already photographed in the nineteenth century), fairies nevertheless belong to the realms of old wives’ tales and children’s books (Figure 6.1).2 The scornful reactions to Conan Doyle’s article were hardly surprising. Among them was a poem, which notably links belief in Sherlock Holmes with belief in the fairies: If you, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, believe in fairies, Must I believe in Mister Sherlock Holmes? If you believe that round us all the air is Just thick with elves and little men and gnomes, 210

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Figure 6.1  Francis Frith, Fairy Glen, ca. 1870. Then must I now believe in Doctor Watson And speckled bands and things? Oh, no! My hat! Though all t’s are crossed and i’s have dots on I simply can’t Sir Conan. So that’s that!3 A cartoon even shows Conan Doyle with dancing fairies in the foreground.4 Conan Doyle remained unruffled by the critical reactions, even going so far as 211

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to incorporate some of them into his brief book The Coming of the Fairies, which appeared two years later. In this he laid all the documents before the “curious reader” in order to allow them to form their own impression. The particular story of the fairy photos dates back to 1917, three years prior, in a little village named Cottingley. As a journalist described it in 1980, Cottingley “is just downhill from Bingley. And Bingley is a suburb of Shipton. And Shipton is a suburb of Bradford. And Bradford is the lesser-known twincity of Leeds.”5 The article goes on to say that if today one enters the village and rings the doorbell at number 31, if you are lucky you will be allowed in and led to the garden “in amazement at the sight of flowers, color over color [. . .]. It’s a place of magic. If ever fairies were to permit themselves to be seen, if ever they were to be photographed, this unquestionably is the place.”6 It’s simply a locus amoenus. What’s ironic about the story is that today the most meaningful collection of historical photographs is located in Bradford, not far from Cottingley. In the collection can be found Frances Griffiths’s autobiographical account about the making of the fairy photos.7 Everything begins in July 1917. Elsie Wright’s cousin, Frances Griffiths, was visiting from South Africa and spent time with them while her father was serving in the army back home. The girls often spoke of the fairies they encountered in the forest grove near the house, though hardly anyone paid any attention to their stories. Elsie’s father then recalled that he still had an old camera and gave it to the girls. To general surprise, the two girls returned with two photographs, in which fairies and a gnome could be seen after they were developed in the darkroom (Figures 6.2–6.4). Mr. Wright assumed nevertheless (which today we would not think incorrect) that the apparitions originated from the paper, and so proceeded straight off to where the photo had been taken in search of the rest of the paper. He also searched the girls’ room, although without success. The photos then were forgotten for three years. Only when Mrs. Wright attended a lecture on theosophy in which the word “fairies” was mentioned did the family recall the pictures. The lecturer was a friend of the well-known theosophist Edward L. Gardner, which is also how the contact with Conan Doyle came about.8 The latter had agreed to write an article for the Christmas edition of the Strand Magazine on “Belief in Fairies,” and was interested in possibly using the photos as illustrations for the essay. When Conan Doyle looked at the photos, they were for him nothing more and nothing less than a revelation. By 25 June 1920 he wrote to his friend Houdini: I have something far more precious [than the Goligher photographs] – two photos, one of a goblin, the other of four fairies in a Yorkshire wood. A fake! you will say. No, sir, I think not . . . The fairies are about 8 inches high. In one there is a goblin dancing. In the other four beautiful, luminous creatures. Yes, it’s a revelation.9 212

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Figures 6.2 and 6.3  Unretouched and retouched photographs of Frances with fairies, July 1917. 213

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Figure 6.4  Elsie and a gnome, September 1917. 214

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The New Revelation of spiritualism could now follow a further one disseminated in the form of photographs. Thus photographic evidence stood at the heart of Conan Doyle’s defense. How Fairy Photos Should be Read Conan Doyle therefore thought of his book The Coming of the Fairies as an example of how photographs should be read. It begins with the following words: This book contains reproductions of the famous Cottingley photographs, and gives the whole of the evidence in connection with them. The diligent reader is in almost as good a position as I am to form a judgment upon the authenticity of the pictures. This narrative is not a special plea for that authenticity, but is simply a collection of facts the inferences from which may be accepted or rejected as the reader may think fit.10 Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies was conceived by its author as actual trace evidence, the inference of which is handed over to the reader. The book carries out, in other words, a process that Sherlock Holmes had become a master of, this time in regards to a case which superficially and highly deceptively, even scurrilously, indeed has to do with spirit photos, but which also raises the question of the interpretability and readability of such images to a fundamental focal point. His first article on fairy photos had just appeared in the Strand Magazine, which was also the magazine that had made Sherlock Holmes famous. When at the start of The Coming of the Fairies he places the question of the readability of the photos front and center, he thus finds himself in good company, namely none other than that of László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Benjamin, who within a few years made it a central focus. Benjamin – who, it should be noted, also associated the metaphor of the crime scene with modern photography – quoted a dictum from Moholy-Nagy.11 “The limits of photography are unforeseeable,” Benjamin writes, adding, “Here everything is new, such that the pursuit itself leads to creative results. Technology is the obvious means to the path forward. The illiterate of the future will be defined not by the inability to write, but their ignorance of photography.”12 In the era of avant-garde photography and the so-called New Way of Seeing, there are countless publications that through images and text try to arrive at proper photographic literacy. To these belong not only classics like foto-auge (Photo Eye) and Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (The New Photographer is Here!), but also the volume edited by Ernst Jünger, Die veränderte Welt. Eine Bilderfibel unserer Zeit (The Altered World: A Primer on Images of Our Time), which does not hesitate to use the word “primer” in its title. These volumes also 215

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attempt in different ways to give voice to photographs and to outline the rules for their visual grammar. This, however, is different than Conan Doyle, as it involves less the inferential nature of a search for photographic traces which makes use of different media and sources, and instead is much more in pursuit of an almost uniform and emphatically formulated paradigm of objectivity, which in its own right is highly problematic. When Moholy-Nagy calls photography the “visual form of our time,”13 this ends up sounding like an epistemological program, which – similar to Alexander Rodtschenko’s ideas on Soviet photography – announces an unobstructed access to reality thanks to the arrival of photography. Rodtchenko states programmatically: “The lens of the camera is the pupil of an educated person in the socialist society.”14 The new human being, the arrival of which the new society is geared toward, already is able to read photographs. He has, as Dziga Vertov said, a cine-eye, radio-eye and photo-eye, a movie, radio and photo sense, for he is a different person, according to Vertov, a “technological Adam.”15 Conan Doyle would probably have had little problem with this idea, if “socialist society” were replaced with “fairy society.” For Conan Doyle it was also – although obviously quite differently than for Rodtschenko and Vertov or Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin – about a new age whose dawning was marked by the ability to read photographs. Whoever had seen fairies in photographs, which in turn verified their authenticity, knew immediately of a parallel world that casts its gentle light amid the shadows of the earthly world. In the middle of the highpoint of the advent of the avantgarde, Conan Doyle followed a decidedly anti-modernist program which took as its task the re-enchantment of the world. Thus did Conan Doyle describe the future that had already been revealed by the fairies: Cameras will be forthcoming. Other well-authenticated cases will come along. These little folk who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.16 This is also the opposite program to that of Sherlock Holmes, who denounced any transformation of the facts into the romance of fiction. However, here the supposed facts lead to the “edge of a new continent” in the middle of this world. Henceforth this one would thus be altogether different. The world of Sherlock Holmes is that of the cold realm of facts, which is now altered with the appearance of the fairies on the photo plate. The cold surface of the moon can now be newly occupied: 216

