Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the <i>Strand Magazine</i>, 1891-1930 9781474406765

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Twentieth-Century Victorian

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 Anna Vaninskaya 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain Nicholas Freeman Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 Christine Ferguson Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban Multiplicity Julian Wolfreys Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Robbie McLaughlan Roomscape: Women Readers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf Susan David Bernstein Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 Anna Despotopoulou Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy Kate Hext London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 Haewon Hwang Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices Helen Groth Jane Morris: The Burden of History Wendy Parkins

Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces Lizzy Welby The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos British India and Victorian Literary Culture Máire ní Fhlathúin Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form Frederik Van Dam Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the NineteenthCentury British Imagination Jenn Fuller Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 Jonathan Cranfield The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Marion Thain Forthcoming volumes: The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Eleonora Sasso Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Patricia Pulham Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920 Clare Gill Victorian eBook: Nineteenth-Century Literature and Electrical Technologies of Representation, 1875–1910 Verity Hunt

Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions Trish Ferguson

Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life Johnathan Buckmaster

Exploring Victorian Travel Literature: Disease, Race and Climate Jessica Howell

Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject Amber Regis

Spirit Becomes Matter: The Brontës, George Eliot, Nietzsche Henry Staten

Gender, Technology and the New Woman Lena Wånggren

Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecve Also Available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys ISSN: 2044–2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930

Jonathan Cranfield

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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 © Jonathan Cranfield, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0675 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0676 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0677 2 (epub) The right of Jonathan Cranfield 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).

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Contents

List of Illustrations Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Periodicals, Popular Writing and Modernism

vi vii ix 1

1. The Strand at the Beginning, 1891–1899

15

2. Chivalric Machines, 1899–1903

43

3. The Two Conan Doyles, 1903–1910

83

4. Lost Worlds and World Wars, 1910–1918

105

5. Flights from Reason, 1918–1925

159

Conclusion: Remnants, 1925–1930

187

Bibliography Index

229 251

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Illustrations

1.1

2.1 2.2

2.3

3.1 4.1

4.2

4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3

6.1

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Illustration by W. S. Stacey taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, Strand Magazine, March 1891, pp. 312–17, p. 317.

25

Photograph by Arthur Weston taken from ‘Sandow in Plaster of Paris’, Strand Magazine, October 1901, pp. 461–8, p. 463.

44

Illustration by W. S. Stacey taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, Strand Magazine, March 1891, pp. 312–17, p. 314.

52

Illustration by W. S. Stacey taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, Strand Magazine, March 1891, pp. 312–17, p. 315.

53

Illustration taken from Stephen Hallett, ‘Totems for Famous Authors’, Strand Magazine, July 1906, pp. 113–15, p. 114.

99

Illustration taken from ‘Dramatic Situations: Can You Supply the Missing Detail? A Problem for Our Readers’, Strand Magazine, April 1910, pp. 437–40, p. 437.

109

Illustration by W. R. S. Scott taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Horror of the Heights’, Strand Magazine, November 1913, pp. 551–62, p. 558.

128

Illustration by Harry Rountree taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt’, Strand Magazine, May 1913, pp. 483–93, p. 485.

131

Illustration by M. MacMichael taken from D. H. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please!’, Strand Magazine, April 1919, pp. 287–93, p. 293.

164

Photograph taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Lost World (I)’, Strand Magazine, April 1912, pp. 363–82, p. 371.

172

Illustration by F. E. Hiley taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (V)’, Strand Magazine, November 1925, pp. 436–48, p. 447.

181

Illustration by F. E. Hiley taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (II)’, Strand Magazine, May 1928, pp. 443–51, p. 451.

218

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Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the socalled Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for

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viii

Series Editor’s Preface

the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

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Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without my wife Joanne’s remarkable capacities of tolerance and intelligence; this book is dedicated to her and to my baby daughter Eliza. The completion of this project is also due to the kind support and encouragement offered to me by my employer Liverpool John Moores University, the indefatigable librarian Val Stevenson and the indulgence of archivists including Peggy Purdue at Toronto Public Library and Michael Gunton at the Lancelyn Green Collection in Portsmouth. In 2006 as part of my MA programme at the University of Kent I was asked by Professor Rod Edmond to prepare an in-class presentation on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Ten years later I find myself here, still aspiring to his example as the best teacher I ever had.

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Introduction

Periodicals, Popular Writing and Modernism

The Strand Magazine in Time [1930] Today when the news bills cried ‘Death of Conan Doyle’ one’s memory went back to a far-off day when one read on the bills ‘Death of Sherlock Holmes’. They were not newspaper bills but advertisements of the Strand Magazine.1 [1949] The number of monthly magazines that have existed is legion, but only a few have left more than a fleeting memory. Among those few [is] the Strand magazine, which owing to the economic difficulties of the time is to cease publication . . . the Strand was a popular influence of great importance in that lively period of English story-telling, both short and long, which reached its height in the nineties. Within six months the Sherlock Holmes short stories had begun to appear in the new magazine and from that date until his death Conan Doyle never wrote a Holmes story for any other paper.2

The lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine were so entwined that the majority of notices marking their respective deaths, twenty years apart, seemed incapable of referring to one without the other. This book offers a reading of the magazine and its most famous author through the lens of their relationship and the footprints that they left elsewhere upon British culture. Ultimately, it will argue that the interdependence of Conan Doyle and the Strand’s reputations was not an arbitrary occurrence, but instead the symptom of a series of shifts in the production and consumption of popular culture. The story of their relationship can illuminate these changes and further explain how author and publication sought to shepherd a determinedly Victorian audience through the turbulence of the early twentieth century. Reading a single, middlebrow magazine like the Strand over this period affords the opportunity to observe a series

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of slow transformations in literary form, ideology, cultural attitudes and social values. Away from the white heat of artistic innovation, we can discover how a generation of Victorians acclimatised to the altered realities of the twentieth century. Beyond Sherlock Holmes, the Strand has survived in the popular imagination as, in the words of Mike Ashley, a ‘pot-pourri of humaninterest snippets, fairly useless knowledge and fiction aimed at lowermiddle class and “aspiring” working-class readers’.3 The attractions of this caricature are clear. If the magazine was constituted of fiction surrounded by ‘snippets’ and ‘useless information’, then literary history can helpfully discard most of the magazine’s non-fiction content when weighing its legacy. In practice, it can also disregard much of its fiction barring the odd exceptional figures such as Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse or H. G. Wells. Yet the Strand between 1891 and 1930 was, in many ways, a single text guided by the same editorial hands and often written explicitly for long-term readers. As such, the meaning of isolated stories and serials was always contingent upon this massive drift of other writing. When we fall into the habit of thinking about stories and novels as distinct from their periodical origins, we can deracinate them and efface their identities while at the same time glossing over the significance of the periodicals themselves. It is necessary to disentangle the Strand both from its caricature in much existing scholarship as well as from the enticing allure of its more famous writers. While the inclusion of a Sherlock Holmes story could increase circulation by hundreds of thousands of copies, regular Strand readers bought the magazine every month, often without that attraction. To account for the success of the magazine solely through Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes and to equate their two popularities would be to give a false impression of the magazine’s own life, voice and influences. Rather than allow the work of one or two enduringly popular writers to stand in for the magazine as a whole, the magazine context can instead throw new light on their well-known texts as well as recovering many other stories and articles that have been simply forgotten. This emphasis upon periodical publishing over book publishing is essential because Conan Doyle belonged to a generation of writers whose early careers depended upon the rise of popular fiction magazines. Their art was shaped by the constant demand from magazines and the public at large for articles and stories. We can see this is in simplistic terms when, for example, H. G. Wells confessed that The Time Machine was only written to fill a ‘lean month’ when all his usual periodicals were backed up with ‘unused articles’.4 We can also

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Introduction

3

think in more general terms about the ways in which short story writing was incentivised and how financial rewards became keyed to particular kinds of writerly effects. The single volumes containing Doyle’s collected stories such as Mysteries and Adventures or Round the Red Lamp would tell you significantly less about his early career than three months of the Strand’s content.5 This would be more helpful, not just in contributing to a more detailed view of the way in which such fiction was commissioned and published but also because it would establish a clearer relationship between fiction and nonfiction. There are many cases outlined throughout this book where this relationship is shown to be symbiotic and indivisible. The vast majority of Doyle’s work was read first in magazine form; this was true of his most half-baked short stories as well as of many of his mature historical novels like The White Company and Sir Nigel.6 By repatriating these works to their original form of publication, they can be re-imagined as incidental or transitory parts of a much larger cultural assemblage. In doing this one can also rediscover the huge body of reaction, comment and criticism that appeared in other periodicals. This reaction formed part of a crucial, first-response dialogue that is also often effaced from Conan Doyle criticism. Even in the most compelling recent critical assessments of Doyle, Catherine Wynne’s The Colonial Conan Doyle and Douglas Kerr’s Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice, we find the Strand referred to in incidental flurries and generally only as a passive venue of publication. These omissions are entirely understandable but they underline the extent to which traditional approaches to criticism marginalise the potentially disruptive periodical ferment. Even dipping a trepidatious toe into the water threatens to decentre the author-hero and pollute the clarity of their productions with meaner textual matter. Accordingly, this book tries to balance the two impulses by holding the two career arcs of author and magazine alongside each other and tracing their fluctuations. Unsurprisingly, this approach brings its own problems. After choosing to focus on the Strand as an object of study, one might wonder whether one publication can justify this level of sustained scrutiny. In the last two decades periodical studies has, with notable exceptions like Catherine Waters’ Commodity Culture in Dickens’ Household Words, taken huge strides towards critiquing the preoccupation with studying single titles. The explosion of online databases of nineteenthcentury periodicals together with an increasing inclination towards poststructuralist notions of intertextuality and textual heterogeneity have meant that criticism has focused discussion on issues, debates,

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figures or ideas rather than single titles. James Mussell argues that taking note of any age’s periodicals ‘pluralizes the cast of actors, events and narratives through which we approach’ it.7 This has allowed critics and historians to move across the barriers between individual titles and track developing discourses not just over time on the pages of one publication, but simultaneously in many publications at once. The most striking examples of this work have come grown out of the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) index and its resultant publications. The chapters in Science in the NineteenthCentury Periodical and Science Serialized display a startling agility in this regard. In Bernard Lightman’s work on John Tyndall’s materialism, for example, he maps the spread of particular ideas or images as they moved from public lectures, through serious journals, daily newspapers and through to caricatures in the popular comic press.8 With samples of so many periodical publications so tantalisingly accessible in digital form, it can seem positively disingenuous to purposely de-prioritise their broad vistas. This model, however, is better suited to the labours of intellectual history, where the periodical press is an invaluable record of public debate, than it can be to cultural history. Authors, magazines and publishers were engaged in conversations with their readers that evolved through time. As a result, a diachronic model of inquiry makes considerably more sense than a synchronic one. This is especially important given the ways in which the Strand has become a kind of shorthand for ‘Victorian’ taste, attitudes and habits of mind. This impression was clearly conveyed by the press coverage of its demise. Its passing, for example, shook the Spectator’s ‘belief in the stability of any human institution’ even though the magazine ‘belong[ed] essentially to the past’.9 How and why did this unilateral ‘Victorianisation’ of the Strand happen? According to Michael Wolff, periodicals represented no less than ‘the closest verbal and graphic equivalent which we have of Victorian urbanism’ and the Strand made this manifest.10 It situated its readers within a particular image of late Victorian London. Its cover image of the crowded city thoroughfare combined with its cultivation of a commuter-based distribution network to immerse its readers in a particular time and place. ‘To read the Strand itself’, writes Christopher Pittard, ‘was also to experience the city’.11 It was perhaps for this reason that the Strand became fused in the generational imagination with Conan Doyle, with Sherlock Holmes and with an overarching aura of ‘the Victorian’. This resulted in some strange cultural blurring between the magazine, the author and the character. One symptom of this phenomenon was that large numbers of interchangeable fan

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5

letters addressed to ‘Sherlock Holmes’ would be sent to the Strand offices, to Conan Doyle’s house and to Baker Street itself.12 It is important to note that, while this blurring is often intriguing, it became increasingly ahistorical and unrepresentative of the Strand as a whole by cleaving to the timeframe of the Holmes stories. Despite being produced more or less regularly until 1930, no Sherlock Holmes story was set later than ‘His Last Bow’ in 1914 and only the occasional late oddity such as ‘The Lion’s Mane’ was set after 1903.13 Thus the stories continued to be placed against an increasingly ersatz, never-ending Victorian backdrop; the milieu known by Holmesian obsessives as ‘forever 1895’. This had the effect of relentlessly bludgeoning a particular periodisation on to perceptions of the Strand as a whole. As a consequence, it is seldom seen as belonging to the twentieth century in any meaningful way despite spending only a single decade of its sixty years under the reign of Victoria (although she was also one of its more esteemed contributors).14 The fact that the Strand had the temerity to run long into the twentieth century can disturb a sense of orderly historicity. Its Victorian readers became its Edwardian readers; they weathered at least one world war and saw the world around them change beyond all recognition. All this upheaval found its way into the magazine’s form and content, yet did so in rather unspectacular ways. Unlike its near relation, the Review of Reviews, the Strand was too middlebrow and had too rigorous a sense of decorum to become seriously involved in many of the heated debates which the openness and scale of the periodical form seemed to encourage. Even when its authors sought to join the debate on, for example, Home Rule or Tariff reform, they were generally sure to do so away from the Strand. We can see this particularly with Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells, who published letters and essays on an astonishing variety of issues in other publications, more often, albeit with notable exceptions, leaving the Strand as a place for fiction. The magazine in fact can seem to enjoy a rather smug elevation beyond the rest of the periodical field, which, in commercial terms, it came to dominate and redefine. The canon of Strand criticism that presents itself to the initiate is not substantial. Kate Jackson’s work has been hugely influential, especially the 2001 monograph George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910. The work is a meticulously researched business and cultural history of the publisher George Newnes whose firm also produced Tit-Bits, the Westminster Gazette, the Ladies Field and the Captain. Each of these publications is accorded a chapter as part of Jackson’s materialist account of diversification and popularisation in

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the periodical field after 1880. She views periodicals principally as culturally embedded products which can unveil the deep tensions between culture and profit in the period. She attempts to answer . . . the challenge posed by recent work in cultural studies and literary criticism concerning the relationship between the industrial production of cultural forms and the consumption or reception of those forms . . . The periodical . . . is a product of negotiation and interaction between editor-proprietor and audience, and is as much context as text.15

This collapsed distinction between ‘text’ and ‘context’, as well as Jackson’s somewhat arduous theoretical legwork on the construction of reading communities, fed directly into subsequent articles by Pittard on the Strand’s precisely middlebrow ‘purity’, Ruth Hoberman on the ‘auratic’ properties of middle-class commodities and Winnie Chan’s chapter on the magazine in her study of the late-century short story.16 James Mussell’s Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press contained a brief chapter on the magazine’s depictions of science and detective fiction and, more pertinently, Peter McDonald artfully examined the role of Conan Doyle’s agent A. P. Watt in the wave of professionalisation brought about by magazines like the Strand. He also made special reference to the collaborative dialogue between author, editor and agent in the production of the Return of Sherlock Holmes series.17 The more recent Revolutions from Grub Street helpfully locates the Strand within twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments in popular media but is rather light on the Strand itself, still relying on Jackson’s basic premises and reiterating her conclusions about George Newnes’s role in its success.18 Elsewhere, the magazine makes frequent, fleeting appearances in discussions of the art of magazine illustration, through its relation to the emergence of the linked series of short stories, studies of transAtlantic cultural influence, as a cultural prop to the politics of new imperialism or as the inconsequential backdrop to much Sherlock Holmes criticism. Few of these critics pay serious attention to the vast swathes of material that appeared alongside the stories in the Strand, and fewer still entertain the idea that their meaning could be modified by it. It is also noticeable that no serious analysis of the Strand extends beyond the length of a detailed chapter or journal article. Indeed, the only book on the subject was the instructive but hagiographic memoir of Reginald Pound who edited the Strand between 1942 and 1946. While this book is highly readable, it made

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sparing use of a huge archive of priceless materials which were subsequently lost or destroyed. One more thing unites these disparate bodies of writing: a clear disinclination to discuss anything to do with the Strand much after 1901 when its cultural validity is presumed to have expired. The various electronic booms that have energised periodical studies are often similarly confined within Victorian or ‘nineteenth-century’ brackets. In turn this reinforces the strong connection between periodical studies and Victorian Studies from which it speciated in the work of Walter Houghton in the 1960s.19 Part of what makes the Strand’s lifespan so striking is that its cultural entrenchment and resistance to change coincided with a far greater longevity than the livelier, more protean illustrated monthly magazines that followed in its wake. Why did it come to exert so distinct and persistent a hold over so many opinion formers from Queen Victoria to Winston Churchill, with a rotating cast of judges, politicians, actors, clergymen, businessmen and scientists in between? Generations of writers and commentators accorded the Strand a privileged status as a metonym for an age and a specific cultural moment. So, if this book accords the Strand a position of privilege by isolating it as an object of study, this only reflects the unusual status granted it as part of its peculiar legacy. In acknowledging this fact, we must also be sceptical; the Strand was not kept afloat for sixty years by the custom of barristers and barons. It endured because it suited itself to the tastes of ordinary readers throughout a long period of extraordinary change. It surfed the wave of the monthly illustrated magazine revolution in the 1880s and 1890s and endured through the rise of the paperback, the gramophone, cinema and a hundred other microclimatic shifts in the production of popular culture. As such, it serves as a priceless record of the durability and adaptability of the British middlebrow sensibility.

The Twentieth-Century Conan Doyle Like the Strand, Arthur Conan Doyle suffers from a predisposition to be viewed principally as a Victorian writer. Even when his later works are considered, they are usually identified as outlying iterations of nineteenth-century forms. The early Challenger narratives, for example, are either late-appearing quest romances like The Lost World or, in the case of The Poison Belt, variations upon the 1890’s Wellsian scientific romances.20 His obituaries in 1930 solidified this impression: the Daily Mail compared him favourably to his ‘more eminent Victorian contemporaries’.21 Elsewhere, in a

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thoughtful retrospective piece, the Bookman reflected that Conan Doyle and the Strand ‘typified’ the ‘English renaissance’ of the 1890s more than W. E. Henley’s ‘jingoistic’ National Observer or the ‘languishing aesthetics’ of Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book. So strong was this impression that a ‘mental shock’ attended his ‘startling excursion[s] into the twentieth century’.22 This caricature was exacerbated by Conan Doyle’s turn towards public advocacy of spiritualism after the First World War. The perceived eccentricity of these efforts allowed him to be painted as the archetypal ‘Victorian out of water’, confusedly floundering at the changed cultural climate and suffering the curse of the writer doomed to outlive his usefulness and popularity. The Daily Mail’s obituary observed that ‘after the war, for various reasons, spiritualism claimed Sir Arthur . . . it became a rather credulous obsession’.23 It is thus easy to imagine both author and magazine running aground in the twentieth century, outflanked by a new generation of modernists and innovators who had little time or respect for these particularly eminent Victorians. This narrative is not only faintly insulting, it also uses hindsight to grant too much epistemological supremacy to the kind of fiction that most commonly features on university curricula and in recent popular imagination. The recovery and revaluation of popular fiction has formed a crucial part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies for many years, but the modernist stranglehold on the 1910s and 1920s has proved more difficult to break down. One can easily find entire critical discourses devoted to amatory fiction, the Gothic and sensation fiction which treat their subjects free from the gravitational pull of their ‘high’ art counterparts. Criticism treating the early twentieth century, however, habitually views popular fiction through the lens of modernism.24 Only in the very recent surge of interest in theorisations of the ‘middlebrow’ can we see genuine attempts to deal with this fiction on its own terms. Even here the focus is understandably on emerging authors and trends rather than formerly famous authors who were still working. Conan Doyle’s prescriptions for dealing with the early crises of the twentieth century may not have proved historically durable but they were certainly coherent, rooted in many important contemporaneous debates and, intermittently, very popular. This book focuses most of its energy upon the later output of author and magazine not just because they are under-discussed and often misunderstood, but also because they allow for necessary reformulations of the literary and cultural fields of the period. Our sense of what might constitute discrete streams of ‘modernist’, ‘popular’, ‘middlebrow’ or ‘lowbrow’ fiction is utterly compromised when reading fiction in the

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9

periodical press. Between 1910 and 1920, the Strand featured writing by Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, F. Britten Austin, Arnold Bennett, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Rudyard Kipling, W. W. Jacobs, P. G. Wodehouse and hundreds of others dotted all over the cultural map of the period. In practice, they were not always accorded equal prestige; Grand and Egerton were generally confined to short symposium contributions, yet their names and views are indisputably part of the same continuous text. Not only was this the case within individual titles but in many authors’ promiscuous cross-publication between different titles. As a result, it is necessary to perform a little spadework with some important literary and historical terminology to establish a framework for viewing Conan Doyle’s later work. If we wish to disentangle him from his ‘Victorian’ mantle then it is useful to ask a series of contextual questions that relate to the period’s wider literary marketplace, the growth of mass culture, the rise of new entertainment media and the emergence of globalised American cultural power through its film and music exports. Recent developments in the fields of ‘popular’ modernism, ‘low’ modernism or ‘vulgar’ modernism initially appear helpful. The term ‘popular modernism’ has been most influentially deployed by Nicholas Daly who effectively argued for viewing the artefacts of elite and popular culture as bifurcated symptoms of the same, shared condition. Individual works may be distinct in the sense that one can recognise obvious differences between, say, D. H. Lawrence and P. G. Wodehouse or between Ezra Pound and John Masefield, but their family resemblances are marked rather than negligible. Daly sees them as ‘siblings’ rather than the daring nephew to the ‘decrepit great uncle’.25 Meanwhile, the term ‘low’ modernism was most prominently theorised by Rachel Potter’s argument for the aesthetic legitimacy of modernism’s most base cultural constituents. She argued that part of ‘Anglo-American’ modernism’s artistic achievement was its ability to fuse the rarefied traditions of naturalism and symbolism with materials habitually associated with low culture: ‘obscene bodies, animals and objects; masturbation, shit and piss’.26 Modernism’s prestige was thus built atop a healthy and mutually informed relationship with lots of other discourses whose critical reputations are negligible by comparison. J. Hoberman’s Vulgar Modernism took the opposite approach by tracing the ‘vulgar equivalents’ of modernism within the American mainstream culture industry.27 Instead of tracking vulgar strains within modernism, he explored the ways in which popular culture anticipated and drove developments in elite art. By this logic, Tex Avery becomes the equivalent of Manet while Buster Keaton’s

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comedies predict the experiments of Eisenstein. Any perceived binary ‘divide’ is, in fact, a subtly distorted mirroring. These projects use wildly different methodologies, yet their aims are comparable, each seeking to redistribute some of ‘high’ modernism’s cultural prestige to less exalted cultural products. This has historically proved difficult because a deep-lying set of value judgements was installed in the academy by the incorporation of ‘the classics of high modernism . . . [into] the so-called canon’ during the rise of English as a university subject.28 Fredric Jameson’s argument was that the ‘canonised’ modernists overcame their own contemporaneous denigration and, in the process, infected subsequent criticism with an over-exaggerated misreading of their high-minded disregard for the popular, the bourgeois and the middlebrow. As a result, subsequent generations of critics and scholars have struggled to overcome the lingering sense of an inferiority complex when entering these fields. Similarly, it has led to a diminished will to investigate popular work from the early twentieth century, particularly when produced by erstwhile Victorian writers. Daly, Potter and Hoberman channel some of the righteous fury of past critics who had sought to rehabilitate works of popular writing from, at best, ghettoisation or, at worst, consignment to what Franco Moretti called the ‘slaughterhouse of literature’.29 In attempting to untangle the theoretical congestion in this area, it becomes clear how much confusion has resulted from attempts to distil or filter culture into different streams. Conceptualisations of the ‘popular’, the ‘low’, the ‘mass’ and the ‘vulgar’ became entangled and effaced the real diversity of the early twentieth-century’s cultural moments. When working through the periods in this book, it becomes possible to see where and how these boundaries were consciously processed and where, by contrast, they were post facto impositions. To the aesthete, what is ‘popular’ might also be what is ‘low’ but to the popular writer, ‘low’ may well be something pornographic or vulgar (indeed, it may even be the opposite of popular). These are parallax terms, depending entirely on the position of the speaker. ‘Mass’ culture, on the other hand, carries industrial connotations that might render its status as a category within literature less directly relevant than for, say, music or cinema. The ‘mass’ production of culture, as analysed seminally by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, maps most effectively on to particular markets within literature such as the Mills and Boon or Beadle and Adams production lines.30 Yet the fiction produced under these regimes has left even less discernible trace in scholarship or criticism than the Strand or its contemporaries.

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Introduction

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Notions of authorial prowess, intellectual prestige and individual genius were pervasive even within popular literature and disrupt the unproblematic deployment of the term. While each definition could be used (with more or less accuracy) to demarcate particular literary microclimates within the early 1900s, this was also the period when, according to Jameson, critical terms were starting to be defined by many of the same modernist writers who were producing the literary texts. After all, it was not just the literary works of the high modernists that were ‘canonised’; it was also a set of critical values and practices as laid out in their non-fiction. In a situation where neither gamekeeper nor poacher, text nor critical category, can be appropriately distinguished, it is better to find the most effective way of collapsing these critical debates into the study of the texts themselves. When working with a writer like Conan Doyle and a periodical like the Strand, this manoeuvre becomes markedly easier because the magazine featured numerous pieces discussing emerging trends in literature, the visual arts, cinema, theatre and music alongside its original works of fiction. The fiction that featured in the Strand was generally published and read with a strong and coherent set of cultural values that were constructed in relation to (we might initially say in opposition to) ‘modernist’ trends. Thus, the only borders and boundaries that need to be critically acknowledged are those that were being consciously processed at the time. While it is necessary to acknowledge later theoretical contortions, they can be respectfully nudged towards the background. This approach mitigates against the anachronistic desire to retrospectively reclassify Conan Doyle as a covert ‘modernist’ or ‘postmodernist’ writer by which one would simply mean ‘he’s a better writer than is commonly thought’ or worse ‘he is more socially and politically engaged than one might imagine’. One can, for example, read any shopping list of ‘modernist’ concerns, easily see them at work within Doyle’s writing and seek to re-christen him. One could seize on Peter Child’s contrast between The Lost World’s ‘mélange of adventure tropes’ and ‘modernist responses to it’ and gleefully show how Doyle was quite capable of satirising and critiquing those concepts himself.31 Yet if we want to ditch arbitrary divisions between cultures, this move seems instead to heartily reaffirm them. Popular texts, under this schema, achieve critical capital only where they mirror the ‘proper’ concerns of the period. This shows a remarkable lack of faith in the texts themselves to speak interestingly and on their own terms about readers whose chosen forms of art were largely unencumbered by formal and stylistic innovation

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but whose everyday lives were equally affected by the changing times. A comparable case could be made for seeing Conan Doyle and his middlebrow brethren not as fastidious Victorian grumblers but rather as the first wave of guerrilla, postmodernist critique. Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide broadly makes this argument by highlighting the dialogic relationship that existed between modernism and its critiques. From this point of view, those popular writers who directly responded to modernism could be seen as the fathers of postmodernism and thus the true progenitors of late twentiethcentury culture.32 By making this distinction, one can also do away with the simplistic schema whereby postmodernism only occurs after the end of modernism.33 This periodisation harmoniously balances the century’s artistic developments alongside its major historical events and naturally suits the requirements of canon-building and curriculum design. If postmodernism, though, is defined principally as the vehicle for sceptical critiques of modernism (though this is far from the only definition available), then there is no reason for any great gap between the one and the other. They might be more or less simultaneous. Indeed, the benighted ‘divide’ between high and middlebrow culture might just be the misrecognised divide between modernism and postmodernism. By this point, the weary critic might be tempted to angrily conclude that all stratifications between types of writing are social constructions, produced by a remote class of literary technicians whose proclamations are designed to assert their own epistemological supremacy. However, sit any literate person in a library with a random assortment of fiction from the Strand and a collection of stories from the modernist ‘little’ magazines and they could reliably (with a few exceptions) split them into two distinct piles based on evident intrinsic and extrinsic differences. There are instinctual forces at work here that prevent us from abandoning this framework completely and therefore the withered mortmains of ‘modernist’ categorisations past and present cannot be escaped as easily as one might wish. There was much radicalism in popular fiction, but of a creeping, cumulative kind in contrast to the vivid iconoclasm of the Futurists or Vorticists. One can observe the accretion of very small advances or developments in literary form and style alongside slow, geological shifts of long-standing ideology among large groups of people. The importance of fiction in the Strand, and particularly that of Conan Doyle, lies in the fact that, for a large audience over time, multiple texts slowly collected enough revisions and small revelations to gradually unveil a changed world. This is a rather abstract way to

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Introduction

13

approach the question of literature’s role in the evolution of social attitudes but, having established this basic framework, the connection between author and periodical publication becomes particularly significant. It is only by observing these slow changes over time that the Strand’s proper legacy can begin to be discerned. The chapters that follow concern themselves with chronological eras in the careers of the Strand and Conan Doyle. Given that so much writing on the Strand has focused on its early years, the first chapter will look at the appearance of the Strand, its reception in other periodicals and the ways in which its success and burgeoning reputation was parlayed into the emergence of the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon. It then establishes the formula for the magazine’s success in its first decade. The second chapter focuses on questions of science and modernity that clustered around the magazine’s coverage of the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the nineteenth century. The third chapter examines the Edwardian years that saw the first real divergence in the relationship between the Strand and Doyle through the troubled resuscitation of Sherlock Holmes. The fourth chapter looks at the role of the Strand and Doyle as propagandists during the First World War, the fifth at Doyle’s attempts to use the Strand as a spiritualist platform in the post-war years and the conclusion reads their shared commercial and artistic decline of the late 1920s against the rise of new forms of popular culture and mass entertainment. The study concludes in 1930, the year of Conan Doyle’s death and the retirement of the Strand’s long-time editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, both of which events marked the first really decisive break in the magazine’s long history. The remaining twenty years after 1930, however, are also replete with tantalisingly untold stories. It is astonishing to think that the magazine of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles and Jeeves survived long enough to observe and discuss Nazism, the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of the NHS. Yet space and logic precludes essays into this period within the scope of this project.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

‘The Two Conan Doyles’, The Manchester Guardian, 8 July 1930, p. 10. ‘Farewell to the Strand’, The Times, 14 December 1949, p. 5. Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers, p. 196. Wells, The Time Machine, p. 93. Mysteries and Adventures was published by Walter Scott in 1889 and Round the Red Lamp by Methuen in 1894.

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6. The White Company was serialised in the Cornhill throughout 1891 and Sir Nigel in the Strand throughout 1905. 7. Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age, p. 32. 8. See Lightman, ‘Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press’. 9. ‘A Spectator’s Notebook’, p. 5. 10. Wolff and Fox, ‘Pictures from the Magazines’, p. 589. 11. Pittard, ‘ “Cheap, Healthful Literature” ’, p. 3. 12. Green, Letters to Sherlock Holmes, p. 9. 13. ‘The Lion’s Mane’ was one of the two late stories narrated by Holmes rather than Watson and is set in 1907, during the detective’s retirement. It appeared in the Strand’s December 1926 issue. 14. In September 1892 she offered revisions and ‘corrections’ to a lengthy article about her collection of dolls. See Low, ‘Queen Victoria and Her Dolls’. 15. Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism, p. 7. 16. Pittard, ‘ “Cheap, Healthful Literature”, p. 16; Hoberman, ‘Constructing the Turn-of-the-Century Shopper’, p. 4; Chan, The Economy of the Short Story. 17. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, pp. 118–71. 18. Cox and Mowatt, Revolutions from Grub Street. 19. Victorian Periodicals Review used to be Victorian Periodicals Newsletter and was originally published under the banner heading of its parent Victorian Studies journal. 20. Robert Fraser, for example, includes The Lost World in his brisk study of the Victorian Quest Romance. 21. Brooks, ‘The Right Wrong Thing’, pp. 174–5. 22. Ibid., p. 174. 23. ‘The Talk of London’, p. 6. 24. See Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, or Baldick, The Modern Movement. 25. Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle, p. 10. 26. Potter and Trotter, ‘Introduction’, p. iii. See also Potter’s subsequent monograph Obscene Modernism. 27. Hoberman, ‘Vulgar Modernism’, p. 172. 28. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and the Consumer Society’, p. 19. 29. See Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’. 30. On the Mills and Boon novels as symptoms of mass culture, see Jones, ‘Mills and Boon Meets Feminism’. 31. Childs, Modernism and the Post-Colonial, p. 11. 32. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and the Consumer Society’, p. 2. See also Huyssen, After the Great Divide, p. 59. 33. When Linda Hutcheon speculates about the beginning of postmodernism in her seminal A Poetics of Postmodernism, her choices all fall after the end of the Second World War: ‘after 1945? 1968? 1970? 1980?’ (p. 3).

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Chapter 1

The Strand at the Beginning, 1891–1899

Appearances The Strand Magazine was born from the failed partnership between the editor W. T. Stead and the publisher George Newnes, who jointly founded the Review of Reviews in 1889. Their differences were explicitly cultural, centring on the function of journalism and its role within culture. The fallout from their disagreement fed directly into the creation of the Strand and helped to fashion its particular branding and identity. One of these disagreements was prompted by Stead’s desire to serialise Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer Sonata. Stead was mocked in the popular press as a treacherous Russophile; Pick-Me-Up observed that he ‘supports Russia, and denounces Great Britain . . . I do not suggest that anyone should nail Mr Stead’s ears to a pump, because it is a pity to spoil pumps.’1 Stead had not read the Kreutzer Sonata but had discussed it in person with the author on his visit to Russia in 1888. He anticipated it as an assault upon the ‘conventional illusion of romantic love’ and the institution of marriage.2 In contrast to Newnes, Stead’s approach to journalism was famously sensational and confrontational; he cast journalism as the new centre of power at the heart of increasingly literate and democratic states.3 Newnes, conversely, saw his proprietorial publications as a way to build and maintain a comfortable consensus with his readers based upon a reverence for their perceived sensitivities. The short partnership with Stead was legendarily lopsided as a consequence. Newnes was exasperated by the constant threat of ‘damages’ resulting from Stead’s taste for controversial literature, his veneration of spiritualism and, in particular, his attack on The Times for its false accusations against Charles Stewart Parnell in 1887. Stead wrote in the Review that the newspaper’s ‘disastrous campaign of moral assassination’ had left it ‘without prestige’ and mired in ‘catastrophe’.4

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So strident was this opinion piece, even in its altered final draft, that Newnes feared it landing his partner ‘in Holloway with me in the adjoining cell’. Finding himself discomposed by the whole experience, he sought to end the partnership ‘peacefully’.5 At times in their correspondence Newnes seems unable to decide whether he was bothered more by Stead’s blasphemy, his irreverence, his iconoclasm, his slander or his salaciousness. Upon the termination of their partnership, he wrote to Stead with a middlebrow mission statement set directly against the tenets of Stead’s ‘new’ journalism: There is one kind of journalism which directs the affairs of nations; it makes and unmakes cabinets; it upsets governments . . . It is magnificent . . . There is another kind of journalism which has no such great ambitions. It is content to plod on, year after year, giving wholesome and harmless entertainment to crowds of hardworking people . . . That is my journalism.6

This ennobling ‘homily’ is recorded in Hulda Friedrichs’s 1911 biography of Newnes. Stead remembered the conversation ending differently, as he wrote in the Review upon Newnes’s death: I remember talking with Sir George one night at his house at Putney Heath, when he remarked: ‘There are two kinds of journalism. There is one which is very magnificent, very powerful . . . and passes Acts of Parliament. That is your kind of journalism . . . There is another kind of journalism, that of Tit-Bits, which does none of those things but which does gather in the shekels.’7

As Newnes walked away from the Review of Reviews and made his plans for the future he had had quite enough of Stead’s ‘magnificence’. Nevertheless an intertextual relationship would continue between the Review and the Strand through their connection in the minds of reviewers, reciprocal advertising space and in the Review’s generally positive, if condescending, reviews. Stead’s uneasy financial arrangements left him unable to support the Review’s existing staff and, characteristically, Newnes felt obliged to keep the group together, putting them to work almost instantaneously on his new project. The conditions of the Strand’s creation were thus oppositional. The Review was created with excitement and anticipation for the contests and challenges of modernity while the Strand purposefully went into the future with its eyes determinedly focused elsewhere.

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There was a political dimension to these disputes as well as a cultural one. Newnes had initially recruited Stead from the Pall Mall Gazette, a Conservative evening daily that had begun in 1865 but which had switched to the Liberals in 1880 when it was taken over by Henry Yates Thompson. Under Stead’s editorial influence in the 1880s the Gazette became, according to Andrew King, ‘an early proponent of new journalism’ and a natural home for the radical Liberal politics of William Gladstone, whom he often supported.8 Newnes served as the Liberal MP for Newmarket between 1885 and 1895 when he was made a peer. He returned to Parliament in 1900 to represent Swansea Town and served until his death in 1910. A staunch party man, his meagre parliamentary record showed him to represent the more cautious and populist aspects of his party. Like many Liberals of this stripe, he was focused upon the liberating, democratising potential of the market and the aspirational voting bloc of the expanding, professional middle class.9 Stead patronisingly termed him ‘a good Liberal of the old school’.10 In her biography, Friedrichs characterised his political career thus: In the House itself he was generally a silent member, and probably no one seeing him there, cheerful and debonair, if occasionally a little absentminded, when the pressure of his own work was very great, would have guessed that deep down in his heart he was a saddened and disappointed politician . . . He had meant to do such good work for the Liberal cause [but] as the years went by he felt more and more strongly that one man alone could not move the cumbersome parliamentary machine.11

Underneath this, he was essentially a cultural conservative, pitting himself directly against Stead who represented the much more radical side of the Liberal coalition. Nevertheless, the Gazette’s readers, predominantly from the educated middle class but not part of the intellectual elite, were precisely the ‘common men’ of Newnes’s imagination and he coveted them as potential readers for his new monthly magazine. Instinctively he believed that he could appeal to their tastes much more effectively than Stead had been able to. Their disputes firmly influenced Newnes’s image of an ideal reader: a middle-class family man who was active and anxious for self-improvement but without a taste for anything avant-garde. When plotting the new Strand Magazine, he was thus able to project a benign, largely depoliticised vision of Liberal England, shorn of the vicious infighting and political instabilities that had split the party in the 1880s and would again in the

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1910s. This vision was of an England of striving workers, progressive and benign institutions and individual freedoms at the heart of an ethical empire. The Strand’s first advertisements in November 1890 were specifically targeted in Tit-Bits but also the Pall Mall Gazette where, a small footer politely informed the reader that ‘THE printing of THE STRAND MAGAZINE has now BEGUN and will be continued day and night until publication’.12 This was followed by other modestly phrased and positioned adverts on 26 and 30. These small beginnings might seem inconsequential but they hint at Newnes’s delicate understanding of the cultural and intellectual economies of the periodical marketplace and his ability to gather and coalesce a reading community. Before analysing the content of the early issues, it is instructive to examine how the Strand was reviewed elsewhere in the popular press upon its first appearance. It is strange to survey the reaction to the Strand’s first issue, since almost every recent viewpoint commends its ‘newness’ and ‘innovation’. In contrast to this commonplace observation, the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal received the magazine with a studied tedium, beginning simply ‘yet another’ before adding that ‘it is not badly got up’. It did, though, specifically condemn the Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times in Their Lives section (featuring Alfred Tennyson, John Lubbock, Henry Irving and H. Rider Haggard among others) as ‘hav[ing] very little interest either for the educated or the hoi polloi. We are already surfeited with the photos of these shop window celebrities.’13 This ennui was understandable; the phenomenon of the illustrated monthly magazine had indeed been in full swing for some years. Golden Hours (1864), London Society (1862) and the Savoy (1865) all ran into the late 1880s and featured some mixture of fiction, current affairs and human interest content. In the 1880s there was a second wave of ‘shilling monthly’ magazines including Art and Letters (1888), the Bookworm (1881) and the market-leading English Illustrated Magazine (1883). The Strand’s principal claims to distinction were the relatively low price of sixpence and a comparatively lavish number of illustrations, diagrams and photographs. In this context, the world-weariness of the Freeman’s Journal makes even more sense. The glorious future of the Strand was, at this point, entirely unpredictable. Of the countless reviews of the Strand’s first number, certain qualities were repeatedly highlighted as being of interest to readers. Portraits of Celebrities was mentioned, as was the high number of

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illustrations, the noticeable influence of American magazines, the number of translated stories, the role of Newnes, his association with Tit-Bits and the institutional portraits of the Animal Hospital, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and the Thames River Police. Its prospects for success were agreed to be fair to moderate. The Birmingham Daily Post asserted that the English Illustrated Magazine ‘ha[d] yet no rival’ despite the Strand aping ‘some of the lighter features of that admirable magazine’ and being, for all its sins, ‘bright’, ‘clever’ and ‘entertaining’.14 The most frequently used word in the reviews was ‘capital’ which seems an appropriately moderate expression of approbation for a solid, if unoriginal venture. These judgements were necessarily revised, however, when the first issue of the Strand sold over 300,000 copies and was elevated to the forefront of the periodical marketplace.15 The Pall Mall Gazette of 6 February contained a huge advertisement that trumpeted the triumph: The phenomenal sale of No. 1 of the STRAND MAGAZINE makes the appearance of No. 2 peculiarly interesting. The sale of No. 1 extended to the hitherto unheard-of total of 350,000. It is an interesting fact that not one single copy has been returned to us from the trade. It is probable that had we been able to print No. 1 fast enough we could have sold half a million.16

Kate Jackson suggests that Newnes’s success with the Strand was principally attributable to his ‘established reputation as a publisher’ and his aptitude for ‘promoting his magazine prior to its appearance’.17 In testament to this, adverts almost overlap with positive reviews in the Gazette which opined: Good in many respects as the first number of the Strand Magazine was, the second issue shows a very marked improvement. It is a home-made Harper. The articles are each excellent, and the illustrations are worthy of them.18

The column then contained a lengthy extract from the symposium article ‘Letters from Artists on Ladies’ Dress’ which ran in the Strand’s first issue. The Strand was widely advertised, well positioned against comparable publications and was able to live up to those expectations in its lavish first edition. It found a harmonious balance between novelty and familiarity, and between luxury and affordability.

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Newnes integrated his magazine with his potential readers’ lives through specifically targeted daily newspapers and by banking upon both his reputation and the reputation of Tit-Bits, which was circulating 600,000 copies a week by the early 1890s.19 He was thus able to broadcast a clear image of his publication to the reading public. The key qualities that the magazine embedded into this campaign were as follows: a middlebrow miscellany blending the high-minded Review of Reviews with the mass appeal of Tit-Bits; high-quality continental fiction; a clear avoidance of anything salacious or sensational; the cultivation of a high-toned sense of ‘celebrity’ focused on public figures as much as on actresses or singers; and, finally, non-fiction pieces which explained modern life and institutions in light-hearted, uncritical prose. Newnes wrote, in relation to his Tit-Bits readership, that ‘they care for things that cheer and make them laugh, and lead them momentarily away from their own more or less drab lives, into an atmosphere of fun and merriment’.20 Greenhough Smith’s curation of the magazine’s fiction was a crucial component of this nascent popularity. He would later explain the Strand’s cultural attitude towards fiction in a diary entry. However irresponsible those early short-story writers of ours seem to our war-tried, more mature generations . . . they did not fashion their plots out of man’s bewilderments and fears; nor did they have any part in the brutal disillusioning process to which many of the new writers put their gifts.21

In 1921 Smith used his considerable connections to assemble a booklength symposium on modern authorship called What I Think. Contributors included the most famous names in the Strand’s stable: P. G. Wodehouse, W. W. Jacobs, Cyril ‘Sapper’ McNeile, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Philips Oppenheim, Jerome K. Jerome, Hugh Walpole and George Bernard Shaw among others. In one section they were asked to comment upon ‘the book I shall never write’.22 Ian Hay summed up the ideal middlebrow relationship between author and reader: Your steady reader does not like his oats changed. Once he has decided what you are – a realist, a feminist, or a humorist, or what not – he sees to it that you remain humbly and reverently in that station to which Vox Populi has appointed you . . . If I were to join that frankly morbid school of soul-dissectors and sex-analysts who are enjoying (so far as they are capable of enjoying anything) so great a vogue today, I should be inundated with protests.23

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Hay, who is now largely forgotten but who was a solidly middlebrow ‘bestseller’ in the 1910s, was simply outlining long-standing Strand editorial policy.24 The Strand’s fiction operated within tight moral and artistic constraints, determinedly defined against the destabilising tendencies of naturalism and early modernism. The Strand’s contents can thus be seen as the result of a three-way pact between the magazine’s editorial staff, its contributors and its readers. The positive response to the first number of the Strand, condescendingly attributed by the Review of Reviews to its colour supplement, ‘so inspirited’ Newnes that he proposed to print a greatly increased number of copies of the second issue.25 The tone was ironic but the relationship it identified was real enough; an ideological pact had been formed between Newnes, his publication and his readers and no party would happily ‘have their oats changed’ for decades to come. In July 1891 Newnes took his publishing company public and declared his intentions, once again in the Pall Mall Gazette: The business consists principally in the publication of the well-known periodicals Tit-Bits and the Strand Magazine. The former was first published in the year 1881, and the circulation is now at the rate of upwards of 550,000 copies per month. Mr Newnes is confident that the business is capable of great development, and he desires to make further provisions for securing the co-operation of those who are able to promote or are interested in such development – viz. Newsagents, booksellers and advertisers. It is this desire which has led to the formation of the company and to the offer now made of a portion of the shares for subscription. Only applications from newsagents, booksellers, bookstall clerks, and advertisers . . . will be considered.26

Descriptions of Newnes’s relationship to his readers often fail to take account of this strategy, which was designed to bind the broader network of advertisers and news-stand owners into the shared community of his success. He understood that the magazine’s initial popularity was precarious and so moved quickly to shore up its foundations by implicating those tradesmen responsible for its sale at street-level into its continued prosperity. This move was the subject of envious sniping from other illustrated publications. Funny Folks, a humorous miscellany, published a satirical column from the illiterate perspective of a newspaper boy: By the way, sir, do you see that the Strand Magazine and Tit-Bits are being turned into an enormous limited liability company, with speshal

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22

Twentieth-Century Victorian fassilities – as shareholders – for the likes of us, who can push their sail? It’s a fact and a ‘cute one too, I call it. Moreover, I’d take some shares like a shot if I had the £ s. D. – speshly the £. I have it not. But not so my boss – he’s got a stocking full of savings somewhere or other, and has taken shares galore. You should see how he’s pushing the July Strand. I hope you won’t sack me sir, when I tell you that I push F. F.27

Even at this early stage, the Strand had become a coveted property on the periodical marketplace, the subject of speculation and interest from those publications that it was outselling. As the subject of reviews, the provider of extracts, anecdotes, reprinted interviews and gossip, the magazine filled the pages of other periodicals both national and local. The ‘Illustrated Interview’ with Cardinal Manning in July 1891, for example, provided anecdotes that were reprinted countless times in the wider press. All of this occurred before the appearance of Sherlock Holmes in the magazine, and so those famous stories cannot claim to have solely precipitated its enduring success. Nevertheless, they certainly raised it from a notable publishing success to a fully fledged cultural phenomenon. After ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ appeared in July 1891, it took no time for Holmes, Watson and Conan Doyle to be deployed as representative images of the Strand’s identity, a development evidenced by their inseparability in the minds of contemporary reviewers. The Sheffield Independent of 16 July wrote, with considerable foresight, that the stories [in the July Strand] are all sensational and worth reading, especially the detective story entitled ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. This is not at all the common type of detective story, with which we are getting very familiar . . . Altogether the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are likely to prove interesting.28

The stories instantly displaced the parts of the magazine that had traditionally been highlighted by reviewers. Reviews in the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the Hampshire Advertiser, the Glasgow Herald and the Aberdeen Weekly Advertiser throughout the following months never failed to mention the inclusion of a new ‘Sherlock Holmes story’ in their reviews.29 The process had begun by which the fame of the stories and their association with the magazine would be solidified by the same network of national and regional newspapers that had reviewed and advertised the magazine since it began. So close was this association that, upon the conclusion of the Adventures,

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the Review of Reviews was led to express patronising concern for the Strand’s endurance: ‘Having no longer the attraction of Sherlock Holmes, the Strand Magazine is lucky in having still Mrs Meade’s series Stories from the Diary of a Doctor to please lovers of the sensational.’30 While Holmes was anything but the ideal Strand reader, there is a clear sense in which the stories played an ambassadorial role for the magazine throughout popular culture. Of Holmes’s connection to the Strand, Hulda Friedrichs has written that The name of Sherlock Holmes was almost synonymous with that of the Strand. It was in its pages where the prince of detectives appeared one day out of nowhere, it might be said, since, so far, he had not attained the world-wide celebrity in store for him. The Strand had leapt into popularity with its first number; with the arrival of Sherlock Holmes it entered upon the period where it had to be sent to press a month before the date of publication, keeping the machines working till the day it was put upon the bookstalls.31

Conan Doyle’s bond with the magazine and the astonishing success of the stories would provide him with a curious mixture of wealth, prestige, criticism and no little restlessness. He was first led to the Strand by desperation as much as anything else. His diaries and commonplace books for 1889 and 1890 are largely concerned with two subjects: his failure to achieve publication with some manuscripts and his dissatisfaction with the meagre terms under which others had been published. His accession to literary celebrity served as a marker for Ashley’s ‘age of the storyteller’, a euphemistic term that really describes the professionalisation of popular fiction writing. Conan Doyle was in many ways fortunate that he arrived at a kind of literary maturity precisely when the periodical marketplace was providing increasing opportunities to reach large readerships and make money. The appearance of the Holmes stories in the Strand and the serialisation of The White Company in the Cornhill (both in 1891) enabled him to break from his nominal ‘employment’ as an ophthalmologist. In doing so, he was not making a Wordsworthian retreat towards literature but instead moving sideways from one profession to another, considerably more profitable one. The change was facilitated as much by his short stories as by his novels, though The White Company, The Firm of Girdlestone and Micah Clarke were all still providing him with both income and cultural prestige.32 In 1889, however, stories like ‘The Great Brown-Pericord Motor’ and ‘The Physiologist’s Wife’ as well as his critical article ‘Mr. Stevenson’s

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Methods in Fiction’ wended a weary passage between Tit-Bits, Cornhill, Blackwood’s, the Fortnightly Review, the National Review and the Nineteenth Century in search of acceptance. In 1890 Conan Doyle saw an increase in the profits from his work, especially after The Sign of Four was serialised in Lippincott’s Monthly. ‘Offer from Warne and Co. of £125 for shilling shocker. Refused’ reads the entry for Friday 14 March, 1890.33 This refusal was significant because Warne were peddlers of cheap, sensational literature only marginally lower in Conan Doyle’s eyes than Ward, Lock and Co., which had published A Study in Scarlet. His new financial stability enabled him to focus on completing The White Company which would feature, to Doyle’s triumph, in the rarefied pages of the Cornhill for which he had ‘reverence’.34 In October 1890 he finished a much less significant work, a short story called ‘The Voice of Science’, which he unsuccessfully sent to Figaro. While this rejection was painful, it enabled the story to be published anonymously in the Strand Magazine’s March issue the following year. ‘The Voice of Science’ was an unremarkable story made interesting by the way in which it helped to establish many tropes that would become Strand archetypes in the years to come. It sat somewhat uneasily between translated stories from Alphonse Daudet, Paul Heyse, Michael Lermontoff, Léo Lespès and Alexander Pushkin. These European writers had been chosen because of the high reputation of continental short fiction and because the stories could be selectively plucked and translated from existing bodies of work. Lermontoff, Lespès and Pushkin also had the inestimable virtue of being dead, meaning that their work could be used in the same way that Newnes had grafted press clippings to form the body of Tit-Bits. This was a clever cultural manoeuvre because it enabled Newnes to claim the works as high art while choosing particular kinds of conventional story, isolating them and having them translated into syrupy English prose that was unlikely to scare off any of his readers. By contrast ‘The Voice of Science’, like Grant Allen’s ‘A Deadly Dilemma’ in the Strand’s first issue, offered a snappy and plainly told romance narrative. In the story, a young woman, Rose Esdaile, has trouble choosing the right fiancée. Her mother, a lady of ‘remarkable scientific attainments’, has brought a phonograph into the family home for the purpose of recording a scientific lecture she has organised.35 Rose is enamoured of an army captain, Charles Beesly, and seems keen to accept his proposal during the coming evening. Rose’s brother, Rupert, has heard rumours about Beesly’s shady past and decides to trap him into a confession using the phonograph: ‘Slowly his hands emerged from his pockets as his eye fell upon the apparatus,

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and with languid curiosity he completed the connection and started the machine.’36 Here we see a dull story, worn thin through use and reuse. Yet with his spark of inspiration, Rupert Esdaile connects some wires and gives the story, like the magazine in which it featured, the superficial air of modernity. Esdaile records himself challenging Beesly on his past indiscretions and plays the recording before an assembled party, from which Beesly flees. ‘The Voice of Science’ ends with a pertinent illustration by W. S. Stacey (Fig. 1.1) that shows Beesly’s flight. The door to the Esdaile house is ajar leading light to spill out; the happy, genteel party has been restored to its position of security. The ideological and ethical menace of the lustful Beesly has been banished by the new auspices of scientific surveillance. The middle-class home, the ideological fortress at the heart of the Strand, is secured by the expulsion of the unwelcome intruder.