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Victorian science would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon; but this science is in truth but a little light in the darkness, and outside that limited circle of definite knowledge we see the loom and shadow of gigantic and fantastic possibilities around us, throwing themselves continually across our consciousness in such ways that it is difficult to ignore them.17 Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies marks the dawning of a new world, one that the reader should also see and recognize. The book, along with the article in the Strand Magazine, was met with an array of reactions, as well as a good number of additional documents ranging from the comments of a clairvoyant on critical reactions by the press, to reports of friends and colleagues, to documents from the long and dark history of folk beliefs, as well as letters from readers in response to his article. The Coming of the Fairies is a very peculiar document that in other ways is symbolic, since photography, which is meant to bring the two realms together, as Conan Doyle makes clear at the start of his book, is able to present a parallel world: It is hard for the mind to grasp what the ultimate results may be if we have actually proved the existence upon the surface of this planet of a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations.18 Fairies are therefore different than most of the apparitions present at spiritualist gatherings, with which Conan Doyle was well familiar, for they are not creatures from the hereafter but very much earthly creatures, even if they possess puzzling qualities, which the author found hard to describe any more precisely. Thus did available reports differ in all respects. The supposedly seen fairies are of different heights, can sometimes fly, but other times not, while the question of how they reproduce remains entirely unanswered. Conan Doyle deduced all of this from a total of five photographs. After the first two that were made back in 1917, three years later the girls took three more with the camera and marked photo plates that Gardner and Conan Doyle had provided for their use (Figures 6.5–6.7). The third was done, as Gardner noted, with a cameo quarter-camera in August 1920, and was taken by Elsie. It shows Frances with a leaping fairy.19 The exact time that the other two were taken is not known for certain. One of the two girls sent the three new pictures to Gardner, who then in 1921 gave slide show lectures about fairies in different cities in England and Scotland, though apologizing, “Afraid that they are not very good, but two are fairly clear.”20 However, for two fairy enthusiasts they were good enough to launch their campaign. 217

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Figure 6.5  Sunbathing fairies.

218

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Figure 6.6  Elsie with a fairy that is handing her a Canterbury bell.

219

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Figure 6.7  Frances with a leaping fairy, August 1920. 220

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Conan Doyle had already published the first two in his first article, finding solemn words in regards to their special meaning. They are nothing less than “an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character,” one comparable to the discovery of America by Columbus.21 A new continent appeared – and right in the middle of Yorkshire! Before Conan Doyle presented them to the public, the photos were examined critically and in detail a number of times, Conan Doyle having called in Kodak, which played a somewhat more pedestrian role. Dismissed was any consideration of double exposure, as well as any other kind of manipulation of the plates. According to Conan Doyle’s source, a Mr. Snelling who worked for many years at the Autotype Company and Illinworth’s large photographic factory: These two negatives are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures.22 This assertion is in fact true, for the manipulation that occurred was done with cut-outs that were dangled amid the natural setting. The two cousins had most likely used templates from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, copied them and then pinned them to plants (Figure 6.8). Conan Doyle had in fact contributed a text to this book that he apparently no longer recalled.23 However, for Conan Doyle what mattered was the fact that it was a straight exposure, and thus evidence that the actual invisible world now had burst into the visible one. Since the advent of snapshot photography and x-rays, there has existed a widespread assumption that photography is capable of letting the eye see into invisible worlds. Conan Doyle claims: We see objects within the limits which make up our colour spectrum, with infinite vibrations, unused by us, on either side of them. If we could conceive a race of beings which were constructed in material which threw out shorter or longer vibrations, they would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up or tone them down.24 Photography is not only a means of assessing clues amid the field of the visible but also a valid conduit between the visible and the invisible world. It is a medium that also made its name in spiritualist circles.25 It is a messenger from the realm of the invisible which brings with it encrypted messages that are for the most part joyous but have to be deciphered in the circle of those gathered in the here-and-now (Figure 6.9).26 Photography is seen as the “scientist’s retina” offering an incomparably larger perceptual spectrum than the human eye. For apparitions of this kind, Conan Doyle hoped that soon “some sort of psychic spectacles” would be invented.27 But when it comes to fairies, 221

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Figure 6.8  Juxtaposition of Princess Mary’s Gift Book with a fairy photograph. everything is much simpler since they are of this world. They reveal themselves to especially perceptive people and above all to children. However, visits to Cottingley by fairy tourists, journalists, spiritualists, mediums and theosophists brought no success. True, numerous additional photographs were taken of the locus amoenus that was now dubbed ideally as a veritable new-age Arcadia – only the fairies absolutely did not reveal themselves on the photo plates, though such tourism still goes on to this day.28 Through this, photography serves, as well as in diverse strictly scientific applications, to authenticate perceptual phenomena which a person or group claims really took place. In this way fairy photos are really no different than apparitions of the Madonna at Lourdes or Medjugorje.29 Photography is thus also a medium that brings messages from a realm that is unavailable to most, so the argument goes, but which nevertheless becomes visible here. The two girls who discovered the fairies and then photographed them likely made it come about through their own auratic qualities, according to Conan Doyle, a type of everyday contact with the winged creatures of light. Conan Doyle then speculated whether such a sensibility disappeared with puberty, which he went on to write about in relation to other instances. However, Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies does not rely on either the aura or on the beliefs of the reader. Instead, much as with the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, where the role of the detective 222

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Figure 6.9  Letter from Conan Doyle to Elsie Wright. 223

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is handed over to the reader, he chooses to offer up various documents which have to be interpreted by the reader. If the “whole of the evidence” is the aim of the enterprise, then it is the result of the practice of reading a narrative chain of symbols as indices that evidence a contiguous parallel world. Yet Conan Doyle, who blindly trusted the medium of photography and was convinced of the existence of fairies, recalled in memory that “there are few realities which cannot be imitated”30 – which was also true of fairies. An Unusual Argument The Coming of the Fairies is in other ways about the “rules and conditions of seeing a particular thing in a particular context.”31 Conan Doyle brings together a long list of heterogeneous documents which, when taken together by the reader, are meant to convey the evidence of which he himself had long been convinced. All of this is divided up into eight chapters, each having a very different status in the chain of evidence. Step One. The small volume begins with various documents meant to reconstruct the history of his own reception in order to prove that the photos are not at all his own making but rather have to do with photos that were already being circulated. Printed next to letters from the circles of British theosophists is also a portion of the correspondence with the family of the young photographers, as well as two photographic affidavits that come to different conclusions. The first is written by Mr. Snelling and comes to the already quoted conclusion that the photographs were authentic snapshots.32 The second was produced by a highly official source, namely the Kodak office in Kingsway. The Kodak workers, however, could not find any tricks except to remain silent in respect to the character of the pictures as visual evidence. Neither wished to serve officially as an expert in this trial involving circumstantial evidence, but thereafter they were regularly cited as such and functioned as important voices. The Kodak workers had even commented that “they could produce, by means of clever studio painting and modelling, a similar negative.”33 Yet Conan Doyle did not hold back from the reader even this caveat, and thus could with pride maintain that to this point we had not proceeded with any undue rashness or credulity, and that we had taken all common-sense steps to test the case, and had no alternative, if we were unprejudiced seekers for truth, but to go ahead with it, and place our results before the public, so that others might discover the fallacy which we had failed to find.34 The reader’s common sense, which this was aimed at, should then be ready to take the next step wholeheartedly, which then step by step through the photos leads to ever widening circles. Conan Doyle continues to make use of images – just as he does throughout the book – all of which make the fairy photos seem all the more plausible. Thus we find actual photos of the girls themselves, as well 224

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as sketches of the village and other related documents, which together spell out a correlation with reality that cannot be refuted (Figure 6.10). Step Two. The next step would most likely have already been familiar to everyone, for it involved Conan Doyle recounting the publication history of his Strand article. “After carefully going into every possible source of error, that a strong prima facie case has been built up,” he sets the bar even higher in trying to establish the verity of all of the photos together. “The pictures stand or fall together. Both are false, or both are true.”35 Conan Doyle recounts quite extensively how the photos were produced, including detailed technical information about focal distance and exposure time, and the exact time when the photos were taken. Yet even this is not enough. Going further, he offers even more detailed considerations of the pictures, such as the different shadows cast by the figures, saying they amounted to ectoplasmic materializations, thus invoking a spiritualist belief of his time. Meanwhile the different look in the appearance of the fairies is a problem, for the astounded creatures who were being photographed for the first time differed greatly in the height ascribed to them in other sources (as we will later see, they ranged in size from fourteen inches to three feet).36 Here Conan Doyle tentatively categorizes them specifically as a thought-form, only to throw out this idea right away by generalizing that it does not matter anyway, arguing, “In a sense we are all thought-forms, since we can only be perceived through the senses, but these little figures would seem to have an objective reality.”37 Step Three. The third step in the chain of evidence (which occurred without any spiritualist convictions needing to be invoked even once before the end) involves the very thorough documentation of the reactions to the publication of the Strand article. These range from sharp polemics, reprinted either in part or in their entirety, to articles that supported his findings. Meanwhile a reporter had found out the identity of the two girls Conan Doyle had used pseudonyms for, then sought out the girls and cross-examined them, visited the true locus amoenus, where – quod erat expectandum – not one fairy appeared. At this point in the chain of evidence, in conjunction with the snapshot character of the photos, mention is made, as we know to be true today, that the photos could have been made through the use of cut-outs. In photo magazines of this time there are several manuals illustrating how to easily take photographs of fairies with butterfly wings (Figure 6.11). Nor should it be any wonder that this possibility is considered: Granting the honesty of the father, which no one has ever impugned, Elsie could only have done it by cut-out images, which must have been of exquisite beauty, of many different models, fashioned and kept without the knowledge of her parents, and capable of giving the impression of motion when carefully examined by an expert.38 225

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Figure 6.10  Map of the village of Cottingley in the year of the event. 226

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Figure 6.11  Illustration from an article about fabrication of fairy photographs.

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But then Conan Doyle exclaims, “Surely this is a large order!”39 And the story continues, as does the chain of evidence. Steps Four and Five. What follows is first the triumphant report of a second series of fairy photos, along with the very camera provided specially to the girls – as well as a clairvoyant who had perceived “many forms of elemental life,” though nothing that could be described as fairies or gnomes.40 With this the first part of the rollout of evidence comes to a close, though the chain that then follows with different forms of evidence remains unbroken. Step Six. As he clearly notes, Conan Doyle sat down to write an article titled “Independent Evidence for Fairies” the very moment that the news of the photos reached him. This, too, is included. Simultaneity, as we know, is a well-known means of establishing meaningfulness and is familiar through numerous narratives, though it is not particularly subtly employed here. Step Seven. Quoted now are numerous people who have stories about their contact with fairies, as well as sources found in folk beliefs. The argument is clear. Having made it with the support of a seemingly good chain of evidence that cannot be dismissed so easily, Conan Doyle now brings in additional voices and their reaction to the photographs, such as a singer who was born blind and who with her “mind’s eyes” sees fairies and who – as expected – hears them as well.41 Eighth and Last Step. Conan Doyle presents finally the last documents “with some confidence to the public” in the form of evidence of the theosophical view of fairies compiled by John Lewis, the editor of the Psychic Gazette, which had nothing to do with the Cottingley fairies. In the end we as readers stand again at the beginning, furnished with a mass of information, and needing to render our verdict. “Having read and weighed all this, the investigator is in as strong a position as Mr. Gardner or myself, and each must give his own verdict.”42 Thus we come to the pronouncement of the verdict.43 The End of the Story Conan Doyle’s curiously convoluted chain of argument operates with different argumentative and rhetorical strategies that allow for a permanent switch in roles. First of all the author functions as his own historiographer, as does the case that he lays out. He is simultaneously a lawyer working on someone else’s case, but which for some time has also been his own. In addition he is a philologist in search of further sources while also being critical of some sources. And naturally he is not only a competent photographer but also a criminal detective who leads the investigation, gathers eyewitness reports, secures and gathers evidence at the scene, but leaves final judgment to the judge, namely the reader. Last of all he is a known spiritualist, who knows that this role might speak against him, but nonetheless hopes – and even gives voice to this hope – that his beliefs will not be held against him. In the end the argument is that fairies 228