Figure 1.1 Illustration by W. S. Stacey taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, Strand Magazine, March 1891, pp. 312–17, p. 317.

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By March, when ‘The Voice of Science’ appeared, Conan Doyle was settled in London, working in his barren oculist’s practice on Wimpole Street where the first two Sherlock Holmes stories would be finished. When they were ready, his agent A. P. Watt’s first instinct was to send them to Greenhough Smith at the Strand, with whom he had so recently been successful. Had the stories been sent anywhere else first and had they appeared in a magazine not experiencing its own surge of early popularity, it is difficult to imagine their endemic popularity being repeated. They appeared just at the moment when the name of the Strand was spreading dramatically through the periodical landscape and capturing a huge readership. In any case, the success of Holmes made it clear to Smith and Newnes that readers were considerably more interested in contemporary domestic fiction than in decades-old continental writing. Over time, this brought the magazine’s fiction content much more into line with its non-fiction writing on contemporary everyday life. As Conan Doyle acclimatised to the first surge of public interest and began to write additional stories for the series, he succumbed to a fever that nearly killed him and from which he emerged changed: For a week I was in great danger, and then found myself as weak as a child and as emotional, but with a mind as clear as crystal. It was then, as I surveyed my own life, that I saw how foolish I was to waste my literary earnings in keeping up an oculist’s room in Wimpole Street, and I determined with a wild rush of joy to cut the painter and to trust for ever to my power of writing . . . I should at last be my own master.37

This liberation was facilitated not through the painstaking labour of his historical novels, but through his short stories. Soon he would be able to gauge his own burgeoning celebrity through the same periodical press upon which the Strand had left such marked footprints in the preceding months. After 1891 a huge drift of reviews, notices, corrections, interviews, satires, gossip pieces and long critical pieces would refer to him, use his image and solidify the connections between him, the Strand and Holmes. His appearances and mentions in the Bookman, for example, were so numerous that an entire volume has been published to collect them together for the benefit of Sherlockian scholars.38 Amid this proliferation, however, there remains an interesting question as to how well the Holmes stories and Conan Doyle’s values more generally fitted into the Strand as a whole. Jackson observes that

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the success of the Strand was also dependent upon the editor-publisher’s editorial experience, and his creation of close affective and social ties with a circle of readers and contributors . . . Appeals to ‘loyalty’ and ‘friendship’ were a common Newnesian ploy . . . Appearing at a time when its middle and upper middle class readers were beset by the forces of change and anxiety over a variety of social problems, [it provided] them with security, stability, a sense of ‘immutable British order’.39

That final phrase was taken from Stephen Knight’s hugely influential Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Without much recourse to the actual contents of the magazine, Knight nevertheless outlined his argument that the readers of the Strand identified with Holmes’s clients, ‘daunted by the puzzling and mundane nature of their experience’ and found ‘comfort’ in Holmes’s grandeur.40 While their relationship would fluctuate dramatically over the next four decades, Conan Doyle’s stories and the magazine as a whole marched through the early 1890s more or less in ideological lockstep.

The Strand, Property and the Law of Exchange In many ways, the Holmes stories served to underline the professional ethics of the magazine itself as well as Newnes’s political vision. We can see this particularly through the representation of money, wages and contemporary employment practices. In ‘A Case of Identity’, James Windibank marries an older woman, Mrs Sutherland, both for her money and for the money of her daughter, Mary. His lifestyle rests upon keeping Mary a dependent in his house and so he disguises himself as a suitor named Hosmer Angel and presses her for an oath of faithfulness before abandoning her on the chapel steps. It was, like many of the Holmes stories, a mystery of capital, a tale of monetary appropriation and distribution. As Knight and many others writing in his wake have observed, the stories depict an ordered society but one subject to interference and assailment from outsiders who seek to distort the tightly woven economies which regulate it. These economies included the market value for waged employment, the codes of conduct within domestic romance, a clearly gendered understanding of familial roles, a class structure which pivoted around the middle class and, finally, the assumed primacy of Britain within both the European political economy and its own colonial hierarchy. James Windibank is a semi-itinerant social climber who ‘travels’ for claret importers ‘Westhouse and Marbank’.41 These details provide

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him with a professional identity of exactly the kind that his alter ego, Hosmer Angel, purposely avoids: ‘Mr Angel was a cashier in an office in Leadenhall Street – and –’ ‘What Office?’ ‘That is the worst of it Mr Holmes, I don’t know.’ ‘Where did he live then?’ ‘He slept on the premises . . . [I addressed my letters] to the Leadenhall Post-Office, to be left till called for.’42

Financial details pepper the story. We discover that Mary’s private income derives from the 4% annual interest on £2,500 of stock held in New Zealand. We also learn that Hosmer Angel made no attempt to procure a dowry before his disappearance and that Mr Windibank lived a lifestyle that seemed suspiciously beyond his means. Why do these details occur with such frequency throughout the story? Doyle’s unpoetic style and uncluttered plotting meant that where a detail about a character was noted, it was either a false lure to purposely derail the readers’ expectations or a clue that Holmes would sooner or later be called upon to interpret. Here, a traceable presence within the economy provided a means by which individuals could be classified and surveilled. Angel’s conspicuous lack of such a presence alerted Holmes to his unreality. Franco Moretti equates criminality in the Holmes stories with a violation of the ‘perfect balance’ of supply and demand and ‘the law of exchange’.43 Thus the acceptance of a low salary or seemingly excessive rewards signalled the occurrence of antisocial or criminal activities. Time and again throughout the Adventures and Memoirs series plots are driven by disruptions of this kind. In ‘The Copper Beeches’, a governess, Violet Hunter, is hired at an excessive wage to act as an unwitting substitute for the imprisoned daughter of the family. In ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’, Hall Pycroft is lured away from his banking job with the offer of a much increased salary so that his position can be taken by a criminal impersonator. In ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, Victor Hatherley is rescued from under-employment by an obscene offer of ‘fifty guineas for a night’s work’ to covertly fix a forger’s press.44 Money, due to its high visibility in the way the stories are told, functions as a sensitive cortex to the underworld of criminality. The subterranean actions of criminals can be intuited from the surface twitches and ruptures in the law of exchange. ‘The Red-Headed League’ exemplified this relationship by representing the fictional world of the stories as a delicately balanced

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and interconnected system where each participant benefited from recognising the inherent value of their position without striving to accrue surplus value or accepting less than they were worth. The first action of the plot (though it is one of the last details to be revealed) is that the City and Suburban Bank strengthened its gold resources by borrowing a large amount of bullion from the French government. This artificial augmentation of value (which was supposed to remain secret) remained in one site: the bank’s Coburg branch.45 This attracted the attention of the criminal network to which the chief villain, John Clay, belonged. All subsequent perversions of the law of exchange resulted from this one temptation, including John Clay’s acceptance of a half-wage to work for Jabez Wilson and the League’s offer to Jabez of ‘nominal’ employment for a ludicrously high wage.46 This continues to the story’s conclusion where Holmes mentions the ‘small expenses’ that he incurred during his investigation and which he ‘expect[ed] the bank to refund’.47 Money broadcasts intention and, as Holmes understands, excessive outlays can only mean deferred, illicit profits at some point in the future. Wilson is pushed ‘outside the conventions and the humdrum routine of everyday life’ and ‘off the beaten track’ by his proximity to the gold reserves. His ordinariness is emphasised in relation to his benign, self-sustaining financial life. He earns enough to make ‘a living’ and ‘keep a roof over [his] head and pay [his] debts . . . if nothing more’.48 He was linked to the Coburg bank by the ‘immense stream of commerce’ that flowed next to his ‘faded and stagnant square’.49 His story is thus an archetypal parable of the persecuted ‘middle’, an honest tradesman placed in danger by an irresponsible financial elite on the one hand, and a ruthless, avaricious criminal underclass on the other. The Holmesian method in these cases is almost always to follow the money. For example, the ‘resistless, inexorable evil’ that John Openshaw described in ‘The Five Orange Pips’ can be reduced to the fact that, when in America, his father stole papers that implicated ‘some of the first men in the South’ in involvement with the Ku Klux Klan.50 The series of violent disasters that persecute his family in England are in fact the violent outlay of wealthy men’s capital as they seek to preserve their liberty and status. In ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’, meanwhile, Neville St Clair sets himself up in ‘a good style’ within the new commuter belt of Sussex. Yet instead of the clean money flowing from his ‘interest in several companies’, it is all paid for by his unusual career of begging in disguise on the London streets. The principal clue to Holmes unravelling the mystery lies in the discovery of a coat weighted down

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with ‘pennies and half pennies’.51 Holmes is called, then, to effectively police the borderline between streams of legitimate and illegitimate income. St Clair balked at the prospect of ‘arduous work at 2 pounds a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still’.52 Holmes restores St Clair to his large family villa on the understanding that he immediately rejoin the ranks of waged commuters. Finally, in ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, the educated working-class Brunton serves as butler to the oafish aristocrat Musgrave. His intelligence and articulacy impress all Musgrave’s visitors and his employer still retains bemusement that he ‘should have been satisfied so long in such a position’.53 This provides the key to Brunton’s eventual disappearance and death. He solves a centuries-old riddle and discovers the secret burial place of what he believes to be a lost royal fortune. He was happy to remain in the job only because he held designs upon the mislaid fortune apparently concealed somewhere on the Musgrave estate. Just as the Holmes stories came to dominate the public’s perception of the Strand, so they influenced its early changes of direction. The most notable change was the aforementioned transition from continental to domestic short stories. Some of these, like Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt and James Muddock’s Dick Donovan detective series, directly mimicked aspects of Sherlock Holmes, but many others were just plainly narrated stories about the lives and loves of the middle classes, echoing ‘The Voice of Science’ much more obviously. In these largely forgotten stories, we find a similar ideological preoccupation with work and the fruits of professional labour and family life. By 1893 the transformation of the magazine’s fiction was almost complete and the number of French stories had been cut to one in each issue. The March 1893 issue memorably opened with a story called ‘A Game of Chess’ set in the sixteenthcentury court of Philip II. No author or translator was identified but a little note marked the prose as being ‘from the French’.54 Yet these boutique, historical narratives were becoming increasingly outnumbered by a swell of domestic fiction. These developments focused the magazine’s gaze upon the peoples and places of everyday life and, as a consequence, fashioned a more clearly coherent worldview. It became preoccupied with the imagined concerns of the reader: marriage, the acquisition and maintenance of a home, the institutions of social order and, particularly, the intimate concerns of waged, white-collar labour. These were the

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concerns of the clients in the Holmes stories but here they could be served neat, without the thrilling but unreliably bohemian mediation of Holmes himself. As Winnie Chan argues, the short story as a kind of prestige art form, its aesthetic criteria, its critical reception and its deep entrenchment in popular taste were absolutely conditioned by the business practices of the monthly magazines like the Strand and its imitators. These models discouraged both the artistic autonomy of the author and whatever residual notions of creative genius had survived from Romantic theories of authorship.55 E. W. Hornung’s ‘Author! Author!’ made tragedy from juxtaposing the respective plights of two writers who take different paths through the era of professionalisation.56 The unnamed narrator opines in later life that ‘writing wasn’t in those days what it is now. I am thinking less of merit than of high prices, and less of high prices than of cheap notoriety.’57 His friend, Pharazyn, ruins himself by giving up all his journalistic and fictional work in order to devote himself fruitlessly to becoming a playwright. As Pharazyn becomes a peripatetic, his former friend acquires all the trappings of worldly, authorial success. The story touches on many issues including the changing cultural hierarchy of fiction, journalism and theatre as well as the whims of literary fashion. Yet its core is the contrast between the two writers: one able to produce regular, workmanlike prose for a ‘weekly cheque’ and the other touched by ‘genius’, but who invests his whole life into his work and thereby finds his ruin. Professional identities and the ethics of work also play into Walter Besant’s ‘One and Two’ where a young undergraduate named Will Challice finds himself torn between a life of idle dreaming and professional advancement. ‘I have not yet decided,’ he arrogantly wonders; ‘The Church, to raise the world. The Law, to maintain the social order. The House, to rule the nation. Literature, Science, Art – which?’58 He finds a war waging within himself between the lure of idleness and the pressures of hard work. At Cambridge he becomes too preoccupied with getting drunk and reading French novels until, like Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, he encounters a doppelgänger who embodies his ‘Intellectual’ side and who begins to take over his life. His personality thus splits into the ‘Intellectual’ and the ‘Animal’ and he finds himself bewildered, watching his other self achieve great worldly success. Unlike the Poe story to which it owes a clear debt, there is a didactic, almost juvenile moral to the story. ‘William Wilson’ expertly left readers suspended in Todorov’s moment of fantastic ‘hesitation’ between mundane and supernatural explanations for the strange events.59 Besant’s story is far less deft as he confusedly seeks

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to effect a reunification between the two sides of Challice’s personality. The ‘Intellectual’ realises the need for the ‘Animal’ in order to seal his courtship of the limpid love interest Nell. By tethering a fantastic narrative to a set of mundane conventions, the story makes a mess of its own moral. The lazy Challice is thus able to coast drunkenly through university while his ‘Intellectual’ patsy does all the hard work and acquires a prestigious career in the law before becoming whole again just in time for his wedding night. Meanwhile, in Marianne Kent’s ‘A Dark Transaction’, the narrator introduces himself as ‘John Blount, commercial traveller’.60 He finds his enjoyable life of business and travel compromised by the illness of his new wife. In hurrying to her bedside, he misses a crucial train and finds himself desperately rushing on foot through a tunnel where he is almost killed by an oncoming train. In missing his train and abandoning his usual work duties, Blount falls between the cracks of his secure lifestyle and ends up swapping clothes with a convict who saves his life. The majority of these stories are variations upon this basic structure: the ordered world is kept turning by the honest labours of the professional class until some disruption pulls them away from their routine. These domestic narratives were complemented by imperial adventure stories such as Charles J. Mansford’s Shafts From an Eastern Quiver series and W. Clark Russell’s ‘The Major’s Commission’. Russell’s story offered a reheated version of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, with characters contesting the ownership of valuable Indian diamonds lost in the fallout of the 1857 Mutiny. More interestingly, Mansford’s stories have been identified by Ronald R. Thomas as key to understanding the Strand’s complicity in the rise of the New Imperialism.61 The stories, like those of his later Africa-set series Gleams from the Dark Continent, are astonishingly crude popular variations upon the patterns established by Kipling’s short fiction and the quest romances of Arthur Quiller-Couch and H. Rider Haggard. These debts were acknowledged by contemporary reviews which euphemistically noted that ‘the short story’ was ‘not the work in which Mr Mansford is likely to establish a reputation’.62 The interminable Quiver series lasted for ten instalments running through a catalogue of stereotypes and tropes from the orientalist playbook. Mansford seemed determined to prove Patrick Brantlinger’s charitable view of the quest romance wrong when he claimed that it was not ‘inherently racist, but rather its conventions mapped easily onto the polar oppositions of racism’.63 The stories describe the picaresque adventures of two Englishmen, Harold and Frank, as they

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travel around Persia and Arabia. They are assisted and guided by a subservient ‘native’ called Hassan who they refer to as their ‘nigger’.64 In the first story, ‘The Diamonds of Shomar’s Queen’, Hassan leads the Englishmen to a lost city carved into a remote and dangerous crevasse. They are able to trick their way past the gate, abuse the sole elderly ‘crone’ guarding it, steal a priceless necklace from the statuesque corpse of the tragic, eponymous princess and blast their way out by demolishing a wall. As Frank approaches the princess’s body, he suffers a moment’s unease: ‘it seemed like robbery to remove the diamonds, but they are useless to the dead, and to us mean an immense fortune’.65 Underpinning the stories is an unquestioned belief in the idea of the wider world, especially the Orient, as a dramatic stage upon which traditional models of masculine dominance could be performed in the accrual of great wealth. The transposition of the quest romance form from the novel to the linked series format degraded an already glaringly unsubtle collection of generic characteristics. In his examination of the genre, Edward Said wrote that the quest romance revival in the late Victorian period was psychologically freeing for readers used to the default tragic mode of much realist or psychological fiction. According to this logic, the ‘tragically, or sometimes comically blocked protagonists’ of realist fiction become gradually substituted by an alternative – not only in the novel of frank exoticism and confident empire, but travel narratives, works of colonial exploration and scholarship . . . we discern a new narrative progression and triumphalism.66

The liberating freedom of the quest narrative form, then, was part of an ecstatic exculpation from imperial guilt that Thomas also identified as a crucial component of the New Imperialist cultural phenomenon. For the Strand, the British model of imperialism was a historical necessity, a moral obligation and, directly or indirectly, a reliable generator of simplistic narratives. The connection between domestic and adventure narratives was underlined beautifully by a later story, Austin Philips’s ‘The Boy Who Read Kipling’. Here, the young hero, Harry Bassett, solves all of his romantic and financial problems by assiduously studying his eponymous author hero. His ‘cleanly, finely Philistine’ bookshelf contains ‘some Doyle’s, some Q’s . . . a stray Stevenson’ and ‘in one red magnificent row, a dozen or more Kiplings’.67 In a scene of almost comically earnest frenzy, a job interview ends triumphantly as his interviewer

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recognises Harry as ‘a White man’ and the two men depart, arm in arm, reciting ‘If’ together.68 In provincial banking careers as in orientalist adventures, perceived impediments and objections simply melt away in the world of the Strand’s stories. Mansford and his ilk helped to establish an imperial framework within which to understand the rhythms of everyday life at home. Domestic comfort was underpinned by the thrill of foreign adventures and the two economies were mutually supportive. Interestingly, Mansford’s adventurers are able to cash in their discovery by sending it home to London, contributing to the very consumerism celebrated elsewhere in the magazine. The diamonds were bought from us eventually by a syndicate of London merchants . . . The wearers of them, as they see the light sparkling from the gems, little suppose that they are adorned with the diamonds of Shomar’s queen.69

So, even while the narratives roam through the remote deserts and oases of fevered Western imaginations, the gravitational pull of the Imperial centre assures the legitimacy of their efforts as well as guaranteeing their immense financial rewards. Ruth Hoberman makes a convincing case for the Strand’s deep complicity in new styles of middle-class consumerism. She takes Walter Benjamin’s argument about the depreciation of the artobject’s ‘aura’ in the age of mechanical reproduction and shows how the Strand valorised the mass-produced commodities that filled the middle-class home. This kind of ‘respectable’ consumerism was privileged over the profligate, indulgent model of aristocratic art collection.70 The Holmes stories repeatedly narrated bourgeois anxieties about the security of these hard-won symbols of comfort and success. The Strand’s non-fiction also established a long-running narrative about the progressive evolution of security and surveillance technologies. An 1894 piece entitled ‘Thieves v. Locks and Safes’ offers a case in point: Ever since man has been possessed of anything worth keeping, some other man has been at work to get it away from him without paying for it . . . When jewels and money came into fashion, and people used houses with doors to them, things became more orderly, and a gentleman who wanted another gentleman’s property had to go about the matter quietly.71

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The article reinforced the idea of criminality as an emanation from without. There was a clear sense of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, which occurred either side of a momentous development where ‘things become more orderly’. This development implicitly refers to the middle-class ‘consumer revolution’ of the eighteenth century when the spending habits and lifestyle choices of the new petit bourgeois classes were enshrined within British culture.72 By this logic, criminality becomes an atavistic echo or an unfortunate hangover from the primordial and less orderly ‘before’. This view meshed with the Holmes stories because it helped to position all crime as a kind of innate perversion in the criminal and thus effaced its social context. In this way, the image of the criminal was constructed as an exterior presence, picking the locks of society as a whole with malicious intent. The assidiously cultivated image of the reader was that of a precarious subject whose position in the world and accrual of capital were under threat. This idea was later reinforced in the social exploration literature of George R. Sims whose Off the Track in London and Trips About Town series detailed the adventures to be found while ‘unveiling how the poor live’.73 He maps out the ‘alien land’ of the immigrants and the ‘guilt gardens’ of the slums that shocked Strand readers could find only ‘a few minutes’ away from the ‘wealthiest’ district ‘in the Empire’.74 ‘Grime and crime’ emanate from these places and both threaten to disrupt the cleanliness and the secure consumerism at the heart of the Strand in this period.75 Likewise, an article discussing the assassination of the Austrian Empress Elizabeth by self-styled ‘anarchist’ Luigi Lucheni cast his violent attack as an emanation from the slum: Lucheni had been abandoned even by his mother, and had been brought up in vice and poverty. How could society ever expect such a being to have the least moral perception? He heard his sentence passed and shouted . . . ‘Death to Society’.76

Yet even in these ominous depictions, readers were never left abandoned by Newnes’s broad faith in the efficacy of modern institutions to address social problems or punish offenders. Lucheni, the ‘ceaseless babbler’, was to be buried beneath the grinding silent routine of the modern prison system which would deny him his desired martyrdom.77 Meanwhile, the poor in Sims’s articles were repeatedly offered the prospect of ‘schemes’ to redeem their arduous lives. The Industrial Schools officer, for example, ‘has occasionally to exercise the ingenuity of a Sherlock Holmes’ in addressing his young charges’ truancy.78

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The Strand frequently published portraits of social institutions. Its first few issues contained a series of articles including ‘A Night with the Thames Police’, ‘At the Children’s Hospital’, ‘At the Animal’s Hospital’, ‘Young Tommy Atkins’, The Metropolitan Fire Brigade’, ‘Our Money Manufactory’ and ‘Smuggler’s Devices’.79 In simple terms, the articles displayed a naive faith in the ability of institutions to provide and maintain the conditions under which the safe, unchallenging world of the magazine’s fiction was possible. More broadly, they amplified Newnes’s simplistic, Whiggish narrative of social and cultural progress. ‘Smuggler’s Devices’ and ‘A Night with the Thames Police’ both began by evoking a past in which criminal behaviour (respectively, the smuggling of dutiable commodities and general riparian thuggery) was widespread and unpoliceable. Then they detailed the ways in which technology and modernisation have allowed the modern state to fight winning battles against them. Finally, they predicted a future with an ever-decreasing potential for committing the crime at all: In old times . . . smuggling reached tremendous proportions . . . the country possessed a very long coast difficult to watch everywhere . . . Since the old protective days . . . customs laws have been wonderfully simplified and . . . consequently smuggling as still goes, the old taint in the national blood, is mean, small and petty by comparison.80

The article highlighted the needlessly complex laws of the past as aggravating crime rather than abating it. The implication was that an increasingly advanced technology of surveillance and an increasingly ergonomic legal system had combined to narrow and contain the problem. The article could afford to be humorous as it shrank the contemporary problem down to a series of amusing anecdotes about the measures by which dock workers and sailors attempted to smuggle small amounts of alcohol and tobacco from ships. These figures give themselves away among large crowds to ‘alert’ customs officials by ‘an unusual expression of blank blamelessness’ or a ‘straight ahead’ gaze that ‘looks neither right nor left’.81 The observers seem first to notice an excess of normality in the criminals that signifies the surplus tobacco hidden in a sleeve or boot. These vignettes (and the illustrations that accompanied them) instantly recall the comic fiction of W. W. Jacobs, and thus a serious social ill can be reduced to isolated moments of misguided idiocy. In ‘A Night with the Thames Police’, the author regrets that ‘goods to the value of a million sterling were being neatly appropriated every

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year’ and praises the mercantile collective that, in 1792, formed the ‘Preventative Service’ which, forty years later, would be incorporated into the Metropolitan Police.82 This organisation had ensured that smuggling was ‘played out’ and that its practitioners now counted themselves lucky to escape with ‘a coil or two of old rope’.83 The river policemen were depicted as a collective body whose purity was maintained by living as a community of men. We are told that ‘accommodation is provided for sixteen single men with a library, reading-room and billiard-room’.84 Their efficiency as a bonded unit is also written in bodily terms: It blows cold as we spin past Traitor’s Gate at the Tower, but our men become weather-beaten on the Thames, and their hands never lose their grip . . . They need a hardy frame, a robust constitution . . . At the time of the Fenian scare at the House of Correction, thirty-six hour [shifts] . . . were considered nothing out of the way.85

The intimacy of the relationship between institutional and bodily efficiency is clearly suggested here but is articulated further in the article as the day-to-day duties of the policemen are discussed. Their physical robustness allows them to patrol the river not just to prevent smuggling but also to act as a dragnet preventing the disappearance of bodies and things into the river. Here the emphasis on institutional efficiency begins to fall into context. It is a suture to cover the whole network of anxieties that attend the role of the river. Rivers historically afford the possibility for unauthorised entrances and exits, be they on the large scale (immigration, emigration, invasion) or the small scale (discarded objects, pieces of evidence or the appearance of new diseases). As Rod Edmond notes, Because of their bounded nature island cultures were unusually susceptible to imported disease, their peoples lacking antibodies and the immunity . . . As places of ceaseless arrival and departure islands seemed to promote the ethnic mingling that, according to later nineteenth-century racial science and germ theories of disease, facilitated contagion.86

In terms of non-fiction, 1893 was also significant because it saw the beginning of Henry W. Lucy’s long-running From Behind the Speaker’s Chair series. It would go on to run between January and August for nine years before a brief revival in 1911–12. Lucy was an ideal recruit for the Strand. He had written parliamentary reports for the Pall Mall Gazette in its Conservative incarnation as well as for the

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Daily News, and humorous political reportage for Punch over many years. He kept his Liberal politics largely to himself and used his commission by the Strand to compose funny autobiographical paeans to the Commons as an institution and the personalities that had inhabited it. Tangential as they were, the articles constituted the only straightforwardly political content in the magazine, since interviews with politicians (particularly those in the Illustrated Interview series) tended to focus even more on personality than politics. Even in Lucy’s articles, which were populated with caricatures of prominent politicians, discussion of specific policies or debates was a subsidiary matter. The pieces were largely reflective and concerned with Lucy’s long history observing the habits and rituals of the Commons. Early in the series his sketch of the veteran Liberal Jeremiah Coleman, for example, concluded in the following way: Mr Jeremiah James Colman, still member for Norwich, has sat for that borough since February, 1871, and has preserved, unto this last, the sturdy Liberalism imbued with which he embarked on political life. When he entered the House he made the solemn record that J. J. G. ‘does not consider the recent Reform Bill as the end at which we should rest.’ The Liberal Party has marched far since then, and the great Norwich manufacturer has always mustered in the van.87

According to Reginald Pound, Lucy was initially reluctant to write for the Strand because the necessity of filing a month before publication might blunt any cutting edge from his observations. George Newnes convinced him first by the inducement of £30 for each article and second by the encouragement that Strand readers were not in need of such visceral commentary. He thus wrote ‘not as political analyst nor interpreter but as a journalist’ representing ‘Parliament as a continuing pageant in the life of the nation’.88 The magazine was, however, capable of making eloquent and passionate critiques of governmental and institutional policy. In 1891 there was a long series of articles by Anthony Guest detailing ‘The State of the Law Courts’. His article on criminal trials mounted a strong attack on abuses of power and other injustices suggested to be endemic. London magistrates, for example, discharged ‘the greatest possible number of cases in the shortest possible time’ at the expense of ‘taking notes and depositions’ in case of a mistrial.89 Guest goes on to detail further problems such as the role of nepotism in the selection of magistrates and the unrigorous, biased practices of country justices of the peace, described as a ‘laughing-stock’.90 These articles

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The Strand at the Beginning

39

show that the Strand’s institutional portraits were not solely monocular recapitulations of dominant ideologies. Failures were measured in terms of ‘inefficiency’ and institutional failure to live up to a scientifically informed expectation of regularity and reliability. Institutions, in short, become the bearers of Thomas Gieryn’s list of ‘scientific’ values: ‘objectivity, efficacy, precision, reliability, authenticity, predictability, sincerity, desirability’ and ‘tradition’.91 The law courts were vulnerable to critique precisely because they failed to live up to this set of ideals. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Strand had established its reputation and captured an enormous, loyal readership by effectively creating a vast, multifaceted image of England itself for its readers to inhabit: the inner city, the suburbs, the countryside, the superstructure of society, power relations, cultural history, class hierarchies, the institutions that ruled and regulated it and the wider world over which it held dominion. It is hardly surprising that this image became nostalgically fused in the generational imagination; it was a beautiful, languorous mixture of wilful ignorance, wishful thinking and skilful fantasy. While purporting to give its readers an intimate sense of their environment and of their role within it, the Strand instead told them the lies that they wished to hear. This was certainly Michael Wolff’s judgement of the earlier illustrated magazines: City-dwellers of the socio-economic level of the readership were in a very limited relationship to their surroundings . . . Its main effect, however unconscious, was to protect those to whom and for whom it spoke from too clear or deep an understanding of the complexities of the industrial city and their own role in it.92

When Newnes turned his back on W. T. Stead, he consciously committed himself to the soft liberalism that George Dangerfield identified as moribund at century’s end: Liberalism in its Victorian plenitude had been an easy burden to bear, for it contained – and who could doubt it? – a various and valuable collection of gold, stocks, bibles, progressive thoughts, and decent inhibitions. It was solid and sensible and just a little mysterious . . .93

The doom of ‘liberal England’ came about, according to Dangerfield’s contested thesis, because it made itself an enemy of the ‘progress’ it had purported to champion throughout the preceding century. The Liberal party would be outflanked by two movements,

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women’s suffrage and unionised labour, over which it had previously assumed a proprietorial air of patronage. It became ‘slow’, seeking ‘to impose itself upon behaviour as well [as politics and economics]’ when the nation as a whole was ready to start ‘running very fast and in any direction’.94 The Strand’s vision of England was precisely this doomed fantastical liberalism, self-satisfied with its own narrative of progress while suppressing and turning away from the increasing broiling tensions elsewhere in culture. These ‘fires’, as Dangerfield called them, ‘long smouldering in the English spirit suddenly flared up, so that by the end of 1913 Liberal England was reduced to ashes’.95 This chapter leaves the magazine poised precipitously at the end of the century. It had enjoyed nearly a decade of relatively stable success during which its core values and assumptions had been left unchallenged. This situation would change dramatically and with little warning due to the escalation of an unpleasant and protracted war in South Africa, the death of Queen Victoria and the rise of a new and challenging scientific culture.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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‘Our Pepper Box’, p. 18. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, pp. 149–50. Baylen, ‘W. T. Stead as Publisher and Editor’, pp. 70–84. Stead, ‘Character Sketch: March’, pp. 185–6. Unpublished letter, archives, Churchill College, Cambridge, GBR/0014/ STED. Friedrichs, The Life of Sir George Newnes, pp. 116–17. Stead, ‘The Progress of the World’, p. 13. King and Plunkett (eds), Victorian Print Media, p. 340. Adelman, Gladstone, Disraeli and Later Victorian Politics, p. 69. Stead, ‘The Progress of the World’, p. 13. Friedrichs, The Life of George Newnes, pp. 158–9. Pall Mall Gazette, 22 November 1890, p. 6. ‘Literature’, p. 2. ‘Periodicals for February’, p. 7. Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism, p. 94. Pall Mall Gazette, 6 February 1891, p. 3. Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism, p. 94. ‘What Women Wear’, p. 2. On 14 May 1891 Newnes announced in the Pall Mall Gazette that his firm was printing a weekly run of ‘620,000 COPIES OF TIT-BITS’.

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The Strand at the Beginning 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

41

Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism, p. 48. Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 75. Smith (ed.), What I Think, p. 134. Ibid., pp. 135–6. See Cockburn, Bestseller, pp. 83–6. ‘The Strand Magazine’, Review of Reviews, January 1891, p. 29. ‘George Newnes (Limited)’, Pall Mall Gazette, 2 Thursday 1891, p. 8. ‘Our Book-Stall’, p. 242. ‘The Strand Magazine’, Sheffield Independent, 16 July 1891, p. 2. Royal Cornwall Gazette, 20 August 1891, p. 6; Hampshire Advertiser, 21 November 1891, p. 7; Glasgow Herald, 24 December 1891; Aberdeen Weekly Advertiser, 16 April 1892. ‘The Strand Magazine’, Review of Reviews, February 1894, p. 186. Friedrichs, The Life of George Newnes, p. 122. Kerr, Conan Doyle, p. 13. 1890 diary, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection. Portsmouth Public Library. Doyle, ‘Memories and Adventures (III)’, p. 562. Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, p. 312. Ibid., p. 314. Doyle, ‘Memories and Adventures (IV)’, p. 89. Dahlinger and Klinger (eds), Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle and the Bookman. Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism, pp. 115–17. Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, p. 74. Doyle, ‘A Case of Identity’, p. 253. Ibid., p. 251. Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, p. 137. Doyle, ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, p. 280. Doyle, ‘The Red-Headed League’, p. 201. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 199. Doyle, ‘The Five Orange Pips’, p. 489. Doyle, ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’, p. 630. Ibid., p. 637. Doyle, ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, p. 482. ‘A Game of Chess’, p. 218. Chan, The Economy of the Short Story, pp. 19–20. By the time the story appeared in the magazine, Hornung was engaged to Conan Doyle’s sister Constance. Hornung, ‘Author! Author!’, p. 241. Besant, ‘One and Two’, p. 45. Todorov, ‘The Fantastic’, p. 136. Kent, ‘A Dark Transaction’, p. 362.

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42 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian See Thomas, ‘The Fingerprint of the Foreigner’. ‘Fiction’, The Speaker, 29 December 1894, p. 723. Brantlinger, ‘Race and the Victorian Novel’, p. 138. Mansford, ‘The Diamonds of Shomar’s Queen’, p. 21. Ibid., p. 27. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 226–7. Philips, ‘The Boy Who Read Kipling’, p. 650. Ibid., p. 653. Mansford, ‘The Diamonds of Shomar’s Queen’, p. 28. Hoberman, ‘Constructing the Turn-of-the-Century Shopper’, p. 1. ‘Thieves v. Locks and Safes’, p. 497. Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, p. 26. Sims, ‘In Alien Land’, p. 416. Sims, ‘In the Royal Borough of Kensington’, p. 545. Sims, ‘In Hidden Camberwell’, p. 666. Ridgely, ‘The Assassin of the Empress’, p. 325. Ibid., p. 302. Sims, ‘In the Royal Borough of Kensington’, p. 550. These pieces offered treatments of vets, soldiers, the Royal Mint and Customs and Excise officers, respectively. ‘Smuggler’s Devices’, pp. 417–18. Ibid., p. 419. ‘A Night with the Thames Police’, p. 124. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 126. Edmond, ‘Abject Bodies/Abject Sites’, p. 134. Lucy, ‘From Behind the Speaker’s Chair’, February 1893, p. 199. Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 82. Guest, ‘The State of the Law Courts IV’, p. 85. Ibid., p. 87. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science, p. 1. Wolff and Fox, ‘Pictures from the Magazines’, p. 561. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. vi.

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Chapter 2

Chivalric Machines, 1899–1903

Fine Physiques How did the reluctant creator of Sherlock Holmes, an English radical socialist and a muscle-bound Prussian bodybuilder help to shepherd a vast popular readership out of the Victorian era and into the twentieth century? Despite sounding like a rather unpromising pub joke, this question is crucial to understanding the ways in which Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells and Eugen Sandow combined to combat the first great challenges to the Strand after a decade of extraordinary success. During the period 1899–1903, four epochal events conspired to revolutionise the work of Conan Doyle and the Strand: the Second Boer War, the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the ‘turn’ of the nineteenth century and, finally, the death of Queen Victoria. Literature scholars and students are now frequently taught to deprecate the taxonomical limitations of ‘epochal’ changes. Such boundaries, we are told, are the arbitrary, post facto impositions of subsequent ages. Nevertheless, close observation of Doyle’s work within the broader context of the magazine’s output across this period demonstrates that a series of fundamental shifts took place. In many cases, readers of the Strand were addressed directly as transitional subjects, a collection of people facing unprecedented change. This chapter will examine the ways in which these events were reported, discussed, fictionalised, theorised and rationalised across the magazine. The war in South Africa changed from a minor colonial conflict into a full-blown national crisis. A profusion of non-fiction articles and short stories are testament to this and Doyle’s contributions were particularly influential among them. However, this initial phase merely set the stage for a sustained period between November 1900 and April 1902 (the ‘long’ 1901) when the Strand would broaden these implications into every area of public life and revolutionise hitherto stable aspects of its worldview. Its depiction of science, intraEuropean relationships, domestic politics and the balance of imperial

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power revealed unmistakable signs of sudden and radical change. This period marked the Strand’s commercial peak and saw the serialisation of both The First Men in the Moon and The Hound of the Baskervilles.1 Readers following both of these works began as nineteenthcentury Victorians and ended as twentieth-century Edwardians facing a very different and uncertain future. Through close reading it is possible to unpick the ways in which much-discussed works of fiction were enmeshed within these changes and to demonstrate how a periodical such as the Strand could deploy multiple, sometimes contradictory voices to generate a new image of the world. Figure 2.1 shows Eugen Sandow in the Strand Magazine of October 1901. Against the backdrop of the war and its attendant fears and anxieties, how did the image of one man’s physique come to be accorded any cultural, political and military significance? Sandow

Figure 2.1 Photograph by Arthur Weston taken from ‘Sandow in Plaster of Paris’, Strand Magazine, October 1901, pp. 461–8, p. 463.

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began his career as a performer in Florenz Ziegfeld’s circus in the late 1880s and became hugely popular with British audiences. He made his mark on the cultural landscape with various publications including memoirs, exercise regimens, a magazine (Sandow’s) and a series of speculations upon the benefits of regular exercise. His work stimulated a long debate on the state of the British body and coincided with an ongoing, increasingly fractious row over the underperformance of the British army. Alan Ramsay Skelley, for example, argued that the Boer campaign of 1899 showed up ‘faults in training and organisation’ which had ‘not been solved between 1856 and 1899’.2 The Victorian British army finally ran aground in 1899 and was forced into rapid and violent modernisation as well as a careful examination of the men who filled its ranks. The latest incarnation of this debate was partly conducted under the banner of ‘physical culture’ and was made up of a wide-reaching series of public discourses and governmental inquiries that sought ways to guard against the weakening and enfeeblement of the British body. These debates were stimulated by a battery of anxieties including the fear of imperial decay, bodily degeneration, the growth of tertiary industry, the death of chivalry and the uncertain future of ‘Victorian’ ideals. Voluminous research on the subject of Victorian masculinities has confirmed that such preoccupations were commonplace in other areas of late Victorian culture, but it is a concept about which the Strand appears to shows a sudden and blinding awareness as a result of the South African conflict. A reader’s-eye view of this period reveals the huge depth of concern and fascination with the war. George Dangerfield characterised the conflict as a watershed moment for the public perceptions of empire, describing it as the time that ‘England discovered how much blood it cost to run an Empire, particularly when that blood was spent in the prolonged and frequently ludicrous pursuit of a number of undaunted Dutch farmers’.3 For Conan Doyle, his service in a private hospital in South Africa, his candidature for the parliamentary seat of Central Edinburgh in 1900 and his attempt to write the definitive account of the war were bound up together in his powerful public proclamations from the period. He identified the moment of crisis as an opportunity to reshape both the army and notions of contemporary masculinity. In addressing his potential electorate through the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, Doyle wrote the following: At the outset of this war, I took it upon myself the task of writing a history of it . . . I became deeply convinced of the Justice and Necessity of the struggle . . . My duties led me to Bloemfontein and Pretoria.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian I heard from their own lips the views of British loyalists, of Africanders, of Boers of every shade of opinion, of British officers, and of British officials.4

By asserting the war as the ‘great question’ to which other, ‘domestic’ issues should be subordinate and by taking on the task of writing and publicising its ‘official’ narrative, Conan Doyle can loom large over studies of the period.5 From the point of view of the Strand reader, while Doyle was certainly prominent, he was limited to relatively few appearances. The story of the war and its implications is thus left for the most part to voices other than Doyle’s and this mediation is crucial for understanding how other figures like Sandow and Wells came to participate in a dialogue with his views. From the beginning of the war in 1899, the Strand was forced into a realisation of the cultural significance of the male body through its engagement with the physical culture debate. As a result, the different ways in which the male body was depicted by fictional narratives of courtship and adventure alongside non-fictional portraits of institutions such as the military became hugely significant. Bodies, in short, became vehicles for ideas and signposts for a changing culture. This was particularly true in the Strand with its uniquely high number of illustrations, diagrams and photographs. This interplay between fiction and non-fiction, between word and image, made for a high-intensity milieu of the kind that would not have been possible in any form other than a periodical. Sandow’s contributions to this debate were often conducted (directly and indirectly) with Conan Doyle. He was an advocate of Sandow’s exercise regimens, recording his progress regularly in his diary. In September 1901, the two men sat together in judgement on a contest at the Royal Albert Hall to find the British man with the finest physique. Andrew Lycett notes that the winner, William Murray of Nottingham, was presented with a ‘solid gold’ statue of Sandow with the proceeds of the tickets being donated to the Lord Mayor’s Transvaal War Fund.6 The connection between individual physical development at home and military exertions abroad was far from accidental. Harold B. Segal has tracked the spread of the ‘physical culture’ debate across Europe during the late century and suggested that military activity and public interest in the issue were necessarily intertwined. If armies had engaged successfully, as was the case with Germany, then the emphasis was on avoiding complacency, whereas in countries of declining military strength the debate was urgently precipitated by performance anxiety on the world stage.7 In Britain, physical culture was deployed in the movement towards ‘national

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efficiency’, a series of strategies designed to increase governmental ‘supervision’ of the nation’s effectiveness on all levels.8 In the accounts of W. H. Greenleaf and Geoffrey Russell Searle, this drive for British ‘efficiency’ would affect the organisation of Parliament, the operation of the marketplace, modes of education and town planning as well as the bodily health of the nation’s subjects.9 Searle insightfully ascribed this impulse to the desire for the country to be organised by ‘scientifically-ordered’ systems.10 In this way, overlapping ideologies of Britishness, masculinity and empire became engaged in the struggle to modernise and make efficient the terrain of individual bodies. This was the context against which Sandow rose to prominence and which created the demand for various kinds of bodily reproduction in the form of statues, photographs and public performances. While Sandow was made the subject of much speculation, not least because of his frequent state of undress (the Review of Reviews remarked pointedly that he ‘looks very much better in his clothes than without them’),11 he was also the proponent of an ideology that specifically targeted British fin-de-siècle anxieties. In 1902, upon the death of Cecil Rhodes, Sandow wrote that ‘our most epoch-making men were physically strong . . . Physical force and muscular strength has, and will ever have, its weight in the affairs of the world.’12 As the great age of colonisation waned, he argued, only the cultivation of physical strength would be sufficient to arrest any decline. In November 1901 a plaster-cast of Sandow’s physique was displayed in the South Kensington branch of the British Museum. A Strand article entitled ‘Sandow in Plaster of Paris’ retold the story of the cast’s painstaking construction. No less than twelve different photographs of a semi-naked Sandow supplemented the article. It clearly sought to place the Strand, its readers and the people who would wish to see the cast at a very particular, mid-way point in the cultural field. While some way beneath the pretentious, implicitly sedentary high-culture aesthetes, they were also some way above the indiscriminate, scopophilic gaze of the low-culture thugs: My friend the Superior Person had been visiting the South Kensington branch of the British Museum, and he came back in high dudgeon . . . indeed, he was literally spluttering with wrath. Evidently his very superior susceptibilities had suffered a cruel outrage.13

The ‘Superior Person’ is, of course, ‘outraged’ at Sandow’s presence in the rarefied space of the British Museum. ‘Great Scot!’ he exclaims, ‘what will the Museum be coming to next? A penny show

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with marionettes and performing dogs, I suppose.’14 The author mediates this perspective by discussing the issue with the museum’s curator (and sometime contributor to the Strand), Ray Lankester, who highlights the anthropological benefit of the cast. Sandow, he argues, ‘presents the perfect type of a European man’ and stands as ‘a striking demonstration of what can be done in the way of perfecting the muscles by simple means’. ‘I know what popular prejudice is,’ continues the narrator sadly, ‘even in these enlightened days individuals still exist who regard the cultivation of the body as a thing to be frowned upon.’15 Having decried the high-culture perspective, the author then resists the counter-claims of low-culture prurience; Lankester ‘is probably the last man in the world who would be moved by considerations of what is likely merely to amuse and to gratify the idle curiosity of a certain section of the public’.16 It was precisely this accusation that had been levelled at Sandow by the Review of Reviews some years earlier when it balefully remarked that his form was ‘the nakedest . . . ever published in a magazine, and the apologetic fig-leaf is much worse than nothing’.17 It was no accident, given the shared past of the two publications outlined in Chapter 1, that the Strand would construct Sandow-sceptics as ‘superior persons’ in this way since his body was now firmly established as the site of cultural contest. The new language of physical culture became a means of legitimising the magazine’s own self-perception as a middlebrow publication; committed to intellectual and personal growth but not so lost to reason and simple pleasures as to join the ranks of the ‘superior persons’. This new imperative can clarify what qualities could be read into the abundance of Prussian flesh on display in Kensington and on the pages of the Strand. The Boer War and the reaction of the public and press to its failures did not necessarily help the anti-imperialist cause; instead, according to Bentley Gilbert, The war and its aftermath turned imperialism inward and redirected its energy, its violence and its intolerance back onto England . . . Imperialists, with the same uncompromising vigour they displayed in the conquest of Africa, took up national service, physical training, the Boy Scouts . . . [and] most importantly . . . they adopted national efficiency.18

In 1904 the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration delivered a damning verdict on the state of Britain’s ‘physical efficiency’ in light of the South African conflict. In testament to this,

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the magazine went to great lengths to engage and palliate the dual crises of the British male body and British manliness as an ideal. By casting Sandow as an idealised figure, someone who embodied the classical proportions of Greek sculpture, the article attempted to legitimate his body as a historical artefact by aligning it with the heroic, masculine discourse of remote classicism. In this way, Sandow’s physique and its promised imperial dividend connected a newly invigorated picture of the future with that of a glorious European past. That the war had been conducted poorly and that the troops had been found wanting are facts open to little dispute. In 1900, after his return from a three-month stint in a private military hospital in South Africa, Doyle announced his entry into the physical culture debate with two telling letters to two very different publications. In November he could be found arguing for military reform in The Times and, in December, for the shortening of shop-workers’ hours in the less illustrious pages of the Grocer’s Assistant. The two debates, disparate in scale, shared only the new popular language of physical culture. There is a great untapped source of military strength in that large portion of the population who would willingly learn the use of a rifle, but who are unable to join any organised body of volunteers . . . It would be a good thing for the country that every man should be made to understand that he is not to trust to others, but to himself for protection.19 The matter of shorter hours for shop assistants is one in which I take the deepest interest, believing that in a country which has no compulsory military service physique and well being of the class to which you allude can only be guaranteed by a universal adoption of short hours and frequent holidays.20

In the first letter, Conan Doyle’s argument was that there were many thousands of ‘immature’ soldiers who had to be left at home and many thousands more who were unfit for combat and who lacked sufficient training to be of any use in the Transvaal. These soldiers had sucked resources away from the core of men who, alone, should have constituted the main military presence. The army’s systems of training and defence were, he felt, antiquated and had been shown to be so half a century earlier in the Crimea, from which point they had evolved little further. The physical condition of the army would be improved, he continued, by halving its numbers, doubling its pay and using it ‘entirely for the defence of the outer empire’.21 Meanwhile

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an expanded militia, or a corps of ‘civilian riflemen’, could defend Britain itself. The inspiration for this plan had come from the Boers themselves who, over the course of the war, had won grudging respect from many domestic commentators. Doyle began his study of the war by asserting that, based on the history of their resistance to Spain, the Boers ‘must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth’.22 He was not alone among the British press in making them subject to a simultaneous demonisation and valorisation that abjured their apparent ‘savagery’ yet celebrated their bravery and endurance: London journalists invariably presented the Boers as primitive and backwards, isolated rural people . . . whose defeat by the superior civilisation of the British was an inevitable result of social Darwinism . . . But the reporting of events on the front soon became more balanced. There arose growing admiration.23

In this context, Doyle’s interest in the physical well-being of shop assistants seems a far more vital problem than at first glance. Indeed, his thoughts prefigure those of Sandow who, in 1912’s ‘My Reminiscences’, traced the birth of his interest in physical culture to a conversation between his father and his ‘delicate’ and ‘frail’ ten-year-old self: ‘The heroes of old, my little Eugen,’ he said, ‘never lolled at ease in a carriage or a railway train. Either they walked or rode on horse-back. Thus they were ever active, ever exercising their bodies. But nowadays,’ he went on, ‘the brain is cultivated and the body neglected . . . the result of it being world-wide degeneration of health and strength.’24

There was a lingering sense that the army had been given a harsh lesson in virility, manliness and bodily fortitude. This corporeal anxiety had been acquired at the scene of colonial conflict but was quickly translated to the delicately balanced hierarchies of European power. Accordingly, in Conan Doyle’s plans for military reform, the threats to Britain’s security were far more likely to come from rival imperial powers; when he imagined an ‘invading force’, it did not emanate from the colonies but from much nearer to home.25 These fears of physical frailty and national vulnerability were banished in the Sandow article by the invocation of his physique as a kind of

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fetish, an ego-ideal that allowed Britain to fantasise about its own strength as a cultural and militaristic combatant. This may seem odd, given that the Prussian Sandow would seem to be representative of a rival imperial power and, as a consequence, someone perhaps to be feared rather than venerated. Despite Sandow’s gestures towards universalism and his adoption of British citizenship, this proved to be the case elsewhere, but not in the Strand.26 If the Strand thought of Germany much at all in this period, it was not as a threat but as a potential ally bound by filial ties to Queen Victoria through her marriage. Nevertheless, because of its unusual development, Sandow’s body was capable of shouldering these expectations. Problems arose, however, when attempts were made to translate this masculine ideal on to ‘everyday’ British bodies, the people in Doyle’s scheme who would be ‘doing something to strengthen their country’.27 This attempt was played out across two linked but distinct plains: the domestic social scene and the site of imperial conflict. Discussion of the former inevitably led towards the latter and it is there that we begin to discover how the new efficiency imperative began to be employed as a discursive and rhetorical technique.