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have nothing at all to do with spiritualism, since they are of this world, and for that there is no need for a leap of faith in order to be convinced that they exist. The result is an overlapping between diverse fields which Conan Doyle strategically blends together in order to posit the authenticity of two photos and what is depicted in them, and to see these as signs of a historic turning point. It involves a particular case of Visual History in which not only the evidential strength of two pictures is in question, but in which they are also used to substantiate an array of consequences. Beyond the referential character of the pictures (“Girls with Fairies and Gnomes”), the photos also reveal the perspective of those who look at them, as their views are part of them. They are not only cut-outs that were draped on plants, but rather cuttings from certain kinds of readings that add meaning to the pictures. What end up occupied are indeterminate zones in the images whose ambiguity can be tied to highly different causes. Sometimes it has to do with the incoherence of the series, such as the different lengths of the shadows, other times with the assumed height of the fairies, or other times with the composition of the pictures in terms of sharp and fuzzy areas juxtaposed next to one another, or finally aspects of the serial character of the pictures resulting from the different times at which they were taken. The interpretive perspectives that are blended together and juxtaposed with one another can now be arranged in preferred orders. Even when some of these are not present, the general validity of the rest is not undermined. This is Conan Doyle’s rhetorical strategy, which he called inference, but what it really spells is the interchangeability and mutual implications of any part of the chain of deduction relating to consistent evidence. Finally, it is not a matter of the pictures themselves establishing a chain of separate parts connected together or the logical consequence of single elements reacting like falling dominoes, but instead highly heterogeneous perspectives on the same event, which the reader is the first to transform into their own. It is up to the reader to create a plausible story that incorporates other convictions. For Conan Doyle, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories and in his works on spiritualism, it involves an unbroken logical chain that links together what supposedly cannot be connected, while at the same time establishing a kind of order that spans the visible and the invisible, the near and the distant. And that is also the case metaphorically, since in both realms different understandings of the invisible and the distant are meant. If The Coming of the Fairies is above all about nothing more than two photographs that were taken by two girls, as well as the art and practice of how to read them, within this lies the key to the interpretive practice employed. The photographs are the starting point for Conan Doyle’s prima facie case. Within them also lies the source of an argument that ties together an array of the argument’s threads. The so-called prima facie or apparent evidence is a special instance of evidence being turned around through a simultaneous chain of 229

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Figure 6.12  Copy of The Lost World dedicated to Elsie Wright. 230

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indices full of holes. A supposition is a way of framing experience that is strong enough to formulate a certain unfolding of events, even when individual elements fail to reconstruct the chain of events. In other words, it is what happens typically in the course of events. Classic examples of this are a highway pile-up, or the theft of a bank card which is then used to take out money, where what can be concluded is that the owner was very careless in sharing his PIN, even if further details remain unknown or cannot be reconstructed. What then does the prima facie character of the fairy photos amount to if, with the best will in the world, they cannot be taken as a common and usual practice? The decisive point, which indeed re-emerges from the argument in different contexts, is the assertion that each of the photos is “a perfectly straight single-exposure photograph, taken in the open air under natural conditions,”44 therefore amounting to an apparent capturing of a single moment. While interpretation reveals that they involved double exposures in which different

Figure 6.13  Photograph of the expedition group attached to the dedication copy of The Lost World. 231

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presuppositions were juxtaposed with one another, nevertheless the photos still appear all of a piece to Conan Doyle. Therefore their truthfulness remains intact, even if certain readings render them obsolete, or eyewitness accounts are deemed unbelievable or other folklore speaks against them. Conan Doyle was right about this, but in regards to the reversal of evidence that, thanks to even fragmentary prima facie evidence, nevertheless showed the chain of evidence could be derived from it, he was wrong. [. . .] Postscript. One peculiar irony of the Cottingley story is that Conan Doyle not only wrote letters to Elsie Wright, the older of the two girls, but also sent her books and dedicated them to her, such as a copy of The Lost World, in which a photo of the members of the expedition was actually attached to a page (Figures 6.12 and 6.13). In revealing what could be done with photography, what could this have meant to the nineteen-year-old Elsie? Was it not an invitation to do just as he had done – to follow his hoax with one having to do with fairies? Notes 1. Conan Doyle’s essays appeared in the Strand Magazine between 1920 and 1923: “Fairies Photographed – An Epoch Making Event,” Strand Magazine, vol. 60, 1920, 463–8; “The Evidence for Fairies,” Strand Magazine, vol. 61, March 1921, 199–206; “The Cottingley Fairies: An Epilogue,” Strand Magazine, vol. 65, 1923, 105. In regards to Conan Doyle’s defense of fairy photos, there are numerous discussions. See especially Catriona McAra, “Of Paper Cut-Outs and Other Worlds: Cottingley, Collage, Cornell, and Conan Doyle,” Inklings. Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik, vol. 29, 2011, 98–120; Paul Edwards, “Repetition of Art into Life: The Surprising Adventure of Sherlock Holmes and the Fairies,” Imaginaires, vol. 9, 2003, 85–111; and especially Geoffrey Crawley, “That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies,” British Journal of Photography, Part One, 24 December 1982, 1374–80; Part Two, 31 December 1982, 1406–14; Part Three, 7 January 1983, 9–15; Part Four, 21 January 1983, 66–71; Part Five, 28 January 1983, 91–6; Part Six, 4 February 1983, 117–21; Part Seven, 11 February 1983, 142–5, 153, 159; Part Eight, 18 February 1983, 170–1; Part Nine, 1 April 1983, 332–8; Part Ten, 8 April 1983, 362–7; Geoffrey Crawley, “Cottingley Revisited,” British Journal of Photography, 24 May 1985, 554–62; Rolf H. Krauss, Jenseits von Licht und Schatten. Die Rolle der Photographie bei bestimmten paranormalen Phänomen – ein historischer Abriß, Marburg, 1992; and lastly Mary Losure, The Fairy Ring, Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World, Somerville, MA, 2012. Probably the last (though likely not) defense of the possible authenticity of the pictures can be found in the otherwise thoroughly informative book by Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, London, 1990. 2. Wolfgang Müller, Neues von der Elfenfront. Die Wahrheit über Island, Frankfurt am Main, 2007. 3. J.E. Wheelwright quoted in Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, London, 2008, 409. 4. Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, New York, 1999, 356.

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5. Richard Weiss Sr., “Case of the Fairy Photos or an Enchanting Quest,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 9 November 1980. 6. Ibid. 7. Frances Griffiths and Christine Lynch, Reflections on the Cottingley Fairies: Frances Griffiths – in Her Own Words with Additional Material by Her Daughter Christine, Belfast, 2009. 8. Edward L. Gardner, A Book of Real Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs and Their Sequel, London, 1945; Edward L. Gardner, Pictures of Fairies: The Cottingley Photographs, foreword by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wheaton, IL, 1982 (reprint of the 1966 edition). 9. Christopher Sandfort, Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Great Magician and the Inventor of Sherlock Holmes, London, 2011, 109. 10. Ibid. 11. Walter Benjamin quoted it twice word for word, once in his review of Blossfeldt and once in his “A Short History of Photography.” 12. Walter Benjamin, “Neues von Blumen,” https://www.textlog.de/benjamin-kritikneues-blumen-urformen-kunst.html, accessed 3 February 2022. 13. László Moholy-Nagy, “Fotografie: die objektive Sehform unserer Zeit,” special issue on Moholy-Nagy, Telehor, no. 1–2, 1936, 120–2. 14. Alexander Rodtschenko, “Zu den Fotos in dieser Nummer,” Schwarz und Weiß. Schriften zur Photographie, ed. Schamma Schahadat and Bernd Stiegler, Munich, 2011, 265–8. 15. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoki—Umsturz (1922/23),” in Wolfgang Beilenhoff (ed.), Dziga Vertov. Schriften zum Film, Munich, 1973, 19–20. 16. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, New York, 1922, 58. 17. Ibid., 125. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Gardner, Pictures of Fairies, 26. 20. Ibid. 21. Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 14. 22. Ibid., 54. 23. The text is about “Bimbashi Joyce,” in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, London, 1914, 23–30. The fairy photos appear on pp. 101–4. 24. Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 14. 25. See Sybille Krämer, Media, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, Amsterdam, 2015. 26. One of the comical problems mediums had was with proper names. It would often seem that they had no memory of such, something that proved a real problem for those speaking in the here-and-now. 27. Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 14. Gardner went even further and developed a theory of aesthetic eyes, which looked similar to concave discs that could be found behind and around the eyeball. They supposedly give the natural eye its powers, though they do not necessarily need those to function (Pictures of Fairies, 32). However, they can be controlled, and this can lead to “a thrilling expansion of vision” (ibid., 53). 28. See http://www.cottingley.net/, accessed 29 November 2013. 29. See Bernd Stiegler, “Kleine Metaphysik der Photographie,” in Randgänge der Photographie, Munich, 2012, 79–117, especially 105–8. 30. Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, v. 31. Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Understanding the Visual, London, 2004, 2. 32. Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 31. 33. Ibid., 36.

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34. Ibid., 37. 35. Ibid., 40. 36. See Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 140ff. 37. Ibid., 56. 38. Ibid., 71. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 107. 41. Ibid., 168. 42. Ibid., 195. 43. The story of the Cottingley fairies was taken up again later on. The story served as the basis for two films, Photographing Fairies (directed by Nick Willing UK, 1997) and FairyTale: A True Story (directed by Charles Sturridge, USA, 1998). See Bernd Stiegler, Belichtete Augen. Optogramme oder das Versprechen der Retina, Frankfurt am Main, 2011. The artist Annelies Štrba has turned the story into a beautiful artist book, Frances and the Elves / Frances und die Elfen, Stuttgart, 2005. And finally the theme of the photographed fairies was turned into a children’s story involving a subtle fantasy story by David and Ruth Ellwand, The Mystery of the Fool and the Vanisher, Somerville, MA, 2009. 44. Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies, 48.

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EPILOGUE: STRATEGIC REALISM

In his book Mysteries and Conspiracies, the French sociologist Luc Boltanski has laid out the close connection between the rise of the crime novel and modernity’s broken social order.1 The more fragile the social fabric, the more the modern world is unfathomable, the more attractive it is to have a detective who can restore order and help his readers to believe in the reality of reality. The detective is therefore closely related to the paranoid, who also came into being in the nineteenth century. Both transform fragmented traces into an orderly interpretation, both formulate scattered signs into a homogeneous cosmos. Conan Doyle’s multifaceted work, which we have covered while rambling through its outlandish heterogeneity, fits seamlessly into this reading and expands it through further facets. Conan Doyle’s publications, from those on amateur photography, to the Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger stories and his political essays and those on spiritualism, chronicle the upheaval of the modern and depict the attempt to deflect it through the use of fiction, photography and many other means. Conan Doyle’s project does not involve new concepts and new constructions, as with the avant-garde, but instead consolidation, preservation and salvation. Despite all of the originality of his characters and the remarkable nature of his narrative settings, he is a deeply conservative writer, who with ever new narrative inventions seeks to restore an old, lost world. His strategic realism, which in turn generates parallel worlds, as well as opening passages between them, is a device for placing a second 235

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order next to the broken order of reality, with the new one promising stability. Between fiction and reality one can shuttle back and forth without problem, since they are congenial with one another anyways. And the same goes for the hereafter and the here-and-now, Great Britain and the colonial world, and also the past and the present. Moral orders therefore remain unaffected. This is also a part of the narrative project which sets itself the task to connect together the broken shards of reality in order to create a second reality that mirrors the first. Conan Doyle titled a book in his library about literary discoveries Through the Magic Door.2 But for him it is not about passing through a magic mirror into another world but much more about finding a way into the mirror, into the communicating orders manifested through clues, indices, discoveries, photographs and stories. On the other side there awaits no realm of wonders and apparitions but rather a copy of the local world, a parallel world that is connected to the first one. In the photo used for the frontispiece of Through the Magic Door, we see a room full of books in which there sits an empty chair (Figure E.1). Should one go through the magic door – and that we do, Conan Doyle appears to say, when we read his books – one can have a seat and once again begin to read, be it of discoveries in South America, of photographic expeditions, or of fairies in Yorkshire. That is the promise of the magic mirror: a new reality that is nothing other than an imaginary mirror of reality before it falls to pieces. Therefore what is needed are signs and indices, images and stories, which above all are one thing: a promise of reality. I promise you the real, it appears Conan Doyle says to us, and I hope that you will follow me along my narrative trails. They will show you the world as it really is. Through the Magic Door is a space filled with signs, with images, stories and constructed orders that touch upon this world and are bound up with it. If nineteenth-century science chilled the world, then what awaits us in the reading chair of the library is the warmth of the promise of fiction. One can somewhat scornfully note that Conan Doyle in all of his conceptions, histories and stories slips into the roles of the master detective and the “master interpreter,” while through his superior role as the high priest of interpreting signs he spells out his reactionary and peculiar, paranoid and ridiculous interpretations, which we as spellbound readers follow like cases solved by Sherlock Homes. That is certainly one side of the coin: the author who, though not the creator of the world, nevertheless magically interprets it, taking up its signs and spinning them into threads in order to weave them into a new story. The other side is that Conan Doyle, through his narrative and photographic forays into the mirror’s realm, remains true to a collection of old images, reproducing them in a new form. One can imagine his work to be like that of a nineteenth-century photo studio in which from old glass plates new prints are made. Sometimes these are broken but then are used yet again. And when nothing on them is still recognizable, then they can be installed in 236

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Figure E.1  Frontispiece to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Through the Magic Door. the roof of the glass house in which new photos are produced from reliable formulas and rules. Therefore we find in his texts a photographic colonialism as well as the notion of a milder kind of Darwinism, the realm of the hereafter as well as a passion for paleontology. The aspiration is simply universal: ancient history and the realm beyond death are as much colonized as modern urban London and the “black continent.” The ancient forest threatens to take 237

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over everywhere, but everywhere the author discovers paths leading through the undergrowth, carrying the reader into the safer realm of a fortified order of things. High above the ancient forest, man arises as the lord of creation, in the middle of the big city the detective is the lord of signs, and deep in the heart of darkness there appears the everlasting light of “Summerland.” To these comforting images and imaginings belongs as well the unshakeable belief in photography. To Conan Doyle it is an image of reality itself, even when ironically deployed. In his world there shines the light of the blessed Kodak, which brings not only enlightenment but also the assurance that the photos which it takes are the mirror images of a real world. It is an assurance and promise of reality all in one. Any doubt about the authenticity of these pictures would be a true sacrilege within the realm of belief in the photos. It is a realm of magic images, in which photographs have long been fetishized. They are already themselves what they depict, wielding special power, as well as supplying a transition into the realm of communicating spaces. The special magic of the images allows the pictures to remain interchangeable with one another. They entertain special relationships, can be combined and arranged, and thus formulate new stories. In the end they all land in albums, as was normal in the nineteenth century, collected there and assembled as an image of a world now able to be narrated. Conan Doyle’s collection of spirit photos is therefore the counterpart to Sherlock Holmes’s album of criminals, just as Challenger’s drawings and prints are the counterpart to the photographs from the Congo, as well as the photographic expedition into nature’s wild. Between them there exist family resemblances and transformations, stories spun out and told. Through such pictures, Malone and Casement become members of Challenger’s expedition, and through photo portraits, inhabitants of “Summerland.” Even the “wild fantasies” are traced pictures of a domesticated nature, which no matter how wild it might seem is turned into harmonic prints. Conan Doyle’s books are photo albums turned into stories. Behind their pictures are others that give them their form. Notes 1. Luc Boltanski, Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies, Cambridge, 2014. 2. Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door, London, 1908.