At Home and Abroad Notwithstanding the likes of Anson Rabinbach tracing discourses on physical health as far back as the thirteenth century, the Boer War period saw them re-emerge with particular ferocity.28 As it happens, the domestic fiction of the Strand had always placed a strong emphasis on the bodily well-being of its protagonists, but this was simply a function of conventional middlebrow poetics rather than bearing any political significance. When Newnes referred to his literature as ‘healthful’, he relied upon the physical well-being of his characters to act as a barometer for its underlying moral robustness. Generally, plots turned upon some innately noble and erect character whose natural haleness was temporarily disrupted by some conundrum or predicament. It may sound asinine but this simple habit was an ingrained editorial policy. The Strand’s art editor, George William Leech, wrote that ‘our most general demand is for normal, decently dressed people who can still retain their attraction under some stress of emotion’.29 In many ways, Conan Doyle’s ‘The Voice of Science’ established the dominant early pattern for the representation of the

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male body. In the story (as discussed earlier), an erect, upstanding sportsman, Rupert Esdaille, saves his sister from the attentions of a slumped, lascivious, emotional villain named Beesly who attempts to conceal the libidinous excesses of his past (Figs 2.2 and 2.3). This elementary opposition of body types became endemic to the magazine’s representation of the male form; its best and worst selves. One does not need to use world events to explain the Strand’s emphasis on the healthy male form. It is fairly evident that any self-respecting, middlebrow writer of fiction would not have chosen to present a corpulent, degenerate sex addict as the hero of a courtship narrative for the simple reason that such a character would instinctively repel the intended audience. Yet as the discomfiting narratives of the war began to circulate, the domestic male body fell under scrutiny and, as a consequence, become a metonym for imperial strength or frailty. If the Boers

Figure 2.2 Illustration by W. S. Stacey taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, Strand Magazine, March 1891, pp. 312–17, p. 314.

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Figure 2.3 Illustration by W. S. Stacey taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Voice of Science’, Strand Magazine, March 1891, pp. 312–17, p. 315.

were proving the British to be insufficiently hardy and rugged, how could this deficit be understood and overcome? This association was not exactly unheard of in the Strand before the Boer War, but dozens of courtship romances in the magazine’s first few years depict ‘healthy’, ‘manly’ heroes without making this connotative leap between individual and national bodies. Conan Doyle had made this connection consistently in his Sherlock Holmes stories, though it came to be narrated far more explicitly

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in later instalments. Two comparable figures in this context are Hall Pycroft in the pre-war story ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’ (1893) and Gilchrist in ‘The Three Students’ (1904). Despite the former being the ‘client’ and the latter the ‘villain’ of their stories, they are both sportsmen who represent the ethical reliability of that code. They also highlight the mutually reinforced connection between sporting and imperial values. Pycroft is a well-built, fresh-complexioned young fellow, with a frank, honest face and a slight, crisp, yellow moustache . . . a smart young City man, of the class who have been labelled cockneys, but who give us our crack volunteer regiments, and who turn out more fine athletes and sportsmen than any body of men in these islands.30

Pycroft’s complaint to Holmes turns out to be the result of a murderous plot to rob a bank by impersonating him. Pycroft’s physique instantly reminds Watson of the imperial value of such men. This connection recalls Doyle’s angry letter to the Spectator in May 1901 when he learned that, while fighting still continued in South Africa, a Springbok cricket team intended to tour England: It is a stain on their manhood that they are not out with rifles in their hands driving the invader from their country. They leave this to others whilst they play games . . . The only excuse for a game is that it keeps a man fit for the serious duties of life.31

This shows Doyle’s understanding of sport as a healthy, domestic arena for the practice and enactment of chivalry. This idea feeds directly into the structure of the Holmes stories; Watson is the key example of someone who nurtured dual passions for both sporting and soldiering. He fought in the second Afghan War and, in civilian life, maintains a fine sporting instinct. He responds well to sportsmen because they tend to share in the idea that a fine physique indivisibly embodies both sporting and imperial ethics. However, ‘The Three Students’ casts new light upon the nature of this relationship and suggests a rather more immediate connectivity between home and abroad. In the story, a university professor’s preparations for an important exam are thrown into disarray by an apparent attempt to steal a look at the question paper. The destination of an important scholarship depends upon the exam and suspicion falls on the titular academics who share the building, one of whom is the aforementioned Gilchrist. The professor, Soames,

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describes him as ‘a fine scholar and athlete; plays in the rugby team and cricket team for the college, and got his blue for the hurdles and the long jump. He is a fine, manly fellow.’32 Watson later joins in, finding him ‘a fine figure of a man, tall, lithe and agile, with a springy step and a pleasing, open face’.33 Gilchrist, for all his physical splendour, turns out to be guilty, though his ‘crime’ was prompted by his family’s impoverishment at the hands of his dissipated father. Holmes shares Watson’s obvious admiration for the boy and their estimation is rewarded by evidence that Gilchrist suffered an attack of conscience and decided not to sit the exam. Instead, he avows his intention to take up a commission in the Rhodesian Police, which denouement satisfies all parties. Gilchrist is, in Holmes’s words, ‘not a callous criminal’; he is, however, guilty of violating certain behavioural codes which his putative imperial service will amend. Holmes tells him, in conclusion, ‘you have fallen low, let us see, in the future, how high you can rise’.34 This sentiment contains an explicit assertion of the translatability of the two ethical codes; deficiencies and misappropriations in the domestic arena may be amply repaid and balanced by exertions at the outer edge of empire. Whereas that potential lay dormant in the figure of Pycroft, in Gilchrist it is suddenly a key determinate in the resolution of the story. In broader terms, the magazine endorsed Conan Doyle’s suggestions for military reform with articles such as 1901’s ‘The New Musketry Practice at Aldershot’, which painted him as ‘the pioneer of civilian rifle clubs’, ‘the oracle of modern warfare’ and suggested that his model would now be adopted by the ‘regulars’.35 In an earlier interview he had suggested that it was ‘as important for a boy to learn to handle a rifle as to learn to swim’.36 These articles and stories speak of a necessity to redraw cultural boundaries to more masculine dimensions and, in doing so, exculpate and occlude the ‘feminised’ cultural domains which were frequently linked to physical and moral weakness. Articles dealing directly with the war made appeals to chivalric traditions, tropes and totems which were held to be immutable. The appeals are interesting because their deployment is complicated by a concomitant attempt to depict the armed forces as ‘efficient’, ‘mechanistic’ and ‘modern’. Who could hope to embody individual notions of heroism and efficient modernity in one body? This deadlock necessitated the creation of a highly unstable fantasy image: the chivalric machine. The bodies that populated the fiction and non-fiction of the magazine’s Boer War canon became ambivalent figures, incapable of supporting these two contradictory impulses.

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‘The Rank-and-File of the British Navy’ from 1900 and a 1913 symposium, ‘If Britain Disarmed’, elaborate the first part of this interaction with their appeals to grand narratives. The latter piece weighs up the financial pros and cons of disbanding the armed forces. The issue turns on how the contributors construe the whole notion of war; the anonymous author of the article mediates by wondering is war an unmitigated evil? Is the maintenance of gigantic armaments without a correspondent benefit to the community? Able Historians have alleged, indeed, that war is as necessary to a high type of civilisation as religion or literature.37

This view comes to predominate (though not without challenge), particularly when voiced by the thriller writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, who opined The nation which ceases to breed warriors and sailors will be a nation without vital impulses . . . I find nothing terrible in war . . . War has been the subjective inspiration of art, simply because it has thrown onto the great canvas of life living examples of chivalry, heroism, patriotism and endurance. War has been the wholesome and stimulating corrective to a stultifying and narrowing commercialism.38

These appeals to ‘heroism’, ‘patriotism’ and ‘chivalry’ are interesting not just in themselves as calls towards traditional ideals, but also in the way they are wielded as guards against the now familiar threat of modern life. These grand narratives derive their power in the Strand’s ideology because of their supposed immutability; they inscribe themselves into monumentality by transcending the humdrum, everyday life. In this way, the Strand set itself up as a magazine against the modern; yet ‘The Rank-and-File of the British Navy’ presented the second part of this doubled idea by valorising the efficiency and modernity of the navy. The article made no attempt to disguise its aim to serve as a recruitment tool that would ‘appeal to the mothers of the Empire who hesitate to trust their sons to the fancied perils of a sea career’.39 The article picked out the various career paths that young ‘bluejacket’ recruits could follow. The development of the boys was charted in the now familiar language of physical culture. ‘Sturdy’ boys who want to ‘try their fortunes on the sea’ become ‘well-filledout young men’ at eighteen, then blossom into ‘splendid specimen[s] of British manhood’ and, finally, can expect to retire the service at

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‘the age of forty, a young man, in the prime of life and in the best of health’.40 This physical education is played out on the same ‘canvas of life’ that Oppenheim described. According to the article, this naval tradition and its attendant prospects for heroism, courage and patriotism was enhanced rather than dimmed by technological advances since the days of Trafalgar. The article explained that the modern navy needed engineers rather than warriors but despite having ‘none of the fun of the fight’, the engine-room would nevertheless ‘be made of the stuff of heroes’.41 This passage marks the first intersection of two ideas of warfare: the chivalric and the technocratic. The depiction of the navy sought to project this doubled perspective of a service subject to increased mechanisation and ‘efficiency’ (the word is used four times in the article) yet still investing its men with the ability to embody the same traditions listed by Oppenheim. The article’s focus on career paths, wages, ranks and pensions suggested that the navy was much more like an industry than (as ‘If Britain Disarmed’ put it) ‘the good old days’ where ‘a man had only to shoulder his arquebus or his pike and be off to the wars’.42 The tension between chivalric and mechanistic models of warfare would prove to be one of the most important debates with regard to twentieth- and twenty-first-century combat. In War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel DeLanda describes a historical contest between two models of warfare: the ‘sedentary’, column or phalanx-based formations of land-holding, imperial powers and the ‘nomadic . . . flexible tactical doctrine’ of the Asiatic armies that ‘invaded Europe in the thirteenth-century’.43 The triumph of the ‘sedentary’ model was partly precipitated by the incipient structures of capitalism that facilitated the faster development and deployment of artillery and hand-weapons. The development of weapons technology gradually stripped the ‘act’ of trigger-pulling of all connotations of ‘artisanship’ and ‘heuristic knowledge’.44 The overarching project of military science, DeLanda suggests, had the effect of gradually developing means by which human beings could be taken ‘out of the decision-making loop’.45 This project derived from the European classical ideal of a depersonalised, massed battle formation (as with the Roman phalanx) and is moving, according to DeLanda, towards a fully computerised, human-independent mode of conflict. Whether these predictions are correct or not, the historical background to his argument is compellingly relevant to the Strand’s rhetorical conflation of classical, medieval and modern warfare. DeLanda discusses a subject familiar to Doyle: the process

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by which ‘sedentary’ European armies had to learn to adopt the ‘nomadic’ tactics of their opponents during colonial warfare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.46 It was in these conflicts that many of the Strand’s models of past heroism are found and it is useful to examine some of those references in the context of DeLanda’s observations. It is interesting that many of the great heroic deeds of the past were performed during engagements (colonial wars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) that necessitated the partial abandonment of the modernising, military-industrial impulse and relied instead upon old-fashioned bodily virtues that harmonised with the projection of a chivalric past. From the millennial vantage point of such theorists as DeLanda and, later, Graham Dawson, the necessary conditions for such a relationship were a historical quirk peculiar to the nuances of colonial combat that would soon be rendered obsolete. This imminent obsolescence, I would argue, adds another dimension to the uncertainty that coloured reactions to the war and added an extra incentive to repress the uncomfortable inconsistencies in the ‘chivalric machine’ dialectic. During the war, the Strand published six articles that dealt explicitly with events relating to it: ‘The Flags of Our Forces at the Front’, ‘Tommy on a Transport’, ‘Pigeons as Messengers of War’, ‘Deeds of Daring and Devotion in the War’ and Conan Doyle’s ‘A Glimpse of the Army’. Doyle was one of the most vocal critics of the ‘oldfashioned’ army of 1899 and he expanded bitterly on this subject in his article: Who can stop this army now? It makes one’s heart bleed to think of the deaths and the mutilations and (worse than either) the humiliations which have come from our rotten military system, which has devoted years to teaching men to walk in step and hours to teaching them to use their weapons.47

Humiliation is worse than death or mutilation for Doyle because it contradicts the grand ideal of chivalry which is to either triumph or die in combat. The best guard against this kind of embarrassment is articulated later in the article. Under a mortar assault, Doyle observes that the operators of a gun battery ‘might have been parts of an automated machine’.48 Elsewhere, the magazine supported the idea that the army’s failures occurred where this mechanistic imperative was disregarded. By this logic, ‘gallant’ soldiers were betrayed by the inefficient army network around them. Elsewhere in his article, Doyle

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examined the deployment of infantry troops, ‘look at the scouts and the flankers – we should not have advanced like that six months ago. It is not our additional numbers so much as our new war craft which makes us irresistible.’49 The army’s advances were, for Doyle, solely predicated upon a new ability to balance the resourcefulness and bravery of the individual soldier with the bludgeoning power of the massed phalanx: The lonely hero is the man to be admired. It is easy to be collectively brave. A man with any sense of proportion feels himself to be such a mite in the presence of the making of history that his own . . . welfare seems for the moment too insignificant to think of. The unit is lost in the mass.50

Doyle provided first-hand evidence of the kinds of military-industrial accommodations discussed by DeLanda a hundred years later and displayed utter faith in the compatibility between individual heroism and mass, scientifically informed efficiency. However, cracks began to appear in this happy ideological conflation when individual bodies were depicted. ‘Tommy on a Transport’ details the passage of British troops to the Cape on chartered liners by soliciting interviews with the ships’ captains. When asked for their opinions on British troops, the captains suggest that ‘the typical British private is a great, overgrown “kid,” a man arrested in development and turned into a machine’.51 ‘Physical drills’ prevented them from becoming ‘soft and flabby’ or ‘going to waste’ on the voyage.52 This mechanistic fitness was set up as a warning contrast to civilian life. ‘After years of peace and prosperity a time of stress and storm is coming once again for England,’ noted ‘The Flags of Our Forces at the Front’, adding that there was a ‘need to see that as a nation we have not degenerated through our long enjoyment of peace’.53 When viewed in isolation, this line of argument can seem to be a simple hymn to the protection that the army offers to the settled, domestic scene. In the context of the Strand’s deep involvement with the physical culture debate, however, these soldierly bodies represent a realisation of domestic strength and a source of unimpeachable models of manly behaviour. The diction and phrasing of these articles was crucial because, through the familiar network of allusions and occlusions, they attempted to carve a strong ideological meaning out of the events in South Africa. The war acted as a lens through which veiled criticisms of ‘the modern’ could be mounted by casting it as a cause of ‘degeneration’,

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‘peace-softening’ and moral weakness. In fiction, this burden could easily be borne through the illustration of characters like Pycroft and Gilchrist. In non-fiction pieces, the processes of visualisation had to be fulfilled as much by photography as by illustration, and this was considerably more problematic. To illustrate these articles the Strand had to find a way of visually representing the ‘chivalric machine’ dialectic. Because they tended to be nominally located around some ephemera (pigeons, flags, transport ships, and so on), many of the articles avoided this representation dilemma by prioritising the depiction of these elements. ‘Pigeons as Messengers of War’, for example, features a series of illustrations of pigeon lofts and ‘Tommy on Transport’ focuses entirely on portrait shots of the transport captains, rather than Thomas Atkins himself. The gaze of the reader was thus cast away from the traditional subject of chivalric art, the male hero, and directed instead towards banks of machines, equipment and technology (and pigeons). To support this assertion, we can examine the only Holmes story that engages directly with the consequences of the Boer War. ‘The Blanched Soldier’ was published in 1926, yet, in order to understand its relationship to the war, we must first consider Doyle’s service in South Africa. He spent most of his time in Bloemfontein attempting to contain a horrendous outbreak of enteric fever and he recorded his experiences in some depth in a letter to the British Medical Journal that was published in July 1900. The letter covers territory that would be familiar to anyone who had read A Study in Scarlet, in which Watson succumbs to enteric fever in Afghanistan and is invalided home to London. In Doyle’s recollections of the events of 1900, the prospect of imperial conflict went hand in hand with the lingering threat of physical degeneration. In describing the lot of the medical orderlies in Bloemfontein, Doyle wrote: He is not a picturesque figure, the orderly, as we know him. We have not the trim, well-nourished army man, but we have recruited from the St. John Ambulance men, who are drawn, in this particular instance, from the mill hands of a Northern town. They were not strong to start with, and the poor fellows are ghastly now . . . sallow, tired men in the dingy khaki suits – which, for the sake of the public health, we will hope may never see England again.54

The risk of infection in the underfunded, understaffed and insanitary military hospitals was enormous and, for Doyle, the war seemed ever entwined with the constant dread of physical debilitation as a result.

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‘The Blanched Soldier’ accordingly presents South Africa as a place with precisely this potential. Holmes narrates the story himself; he is visited by James Dodd, a Boer War veteran, who has not heard from his comrade, Godfrey Emsworth, since the latter was sent home with a bullet wound. Emsworth’s father has responded very coolly to Dodd’s enquiries, but in spite of this Dodd made a visit to the Emsworth family home where he is convinced he saw the spectral, ‘deadly pale’ face of his friend through his window.55 It transpires that Emsworth is being kept under a kind of secret quarantine by his family. When confronted by Holmes, Emsworth retells the events that followed his injury and flight from the battlefield at Pretoria. Having regained consciousness, he stumbled into a remote house and fell asleep in a convenient bed. He awoke to scenes of supposed horror: ‘A small, dwarf-like man with a huge bulbous head, who was jabbering excitedly in Dutch . . . behind him stood a group of people . . . a chill came over me as I looked on them. Not one of them was a normal human being. Every one was twisted or swollen or disfigured in some strange way.’56

A doctor arrives to explain that Emsworth has ‘slept in a leper’s bed’ and he soon discovers the ‘terrible signs’ of the disease on his face.57 Casualties of war, physically compromised by their involvement at the outer fringes of the border between health and disease, come to represent the same kind of threat as the orderlies’ ‘suits’ in Doyle’s letter. Fortunately for Emsworth, his ‘disease’ proves equally simple to disrobe from and he is discovered to be suffering from a psychosomatic and non-contagious pseudo-leprosy brought on by the trauma of his experience. In its artificiality, the story’s limp conclusion effaces this ‘horror’ by reversing his bodily degeneration and reinstating his ‘frank manliness’. The unsatisfying denouement constitutes an acknowledgement that, even in 1926, there was something still too alive and raw in the blended threat of imperial and physical decay for it to be faced squarely. The conclusions of the Holmes stories were written to reasonably consistent specifications; the solutions to the mysteries, while guessable, were never calculable. The mysteries hinged on one or two particular ‘clues’ scattered throughout the story that were ultimately loose and malleable signifiers that could mean anything that Doyle wanted them to when he reached the end. A brief acquaintance with the Holmes stories would allow a reader to see where these clues lay, but no inherent logic could be expected to interpret them sensibly in real time.58 In ‘The

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Blanched Soldier’, Holmes has the fact of Emsworth’s bleached skin, his exposure to South Africa where leprosy is ‘not uncommon’ and the hunch that only an infectious malady would prompt such domestic banishment as he hears described.59 The ungainly deus ex machina seeks not only to explain the mystery, but also to further restore every relationship in the story to a normal, healthy state. If we accept Holmes as a social agent whose goal is to reconstruct fractured social and ideological relationships, then merely discovering Emsworth’s condition would be insufficient; he has to cure him as well. This desire overrode every good, formal sense that Doyle possessed and suggests, therefore, that an occlusion is taking place. The exterior signs of distress and dissatisfaction that disfigure characters when they first visit Holmes must be erased to rebalance the healthy physique. The truth of Emsworth’s state would be too dreadfully visceral, and so it is instead displaced and repressed. Without presuming to psychoanalyse Doyle, it is clear that, for him, the Boer War was enmeshed with ideas of physicality: physical culture, physical decay, infection, health and disease. His readiness to make this conscious association in his letters to the press, his fiction and his Strand articles should render a putatively unconscious, unmediated connection in ‘The Blanched Soldier’ less specious. The image of a leprous Emsworth peering through the window at his friend seems so much more vivid than the questionable resolution of his illness. The observation of this vividness is not original; Susan Cannon Harris has already observed that the story’s conclusion ‘leaves the Empire’s pathological possibilities wide open’.60 However, this openness is changed by invoking the longer history of the Strand’s depictions of male bodies, empire and the threats of decay during the period. The early years of the war had clearly thrown the Strand’s familiar ideological furniture into some disarray. New stories needed to be found in order to preserve old ideals. Within the military domain, the idea of science as a revolutionary force had been firmly established. However, over the course of a sustained and highly concentrated period of activity throughout 1901, this realisation would be broadened into every conceivable sphere of public life.

The ‘Long’ 1901 It is impossible to overstate the degree to which the Paris ‘exhibition’ of 1900 (L’Exposition Universelle) permeated almost every aspect of the Strand throughout 1901, precisely as it serialised Wells’s The

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First Men in the Moon and Doyle’s return to Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The exhibition’s emphasis on articulating a particular vision of twentieth-century modernity in the related fields of scientific, artistic, judicial, academic and governmental endeavour proved surprisingly catching among the reluctant modernists of the Strand. For them, the exhibition’s virtue lay in its representation of the harmonious interactions between science, government, artists, writers, the press and the public. As such, it became the principal vehicle through which the Strand reoriented its attitudes towards science and scientists. They were now seen to offer significant contributions in determining the nature of the new century. The exhibition lasted from April to early November of 1900; before the year was out the Strand was beginning to show evidence of its deep cultural reverberations. In the November issue, the French astronomer François Deloncle contributed an article on one of the sensations of the exhibition: the largest refracting telescope ever seen which, Deloncle claimed, would provide images of the moon as if from a metre away (‘la lune á un metre’).61 The technical difficulties of the new telescope had been described at length in the June issue of that same year.62 The exhibition, according to Deloncle, ‘should celebrate the dawn of the twentieth-century . . . and must also, if possible, mark an epoch in history by bringing science, which bids fair to completely revolutionize the world in the near future, home to the popular mind’.63 Deloncle was a populariser of the most brutal kind, a polymath who sought, against the scepticism of ‘specialists’, to bring the ‘most stupendous of the sciences down to the level of the least educated mind’.64 The promise of ‘the moon from a metre’ could only have been satisfied by extraordinary scientific labour, yet the juxtaposition that it offered to the ‘least educated mind’ needed little explanation. It played a child-like, Swiftian game with perspectives: enormous spaces collapsed, huge distances evaporated and immensely distributed objects were easily encountered and consumed. This was no doubt pleasing for a readership long familiar with optical illusions, visual tricks and puzzles from the long-running Curiosities segment at the end of each issue. This metaphorical play marked the first seismic shift in what the Strand believed that science could now achieve for its readers. Advances in science, as well as in mechanisms of knowledge distribution (‘those catch-words that fly around the world as fast as the electric telegraph can carry them’)65 could now be condensed into the kinds of spectacular narrative to which fiction had previously possessed sole rights. When Cavor suggests a journey

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to the moon in The First Men in the Moon, for example, Bedford’s frame of reference is literary rather than scientific: ‘like Jules Verne’s thing in A Trip to the Moon?’66 We know from the extensive work of Bernard Lightman, William H. Brock, Gillian Beer, Gowan Dawson, Cooter and Pumfrey, Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth among others that the story of the growth of the popular press throughout the nineteenth century was synonymous with that of a growing popular appetite for scientific knowledge.67 The Strand, which had only ever made the most tentative attempts at popularisation before 1900, suddenly shows awareness of its importance. It seems strange, almost incredible, that its innate conservatism was able to defer this realisation until the final possible moments of the century. Yet the change is so striking that it even subsumed another epochal event, the succession of Edward VII to the throne. In From Behind the Speaker’s Chair, Henry William Lucy wrote that, upon the new king’s first address to Parliament in February 1901, ‘all the arteries of life in connection with the Crown [felt] the wholesome impulse of a fresh current’. This was thanks to the particular characteristics of the new king, who was ‘a born and trained man of business’ and who had evidenced these rulerly qualities through ‘the presidency of the Committee of the English Section of the Paris Exhibition’.68 Science in the Strand prior to 1901 was curiously stunted. While individual scientists as public figures, authorities and celebrities were made the subject of respectful portraits, the nature of science’s social and cultural function as well as its epistemological status was considerably more limited than elsewhere in the late-century popular press.69 Two kinds of article predominated: humorous miscellanies and case studies in natural history. The anonymous ‘Some Curious Inventions’ of 1892 set the tone for a slew of subsequent articles such as James Scott’s ‘Eccentric Ideas’ (which charted the ‘ideas of cranks and addlepated men’),70 ‘Remarkable Accidents’, ‘Peculiar Furniture’, ‘Strange Devices’ and ‘The Evolution of the Cycle’.71 The language of these articles did not highlight the cultural worth of ‘inventions’, but instead their ‘novelty’ and the humorous side of their failings. Vast sums of money are brought in by apparently simple inventions requiring no great mechanical knowledge . . . We feel that we could have invented them with the greatest ease, if we had only known better the wants and tastes of the public.72

The article allowed for no elevation of the ‘inventors’ or their ideas beyond the reader’s sphere of interest; what distinguished them was

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not some reserved skill-set but a better understanding of market forces and public demand. Explicitly, and in direct contrast to the articles that would emerge throughout 1901, there was no distinction made between the world of science and the everyday world; there was no epistemic hierarchy where the scientist was cast as a knowledge-producer for the reader. Instead, the reader’s values and everyday environs were the testing ground for the worth of any idea. One inventor is discussed who believed that he had solved the riddle of hat ventilation with a cunning system of ‘springs, slides, or staples’.73 The author then satirically notes that ‘the “every day” man would prefer holding his hat in his hand if very hot’.74 The other type of scientific article could be found epitomised in the gentle natural history articles of Grant Allen’s series Glimpses of Nature and In Nature’s Workshop. Again, scientific detail was spread very thinly through these pieces which used techniques from juvenile fiction to outline the mating habits of ‘Rosalind the spider’ and her compatriots from the animal kingdom which could reliably be found in any suburban garden.75 In January 1901 the Strand provided the clearest possible statement that this attitude was to change with Frederick Dolman’s article ‘Science in the New Century’. The scientific gaze that had revolutionised the magazine’s view of the male body in the previous year was now being broadcast indiscriminately into other areas of life. Not only was this article totemic within its immediate context, it was also seminal for later articles that replicated its rhetoric, structure, language and content.76 It began in declamatory fashion: It has been the century of science writ largest . . . Can the century upon which we are just entering possibly have in store for the world any similar series of scientific achievements?77

Dolman calls ‘upon some of the most distinguished scientists of the day, the representatives of physics and chemistry, astronomy, electricity, mechanics and medicine’.78 These men, identified in relation to their specialist fields, include Norman Lockyer, William Preece, John Wolfe-Barry, Sir William Crookes, Joseph Swan, Marcellin Berthelot, Henry Roscoe and Thomas Bryant. Dolman locates his interviews within a clearly socialised landscape of calling cards, doorbells and prestigious London addresses. The encounters take place over an impressive series of oak desks and under the shadow of gleaming banks of suitably unfathomable equipment. Dolman’s job was to translate the language of scientific discovery into understandable terms and to mediate between the interests of the Strand’s

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readership and those representatives of a socio-cultural institution from which so much was expected. The world of mechanical hats had been left even further behind. Norman Lockyer was the first interviewed and asserted that astronomy might reasonably expect to determine patterns of drought and famine from the behaviour of sunspots. The principal virtue of this development would be that it would allow astronomy to provide a ‘practical service’ to society. Lockyer further added that ‘so long a scientific research is merely speculative Government and people generally care very little about it’.79 The knowledge that appears ‘most useless’ often proves to be of the ‘most use’ when taken up by those of a more ‘practical’ turn of mind.80 These pieces show a definite opening-out of scientific perspective and marked a distinct break from the past by embracing the uncertainties that arose from facing forwards into a speculative future. The possibilities for ‘twentieth-century man flying through the air’ depend upon ‘some entirely new principle, at present altogether beyond our conception’.81 John Wolfe-Barry remembers a visit to the Paris Exhibition where he encountered Charles Seeburger’s prototype model of the escalator and sees it as being indicative of the kinds of new civic reorganisations of city-space that increasing levels of urbanisation would render necessary in the twentieth century. If there were any lingering doubts that scientific endeavour remained unbounded, Wolfe-Barry banishes them by suggesting that, while a Channel Tunnel would be scientifically possible due to the large amount of geological data that has been amassed, it was not ‘politically and commercially advisable’.82 The plan was also commented upon in From Behind the Speaker’s Chair in terms of the parliamentary debate between Randolph Churchill and Edward Watkin, the scheme’s champion. Churchill’s anxieties were apparently eased by the suggestion that, in the event of a Franco-English conflict, ‘the British end of the tunnel could be blown up’ by use of ‘an electric button, pressed in a room in London’.83 Elsewhere in the November 1900 issue, the spirit of the exhibition was found in two articles that dealt, respectively, with the expanding horizons of knowledge in polar exploration and the increasing accuracy of map-making. ‘Further North than Nansen’ found the Italian journalist Olindo Malagodi discussing the Arctic perambulations of his fellow countryman Luigi Amedeo. Amedeo’s expedition was designed to ‘correct geographical errors’ and bring back more systematic, reliable data relating to ‘ocean currents, the magnetic pole and its influence, the luminous phenomena of the Polar nights, the

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formation and extension of the ice’.84 By ‘determining’ geographical ‘boundaries’, Amedeo was actualising the claim of Beckles Willson’s ‘The Evolution of Our Map’: that speculation and guesswork were gradually being eliminated from cartographic representations of the world. He plotted the historical journey from ‘unpicturesque irregularity’ through ‘approximate exactitude’ to ‘true likeness’.85 This tension between the global accrual and distribution of knowledge on the one hand and the lessening of fictional fertility on the other was also to be the driving tension behind the genreplay in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The First Men in the Moon. Holmes, confronted by the ‘early eighteenth century’ manuscript of the Baskerville ‘legend’, had to decide whether the most outré excesses of Gothic fiction and primordial folkloric violence could still occur within his rationalist schema.86 Willson and Malagodi were negotiating and redrawing precisely this same boundary, though in both cases the gradual planing away of falsities and the accumulation of knowledge provided enough opportunity for heroism in itself: ‘continuing the great tradition of Polo and Colombo . . . You, sons of the land of the sun, have gone further North than any Northerner as yet.’87 Wells’s The First Men in the Moon also looked to generate irony from generic juxtaposition; we see, for example, the mundanity of Bedford’s commercial investment in Cavor’s fantastical voyage: ‘ “Ass!” I said; “oh, ass, unutterable ass . . . Hopping about looking for patents and concessions in the craters of the moon!” ’88 The texts, despite their differences, share this sense of generic conventions not as rules to be obeyed but as ideas to renovate, work through and modernise. When reading the texts in isolation, this quality can seem purely literary; in the context of the Strand’s own scientific revolution, they seem to play a very active role in deciding what activities and practices will be accorded this new level of legitimacy. The November 1900 issue also featured ‘An Electric Man’ which detailed the work of the American inventor Louis Philip Perew. He claimed to have designed, built and patented an electrically powered ‘automaton’. This would later be exposed as a fraud. A later patent application filed in 1907 classified the ‘automaton’ as a mere ‘advertising device’ where a ‘figure’ is attached to a ‘gas-engine powered vehicle’.89 The article was preoccupied, first, with the process by which the necessary ‘patents’ were secured to ensure the invention’s marketability and, secondly, the money provided by local ‘capitalists’ who supported the inauguration of the limited liability company. In explaining these structural details, the article was revisiting a theme

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from the November Illustrated Interview with Baron Romer who had recently been elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society. Romer had asserted that ‘I have always retained my interest in science . . . [it] has undoubtedly been of use to me at the Bar, especially in the many complicated patent cases in which I was engaged’.90 The old, humorous picture of inventors’ struggles for public attention has become a far more serious question of intellectual property, one that further evidenced the bleeding together of discourses of science with discourses of power (whether monarchical, governmental or judicial) throughout 1901. That patenting and the process of corporate marketing (called by Adam Mossoff ‘the property-based, commercialization framework’)91 were suddenly treated as serious issues is indicative of a changed attitude, and the article becomes more explicit in detailing the potential impact of the automaton upon society. When Bedford considers the various applications of Cavorite in The First Men in the Moon, he quickly conflates the commercial with the military: ‘My first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human industry.’92 In doing so, he echoed ‘An Electric Man’, which considered the automaton’s merits as a drawer of omnibuses, though its most significant role might have been as an agent of war: It could be made to do a thousand and one things which men of flesh and blood would shrink from . . . it could become a fighting appliance, carrying death and destruction in its machinery . . . as a carriage for a species of rapid-fire gun?93

The invention’s worth was heightened by the putative development of a military-industrial complex in which issues of technological development, ownership and distribution rights might become highly politicised.94 This passing allusion was more distinctly elaborated by Roy Stannard Baker’s ‘The Building of the “Deutschland” ’. The article made a series of explicit connections between the growth of military technology and the onset of a European knowledge economy. It also presaged the early twentieth-century’s reorientation from colonial conflicts to the clash of rival empires within Europe.95 The article was impressed by the scale of the achievement evidenced by The Deutschland but also expressed anxiety at Britain’s lack of equivalent development. Significantly, while the ship was nominally destined for commercial uses, it had also been made ready for war.

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These vessels, although intended for the Atlantic passenger service . . . are all built under the requirements of the German navy. On the deck there are beds for the mounting of great guns . . . in a fortnight, should the Empire need them, these peaceful passenger ships could be made terrible engines of war.96

The article betrayed a sense of the politicised dimension underlying the disparate technological developments among the imperial powers. It was only a small step from the commercial and mercantile confrontations that the article described to the military confrontations that would soon erupt. In this sense, the commercial ocean liner made fit for combat was a potent metaphor for the politically charged science and trade wars at the turn of the century. The idea that globalised commerce would force a reconstitution of the European power balance was the source of no little anxiety in all areas of culture. Governments’ ability to feed, grow and take possession of their domestic inventors and technologists became emblematic of their military standing. In The First Men in the Moon, Bedford’s ambitions for the commercialisation of Cavorite are tellingly framed in the kinds of language previously reserved for global powers: Suddenly I saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners and spheres deluxe. ‘Rights of pre-emption,’ came floating into my head – planetary rights of pre-emption. I recalled the old Spanish monopoly in American gold . . . ‘This is tremendous!’ I cried. ‘This is Imperial!’97

By the time readers of the Strand encountered that sentiment, the magazine more generally had been underwriting the political importance of patenting and commercialisation rights for some time and painting them as key areas of concern for British supremacy within European competition. The fear of military failure is observable elsewhere in ‘Breaking Wild Horses for the Army’, ‘The Locust Plague in South Africa’ and, most tellingly, ‘A British Commando’. In the latter, Conan Doyle provided more details of his plan for the militarisation of civilians as part of daily life. He also tried to innovate new methods of weaponry on the back of his own experiences and ingenuity. He wrote to both The Times and the Westminster Gazette in February 1900 describing his efforts to interest the War Office in trialling a ‘small and economical apparatus’ that would adapt ordinary rifles for ‘high-angle fire’.

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He had received an impolite rebuff and exclaimed ‘no wonder that we find the latest inventions in the hands of our enemies rather than ourselves’.98 In May 1901 his eye would have been gladdened by an article called ‘The Most Destructive Projectile Ever Invented’ on the subject of the ‘Gathman’ shell: In spite of . . . efforts toward the suppression of warfare, the man who can invent the weapon calculated to wreak . . . the greatest possible destruction of life and property is still a popular hero and a certain winner of wealth and glory.99

The shell ultimately proved far too erratic to be deployed in combat situations, despite the Strand’s claim that ‘the most powerful warship afloat’ could be ‘utterly destroyed’ by it.100 The magazine embraced these new inventions in the eager anticipation that greater development equated to greater global power, a view heavily satirised by Cavor in The First Men in the Moon: ‘Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another . . . science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use.’101 For the magazine as a whole, however, imperial anxieties in South Africa and commercial anxieties in Europe found a common balm in articles that speculated about the destructive capacity of new weapons technology. By July 1901 the issue of patent reform was centre-stage in an article by John Mills on ‘His Majesty’s Patent Office’. Mills observed that ‘an age is known by its inventions’ and accordingly tabulated the comparative number of patents applied for in the major European countries, asserting Britain’s role as a competitor in a bitterly contested marketplace: ‘the number of patents applied for illustrates the progress of inventive activity’. Accordingly, the flow of ideas and inventions is indicative of a putative British economic and military supremacy; however, the nation’s creativity is not supported by the practices of the state. He recalls Charles Dickens’s ‘Poor Man’s Tale of a Patent’ which described the unfairness and labyrinthine complexity of acquiring commercial rights. Improvements had been made, however, and this was reflected in the deployment of scientific knowledge by its team of ‘skilled examiners’, something alluded to by Romer in the earlier interview. Increased scientific involvement in government practices appeared to promise the end of the Dickensian characterisation of institutions as convoluted networks of sinecures.102 By 1901 the imposition of scientific standards of experiment, verification and legitimation appears to be the principal route through

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which change could be affected. This conclusion was echoed elsewhere in relation to the training of cab drivers and archbishops, the efficiency and productivity of potato-peeling contests, the ‘campaign’ against avalanches and the attendance upon railway accidents.103 John Mills provided further evidence of the pervasiveness of the scientific establishment in his article on ‘The Government Laboratory’ in May 1901. Here, he emphasised the degree to which the compact between science and business should in fact be viewed as a trinity, including the role of the government. The rise of MPs and Lords with a ‘commercial’ background had also been noted interestedly in From Behind the Speaker’s Chair.104 On The Strand (where else?) Mills introduced his readers to a building whose anonymity belied the importance of the activity within: a place where ‘scientists’ (of all disciplines and kinds) ‘exercise their scientific skills in the interests of the state’.105 The laboratory’s remit had grown since the 1850s when it was a small part of the Excise department that dealt with the regulation and taxing of import and export goods by measuring the rates of ‘adulteration’ in tobacco and milk.106 In 1901 the ‘value of Chemistry as an auxiliary’ has seen the laboratory develop into a multivalent and continually growing department that had added the regulation of all trade to and from India, the investigation of the ‘difficult’ question of yew-tree poisoning, measuring the pollution of Thames water, the safety-testing of all scientific equipment arriving in the country and the detection of ‘foreign matter’ in butter.107 The laboratory had unknowingly become, for Mills, ‘a factor in our daily lives’.108 The drive towards efficiency required government scientists to ‘play the part of engineer, architect, and chemist, all rolled into one’ as they ‘construct [their] own apparatus, invent mechanical auxiliaries and sketch out plans of attack and defence’.109 The readers of the Strand, during this whole sequence of articles, were given a revelatory whistle-stop tour around the various ways in which science had penetrated unseen into the daily transactions of their lives. By April 1902 we can observe the consequences of this change in H. J. Holmes’s article ‘Making a Policeman’, in which we see prospective candidates being measured and weighed to see that their bodies meet the required standards. The article later asserts that all candidates ‘must be re-vaccinated’ before they assume active duties and assumes a direct connection between physical and moral effectiveness.110 This emphasis was applied to their physical presence and institutional efficiency but, strangely, not to their detective practices. Despite one or two references to developments in

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forensic science that occur after 1902, the reader of The Hound of the Baskervilles across 1901 and 1902 had been presented with few frames of reference.111 In the early stages of the novel, readers discover that James Mortimer’s career in ‘Comparative Pathology’ includes authoring articles such as ‘Is Disease a Reversion’, ‘Do We Progress?’ and ‘Some Freaks of Atavism’. He subsequently affronts Holmes by describing him as ‘the second highest expert in Europe’ behind Alphonse Bertillon.112 Yet the Strand had published nothing to make those references accessible to its readers. Instead they would be much more likely to see Holmes as an individual who was best able to take advantage of the clues, traces and trails that new institutional efficiencies and bureaucratic modes of power had brought into place. Holmes’s deductions most often derive from data-logs comprising train timetables, tram tickets, cab numbers, typewriter idiosyncrasies, newspaper font and telegram carbon-copies rather than the catalogues of ear shape or degrees of ‘nose flatness’ that preoccupied the new discipline of criminology.113 Holmes’s ability to read criminality through physiognomy, however, does occur spectacularly in The Hound of the Baskervilles and has consequently proved central to critical discussion of the novel’s location within turn-of-the-century scientific culture. His ability to locate the villainous Stapleton within the tainted lineage of Hugo Baskerville is allied to his observations on the primitive nature of Selden’s form and features as well as the passionate tendencies that are dictated by Dolores’s ‘Spanish blood’.114 This employment of degenerative science within a criminological framework has provided an attractive way of reading the novel for modern critics. It allows for a politicisation of Holmes’s method, establishes an imperial context for the stories and forms a natural congruity with the novel’s status as a work of late Gothic fiction. Catherine Wynne observes that the Baskerville moors ‘became a site for the interplay of Gothic forces. Aristocratic degeneracy, madness and defilement of purity flourish in this kind of landscape . . . a treacherous site of instability that unleashes dark and degenerative forces.’115 Similar arguments appear in Stephen Kern’s critical overview, A Cultural History of Causality, where he describes the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles as being driven by ‘a reversion to ancestral evil’.116 These arguments are rehearsed in numerous other sources where familiar names are held up as key contexts: Lombroso, Havelock Ellis, Francis Galton and Max Nordau.117 Such readings are valuable in themselves but they disregard the fact

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that, as far as readers of the Strand were concerned, the Lombrosian method (adumbrated for the English market variously by Nordau, Ellis and Galton) taught them nothing that was not already felt to be instinctually true in everyday life. Historicist readings of the novel often conceive of it emerging from a broad intertextual landscape of scientific theories and popular narratives involving criminality, degeneration, atavism and middle-class prejudices. That these scientific contexts were entirely absent from the Strand draws attention to the limitations of that reading. We have to try to sketch out the contours of the text as viewed from this distinct and very particular perspective. The question of what sort of claims Sherlock Holmes did have to epistemological legitimacy in direct relation to the Strand offers a rather different answer to that offered by most critics viewing the texts in isolation.118 This can be illustrated with reference to Gertrude Bacon’s article ‘Has Baby a Clever Head?’ which discussed aspects of phrenology in relation to the facial characteristics of babies. Bacon begins by asserting that ‘there are many who sneer at the science of phrenology as elaborated nonsense and charlatanism’ not least because ‘they declare . . . “all babies’ heads are alike” ’.119 This falsity is something that ‘no mother will allow’ and so the article advances into its promulgation of phrenology with the ‘sneering’ scientist left behind and ignored. The article was lavishly illustrated with photographs (like Bertillon fiches) captioned with their dominant quality (‘No. 4 – A typical John Bull’, ‘No. 5 – A peaceable citizen’).120 These qualities are particularly potent to Bacon because they are morally unbound and owe their ultimate fruition to the manner of the babies’ upbringing: A very noteworthy set these . . . it is to their abuse and undue development that we owe the seamier side of life. Phrenology owns to no ‘bad bumps’ per se, holding that so-called bad qualities are only abuses of good and natural ones.121

So the qualities that may beget a fine soldier may equally create a street brawler. Accordingly, contributors to the nascent field of criminology were telling mothers nothing that they did not already know. Holmes’s vaunted ‘method’, then, was not necessarily something esoteric and unachievable for Strand readers, but rather a heuristic and ideological model that could be at least partially applicable to the moral practices of everyday life. This also marks the crucial