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INDEX

Note: Names of fictitious characters appear in italics. Page numbers in italics refer to figures. A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 4 Adler, Irene, 40, 42, 44 “Adventure of the Copper Beeches, The” (Conan Doyle), 43 “Adventure of the Dying Detective, The” (Conan Doyle), 42 “Adventure of the Illustrious Client, The” (Conan Doyle), 45 “Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, The” (Conan Doyle), 2 “Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, The” (Conan Doyle), 45, 46 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (Conan Doyle), 43 African Steamship Company, 20 “After Cormorants with a Camera” (Conan Doyle), 19, 21–3 Amateur Photographer and Photography magazine, 16–17, 38 amateur photography, 13–28

as colonialist mirror, 24–8 Conan Doyle’s writings about, 13–14, 19–24 Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions (Duchenne de Boulogne), 33–4 Answer to Mark Twain, An (anon), 89, 91, 92 anthropometric photography, 50 ape-men, 109–11, 114, 116, 117, 143 Armistice Photographs, 180–1, 183, 184–5 Armstrong, Rev. W. D., 86 Astley, Hubert, 191 atavism, 48, 55, 60 Baddeley, Colonel E., 152 Ball, Henry, 147 Baraduc, Hippolyte, 198 Barthes, Roland, 44, 69n32 Baskerville, Sir Charles, 47, 48, 58 Baskerville, Sir Henry, 47–8

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Baudelaire, Charles, 65 Bell, Joseph, 5, 39, 75, 106, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 215 Bertillon, Alphonse, 48, 49, 50, 58 illustration of possible identification, 56 photograph of Francis Galton, 52 “Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Facial Traits”, 51 Bignell House, 200 Blackwell, Henry, 152 Bolivian Boundary Commission, 106 Boltanski, Luc, 235 Bolton, W. B., 15 “Book of Life, The” (Sherlock Holmes), 33, 47, 58 Boot, W. H. J., 74 Boothroyd, J. B., 74, 78 Bowditch, Henry Pickering, 107 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 42 Brewster, Sir David, 19 British College of Psychic Science, 151, 169, 176 British Journal of Photography, 10, 13–14, 15, 19, 20, 98, 144–5 British Journal Photographic Almanac, 27, 28 Buguet, Edouard Isidore, 168, 172 Burroughs, Robert M., 89, 95n15, 95n22 Burton, John Hill, 19, 28 Burton, William Kinnimond, 15, 19 Buxton, Mrs., 169–71, 199 Caird, Frank, 107 Calotype Club, 19 camera-less photographs, 197–8 Campbell Swinton, A. A., 190 Carrington, Hereward, 166, 168 Case for Spirit Photography, The (Conan Doyle), 177, 190 “Case of Identity, A” (Conan Doyle), 32, 63 Casement, Roger, 80, 86, 89, 94, 95n27, 97, 104, 106, 238 Cenotaph, 155, 161, 180, 183, 187–8, 190 Challenger, Prof. George, 8, 10, 12n21

240

in The Land Of Mist, 137, 139, 140, 144 in The Lost World, 98, 99, 101, 107, 108, 109, 114, 116 circumstantial evidence, 36, 47, 224 Clay, Weald, 114 Coates, James, 152, 155 coincidentia oppositorum, 65, 66 Colley, Archdeacon T., 155, 155, 177, 179, 196, 207n96 Collins, Wilkie, 42 colonialism, 150–1; see also Congo atrocities colonialist mirror, photography as, 24–8 Combermere Photograph, 169, 190–2, 191 Coming of the Fairies, The (Conan Doyle), 10, 210, 212, 215, 216, 222, 224–8, 229 comparative photography, 49–50 composite photography, 53–4, 55, 58, 89, 102, 104–6, 107, 114 concealed cameras see detective cameras Congo atrocities, 79–94 Kodak and the King, 87–94 photography as performative evidence, 80–7 Congo Conference 1884/85, 81 Congo Reform Association, 80, 89 Conrad, Joseph, 80, 155 Cook, Florence, 157 Corbet, Mrs. Sybil, 191–2 Cottingley, 212, 222, 226 Crandon, L. R. G., 156 Crandon, Margery, 156, 160, 164 Crawford, William J., 167 crime novels, 235; see also Holmes, Sherlock Crime of the Congo, The (Conan Doyle), 9, 79, 84–5, 87, 89 Crookes, William, 155, 160, 161, 168 photographs of Katie King/Florence Cook, 157 Cushman, Colonel Allerton S., 165 Daily Sketch, 183, 186–7, 186–8, 186, 190

index

Darget, Louis, 166, 197, 198, 206n Darwin, Bernard, 75, 78 Darwin, Charles, 4, 119n7, 131 Darwinism, 109–11, 132, 237 Davidson, Jo, xvi Davis, Andrew Jackson, 150 Dawson, Charles, 114 Deane, Ada, 155, 164, 168, 169, 180–90, 182 Armistice and Remembrance photographs, 184–5 photograph of Colonel Allerton S. Cushman, 165 photographs of Rev. W. S. Irving, 162–3 spirit photography, 189 Defence of Modern Spiritualism, A (Wallace), 168–9 Delacroix, Eugène, 65 Deleuze, Gilles, 4 Denton, William, 139 detective cameras, 27, 28 Dickens, Charles, 42, 121n Dingwall, Eric, 156 dinosaurs, 97, 104, 109, 114, 125, 138 dinosaur’s footprint, 115 Dluzynski, Lieutenant, 143 Donohoe, Madge, 166, 197–8 Douglas, James, 169–71, 176, 193 Doyle, Mary, 98, 199–200 Drayson, Alfred, 145 Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume, 33–4 ectoplasm materializations, 159, 160–1, 160, 165–6, 167, 202 Edinburgh Photographic Society, 19 Edwards, Elizabeth, 70n56 “Empty House, The” (Conan Doyle), 47 Étude anthropométrique sur les prostituées et les voleuses (Tarnowsky), 53 evidential paradigm, 6, 38 evolutionary theory, 114; see also Darwinism Extinct Animals (Lankaster), 107 “extras”, 164, 168, 171, 172, 176