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connection between the construction of criminality in The Hound of the Baskervilles and the rest of the Strand in 1901. If institutions, organisations and family structures could intercede in containing potentially antisocial or criminal tendencies, then their progressive efficiency and effectiveness took the form of a simple ideological necessity. The reason Selden is able to survive on the moor undetected is because no one connects this violent degenerate with the quiet and withdrawn Mrs Barrymore who is revealed to be his sister. While Selden’s face bears the ‘savage’ marks of his moral depravity (‘a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions’),122 it is his overindulged upbringing that truly makes him monstrous: ‘We humoured him too much when he was a lad and gave him his own way in everything until he came to think that the world was made for his pleasure.’123 A Lombrosian could well have picked Selden out of a police lineup, then, but an alert and morally rounded neighbour could have predicted such aberrant behaviour in early childhood through the rigorous application of common sense. This assertion is backed up by Doyle’s Strange Studies from Life series from 1901 in which the multiple murderer, William Youngman, was described as suffering from childhood overindulgence: ‘Let the thing that he desires be withheld from him [and] his own will and his own interest’ will ‘blot out for him the duty that he owes to the community’.124 Doyle’s preoccupation, though superficially scientific, is also ultimately subordinated to the didactic lesson of a childhood fable. When thinking about Wells’s and Doyle’s novels as cohabitants, we must remember that, when they first appeared in the Strand, Doyle’s identity was far more heavily associated with the magazine than was Wells’s. There was a natural harmony between Conan Doyle and the Strand, typified by his close relationship to George Newnes and to Herbert Greenhough Smith, as well as to other prominent authors including H. Rider Haggard and Grant Allen.125 Wells was a much more incongruous member of the Strand club; his proximity, in this context, to issues of science and public engagement is something of a false lure.126 It takes only a superficial comparison between his appearances in the Strand (where he published fitfully and, for the most part, after his commercial and artistic peak)127 and the Fortnightly Review (where he was encouraged to publish lengthy disquisitions on socialism, sociology and wildly speculative engagements with contemporary science, the future of democracy, war and sociology under the title

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of Anticipations) to confirm this.128 These articles were extracted and reprinted in the Review of Reviews in 1901. Wells’s brand of confrontational, iconoclastic social engagement was in direct contravention of many of the Strand’s founding principles, particularly in relation to science. His work was a much more natural companion to that of Stead. The first readers of The First Men in the Moon encountered it as inhabitants of an intellectual climate that was antithetical to Wells’s utopian radicalism, as has often been a key part of critical readings. Whether the novel appears as a critique of science in the wake of a socialist or Fabian political awakening, an expression of anti-capitalist, Swiftian satire or a conscious attempt to politicise the dormant elements of older ‘science fiction’, meaning is always generated from the friction between the constraints of generic form and the disruptive tendencies of a radical worldview.129 Criticism has been divided on the nature of the novel’s critique. Most agree that the novel is critical of commercial capitalism and ‘social Darwinism’, both of which are characterised by Bedford. However, it also provides a critique of science’s disregard for the human cost of progress, as epitomised by Cavor who blithely characterises the presumed deaths of his assistants as a ‘martyr[doms] to science’.130 When read as part of the Strand as a whole throughout 1901, this ideologically charged relationship, the source of the novel’s meaning for all those treating Wells as a serious artist, is more or less neutered and submerged. The satire of Bedford’s avaricious consumer capitalism assumes a far less critical tenor when inserted alongside the incipient climate of competition anxiety established by so many other articles from the period. If an innovative market supported by science is going to improve institutions, win wars and assure the prosperity of empire (as asserted elsewhere), then how could Bedford’s attitude be taken in such a strictly negative way? Read in isolation, the novel’s representation of the central Bedford/Cavor relationship is entirely open, hence the wide dichotomy of critical opinions. There can little question that, read as part of the Strand, Bedford assumes the dominant voice while Cavor’s famous critiques (‘science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use’)131 become marginalised. Bedford’s status as the translator of scientific information and scientific language identify him with those stable, dependable narrators of ‘Science in the New Century’, ‘The Promise of Science’ and ‘Problems Science has Almost Solved’. Early on in the novel, Bedford

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acknowledges that his reader is probably expecting a summary or explanation of the precise nature of Cavor’s work: The best thing I can do therefore is, I think, to give my impressions in my own inexact language without any attempt to wear a garment of knowledge to which I have no claim.132

Carlo Pagetti (with John Milstead, Steven McLean and Patrick Parrinder) remarks upon the way in which the bourgeois voice of Bedford is used to incorporate the arcane language of the wilfully abstract scientist, Cavor.133 This is certainly valid but relies upon a slight misreading of the Strand’s changing scientific culture at the time that it was serialised. The early scenes of their friendship depend for their comedy upon the conversational incompatibility between the two men. Milstead identified the key problem of the story to be one of miscommunication, a problem that is only solved by Bedford ‘successfully tell[ing] his story’ in the shape of his autobiographical novel.134 According to this reasoning, Wells exaggerated the conversational chasm between the two men as a way of underscoring Bedford’s philistinism. This approach also informs the most recent influential account of the novel in McLean’s The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells. McLean’s analysis of the novel suggests that Bedford’s garbled explanation of gravitational forces is a direct example of the Strand’s ‘nonspecialist’ readership’s demand for crude kinds of popularisation.135 This is a little misleading given that it acknowledges the periodical origins of the narrative, only to dismiss them as unilaterally unscientific. McLean does a disservice to the Strand and its readers who had been reasonably well prepared for the scientific content of the story’s commercial, legal and military implications. What the Strand readership was not prepared for was the dissenting dimension of Wells’s politics. Bedford’s final and determining claim to legitimacy in the eyes of the Strand is that he produced precisely the kind of fiction that its readers would want to consume. In that sense, Bedford as the ‘author’ of The First Men in the Moon was a far more natural fit than Wells. Perhaps the most summative article published in the Strand on the subject of science during this period was also the most poetic and the most coherent statement on the changed nature of the scientific establishment itself. ‘The History of the British Association’ (also written by John Mills) appeared in September 1901. Mills placed the Association firmly at the heart of nineteenth-century scientific progress and the

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spread of scientific understanding ‘home to the doors’ of the ‘every-day man’.136 A beautiful passage describes the difficulties that the Association faced in bringing together its members from across the country in the 1830s when England was ‘a different land’ where travel was costly, dangerous and difficult.137 Nevertheless, the organisers were surprised by the multitudes that did arrive in Cambridge in 1832, a ‘hodgepodge of philosophers’ from different disciplines with wildly different levels of professionalisation, organisation and cohesion.138 Mills characterised the Association’s drive towards public engagement as being central to its rise in prominence and forms an implicit comparison with the comparatively aloof and aristocratic Royal Society. This engagement is represented as being the result of science acquiring both a coherently unified voice and the popular language with which to express it. Science has thus moved from the domain of the hobbyist to become ‘the prime mover of progress in all that pertains to the improvement of trade’.139 A series of clearly identified examples demonstrated science’s penetration into the everyday world of trade and domesticity, from the use Robert Stephenson made of the Association’s aggregated findings on the stresses and strains upon metals in developing his locomotive engine, the theorisation of artificial manure, Schonbein’s gun-cotton as a military-industrial tool up to Sir Henry Bessemer’s oxygenation for producing industrial steel.140 These internal developments blended with the lessening of the price of scientific equipment and the spread of scientific education more broadly across the classes.141 This recognises that the reader of the Strand should consider him or herself a ‘stake-holder’ within the scientific establishment and possess a corresponding right to enjoy the benefits of the ‘dividend’. These articles mark the completion of a complex process by which the Strand slowly deferred epistemological power to the various institutions of science on the understanding that those same institutions would be beholden to the magazine’s core values. This transformation in a relatively short space of time formed one of the most fascinating and under-discussed episodes from fin-de-siècle popular culture. More crucially, the new dependency upon blended institutional and scientific authority would go on to form the key reasons for the breakdown in the relationship between Conan Doyle and the Strand. At this stage, their respective goals seem more or less aligned, yet Doyle would come to rail against a hegemony that he himself helped to inaugurate for a mass-market readership. The Strand meanwhile would prove reluctant to pursue the consequences of its scientific revolution once the threat of war had abated.

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Notes 1. The First Men in the Moon was serialised across ten issues between November 1900 and August 1901; The Hound of the Baskervilles was spread across nine months between August 1901 and April 1902. 2. Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home, p. 301. 3. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 9. 4. Doyle, Letters to the Press, p. 64. 5. Even more recent histories such as Judd and Sturridge’s The Boer War: A History credit him with creating the defining image of the Boers (p. 94). 6. Lycett, Conan Doyle, p. 270. 7. Segal, ‘Pantomime, Dance, Sprachskepsis’, p. 68. 8. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, p. 106. 9. Ibid., pp. 105–6. 10. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, pp. 27, 101, 256. 11. ‘How to Become Strong’, p. 54. 12. Garrett, ‘Rhodes Reflected in Many Minds’, p. 605. 13. ‘Sandow in Plaster of Paris’, p. 461. 14. Ibid., p. 461. 15. Ibid., p. 461. 16. Ibid., p. 462. 17. ‘How to Become Strong’, p. 54. 18. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain, p. 61. 19. Doyle, Letters to the Press, pp. 72–3. 20. Ibid., p. 71. 21. Ibid., p. 73. 22. Doyle, The Great Boer War, p. 1. 23. Morgan, ‘The Boer War and the Media’, p. 5. 24. Sandow, ‘My Reminiscences’, p. 145. 25. Doyle, Letters to the Press, p. 72. 26. For anxieties about Sandow’s lineage expressed elsewhere, see Plock, ‘A Feat of Strength in “Ithaca” ’. 27. Doyle, Letters to the Press, p. 74. 28. See Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 25. 29. Leech, Magazine Illustration, p. 5. 30. Doyle, ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’, p. 282. 31. Doyle, Letters to the Press, p. 81. 32. Doyle, ‘The Three Students’, p. 607. 33. Ibid., p. 611. 34. Ibid., p. 613. 35. Broadwell, ‘The New Musketry Practice at Aldershot’, p. 777. 36. Trevor, ‘A British Commando’, p. 635. 37. ‘If Britain Disarmed’, p. 414. 38. Ibid., p. 416.

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Chivalric Machines 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

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Beresford, ‘The Rank-and-File of the British Navy’, p. 379. Ibid., pp. 371–4. Ibid., p. 376. ‘If Britain Disarmed’, p. 416. DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, pp. 11, 113. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 13. Doyle, ‘A Glimpse of the Army’, p. 345. Ibid., p. 350. Ibid., p. 346. Ibid., p. 350. Story, ‘Tommy on a Transport’, p. 417. Ibid., pp. 417, 421. Osborn, ‘The Flags of Our Forces at the Front’, p. 259. Doyle, Letters to the Press, p. 61. Doyle, ‘The Blanched Soldier’, p. 427. Ibid., p. 432. Ibid., p. 432. See Hodgson, ‘The Recoil of “The Speckled Band” ’. Doyle, ‘The Blanched Soldier’, p. 434. Harris, ‘Pathological Possibilities’, p. 465. Deloncle, ‘The First Moon Photographs’, p. 493. ‘How the Great Paris Telescope Was Built’, pp. 612–18. Deloncle, ‘The First Moon Photographs’, p. 493. Ibid., pp. 493, 497. Ibid., p. 493. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (II)’, p. 697. See Lightman, ‘Marketing Knowledge’; Cantor et al (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical; Cantor and Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized; Brock, Science for All; Cooter and Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places’. Lucy, ‘From Behind the Speaker’s Chair’, July 1901, p. 104. See Mussell, Science, Time and Space. Scott, ‘Eccentric Ideas’, p. 340 ‘Some Curious Inventions’; Scott, ‘Remarkable Accidents’, ‘Peculiar Furniture’, ‘Strange Devices’; ‘The Evolution of the Cycle’. ‘Some Curious Inventions’, p. 313. Ibid., p. 314. Ibid., p. 314. Allen, ‘Glimpses of Nature: III – A Beast of Prey’, p. 287. Later articles included ‘The Promise of Science’ and ‘Problems Science Has Almost Solved’. Dolman, ‘Science in the New Century’, p. 57. Ibid., p. 57.

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80 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 60. Lucy, ‘From Behind the Speaker’s Chair’, July 1901, p. 108. Malagodi, ‘Further North than Nansen’, p. 561. Willson, ‘The Evolution of Our Map’, pp. 543, 546. Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles (I)’, p. 126. Malagodi, ‘Further North than Nansen’, p. 562. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (V)’, p. 281. US Patent Ref: 949287, 20 July 1907. Cordova, ‘The Right Honourable Lord Justice Romer’, p. 568. Mossoff, ‘Commercializing Property Rights in Inventions’, p. 356. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (I)’, p. 535. Northrop, ‘An Electric Man’, p. 587. I do not use this term with the historically specific meaning derived from the period when it was coined (the period during and after the Second World War), but instead in line with more recent theorists from various disciplines to refer to the incipient dawning of formal relations, shared goals and shared projects between governments and arms manufacturers which DeLanda dates tentatively to the turn of the twentieth century and the slide towards 1914, when ‘the conflict was not a confrontation between tactical innovations . . . or between strategic ideas but a clash between the industrial might of entire nations” (War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, p. 108). See DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, p. 13; Gordon, ‘Colonial Warfare, 1815–1970’, pp. 298–9. Baker, ‘The Building of the “Deutschland” ’, p. 672. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (II)’, p. 698. Doyle, Letters to the Press, p. 59. ‘The Most Destructive Projectile Ever Invented’, p. 532. Ibid., p. 533. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (VII)’, p. 498. See Pettitt, ‘ “A Dark Exhibition” ’. See ‘How Cab, Bus and Tram Drivers are Tested’; Lucy, ‘From Behind the Speaker’s Chair’, August 1901, pp. 173–8; Holmes, ‘A PotatoPeeling Contest’; Burgh, ‘A Campaign Against Avalanches’; Valentine, ‘The Breakdown Train’. Lucy, ‘From Behind the Speaker’s Chair’, April 1901, p. 413. Mills, ‘The Government Laboratory’, p. 561. Ibid., p. 562. Ibid., pp. 563–8. Ibid., p. 571. Ibid., p. 564. Holmes, ‘Making a Policeman’, p. 389.

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111. See, for example, Anderson, ‘Detectives at School’; Mallett, ‘FingerPrints Which Have Convicted Criminals’; Scott, ‘The Detection of Blood Guilt’. 112. Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles (I)’, p. 126. 113. See Lombroso’s famous chapter from Criminal Man called ‘The Born Criminal’ (p. 7). 114. Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles (IX)’, p. 372. 115. Wynne, The Colonial Conan Doyle, p. 66. 116. Kern, A Cultural History of Causality, p. 40; Clausson, ‘Degeneration, “Fin-de-Siècle” Gothic, and the Science of Detection’; Frank, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. Kestner’s The Edwardian Detective highlights ‘the cultural anxiety about atavistic reversion’ as the cause of ‘moral, intellectual and existential instability and disorientation’ (pp. 37–9). For Greenslade, The Hound of the Baskervilles ‘tapped the widespread and irresistible fascination with physiognomy’ to ‘underwrite the plausibility of the narrator’s extensive use of degenerationist and reversionary discourse’ (Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, p. 100). 117. See Thomas, ‘The Fingerprint of the Foreigner’; McBratney, ‘Racial and Criminal Types’; Fluet, ‘ “Distinct Vocations” ’; Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture, pp. 342–8; Hutchings, The Criminal Spectre, pp. 114–20; Baker, ‘Darwin’s Gothic’. 118. This debate has principally occupied critics interested in the relationship between the Holmes stories and science. See Jann, ‘Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body’; Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science; McBratney, ‘Racial and Criminal Types’. 119. Bacon, ‘Has Baby a Clever Head?’, p. 490. 120. Ibid., pp. 490–2. 121. Ibid., p. 492. 122. Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles (V)’, p. 611. 123. Ibid., p. 609. 124. Doyle, ‘The Holocaust of Manor Place’, p. 252. 125. According to Reginald Pound, Doyle thought Allen ‘stood alone’ as ‘an interpreter of science’ and ‘was the first to convey the meaning of Darwinian theory to the multitude’ (Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 68). After Allen’s death, Doyle completed the final Hilda Wade episode (‘The Episode of the Dead Man who Spoke’) in a ‘beautiful and pathetic act of friendship’ recorded at the head of the published story (p. 217). 126. The Chronicles of the Strand Club was a series of articles published regularly between July 1905 and July 1907. The humorous articles consciously evoked the tone of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and depicted the magazine’s most famous ‘literary and artistic contributors’ in telling amusing stories and anecdotes; the famous names were playfully concealed behind noms de plume. ‘The Chronicles of the Strand Club – No. 1’, p. 66.

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127. The most significant contributions (aside from The First Men in the Moon) were the short stories ‘The Country of the Blind’, ‘The Empire of the Ants’ and ‘The Stolen Body’, as well as his famous twin articles on ‘The Land Ironclads’ and a 1920 rebuttal of Conan Doyle’s belief in spiritualism in tandem with George Bernard Shaw. 128. Anticipations ran in the Fortnightly Review between April and December 1901; it was followed in 1903 by a similarly inflected irregular series Mankind in the Making between April 1903 and March 1905. 129. See Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells, pp. 169–70; Parrinder, H. G. Wells; Philmus, Into the Unknown; Suvin, ‘Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition’. 130. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (I)’, p. 538. 131. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (VII)’, p. 498. 132. Wells, ‘The First Men in the Moon (I)’, p. 534. 133. See Parrinder, Shadows of the Future; Milstead, ‘Bedford Vindicated’; McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells; Pagetti, ‘The First Men in the Moon’. 134. Milstead, ‘Bedford Vindicated’, p. 103. 135. McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells, pp. 117–19. 136. Mills, ‘The History of the British Association’, p. 258. 137. Ibid., p. 258. 138. Ibid., p. 258. 139. Ibid., p. 258. 140. Ibid., pp. 260–3. 141. Ibid., p. 258.

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Chapter 3

The Two Conan Doyles, 1903–1910

Dear Sir Conan Doyle – Nearly fourteen years ago I had the great pleasure of an introduction to your writings, Micah Clarke being the medium . . . Shortly afterward I read a still earlier work of yours, a clever detective story issued in the form of a ‘shilling shocker’, and called A Study in Scarlet. For once an author’s earliest works were rightly appraised; the one being deservedly relegated to the limbo of the three-penny box, the other as being deservedly acclaimed one of best novels of the day . . . It may be said then, that you had from the first a dual personality.1

So wrote a Mr G. W. Parker of Sheffield in 1902. The letter was published in Good Words of December 1902, the winning entrant in their short-lived Letters to Living Authors competition whereby readers were solicited for their literary views. The runner-up, John O’Connor of Shepherd’s Bush, similarly hoped that, after Sherlock Holmes’s death in 1893, ‘admirers of your other fiction were pleased to think that you were free to devote yourself to more ambitious work’.2 History has left no other trace of these gentlemen’s literary criticism but it spoke to a generally schismatic and confused sense of Conan Doyle’s reputation in the early twentieth century. Good Words remarked upon this lack of unanimity: ‘very few [letters] are agreed as to which of his manifold classes of writing . . . most strictly entitles him to a place among the leading writers of to-day’.3 If this was true for readers, it was equally true of professional critics and even of Conan Doyle himself. After the enormous success of The Hound of the Baskervilles, there seemed to be a sudden unease among critics at the prestige of ‘our only literary knight’ and a general desire that, for good or ill, he choose a path.4 In the Pall Mall Magazine, James Douglas was succinct on the subject of any author who ‘degrades his talent to supply the demand of the market’: ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in Micah Clarke and The White Company, was travelling in the right

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direction, but the popularity of Sherlock Holmes tempted him, and he fell.’5 The Academy was even less kind on the subject of his Round the Fire Stories, arguing that, in any previous age, ‘Titbits novelists’ like Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells would ‘remain in their proper positions in life’. Their unearned success and prestige was solely down to the ‘mob’ while the popularity of Sherlock Holmes did ‘not flatter the mentality of the time’.6 At the period of his greatest success, Conan Doyle reached an impasse in his work. His lifestyle was built upon the commercial success of his magazine fiction. He also maintained sincere sympathy for the agora theory of criticism, which placed popularity itself as the ultimate arbiter of value. Yet the criticisms of his ‘commercial’ writing echoed his own frequently voiced concerns and reservations about the expenditure of his own literary efforts; he unambiguously rated his historical novels as his most valuable and enduring work. The enthusiastic readers of Good Words, the ever-dwindling home of nonconformist ‘improvers’, who prized this historical fiction above all, were an increasingly marginalised, backward-looking group. To please them most of all would neglect the other reading constituencies that he courted. In 1903 he faced a dilemma over whether to write more Sherlock Holmes stories or compose his long-anticipated sequel to The White Company. Under these circumstances, it is telling that, despite his finer feelings, he made the full resurrection of Sherlock Holmes his first priority.

The Returned The stories published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand between 1903 and 1904 should have reinforced the success of The Hound of the Baskervilles, answered the Strand Magazine’s dearest commercial prayers and cemented the relationship between author and periodical. However, while the resurrection of Holmes appeared to be a triumph on the surface, in practice the stories’ production and publication was convoluted and relations between Conan Doyle and the Strand were weakened as a result. The correspondence between Doyle and Greenhough Smith on the composition of the stories has traditionally been interpreted as positive and encouraging, as argued by Peter McDonald who casts Smith as ‘an attentive critic, champion and, of course, investor . . . he bolstered his leading author’s often flagging morale’.7 Since the dialogue was never less than superficially cordial, this benign interpretation is perfectly valid until one moves

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beyond the limits of McDonald’s period of direct interest. The same issues at stake in 1903 and 1904 recurred throughout the remainder of Doyle’s relationship with the Strand in a series of cultural flashpoints that would characterise the ebbing tides of both parties’ fortunes. The Edwardian period in the Strand was intriguingly juxtaposed with the same period in Conan Doyle’s career. The magazine sought a retrenchment, a consolidation of its commercial interests and found a new, energetic generation of authors ready to provide it. Doyle, on the other hand, moved gradually towards a series of increasingly critical and occasionally radical positions in his cultural, political and religious beliefs. These stances would be forged through dramatic changes in his private life but also refined through much public debate in person and in print. The aspic Victoriana of Sherlock Holmes served the former’s interests more obviously than the latter’s and it is unsurprising that the first intimation of future fissures would be observable here. Herbert Greenhough Smith’s requests for more Sherlock Holmes stories were an understandably common feature of his correspondence with Doyle throughout their working relationship. In his early autobiography J. D. Carr notes that ‘over and over Greenhough Smith urged him to write something of more general popular appeal’ only to be met with increasingly firm rebuttals.8 Almost anything by Doyle was of course desirable (and expensive) material for the Strand, but Smith evidently grasped the unique alchemical potential of the particular mixture of character and publication. Despite his careful nurturing of the relationship, he was frustrated by the fact that Doyle only agreed to resurrect Holmes upon the promise of a huge payment from the American market in the shape of Courier’s Weekly.9 Doyle agreed to this deal with famous reluctance, but also used Courier’s largesse to forcibly enlarge his deal with the Strand. While these financial arrangements made pleasurable reading for Conan Doyle’s agent and accountant, in retrospect they laid an uneasy and discomfiting foundation for the production of the actual stories. The contract with Courier’s did not specify a number of stories but rather a series of inducements that would be triggered up to the number of thirteen. In practice, this pulled Doyle through a series of contortions as he had to continually find ductility in material that he already considered grievously thin. The commercial inducements both attracted and repulsed him as he moved from planning an eight-, ten-, twelve- and finally thirteen-story series. He generally approached his writing as a yeoman rather than an aesthete,

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even in his self-perceived higher endeavours, but his professionalism appeared taxed by the unwelcome task of returning to the stories and by the very high expectations that he confronted, especially from Smith. He later described ‘The Norwood Builder’ as ‘carpenter’s work’, indicating his wearied sense of depersonalised workmanship.10 This is not to say that he took no pleasure from some of the stories, especially ‘The Empty House’ and ‘The Second Stain’, but he reacted sensitively to Smith’s critiques of ‘The Norwood Builder’ and ‘The Solitary Cyclist’ which Smith judged to be awkwardly told, poorly paced and lacking in apparent crime. Doyle defended his work, but also conceded that he was mining a diminishing seam: ‘The Norwood Builder’ I would put in the very first rank of the whole series for subtlety and depth . . . it is well for other reasons to have some of the stories crimeless . . . As to the Cyclist, I did not like it so well . . . yet I could make no more of it . . . You will appreciate more fully now my intense disinclination to continue these stories which has caused me to resist all entreaty for so many years. It is impossible to prevent a certain sameness & want of freshness.11

Smith’s criticisms placed Doyle in an awkward bind; on the one hand he was censured in terms of literary merit but, on the other, induced by commercial rewards. In response to this difficulty he promised that the series should extent no further than eight stories: ‘The Americans have been asking me to make the series 12, but in view of your letter I will keep it to 8.’12 However, the series ultimately numbered thirteen and, with uncanny precision, triggered the highest payment from Courier’s of $45,000. Four short years earlier, in 1899, Smith’s creative involvement in Conan Doyle’s work for the Strand was considerably more harmonious: Why not come down for a weekend and talk about projects? I would do something at once for the Strand if I knew what to do. Perhaps you could knock a spark out of me.13

What had changed? The new awkwardness depended upon a change in Doyle’s very precise perception of his role within the cultural field. McDonald has accurately mapped the evolution of this position as it waxed and waned between ‘profiteer’ and ‘puritan’, never fully alighting on either side.14 He was careful in his public proclamations on literature to place the public as the ultimate arbiters of literary

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value at the expense of ‘schools’ of critics and theorists. He argued in his essay on Stevenson that critics were a ‘fallible race’, constantly revising their opinions based upon ‘the collective voice of the reading public’.15 His faith in the reading public as the final arbiters of taste was later tested by his belief in the essential quality of writers like George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Hall Caine and George Moore, all of whom at different times and in different ways contravened standards of conventional middlebrow decency and ran afoul of the public. They were writers of ‘remarkable powers’, breakers of convention, yet unable to ‘lay hold of the public mind’.16 This frustration also led to his public intervention over W. H. Smith’s refusal to distribute Moore’s Esther Waters through their circulating libraries. He argued that misguided notions of propriety and ‘legitimacy’ were interfering with the production of ‘true and serious work’.17 Having despaired of the reading public and the critics on behalf of other writers, he would soon feel the pain of their indifference himself when he followed the Return series with Sir Nigel at the end of 1905. The novel was a prequel to his cherished work of fourteenth-century historical fiction The White Company. Intriguingly, the proximity of the Return series to Sir Nigel restaged the simultaneity of the publication of The White Company and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1891. Conan Doyle accorded his Nigel novels a special artistic and historical significance. ‘It is,’ he remarked in an 1892 Bookman interview, ‘the only work I really fancy’ before elucidating the amount of dense research required (‘no less than 150 books’) to admiring gasps from the interviewer.18 This perceived tension between Sherlock Holmes and his ‘higher’ work persisted into his later life, leading to his most famous proclamation on the subject from his Memories and Adventures: [The Nigel novels] taken together did thoroughly achieve my purpose . . . as a single piece of work they form the most complete, satisfying and ambitious thing that I have ever done. All things find their level, but I believe that if I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one.19

Doyle’s plans for Sir Nigel were postponed by the unexpected Return windfall, a delay which led to rather defensive responses to Smith and to his mother on the subject: ‘I don’t see why I should not . . . earn three times as much money as I can by any other form of work.’20

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In order to further underline that his pre-existing artistic credentials had earned him the right to the return of Holmes, he had written to Smith lamenting that ‘the most expensive luxury in life is even so limited an artistic conscience as mine’.21 He also included a bruised observation that he had written ‘Sir George [Newnes] four letters – important ones – and got no reply. I feel sore’ and an admonishment that if ‘the company [Newnes Ltd.] were to publish the final Brigadier Gerard adventures as a single tome’, he ‘must take some steps to ensure proper production and advertising’.22 At the same time there was a growing interest in the possible reappearance of Sherlock Holmes, oscillating between twin poles of excitement and scepticism. The Courier’s deal had been finalised in March and, by June, wild rumours were circulating that Conan Doyle planned to relocate to Montauk in order to produce ‘a series of stories and mysteries of American origin’.23 While Doyle publicly denied these reports, they hinted at a measure of British unease at the American money fuelling the work.24 A Punch sketch in September addressed the American rumours by having an Americanised ‘Sherlock P. Holmes’ bump into a forgotten Watson in the Strand: ‘Holmes!’ I clutched him fervently to my bosom. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ ‘Name of –?’ he queried. ‘Watson. Dr. Watson.’ ‘Well darn my skin if I didn’t surmise I’d seen you somewhere before . . . Oh this is slick!’25

Holmes then enquires after the health of Sir Henry Baskerville and is delighted to discover that he has introduced ‘baseball into the West Country’.26 The sketch is broadly sympathetic but also speaks to anxiety at the mixing of the two cultures and for the preservation of Holmes’s distinctive Englishness. Holmes asks if ‘the public’ will object to his ‘Amurrican accent’ to which Watson replies ‘it wouldn’t matter if you talked Czech or Chinese. You’ve come back, that’s all we care about.’27 This response was kindly but also hinted that literary judgements would hardly impede a triumphant commercial return. Indeed, once the shadow of potential Americanisation had passed, the press was left only to speculate upon the vast sums on offer for the new stories. Local newspapers in Portsmouth were agog at the reputed sums (reported in Household Words) of ‘£6,000 per story’ for ‘a series of 8’ and which had only been achieved through the ‘urgent representations of Sir George Newnes’ himself.28 These sums also prompted bemusement and suspicion. The Citizen wondered ‘who says the paths of literature hold no reward for the ambitious? . . . The

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question is whether the author having reached such a pedestal will do so well as in the early days of his enthusiasm.’29 The stories that make up the Return bear out some of Conan Doyle’s fears as well as those of his readers. ‘The Empty House’ offers a colourful and credibly monstrous villain in the shape of Sebastian Moran, an elaborate and modern murder weapon in the long-range air rifle and some tightly wrought subterfuge interspersed with details of Holmes’s activities in the years of his absence. Yet the story also betrays a self-reflexive awareness of its own status as a kind of ersatz Victoriana in a way that The Hound of the Baskervilles was able to avoid. The story plays self-consciously with its own mythos to the extent that we find Holmes and Watson surreptitiously gazing across an unfamiliarly familiar Baker Street at a Sherlockian silhouette – beloved already by merchandisers and fans. It was a wax-coloured model of my friend, so admirably done that it was a perfect facsimile. It stood on a small pedestal table with an old dressing-gown of Holmes’s so draped round it that the illusion from the street was absolutely perfect.30

The ‘illusion’ of the dummy echoed the illusion of the stories themselves, brought into being through the shared responsibility of capital, editors and a professionalised publishing milieu as much as through the individual will of the author. In an absurd attempt at unbroken continuity, Holmes secretly buys Watson out of his medical practice to ensure their reunion at his perfectly ‘preserved’ Baker Street apartments.31 In the second story, ‘The Norwood Builder’, Watson remembers that A young doctor, named Verner, had purchased my small Kensington practice, and given with astonishingly little demur the highest price that I ventured to ask – an incident which only explained itself some years later, when I found that Verner was a distant relation of Holmes, and that it was my friend who had really found the money.32

Watson in the Return is thus a diminished figure with no other employment than to follow Holmes around, affording little actual assistance and serving only to ensure the prolongation of his narratives. Previous stories purchased the thrill of Watson’s involvement in Holmes’s cases against his competing investments in familial and professional life. With his wife seemingly vanished into thin air along with his lifelong medical vocation, this meagre veneer of realism was jettisoned from the stories.

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Responses to ‘The Empty House’ among popular and critical periodicals from 1903 were highly positive but focused primarily on the fact of Holmes returning rather than the merits of ‘The Empty House’ in particular. The Derbyshire Times was of the opinion that ‘the Strand Magazine for October has a far greater interest attaching to it than any of its predecessors for some months’.33 The phenomenon of the reappearance was generally characterised as, on the one hand, an exceptional cultural event but also an alleviation of shared grief. Readers were apparently beset by ‘infinite regret’ and, in the words of the Strand advertisement that announced his return, ‘the loss of a personal friend’.34 Smith’s anxieties about some of the stories proved well founded. In two of the stories, Holmes remains in London rather than investigating in person. In ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, Holmes sends Watson to investigate the strange story of a beautiful governess, Miss Smith, who finds herself stalked by a bearded cyclist. Watson performs these duties incompetently, earning Holmes’s reproach that ‘you really have done remarkably badly’.35 By the time Holmes deigns to ‘find time’ himself, he is barely able to prevent Smith’s forced marriage to the abhorrent Mr Woodley who is subsequently shot and killed.36 In ‘The Dancing Men’, despite his apparently deep suspicions, Holmes passively encourages Hilton Cubitt to return home and await further developments, whereupon he is also promptly shot and killed. There is no reason given for the delay, which Holmes spends anxiously waiting at Baker Street for a telegram. The baseless delay has no other effect upon the plot other than facilitating a thrilling climax that might otherwise have been difficult to engineer. Other problems permeate the series. ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ drifts towards the implausibly sensational as a masked Holmes and Watson indulge in house breaking and theft. Watson’s moral qualms are hastily put to one side in order to ‘share this adventure’.37 ‘The Missing Three Quarter’ is stunningly tone deaf in its conclusion; Holmes cheerfully sums up the case and receives the approbation of the previously antagonistic Dr Armstrong, while Godfrey Staunton weeps over the dead body of his wife in his ‘house of grief’.38 ‘The Three Students’ (discussed in the previous chapter) is plainly asinine. Holmes finds the ‘villain’, Gilchrist, readily equipped with his own written confession and means of penitence through colonial service in Rhodesia. ‘You have fallen low,’ says Holmes to the erring Adonis, ‘let us see, in the future, how high you can rise.’39 In terms of their theme, the stories also show a remarkably repetitive fascination with issues pertaining to marital unease and

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its unintended consequences. ‘The Norwood Builder’ has Jonas Oldacre bitterly ruminating on a broken engagement from decades before and plotting the elaborate ruin of his former fiancée’s son. ‘The Dancing Men’ sees the Cubitts torn apart by secrets and private shame. ‘The Solitary Cyclist’ depicts the grotesque forced marriage of the effervescent Miss Smith to Woodley, a spectacle complete with an ‘unfrocked’ clergyman of ‘singularly dark’ repute.40 ‘The Priory School’ builds its mystery upon the failed Holdernesse marriage and the conflict between the Duke’s legitimate and illegitimate offspring. ‘Black Peter’ sees the abusive Carey marriage ended violently by a whaling harpoon. Charles Augustus Milverton threatens to ruin the engagement of Lady Eva Blackwell to the Earl of Dovercourt through the release of ‘imprudent’ letters from her youth.41 ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’ depends upon the importation to Britain of a long-running marital feud from the revolutionary cadres of Tsarist Russia. ‘The Missing Three Quarter’ sees Godfrey Staunton desperately concealing his doomed marriage to a consumptive workingclass wife in order to preserve his inheritance. Finally, and most explicitly, ‘The Abbey Grange’ focuses on the horrors of domestic violence and alcohol abuse in the aristocratic Brackenstall marriage. Lady Brackenstall, an Australian émigré, observes that Our marriage has not been a happy one . . . Sir Eustace was a confirmed drunkard. To be with such a man for an hour is unpleasant. Can you imagine what it means for a sensitive and high-spirited woman to be tied to him for day and night? It is a sacrilege, a crime, a villainy to hold that such a marriage is binding. I say that these monstrous laws of yours will bring a curse upon the land – God will not let such wickedness endure.42

Both Watson and Holmes are struck by the force of this attack upon the British laws and customs pertaining to marriage and divorce. Such is its power that Holmes invests Watson with the juridical power to acquit Brackenstall’s killer and to facilitate his future relationship with Lady Mary. While Sir Eustace is nominally the ‘villain’ of the story, the cause of its disturbances is structural rather than individual, ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’.43 With ‘The Abbey Grange’ in mind, the marital strife that predominates elsewhere in the series begins to fall into focus. Much of the institution of marriage is shown to be rotten: proprietary legal strictures induce predatory unions; restrictions against divorce perpetuate abuse; buttressing architectures of sexual and romantic neuroses incentivise and shame incompatible people into misguided relationships.

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The stories can be read together in this way as a kind of critique of this component of Victorian values and, furthermore, of the kinds of fiction that uncritically supported them. This combination of attention and critique from a distance would superficially make the Return series one of the first major examples of neo-Victorian fiction, at least if one uses Marie-Louise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben’s definition of ‘critically re-visioning the nineteenth century from latter-day perspectives that complicate simplistic notions of the period’.44 Marriage, as examined in Chapter 1, was one of the key pillars of the Strand’s fiction, operating as a light-hearted source of peril and a constraint against which low-level drama could be easily leveraged. It also served as a kind of shorthand for everyday life, linked its stories more explicitly to the projected ‘family’ readership of George Newnes’s imagination and offered reward for earnest romantic labours in courtship fiction. With some exceptions, the question of marital difficulties was treated on the other side of Greenhough Smith’s projected cultural balustrades around the Strand’s content. For Conan Doyle, however, a reader well versed in the likes of Hardy, Caine, Gissing, Meredith and Moore, this was an insufficient response to the challenges of modernisation. His views on modern fiction, as alluded to earlier, would be echoed later in his public advocacy for divorce law reform. The Separation Act of 1895 was, he thought, a masterpiece of what Ford Madox Ford would later call ‘parade’: a public performance of moral behaviour that in practice coerced people into immorality. The ulcer was suppurating beneath the surface and it was no use simply concealing it with a bandage. By allowing separations but outlawing remarriage, the law lived up to its religious obligations at the expense of public morality. ‘Compulsory celibacy,’ he argued, ‘could not enforce morality.’45 In the wake of the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1912, Conan Doyle wrote to the Daily Mail several times in response to letters from disgruntled clergymen putting forward his nonconformist, non-literal view of the role of scripture in modern life: A million widows have been consumed in the rite of suttee because the original direction in the sacred books was misread ‘fire’ when it was actually ‘altar’. It is a terrible and apposite example of the danger of allowing sayings uttered in a foreign tongue, under different conditions, in distant lands and far-off days, to hamper our common sense and to throw a blight upon living men and women.46

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In the ensuing public debate, Doyle’s self-consciously liberal, modernising stance aligned him much more closely with radical and socialist voices like the Daily People and Morning Star than the Strand, the Spectator and Blackwood’s which were perhaps his more natural environment.47 The stories’ depictions of marital tensions are split evenly between the straightforwardly ‘bad’ unions on one hand and, on the other, the evils resulting from honest partnerships being threatened by some meaningless indiscretion or perceived social malfeasance. If Lady Eva’s letters in ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ are so meaningless, how on earth could readers desire her marriage to a man who would over-react so violently to reading them? Milverton is one of the most enduring villains of the Holmes canon, partly for his oleaginous, threatening demeanour, but also because of what he represents. He makes a profitable cottage industry from feasting upon the ‘parade’ and hypocritical Victorian cult of innocent femininity. His extortions reflect and are underwritten by patriarchal investments that construe feminine chastity as sacrosanct. It was precisely these issues that were at stake in the later divorce debates when this inequality in law was addressed. We might further wonder what amount of money or prestige could possibly be worth the life of secret torment lived by Godfrey Staunton? As the orphaned heir to ‘Lord Mount-James . . . one of the richest men in England’, Staunton’s marriage to his landlady’s daughter grievously threatens his inheritance.48 Dr Armstrong remarks that ‘no man need be ashamed of such a wife’, yet the story implicitly critiques class-bound notions of propriety which demand precisely that.49

The Wrong Side of History In some respects we can view this debate as the point at which Conan Doyle began to construe himself as post-Victorian and began to experiment with new ideas and values, to see which admixture of old and new might best fit the twentieth century. The Return stories were early signals of this dimension in his thought given that they preceded any other public proclamations on the subject by some years. They are instructive precisely because, in working through his disinclinations, he was forced to confront the discomfiting elements of his own worldview. This was also true of his attitudes towards colonialism as well as marriage. His slow movement away from a

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non-doctrinaire Liberal Unionism to a quiet support for Home Rule was made in a series of painstaking steps. Likewise, his Crime of the Congo in 1908 demonstrated a highly articulate attack upon predatory colonialism. Though the text made every effort to reinforce the distinction between Belgian and British imperialism, his later acknowledgment of Home Rule suggested that beneath his uncomplicated nationalism, he was increasingly sceptical of the dominant views of the recent past. It is, then, an interesting quirk of fate that these personal developments were the background to his Holmesian ‘return’. He could not realistically expect to uncritically revisit the Victorian scene of his successes without embedding new forms of critique and distancing. By the time he was able to turn his full attention to Sir Nigel in early 1905 the historical setting, longer word count and narrative freedom at his disposal must have seemed liberating. He was freed from contemporaneous politics as much as from the commercialism of his previous projects. Despite its huge scope and reams of historical information, the composition was tranquil and, finally, triumphant. With accustomed hyperbole, he wrote to his mother upon its completion at the end of November that it was ‘my absolute top’.50 Any dissatisfaction with contemporary life, temporarily soothed by his Plantagenet endeavours, would, however, again be aggravated by a bitterly fought, exhausting and disillusioning campaign during the general election of January 1906. Doyle the Liberal Unionist was submerged beneath the Liberal landslide and could barely conceal his relief afterwards. Sir Nigel began to be serialised in the Strand in the Christmas issue of 1905 and ran somewhat remorselessly throughout 1906. When reading through the Strand Magazine from the early 1900s, Sir Nigel feels dramatically out of place. This is partly because serious historical fiction was ill suited to this kind of serialisation. When Cornhill serialised The White Company in 1891, it did so as a selfconsciously serious literary journal. This meant that the instalments were published alongside other novels and short stories of a comparable tenor, as well as complex literary criticism and scientific and historical reflections. These modes of writing clearly encouraged slow, meticulous engagement and Cornhill’s readership might have been expected to have a higher tolerance for Sir Nigel’s passages of dense, meticulous detail. In the Strand, however, Sir Nigel appears leaden and slow when published alongside ‘Across America by Motor-Car’, ‘Curious Incidents of Cricket’ and the sensational ‘Boomerangs and Boomerang Throwing’.

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In part this was a particular feature of the novel itself, which wended a leisurely path towards the adventures of Sir Nigel Loring and Samkin Aylward. It is easy to imagine readers being a little frustrated by the time, six months after the serialisation began, when they were greeted by the happy news that ‘at last the two comrades, gentle and simple, were fairly started on their venture’.51 This was after twelve chapters spent slowly establishing the anachronistic, impoverished character of its hero. Nigel, the latest sire of a denuded line of great warriors and adventurers, is reared by his aged grandmother Ermyntrude and his values have been forged by her tales of heroism and knight errantry which commemorate the ‘glorious’ deaths of his father and grandfather in the Scottish and French wars respectively: The old dame broke into a long poem, slow and dull in the inception, but quickening as the interest grew, until with darting hands and glowing face she poured forth the verses which told of the emptiness of sordid life, the beauty of heroic death, the high sacredness of love and the bondage of honor. Nigel, with set, still features and brooding eyes, drank in the fiery words, until at last they died upon the old woman’s lips and she sank back weary in her chair.52

We learn not only about Nigel and his family history but also of the decay of feudalism after the Black Death, the rise of commercialism, the increasingly oppressive yoke of the common law, abuses of monastic power, maritime customs, horse husbandry and, in one especially interminable scene, the correct collective nouns for badgers, foxes, lions, boars and swine (an important distinction). Nigel’s love interest, Lady Mary, proves her eligibility by demonstrating her expertise: ‘surely, sweet sir,’ she blushingly interjects, ‘one talks of a sounder of swine’.53 Douglas Kerr has noted that Conan Doyle’s historical fiction often depends upon a slightly crude ‘pastoral’ mode that sustains the narratives even when they roam into continental Europe and lose their surface-level interest in the charms of forestry and woodcraft.54 By losing himself and the first half of his narrative amid the rich, dense forests of Hampshire, Doyle was able, like Wordsworth, to shake himself free of the ‘vast city’ and its inconvenient fascination with crime and detectives, a ‘discontented sojourner; now free’.55 Any respite would be ended by the novel’s tepid critical reception, a disinclination that persists into the present day. Very few modern critics have paid any close attention to Sir Nigel largely because, as Kerr

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observes, it ‘repeats the successful formula’ of The White Company.56 The two novels are, in fact, astonishingly similar. Alleyne Edricson and Hordle John from the earlier novel are replaced by the young Nigel and Samkin; the older Nigel of The White Company is replaced by John Chandos as a battle-hardened mentor and Lady Maude becomes the young Lady Mary. Early scenes of Chaucerian journeys give way at the middle of the novel to a departure for the French wars. Minor trials of nobility culminate in a dramatic battle, a knightly investiture and a return home to claim the chaste, waiting damsel. While the later novel is less well remembered, it was no commercial failure and earned Conan Doyle a great deal of money for the serialisation rights both in Britain and America, where sensational advertisements on behalf of the Philadelphia Press claimed that ‘it cost $25,000 to secure Conan Doyle’s thrilling new romance’.57 The Bookman also noted it as one of the best-selling ‘six-shilling’ novels of December 1906.58 Its importance is nevertheless extrinsic rather than instrinsic. Rather than being any great aesthetic work, the novel is meaningful in terms of what it tells us about Doyle’s career, attitudes and self-perception in the early 1900s. Conan Doyle’s sense that the Nigel novels amounted to his best and most lasting work was based upon the idea of historical fiction as the self-evidently pre-eminent literary form. While the relative currency of that point of view had fluctuated throughout the nineteenth century, it was certainly a minority view by 1906. By then the second great wave of historical fiction, upon which Micah Clarke and The White Company had surged to prominence, had broken.59 Literary critics of the early century produced a wide variety of reflective pieces on the subject as the form ‘fell’ from prominence to being the preserve of Boy Scouts rather than serious readers. This attitude was summed up in a particularly withering Academy article in 1902, which observed that it had been ‘a number of years since any person of taste read a new historical novel with genuine interest’.60 The argument, when expounded, could have predicted some of the later criticisms of Sir Nigel: Imitation of imitation of imitation. A convention wherein every characteristic, almost every gesture, is absolutely stereotyped . . . puppets in historically correct clothes behave always with perfect consistency according to an unalterable code . . . Scott did a great deal, but not everything.61

The argument ultimately concludes that the historical novel has become asinine through excessive reverence for Scott’s ‘boyish’

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values.62 D. F. Hannigan in the Westminster Review had already remarked that Scott had been wrongly credited as the progenitor of the historical romance in place of the ‘incomparably superior’ Defoe.63 Instead, Scott was characterised as the father of the ‘novel of costume’, and those who came in his wake (some of whom, like Conan Doyle, explicitly identified as such) had watered this tradition down even further.64 The rise of critical indifference towards the historical novel was paralleled by its emergence as a pedagogic tool or simply as juvenile literature. The most popular new writers of the genre, such as G. A. Henty, were explicitly marketed as such.65 The White Company was prescribed reading in Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and further articles for new generations of schoolteachers recommended Sir Nigel as a ‘peg on which to hang’ history lessons about the Middle Ages.66 Historical fiction was not unknown to the Strand but it is fair to speculate that the only reason Sir Nigel was accorded such a prestigious space was because of its author’s reputation and connectivity to its regular readership. If the manuscript had been submitted ‘cold’ there would have been little question of Smith approving it. Smith wanted the serialisation rights but was anxious about the novel’s length. In response Doyle grumbled that ‘there are parts which I could cut away in order to fit it into twelve numbers but I confess it should be bother to do so’.67 In a final note upon the novel’s completion he cautioned that ‘I reckon this book to be my best work – though I don’t claim that it is the best for the purposes of the Strand’.68 By way of contrast, the most direct comparator in the magazine was Max Pemberton’s Lafayette (later published as My Sword for Lafayette in 1906), which recounted events from the American and French revolutions in a much more accessibly narrativised form. Pemberton was explicitly at pains to distance his story from the dry matter of history, writing ‘to history will the student look for a more faithful picture of [Lafayette’s] feats of arms’.69 For Pemberton, history was an opportunity for romance; for Conan Doyle, it meant a deep and meditative excavation of the very origins of the term. Pemberton’s book, as a consequence, made even less headway with the serious reviewers targeted by Doyle. Where Lafayette was received positively, it was hailed as ‘adventure crowding on adventure, exciting scene upon exciting scene’.70 Where it was not, reviewers were vicious: the Saturday Review called it ‘amazingly tedious’ and a supercilious Review of Reviews wrote that ‘Max Pemberton’s new story, My Sword for Lafayette . . . is sufficiently described by the mention of its author and title’.71

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Sir Nigel was a dissonant presence in the magazine for a number of reasons beyond its genre. From one perspective, it is clear that Conan Doyle identified with some aspects of the Nigel character himself. This had both profound and trivial results. The relationship between Nigel and Ermyntrude was clearly modelled on that of himself and his mother, whom he revered as the keeper of romantic lore, both historical and of their own Irish genealogy. No Doyle biography is complete without a rhapsodic conjuring of her fireside recantations and ‘stirring examples of chivalrous behaviour . . . quickening her son’s heart’.72 Andrew Lycett also notes that Doyle’s outrage at receiving a fine for speeding in his car in 1904 lead directly to the villainous ‘crooked man of Shalford’ whom Nigel heroically subdues.73 More broadly, Nigel is consistently painted as a man preyed upon by commercialisation and modernisation. The Loring estates are being swallowed up by common law cases brought by the nearby Abbey and its grotesque bailiff. When trading in Guildford market to buy provisions for an unexpected royal visit, Nigel finds himself particularly adrift: Nigel bent his brows in perplexity. Here was a game in which neither his bold heart nor his active limbs could help him. It was the new force mastering the old: the man of commerce conquering the man of war – wearing him down and weakening him through the centuries until he had him as his bond-servant and his thrall.74

Nigel’s plight, a man forced to dirty himself with trade when he would rather be fighting abroad in the hope of ‘honourable advancement’, echoes that of Conan Doyle, a man desperate to compose the honest, serious literature of historical romance but pushed towards the production of fodder. Of course, this tension had always existed within Doyle’s work but, with this in mind, Sir Nigel appears to be a direct attempt to confront the limitations of the Strand’s content and to reshape the magazine into something more representative of his tastes. This discord was also made apparent when, in 1906, the Strand published a whimsical article offering up potential ‘totems’ or crests for famous authors. Many were obvious and straightforward; Conan Doyle’s was less so (Fig. 3.1): At first blush it would seem as if a pair of handcuffs would be the most fitting totem for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if one remembers only the brilliant Sherlock Holmes stories; but Sir Arthur has hopes of being best remembered in another and more classic vein, of which The White Company and Sir Nigel are examples.75

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Figure 3.1 Illustration taken from Stephen Hallett, ‘Totems for Famous Authors’, Strand Magazine, July 1906, pp. 113–15, p. 114.

This attempt at changing the magazine itself was understandable but misguided. In the event Sir Nigel fell between two stools: it was commercially successful, but considerably less so than Sherlock Holmes and it was received with critical indifference. The Saturday Review was damning, reproducing the broader critical consensus on the state of the historical novel in the period: He offers you an age without atmosphere . . . He apologises for incidents which may accentuate the contrast between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, but the mischief is that the contrast is not more apparent . . . It is just a ‘boy’s book’; with all the thinness and the hardness which the term seems to imply.76

Criticism was one thing, but in Punch the novel was made the subject of open mockery that piqued Doyle, who drew Greenhough Smith’s attention to the ‘ill natured skit’.77 A satirical advert proclaimed the arrival of ‘Sir Gargle’ by ‘Sir A. Sala Doyle’. Repetitions of the title were interspersed with mocking asides: ‘Portcullises on easy terms’, ‘The Middle Ages brought to our doors’, ‘For the dignity of letters’, ‘Doyle says it’s his best work’, ‘Where’s your Walter Scott noo?’78 The tone is somewhat puerile but was focused squarely upon perceptible disconnects, first between popular readers and the historical novel and, secondly, between the novel itself and the magazine in which it was to be serialised. Readers of the Strand had themselves acquired new tastes in the Edwardian years. There was no cultural revolution in the Strand after 1901, but a form of retrenchment combined with subtle refinements in the kind of fiction that it published. The prophetic articles about

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science and society that had appeared to promise a new dawn in fact gave way to nothing of the kind. Science, indeed, dropped noticeably from the face of the magazine. It was replaced by a return to natural history in non-fiction, in which Samuel Levy Bensusan’s gentle, pastoral essays upon ‘The Story of a King-Fisher’ and ‘The Story of a Green Woodpecker’ hardly taxed their readers to think about new and imagined futures. There was also a new voice in the magazine’s fiction. P. G. Wodehouse’s story ‘The Wire Pullers’ was his first in the Strand, appearing in July 1905, five months before Sir Nigel. Wodehouse had served a form of apprenticeship for Newnes’s boy’s periodical the Captain before making the leap into the hallowed ground of the Strand where his literary idol, Conan Doyle, had first inspired him. In later life he would write to a friend that ‘the tragedy of life is that your early heroes lose their glamour . . . With Doyle I don’t have this feeling. I still revere his work as much as ever.’79 While Wodehouse would not come to dominate the Strand himself until the later 1910s, his first stories established exactly the kind of fresh, cynical, ironic voice that would become his signature style. Within the context of the Strand, suddenly striking upon the Wodehouse stories after years of worthy, leaden-footed fiction feels rather like the alleviation of some heavy burden. Of the three stories published across 1905 and 1906, two feature the Joan Romney character who manipulates the men and servants in her family through their sporting interests in order to facilitate her own wishes. The earnest, neurotically formal courtship rituals that marked romance narratives in the Strand were channelled into something rather different. Romantic attachments swing like pendulums and, if there is such a thing as human nature to be observed, it is perpetually shallow. The Wodehousian predilection for artful hyperbole and ironic detachment guides the narratives and sparks them fitfully into life. After she believes herself to have manipulated her brother George a place in the Oxford football team, Joan’s shout of encouragement from the terraces bring about a change in his poor performances: Up to then he had been fearfully ashamed . . . He had passed the limits of human feeling. The result was that he found himself suddenly icy cool, without nerves or anxiety or anything . . . I have felt it sometimes myself when, directly after I have had my best dress trodden on and torn at a dance, I have gone down to supper and found that all the meringues have been eaten. It is a sort of calm, divine despair.80

This kind of prose marks a significant change because so much writing in the Strand’s fiction would have deployed similar phraseology,

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while earnestly meaning every single word. Elsewhere, we find Joan earning herself a season in London by bribing her maid to seduce a bowler who threatens her father’s eminent batting average. In ‘The Missing Bowlers’, an attempt to bring first-class cricketers into a village game is resolved by rushing them half way across the county in a motor car during the innings break. The swiftness of Wodehouse’s prose was indicative of a change in popular tastes and his irreverence was far more representative of popular taste in the early century than Sir Nigel would prove to be. Wodehouse’s rise from juvenile literature into the mainstream more or less exactly paralleled the ‘descent’ of the historical novel into the same cultural bracket. Wodehouse offered something priceless to the Strand, something that felt new and modern without any of the discomfiting edges that so often attend those qualities in fiction. Many critics have observed the patterns of influence and stylistic echoes that link Wodehouse to the likes of Oscar Wilde. However, where Wilde’s satire in his plays and tales was often iconoclastic, Wodehouse’s only targets were archetypal models of human folly.81 Elsewhere in the same period we find E. Nesbit’s novel for children The Amulet, the ascent of W. W. Jacobs to his fullest celebrity with a series of short stories including ‘The Boatswain’s Mate’ and a drift of flimsy short fiction such as Marion Ward’s ‘A Rivalry in Flowers’, in which a retired colonel and a spinster engage in an escalatory conflict over the production of flowers and vegetables. The more ponderous tradition of Strand romance narratives was maintained by the unlikely figure of Henleyite H. B. Marriott Watson whose short story ‘Her Face’ finds a tortured poet brought face to face with his unknowing muse when a sheet of his poesy blows across the courtyard into her rooms. The new significance of Jacobs and Nesbit was underlined by featured appearances by them in Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times in Their Lives. In this way the Strand experienced its own Edwardian summer, turning its face from those deeper questions of life that had threatened to preoccupy it during the transitional years at the turn of the century. This consolidated the Strand’s reputation as an island of middlebrow popular writing in a period of great change, but it did so by to some extent sacrificing its competitiveness. When George Newnes died in June 1910 he had played no active part in the business for nearly two years as he was stricken by complications resulting from his diabetes. After the commercial high water mark of 1901 and a subsequent plateau until 1904, he had overseen a company with declining profits as various pressures began to eat into the Strand’s market share and prestigious reputation. This decline can be read

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from the public announcements of Newnes Ltd’s accounts and reports to shareholders. There was a drastic drop in profits in 1906, partially defrayed by Newnes’s private capital, which necessitated a reduction in shareholder dividends.82 By 1907 the situation was parlous, with no dividend whatsoever and warnings about huge outlays on advertising.83 The larger resources of American publications (as well as their encroachment into the English marketplace) had greatly inflated author fees. At the same time the production costs for ‘luxury’ magazines had not been leavened by the falling costs for lower grades of paper.84 When Newnes died, it is plausible to suggest that his era of popular publishing had already ended. In 1907 he had bemoaned his difficulty in attracting new readers to Tit-Bits and the Strand: ‘At one time I had this scheme almost entirely myself. It is not so now; it is more difficult than it was to attract the public by prizes and the like.’85 The Strand was becoming increasingly isolated, preserved by its reputation and its loyal readership but, like an ox-bow lake, cut off from the new forms of competition with which it declined to seriously compete.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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‘Things and Other Things’, p. 815. Ibid., p. 819. Ibid., p. 815. ‘The Tepid Tales of Conan Doyle’, p. 391. Douglas, ‘Some Popular Novels and Why They Are Popular’, p. 382. ‘The Tepid Tales of Conan Doyle’, p. 391. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, p. 143. Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 331. Lellenberg notes that Doyle’s acceptance of the offer amounted to a kind of angry acquiescence, responding simply ‘Very well. ACD’ (Lellenberg et al. [eds], A Life in Letters, p. 510). Unpublished letter, University of Virginia Library. Ibid., p. 514. Ibid., p. 514. Unpublished letter, Toronto Public Library, No. 13. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, p. 121. Doyle, ‘Mr. Stevenson’s Methods in Fiction’, p. 647. ‘Dr Conan Doyle on Fiction’, p. 4. Doyle, Letters to the Press, pp. 44–5. Blathwayt, ‘A Talk With Dr. Conan Doyle’, pp. 50–1. Doyle, Memories and Adventures, p. 81.

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The Two Conan Doyles 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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Lellenberg et al. (eds), A Life in Letters, p. 512. Unpublished letter, Toronto Public Library, No. 13. Unpublished letter, University of Virginia Library. ‘The Revival of Sherlock Holmes’, p. 5. ‘Sir A. Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes’, p. 6. ‘The Prodigal’, p. 203. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 203. ‘An Author’s Princely Remuneration’, p. 2. ‘Sherlock Holmes’, p. 3. Doyle, ‘The Empty House’, p. 374. Ibid., p. 368. Doyle, ‘The Norwood Builder’, p. 483. ‘Return of Sherlock Holmes’, Derbyshire Times, 3 October 1903, p. 2. ‘The Return of Sherlock Holmes’, Strand Magazine, September 1903, p. 360. Doyle, ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, p. 8. Ibid., p. 6. Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’, p. 377. Doyle, ‘The Missing Three Quarter’, p. 135. Doyle, ‘The Three Students’, p. 613. Doyle, ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, p. 8. Doyle, ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’, p. 374. Doyle, ‘The Abbey Grange’, p. 245. In Violence, Slavoj Žižek refers to this apparent juxtaposition of everyday peace and sudden violence as the difference between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ violence, where the violent act that disturbs the apparent stillness of day-to-day life is somehow dissociated from the ‘objective’ violence necessary to maintain that same appearance of peace: ‘The overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably functions as a lure that stops us from thinking . . . [and] observing the systemic violence that has to go on in order for a comfortable life to be possible’ (pp. 3–8). Kohlke and Gutleben, ‘Introducing Neo-Victorian Family Matters’, p. 5. ‘Sir A. Conan Doyle on the Divorce Laws’, The Times, 9 February 1914, p. 3. ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on Divorce’, Daily Mail, 23 January 1912, p. 4. Deleon, ‘Divorce’. Doyle, ‘The Missing Three Quarter’, p. 125. Ibid., p. 135. Lellenberg et al (eds), A Life in Letters, p. 529 Doyle, ‘Sir Nigel (VI)’, p. 483. Doyle, ‘Sir Nigel (II)’, p. 8. Doyle, ‘Sir Nigel (V)’, p. 369. Kerr, Conan Doyle, p. 165.

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55. Wordsworth, The Prelude, p. 3. 56. Kerr, Conan Doyle, p. 160. 57. Sir Nigel commercial postcards, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, Portsmouth Central Library. 58. ‘Scotland’, p. 110. 59. Orel, The Historical Novel, p. 2. 60. ‘The Historical Novel’, p. 15. 61. Ibid., p. 15. 62. Ibid., p. 15. 63. Hannigan, ‘The Waverley Novels After Sixty Years’, p. 18. 64. Ibid., p. 18. 65. Kerr, Conan Doyle, p. 165. 66. ‘Conan Doyle as History Teacher’, p. 463. 67. Unpublished letter, 14 November 1905, University of Virginia Library. 68. Unpublished letter, 1905, University of Virginia Library. 69. Pemberton, ‘Lafayette (V)’, p. 13. 70. ‘The Review’s Bookshop’, p. 315. 71. ‘My Sword for Lafayette’, p. 561. 72. Lycett, Conan Doyle, p. 19. 73. Ibid., p. 289. 74. Doyle, ‘Sir Nigel (III)’, p. 144. 75. Hallett, ‘Totems for Famous Authors’, p. 113. 76. ‘Sir Nigel’, p. 713. 77. Unpublished letter, December 1905, University of Virginia Library. 78. ‘Sir Gargle’, p. 420. 79. Jasen, P. G. Wodehouse, p. 102 80. Wodehouse, ‘Petticoat Influence’, p. 212. 81. The best-known piece is Christopher Hitchens’ ‘The Honorable Schoolboy’. 82. ‘George Newnes, Limited’, Daily Mail, 10 August 1906, p. 2. 83. ‘George Newnes’ Profits’, The Financial Times, 3 August 1907, p. 4. 84. ‘George Newnes’, The Financial Times, 13 August 1910, p. 3. 85. ‘George Newnes, Limited’, Economist, 10 August 1907, p. 1364.

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Chapter 4

Lost Worlds and World Wars, 1910–1918

The Strand Magazine has frequently been described as a ‘national institution’, but never did those claims carry as much truth as during the First World War.1 Before 1914 the phrase simply referred to a kind of successful hegemony where its commercial success had meaningfully fused with the size of its cultural footprint. Perhaps it also implied a specific ability to speak alongside the establishment and to operate with its blessing, a supposition evidenced by its many commissioned articles from prominent political, royal and aristocratic figures from across Europe. During the war, however, the magazine was more or less entirely transformed into a vehicle for propaganda. While it prominently featured work by writers like Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells who were actively employed by the British Propaganda Office at Wellington House in different capacities, these marquee names were supported by hundreds of other voices clamouring in their support across fiction and non-fiction pieces. While the Strand had never been a place for controversy or genuinely frictive disagreement on major issues (as compared, say, to the Review of Reviews, the Pall Mall Magazine or the English Magazine), never had its pages found so many voices speaking as one. This univocality was produced by a pervasive sense of shared purpose based on moral, ideological and cultural imperatives. It also had the effect of effacing the more turbulent pre-war period in the magazine. Reading the Strand between 1910 and 1914, the period with which this chapter begins, is a more discomfiting, disharmonious experience that at any previous time in its history. In political terms, the Strand’s vision of England was assailed on its own pages by the disparate forces of suffragism, revolutionism, Irish separatism and trade unionism. Accordingly, this chapter is broken into three parts, the first of which examines the unease of 1910–14, the second Conan Doyle’s writing within the magazine, and the third the war years.

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The Gathering Storm The reason for this division is to draw particular attention to the strange phenomenon whereby the coming of the war was experienced almost as a soothing balm, alleviating the aggravations of peacetime. If this seems odd, it is largely because our own age has become so used to the shorthand idea of the Great War as a national cataclysm, arriving to overturn Edwardian and Georgian complacencies. That we find a different kind of narrative in the Strand might also help to explain how and why the magazine found itself definitively out of step with the post-war world after 1918. Its close ties to the establishment ‘line’ on the war would, in its aftermath, lead to doubt and mistrust. The whole notion of ‘propaganda’ would become tainted in the popular imagination and the Strand’s chirpy patriotism would prove disharmonious with the general tenor of the post-war mood. This disharmony would deepen throughout the twentieth century as the war poets and modernists were ordained by subsequent generations of readers and critics as the true arbiters of the war as a national catastrophe rather than a triumphant procession. This process has been most notably documented by Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell plots the spreading fault-lines between those who had fought in the war and those (‘the rest’ or ‘the enemy to the rear’) who had remained at home ‘talk[ing] of war’ and ‘ordain[ing] it’.2 These fault-lines would undermine the apparent consensus of publications like the Strand and, crucially, highlight the role of propaganda as a recruitment tool. Trumped by the modernists and cultural pessimists on the one hand, the Strand would also fall victim on its other flank to a concentrated boom in popular culture that was precipitated during the 1910s and that was to some extent powered by the sudden technological surges produced by the conflict.3 New forms of popular culture would prove to be faster, livelier and more likely to satisfy new generations of consumers whose minds had become habituated to a more frenetic pace of life. Just as the Strand itself had made the ‘miscellanies’ and serialised fiction magazines of the 1880s appear staid and unexciting, so it found itself struggling to acclimatise to what David Trotter has recently christened ‘the first media age’. Trotter characterises this epoch as beginning when the ‘augmentation of the given communicational media by new, mechanical technologies assumed something like a critical mass and (quantity becoming quality) began to be thought of and responded to as an integrated system’.4

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The relationship between the Strand and Conan Doyle appeared superficially strong during these years, not least because of the latter’s various official roles within the British war effort. During the period 1910–18 one could argue that Doyle entered the silver age of his career after the golden years of the 1890s. He would write one of his most enduring novels, The Lost World, in 1912 and, in so doing, usher his second most famous fictional character, Professor Challenger, into the public consciousness. His shorter fiction such as ‘The Horror of the Heights’ and ‘Danger!’ was published in the Strand to an unusually harmonious mixture of popularity, acclaim and serious comment. Yet this apparent strength also hid a series of deeplying lesions that would begin to damage the relationship between author and magazine. Doyle’s fictional work across these years can be read as an attempt to introduce ‘modern’ ideals and values into older forms of genre fiction. The contours of the quest romance, the Gothic story and the invasion narrative were to be remapped according to the exigencies of technological and scientific modernity. This task was distorted by Doyle’s pre-existing spiritualist values as well as by his experiences of the war and its aftermath. He began to deprecate many of the symptoms of modernity that he had previously courted, among them the ideological sentinels of the mass market press (including, implicitly, the Strand) which might obstruct or ridicule the religious and spiritualistic dimension of his thought. In 1910 long-term readers of the Strand would have noticed some intriguing developments in the magazine’s fiction as well as the political background established by its non-fiction pieces. Unlike in 1901, questions of science and technology were not paramount but were subsumed into growing unease over political questions: women’s suffrage, the intensification of European political rivalries, fear of an Anglo-German conflict, working-class movements, Irish separatism and threats to the dominant political order from Eastern European ‘revolutionists’.5 The magazine was evidently stricken with anxiety by these threats but, in attempting to counteract them, it was also forced to introduce new ways of representing them. Thanks in part to the enduring influence of Dangerfield’s work, these emergent political forces have become collectively enshrined as arbiters of change in the period as a whole. Within the Strand specifically, however, we find an intriguing case study of the ways in which they forced explicit revisions to long-standing beliefs, attitudes and narrative forms. The magazine’s content had shrivelled in scope by the 1910s; fiction had come to crowd out the speculative symposia, popular science writing and political ribaldry. Yet this pleasantly

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anaesthetised vision of the early twentieth century was to prove unsustainable and, in 1910, was subject to a noticeable coarsening. The antagonistic forces that could be relied upon to provide conflict and sensation in genre fiction were suddenly quickened and given a new richness which resulted in a restive unease within middlebrow conventions. In April 1910 a competition called ‘Dramatic Situations’ contained a series of suggestive illustrations and captions from which one significant detail was removed and upon which readers were invited to speculate. The answers were never published, leaving the piece standing only as an intriguingly self-reflexive commentary upon the state of the magazine’s own fiction at the time. ‘We live in a world of melodrama,’ the piece began, ‘when sudden, vivid, arresting incidents are happening . . . in our own lives, before our own eyes, or between the covers of a book or in the columns of a newspaper.’6 The first hypothetical example posited a ‘female Anarchist about to hurl a bomb into a patrician tea-party’ and suggested that, if the word ‘bomb’ were erased then we might substitute ‘a copy of Votes for Women, or a green parrot, or a Maltese cross’.7 The Maltese cross figured within the heraldic iconography and honours of almost every major European power in the period including Germany, Italy, France and Bosnia. This left the symbolism of the hurled object open and yet circumscribed within certain implicitly politicised domains. The first illustrated example (Fig. 4.1) was more explicit: The pair were too dazed to speak. A mist swam before their eyes. They were but dimly conscious that their sufferings were now all but over. Two powerful troopers were busy at the ____8

The image shows two civilian figures, one male and one female, surrounded by soldiers apparently in Germanic military dress. On the extreme right is another military figure who appears to be dressed differently. Is he saving the civilians from the depredations of the others? Is he perhaps their leader, organising a rescue from malignant parties unseen? Are the civilians ‘sufferings’ ‘all but over’ because they are to be freed or because they are to be killed? Answers to these questions were not forthcoming. As a result, the images from the article offer a useful summation of the Strand in 1910, facing a variety of contradictory forces arraigned awkwardly against its own undisturbed ‘tea party’. Over the next few years, feminists, trade unionists, anarchists, terrorists and representatives of rival empires would infiltrate the

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Figure 4.1 Illustration taken from ‘Dramatic Situations: Can You Supply the Missing Detail? A Problem for Our Readers’, Strand Magazine, April 1910, pp. 437–40, p. 437.

Strand’s fiction in place of its familiar rogues and scoundrels. They brought with them new forms of disruption and difficulty, reflecting the rapidly darkening tenor of the historical moment. The nature of the ‘threat’ in much earlier fiction had often been indistinct and opaque. Villains may have been foreign, but only of a nondescript type, open to interpretation. After 1910 these faces become historically recognisable symbols for specific contemporary fears.

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In July 1910 ‘Customs at Foreign Courts’ offered a survey of the fashionable ‘seasons’ and social conventions at various European courts. Most intriguingly, we find the German court identified as the nearest ‘akin in relationship’ to Britain, despite an observable lurch away from the ‘modesty’ and ‘simplicity’ of the 1880s towards a ‘plutocratic’ style augmented by displays of ‘excessive luxury’.9 This vision of a new and bloated German culture at odds with its traditionally austere values augured uneasily for relations between the nations. Meanwhile, readers were invited to find the ‘aged’ court of Austria-Hungary to be hidebound by ‘extreme rigidity’ and that of Tsarist Russia to go ‘one better than any other Court in Europe in the way of luxury and an almost barbaric magnificence’.10 It is always tempting to return to these essentially light-hearted images and attribute a disproportionate sense of foresight. Yet it is certainly the case that the light tone of the article contained a clear sense that some of the ancient regimes of Europe were changing and that the historic ties and relations that kept the balance of power may have become irrevocably skewed. This idea of a slow, tectonic divide was also raised in the depictions of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm which appeared in the magazine in the years leading up to the war and which would, after 1914, be subject to very hasty revision. In these depictions, the Kaiser was repeatedly described as ‘misunderstood’, his familial and ideological ties to England were emphasised and the man himself was shown to be a restraining impulse upon the destabilising forces within the country over which he ruled. In 1908, for example, a J. L. Bashford portrait was published proudly proclaiming the ‘Emperor’s sanction’ for its contents. This sanction was hardly surprising given the fawning obsequy beneath. The Kaiser had apparently been ‘denounced as a firebrand, the disturber of the peace . . . an intriguer’, yet he had ‘not drawn the sword since [assuming] the throne’.11 He appeared as the ‘darling grandchild of Queen Victoria’, ‘drawn to England by natural inclination’ and ‘esteem[ing] British opinions’.12 His ‘serious’ demeanour in public, Bashford continued, belied his ‘urbane’, ‘humorous’, ‘frank’ and ‘communicative’ private self. His fealty towards British naval supremacy is restated (‘we can never – even if we would – be strong enough to menace Britain’)13 and even his telegram of encouragement to President Kruger after the Jameson raid of 1896 is explained away as an act of ‘impulse . . . most decidedly regretted upon reflection’.14 This image of the Kaiser persisted until 1912 when a similarly inflected piece called ‘The Kaiser as He Is’ dispelled accusations of his being a ‘firebrand’ and asserted that he was ‘a great asset towards

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assuring the peace of the world’.15 Indeed, there is a startling symmetry between the two pieces, as the Kaiser’s close ties to England and to English royalty were emphasised: There is a great deal in common between the Kaiser and King George. This is a factor that, perhaps, deserves to be taken into consideration by those who talk so glibly of the possibility of war between the two countries.16

His desire to build up Germany’s army and navy were again figured as a benign wish to emulate the British while leaving their ‘supremacy’ unchallenged. He was again depicted as hidebound and ‘autocratic’ in comparison to Britain, but also possessed of humour and self-deprecation. Germany was thus shown to be the junior partner to a modern Britain. Despite the superficial pleasantries of both pieces, the message underlying them was clear: Germany’s imperial reach and its military and naval prowess had become significant determinants for the political coordinates of the new century. The Strand took a clear line on these issues, insisting upon the durability of Victorian bonds and family ties. Affairs of the heart were also undergoing revision in 1910. While the Strand had in the past featured short stories with tragic endings, thwarted heroes and failed romances, the number of these would increase significantly. A short symposium called ‘Love Stories of Real Life’ in July of that year invited novelists to share ‘true’ tales of romantic love. An aged Mary Elizabeth Braddon called the whole nature of the project itself into question as part of her response: ‘I regret much that I am not able to recall any instance of romantic love in real life. The people I have known have been sadly wanting in thrilling experiences of master passion.’17 This dissociation of ‘everyday’ people from the grand narrative of romantic love and fulfilment is striking within the context of the Strand because it had, for nearly twenty years, published an endless stream of stories that offered romantic love as a satisfactory ending for domestic narratives. Elsewhere in the symposium, Winifred Graham offered the bizarre tale of a hospital nurse who fell in love with a dying patient and, upon his dissection, kept his skull and the bones from his hands. Alice Williamson narrated the fate of a ‘famous’ and ‘brilliant’ scientific man who repeatedly made fortunes that he would pass on to his ex-wife since ‘his only pleasure in his money had been to give her pleasure’.18 L. T. Meade told the Hardian tale of a houseguest who mistakenly wooed the wrong sister through love letters while his true intended withered and died from misery.19

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Seven of the eight stories were tragic and depended upon the ways in which individuals might be driven out of their minds by the vicissitudes and impossibilities of romantic love. Widows wait daily for the arrival of long-dead husbands, a man falls in love with a woman glimpsed momentarily in a city crowd, a middle-class woman destroys her hopes by fixing herself to a drunken degenerate whom she is never able to redeem. In all of these brief anecdotes, shorn of context, the message is clear: love destroys the self. Rather than offering the foundations for love and security, passion burns through the people who feel it. Like ‘Dramatic Situations’ before it, the short symposium demonstrated a self-reflexive awareness that the demands of producing fiction and the expectations of its readers had changed. As we survey some of the fiction from the period, these changes clearly began to breed fiction of a darker hue. In practice, these changes called far more into question that simply the desirability and efficacy of romantic love. Aubrey Hopwood’s ‘The Melonville Expressman’ offers a startlingly grim example of this. The story’s protagonist, Freddy Burton, finds himself shunned by the British military despite all the apparent privileges that ‘an Eton education’ and ‘two years’ tuition at the hands of a fashionable Army crammer’ should have provided.20 A familiar archetype, the fair and ‘fresh-faced’ Burton is instead sent away to rural South Florida where he might amass a fortune by growing oranges. Yet even this enterprise fails and Burton, ‘surprised and disgusted’, invests his last money in a horse and cart, settling for a life as the titular expressman. ‘For a healthy Eton boy it was a demoralising, wearisome existence,’ writes Hopwood, before introducing his beleaguered hero to a paramour in the shape of ‘a shapely, reckless, bare-legged cracker girl of seventeen’ named Kitty.21 Their courtship and eventual marriage takes place against the backdrop of American growth in the shape of ‘railroads’ and ‘grotesquely self-conscious . . . massive structures’ that pockmark the burgeoning settlements.22 Burton decides to marry Kitty, given that ‘he had dropped out of the groove of his social sphere . . . beyond all possibility of retrieval’.23 The story appeared, like Conan Doyle’s ‘The Three Students’, to offer the well-worn narrative of colonial renewal: a journey from the class-bound old world to a new and fresh landscape with scope for reinvention and reinvigoration. Yet the couple’s happiness is destroyed when Kitty’s throat is ‘slashed’ by a jealous Chinese-American suitor named Sol Shannon who is depicted with gleeful, orientalised malignance.24 Burton, his mind contorted by grief and rage, plots Shannon’s grisly fate until he is

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able to kidnap the murderer, bind and gag him, and bury him up to his neck in the path of an oncoming train. The story ends with Burton endlessly and joylessly repeating his rounds, ‘seeking a passenger who never comes’, while his memory feasts upon the image of Shannon’s last moments:25 The thing he turned to gaze upon was scarcely human. Contorted beyond recognition, it had become a mere sweating mask of abject terror. Rigid with the appalling horror of his coming doom, the man had ceased to move; the sightless eyeballs glared vacantly into space.26

These disturbing narrative turns not only undermined many of the familiar romantic economies of the Strand’s fiction, but also political and imperial economies. America swallows the English emigrants whole, dissociating them from their past without offering any new hope for the future. The violence of the story was striking, but no less striking was its worldview, which isolated stories of individual failure and tragedy from the broader narratives of growth and success that surrounded them. The characters, still recognisable archetypes, were now cut off from traditional repositories of meaning and at the mercy of arbitrary and violent forces against which there was little defence. These early intimations of doubt in the transcendent power of romantic love and marriage as a socio-cultural institution found a non-fictional counterpart in an article on divorce given the eyewatering title ‘Untying Hymen’s Knot’. ‘Marriage,’ the piece began, ‘is a solemn affair; even more solemn is divorce . . . the tragedy of two mortals who once have loved and now are parted.’27 If divorce was ‘tragic’ then the comparative statistics that dominated the article painted a bleak picture for the future of marriage and those inclined to try it. Divorce rates in England had risen exceptionally with only minor pauses that could be accounted for by ‘commercial crises’ or ‘periods of business depression’: ‘the divorce rate in 1900 was two and one half times as great as it was in 1870’.28 Other European countries were said to be ‘following [America’s] example’ as divorce is ‘losing its terrors’ by becoming ‘an everyday affair’.29 By 1960, the article concluded, as many as ‘one third’ of people who married would either end up divorcing or have been divorced in the past.30 What the article alludes to, but pulls back from expressing outright, is that this rise has resulted from the increasing emancipation of women; we are told that ‘more than twice as many’ women file for divorce as men, who once enjoyed the exclusive right.31

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Access to divorce was one of the few areas in which the suffragists could line up alongside Arthur Conan Doyle on the barricades, and in its gradual proliferation we find a potent metaphor for the ways in which the transcendental and institutional pillars of the Strand’s ideology were slowly deconstructed. The placid helpmeets of the Strand’s early romantic fiction were prizes to be seized for their own charms, for their role as avatars of social respectability and as a direct pathway to the middle-class lifestyle idyll. While this dynamic model of middlebrow popular fiction was still prevalent, indeed dominant, its prevalence was far less secure under the strain of feminist critique and reform in the fields of women’s employment, enfranchisement and birth control. This speculative contextualisation of marital anxiety was given a much clearer voice in Harry Harper’s story of an author’s marriage brought to the brink of collapse, ‘The Scorch of the Flame’. The author, Lionel Maunder, ‘lived in a secluded world of books and their making’ with his wife Phyllis.32 However, their airless life of ‘placid’ and ‘faithful’ romance breeds a deep ennui in Phyllis who finds herself an ‘automaton’: Phyllis shivered; it was as though, in her well-warmed, well-protected life, someone had left a window open and in had rushed a chilling blast . . . her husband’s words seemed empty and the man himself futile.33

This futility was figured in intellectual terms as well as romantic ones. Maunder’s novels betray ‘no spark of genius’ and their author writes mechanically and professionally, ‘never allowing his books to worry him’.34 Phyllis begins an affair with a ‘primitive’ adventurer named Ralph Courlander and plans to run away to Paris with him after a series of ‘hackneyed’ yet ‘efficacious’ promises. Although the story began by focusing closely upon Lionel, it becomes increasingly preoccupied with Phyllis’s dilemma. From stage to stage she had passed, and passed insensibly . . . Intellect and emotion had fought their duel, and emotion had won. Her brain, through the years had been well fed and was content; but her emotions had been starved.35

Phyllis eventually flees from the overtly sexual advances of Courlander, returning to her ‘quiet scene of peace and comfort’ with Lionel.36 The story, while it moved inevitably towards this resolution, raised too many questions for it to read as emotionally satisfying. Trapped

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between the ‘intellect’ and comfort of one man and the exciting depredations of another, made happy by neither, the reader is left only to long for Phyllis to be rid of both of them and to grasp some of the new opportunities for self-discovery and fulfilment that the 1910s were beginning to offer women in her position. 1910 also saw the publication of two relatively short pieces that indirectly addressed the question of working-class consciousness. In some ways, the question of suffragism and the emergence of women into political and public spheres had been easier for the magazine to contemplate because at least some of its exponents were precisely the kind of figures (novelists, wives of public figures, teachers, aristocrats, popular singers) who had always maintained a presence within its pages. Working men, by contrast, were only seen peripherally and working women hardly at all. ‘The Soul of the Workman’ and ‘The Art of the British Working Man’ recounted attempts from the established culture industries of Germany and England to take account of visual art produced by uneducated manual labourers. In sequence, the articles staged a form of AngloGerman competition. The first described the efforts of political economist Dr Levenstein to acquire German examples and to exhibit them around the world as a kind of statement of cultural superiority. Levenstein’s project was designed to evidence that the ‘artistic spark’ was present in everyone and that he was thus able to lay open ‘the inner consciousness of the working man’.37 He supported the artworks with questionnaires that aimed to understand the role that culture played in working life, where the practitioners found the time, inspiration and materials to create art and, finally, how their endeavours were received by others of their class. He sought to situate their work within the broader psychodramas of their class (as construed by himself): religion, mechanistic labour and romance. Levenstein was not convinced that other European countries would yield similarly rich results; this was partly because no one was applying his own scholarly method, but also because of the questionable status of other nation’s ‘artistic temperament’.38 Consequently, the Strand issued a challenge to its working-class readers to prove that they too were in possession of souls. It received a huge number of submissions, suggesting that the Strand had more self-identifying working-class readers than it appeared to presume.39 As far as demonstrations of working-class ‘consciousness’ went in the pre-war period, the Strand could think itself lucky that things remained so genteel. The rise of the Labour party threatened the two-party system and, by breaking free of Liberal fostering, helped to

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bring about the long-term marginalisation of Newnes’s Liberal party and the benign worldview with which it had become associated. The pre-war period also saw the first sustained and programmatic period of industrial action among unskilled labourers who constituted the largest male demographic still excluded from the franchise. This period, subsequently known as ‘the great unrest’, contributed further background static to the orderly class hierarchies that had been allowed to predominate in the Strand. It is important to remember that the magazine’s representation of the working class, particularly within its fiction, had been principally comedic. The most notable examples of this attitude were provided by W. W. Jacobs’s stories which presented working-class life as a series of small-stakes cultural and romantic confrontations. In Jacobs’s world, characters were mostly preoccupied by the petty preservation of minor distinctions while fighting off predilections for drinking and the constraints of work. These tropes persisted into the 1910s in stories such as Arthur Morrison’s ‘Frenzied Finance’. The title made ironic play in reference to Thomas Lawson’s sensational exposé of corrupt stock speculation in America, which had been published in 1904. Lawson’s work was self-consciously iconoclastic, railing against the ‘lawlessness’ of ‘colossal corporations’ that had grown fat on the unregulated exploitation of ordinary people’s savings.40 Morrison’s, on the other hand, was concerned with a trio of incompetent burglars who become embroiled in a parody of high finance through the lending of burglary tools, the charging of fees and the raising of credit. As the story progresses, each man believes an illusory five-pound note to be held by one of his comrades, until things degenerate into a street brawl and subsequent arrests. The storyteller, Snorkey Timms, sadly notes that this was ‘’cos o’ the difficulty o’ raisin’ credit in Shoreditch’.41 The seismic gaps between these comedic scenes, the work of Levenstein and the increasingly fraught political realities of pre-war Britain are suggestive. They indicate the growing disparities between Victorian conventions of working-class depiction and an increasingly democratised culture.42 Political dissent across Europe also assumed more violent forms. Anarchists and terrorists were not exactly unknown to the Strand; several articles and stories appeared during the 1890s’ panic about the issue. Yet this threat would reappear in 1910, augmented by the proliferation of high-powered explosives. The kinds of anarchistic attacks that would, when practised by the Serbian ‘Black Hand’ group, help to precipitate the opening of European hostilities became suitable material for light-hearted fiction as well as serious and meditative discussion. In 1910 Edgar Jepson’s ‘The Infernal Machine’

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and Morley Roberts’s ‘The Other Overcoat’ both supplemented their generic narratives with the garnish of ‘revolutionist’ terror. Jepson’s story depicts an awkward Russian dinner party presided over by a patriarch, Prince Urusoff, and his son Constantin. Also present are Constantin’s love object, Elizabeth, and his apparent rival, Colonel Svalon. Elizabeth once seemed to prefer Constantin but has, of late, been drawn to the glamour of the braggart war hero Svalon. The dinner party takes place beneath ‘electric lights’, whose sharp light ‘produced an effect of crude barbarism’.43 Technology begets barbarism in other ways as the story progresses and Svalon unveils a series of increasingly dramatic and romantic stories: He sneered at the panslavistic dream; the conquest of Persia, himself the conqueror, was his goal . . . Once, when there were no servants in the room, he broke out about the Czar, that rankling grievance of the Russian ruling class, speaking of him as ‘that cowering rat . . . whose passion for sneaking a finger into every pie hampered everyone’.44

A besotted Elizabeth gazes at Svalon and calls him ‘a superman – dreaming in empires’.45 The effect of this trance is broken by the sudden ticking of what the elder Urusoff instantly recognises as that of an ‘infernal machine’ or explosive device (the term has been traced to Napoleon’s description of a would-be assassin’s time bomb).46 This realisation wordlessly spreads through the group as they find themselves trapped in the room, tearing at the doors, windows and carpets in the hope of discovering the device. The heavy doors, oak floors and barred windows that reinforce their privilege and social prestige seem to have instead entombed them; ‘these cursed revolutionists have all the resources,’ laments Svalon ‘this room was built for them’.47 Under the pressure of the imminent conflagration, Svalon disgusts Elizabeth by imploring her for as many ‘kisses’ as they can squeeze in before death. Naturally, the whole event is staged by Prince Urusoff to warn Elizabeth of her folly and direct her attentions back towards his son, whose respectful and manly response to events confirms him as the superior suitor. The stakes in the story are interesting; the elder Urusoff rails against the ‘modern’ equanimity of his son and urges him to fight a duel. Meanwhile, Svalon is a strange composite figure uniting both subversive radicalism and Napoleonic ambition. One can imagine Svalon rising through the chaos of the October Revolution and stating, as Napoleon did, ‘the revolution is over. I am the revolution.’48 For all its conventionality, the story shows a society on the point of

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collapse, a top-heavy aristocracy weighted down by its accumulated history, hidebound by Czarist rule and threatened by modernisation on the one hand and revolutionaries on the other. If we read the story bearing in mind the events of the war and the 1917 revolution, then it seems hardly surprising that the elaborate dining room should become a mausoleum. Roberts’s story is perhaps more intriguing, given that it continues the magazine’s meta-commentary upon the status of its own fiction and authors who might find themselves ill-suited to a world of anarchism, assassination, revolution and infernal machines. The story is one of mistaken identity with only the barest attempt to make its central conceit plausible. At his Knightsbridge club, an author named James Pullen meets a Russian ‘criminologist’ by the name of Lermontoff whom he exactly resembles and who wears exactly the same overcoat. Lermontoff is revealed to be a secret policeman in the midst of tracing the remnants of a ring of ‘anarchistic’ forgers.49 Pullen, of course, leaves the club wearing Lermontoff’s overcoat, is kidnapped, and becomes embroiled in the anarchist ring before foiling them single-handedly. The story is diverting enough in terms of its plot, offering a popular counterpoint to the territory made so familiar by the contemporaneous work of Joseph Conrad (particularly Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent). Yet the story mines an interesting seam in the doubled relationship between Pullen and Lermontoff, which serves as a commentary upon the inadequacies of late Victorian and Edwardian models of popular writing. Pullen feels ‘a shadow’ fall over him when first meeting Lermontoff and, as events escalate, his sense of his own shortcomings and those of his work begin to consume him: This was an adventure in its very beginning. Or here it came up into the light out of the mystery in which such adventures are begotten . . . he shivered and wondered if he was equal to an encounter with any terror that walked by night.50

When confronted by the ‘armed, savage, cynical and triumphant’ figure of Marcovitch, the leader of the anarchist cell, Pullen can only babble ‘I’m not Lermontoff. I’m James Pullen. I – I write stories.’51 In describing Pullen’s rising to the occasion and his taking control of the situation, Roberts uses a series of literary reference points to mark his growth: He had a novel half finished – a novel with adventure in it. There was blood spilt in it. That was merely red ink now.52

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In romance, all Englishmen were brave. That was a trick of romance, when it dealt with chief characters. Pullen could not have written a story without making his hero English and utterly brave. To give him the natural tremors, the weaknesses, the moments of despair and doubt the bravest have, would have seemed disloyal . . . Romance blinded his eyes to life.53

By confronting the anarchists, Pullen becomes fitted for the bleaker purposes of modern authorship, recognising that ‘at life, each little lonely soul warmed itself before it departed into the dumb frost of nothingness and dark annihilation’.54 The Strand also roused controversy when it published, without apparent condemnation, an article entitled ‘The Assassination of Plehve’ purportedly written by ‘One of the Assassins’. The long piece detailed the plans of the Russian Revolutionary Society to throw a series of bombs at the horse-drawn carriage of Russia’s Minister of the Interior. The article covered the underlying politics of the revolutionaries, their moral convictions, the science of bomb making and the practical impediments to carrying out their plan. In the Commons, Liberal MP John David Rees remarked with horror that it seems to me a deplorable thing that the assassination of a Chief Minister of a friendly Power should be published without any comments and without any regrets that the incident happened, but just like a pleasant tale told for the amusement of the hundreds of thousands who, we are told, read this publication.55

Incredibly, a heading above the article proclaimed that ‘these men and women, perpetrators though they were of what is commonly regarded as the vilest kind of murder, have something in them of which, in better causes, heroes and martyrs are made’.56 Winston Churchill opened correspondence with Greenhough Smith, who was shocked and ‘regretful’ that it could have been considered as ‘incitement’ or an expression of ‘sympathy’.57 In the aftermath of this discussion on 16 June, there was a note of partisan tension in the response of the Labour MP Keir Hardie, who satirically wondered whether anyone other than Rees had been ‘affected’.58 This otherwise peripheral discussion is helpful in demonstrating the ways in which British political upheavals were bound up, however indirectly, with those more extreme variations across Europe.

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Conan Doyle and Modern Romance The descent towards war in the 1910s posed a particular challenge for writers of genre fiction. A whole generation of middlebrow writers had come of age during the short story and periodicals boom of the late Victorian period. Their number was riven by divisions of ability, popularity and ideology, but they inevitably shared similar stocks of phrases at key points in their narratives. Innumerable events are described as ‘monstrous’ and ‘catastrophic’, innumerable narrators find their ‘spines chilled’, their stomachs ‘churning’ and their sense of the possible and the rational ‘enlarged’. Writers of supernatural tales, of horror fiction, of science fiction and of detective fiction had become used to returning time and time again to the same language of shock and sensation. Like James Pullen and Lionel Maunder, these authors now found their rhetorical catastrophism had been entirely recontextualised and subsumed by national events. In Conan Doyle’s memoirs he wrote that I can never forget, and our descendants can never imagine, the strange effect upon the mind which was produced by seeing the whole European fabric drifting to the edge of the chasm with absolute uncertainty as to what would happen when it toppled over . . . As a rule one has wild dreams and wakes to sanity, but on those mornings I left sanity when I woke and found myself in a world of nightmare dreams.59

When this passage appeared in the Strand in 1924 it echoed many of Doyle’s own fictional narrators, for example Dr James Hardcastle, the stricken hero of 1910’s ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, who was forced to confront a prehistoric, subterranean beast: There was indeed some inconceivable monster, something utterly unearthly and dreadful . . . The combat between my reason, which told me that such things could not be, and my sense, which told me that they were, raged within me . . . I was almost ready to persuade myself that this experience had been part of some evil dream.60

The monsters, ghosts and crimes that had previously occasioned such language might now appear obsolete when measured against the very dissolution of the European social fabric and the consequent threat to Britain’s empire and global position. With this challenge in mind it is fascinating to observe Doyle’s fiction in the highly concentrated period of productivity between 1912 and 1913 which included The

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Lost World, The Poison Belt and ‘The Horror of the Heights’, all of which found their author attempting to balance the competing demands of past certainties, present anxieties and future hopes. These endeavours had further consequences when he would later confront the realities of the First World War and attempt to make sense of them in its aftermath. While the Strand took the establishment line throughout the war and in its aftermath, Conan Doyle began to regret the unintended consequences of this pact and felt compelled to find new ways to re-spiritualise or re-enchant his readers. In 1912, however, all of this lay ahead. His explicit goal in writing The Lost World was to effect a scientific quest romance that would unite elements from the work of his friends H. Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells.61 He had written to his mother as early as 1889 recording his interest in writing ‘a Rider Haggardy kind of book . . . for all the naughty little boys of Empire’, and constructed the pursuit of knowledge and the gathering of scientific data as a superficial attempt to fit the venerable form of the quest romance for modern readers.62 By 1911, however, the challenge of writing such a book had changed dramatically. Doyle himself felt that the expanding horizons of scientific exploration had in some way compromised the potential for romantic fantasy. His 1910 speech at a lunch given for the Arctic explorer Robert Peary anticipated much of The Lost World’s thematic content: There had been a time when the world was full of blank spaces and in which a man of imagination might be able to give free scope to his fancy . . . these spaces were rapidly being filled up; and the question was where the romance writer was to turn.63

The Lost World spends a great deal of time establishing the increasing impossibility of romance in the modern world. In his estimation, the elongation of the boundaries of knowledge had made the pursuit of adventure difficult because it stripped the world’s landscape of mystery and made it open and knowable. Such views had already been expressed in the Strand as part of a symposium on Arctic exploration wherein Captain Scott himself observed that The age of exploration, in the sense in which the discoverer is the first comer, is drawing to a close. The age of the scientific study of the earth in its completeness has already begun, and the results of this form of discovery it is impossible yet to foresee. Geography has almost accomplished its task.64

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As such, The Lost World attempted to find new wonder and new romance hidden away in the extreme corners of the known world. Even if science had helped to erode these possibilities, it was surely only scientists who could now find such experiences. The novel begins with a journalist, Edward Malone, who is propelled by sexual and romantic frustration to join Professor Challenger on an expedition to South America. Challenger himself has only recently returned from his first expedition and has been discredited by his apparently baseless claims for the survival, on a remote plateau, of several dinosaur species. In order to verify these claims, the Royal Society sends the sceptical Professor Summerlee to join Challenger and Malone; the party is completed by the presence of Lord John Roxton, a sportsman and adventurer. Two scientists and a journalist thus accompany the anachronistic ‘sportsman and traveller’ Roxton, who seems to consciously echo Haggard’s Allan Quatermain. Challenger’s status as a scientific charlatan means that the group is ‘elected’ by the Royal Society as a way of proving or disproving his far-fetched claims.65 Challenger stands before a riotous lecture hall and proclaims ‘you persecute the prophets! Galileo, Darwin and I’, his ‘you’ referring to those arbiters of authority who refuse to believe his fantastic tale.66 The very exoticism of Challenger’s quest compromises the evidence that should have confirmed its truth. The traditional elements of the quest romance are, in this way, embedded into a reactionary critique of the insipidity of modernity. The press further enforces this culture. Malone, grieved at his rejection by his lover Gladys, goes to his editor to demand an adventurous assignment through which he may impress her. The editor, McArdle, echoes Doyle’s speech of 1910 and talks of the shrinking romantic margins of the modern world. While on this subject, his mind turns instinctively to Challenger’s apparent lying and fakery upon his return from South America. Romance becomes unconsciously associated with something that is false, something to be debunked and made ‘rideeculous’.67 Fleet Street has become a machine for breaking down fantasy and exposing naked reality: a disintegration machine. When Summerlee is finally convinced of the veracity of Challenger’s story in Maple White Land he says ‘what will they say in England of this?’ Challenger responds that ‘they will say you are an infernal liar and a scientific charlatan . . . Malone and his filthy Fleet Street crew’.68 Fleet Street’s ability to police the boundaries of acceptable truth and to make heroes and pariahs on a whim presages later ideological conflicts in which Doyle would find himself cast as the ‘infernal liar’ and ‘charlatan’.