facial expressions, 33–4 fairies, 4, 6, 36, 210–11; see also Coming of the Fairies, The (Conan Doyle); fairy photos Fairy Glen, 210, 211 fairy photos, 212, 213, 218–20, 222, 227 evidence, 224–32 readability, 215–24 family resemblances, 47, 54–5, 58–60 Farabee, Prof. William Curtis, 118 Farrable, Dr., 118 Faulds, Henry, 49 Fawcett, Colonel Percy H., 104–6, 120n16 Ferrero, Giuglielmo, 53 Firm of Girdlestone, The (Conan Doyle), 15 Flammarion, Camille, 138–9, 140 Fletcher, Alice C., 53 Forbes, Patrick, 98 “Force” ... versus ... the Kodak, 89, 90 fossils, 114–19 Fox Newsreel, 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 9 Freud, Sigmund, 38 Frith, Francis, 211 Fritsch, Gustav Theodor, 58 ethnographic photographs from South Africa, 59 Galton, Francis, 49, 50, 52–3 composite photographs, 53 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 54 photograph of, 52 Gardner, Edward L., 212, 216 Garrideb, 50, 52 Germand, S., 143 Ginzburg, Carlo, 6, 38 gnomes, 6, 212, 214 Goligher Circle, 165 Goligher, Kathleen, 167 Gramont, Arnaud de, 140 Griffiths, Frances, 212, 213, 216, 219, 220 Guattari, Félix, 4 Gurney, Edmund, 147

241

arthur conan doyle and photography

Hamilton, Thomas Glendinning, 202 Harris, Rev. J. H., 81 hereafter, science of, 193–7 Herschel, Sir William, 49 Hertner, Mrs., 143 Hewat McKenzie, James, 152, 176, 188 Hillary, Howard, 130, 131, 132 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 26, 63–4, 64–7, 75, 115 Holmes, Sherlock, 32–67 “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” 43 “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” 42 “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” 45 “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” 45, 46 “A Case of Identity,” 32, 63 death, 145 and fairies, 210–11, 216 as fictional vs real-life character, 7, 8, 35, 67n6 The Hound of the Baskervilles, 43, 47–8, 52, 54–8, 61, 75, 104 illustrator, 74–5 inspiration for, 26 “The Last Problem,” 61 name, 63–4 The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 37 photo albums, 42–3, 45–7 photography in, 8–9, 39, 66–7 reading signs, 35–9 “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 9, 40–2, 42–3, 43–5, 47, 60 Sherlock Holmes Exhibition 1951, 75–8 The Sign of Four, 63 and spiritualism, 1–2, 5, 6, 61–2, 195 A Study in Scarlet, 28, 33, 58, 60–1, 62–3, 68n20, 222 The Valley of Fear, 60, 72n80 Hope, William, 164, 168, 169–80, 178, 179, 198–9, 201 Hornung, E. W., 101

242

Houdini, Harry, 123–34, 168, 193, 212 with Arthur Conan Doyle, 126–8 “Do Spirits Return?” poster, 129 surrounded by spirits, 135 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Conan Doyle), 43, 47–8, 52, 54–8, 57, 61, 75, 104 Howlett, Anthony D., 75 Humboldt, Alexander von, 66 Im Thurn, Sir Everard Ferdinand, 106 indexical signs, 36, 114 Innes, Cosmo, 19 Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (Galton), 54 Irving, Reverend W. S., 162–3 Isle of May, 18, 19, 23, 24 James, Henry, 18 Janin, Jules, 66 Japan Photographic Society, 19 Java Man, 114 Jerome, Jerome K., 168 Jünger, Ernst, 115–16, 215 Keith, Sir Arthur, 188 King, Katie, 138, 155, 157, 161 King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Twain), 80, 82–3, 87, 88, 93 Kipling, Rudyard, 80 Klinger, Leslie S., 35 Kluski, Franek, 143, 154, 155 Kluski séance, 142, 143–4, 158 Kodak camera, 15, 16–17, 87–94, 238 Kodak (company), 181, 183, 221, 224 Kölnische Zeitung, 89 Kracauer, Siegfried, 35 Lamond, Rev. John, 2–4, 144 Land of Mist, The (Conan Doyle), 10, 12n13, 137–8, 139, 140–3, 144 Lane, H. G., 188 Lankester, Edwin Ray, 102, 107 “Last Problem, The” (Canon Doyle), 61 Leckie, Malcolm, 147 Leduc-Grimaldi, Mathilde, 117–18

index

Leopold II, 79, 81, 89, 92, 93, 94; see also King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Twain) Lewis, John, 228 Life Beyond the Veil, The (Vale Owen), 150 Light magazine, 144, 180 Lincoln, Abraham, 124, 155, 168 spiritualist photographs, 130, 131 Loder-Symonds, Lily, 147 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 147, 150, 154, 166, 188, 195 Lombroso, Cesare, 53, 71n62 Lord, Mr. W. R., 187–8 Lost World, The (Conan Doyle), 1, 10, 94, 97–119 ancient slides, 109–14 ape-man illustration, 117 cave painting, 112 copy dedicated to Elsie Wright, 230, 232 dinosaur’s footprint, 115 draft for illustration, 103 Edmund Dene Morel, 103 Edward D. Malone, 100 expedition group, 99, 102, 231 film, 125, 128 film stills, 132 first page, 105 high plateau, 110 and The Land of Mist, 143 photographs, fossils and fakes, 114–19 Professor Challenger, 101, 108 pterodactyl escapes, 113 Lower, Rev. B. J., 86 Lyons, Mrs., 43 McArdle, 114 McCabe, Joseph, 150, 195–6 McCormel, Mrs., 190 Magician Among the Spirits, A (Houdini), 123, 124 magicians see Houdini, Harry Malone, Edward D., 98, 99, 100, 104, 106, 111, 114, 238 Man from Beyond, The, 133 Man from Beyond, The (film), 130–2

Marey, Étienne-Jules, 21 photographic shotgun, 21, 22, 23 Marjorie, 164, 165, 199 Marriott, William, 176 Martyrdom of Man, The (Winwood Reade), 47 Max, Gabriel von, 121 Mayumba (ship), 20 Meagher bellows camera, 18–19 Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (Duchenne de Boulogne), 34 Memories and Adventures (Conan Doyle), 183 Metapsychic Institute, Paris, 140, 204n16 Milverton, Charles Augustus, 45 Moholy-Nagy, László, 215, 216 Morel, Edmund Dene, 79–80, 81, 86, 89, 94, 95n27, 97, 103, 104 Morelli, Giovanni, 38 Moriarty, Prof., 61 Morning Post, 190 Mortimer, James, 47, 48, 49, 55, 58 Mumler, William H., 130, 168 Myers, Frederic, 147 Mysteries and Conspiracies (Boltanksi), 235 “Mystery of Sasassa Valley, The” (Conan Doyle), 13 Nähr, Moritz, 55 Narratives from the Criminal Trials in Scotland (Burton), 28 Nature magazine, 190 Nature’s Secrets (Denton), 139 New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The (Conan Doyle), 37 New Revelation, The (Conan Doyle), 2, 130–1, 154, 215 New York Times, 125 Odic forces, 5, 61, 144–5, 164 Okolowicz, Colonel, 143 “On the Slave Coast with a Camera” (Conan Doyle), 29–30n21, 30n31 Ormstein, Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismund von, 40, 44