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Upon their return, Challenger, Summerlee, Malone and Roxton make a public appearance in the Queen’s Hall to have their ‘assertions’ ‘questioned’ by the scientific cognoscenti of the metropolis. Before a half-panicked and half-fascinated audience they produce a pterodactyl which soars for a brief moment above the tumult before escaping. The animal was proof that, in Summerlee’s words, ‘the age of romance was not dead, and there was common ground upon which the wildest imaginings of the novelist could meet the actual scientific investigations of the searcher for truth’.69 We can read the brief appearance of the animal as an expression of the ephemerality of romance within the modern metropolitan space. By retreating to the globetrotting geographical reach of the quest romance, The Lost World was also able to successfully repress and marginalise all of the burgeoning political discords that were beginning to impinge upon the Strand’s other content. It is always tempting to impose linear cause-and-effect explanations for the rise and fall of literary genres, but it would be obtuse not to notice that, as the quest romance and the detective story fell in popularity (albeit the former far more significantly than the latter) after the turn of the century, so the spy story and the thriller rose to prominence. The genres that thrived were those best able to reflect the dominant anxieties of the period which were local rather than imperial, as we have seen clearly from the Strand’s content after 1910. Claude Cockburn identifies Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands as being a transformative novel in this regard, opening the way for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels.70 The flaw in Conan Doyle’s grand plan should be apparent by this point: science cannot reasonably be both indicted as the cause of cultural malaise and invested with the responsibility for its revival. While the remaining ‘blank spaces’ might still offer scope for oldfashioned kinds of scientific heroism, science’s rise to the heart of government, industry and the military (as charted in Chapter 2) spread its influence firmly and permanently into every aspect of British cultural life. While his explorers were busy on the far side of the world in the name of ‘science’, they were blind to the ways in which the country was being changed irrevocably by science’s other, more mundane incarnations. A broader survey of the press in the period shows that, from the early 1900s, romance, science and modernity were frequently pitted as antagonistic forces. In 1901 Leslie Stephen painted a far less flattering picture of science and romance’s cohabitation in the Pall Mall Magazine. He suggested that ideologies founded upon retrospective

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valorisation of the past were doomed to failure because they misunderstood the human condition. Many people complain that a railway would destroy the charm of the English Lakes. They would, that is, keep people out of the district in order to preserve its beauty . . . The love of the romantic in this sense looks like one version of stolid conservatism.71

He went on to suggest that ‘something in the very nature of modern progress is essentially antagonistic to poetry and romance . . . The subjugation of the whole planet has bought the daylight of plain prose into the mysterious regions where fancy could once find room.’72 This conclusion was grounded in enough self-reflexivity to know that ‘the present is always dull . . . life has to be made up to a lamentable extent of a trivial and wearisome round of petty activities’.73 While the Pall Mall Magazine was hardly Blackwood’s or the Review of Reviews, its willingness to publish the likes of Stephen and to seriously weigh the cost of these tensions marked a clear distinction between it and the Strand. It was here, after all, that James Douglas would declare Conan Doyle’s temptation and ‘fall’ after the ‘popularity of Sherlock Holmes’.74 Meanwhile the Review of Reviews was frequently the site of heated debate over the relationship between science and romance. W. T. Stead could be found as early as 1890 declaring that ‘the old poets are one by one dying out. Their message has been delivered . . . The new era awaits expectant a new race of bards . . . We have yet to open our eyes to the extent to which Electricity has re-energised the world.’75 Neither the Pall Mall Magazine nor the Review of Reviews represented a single, consistent view on the subject, but both were open to the possibility that the sweeping changes brought about by science might necessitate cultural changes that traditional modes of appreciation and analysis could fail to adequately capture. By 1910, however, even the Strand’s more mundane, domestic characters and scenarios could be found acclimatising to the exigencies of new technologies. Richard Marsh’s contributions to the Strand throughout the 1910s are diverting enough but are elevated to a higher pitch of interest because many of them follow the same character, Sam Briggs, from the boyish escapades of the pre-war years through enlistment, combat, injury and then a peacetime return home. In this, Marsh offered a compelling narrative about the precise process by which familiar archetypes and genres were distorted and thrown out of shape by the onset of war. As such, they have been one of the few Strand serials accorded critical attention by the

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likes of Ann-Marie Einhaus and Minna Vuohelainen. Up until the 1910s Briggs had been a straightforwardly buffoonish caricature of a recognisable lower-middle-class type. He lived at home with his mother and sister, he worked a in professional, low-paid, white-collar job and was often the butt of the humour of those around him on account of his ‘miniscule frame’ and penchant for large top-hats.76 In 1908’s ‘The Limerick’, for example, Briggs enters a Tit-Bits limerick competition and is then assailed from all sides by demands for a share in his prize. Briggs appeared hapless, well intentioned but essentially foolish. By 1914’s ‘Looping the Loop’, however, these low-level episodes had escalated thanks to the intrusion of aeronautical technology. The story marked a transitional moment in Briggs’s progression towards the heroic, soldierly adult he would become. Like Malone in The Lost World he feels compelled by sexual jealousy to boastfully declare at a party that he would ‘like to be an airman’.77 He cannot envisage his world of quiet, ordered domesticity colliding with the brutal and dangerous business of aeroplane flight. However, unlike Malone, he finds adventure and danger considerably closer to home. It transpires that a daredevil aviator named Launcelot King has been a silent presence at the party, and he butts in to offer Briggs a ride at an aeronautical exhibition the following day. When Briggs numbly accepts his offer, the story continues along its well-honed parodic grooves. Yet as his mother and sister fear for his life and beg him not to take part in the flight, the story begins to sound ominous echoes of the later wartime narratives. Realising the seriousness of his plan, his sister Louisa begins to plead as well: ‘Suppose anything happens to you? Suppose they bring you back dead or with every bone in your body broken – what will become of mother?’78 The family discuss the number of flying-related deaths reported in the newspapers, and the narrative assumes a rather more poignant air, as if the somnolent Edwardian ribaldry was suddenly sharpened by an appreciation of genuine threat. The following day Briggs finds his slight frame garbed in trousers, leather tunic, helmet and goggles. This process leaves him gibbering with fear: ‘I can’t describe the state I was in. Words wouldn’t do it justice – not the sort of words I could lay my pen to.’79 The events of the flight itself are consequently opaque: ‘It is no use asking me to attempt to describe what happened; I could not do it even for a hatful of money . . . By the time we had finished I was all in pieces.’80 Briggs’s prize is to take his love interest Dora to see a film called Out of the Jaws of Death at the cinema (which he had previously been unable to afford). Even though the story reverts to type at its conclusion, it

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is noticeable that the flight places stress upon all of the story’s key relationships, disrupts Briggs’s usual bonhomie and brings his usual rhetorical hyperbole into sudden and potentially horrific reality. Like Wodehouse, Marsh has his characters suffer ‘disasters’, face ‘dangers’ and undergo ‘tortures’, deriving comedy from an exaggerated disjunction between hyperbolic syntax and mundane plotting. This chasm, like the ‘grotesque’ lexicons preferred by late Gothic and horror writers, was now being sufficiently narrowed by the increasingly brutal facts of the everyday world. This phenomenon, in which a blandly conventional romance plot could be thrown off its axis by its intersection with new technology, is also observable in Marsh’s ‘On the Film’. A putative marriage between Bob Parker and Nora Dickinson is endangered by a visit to the cinema, where Bob is horrified to see his own likeness projected on to the screen pulling a variety of ‘disgusting’ comic faces before he is aggressively kissed by a woman and then comedically assaulted by a gang of men who repeatedly kick him and throw him around.81 The story is awkward, straining to conceal the fact that Bob knows very well where the film has come from until its very end. The footage, it transpires, was produced covertly when he was tricked into visiting a ‘studio where they make pictures . . . innocent as a child’ and gulled into acting out the scenes by an acquaintance.82 This awkwardness renders the story aesthetically unlovely, but it does have the intriguing effect of emphasising Bob’s alienation and, indeed, revulsion at seeing himself on screen. Nora, too, is initially repulsed and storms out of the cinema. From this perspective, the story can be seen as the staging of a conflict between two cultural worlds: the pre-war romance plot taking place in the audience which is disrupted and thrown out of shape by the relatively crude slapstick of the cinema, which prompts baying, cruel laughter from the ‘idiots’ watching.83 Just as the Strand was beginning to feature articles on film and film stars whose fame was beginning to eclipse that of theatrical performers, so Bob is seduced into joining the new culture industry. The story’s denouement finds him being offered a settlement from ‘the British Polyscopic Company’ for fifty pounds which allows him to purchase his and Nora’s marital home. Conan Doyle’s ‘The Horror of the Heights’ can be viewed as having the same effect upon our reading of The Lost World and ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’ as ‘Looping the Loop’ had upon the early Sam Briggs narratives. The intrusion of aeronautical technology brought new sensations, new dangers, new terrors and a new language of extremity. In February 1914 Popular Mechanics Magazine reported on the exponential increase of aviation deaths over the preceding year.

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‘Many more airmen than ever made flights during the year; many thousands more miles were covered’; consequently 192 people lost their lives as compared to 140 in 1912 and 114 in all the preceding years combined.84 The report was picked up and widely commented upon in the popular press, confirming both the inherent dangers of motor-powered flight and also its slow but insistent movement into everyday life. These deaths, which were alluded to by Marsh, are given a startling vividness by Doyle when he notes the fate of Lieutenant Myrtle who, in ‘attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet . . . his head was entirely obliterated’.85 The story’s old-fashioned found-manuscript frame narrative is modernised by the fact that the document (the ‘Joyce-Armstrong Fragment’) survives an appalling aeroplane disaster at ‘forty-three thousand feet’.86 ‘The Horror of the Heights’ is thus a generic oddity, trapped between its familiar late Gothic narrative structure and the new technologies that would provide new aesthetics and conventions for popular fictions. The story locates its dangers in the upper reaches of the atmosphere and grafts on a familiar language of adventure to describe them: A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them.87

Joyce-Armstrong dresses ‘like an Arctic explorer’ for his expedition into the sky above Wiltshire. Aeroplanes thus facilitate the discovery of romance and adventure directly above the stereotypical environs of a ‘close, warm’ autumnal English countryside.88 He encounters the incremental dangers of oxygen-deprivation, mechanical failure and meteor showers before reaching the highest atmospheric planes yet attained by man. There he discovers beautiful, gigantic ‘jelly-fish’ and, finally, monstrous squid-like beings: So elastic and gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape . . . The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred.89

The most striking passages in the story are not those detailing these absurd monsters, a shortcoming accentuated by the illustrations of W. R. S. Scott which make them look like a series of beaked blisters flocking above the clouds (Fig. 4.2). Much more striking are the

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Figure 4.2 Illustration by W. R. S. Scott taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Horror of the Heights’, Strand Magazine, November 1913, pp. 551–62, p. 558.

details of Joyce-Armstrong’s ascent through the sky and his meditations on the transformative powers of technology upon human experience. This disjunction splits the story down the middle and helps to illustrate the imminent obsolescence of the ‘monstrous’

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conventions of the Gothic short story. A man fascinated by the potential of new technology, Doyle was showing awareness of a similar awakening to that of the Italian Futurists who proclaimed a desire to ‘hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit’.90 To do so they needed to detonate the old ‘pensive immobility’ of pre-existing literature. The Futurists, of course, realised that by embracing technology as the ‘new poetry’, they were also entering a new world of mass warfare. This was the unintended consequence of ‘The Horror of the Heights’, in valorising technology as the new route towards old-fashioned kinds of heroism; it in fact showed a world sprinting towards imminent industrial warfare. The Poison Belt was the final element of Conan Doyle’s bad faith efforts to reconcile science with romance, and it ultimately revealed the most obvious internal contradictions. The story’s particular constructions of mechanical science and of the popular press present an especially telling example of ideological instability. The plot begins when the Earth passes through a belt of poisonous ‘ether’. Challenger predicts this event and takes adequate precautions to preserve himself, his wife and his group of friends in a sealed room against whatever the ill-effects might be. They emerge to discover that the entire population has been wiped out and that the country lies in ruins around them. However, after forty-eight hours the disaster is reversed and the bewildered sleepers awake completely unharmed by their experience. The novel begins with McArdle reading a letter, published by Challenger in the popular press, in which he attempts to warn the public of the coming catastrophe. Challenger has correctly interpreted the few portents observable in nature; there are reports of sickness in South East Asia, but in London the only clue to be found is the blurring of Frauenhofer lines when viewing a colour spectrum. His attempts to publicise the coming events represent a new and more urgent portrayal of the resistant materialism of the popular press, which would, in time, darken to condemnation and outrage. Challenger writes in The Times that he ‘can hardly hope, by the use of scientific language, to convey any sense of my meaning to these ineffectual people who gather their ideas from the column of a daily newspaper’.91 The inability of scientific language to express itself within such a medium again acknowledged the potentially deleterious power of the press. On his visit to dead London, Challenger smugly observes a banner reading ‘Is Challenger Justified? Ominous Rumours’ and takes pleasure in the belated attention paid to his ideas by the mass-market readership.92

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The unresponsiveness of modern mass culture to conflictual voices was, he wryly notices, only stimulated by an apocalyptic event. The scientific project of The Lost World had been based around the imposition of pre-existing taxonomies to incorporate the new discoveries into the symbolic network of science, or ‘the deathless roll of zoology’ as Challenger puts it. Challenger’s findings are based on experiment rather than observation and it is this kind of prolepsis that begins to destabilise science’s easy ability to relegitimate the idea of romance. His new eschatological perspective has the consequence that the quest form, with its associations of travel, adventure and romance, becomes redundant. Challenger is even reluctant to leave his house for London, a journey that he eventually makes in the aftermath of the tragedy. It is one of the unspoken assumptions of the quest romance that as the adventure leads into far-flung territory, the domestic metropolis remains unquestioned and secure in the heroes’ absence. It provides a gravitational pull that perpetually assures the transferability of the romantic currency of adventure back into domestic esteem, affluence and eminence. In The Poison Belt, however, when the group arrive in London they find the fulcrum of empire ‘dead’: its roads ‘choked from end to end with frozen traffic’ and its river with ‘blazing . . . ships’. The dead city is not simply used as a device to create disquiet; instead it forms an uneasy part of the story’s modernity-critique. As the group barricade themselves in Mrs Challenger’s anteroom they cast themselves as impotent observers, viewing the fabric of modern society collapsing before their eyes. They observe a train hurtling along, its driver insensible before it derails (‘Engine and carriages piled themselves into a hill of splintered wood and twisted iron’).93 The worldwide devastation is measured almost exclusively in technological and mechanical failure (Fig. 4.3). Doyle shows the disintegrated train, a drifting vessel and a city conflagration in montage. The result is that the group, isolated within a historical moment, reach a kind of spiritual equilibrium. Challenger muses that ‘the physical body has rather been a source of pain and fatigue to us. It is the constant index of our limitations.’94 Malone is forced to reconsider his life: ‘What am I to do, for example? There are no newspapers, so there’s an end to my vocation.’95 Suspended within this moment, Malone imagines the headlines reporting the end of the world; the urge to continue the unfinished project of modernity is not lightly given up. When the world reawakens, however, modernity ecstatically reasserts its hold over the text with a flood of headlines from Malone’s triumphant account of the events:

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Figure 4.3 Illustration by Harry Rountree taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt’, Strand Magazine, May 1913, pp. 483–93, p. 485.

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TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS’ WORLD COMA UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCE CHALLENGER JUSTIFIED OUR CORRESPONDENT ESCAPES ENTHRALLING NARRATIVE THE OXYGEN ROOM WEIRD MOTOR DRIVE DEAD LONDON REPLACING THE MISSING PAGE GREAT FIRES AND LOSS OF LIFE WILL IT RECUR?96

The horror of a newspaperman with scintillating copy but no market to publish it for is thus redeemed. Malone is granted ‘the greatest journalistic scoop of all time, which sold no fewer than three-and-ahalf million copies of the paper’.97 The pseudo-cataclysmic event is shown to have a chastening effect upon all of the social, cultural and political problems that had been eating away at the fringes of the Strand’s worldview since 1910. Malone ponders upon the great unsolved questions . . . the Anglo-German competition, for example . . . Whoever would have guessed, when we fumed and fretted so, how they would eventually be solved?98

He then sententiously wonders how long mankind may preserve the humility and reverence which this great shock has taught it, can only be shown by the future . . . It is . . . an alteration of perspective, a shifting of our sense of proportion . . . The more sober and restrained pleasures of the present are deeper as well as wiser than the noisy, foolish hustle that passed for enjoyment in the days of old.99

As Malone imagines the scenes of final panic he pictures St Paul’s Cathedral as a ‘packed mass of despairing humanity, grovelling at this last instant before a Power which they had so persistently ignored’.100 Malone further notes that ‘terrified people’ had overfilled ‘city churches which for generations had hardly ever held a congregation’.101 Religion is reasserted, extravagance is decried and the family becomes again promulgated as the dominant, desirable model of existence. This reactionary critique might have drawn approving nods from the Strand’s older readers, but its prescriptions were largely incompatible with the magazine’s own culture. By 1914 the Strand had responded to

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popular tastes by including many more features on the cinema and its new stars. In January 1914 ‘Heroines of the Film’ recounted the ‘grave and gay’ adventures of cinema actresses.102 It had also enshrined the art form as a reliable reference point in fiction to represent a changed pace of life with markedly different social and romantic mores. What for Conan Doyle constituted a ‘foolish’ hustle (consumerism, romantic incontinence and irreverence) was slowly becoming the magazine’s new normal in stories like Herman Scheffauer’s ‘Nero Junior’, in which a young, cinema-obsessed slum-dweller steals a roll of celluloid and accidentally burns down his condemned block of flats. Wodehouse’s ‘Something to Worry About’ also testifies to this change by identifying cinema as a key site of generational conflict. In this story, young Sally Preston is banished from her beloved London by her father, who considers ‘cinema palaces’ as ‘wiles of the devil’:103 She had been born in London; she had lived there ever since – she hoped to die there. She liked fogs, motor-buses, noise, policemen, paper-boys, shops, taxi-cabs, artificial light, stone pavements, houses in long, grey rows, mud, banana-skins, and moving-picture exhibitions.104

In protest Sally acts out by becoming engaged to four men during her stay at a loathed seaside town. In doing so, she was not walking the benighted path of the fallen woman, but experiencing the benefits of a social life freer from judgement and condemnation than those of her mother or grandmother. The contributors to a 1914 symposium titled ‘Why Men Do Not Marry’ also noted this phenomenon. Irene Vanbrugh observed that ‘to-day women are probably allowed more relaxations, more freedom, in every way than ever before in our history’.105 Sarah Bernhardt agreed: ‘young people have so much more freedom, see so much of each other as “a matter of course” . . . that after a time they feel it might be irksome to have to give up some of this freedom’.106 Other contributors note the rising costs of family life, the decline of idealistic notions of ‘Love’ and the changed attitudes away from the ‘effort, struggle, discipline [and] self-sacrifice’ required for marital happiness.107 In an age of ‘amusement’, Alice Muriel Williams suggested in terms that would make Conan Doyle seethe, ‘there seem to be so many more things in the world to want than there used to be’.108 Individual authors can afford the luxury of being ‘signposts’ whereas periodical titles are obliged to be ‘weather-vanes’. The Strand’s advertisements from the years 1910–14 tell their own story about where the magazine’s money came from. Its handsome endowments for authors were the direct result of the growth of a

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new consumerism. In place of the patent medicines and periodicals of previous years, the magazine’s advertisements became flooded with motor cars, gramophones, vaudeville records, ‘electric novelties’, Meccano, vacuum cleaners and, especially, cinemas. The Strand itself recognised the lucrative potential of the cinema, commissioning a series of films to be made by the Solograph Film Company based on its short stories. This series, called ‘Stories from the Strand’, was prominently advertised within the main body of the magazine. All of these developments made the magazine unlikely territory for excoriating diatribes on the disintegrating failures of modern culture, let alone treatises as inconsistent and contradictory as Conan Doyle’s. Yet all this confusion and upheaval would soon be masked and mitigated by the outbreak of war.

The Strand at War In 1911 an eight-year-old boy was caught rummaging through the dustbin of a neighbouring family. ‘You dirty boy,’ shouted an accusatory matriarch, ‘I’ll tell your mother when she gets home.’109 The exchange took place on a back street behind a cramped cluster of apartment buildings on Hanbury Street in London. The boy’s family were Russian immigrants, fleeing the pogroms of the 1880s and, when his father died of consumption, the family sank further into extreme poverty. But he was not rummaging in the dustbin to find food. Instead he was looking for his neighbour’s discarded copy of the Boy’s Own Paper in order to read the final instalment of Frederick Boyle’s The Orchid Seekers.110 Reading assumed high importance for the boy and periodicals offered the cheapest and most accessible route through which to obtain it: I discovered the reading room in the public library where I spent hours reading magazines like the Strand which was carrying an adventure of Sherlock Holmes each month . . . I ranged far and wide, discovering during my journey, authors like Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Scott, Dickens, whom I did not like, Jeffrey Farnol and others.111

When the author, Hymie Fagan, grew up he would come to reject almost all of the Strand’s values. He went on to have a long career in radical Labour politics, trade unionism and as a writer of books and journalism. His attitude towards the Strand was changed dramatically by its content during the First World War. Afterwards, he decried its

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patriotic, uncritical content as ‘propaganda’ and ‘indoctrination’.112 Fagan’s path from entranced schoolboy reader to disaffected, postwar agitant was emblematic of a much wider loss of faith with the British establishment during the post-war period. One cannot spend time in the literature classrooms of the English school system without forming a clear impression that the literary response to the First World War was predominantly poetic in form and predominantly tragic in tone. This deep fusion of world events and literary response has been challenged by a growing body of criticism that has sought to measure the less fashionable contributions of patriotic, middlebrow and popular literatures which often articulated less politicised responses to the conflict. In the usual thumbnail adumbrations of literary history, the First World War is also figured as the lesion facilitating a paradigm shift towards modernism by habituating a broader readership to its preferred modes of introspective, dyspeptic unease. In fact, it takes only the most cursory survey to disprove this version of events. Even critical texts as venerable as Bernard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight were able to blend discussion of popular and middlebrow writers with war poets and serious prose writers, albeit as part of a clearly structured hierarchy. Rosa Maria Bracco’s Merchants of Hope offered a rallying cry for those interested in these neglected avenues of enquiry but, in general, the study of popular fiction has not encroached as pervasively into studies of First World War literature as it has into most other literary periods. The difficulty in establishing this popular tradition lies in the fact that much popular fiction either displayed direct approval of the war effort, with no serious comment to make about its rights and wrongs, or else a bald lack of interest in the transformative nature of the event. As such, it can easily appear supine, apologist and perhaps even disrespectful to those poetic voices who have been inaugurated as its official chroniclers. If popular fiction has struggled to make itself felt within First World War literature studies, the periodical has fared even less well. The appearance of Ann-Marie Einhaus’s The Short Story and the First World War in 2013 solidified this impression. Einhaus observed that short stories suffered because of their appearance in cheap, popular periodicals which made money and were widely read but which did not offer them any durability. From this point of view, short stories suffered because they could only ever appear alongside other texts, whether in periodicals, single-author collections or anthologies, all of which robbed them of some of their epistemological autonomy. The stories, for Einhaus, were ‘dampened’ by their position ‘amidst

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other texts’.113 She focused in some depth on the Strand and sought to salvage the short story from the periodical ullage which frequently inhibited it. While this was valuable in itself, it was also striking that the chapter on the Strand did not contain a single quotation from any non-fiction piece. The result of this was that readers were confronted with the gaping absence of periodicals from the usual literary histories of the First World War, but presented with no workable model by which this could be rectified. In exploring the Strand’s content during the war, it should at least be possible to flesh out how the conflict helped to shape the ongoing development of formerly Victorian values and the challenges to which they were subjected. In 1914, with the declaration of war, much of the creeping unease of the 1910s was neatly resolved. The Strand moved seamlessly from arguing that a war with Germany was unlikely to depicting the conflict as the ineluctable product of an existential clash of cultures between the two nations. Some of the ideological contortions necessary to effect this change had wide-ranging consequences. Germany, and Kaiser Wilhelm in particular, were invested with particular qualities (autocratic, class-bound, undemocratic) that necessitated a revisionary, integrative re-imagining of Britain as its opposite (modern, open, meritocratic). Thus, much of the turbulence of the 1910–14 period was effaced and recontextualised. No longer ominous threats to the status quo, some of these radical challenges could now be incorporated into Britain’s self-perception far more readily, while Germany reflected a distorted mirror image of its own past. Einhaus’s book argued that the Strand sleepwalked into the conflict, only beginning to reflect the changed European scene months later.114 This glosses over a great deal of the magazine’s fiction post1910 but it does correctly identify that much of the magazine’s content was accepted some time in advance of its publication. Consequently, it was some months after June 1914 before a concerted ideological perspective upon the war began to emerge. In January 1914, for example, the magazine published a short story by Ernest Dunlop Swinton (under his pseudonym, Ole Luk-Oie), who would soon be employed as the army’s official war correspondent on the Western Front. His story, ‘Full Back’, juxtaposes a pre-war game of rugby football with a monoplane battle in the skies of Britain as troops desperately attempt to repel an unidentified ‘invading enemy’.115 This empty, nameless threat echoed that of ‘Dramatic Situations’, and the story’s aestheticisation of a youthful sporting occasion played in ‘growing darkness’ was an apt demonstration in isolation of how fictional prophecies of war were becoming more

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foreboding.116 H. C. Steppings-Wright, the war correspondent for the London Illustrated News, also wrote a brief entry for the prominent series The Most Impressive Sight I Ever Saw in which he recounted being ‘Bombarded by Airships’ in Tripoli during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911. That conflict had seen the first sustained use of airborne weaponry and thus Steppings-Wright’s observation that ‘there are no ethics in modern warfare’ made the commentary especially prescient.117 These shards of perspicacity were all the more striking for appearing alongside reams of the usual, lighthearted articles like ‘Tips for the Tango’, ‘Japanese Juggling Tricks’ and Jack Hobbs’s seminal advice on ‘How to Improve Your Batting Fifty-Per Cent’. As the Strand began to acclimatise and reflect a consistent response to the war, it fell into a rhythm of reproducing several streams of related material, almost all of which we might class as propaganda but which were designed to build upon existing discourses and styles from the magazine’s own past. On the one hand, we find a highly traditionalist series of articles which recall those published during the Boer War and which uncritically sought to integrate the new conflict and its combatants into the grand narratives of chivalric valour. In this regard, ‘For Valour’ and ‘Our Greatest Sailors and Soldiers’ are of particular interest. The former examines the bestowing of military honours around the world with a view to testifying that war can take a ‘derelict out of a London gutter’ and ‘teach him to . . . bear his life carelessly as becomes a man’.118 The medals included the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order, the French Legion D’Honneur and the Belgian Order of Leopold. The anecdotes were designed to connect past and present, noting that ‘Belgium has been too preoccupied with heroism to think of the symbols for it’. The war offered a fertile theatre for what Cunnliffe-Owen refers to as ‘that sudden, rapturous urge for which the name is valour’, where individuals could shake off the trappings of whatever period they may happen to have been born into and connect themselves with great deeds of the past. This ahistorical transcendence also informed the ‘Greatest Sailors and Soldiers’ debate, which drew opinion from eleven distinguished servicemen and military historians. All affirm that Nelson and Wellington should carry off their respective laurels, but the aim of the thought experiment is to re-emphasise past wars as sources of legitimation for the present: With new names of imperishable glory being made on both sea and land in this greatest of all wars, the question presents itself – who are the

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greatest commanders in the British army and navy of the past whose achievements may be equalled, if not excelled, by several of those taking part in the Titanic struggle of today?119

Algiers, Waterloo, the Boer War, the Indian Mutiny, Trafalgar, China, Lissa and the Crimea were all invoked as touchstones drawing the First World War into the same well of meaning. However, at least in the case of ‘For Valour’, this connectivity depends upon war becoming ‘democratic’, open to all classes as the world itself has ‘democratized’.120 As the importance of rank and privilege waned, Cunliffe-Owen argues, the value of military honours could alone persist precisely because it represented a pure meritocracy. As before, these articles were complemented by a kind of informal war reportage that included portraits of the French General Joffre and a resurrection of ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of Their Lives’ in 1915 that featured a barrage of military and naval figures. But among these familiar shop-worn tropes and rhetorical flourishes, there was also a consciousness that the present war represented something new to human experience. This knowledge was partly predicated upon the batteries of new technologies being deployed and partly upon the political novelty of an intra-European conflict. The scientific dimension of the conflict was augmented by the political necessity to ‘other’ the enemy. Previous ‘colonial’ conflicts (such as the Indian Mutiny or the Boer War) could easily be characterised as anarchistic outbursts of aggression. The major continental wars in which Britain had been involved had been the various conflicts with France in the period from 1793 to 1815. Whether facing post-revolutionary France or the dictatorship of Napoleon, the conflicts were characterised by the Strand as being predicated on a clash of cultures. It was this model that was resuscitated when war with Germany was declared. The issue was complicated, however, by the fact that the magazine had spent the previous fifteen years arguing that England and Germany shared familial ties that rendered the nations similar and their cultures compatible. Germany’s head of state was not a Napoleonic monster but rather a misunderstood, measured and peaceful man, conscious of a strong fealty to his ‘Victorian’ ancestral ties to England. This perception of Kaiser Wilhelm was among the first elements to be turned upon its head. In order to buttress support for the conflict, the Strand would go to considerable lengths to portray the country and its ruler as irretrievably lost to reason. Ray Lankester’s

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‘Culture and German Culture’ began this process in January 1915 with a withering assessment of the Kaiser and the cultural climate of Germany as a whole. The tone of the article was markedly intellectual and effectively located the rise of German militarism within an ideological framework of cultural imperialism. He offered a swift genealogy of his key terms, differentiating the Anglicised, Arnoldian version of ‘culture’ (‘the best that has been thought and said . . . a well-directed training in literature and history’)121 from the German kultur meaning ‘the control and direction by humanity of the growth, development, and activities . . . mental as well as corporeal, national as well as individual – of humanity itself’.122 Under the auspices of a German ‘kultur-mission’, a sense of innate, cultural superiority and exceptionalism had induced a kind of madness in the nation as a whole, their ‘minds disordered by conceit and debauched by Prussian tyranny’.123 The seeds of Germany’s kulturkampf (‘culture-war’) were sown in the Franco-Prussian victories of 1871 and the consequent rise of Prussian attitudes and values over the other ‘easygoing, sentimental, hard-working, fairly honest’ states that would be brought under its control. This dangerous legacy was a tinderbox, Lankester continued, sparked into flame by the accession of Wilhelm in 1888, who presented himself ‘as a demi-God clad in shining armour, perpetually defying the enemies of the Fatherland, and ready with mailed fist to punish foreign aggressors’.124 This impression of Germany sought to abandon distinctions between the different parts of Germany, to further efface any boundaries between its ‘cultural’ products (meaning art and science) and the superstructure of its state and imperial lineage. The ‘morbid condition’ and ‘megalomania’ of Wilhelm ‘hypnotized’ a people predisposed towards this colonisation through their own ‘childish . . . subservience’.125 The piece constituted a dramatic response to the famous ‘To the Civilized World’ letter which was published in Germany in October 1914 arguing for Germany’s good conduct in Belgium and its entitlement to launch the invasion. This letter and Lankester’s response bore out the notion that military conflicts in the twentieth century would be intertwined with epistemological conflicts waged at the level of propaganda. As Arthur Conan Doyle discovered in his Boer War exertions, these matters were far from peripheral. Manufacturing consent and shaping the narrative of the war for international audiences could decisively impact events in the field. As such, Lankester’s new set of Germanic tropes filtered through the Strand over the next few months. Hayden Church could soon

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be found unveiling a story about the Kaiser that could ‘only be spoken of with bated breath’.126 The story is framed as part of the ‘revelation’ of Wilhelm’s true character, effectively justifying the magazine’s previously sympathetic depictions. Wilhelm had been thought ‘a vain, although not ungifted man . . . not entirely unworthy of the British blood that flows through his veins’.127 This sham was revealed as such when he ‘shattered the peace of Europe’ and ‘plunged whole nations into war’.128 The article recounts how, when touring Norway on his yacht, he discovered a young officer fooling around on a bicycle. Transported by fury, he is said to have shoved the young officer who, in return, struck the Kaiser ‘above the eye’.129 The sentence for this crime was for the young man to ride his offending bicycle over an immense cliff to his certain death. Capricious, cruel and vainglorious, the Kaiser was condemned as ‘eccentric’ and borderline insane. The story, apparently excavated from a penumbra of embittered Norwegian locals, was designed to epitomise ‘the ethics of Kultur’ with its ‘Zeppelins’, ‘U boats’, ‘poison gas’ and ‘warfare on the defenceless’.130 The case for the Kaiser’s ‘insanity’ was also made by Dr Caleb Saleeby. He drew together a variety of medical opinions and speculation before adjudging Wilhelm ‘one of the great criminals of history’.131 His speeches were analysed as exhibiting ‘true obsession’ in their constant hatred and disparagement for the ‘social democrats who constitute . . . no less than one third of his own people’.132 Saleeby’s work, and that of those he cites, was invested in the same magazine-wide project of dissociating England from Germany. This elementary psychological process was required to undo decades of strongly asserted similarity. Germany suddenly appeared to be the horrifying reflection of Britain’s worst self, in need of swift and violent disavowal. As alluded to earlier, the Kaiser’s apparent madness derived not from a particular psychological malady (though he possessed plenty of borderline symptoms) but from the disjunction between the German power hierarchies and the modernising, democratising world around it: The Kaiser and his position are grotesque anomalies and anachronisms in the modern world. He stands for personal prerogatives invested in him . . . not by the will of the people, but by the will of God . . . He rules . . . by Divine right, and any rights which his people may possess he has graciously granted to them.133

This serious, academic labour echoed the high intellectual tone of Lankester but also sought to render the Kaiser ridiculous, a Malvolio

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‘sick of self-love’. Just as Church had wondered whether the Kaiser planned to ‘dash off a masterpiece in oils or to outdo Phidias with the spatula’, so there were also articles that sought to portray him as a cartoonish boob, deriving comedy from the grievous gap between his self-perception and reality. In doing so, these articles tapped into a broad history of broad British comedy, satirising self-deception, conceit and vainglory. The most compelling example of this type of article was the MP Spencer Leigh Hughes’s ‘Hearing the Kaiser Preach in Jerusalem’, which described the Kaiser’s 1898 visit to Palestine and Syria from the perspective of the British press. The Kaiser arrived in ‘his usual style’: ‘amid the firing of guns and the blare of trumpets’, met by bands setting to work ‘with almost epileptic fury’.134 The ridiculous, colossal scale of the event apparently bemused most observers: ‘Nothing equal to this has been seen on earth since Noah came out of the Ark, or since Barnum entered London.’135 He was a ‘pantomime edition of Richard the Lion-hearted’ but it was ‘not safe for anyone to laugh’ given that the Kaiser ‘took himself and the whole affair very seriously’.136 The whole endeavour is shown to be an exercise in tedium interspersed only with episodes of low, picaresque shambles. The Kaiser’s sermon proves a ‘rather trying experience’ alleviated only by the ‘unimpressed demeanour’ of the Empress whose wan expression seemed to say ‘he often talks like this at home’.137 If England was to become the inverted image of Germany and its benighted ruler, its representatives and culture should be shown to be self-aware, brave, warmly humorous and self-deprecating. As a consequence, many of the ‘mechanisation’ tropes apparent in the Boer War articles were abandoned. Articles discussing the humorous war sketches of the cartoonists Captain Bruce Bairnsfather and Alfred Leete repeatedly stressed this point. The former outlined the ‘psychological factors’ at play in the war, with particular emphasis upon ‘the irrepressible band of humourists, the British Army in the Field’.138 This ‘surprising’ sense of humour springs from the blend of ‘incorrigible surface levity with that tenacity of purpose which lies beneath’.139 Thomas Atkins has changed in these articles from the image of a mechanistic automaton in 1899–1902 to a Puckish creature of ‘imperturbable good humour and divine discontent’ and a mixture of ‘discipline and mutinous individualism’.140 A later article, ‘The Artist with Funny Ideas’, reasserted the ‘irrepressible love of banter which cannot resist making a game of the most portentous solemnities . . . the essence of the national humour’.141 This humour has been conditioned by the paradoxes of ‘civilised warfare’ in the new age, where the human plight amid the mechanised carnage was

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increasingly helpless. Nevertheless, the English were shown to be humorous and fiercely individualist, battalions made up of workingclass troops no longer strange outsiders whose artistic ‘souls’ might be assessed or speculated upon but instead the ranks of a new democracy capable of combating a Germany of gullible children beguiled by a demagogic, borderline insane autocrat. The Strand’s war fiction operated largely within the political and ideological parameters established by the non-fiction pieces discussed above. Between 1914 and 1918 there was a reasonably equitable split between, on the one hand, domestic narratives that solidified the nascent conventions of the spy story and, on the other, stories set at the front that grafted a mixture of pre-war adventure and soldierly narrative tropes on to real-life events in France and Belgium. Two of the domestic spy narratives demand particular attention: Harold Steevens’ ‘Schmitt’s Pigeons’ and Conan Doyle’s ‘The Prisoner’s Defence’. Both were built around the foreboding premise of German sleeper agents seeking to disseminate sensitive information to enemy intelligence. Because of this, they serve as indirect commentaries upon the previously cordial and welcoming relations that had existed between the two countries. Steevens’ story derives obvious pleasure from pitting the spy, resonantly named Hans Kultur Schmitt, against the quiet determination of a housewife named Gondula Egerton. Schmitt’s plan is to pass on sensitive meteorological information by homing pigeon; the information is needed for the German forces to safely deploy a vast aerial ‘armada’ of zeppelins and aeroplanes to invade Britain. Conan Doyle’s story finds a British intelligence officer, John Fowler, facing a sensational murder trial over the death of his fiancée. Fowler is eventually able to reveal that the murder of the woman known to him as Ena Garnier (really Sophia Heffner) was essential as she planned to pass on classified information about troop movements that she had been able to extort from Fowler through the exercise of mercurial sexual and romantic charms. Both stories situate their narratives within the auspices of wartime censorship. In ‘The Prisoner’s Defence’, Fowler argues that his damning silence since the murder was because ‘the victory of the Allies and the lives of thousands of our soldiers were at stake’ and ‘the hour of the French advance had not yet come, and I could not defend myself without producing the letter that would reveal it’.142 In ‘Schmitt’s Pigeons’, Steevens describes the British reading public and newspaper editors as ‘panting’ to disseminate details of the case, especially as Schmitt gruesomely committed suicide in the wake of

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his failure.143 This desire was thwarted as ‘the censor forbade it’.144 This self-conscious limitation on detail lent the narratives a kind of austerity, despite the faintly fantastic contortions of their plots. The likes of Fowler and Egerton could easily, like Sam Briggs, have had a happier pre-war existence within the secure and sedate languor of the magazine’s genre fiction. However, the political and military implications of the war clearly impinged upon all areas of domestic life; it is unsurprising to note that this period saw the first deployment of the term ‘the home front’, most notably in the rousing leaders of the Review of Reviews during the latter stages of the conflict.145 Steevens delights in a particular narrative shift in the early stages of the story, moving from the awesome destructive potential of the German ‘armada’ to the apparently mundane train journey of Mrs Egerton: To this day it is a mystery how the enemy succeeded in collecting so vast a fleet of air craft with such consummate secrecy . . . a hundred airships, attended by a unnumbered cloud of battle-aeroplanes, were rushing towards this land, pregnant with slaughter and destruction . . . Early in the forenoon of that day of great deliverance, Mrs Gondula Egerton was travelling north to see her husband.146

This jarring shift is evidence of the move towards total war, where even the most benign domestic railway journeys could shape its outcome. We are told that ‘a woman’s chances of striking directly at the enemy are few’ but that Gondula’s exertions ‘permit’ her to know the full story and to be awarded ‘the DCM. – a most unusual honour for a woman’.147 Invasion narratives, which had previously been the preserve of writers of science fiction, had fused with the everyday realities of life in wartime. The evidence for this is further enhanced by the appearance of Conan Doyle’s submarine story ‘Danger!’ which dramatised how British sovereignty could be swiftly and easily undermined by the action of eight enemy submarines. Many critics have commented on the fact that invasion literature and the spy story reached maturity and found their widest readership during a time when many of the authors writing them were actively engaged in the production of propaganda. The professionalisation of the literary marketplace of the 1890s had been fuelled by the demands of periodicals and their mass readerships; the weaponisation of these writers and publications during the war was structurally similar. The broad ideological consensuses that had been assiduously cultivated by each publication over

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long years were the perfect delivery system for propaganda. Their writers, used to finding success through the mimetic reproduction of generic narratives, characters and tropes, found the newly toxic oppositions between Britain and Germany familiarly unambiguous themes for this kind of fiction.148 As with most genre writing within the Strand, Conan Doyle epitomised it while also coming closest to raising it to an art form. ‘Danger!’ railed against the complacency and petty jostling of domestic ‘party’ politicians who, preoccupied with ‘academic disputes about Free Trade or Protection’, led Britain ‘into a war without having foreseen how helpless we were against an obvious form of attack’.149 The ‘form of attack’ is the nugatory submarine fleet of a minor coastal European power named Norland which has been drawn by means of a border dispute into a conflict with Britain. Norland’s allegiances are made clear when its submarines, commanded by Captain John Sirius, are offered a comradely salute by a German steamer while aggressively occupying the Channel. This unacknowledged danger proves parlous for several historically interesting reasons. First, Britain’s cultivation of a global economy and its encouragement of domestic markets to depend upon imported foodstuffs by sea has left it vulnerable to blockades. Secondly, Norland’s submarines prove Steppings-Wright’s observation about the lack of ethics in modern warfare by indiscriminately destroying merchant vessels and those of neutral countries such as America and South Africa. Thirdly, the apparently impervious British sense of togetherness and patriotism is revealed to be a pleasant illusion by the sudden threat of famine. As starvation spreads, political and social fault-lines re-open grievously and erupt into bloody violence, ‘serious rioting’ and ‘Socialistic upheaval’.150 Fourthly and finally, the genius of the Norlanders’ plan is that it recognises the ways in which all of these trends can be manipulated not by vast numbers of troops and machine behemoths but through the judicious and strategic manipulation of virtual knowledge systems. Real violence inflicted upon the ships is only relevant in terms of the symbolic violence inflicted upon the price of corn in ‘Lanarkshire’ and the spiralling insurance rates for merchant voyages. Sirius gleefully realises the fruition of his plans when he picks up a newspaper from a captured schooner: ‘Wheat, 84; Maize, 60; Barley, 62.’ What were battles and bombardments compared to that!151

The stylistic decision to have Sirius narrate the story allows Doyle’s own critiques of British policy to be ventriloquised from the perspective of a ruthless enemy:

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War is not a big game, my English friends. It is a desperate business to gain the upper hand, and one must use one’s brain in order to find the weak spot of one’s enemy. It is not fair to blame me if I have found yours.152

Sirius and Norland are effectively presented as a less threatening incarnation of Germany in miniature. Their conquest of Britain is used as an expedient to resolve the conflict and reaffirm their world status rather than strip Britain of its ‘tropical possessions’.153 The message is clear: if this kind of existential threat could emanate from a minor power, imagine the consequences were Britain to fall victim to a ‘first class power’; then ‘we should have ceased to exist as an empire’.154 Because of its radical conclusions, the fame of its author and the way in which the story was buttressed in the Strand by Doyle’s polemical preface at the start and by reflections from ‘naval experts’ afterwards, the story precipitated a national debate. The language of this debate uncritically framed Doyle and the wider circle of Edwardian writers to which he belonged as playing a crucial, ideological role in the burgeoning conflict. The Conservative MP Bolton Eyres Monsell remarked in the Strand that the ‘great value’ of the story was ‘in vividly bringing to the minds of those who read it the paramount importance of our food supplies in war’; the journalist Arnold White commented that Doyle had ‘placed his finger on the neuralgic nerve-centre of the British Empire’ and provided ‘A national service’.155 Soon the debate filtered out into the wider press. The Review of Reviews commented: ‘Once again a writer is found to sound a necessary note of alarm in British ears: this time Sir A. Conan Doyle is good enough to place his pen at the service of his countrymen.’156 It is difficult to imagine this investiture of trust in creative writers occurring at any other time in British history. Most previous wars pre-dated mass literacy of the kind necessary to facilitate it, and even those conflicts from the later Victorian period (such as the Crimean War and the Boer War) failed to present real challenges to everyday ways of life. Neither was a ‘total war’ in Gary Messinger’s terms: ‘not the limited [war] of professional armies observing a chivalric code’ but one involving ‘entire populations led by democratically aware leaders’.157 The other crucial factor was that of democracy. In a political climate where the trend, even in grudgingly recalcitrant Conservative circles, was towards creeping enfranchisement, the will of the people, their ideas and values became a crucial battleground. It is worth reflecting on the fact that wars after 1918 also failed to produce this kind of literary or artistic consensus. Indeed, it has become

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habitual to view the key artists and writers of any given conflict as those working to a greater or lesser extent against the grain of official propaganda. This subsequent trend suggests that those associated with uncritical positions of support would ultimately suffer for them, as the instabilities in their position became apparent. For Conan Doyle, aside from ‘Danger!’, the war was not an especially fertile time for fiction. The unremarkable Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear was serialised between September 1914 and May 1915 to predictably solid sales, if lukewarm reviews. The Saturday Review identified ‘a certain weariness, a languor’ and a reliance upon ‘padding to eke out a slender tale’.158 Doyle was writing more Holmes ‘not because he would, but because he must’.159 For The Athenaeum, the novel lacked the ‘inimitable touch’ of the former stories and the Bookman found Holmes faded into the background of his own story and forgotten by the ‘lurid’ second half of the narrative.160 Doyle would later explain to Greenhough Smith ‘I can’t attune my mind to fiction. I’ve tried but I can’t.’161 Instead he became consumed with the production of a long series of articles on the war that Smith had agreed to publish in the Strand. This process proved tremendously frustrating for Conan Doyle as he found himself perpetually wrangling with Smith on the one hand and with the War Office censors on the other. Smith was happy to publish the pieces, especially if they had some claim to novelty for his readers, but he was principally concerned with breaking Doyle’s long chapters down into more readable portions and adding an understated tinge of sensation to their advertisement. ‘I got nearly all the dull chapter [sic] out,’ Doyle wrote in August 1916, ‘but it is a very close narrative and difficult to mutilate.’162 It was also imperative that the monthly sequence, as with a serialised novel, be unbroken. When Doyle was unable to clear a particular instalment in time for publication, the narrative jumped awkwardly in time. Despite his requests that Smith explain this within the magazine, no note was forthcoming, and Doyle was ‘distressed’, writing that ‘I will get the blame’. He found in practice that the censors (‘these fools’ as he dismissively called them) withheld publication for unnecessarily lengthy periods.163 He became further distressed when another mooted book on the war with ‘special information’ was advertised in March 1917, concluding, ‘I was very keen to be the first to tell the story’.164 Repeated entreaties from Smith for more fiction were rebuffed in similar terms: ‘Alas I have nothing. I am dry. Must return to my history.’165 Instead Doyle began work on his long spiritualist essays, The New Revelation and The Vital Message, which

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he thought ‘would annoy certain sections’ of the Strand’s readership, and produced only his short series of anodyne children’s stories, Three of Them, for the Strand.166 The Strand’s other fiction during the war years was much more conducive to Smith’s artistic and commercial instincts, and the magazine effected a difficult balancing act by preserving old certainties while appropriately representing the conflict and its upheavals. It achieved this in practice by continuing to publish streams of short stories that could just as easily have appeared before the war. W. W. Jacobs and P. G. Wodehouse both continued to cultivate their atemporal and increasingly nostalgic fictional landscapes. The comic working-class class archetypes that had peopled Jacobs’s stories since the 1890s went unconcernedly about their riparian business in stories like ‘Sam’s Ghost’, ‘Made to Measure’ and ‘Substitute’. In Wodehouse, the most pressing issues remained romantic entanglements and the lingering danger of being expected to perform a day’s work. A typical Wodehouse story from the early war period, ‘Parted Ways’, contained a kind of manifesto on such matters. The story detailed the marital exploits of George and Grace Marlowe. George is a writer whose attitude to his craft is intriguingly blasé: Marlowe belonged to the new school of writers, who write because they have the knack of writing, and because it is an easy way of making enough money to enable them to do the things they want to do. He cultivated no pose; he had no message; he simply wrote . . . The thing was a walk-over.167

The couple bond predominantly over a love of golf, Marlowe being so impressed by his wife’s skills that he imagines a bright future since ‘as a bachelor, his putting had been execrable’. A ‘serpent’ wriggles into this ‘Eden’ when Grace is struck by a desire to write a novel that unexpectedly becomes a bestseller. As a consequence of her rising fame she is submerged beneath demands for autographs, public lectures, essays and further fiction. Under this pressure she wilts until her husband offers to pass off some old works of his own under her name: When we were married I said to you, ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ They include an historical novel of life at the Court of Louis XI, which even I have never had the gall to offer to any publisher . . . The others I suppose I shall have to write . . . It will cut into the mornings rather.168

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The story, written during Wodehouse’s stay in America, served as a guarantee of disengagement. The pattern was only broken by his ‘A Prisoner of War’, which featured an American husband, Hailey Porter, who is reunited with his estranged wife after he is left stranded by the outbreak of war and tricked into performing manual labour by an ardently ‘feminist’ friend of his spouse. His growth from pampered Wall Street trader to accomplished man of the world is uncomfortably and humorously aligned with the wartime setting. This imbalance was swiftly corrected with later stories like ‘The Romance of an Ugly Policeman’, ‘Concealed Art’, ‘The Mixer’ and ‘Extricating Young Gussie’ in which the embryonic formulas of his Archie and Jeeves and Wooster characters were forged within their permanent Edwardian summer and no further mention was made of the war. Upon this bedrock, it proved relatively simple for the Strand’s writers to update existing narrative forms to reflect new events. We find early stories like R. S. Warren Bell’s ‘Master and Pupil’ and Edgar Wallace’s ‘The Despatch Rider’ dramatising the conflict’s encroachment into the lives of familiar stock characters. The former finds a schoolmaster’s leisurely French retirement abruptly curtailed by the threatening appearance of a German foraging party, coincidentally led by a former pupil, Schandhorst, who had been expelled before the war. It was, then, war. The country was at war with the ‘Boches’ – Germany. And he – he for weeks had been so immersed in study.169

The story is also a demonstration of how the Strand’s traditional modes of fiction were inadequate for dealing with the horrors of the war. The schoolmaster, Philip Bailey, is horrified when the son of his housekeeper is threatened with execution for trying to betray the Germans’ presence to the local resistance. Bailey pleads for the boy’s life and is condemned to die as well. In setting his affairs in order, however, he finds an old letter that proves that he argued for leniency in the treatment of Schandhorst’s misdemeanours, and he is able to leverage his freedom. The story ends with Bailey ‘hastening up a cornfield’ but presumably abandoning the unfortunate child and his mother to certain death.170 Wallace’s story exploits the outbreak of war in France to bring about a resolution between a feuding couple. George Mestrell mocks the emancipatory rhetoric of his betrothed, Josephine, who retorts ‘you don’t realize how women’s positions have changed, how their capacities have enlarged’.171 They are reunited when Josephine, like Bailey in ‘Master and Pupil’ and Porter in ‘A Prisoner of War’, is

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caught in France during a motoring holiday designed to balm her wounded pride after George has mocked her plans to participate in an experimental corps of motorbike-mounted nurses. When she encounters the British forces, she undertakes a dangerous drive through enemy fire in order to warn George’s battalion of imminent danger. While the story is less obviously ham-fisted than Wodehouse’s and Bell’s endeavours, one still struggles to invest fully in the romantic coming together at the story’s conclusion. The chilling deaths of two despatch riders in the middle of the story cast a lingering shadow over subsequent events: ‘he lay an inert little bundle of humanity under his broken machine’.172 The two riders are sent to their deaths by an officer who, coldly calculating risk and reward, decides he cannot risk a third ‘cyclist’ and that, as a result, George’s battalion should be left to die: ‘ “He will stay there till he is cut up,” said the staff officer’s voice, very slowly and deliberately.’173 Such impediments to an interrupted romance might be swept aside easily by the narrative but are less easily forgotten by readers pulled between such violent shifts in tone. Richard Marsh’s stories featuring Sam Briggs solve this problem by removing their hero from his usual domestic setting entirely and consequently changing genre consciously from the domestic comedies of the 1900s to adventure narratives. This genre provided the clearest examples of what Fagan identified as ‘propaganda’ designed to ‘fan the hatred of the Germans’.174 The stories of Cyril ‘Sapper’ McNeile performed a similar function, though they preserved elements of low farce even in the trenches. ‘The Man Trap’ was positively Wodehousian, depicting Subaltern Percy Fitzpercy’s painstaking preparation of a foul-smelling subterranean hollow in which he accidentally ensnares his own general and colonel. While commonly classified as an adventure writer, Sapper’s stories never stray too far from these broadly comic moments. Indeed the Spectator’s review of No Man’s Land (the collection containing ‘The Man-Trap’) demonstrates this component of his contemporaneous reputation: Sapper writes, too, on graver themes . . . but, as in most war fiction, humour predominates. The soldiers do not treat the war as a joke, but they are incurably light-hearted, and their laughter helps them to face things too deep for tears. ‘Sapper’ as a jester is typical of a very largo class of soldier-authors.175

Humour might have been a psychological necessity for those, like McNeile, who served in the war but, in concert with all the other elisions and effacements that served to soften the depiction of the

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conflict and its impact upon those involved, Fagan’s damning judgement becomes more understandable. The Briggs war stories are the most culpable instances of propaganda. When read as a complete sequence, they appear to serve as a straightforward recruitment tool designed to shame those who might hesitate to enlist when set against the comical figure of Briggs, who enlists despite his small stature and health problems. He finds a new aptitude in his soldier’s training and eventually thrives in a war environment. The scenes of conflict are highly romanticised, casting Briggs and his associates as good-hearted naïfs who almost inadvertently amass piles of ‘frightful’ German corpses wherever they move; Briggs is finally awarded a Victoria Cross. When he is grievously wounded in the penultimate story, ‘On the Way Home’, a nurse comments upon his legendary status: Trenches being taken without a drop of blood being spilt; about some wonderful battery being destroyed; about gas killing a whole countryside full of Germans; about more gas which destroyed seventy other Germans, and goodness knows how many more besides – a feat which landed you here.176

Briggs’s injuries are said to be severe; he has been ‘blown to pieces’ with no surety of being adequately reassembled. His relationship with Dora endures despite lingering, implicit doubts over his continued potency. Somehow the final instalment establishes a ludicrous tonal disconnect between the severity of his experiences and the ecstatic narrative closure on offer: Briggs is made lieutenant, he returns to England to be showered with money, goods and avenues of employment, he resumes his relationship with Dora and receives his VC from the king bathed in the glow of his status as ‘the most famous man in England’.177 The clear implication is that any imminent English victory would be the direct result of his individual endeavours. Briggs ends the narratives with the following soliloquy: Look at me, at what I am and at what I was . . . Uniforms, and ‘civies’ and furniture, and houses of a kind, and even matrimony of a sort – these things put together might bring fortune to me. But England’s victory means the greatest fortune of us all . . . ‘Go out and fight, O ye men!’ I keep on shouting.178

Later readers, cognisant of the poetry of Wilfred Owen and the deep trauma of Septimus Warren Smith, might well blanch at the ease of

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Briggs’s re-assimilation into society. While this reaction is undoubtedly touched by anachronistic revisionism, Briggs’s return to wealth, prosperity, romantic fulfilment and psychological health are all so neatly wound into the fabric of the story’s conclusion that it seems to defy belief. As Marsh has the character ventriloquise his recruitment pitch, it feels too much like a betrayal of good literary instincts and common human understanding. All this being said, the Strand generally contained enough quality literature to disrupt such easy, unilateral characterisations. The Briggs narratives, the stories of Wodehouse, Sapper, Jacobs and all the others made the war into a dramatic or comic stage for what Randall Stevenson described as ‘a celebration of individual agency, even while acknowledging . . . the scarcity of opportunities for its exercise’.179 For Conan Doyle, as for the modernists, the war represented something else: no less than a rupture in the progression of European civilisation as a whole. He was not alone, however. Frederick Britten Austin had authored some unremarkable adventure fiction before 1914, but the years of conflict saw him contribute one of the most striking, if now totally forgotten, bodies of short fiction from the period. The stories collected in Battlewrack (1917) and According to Orders (1919) did not all appear in the Strand, some featuring in Pearson’s and others in Pall Mall Magazine. Nevertheless, in his sophisticated treatment of the conflict and its human experience from both sides of the trenches, Austin demonstrated that the undervaluing of ‘middlebrow’ war fiction has consigned a great deal of impressive work to the dustbin. Even Einhaus is content to dismiss Austin as a writer who ‘unfailingly portrays the German enemy as inhuman and cruel’.180 In fact he balanced the stories of Entente troops in Battlewrack with those of the Germans in According to Orders. He deconstructed the idea of heroism as a transcendent force and instead presented it as a contingent, performative series of actions, made by fallible and imperfect actors. In ‘Pro Patria’, three British soldiers desert their regiment after their minds have been turned against war by barrages of ‘shells over’ead as if the sky was breakin’ in’ and by the conviction that the ‘pore . . . ain’t got no stake in the country’.181 They strip themselves of insignias and signs of rank before being captured by enemy troops who threaten to execute them as spies unless they reveal the details of recent troop movements. Out of spontaneous loyalty to their abandoned country, all three suffer themselves to be shot rather than reveal the information. The story’s conclusion is brutal as the bodies pile up (though the Bookman thought the whole to have ‘the touch of melodrama’)182 but produces a perverse and idiosyncratic form of heroism. The story does

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not ironically abuse the patriotic slogan that it paraphrases for its title, as did Wilfred Owen’s immortal ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, but it clearly demonstrates that the imagined poles of heroism and cowardice that thrived elsewhere in the popular fiction of the period could be subverted and played against each other. Austin’s greatest achievements in this regard can be found by reading the two collections alongside each other. ‘In the Hindenburg Line’ is a shocking study of mental disintegration that depicts a small group of German officers who inspect a frontline trench. Cut off from support and battered by a ceaseless barrage of shells from the British, they find themselves living through the reality of a cataclysmic defeat. Hauptmann Hofmeister, the central character, stumbles bewildered into a treatment room where he finds ‘the floor . . . carpeted with supine bodies, bandaged in all fashions’; the medical offer confronts him furiously: These men are dying – German soldiers, dying in their filth. Is this the glory that you promised them, the joy of dying for the Fatherland that you war makers prate of?183

Austin’s psychological attention to the trauma of war was not compromised by the popular media in which his stories appeared or by the expectations of readers conditioned to encounter uncritical cheerleading. This was aided by his claims to authenticity, since he was a serving soldier; his publisher Nelson’s made much of this as part of their advertising campaign, calling Battlewrack ‘the real thing written by a soldier who is also a literary artist’.184 Austin’s most radical works, ‘They Come Back’ and ‘Peace’, imagined the end of the war from the perspective of English and German troops returning home. They resonated profoundly with the idea of the war as a historical lesion facilitating the transition to full democracy and the abandonment of many stereotypically ‘Victorian’ preoccupations. This view was common among radical commentators such as John Atkinson Hobson, whose Democracy After the War also appeared in 1917, making precisely this point. ‘They Come Back’ features a wealthy officer, Harry Hathaway, who returns from the war after having had his life saved by a former employee of his family’s factory. He returns having overcome all of his father’s class hatred of ‘Labour’ and determined to move beyond the industrial confrontations of the nineteenth century. His father opines that ‘for long enough we’ve been dictated to by Labour and now, by God, we’re going to crush it!’185 His regime is overthrown when Harry

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assumes control of the family business, inviting his working-class ‘comrade’ to join him in a climactic board meeting: Class-hatred! It has vanished as between officer and man. We’re all Englishmen together – and we’re going to work, share and share alike.186

Between the old generation and the new, for Austin, lay ‘a curtain of fire, of emotions that had transformed, of the intensity of life which has persisted in the face of death’.187 By contrast, the bitterly ironic ‘Peace’ finds a German officer returning to a homeland wracked by guilt, shunned by the world community and left to descend into a feral struggle for survival. The officer, Leutnant Muller, is refused work and abused by the officers of a new domestic militia. Incensed, he dies as part of a revolutionary gun battle intended to overthrow ‘that upper race which had squandered millions of lives as a vain fee for their ambitions and succeeded only in rendering the German an outcast’.188 Austin’s projection of a post-war Germany subject to extreme poverty and social fracturing was to prove frighteningly prescient. As we leave the Strand in 1918, we do so at an intriguing historical and cultural moment. The war had the curious effect of making many of its worst fears come true, yet did so as part of an optimistic euphoria glimpsed through the trauma of conflict and its uneasy resolution. Thus the magazine was facing a new Britain, a new culture in need of light relief and less obviously desirous of sprightly monthly reading material for the train and tram. As Hobson bitterly observed in Democracy After the War the tastes and interests of the mass of working-class readers . . . have been brought up to want the doctored and drugged news, the fierce appeals to hate and suspicion, the procession of scares and horrors, the strong unmeaning headlines, the bold false prophecies. This has been their war-mind. In peace, the sport and betting news, the police-court, the story of adventure, doings in high life and local gossip, eat away all serious sustained interested in politics.189

One thing was clear, however – a new future was to be made and there was little currency left in peddling retrogressive visions of the past. Fixed ideological points from history could help to ensure a workable consensus between writers, publishers and readers, but the business of imagining new futures would afford little comparable stability. The Strand would suffer from a declining readership and the

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more existential problem of a suddenly chasmic generational divide between loyal long-term readers and war-tried younger consumers for whose attention it would now have to compete. Meanwhile, very few mainstream writers were imagining a future quite as esoteric as Conan Doyle, who was finally ready to unveil his spiritualistic beliefs to the mass market, specifically targeting the Strand as part of his planned revolution.

Notes 1. The term is used at various times by Pound in The Strand Magazine. It also featured in the magazine’s own advertising: when its decease and incorporation into its ‘companion publication’ Men Only in 1950 was announced, readers of The Times were reassured that the ‘institution’ and its values would live on (‘Goodbye to the Strand’, p. 3). 2. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 89. 3. One could make a reasonable case for public radio broadcasting (effectively beginning in both America and Britain in 1922) as being the first fully integrated form of popular culture, bringing a blend of music, drama, advertising, sports and news to a mass audience for the first time. See Betts, A History of Popular Culture, pp. 16–17. 4. Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, p. 6. 5. This unwieldy term was commonly used in the Strand to denote anarchistic, communistic or terroristic political forces. Its most common use was in the description of opponents to Tsarist rule in Russia. See, for example, two texts discussed later in this chapter, ‘The Assassination of Plehve: By One of the Assassins’ and Edgar Jepson’s story ‘The Infernal Machine’. 6. ‘Dramatic Situations: Can You Supply the Missing Detail?’, p. 437. 7. Ibid., pp. 437–8. 8. Ibid., p. 437. 9. ‘Customs at Foreign Courts’, p. 43. 10. Ibid., p. 43. 11. Bashford, ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II’, p. 19. 12. Ibid., p. 20. 13. Ibid., p. 22. 14. Ibid., p. 22. 15. ‘The Kaiser as He Is’, p. 255. 16. Ibid., p. 256. 17. ‘Love Stories of Real Life’, p. 706. 18. Ibid., pp. 706–7. 19. Ibid., pp. 707–8. 20. Hopwood, ‘The Melonville Expressman’, p. 70.

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Lost Worlds and World Wars 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 74. ‘He was a tall, thin man with a face of parchment hue, sinister in expression, curiously Chinese in type. His yellow skin, high cheek-bones and almond-shaped slits of eyes were all so redolent of the Mongolian race that he only lacked the distinction of a pendent pigtail to complete the caricature’ (ibid., p. 72). Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 80. ‘Untying Hymen’s Knot’, p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. The Office of National Statistics records 596 divorces granted in 1910 and 23,868 in 1960. ONS, ‘Divorce in England and Wales, 2012’. ‘Untying Hymen’s Knot’, p. 23. Harper, ‘The Scorch of the Flame’, p. 191. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 198. Williams, ‘The Soul of the Workman’, p. 205. Ibid., p. 208. ‘The Art of the British Working Man’, p. 559. Lawson, Frenzied Finance, p. vii. Morrison, ‘Frenzied Finance’, p. 336. See Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents. Jepson, ‘The Infernal Machine’, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 12–13. Ibid., p. 13. Gannon, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines, pp. 2–3. Jepson, ‘The Infernal Machine’, p. 14. Jordan, Napoleon and the Revolution, p. 71. Roberts, ‘The Other Overcoat’, p. 259. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., pp. 262–3 Ibid., p. 263. ‘Consolidated Fund (No. 2) Bill’, 13 June 1910. ‘The Assassination of Plehve’, p. 679. ‘Consolidated Fund (No. 2) Bill’, 13 June 1910. ‘ “The Assassination of Plehve” (Magazine Articles)’, 16 June 1910. Doyle, ‘Memories and Adventures (X)’, p. 22. Doyle, ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, p. 136.

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156 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Lellenberg et al. (eds), A Life in Letters, p. 260. Ibid., p. 577. Ibid., p. 578. ‘What is the Practical Use of Polar Research?’, p. 667. Doyle, ‘The Lost World (II)’, p. 489. Ibid., p. 488. Doyle, ‘The Lost World (I)’, p. 367. Doyle, ‘The Lost World (IV)’, p. 8. Doyle, ‘The Lost World (VIII)’, p. 488. Cockburn, Bestseller, pp. 75–8. Stephen, ‘Romance and Science’, p. 106. Ibid., p. 110. Ibid., p. 111. Douglas, ‘Some Popular Novels and Why They Are Popular’, p. 382. ‘Looking Forward’, p. 230. Vuohelainen, ‘Introduction’, in Marsh, The Complete Adventures of Sam Briggs, p. xx. Marsh, ‘Looping the Loop’, p. 143. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., pp. 152–4. Marsh, ‘On the Film’, p. 290. Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., p. 299. ‘Aviation Death Toll in 1913 the Heaviest Yet’, p. 184. Doyle, ‘The Horror of the Heights’, p. 552. Ibid., p. 562. Ibid., p. 553. Ibid., p. 554. Ibid., p. 561. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism’, p. 4. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (I)’, p. 244. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (IV)’, p. 611. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (III)’, p. 484. Ibid., p. 487. Ibid., p. 490. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (V)’, p. 71. Ibid., p. 71. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (III)’, p. 490. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (V)’, p. 66. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (III)’, p. 491. Doyle, ‘The Poison Belt (IV)’, p. 612. Talbot, ‘Heroines of the Film’, p. 96. Wodehouse, ‘Something to Worry About’, p. 157. Ibid., p. 157. ‘Why Men Do Not Marry’, p. 54.

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111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

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Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 54. Fagan, unpublished autobiography, p. 18. Here, as with many instances in his manuscript, Fagan’s memory appears faulty. Boyle’s story had been serialised in The Boy’s Own Paper in 1892 before being published as a single volume in 1893, ten years before Fagan’s birth. He records the title as ‘The Orchid Hunters’ which does not correspond to anything published in the Boy’s Own or any similar publication from the early 1900s. Fagan, unpublished autobiography, pp. 16–17. Ibid., pp. 36–7. Einhaus, The Short Story and the First World War, p. 38. Ibid., p. 46. Luk-Oie, ‘Full Back’, p. 6. Ibid., p. 3. Steppings-Wright, ‘Bombarded By Airships’, p. 172. Cunliffe-Owen, ‘For Valour’, p. 136. ‘Our Greatest Sailors and Soldiers’, p. 226. Ibid., pp. 136, 142. Lankester, ‘Culture and German Culture’, p. 32. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 33. Church, ‘Doomed By the Kaiser To Ride To Death’, p. 479. Ibid., p. 479. Ibid., p. 479. Ibid., p. 481. Ibid., p. 485. Saleeby, ‘Is the Kaiser Mad?’, p. 421. Ibid., p. 419. Ibid., p. 419. Hughes, ‘Hearing the Kaiser Preach in Jerusalem’, p. 589. Ibid., pp. 589–90 Ibid., p. 590. Ibid., p. 592. ‘A Great Humorist of the Trenches’, p. 317. Ibid., p. 317. Ibid., p. 319. ‘The Artist With the Funny Ideas’, p. 96. Doyle, ‘The Prisoner’s Defence’, p. 122. Steevens, ‘Schmitt’s Pigeons’, p. 306. Ibid., p. 306. ‘The Progress of the World’, p. 4. Steevens, ‘Schmitt’s Pigeons’, pp. 306–7.

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158 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Ibid., pp. 313, 316. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning, p. 2. Doyle, ‘Danger!’, p. 19. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 19. ‘What Naval Experts Think’, p. 22. ‘Britain Succumbs to Starvation’, p. 109. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, p. 93. ‘The Valley of Fear’, Saturday Review, 17 July 1915, p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. ‘The Valley of Fear’, Athenaeum, 5 June 1915, p. 111. Unpublished letter, Toronto Public Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, No. 42. Unpublished letter, 10 August 1916, University of Virginia Library. Unpublished letter, University of Virginia Library. Unpublished letter, 10 March 1917, University of Virginia Library. Unpublished letter, University of Virginia Library. Unpublished letter, University of Virginia Library. Wodehouse, ‘Parted Ways’, p. 658. Ibid., p. 666. Bell, ‘Master and Pupil’, p. 269. Ibid., p. 280. Wallace, ‘The Despatch Rider’, p. 717. Ibid., p. 721. Ibid., p. 721. Fagan, unpublished autobiography, p. 37. ‘Fiction’, Spectator, 17 August 1917, p. 17. Marsh, ‘On the Way Home’, p. 582. Ibid., p. 587. Marsh, ‘A Fighting Man’, p. 645. Stevenson, Literature and the Great War, p. 66. Einhaus, The Short Story and the First World War, p. 124. Austin, Battlewrack, p. 36. ‘Battlewrack’, Bookman, December 1917, p. 95. Austin, ‘In the Hindenburg Line’, p. 306. ‘Battlewrack’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 December 1917, p. 616. Austin, ‘They Come Back’, p. 369. Ibid., p. 375. Ibid., p. 368. Austin, ‘Peace’, p. 221. Hobson, Democracy After the War, p. 131.

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Chapter 5

Flights from Reason, 1918–1925

Visions of Future Past For 200 years Christianity has been fighting against Materialism. First there were Hume, Voltaire and Gibbon, then the great Agnostics Huxley, Herbert, Spencer, Haeckel . . . the church was helpless against them. All it could do was quote a text, which was met by the reply: ‘I don’t believe it’. The Church was beaten from position after position and Materialism triumphed, and with the triumph came this catastrophe.1

In the wake of the First World War, Arthur Conan Doyle found a new impetus that would pour fresh energy into his political, religious and creative work throughout the final decade of his life. This same energy, however, would also drive him away from the mainstream success that he had previously enjoyed and would cast a lingering shadow over his reputation. While the war dramatically reconfigured Doyle’s attitude towards the trends of twentiethcentury modernity, it was only in the aftermath of the conflict that he began to self-consciously synthesise the hitherto disparate aspects of his ideology into a coherent response to the post-war landscape. With the physical and emotional wounds still raw from the conflict, Doyle identified a historic convergence of social and political forces that, he thought, would enable him to directly assault both the dominant modes of religious belief and the damaging tendencies of scientific materialism. While the finer points of this intervention would be honed in public lecture halls around the world, he had clearly identified the Strand Magazine as a key site of the conflict. Yet after the First World War the magazine itself was also changing both in terms of its treatment of world events and in the kinds of fiction that it featured. Close attention to the magazine in this period reveals a new emphasis on levity, a preponderance of comedy writing by a generation inspired by Wodehouse and new species of popular

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fiction directly influenced by American cinema. This chapter will explore the nature of the iconoclastic, radical beliefs that underpinned Doyle’s work in this period and how they were contested on the pages of the Strand. Between 1891 and 1930 the Strand published fourteen articles specifically on the subject of spiritualism.2 These articles can be split into successive waves. Two pre-war articles, 1901’s ‘A Parlour Séance with David Devant’ and 1913’s ‘The Mysterious Spiritualistic Séance’, presented the subject uncritically as a harmlessly contrived and artificial form of family entertainment. The latter article is particularly happy for the terms ‘medium’ and ‘illusionist’ to be used interchangeably; it is headed with a promise to ‘expose’ ‘the mystery which has baffled the greatest scientists of the day’.3 Furthermore it concludes that ‘the writer positively asserts that all spiritualistic manifestations . . . are the result of trickery’.4 The treatment was similar to that of pseudo-sciences such as palmistry or phrenology.5 Other articles such as ‘Thought Reading Tricks for Amateurs’ reinforced the artificiality of mediumship in indirect ways by referring to ‘mediums’ in quotation marks, identifying it as a performative role rather than as any kind of serious social function. So while the Strand was not necessarily hostile in its depiction of spiritualism (as many other publications frequently were), it still presented a series of linguistic and representational strategies that subtly undermined both its veracity and its seriousness. The idea that the horrors of the First World War might bring about some sort of change to this attitude was first raised by Oliver Lodge in his 1916 opinion piece ‘Is it Possible to Communicate with the Dead?’ and its 1917 sequel ‘How I Became Convinced of the Survival of the Dead’. These two pieces were granted similar privilege to other scientific pieces; there is no pointed editorial note above the frontispiece and Lodge himself is pictured sombrely. The writing was asinine stuff, as Lodge refused to discuss his experiences in any depth and instead made generalised observations about the nature of the dead (‘they are keenly susceptible to friendly feeling and affection . . . and less shy or chary of expressing their feelings than they were down here’) and vague references to experiences which he is ‘unable to refer to in detail’.6 However tepid these excursions may have been, they stimulated debate and response of a serious kind. Moreover, Lodge had previously appeared in the magazine as an arbiter of scientific knowledge and ‘a great authority of today’ in 1897.7 A symposium of 1904, ‘The Promise of Science’, found Lodge’s voice raised with those of other ‘eminent scientists’ on the subject of how

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scientific advances would affect, among other issues, food provision and flood prevention. Lodge’s contribution to the discussion ended with the observation that ‘I am certainly one of those who look for great and almost revolutionary improvements in the conditions of human existence’.8 The idea that the beliefs and practices of spiritualism could form part of this project might have seemed anathema to Strand readers because of their treatment elsewhere in the magazine. However, Lodge’s postwar comments opened up the space for a debate within the magazine, a debate that would soon feature Conan Doyle himself. Later that year, in July 1917, the Strand published two conjoined opinion pieces by Doyle and Edward Clodd under the umbrella title ‘Is Sir Oliver Lodge Right?’ Doyle wrote passionately that the war was a relapse to ‘the Dark Ages’ and that this ‘new Christianity’ will be ‘something definite . . . based upon tangible proof [and] combining the most advanced science with the most exalted morality’.9 Clodd, meanwhile, described a movement whose ‘inception was in fraud’ and whose exponents are ‘a pack of sorry rascals . . . committed to prisons as rogues and vagabonds’.10 While the war raged, the quiet burgeoning of this dispute would come to dictate the terms of Doyle’s future relationship with the magazine and his readership. Conan Doyle’s next proclamation of spiritualist belief in the Strand came in March 1919 when the magazine featured a twopage interview with him entitled ‘Life After Death’. The interview is striking in a number of ways that illustrate the key issues in the debate. In the first place, Doyle was keen to contest the meaning of the word ‘belief’ and to effect a kind of inversion of its traditional meaning. His ‘belief’ was not a blind act of faith or intuition but a carefully considered, evidential statement of fact based upon ‘thirty years of investigation’.11 Secondly, the legacy of the war proved to be important to the nature of his public intervention: he addressed himself explicitly to a new legion of ordinary people grieving for lost intimacy with sons, husbands and brothers as well as questioning the validity of previously unquestioned modes of governance and religious orthodoxy. Doyle describes himself as ‘privileged’ to personally enable connections between mothers and their lost soldier sons.12 Moreover, the ‘glad tidings’ which ‘revolutionize . . . all our conceptions of death’ should be sufficient to effect a widescale ‘reconstruction of religion’.13 The war, from this point of view, was a colossal warning sounded to the world, designed to alert it to truths that it had succeeded in marginalising and mocking for hundreds of years:

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Religion . . . has failed. It has failed because it is not believed. If it had not failed, such a world cataclysm as we have just witnessed would have been impossible in our day and generation. The terrible war that has just ended . . . was an object-lesson intended to shock us, to steady us. God help us if we fail to profit by the lesson, for we shall never have such a chance again. It is now or never.14

In making these assertions, Doyle was rejecting mainstream scientific consensus, decrying both Anglican and Roman Catholic orthodoxies and attempting to imbue something of their faded legitimacy on to a class of individuals (mediums) who had been identified by the magazine as, at best, entertainers and, at worst, malicious frauds. Conan Doyle’s biographers make much of their subject’s energy and desire for public engagement during this period of his life. His protracted efforts to make himself into an apostle of the new church of spiritualism brought him to the doorsteps of many believers and many dissenters, yet the pages of the Strand were an equally significant battlefield for the attention of audiences who were removed from either extremity of the debate. Doyle would later bemoan the absolute impenetrability of the mainstream press to spiritualist ideas and it is testament to the intimacy of his ties to Greenhough Smith that he was given such a prominent and sustained platform. From November 1919 he published a series of articles on the subject under the collective heading The Uncharted Coast. These articles were significant because they attempted to situate recent spiritualist ‘breakthroughs’ within a clear post-war context. The series depicted a spiritualism specifically fitted for the purposes of the ‘everyday’ Strand reader: divorced from fanaticism, emphasising its rationalist basis and particularly fitted to a society whose internal and external relations were in flux. The second article, ‘A New Light on Old Crimes’, made the following claim: So long as gravity, electricity, magnetism, and so many other great natural forces are inexplicable one must not ask too much of the youngest – though it is also the oldest – of the sciences. But the progress made has been surprising – the more surprising since it has been done by a limited circle of students whose results have hardly reached the world at large.15

Throughout the articles, Doyle tempered his grand claims for the palliative effect of spiritualism in general with modest claims for its effectiveness and frequent references to the ‘fraud’, ‘off-days’ and ‘failures’ which bedevilled the systematic use or examination

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of spiritualist practices. Nevertheless, the articles purported to outline ‘the laws which regulate psychic affairs’ as well as cataloguing certain historical examples which demonstrated the ways in which a spiritualist view could have improved the handling of various criminal cases, unexplained happenings and injustices. Wrongdoing, especially physical violence and the endurance of prolonged suffering, leaves ‘a record on the screen’ of the place where it occurred. Moreover, emotional bonds between relatives, lovers and friends that are suddenly severed can persist in the psychic realm and can be revisited through dreams, visions or automatic writing. These structural truths of spiritualism were thus an attempt to couch the old ‘Victorian’ values of the Strand in new terms. Family, sexual continence, the ties of friendship and the rejection of ‘materialism’ in both senses of the word are not a simple series of ideological positions but rather proclamations that arrive with the dual weight of a religious commandment and a scientific fact. One of the problems that Conan Doyle faced was that his particular narrative of post-war Britain was only one among many in the Strand. Earlier in 1919, alongside his ‘Life After Death’ interview, Strand readers may have found themselves somewhat nonplussed by the appearance of a story called ‘Tickets, Please!’ At first glance, the story seemed familiar enough fare; set in the Midlands it described the romantic mishaps of an amorous ticket inspector on a remote tram route. The inspector (one John Joseph Raynor) earns the ire of his many female subordinates and, in scenes that become increasingly strange and tinged with feral violence, is assaulted by them as they demand that he choose one of them to marry. After his acquiescence, the women become so disgusted by the sight of Raynor that they throw him out into the cold winter night. The story’s author, D. H. Lawrence, would return to the same themes many times in the years after the war and with significantly more impact upon the literary and cultural life of the country. However, Lawrence critics are more or less united in their identification of ‘Tickets, Please!’ as a key early attempt to work through his Darwinian ideas about sexual selection, violence and the radical impact of the war upon gender roles and sexual mores. The tramcars do not augur a shining vision of progress but instead offer unstable and thrilling sensations to their staff and passengers as they hurtle through ‘the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond’.16 Likewise, the spurned Annie does not respond in the usual manner of Strand heroines; rather than denouncing her unfaithful beau, she instead relies upon allegiances with her female colleagues to plot his

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downfall: ‘But we’ll drop on him one of these days, my girl.’17 In the final carnivalesque confrontation, language itself breaks down amid the hysterical ‘flushed’ faces and ‘wild’ hair (Fig. 5.1): ‘Now then, my fellow!’ gasped Annie at length. ‘Now then – Now -’ . . . He lay in a kind of trance of fear and antagonism. They felt themselves filled with supernatural strength. Suddenly Polly started to laugh – to giggle wildly – helplessly – and Emma and Muriel joined in.18

The characters are propelled towards this obscene parody of a courtship ritual in part by the ‘wild romance’ of their day jobs but also through the extra freedoms experienced during the war. The women become empowered to assault Raynor’s assumed superiority through their economic emancipation. Annie impulsively ‘hops . . . off her car and into a shop where she has spied something’ and ‘push[es] off the men at the end of their distance’.19 It is difficult to imagine Greenhough Smith’s rationale for publishing Lawrence’s story given that it clearly strikes a discordant note. It provides precisely the kind

Figure 5.1 Illustration by M. MacMichael taken from D. H. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please!’, Strand Magazine, April 1919, pp. 287–93, p. 293.

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of bleak picture of human relations that the magazine had sought to banish. Amusingly, the magazine attempted to lighten the story by insisting upon the use an exclamation mark in the story’s title (which was peremptorily removed from the subsequent collection England, My England in 1922). Its later inclusion in Jack Adrian’s edition of Strange Tales from the Strand suggests that perhaps it was seen as a kind of ‘horror’ narrative rather than a piece of blackly humorous social observation. While Lawrence’s story was clearly an odd fit for the magazine, his depiction of a society struggling with the wartime disjunction of women from their traditional roles and their concomitant political and economic enfranchisement spoke to wider shifts in the magazine’s approach to women and femininity. By 1919 we find a number of stories and non-fiction pieces that were no longer bound so absolutely by the rules of Victorian fiction. Marriages can be broken, heroines can entertain multiple potential partners, married women may still take an unashamed part in public life. These seem like small concessions no doubt, yet stories such as Edward Cecil’s ‘The Man Who Understood Women’, Lucian Cary’s ‘What Women Will Never Learn’ or Roland Pertwee’s ‘An Affair of Sentiment’ all present narratives in which romantic and sexual economies have been notably changed, fulfilling the promised upheaval of its fiction from the early 1910s. To some degree, they rely upon satirising the pose of the ‘man of the world’ who prizes his ability to understand and master women. Such figures are shown up as being otiose, left adrift by the modern world. Cecil’s narrative, for example, explicitly dramatises the conflict between Victorian and Georgian mores. John Fearon, a captain of industry and prospective Member of Parliament, takes pleasure in his self-appointed status a ‘double expert’ in ‘money-making’ and ‘understanding women’.20 Fearon is annoyed at the ‘independent way in which his daughter [Jessica] managed her own affairs’ as well as at her ‘restlessness’ in ‘motoring’ back and forth between her father’s house and London where she works as an actress. She mocks his sudden affectation of religious observance which is designed to increase his political stock. Fearon is thus shown to be profoundly hypocritical, not least when he objects to Jessica’s engagement to the nephew of a man, John Ormandy, with whom he has nurtured a long-running grievance. Fearon’s ‘brain’ tells him to be ‘firm’ because ‘in dealing with women what is wanted is a firm hand’.21 His intransigence is due to the fact that, some twenty years beforehand, Ormandy had attempted to run away with Fearon’s wife,

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Lucy (now deceased). During a confrontation between Fearon and Ormandy, Fearon’s version of events, in which he is an innocent husband whose ‘marital happiness’ was purposely ‘wrecked’, is directly contradicted by Ormandy who instead describes Lucy Fearon as a women destroyed by patriarchy. She was forced into her marriage for the advantage of her family and found, in Fearon, a man whose ‘idea of married life could be summed up under that phrase – breaking the woman in’.22 While his deficiencies fall short of physical violence, the Fearon marriage is shown to embody the very worst of the manifold hypocrisies that Conan Doyle had exposed in his Return of Sherlock Holmes series over fifteen years earlier. The story is far removed from ‘Tickets, Please!’ yet shares with it a belief that gendered notions of propriety are in the process of being revised, and for the better. Against either of these narratives, Doyle’s prim remonstrances were unlikely to achieve much purchase. Such observations find contextual support in two symposia from the same period: ‘Leap Year’, in which the humorous notion of women proposing marriage is discussed in the context of the 1918 enfranchisement, and ‘Who Has the Best Time – A Man or a Woman’. Both pieces collect together the reflections of prominent religious figures, writers and actresses who reflect, to some degree, on the recent changes in gender relations. ‘Leap Year’ begins with the editorial assertion that ‘women have abandoned privileges and insisted upon rights’.23 Opinions are courted from an array of female writers including Sarah Grand, Elinor Glyn, Clo Graves, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), Winifred Graham, Maxwell Gray (Mary Gleed Tuttiett) and Rita (Mrs Desmond Humphreys). While the cultural roots of these writers varied wildly between the romantic, the sensationalist, the literary, the naturalist and the popular, they took part in a shared dialogue about what role emancipated women would play in a post-war society. Grand, in the most radical of the feminist views expressed, suggested that no great sea change in the politics of marriage proposals should be expected unless ‘the metamorphosis, which anti-suffragists have so often warned us would be the inevitable result of the political emancipation of women, has taken place’.24 Other voices were more openly critical of potential changes to chivalric modes of courtship. Rita wondered whether ‘equality of sex [is] to mean the abrogation of all its most delightful and romantic feminine rights? That of being wooed and won; of admiration, homage, devotion?’25 Egerton, meanwhile, identified the key determinant as economic: ‘Nowadays, the woman sometimes has an earning capacity approaching if not equalling that of the man,

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and this will be more and more frequently the case.’26 While the conclusions varied, the participants in the symposium were engaged in a discussion with a clearly defined and accepted central thesis that the role of women, the way they were perceived and the nature of gendered interactions had been profoundly altered. We see this more clearly still in ‘Who Has the Best Time – A Man or a Woman?’ The most interesting aspect of the discussion (which features public figures of both sexes) centres upon the individual interpretations of what constitutes a ‘good time’. James Welldon, the Dean of Durham Cathedral, suggested that the male experience offered ‘freedom, knowledge, interest in public affairs, variety of occupation, the chance of getting on in the world, and the opportunity of self-gratification without paying the cost of it’ to a far greater extent. There is an awareness that domestic affairs may well be an insufficient occupation to offer satisfaction to a woman’s life. Welldon ‘rejoices’ in the fact that women ‘are now highly educated’ and that they are ‘coming to be admitted to all the great professions’.27 The poet Ernest Thurston speculated that ‘in the very easiness of her life she has a harder time than any man’ since ‘the very search for enjoyment rouses it to the quality of elusiveness’.28 The entertainer George Robey contended that ‘the war has made all the difference. Women have done things which mere man in his conceit thought only himself capable of accomplishing.’29 A reappearing Winifred Graham asked, pertinently, ‘have you ever met a man who wanted to be a woman?’ and ‘have you not met dozens of women who would give anything to be men?’30 Again, what Horace Vachell later calls ‘the sheltered-lives epoch’ is generally agreed to have ended. It takes only a superficial comparison with some of the magazine’s earlier essays into the subject such as ‘Muzzles for Ladies’, ‘How a Woman Should Walk’ and ‘Distinguished Women and Their Dolls’ to note the marked change in attitude. These developments in the Strand’s non-fiction were paralleled by comparable changes in its fictional output. Wodehouse became the Strand’s champion author in this period. However squeezed the Newnes finances became through the later 1920s, funds would always be found to ensure his more or less constant presence. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the company (with the Strand still the most prominent of its publications) enjoyed something of a boom, recording its highest ever profits in 1918 and 1919 before it began again to lose its ceaseless war of attrition with the cost of high-quality paper.31 One of the reasons Wodehouse became such an important cultural figure for the Strand after the war was that his

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humour and his detachment from the sombre tenor of much postwar writing gave the magazine a new cultural impetus. A new generation of war-tried readers would, Frank Newnes believed, relish levity and distraction. In 1919 he bemoaned the dearth of new comic authors, prophesying that ‘a fortune awaits anyone who can produce humorous matter which takes the public fancy’.32 The search for comic writers and his strange belief that the war had ‘not thrown up many new authors’ is further testimony to the magazine’s increasing dissociation from the mainstreams of literary culture in the period. Wodehouse, at least, was very clearly on message. Even after the war, in his ‘Archie’ sequence (later condensed into the novel The Indiscretions of Archie), Wodehouse still dealt with the war as an unwanted anomalous disruption to patterns of life that could instantly be resumed. In the story ‘Archie and the Sausage Chappie’, Archie bumps into an old army friend who seems to be suffering from shell shock, having ‘forgotten all sorts of things. When I was born. How old I am. Whether I’m married or single.’33 Archie is, however, relieved to discover that the large scar adorning his comrade’s head was acquired ‘jumping through a plate-glass window in London on Armistice night’ rather than in the scene of conflict. Wodehouse’s success was emulated by the likes of Edwin Pugh, who contributed a great number of light-hearted, comedic narratives that shared in Wodehouse’s fondness for affluent, socially mobile characters as well as his resistance to literary artifice and emotional sincerity. E. Philips Oppenheim, meanwhile, converted himself from a writer of unremarkable adventure and detective fiction to a writer of equally unremarkable comedies in the style of Wodehouse or W. W. Jacobs depending on his mood. This development was alluded to in an interview with Oppenheim in 1920 where Sidney Dark attributed the transition to Oppenheim ‘discover[ing] he had humour’.34 The Wodehousian trend in comic writing was complemented by exotic romances such as Henry De Vere Stacpoole’s The Beach of Dreams and The Garden of God, which reproduced the hugely successful formula of his 1908 novel The Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon is often held up as a barometer of cultural change in literature, marking the point at which mainstream novels were able to experiment with more explicit ways to represent sex, desire and the body. Stacpoole was able to break with ‘literary conventions’ as well as ‘moral conventions’ and, by 1920, was determinedly ploughing an increasingly repetitious furrow of such narratives with their coy, melodramatic and earnestly sensual language.35 Importantly, however, Stacpoole’s novel would endure in the popular imagination through a 1923 silent

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film which boosted his reputation and fuelled the Strand’s marketing of his subsequent contributions. His style could also be found in a new generation of adventure stories which, like the post-war short fiction of F. Britten Austin (‘The Lovers’, ‘The Treasures of the Tombs’, ‘Buried Treasure’ and ‘The Inca’s Treasure’), were lavishly illustrated with images imitating the aesthetic of the early cinematic romances featuring the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks. Here the relationship between fiction and cinema had been inverted from the Strand’s early ambitions to bring its stories to the screen. As Greg Semenza and Bob Hassenfratz argue, it was in the early 1920s that ‘film no longer needed literature for its survival’ as it began to dictate a new set of aesthetic criteria rather than attempting to mirror the cultural prestige of literature.36 In more general terms, cinema began to cast an increasing shadow over the contents of the Strand during this period in such articles as Charlie Chaplin’s ‘What People Laugh At’, which made assertions about the new primacy of ‘comedy moving pictures’ over music-hall entertainments.37 Other articles on theatre such as ‘Three Drolls’ likewise describe the medium’s charms, though enduringly popular, as ‘old-fashioned’.38 The Strand, then, had a very clear plan to market itself to a post-war generation of readers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s plans, however, were rather different.