243

arthur conan doyle and photography

Paget, Mrs. Alexander, 192 Paget, Sidney, 74, 75, 78 illustrations by, 41, 46, 57 Paget, Walter, 74, 75 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 36, 69n32 Pfau, Ludwig, 65 Phantasms of the Living (Myers, Gurney and Podmore), 147 Pheneas, 8, 148–50, 190, 200 Pheneas Circle, 149 photo albums, 42–3, 45–7 photo clubs, 15, 19 photographic criminology, 50 photographic identification, 50 photographic shotgun, 21, 22, 23 photography, 8–11 as indexical sign, 36, 114 as performative evidence, 80–7 in Sherlock Holmes, 8–9, 39, 66–7 see also amateur photography; anthropometric photography; comparative photography; composite photography; spiritualist/ spirit photography photomontages, 117–18 picture postcards, 174–5 Piltdown Man, 114 Pithecanthropus, 143, 144 Podmore, Frank, 147 Poe, Edgar Allen, 42, 63 post-mortem photographs, 198–203 Price, Harry, 176 Princess Mary’s Gift Book, 221, 222 Psychic Bookshop, 141, 152 Ransford, W. H., 98 reading signs, 35–9 Reichenbach Falls, 61, 75, 145 Reichenbach, Karl von, 5, 61, 164 “Resident Patient, The” (Conan Doyle), 47 Return of Sherlock Holmes, The (Conan Doyle), 45 Richardson, Jenness, 53 Richet, Charles, 140 Rodtschenko, Alexander, 216 Rouillé, André, 69n32

244

Roxton, Lord John, 98, 99, 106 Rutherford, William, 107 St. John Adcock, Arthur, 119 “Scandal in Bohemia, A” (Conan Doyle), 9, 40–2, 42–3, 43–5, 47, 60 Scatcherd, Felicia, 152, 155, 181, 183, 197 Schrenck-Notzing, Albert von, 159 “Science of Deduction”, 58, 61, 63 science of the hereafter, 193–7 Scientific American, 193 séances, 5, 6, 8, 140, 141–4 Charles L. Tweedale, 199 Margery Crandon, 156, 160 materialization during, 158 Pheneas, 148 science of the hereafter, 193–4 as social practice, 151 William Hope, 169–71 Sekula, Allan, 70n56 Sheldon, Mary French, 81 Sherlock, William, 64 Sign of Four, The (Canon Doyle), 63 signs see indexical signs; reading signs Sinclair, Dr. Gregory, 131 Sinnett, A. P., 147 skotographs, 197–8, 198 slide shows, 153–64 Smith, George Albert, 145 Smith, Herbert Greenhough, 74 Smith, Violet, 78 Snelling, Mr., 221, 224 social Darwinism, 109–11 Society for Psychic Research (SPR), 147, 153, 176 Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures (SSSP), 152–3 Society of American Magicians, 125 Sokolow, L., 143 South Africa, 58, 212 ethnographic photographs, 59 South America, 97, 106, 109, 118 Speaight, Mr., 181 Speaker magazine, 79 Spencer, Major, 152 Spencer, Mr., 152

index

spiritualism, 4, 144–5 Harry Houdini, 124, 125 The Land of Mist, 137–8, 139, 140–3, 144 as new revelation, 8 Pheneas, 8, 148–50, 190 in society, 151–3 Summerland, 150–1 vs Sherlock Holmes, 1–2, 5, 6, 61–2 spiritualist/spirit photography, 146, 147, 164–9 Abraham Lincoln, 130, 131 Ada Deane, 164, 168, 169, 180–90, 182, 189: Armistice and Remembrance photographs, 184–5; photograph of Colonel Allerton S. Cushman, 165; photographs of Rev. W. S. Irving, 162–3 Combermere Photograph, 169, 190–2, 191 Harry Houdini, 134–5 post-mortem photographs, 198–203 science of the hereafter, 193–7 skotographs, 197–8, 198 slide shows, 153–64 Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures (SSSP), 152–3 William Hope, 164, 168, 169–80, 201 Stanislawa P., 159 Stanley, Henry Morton, 81, 95n13, 118 Stapleton, 48, 52, 55–6 Stead, Estelle W., 180, 181, 183 Stead, W. T., 180, 181 “Stereoscope and the Stereograph, The” (Holmes), 26–8 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 18 Strand Magazine “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” 45, 46 “Canon,” 40, 74 fairy article, 210, 212, 215, 225 The Hound of the Baskervilles, 57 The Lost World, 98 Plesiosaurus, 102 “A Scandal in Bohemia,” 9, 41 Strange, Felice, 132 Strange, Professor, 131–2

strategic realism, 7–8, 35, 235–8 Study in Scarlet, A (Conan Doyle), 28, 33, 58, 60–1, 62–3, 68n20, 222 Summerland, 150–1, 166, 200, 238 Summerlee, Prof., 98, 116 Summerscale, Kate, 42 Sunday Express, 137 Sunday Times, 190 Suspicions of Mr Whicher, The (Summerscale), 42 “Sussex Vampire, The” (Conan Doyle), 47 “Synoptic Table of Physiognomic Facial Traits” (Bertillon), 51 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 19, 64, 166 Tarnowsky, Pauline, 53 Taussig, Michael, 24 “The Adventures of the Three Garridebs” (Conan Doyle), 50–2 Thompson, Elizabeth M., 200 thought photos, 197 Through the Magic Door (Conan Doyle), 236, 237 To the Lost World (Zahl), 97 Toepffer, Rodolphe, 65 Trent, Dr., 132 Twain, Mark, 80, 87, 89; see also Answer to Mark Twain, An (anon); King Leopold’s Soliloquy (Twain) Tweedale, Charles L., 155, 199 Vale Owen, George, 150 Valley of Fear, The (Cohan Doyle), 60, 72n80 Vandeleur, Mr. and Mrs., 43 Vertov, Dziga, 216 visual history, 229 visual literacy, 38 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 155, 168–9 Wallace, Dr. Abraham, 152, 153 Warner, W. Harding, 145 Watson, Dr. John H., 6, 28, 33, 35, 38, 39, 45, 47, 48 “Watson’s Detective Camera”, 27

245

arthur conan doyle and photography

Weight, Michael, 75 Wellington Henry, 2nd Viscount Combermere, 191 White, Maple, 109, 116 Wilde, Jimmy, 183 wilderness, forays into, 23–4 Winwood Reade, William, 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53–4, 55

246

Woodman, Mr., 180 Wright, Elsie, 212, 214, 216, 225 copy of The Lost World dedicated to, 230, 232 letter to, 223 Wright, Mr., 212 Wright, Mrs., 212 Wynne, Rev. W., 195