From Centre to Margin Conan Doyle’s early essays into the subject of spiritualism in the Strand were dealt with tolerantly and in the spirit of honest debate. His emphasis upon post-war regeneration and his anti-materialist vision of the future seemed to flicker briefly as a legitimate perspective among the broader changes that the magazine underwent. However, this tolerance was not to last; the gentle arbitration of his head-tohead dialogue with Clodd was followed by an article of a rather different tenor, ‘G. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells Disbelieve in Spiritualism’ in 1920. Shaw was merciless in his dismissal of spiritualism as ‘rank nonsense’ and, while ‘many people find comfort in what the spiritualists picture’, for him it simply ‘adds a new terror to death’.39 He reports how a medium happily channelled the spirit of his ‘dead’ friend ‘Herbert George Wells, who used to write’ and concludes that belief in immortality depends on faith in supra-temporal absolute values . . . the moment we are asked to accept ‘scientific evidence’ for spiritual truth, the alleged spiritual truth becomes for us neither scientific nor truth.40

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This argument attacked the very basis for Conan Doyle’s design to rescue spiritualism from the taint of pre-modern superstition that still clung to it. Shaw’s assertion drove a wedge between the two epistemologies of religious belief and evidential reason that Doyle was attempting to dialectically combine. Shorn of emotional appeals to the post-war sense of communal loss, the collocation was made to appear silly, not least because the reader of the Strand was already being shown a new, distinct and attractive cultural scene. One that processed the horrors of the war in ways far more palatable for a generation more inclined towards pleasure and the enjoyment of the new peace. Wells completed this assault upon Doyle’s case by arguing that ‘new worlds will be discovered by science. Marvels will come. But they will be discoveries that will connect with what we already know. The new will be part of our system. The feel of reality will be irresistible.’41 More worryingly for this new class of leisureseekers, spiritualist heaven seemed destined to plane away the traits of the individual in the eyes of Wells: ‘the whole idea of a personal immortality is absurd on the face of it. Take away the little characteristics which distinguish one human from another . . . and what is left? Little more than a formula.’42 If Strand readers were in doubt over who to trust, they could also find an interview with Wells that depicted its subject in far more glowing terms than those through which Doyle was presented in ‘Life After Death’. In its attempt to establish Wells’s dual status as creative force and public intellectual, the interview recalls Doyle’s frequent appearances during the Boer War and his status as a military and cultural guru. The Wells interview describes the scholarly process behind his work The Outline of History and its potential impact upon the study of history. Wells is shown to ‘discourse with equal ease on modern events and ancient happenings’ and to be capable of uniting hitherto disparate stories of human development into a single ‘tellable story’.43 Notwithstanding the dismissive hauteur of Wells and Shaw, however, Doyle would soon prove himself entirely capable of discrediting his public image on his own. In December 1920 the Strand published ‘Fairies Discovered’ wherein Conan Doyle discussed the appearance of several photographs taken by two young girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. A year later the article would be expanded into a book-length treatise on how he believed the pictures figured in his post-war worldview. Describing himself as ‘by nature of a somewhat sceptical turn’, he sought to establish counter-claims to the validity of the photographs. Some critics had suggested that the backgrounds

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had ‘theatrical properties’ and that the toadstools featured were ‘unnatural’. These objections were wearily familiar to the author, who remarked ‘how well we know that type of critic in all our psychic work, though it is not possible at once to show his absurdity to other people’.44 More importantly, the existence of fairies might have formed a natural staging post on the route to spiritualist salvation. ‘Fairies Discovered’ attempted to identify the photographs as marking a historic ‘epoch’ in human affairs.45 Doyle again suggested that ‘modern’ ways of life could be recalibrated to older specifications: 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 charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk . . . Recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century out of its heavy ruts in the mud.46

The Cottingley Fairies incident and the hectoring, reactionary tone that it produced in Doyle’s writing suggest that he was becoming frustrated at his lack of success in promoting spiritualism. In pursuing it so vigorously and in such a sustained way within the Strand he unintentionally damned any hope of a spiritualist breakthrough by tarnishing the legacy of his earlier successes. Michael Saler has frequently argued against the idea of modernity as fundamentally opposed to ‘enchantment’. Enchantment, for Saler, meant balancing ‘delight in wonderful things’ against the risk of ‘beguilement’: ‘the price of living with enchantment was the possibility of being captured by it’.47 It was precisely this thin barrier that Doyle transgressed in his public proclamations of belief. The case for spiritualism had been made soberly and with due attention to the social and emotional problems that it purported to salve. Straight-faced belief in the romantic charms of fairies suggested nothing short of ‘beguilement’. The purported relationship between religion and science that Wells and Shaw had attacked was made to appear ridiculous through its association with the subject. Conan Doyle was beginning to lose a game that he had previously played with great skill. When preparing The Lost World for publication, he took pleasure in mocking up the faked photographs and maps that were appended to it upon its first appearance and wrote to his mother that he was ‘very busy superintending’ their production (Fig. 5.2).48 He much preferred these ‘corroborative

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Figure 5.2 Photograph taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Lost World (I)’, Strand Magazine, April 1912, pp. 363–82, p. 371.

documents’ to Harry Rountree’s illustrations because, as he wrote to Smith, they ‘increase the illusion so enormously’.49 These staged photographs represented the ‘ludic space in which reason and imagination cavort’ because, within the context of the story, they offered a secure, rational route to romance and fantasy.50 This process is a neat encapsulation of how Saler’s ‘ironic imagination’ works; an author in a fake beard physically appearing in his own text as a coded claim for authenticity. The photographs constituted a plea for readers to abandon themselves to enchantment while safe in the knowledge that a rational anchor and ironic narration would preserve them from beguilement and potential ridiculousness. Thirteen years later, Doyle again appeared before the readers of the Strand presenting photographs that he claimed to be genuine, but with entirely the opposite result: he appeared ludicrous. The wider

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press’s interest in the Cottingley affair characterised Doyle in exactly this way; they were, according to Lycett, ‘astounded by his credulity’.51 The Saturday Review took the occasion of the appearance of a spiritualist memoir to launch a scathing attack on Doyle and the ‘moral earnestness that blinds his . . . discriminating eyes’ before concluding that ‘spiritualism, fairies and elements generally’ were unlikely to convert anyone other than those ‘whom the war has left hysterical, unmanned, morbid, and unbalanced’.52 By taking the photographs so seriously, Doyle contravened his own and the Strand’s established boundaries for mobilising ‘enchantment’ in a fictional context. His language in exploring the existence of fairies and the veracity of spiritualism resulted from a mixture of scientific rigour, honest curiosity, naive commitment and perceived common sense. All of these qualities were caught in a continuous, dialectical struggle for primacy. For Doyle, the debate constituted a challenge to the ‘materiality’ of the twentieth century that required rigorous attempts to establish its truth. He asserted that 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 the limited circle of definite knowledge we see the loom and shadow of gigantic and fantastic possibilities around us, throwing themselves continually across our consciousness.53

This metaphor is key to the kind of spiritual-scientific dialectic that Doyle propounded. By physically situating spiritual knowledge around the liminal periphery of rational thought he was able to reinvent pre-modern belief systems and cast them as a progression beyond traditional science rather than a reversion from it. In March 1920 Conan Doyle took part in a long debate with Joseph McCabe of the Rationalist Press Organization at the Queen’s Hall, the venue where Challenger had unveiled his pterodactyl. By this time, Doyle’s status as a spiritualist was known and generally accepted and he saw it as important only to talk about spiritualism from the perspective of an ardent materialist. In his subsequent book, McCabe recalled how this attitude influenced the structure of their confrontation: My opponent had insisted that I should open the debate; and, when it was pointed out that the critic usually follows the exponent, he had indicated that I had ample material to criticize in the statement of the case for spiritualism in his two published works.54

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According to Doyle, his route to spiritualist belief had taken thirty years of reading, observation and experimentation. As such it felt natural that he should pass the burden of proof on to the antagonistic materialists. In a 1920 pamphlet that sought specifically to address the attitude of McCabe, Doyle explained this attitude further: Spiritualists ask for nothing better than that [Science] should intervene again and again, for each honest inquiry can only strengthen the cause of truth . . . But let it be real Science which comes to us, not prejudice and ill-will, which judge a case first and examine it afterwards. This is not Science, but the very antithesis of Science.55

It would be wrong, therefore, to cast Doyle as someone who suddenly abandoned one system of thought for another; it was simply that, at some point, alternate definitions and multiple possibilities came to be implied by words such as ‘evidence’, ‘belief’ and ‘science’. It has become easy to see him as a wild-eyed fundamentalist attempting to break apart a materialist hegemony. Indeed, he frequently played up to this role such as when, in 1919, he addressed a speech to an audience in Leicester and claimed that the orthodox church should ‘come in and help us fight the materialism of the world’.56 Yet this caricature is not substantial enough to capture the truth of his beliefs. These slow, tectonic shifts in public taste, Doyle’s beliefs and the Strand’s commissioning policies can also be felt in the waning intimacy of the letters between Doyle and Smith. In April 1919 he had responded negatively to Smith’s request for more Sherlock Holmes stories, citing his work on his long spiritualist essay The Vital Message. I am sure that the Vital Message is too strong meat for a popular magazine . . . Hearst’s magazine in USA has it, but it has not a family circulation like the Strand.57

While the letters retained their friendly tone, Doyle continually resisted Smith’s exhortations to provide him with conventional fiction. It is undeniable that Doyle’s writing on fairies thoroughly damaged his own reputation, but it also had the effect of leaving the magazine itself open to ridicule. The Washington Times led with a large feature with the headline ‘Poor Sherlock Holmes – Hopelessly Crazy?’; the byline continued ‘Conan Doyle, who has been victimised by transparent “spirit” frauds, now offers photographic evidence that fairies exist just like in the story books.’58 The article criticised Doyle’s ‘painful’

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public appearances in America the previous year and made the final assertion that even ‘Sir Oliver Lodge, who believes almost everything he hears, refused to accept them as fairy pictures’.59 The New York Tribune found Dr Charles Richet arguing for a clear distinction between the ‘scientific fact’ of ectoplasm and the fairy pictures, which were ‘suspicious’ at best and ‘perfectly foolish’ at worst.60 Russell Miller notes that while the Strand issue containing ‘Fairies Discovered’ sold out across the country, it also raised concerns about the fact that it was published by a ‘respectable magazine’.61 For years, Conan Doyle’s reputation had been synonymous with that of the magazine, giving strength and publicity to its reputation. Now the power balance between the two had shifted, with the magazine suffering by its association. While the matter was reported in neutral enough terms, a study of the reception of Doyle’s Cottingley writings shows a very firm consensus forming among periodicals in Great Britain and America on two issues: first, that Doyle’s reputation as a serious commentator was irretrievably damaged and, secondly, that this was further confirmation of the spurious basis of spiritualism. After this point, the issue of spiritualism simply vanished from the pages of the Strand, with one notable exception in the shape of Doyle’s The Land of Mist. That novel would constitute his last great gamble to convert the Strand readership. While Doyle would later admit to Smith that ‘I should not use my rather special position with Strand readers for the purposes of proselytising’, he had evidently learned that the more unusual elements of his belief system needed to be more appropriately sugared in some way to be made palatable.62 In this context, he was hugely excited by the prospect of a long, serious novel that blended the characters of his Challenger narratives with the deeper questions raised by spiritualism and its struggle to be heard within popular culture. In October 1924 he wrote to Smith unveiling his plans for the novel, making sure to begin his letter by flattering the recipient as a ‘born storyteller’. I have for years had a big psychic novel in me, which shall deal realistically with every phase of the question, pro and con. I waited and knew it would come. Now it has come, with a full head of steam . . . So far I am very satisfied with it, but whether it is your meal is another matter.63

The letter warned Smith about ‘what is coming’ but also took pains to assure him repeatedly that it would ‘do the anti – as well as the “pro” ’.64 He was keen to appear principally as a novelist treating an

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interesting subject rather than a fanatic preaching a sermon. Part of his excitement must have come from contemplating a work of fiction that possessed the same genre-splicing energy of The Lost World but which used the delivery system of popular fiction to alert, engage and interest a vast popular readership once again. Such a work involving Sherlock Holmes would have been impossible, but the character of Challenger proved to be an ideal vehicle for the project.

Inverting the Quest In many ways, The Land of Mist was a re-imagining of The Lost World. Both titles invoked the language of exploration and they could have been swapped with no real loss of sense. While the former work used the potential of adventure as a means of counteracting a wave of materialistic modernity, the latter used the same form to launch an interrogation of the self (it was even subtitled ‘The Quest of Edward Malone’). The Land of Mist sought to position itself specifically in relation to the artificiality of The Lost World. This sentiment was trumpeted from the first sentence of the novel which stated that ‘the great Professor Challenger has been – very improperly and imperfectly – used in fiction’.65 When Challenger later hears that a medium has channelled the spirit of Professor Summerlee, he roars ‘Good Heavens, where are your brains? Have not the names of Summerlee and Malone been associated with my own in some peculiarly feeble fiction which attained some notoriety.’66 In this way Doyle’s frame narrative allows for radical changes of character and theme by reclassifying the preceding works as ‘fiction’. This retreat from artifice also allows for the introduction of Challenger’s daughter, Enid, whose existence had never previously been hinted at. Doyle clearly wished to paint The Lost World as an amusing diversion but one that, upon re-evaluation, was invalid. The dormant danger of the symptoms of late modernity, which he had incorporated into the quest form, erupted and exploded the idea that they were ever really compatible. The Land of Mist explicitly dramatises this incompatibility through the various evolutions of its principal characters, all of whom take divergent paths towards inevitable spiritual conversion. The strains of a post-war landscape are very evident. Summerlee is dead; Challenger is stricken by grief after the death of his wife and ‘losing something of his fire . . . his voice as monstrous as ever but less ready to roar down all opposition’.67

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‘Post-war conditions and new world problems’ have ‘left their mark’ upon Malone who finds his ‘muscles wilted’ but his ‘mind . . . deeper and more active’.68 Roxton, felled by an elephant bullet while leading troops in East Africa during the war and bored by earthly quests, is ‘seeking new worlds to conquer’.69 All find solace, motivation and respite from ‘new world problems’ by embracing spiritualist beliefs which variously re-energise their particular degenerations. Challenger’s personal loss is directly equated with a lessening of his bragging, arrogant materialism which, in microcosm, reflects the novel’s more general equation between the loss of life in the war and the increased public appetite for spiritualism. As a reporter in The Lost World, Malone represented a key conduit between the exotic adventure and the return to the quotidian, domestic scene. Thirteen years later this occupation becomes a source of dissatisfaction; the press is constantly identified as the enforcer of a rigid and unfairly material set of hegemonic values. Each of these characters were particularly measured for their contributions to the questing group in The Lost World and those qualities were specifically inverted in The Land of Mist. Each of their occupations and interests have somehow disjointed from the world around them, and to achieve new satisfaction and happiness the gaze of the scientist, the reporter and the adventurer have to be inverted to re-evaluate the spiritual make-up of their own bodies. The function of spiritualism as a post-war ideal for Doyle was monolithic and unilateral. It brought not just every living person, but every soul that had ever existed on earth into the same system of belief and thus offered a defence against the fragmentation of society. This was combined with an excoriation of early twentieth-century Christianity and particularly the Catholic Church. Doyle would later write that To the orthodox Roman Catholic, there is nothing good outside his own dogmatic fence. All else is heresy . . . With them is salvation, beyond their pale is damnation, or at the lowest, danger.70

Worse, by claiming sole ownership over spiritual matters, Catholicism, in effect, ‘would prefer that . . . man should be left in a state of complete materialism rather than that he should accept any systems which did not in each particular agree with his own’.71 Early in the novel, a spirit named Lucille is interrogated about religious doctrines: ‘All religions are right if they make you better . . . It is what

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people do in daily life, not what they believe.’72 Belief, in an age of declining religiosity, has become too precious a commodity to reject because of differences of dogma. While his public pronouncements in the press, in pamphlets and in speeches still maintained some small purchase on popular discourse, Doyle turned to fiction as the most effective way of reasserting his claims to the interest and attention of his former readership. Spiritualism, from this perspective, offered a means of escape from the horror of the war and from the now well-worn list of ‘modern’ symptoms: urbanisation, mechanisation, mass-market and popular culture, the decline of orthodox religion, contraception. Spiritualism’s explicit answers to these individual problems were strategically unveiled throughout the novel. Malone and Enid Challenger, in their capacities as newspaper reporters, begin the novel by attending a spiritualist church and attain entry despite the huge throng outside. From the stage they gaze out at the crowd: The hall was crammed . . . one saw line after line of upturned faces, curiously alike in type . . . The type was not distinguished nor intellectual, but it was undeniably healthy, honest and sane. Small trades-folk, . . . shopwalkers, better class artisans, lower middle class women, . . . occasional young folk in search of sensation.73

For these people, divorced from the intellectual tussles of high modernism and, like the readers of the Strand, faced instead with the everyday representations of them, spiritualism seemed custom-fit to meet their communal lack. It offered less dogmatic religious prescriptions for living that nevertheless limited the damaging disintegrations of modern life. Spiritualism enforced the idea that every soul has its mate and that the two would inevitably be united, either on earth or in one of the heavens. Luke, a ‘high spirit from the sixth sphere’, tells Malone and Enid that ‘there is one man, and only one, for each woman and one woman only for each man . . . Until they meet all unions are mere accidents which have no meaning . . . Real marriage is of the soul and spirit. Sex actions are a mere external symbol which mean nothing and are foolish, or even pernicious.’74

The tenets of spiritualist romance reassert monogamy and sexual normalcy, not as an impersonal and dogmatic article of legislation but as

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a beneficent natural law that is reinforced by the evidential observations of psychical science. The romantic relationship between Enid and Malone is played out unobtrusively and largely unmentioned. There is no hint of sexual attraction between them and the courtship represents a model that Doyle describes as ‘clean and honest comradeship’ over the ‘prim affections and sly deceits of the past’.75 Doyle even observed sanctimoniously that their love affair ‘is not of the slightest interest to the reader, for the simple reason that it is not of the slightest interest to the writer’.76 This statement, a direct rebuke to Strand readers for expecting a dash of romance with their sermon, set a worrying tone in the first chapter. The dangers of drink were also critiqued and grouped with sex as a parcel of sensations that promised degeneration, dissipation and unhappiness. By lessening the urgency of life and by urging its followers to focus on ‘spiritual preparation’, spiritualism could strip these transitory ‘thrills’ of some of their perniciousness.77 The potentially violent fault-lines between classes were also shown to dissipate under the aegis of spiritualism; the diverse audiences that gather at the many meetings and séances throughout the novel show that ‘there is no such leveller of classes as Spiritualism, and the charwoman with psychic force is the superior of the millionaire who lacks it’.78 The spectre of the war loomed large. The Vital Message had been a caustic, profoundly reactionary polemic that verged on welcoming the conflict as a means of cleansing corruption and ‘wickedness’: ‘It was needful to shake mankind loose from gossip and pink teas, and sword-worship, and Saturday night drunks, and self-seeking politics and theological quibbles.’79 In The Land of Mist, this caustic narrative could be covertly deployed within a kinder fictional framework. Doyle depicted spiritualism as soothing the raw grief of those who had survived the war. Three scenes of clairvoyance hinge upon characters in mourning contacting those who had died in combat, and it is strongly implied that the experience of loss and devastation has created a society more open to spiritualism. The spiritualist crowd at the start of the novel is addressed by a Mr Miromar, who claims that heaven’s gift [proofs of spiritualism] had been disregarded. The blow fell. Ten million young men were lain dead upon the ground. Twice as many were mutilated. That was God’s first warning to mankind. But it was in vain, the same dull materialism prevailed as before.80

In this context, the war was not a vast, inhumane act of man but instead the symptom of a religious power desperate to make itself

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known. In this scheme of events, the only way to prevent anything similar from happening again is to avoid heaping up ‘fresh loads of sin’ to be ‘atone[d]’ for.81 That the more benign tenets of spiritualism should be enforced by this threat of terrible deferred violence is not a contradiction that Doyle seems overly concerned with; the munificent and the tyrannical happily coexist as part of the text’s religious and ideological framework. Why would the readership of the Strand hesitate when offered such a beautifully unilateral solution for all their problems? The two forces that most threaten and undermine spiritualism are the popular press and orthodox science. Difficulties arise as a result of Doyle’s claim that spiritualism was differentiated from other faiths because it was informed by the field of psychical science which provided objective sources of legitimation. Accordingly, in The Land of Mist representatives of orthodox science are decried as obstacles to intellectual and moral progression. The prophetic Miromar proclaims that The very idea of progress has been made material. It is progress to go swiftly, to send swift messages, to build new machinery. All this is a diversion of real ambition . . . Mankind . . . presses on upon its false road of material science.82

‘Mechanical’ science produces ‘swift messages’ and ‘new machinery’ which exacerbate the spiritual dissatisfaction of the modern world. ‘Rational’ science, embodied by Challenger himself, unambitiously uses a stunted worldview to categorise the contents of the physical world. Psychical science, the systematised and ‘provable’ basis of spiritualism, is separated from the other two branches and held up as a new paradigm in which a religious act of faith is reinforced by the objective, discriminating gaze of the scientist. The second dimension of this antimony and the second ‘oppositional force’ in The Land of Mist is the popular press. In The Lost World, the protagonists required the assent of Fleet Street to avoid being labelled charlatans. By 1925, in Doyle’s estimation, this tension had become a burgeoning and rancorous sore. When Malone and Enid attend their first spiritualist service at the beginning of the novel there is no room in the audience and so they are asked to sit on the stage. Their presence reinforces the idea of the extent to which the media were participants in the public debate. Doyle frequently laid the blame for people’s antipathy towards spiritualism at the door of a media-enforced materialism (Fig. 5.3). A medium named Tom Linden

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Figure 5.3 Illustration by F. E. Hiley taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (V)’, Strand Magazine, November 1925, pp. 436–48, p. 447.

is entrapped by two policewomen posing as clients and the narrator notes of the subsequent trial and conviction that poor Tom Linden had a bad press . . . The Planet, an evening paper which depended for its circulation upon the sporting forecasts . . . remarked upon the absurdity of forecasting the future. Honest John, a weekly journal which had been mixed up with some of the greatest frauds of the century, was under the opinion that the dishonesty of Linden was a public scandal . . . The Churchman remarked that such incidents arose from the growing infidelity, whilst The Freethinker saw in them a reversion to superstition.83

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Each of the periodicals mentioned co-opts the truth of the situation into a self-serving and hypocritical message. Doyle presents Linden as an honest man who ‘gives away’ his earnings as ‘quick as [he] makes [them]’.84 Yet the press unthinkingly dismisses him, like all other mediums, as ‘charlatans’ trading ‘upon the finer feelings of bereaved parents’.85 Even when Malone sees what he deems to be undeniable proof of materialisation while at the Institut Metaphysique in Paris he is totally frustrated in his attempts to disseminate the story. Malone, a strong individual who ‘always look[s] up cold facts’, finds himself at variance with this hegemony and, in one of several scenes of renunciation in the novel, resigns from his position.86 His editor relays a message from Mr Cornelius, the owner of the Daily Gazette, that Malone must change his tone and ‘poke fun’ at spiritualism. Cornelius, the reader is sententiously informed, lives a lifestyle of luxury ‘on the edge of vice’ but may occasionally ‘sway public affairs by a manifesto printed in larger type upon his own front page’.87 This conflict marks the point at which the mixture of romance and modernity finally explodes. When Malone resigns and, later, when Challenger is convinced as to the veracity of spiritual beliefs, we see the death of Conan Doyle’s ‘modern’ romance as his heroes change from avatars of orthodox science, adventure and modernity into representatives of a circumscribed and embattled minority interest. Characteristically, however, Doyle’s final chapter resisted offering his readers some respite from his twists and turns between rationalism and enchantment, between consumer culture and spiritual fulfilment, between romance and modernity Challenger . . . had long needed an active clear-headed man to manage his business interests, and to control his world-wide patents. There were many devices, the fruits of his life’s work . . . were all money-makers.88

Challenger and Malone become professional scientists, profiting from the same mechanical advances that have been frequently decried throughout the novel as a diversion from spiritual advancement. The Land of Mist was a novel at war with itself, torn between accommodating and admonishing its readership. It showed up the glaring flaws in using large, brash but paper-thin characters from popular fiction to express deeper and more finely drawn feelings. The two Conan Doyles, the populist and the idealist, continued

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their restless struggle for supremacy and the novel was a sheer failure. For all his undoubted charm and skill, Doyle wrote many bad pieces of fiction. Even among this lesser company it is difficult to imagine a more ill-conceived and uneven work than The Land of Mist. It is the nadir because of its unpleasant reactionary qualities. His genuine investment in the alleviation of post-war grief and suffering merged nastily with his sense that the ‘message’ of the war was being ignored. Reaction to the novel that went beyond straightforward opprobrium was minimal. Those that commented charitably ended up killing it with kindness. The Sunday Times wondered what readers would make of it, even those ‘few’ still demanding a ‘moral’ from their novels.89 The Land of Mist was not dreadful but was ‘propaganda and little else’, leaving ‘those . . . looking for another first rate story . . . sadly disappointed’.90 G. K. Chesterton in the Illustrated London News called it ‘interesting’ but called foul at Challenger’s sudden and miraculous conversion to spiritualism: ‘A man of that extreme materialism has at least a long way to travel before he comes even within sight of the Land of Mist.’91 He concluded that Doyle’s problem was not so much the nature of his beliefs but rather his inability to turn them into passable art: ‘If Arthur Conan Doyle has found it difficult to turn his moral philosophy into a really good novel, he is not the first to fail in doing that.’92 This failure was so complete that it led Doyle to abandon his plan to wage spiritualist war upon the pages of the Strand and to draw a much stricter divide between his fiction and his faith. The Strand, meanwhile, was left searching for the generation of comic writers that would resuscitate its fortunes.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Doyle, Our Reply to the Cleric, p. 6. Beare, Index to the Strand Magazine, p. 744. Ross, ‘The Mysterious Spiritualistic Séance’, p. 232. Ibid., p. 233. See ‘Cheiro’, ‘What I Read in Lord Kitchener’s Hand’, p. 96. Lodge, ‘How I Became Convinced of the Survival of the Dead’, p. 567. Dam, ‘The New Telegraphy’, p. 280. ‘The Promise of Science’, p. 672. Doyle, ‘Is Sir Oliver Lodge Right? – Yes’, p. 50. Clodd, ‘Is Sir Oliver Lodge Right? – No’, p. 53.

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11. Church, ‘Life After Death: An Interview with Arthur Conan Doyle’, p. 204. 12. Ibid., p. 204. 13. Ibid., p. 207. 14. Ibid., p. 207. 15. Doyle, ‘A New Light on Old Crimes’, p. 65. 16. Lawrence, ‘Tickets, Please!’, p. 287. 17. Ibid., p. 290. 18. Ibid., p. 292. 19. Ibid., p. 287. 20. Cecil, ‘The Man Who Understood Women’, p. 139. 21. Ibid., p. 142. 22. Ibid., p. 145. 23. Margaux, ‘Leap-Year’, p. 269. 24. Ibid., p. 271. 25. Ibid., p. 271. 26. Ibid., p. 271. 27. ‘Who Has the Best Time – A Man Or a Woman?’, p. 111. 28. Ibid., p. 112. 29. Ibid., p. 114. 30. Ibid., p. 114. 31. ‘George Newnes, Ltd.’, Daily Mail, 22 August 1919, p. 3. 32. ‘George Newnes (Limited)’, The Times, 9 September 1918, p. 13. 33. Wodehouse, ‘Archie and the Sausage Chappie’, p. 354. 34. Dark, ‘E. Philips Oppenheim – An Interview’, p. 306. 35. Trotter, The English Novel on History, p. 198. 36. Semenza and Hassenfratz, The History of British Literature on Film, p. 116. 37. Chaplin, ‘What People Laugh At’, p. 119. 38. Walkley, ‘Three Drolls’, p. 38. 39. Gollomb, ‘G. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells Disbelieve in Spiritualism’, p. 392. 40. Ibid., p. 394. 41. Ibid., p. 395. 42. Ibid., p. 395. 43. Lynch, ‘H. G. Wells As Historian’, p. 467. 44. Doyle, ‘Fairies Photographed’, p. 468. 45. Ibid., p. 463. 46. Ibid., p. 468. 47. Saler, ‘Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Ironic Imagination’, p. 138. 48. Lellenberg et al (eds), A Life in Letters, p. 580. 49. Unpublished letter, August 1912, University of Virginia Library. 50. Saler, ‘Modernity, Disenchantment and the Ironic Imagination’, p. 139. 51. Lycett, Conan Doyle, p. 389.

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52. ‘Literature, Science and Art’, p. 37. This is not to say that the book was unilaterally dismissed. The Bookman, as with its later review of the Land of Mist, proved surprisingly open to Doyle’s ideas: ‘Perhaps the “cold poetry” of science may enrich the faerie legend by showing that it is based on a foundation of literal truth . . . There should be a wide welcome for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s new book’ (Gow, ‘The Camera in Elfdom’, pp. 34–5). 53. Doyle, ‘The Evidence For Fairies’, p. 199. 54. McCabe, Is Spiritualism Based on Fraud?, p. ii. 55. Doyle, Spiritualism and Rationalism, p. 19. 56. Stashower, Teller of Tales, p. 342. 57. Unpublished letter, 21 April 1919, Toronto Public Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, No. 47. 58. ‘Poor Sherlock Holmes – Hopelessly Crazy?’, p. 6. 59. Ibid., p. 6. 60. ‘Scientist Accepts Ghostly Ectoplasm as Natural Phenomenon’, p. 3. 61. Miller, The Adventures of Conan Doyle, p. 408. 62. Unpublished letter, 23 October 1924, Toronto Public Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, No. 75. 63. Unpublished letter, 23 October 1924, Toronto Public Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, No. 50. 64. Ibid., 65. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (I)’, p. 3. 66. Ibid., p. 18. 67. Ibid., p. 3. 68. Ibid., p. 4. 69. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (IV)’, p. 323. 70. Doyle, The Roman Catholic Church, p. 5. 71. Ibid., p. 6. 72. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (III)’, p. 231. 73. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (I)’, p. 10. 74. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (II)’, p. 118 75. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (I)’, p. 7. 76. Ibid., p. 7. 77. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (IV)’, p. 115. 78. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (III)’, p. 227. 79. Doyle, The Vital Message, p. 15. 80. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (I)’, p. 14. 81. Ibid., p. 14. 82. Ibid., p. 14. 83. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (II)’, p. 123. 84. Ibid., p. 123. 85. Ibid., p. 122. 86. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (I)’, p. 6. 87. Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (VIII)’, p. 148.

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186 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Doyle, ‘The Land of Mist (IX)’, p. 292. ‘New Fiction’, p. 9. Ibid., p. 9. Chesterton, ‘Our Note Book’, p. 648. Ibid., p. 648.

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Conclusion

Remnants, 1925–1930

The Strand, Popular Culture and Late Capitalism Although some of the concerns of the decade prove to be localised, others seem to anticipate the concerns of our own time: unsurprisingly so, since the 1920s is the decade which heralded the arrival of late capitalism, with its armoury of mass media, its attempted consolidation of global hegemony (which was, however, powerfully interdicted by the success of the Russian Revolution) and its dialectic of promise and refusal in which a great many social alternatives are systematically closed down while new human possibilities are tantalisingly glimpsed.1

Where do we situate Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine within the literary landscape of the later 1920s? What role do they play in the trends highlighted by David Ayers and with what kind of capacity to endorse or resist them? The reputation and commercial prestige of the Strand was finally hit by the cultural revolution which had been postponed by the First World War. Ayers’s use of the term ‘late capitalism’ forces the twenty-first-century reader of the Strand to raise their eyes beyond the literary landscape and to contemplate the broader economic and political climate in which it continued to find a diminished readership. The status and validity of the phrase ‘late capitalism’ has been hotly disputed, but Ayers’s periodisation is intriguing since it contradicts the canonical work of Ernst Mandel, whose Late Capitalism is explicit in identifying the term with the post-1940 landscape.2 This timeframe aligns the onset of ‘late capitalism’ with the age of ‘postmodernism’ and the two categories share some genetic tissue, at least in the theorisations of Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard. The main flaw of ‘late capitalism’ as a concept is that it comes fully equipped with a sense of inevitable decline, seeming to predict a twilight of the capitalist gods. The term is not used here to act as a proxy vehicle for any certain predictions of the future but simply

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to describe the particular economic climate that emerged after 1918 and that played a substantial role in the production and distribution of all forms culture thereafter. Since none of the arguments of the theorists mentioned hitherto are treated as sacrosanct, we can tactfully withdraw from Ayers’s implied critique of Mandel’s periodisation. Those economic trends identified by Mandel and the cultural ones identified by Jameson might acquire a new kind of solidity and profusion after 1940, but the seeds for their fruition were already clearly visible in the 1920s and were making their mark in the Strand. It will be helpful to break down some of these characteristics in simple terms and to ask what set of conditions came together to constitute ‘late capitalism’. The simplest indicator in Britain was the decline of primary and secondary industries (including mining and manufacturing) in relation to the rise of tertiary and quaternary sectors (such as sales and ‘knowledge production’). Economic historians of the inter-war period have proved as incapable of forming a coherent consensus as literature scholars in terms of the precise narrative of the British economy during the period. Analyses swing from doom-laden unemployment statistics and vexed labour relations towards optimistic appraisals of overall growth and the mediumterm improvements that underlay the period’s wild fluctuations.3 While the minutiae of these quarrels are more significant for economic historians, there are a few specific trends that bear particularly upon the production of culture and upon the rhythms of everyday life that periodicals had always sought to reflect. Bernard Alford and his direct contemporary Derek Aldcroft agree that the inter-war period was marked by the rise of ‘new industries’: ‘consumer-goods industries . . . motor vehicles, electrical goods and artificial fibres’.4 The emergence of a consumer culture was dependent upon the rise of manufacturing and service industries at the expense of what Aldcroft termed ‘basic industries’ (‘coal, cotton, woollen and worsted, shipbuilding and iron and steel’)5 which constituted an ever-shrinking sector of the economy. As such, Britain began to export less and import more, which precipitated giddy spurts in growth but also left the industrial working class disenfranchised and the country’s fortunes increasingly dependent upon fluctuations elsewhere in the world.6 The direct connection between Britain’s economic performance and its primary industries was undermined and, while these industries would play a crucial role in the economy until their more marked decline after 1945, the 1920s saw the first stages in this long process.

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For Ayers, the key divide between ‘popular’ and ‘modernist’ fiction of the period could be broadly characterised by their attitude towards these changes: did they ‘critique’ or ‘acquiesce’?7 Increasingly through the 1920s, this difference could be as much part of the book’s production as its representation. Publishers began to experiment with cheap editions of contemporary popular works at the expense of prestige editions of classic fiction.8 Popular fiction, whether in serialised or book form, was thus far more likely to be produced from within the new economic regimes than to offer critique from without. While the revolution in paperback publishing would largely be postponed until the 1930s, periodical publishing was already and definitively part of mass culture by the 1920s. For Mandel, one of the most important catalysts for the emergence of late capitalism was the proliferation of models of labour organisation, technology and production that derived from the arms industry. Through the chaos of the First World War and its mercurial economic aftermath, the arms industry had boomed and laid down influential patterns of automation, technological innovation and the suppression of labour costs.9 The fruits of consumerism and its associated economic changes were thus powered by technological developments unearthed during the wartime arms race which filtered through into everyday experience. Crucially, while Mandel and Lyotard make far from easy theoretical bedfellows, this feeds into Lyotard’s analysis of the growth of knowledge economies. Lyotard identified the coming of the ‘postmodern’ with the conflict between private and public forms of knowledge production: The mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the state, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich in information and easy to decode.10

Even if these trends needed to wait until the next war and the deeper entrenchment of Mandel’s ‘third technological revolution’ of the 1950s to become the fully fledged harbingers of globalisation and the ‘world system’ economy, the 1920s again marked a crucial formative stage. By the mid-1920s Britain’s conception of itself as an industrial country was in need of serious examination of the kind that it had

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already undergone during the nineteenth century, when narratives about an essentially ‘rural’ or ‘pastoral’ England had to be revalued in the face of industrialisation.11 These were all ‘live’ issues for periodicals at the time, operating on the surface of daily post-war life. The economic difficulties of a decade that featured the General Strike of 1926 and that was book-ended by two serious depressions were exacerbated by the sense that the world order was being reconfigured to accommodate new powers from America, Russia and the Far East. Indeed, against these intimidating new global presences, Europe’s old imperial powers, riven by post-war hostilities, appeared less able to compete. In 1921 Austin Harrison in the English Review wrote that The camouflaged peace . . . has destroyed European purchasing power and threatens radically to weaken it . . . Post-war Europe is not an abnormal result, it is a positive condition, of war . . . the net result of Versailles is war.12

Crucially, part of this approach to understanding the period is that both Versailles and the legacy of the war more generally had demonstrated a disproportionate and obstructive return of nationalism and parochialism rather than European cooperation. Here we see the seeds for the waning power and status of the nation-state that characterises late capitalism and for the assumption of its epistemological, legal and economic power by corporations. The English Review (under Harrison’s editorship after he succeeded Ford Madox Ford) might appear to be an extreme case given that it was probably the publication of the period that shared the greatest proportion of thematic concerns with the works of literary modernism. Nevertheless, in comment pieces, reportage and book reviews, less ostentatiously intellectual publications like the Bookman, the Saturday Review and the Fortnightly Review were all engaged in measuring the potential cost of these changes in terms of Britain’s empire, economic prestige and cultural power.13 While the Strand responded more slowly and with far less incisiveness than these publications, it was still embroiled in the popular debate. Late capitalism saw the blossoming possibility of a global mass culture that, for 1920s Britain, equated to engorged markets for cinema, for recorded popular music and for newer kinds of glossy fashion and celebrity publications that remapped the periodical marketplace. This kind of consumerism occasioned further unease as the world’s apparently shrinking borders risked domestic culture

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appearing otiose and parochial. The Strand’s claim to be a ‘national institution’ might now assert the limitations rather than the breadth of its reach. Pressed by the convergence of these trends, the pace of culture, its fashions and its icons moved with increasing rapidity, leaving the Strand’s publication cycle appearing slow and its content pedestrian. Jameson argued that modernist art was characterised by a direct and tangible rejection of Victorianism: it ‘did not go well with over-stuffed Victorian furniture, with Victorian moral taboos, or with the conventions of polite society’.14 For the readers of the Strand, still in possession, perhaps, of just this kind of ‘furniture’ (both literal and metaphorical), how were these debates played out? In this period, Conan Doyle reappeared with far greater frequency than had seemed at all likely in the immediate fallout from The Land of Mist and his failed spiritualist mission on its pages. His work became self-consciously evacuated of spiritualist dogma and he sought instead to reconcile his and the magazine’s past with the new realities of the mid-to-late 1920s.

The Strand at the End The years between the publication of The Land of Mist and Arthur Conan Doyle’s death in July 1930 clearly marked a decisive phase in the decline of the magazine’s two measures of success: its profitability and its ability to set or participate meaningfully in the nation’s literary and cultural agenda. Pound’s account of the magazine’s decline contains the most sombre and objective passages in his volume. Helpfully, we can measure its accuracy against the yearly business statements of Newnes Ltd’s annual general meeting which appeared every July in The Times. These reports included an overview of the company’s portfolio of publications, their profits, losses and prospects. In 1925 the Strand was described as ‘more than maintain[ing] its circulation as well as its advertising revenue, which is substantially higher than even the good figures of the previous year’. Attention was also drawn to the publication’s continued association with its ‘old friend, Arthur Conan Doyle’ whose ‘new serial . . . will arouse great interest’.15 That serial would be The Land of Mist, a work that signalled nothing but growing ideological schisms between the magazine and its ‘old friend’. Pound describes the ‘pressure’ that Doyle brought to bear upon Greenhough Smith to ensure the publication of both The Land of Mist and his articles on the Cottingley fairies.16 Similarly, he

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suggests that ‘most readers . . . recoiled by making fun of Conan Doyle’s latest psychic obsession’, ‘that he was unbalanced by his researches’ and that his work ‘did nothing to repair the shaken confidence of old admirers’.17 Smith was caught in an impasse between his strong ties (both emotional and commercial) to Doyle and his dependence upon advertising revenue, whose representatives ‘preferred that readers should be pre-occupied by the things of this world’.18 Arguments for spiritual withdrawal from the new consumer culture unsurprisingly sat awkwardly amid advertisements for motor cars and telephones. Over the next few years The Times’s reports would drift away from using specific figures to indicate growth in profits, circulation or advertising revenue and instead begin to rely upon soft-focused evocations of ‘prestige’ and ‘tradition’ to mitigate the magazine’s worsening economic plight. The 1927 report, for example, notes that ‘sundry debtors show an increase of £30,031, and, on the other hand, trade creditors and credit balances are up by £53,192, both due mostly to increased trading’.19 In 1929 the gradual decline of the Strand’s circulation was elided by a reassertion of its relevance in a changed periodical marketplace: The Strand will continue to live up to its best traditions. It will continue to lead the way with new and fresh ideas; it will welcome new writers of note, and in this connexion everybody knows how many famous faces were first introduced to the public by the editor of the Strand. It is just because of this enterprising policy that the Strand steadily continues to maintain both its circulation and its advertising revenue. We have heard recently a good deal about the importance of the search for new markets for British manufactured goods. If there should be any advertiser who has not used the pages of The Strand Magazine, I give him his hint.20

The Strand’s circulation did not enter a straightforward plummet. While sales had shrunk from the 1901 peak of over one million to below 100,000 by 1930, they continued to fluctuate, reaching 80,000 before Pound’s editorship began in 1941.21 The magazine underwent numerous regenerations in the last twenty-five years of its life, including an increased page size in 1936 and a shift to a pocketsized format in 1941, enforced by the demands of paper rationing. What the reports in The Times reveal, however, is that the cultural perception of the Strand was also changing rapidly. Increasingly, its role as a disseminator, mediator and summariser of middlebrow cultural trends was being subsumed by other kinds of publication.

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As Pound notes, the readership of ‘popular newspapers’ expanded and the format began ‘taking over the magazine function’.22 At the same time, the leisurely pace of the Strand’s monthly publication was proving less and less attractive to the higher echelon of advertisers. For ‘the car manufacturers, the oil companies, the food industry [and] the department stores . . . the monthly interval was no longer economically tenable’.23 Pound paints with broad brushstrokes, but his assertions are more or less confirmed by recent scholarship on the periodical marketplace of the 1920s. The tabloid press evidenced a decisive swing towards Americanisation in its embracing of lifestyle content just as there was an emergence of dedicated celebrity gossip magazines built around fashion, film and music stars and, finally the rise of plush, glossy magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. All of these overlapping trends speak to the usurpation described by Pound and it is also significant that many of the newer publications featured literary content, draining authors and interest away from the Strand. P. David Marshall, for example, writes that Celebrity itself generated an entire industry by the second decade of the twentieth century . . . celebrity status became aligned with the potentialities of the wedding of consumer culture with democratic aspirations. The images of possibility provided by films, radio and popular music represented an accessible form of consumption.24

Advertising thus became fused with the new, profitable mass culture and the consequent developments in aspirational consumerism as eloquently theorised by the likes of Simone Weil Davis and Peter N. Stearns.25 Conan Doyle’s letters to Greenhough Smith show discomfort with the increased role of advertising within publishing. In a letter seemingly written during the composition of The Maracot Deep in 1927, Doyle wrote, ‘I do very much object to this [brash] style of advertisement. It is all wrong from the author’s point of view. It is not for author or publisher but for the critic to pronounce upon the merits of a book.’26 He went on to acknowledge the necessity of making the writing ‘attractive’ but, with a rather touching naivety, was ‘sure that it [could] be done without direct praise’. The Strand’s model of celebrity reportage (built upon esteem, success and achievement rather than good looks or cultural prominence) was made to appear suddenly dreary and significantly out of date. The Illustrated Interviews with archbishops and judges posing

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stiffly and reluctantly for photographs in their studies could hardly be expected to effectively compete or adapt to these changes. Because of these factors, circulation by itself was no longer a reliable indicator of health in the overall estimation of the industry. In testament to the new exigencies of periodical publishing, squeezed advertising revenue resulted in a direct diminution of cultural reach. The kinds of popular, established writers who had previously been its stock in trade would become unaffordable for the Strand by the 1930s. Pound suggests, for example, that Somerset Maugham stories were beyond the meagre reach of the Strand’s fiction budget by this point, despite his appearing with some regularity in the preceding years.27 Maugham’s particular brew of populism, cynicism and reserved romanticism, and his adeptness at the short story form would seem to identify him as the natural successor to those past writers whose careers were so bound to the Strand. Yet by the 1930s his talents were primarily to be the preserve of the ‘brackish’ waters of American style magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar. These publications generated the majority of his income from his short fiction before the stories appeared elsewhere in the British periodical marketplace (such as Pall Mall Magazine and the Novel Magazine).28 The vague allusions of the 1929 Times report to ‘new writers of note’ masked the fact that, aside from Wodehouse, there were no star authors whose names were synonymous with the magazine. As a consequence, the number of ‘unsolicited stories’ sent in by aspiring authors plummeted from ‘four thousand . . . a year’ to ‘zero’. As Pound put it, ‘even the more yearning aspirants were no longer trying’.29 For young authors, as well as established ones, the Strand was no longer somewhere to establish a desirable reputation. While it would be foolish to make the Strand emblematic of ‘Victorian’ beliefs or of the periodical scene as a whole, its narrative of decline is hard to dissociate from that of some of the late nineteenth-century’s dominant cultural trends. The rise of new media and new iterations of consumerism shattered the possibility (however fragile and remote) of a single dominant print culture that was identifiably and specifically domestic. The periodical field was on the verge of atomisation and specialisation that would further undermine the nineteenth-century models for success in the marketplace.30 The Strand suffered because its reputation was so closely aligned with a number of hugely significant names, trends and brands that became retrospectively fixed in the public imagination as Victorian.

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The other great trend in post-war periodical publishing was specialisation, the tailoring of publications to specific groups and interests. Ray Eldon Hiebert observes that in the last decades of the nineteenth-century, as the magazine market became more horizontal, more mass in reach, it also became more vertical, more specialized in scope . . . Such specialization continued until it became the prime characteristic of the entire magazine field in the twentieth-century.31

This represented a death knell for one of the Strand’s key cultural objectives: to build community and consensus through a kind of leitkultur that blended fiction with commentaries on other aspects of culture, politics and science. George Newnes’s position in the growth of mass culture was crucial not simply because he was one of the last representatives of an old paradigm (the benign, celebrity Victorian media magnate), but because he laid the groundwork for his own obsolescence. Newnes’s business model’s emphasis upon responding to his readers’ desires and interests was soon to characterise the whole industry’s construction of smaller, specialist reading communities. If the reading community itself was subject to fragmentation along sociocultural fault-lines, then no single domestic publication could ever hope to recapture the Strand’s ‘imperial’ phase of cultural dominance that it achieved during 1901. One of the smaller repercussions of the opening of hostilities in 1914 was that American publishers found it increasingly difficult to ship their magazines to England and so began to produce English editions of Harper’s and Vogue. These magazines were able to blend a localised scope with an international reach that was dependent upon global success.32 The only form of leitkultur available would be one with a distinct American accent, and underwritten by dollars rather than pounds. Critics differ in their estimation of precisely when atomisation became the dominant paradigm in periodical publishing, but all agree that, as a direct consequence, the ‘grandeur and scope’ of ‘mass appeal’ publications was suffering its ‘death throes’.33 As such, the Strand was significant because it marked the realisation of the success of such mass appeal publications and also the high-water mark after which the magazine form was subjected to a rather messy kind of reformulation. As Edward Bishop has observed, publishing was becoming less of a standalone trade and more of an arm of the

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large conglomerates that marked the rise of the contemporary culture industry: After the Second World War magazines and presses were absorbed into ever-larger conglomerates, so that now a publishing house [was] likely to be part of the ‘entertainment group’ of a multinational that also [owned] a film company and oil wells.34

While Bishop was concerned principally with the effect of these changes upon the ‘little magazines’ that had covertly drip-fed high modernism into the British marketplace, the process had a similarly deadening effect upon older mainstream publications such as the Strand. In January 1947 The Times mentioned the Strand for the first time in five years to observe that specimens of the magazine from the 1890s were going to be displayed as part of an ‘exhibition of Victorian fiction’ in the ‘rooms of the National Book League’. The Strand featured as one of the ‘typical . . . fiction publishing magazines’ alongside ‘characteristic examples of the three-volume novel’.35 By this time its image had become fixed in the public imagination; no new authors or new approaches in the magazine’s production had been able to make it keep pace with the world around it. Pound’s mournful elegy to his magazine’s status in a changing world encapsulates this dilemma: We both agreed that the old pre-war uncritical, easy-going conformist line would never serve again, that for survival the magazine could no longer exist as a vehicle of passive entertainment and mere relaxation . . . Communications were swifter and more complex. World events were being reported with an immediacy that was new in human experience. Those were matters of more than editorial interest . . . the Strand seldom touched the deeper currents of life and thought.36

The Times marked the magazine’s passing in December 1949 by observing that ‘after the First World War the kind of intelligent, well-written adventure story with a plot ceased, for the moment at least, to be written save by a few of the older hands, and with this change the Strand was probably already doomed, though the fact was not then evident’.37 This assessment is, of course, a little reductive, but it presents the common understanding of the magazine as a publication that had somehow been able to outlive the period for which it was fitted but that could now be safely confined to the mausoleum of literary history.

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Despite this, the later years of the Strand are still fruitful in plotting the transformation of older value systems as they gradually came into contact with the modernist age. When contemporary critics look back to the past, especially to periods that we know to be transformative and revolutionary, it is tempting to award prizes for the ‘first-responders’; those who diagnosed and captured the moment in the most timely and striking fashion. It is easy to deprioritise those laggards who oafishly missed the stunning historical significance of their moment and who still sought to dabble with the forms, the genres or the language of the near-past. Yet by paying close attention to the Strand between 1925 and 1930, it is possible to observe the slow and stately formation of a broadly and explicitly ‘modernist’ sense of the times. After all, to put it colloquially, anyone can convince a member of the avant-garde that revolution is in the air, whereas it takes a specific kind of genius to convince your grandfather of the same thing.

Culture and Conflict I wonder if you can help me? I am looking for a girl. Not just any young lady. The girl I have in mind has the eyes of Marion Davies, the nose of Betty Balfour, the chin of Mary Astor, the cheeks of Delores Del Rio and the hair of Mary Pickford.38

So began J. D. Millard’s diverting short story ‘The Girl with the Hollywood Face’ in the Strand of June 1929. The story now serves as a useful summation of the ways in which the magazine had attempted to find a new position for itself in the late 1920s. The barrage of references to glamorous and popular actresses from both sides of the Atlantic was clearly intended for a cine-literate readership familiar with both the names and the faces. The story itself is a humorous study of the new multimedia frenzy that resulted from the emergence of cinema, the boom in recorded music sales and the complicity of printed media and public relations firms in fostering new notions of celebrity. Mallion, the story’s narrator, introduces himself in the following way: ‘What sells gramophone records is publicity; and PUBLICITY – that’s me! I’m the publicity manager for Record Records.’39 Mallion’s plan is to invent a fictitious band called ‘Lolita and her Señoritas’ to capitalise upon a new craze for big-band dance music. Anonymous session musicians are tasked to record nondescript musical tracks while Mallion painstakingly concocts ‘Lolita’s’ exotic recent history. This concoction, which is

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fed to a slavering celebrity press, features performance residencies at the Plaza Grand Palace Hotel in New York, wealthy private parties, Long Island millionaires, run-ins with the law and an encounter with the Prince of Wales. Despite the patriotic concerns of Sir Robert, the firm’s managing director (‘I trust that this firm has never wavered in loyalty to the throne’),40 Mallion is empowered to create a photograph of Lolita composed of various images of ‘a dozen film stars’ doctored with scissors, glue and a ‘touch up’ from an expert.41 Through this rudimentary photoshopping, Mallion constructs the perfect empty spectacle of early twentieth-century popular culture and, in doing so, reconfirms the subordinate role of the printed word in relation to new media: ‘Then, at last the Press began to take an interest in Lolita . . . But then the Press always is the last to wake up to the news.’42 Any reader of the Strand who had followed the magazine from its early days until the late 1920s would notice two key changes to the magazine’s self-perception in ‘The Girl with the Hollywood Face’. First, rather than straightforwardly decrying the ephemerality and prurience of popular culture, the magazine instead prostrated itself before it. Secondly, it acknowledged that British culture in the period was fighting a losing battle against Americanisation in various forms. The possibility of translating Lolita’s fame into film sparks a bidding war between British and American companies. Rex Coward, a British producer, exclaims ‘good God, man! Can’t you see what it means! The revival of British films, thousands of men given jobs in this country, the spreading of Britain’s name and fame to the whole world – and trade, as you know, follows the film.’43 In the post-war landscape, with British primary industry in decline, culture becomes the engine of prestige and economic power. This was certainly the attitude of the British government when it introduced the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act which sought to impose a quota system upon exhibitors and distributors of films to ensure a space for British works amid American fare which, according to H. Mark Glancy, ‘took the vast majority of Britain’s box-office revenues’.44 In music, the European taste for American (or Americanised) jazz was big business and provided another site of potential conflict since it appeared to override the long-standing traditions of classical musical and popular song that the Strand had helped to sustain. Andrew Blake writes that the ‘spread’ of the gramophone was ‘led by American capitalism’ and an American musical sensibility was inculcated in many parts of the world. From the turn of the twentieth century American music was

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welcomed by an Old World whose composed art music was becoming increasingly self-referential and elitist . . . The various acts of cultural and political resistance alongside American music’s popularity resulted in cultural schizophrenia.45

We can certainly see the marks of this cultural conflict in ‘The Girl with the Hollywood Face’. The Strand had sustained the older traditions through its frequent interviews and pictorial pieces featuring popular singers such as Marie Roze, Emma Albani and Belle Cole which were augmented by intermingled reminiscence and commentaries from other notable figures from public life who had enjoyed their work.46 Yet these figures were representatives of a cultural climate that had quickly become unrecognisable in the face of booming markets for jazz and dance music. In the Strand of January 1929 G. M. Thompson’s ‘Britain’s Favourite Gramophone Records’ acknowledged that jazz had become the dominant commercial form of recorded music on the British market: ‘[It] has taken such a grip of the modern world that it would not be surprising to learn that the result of the Gramophone Stakes was “Saxophone, and the rest nowhere” ’.47 Thompson, however, decided (on behalf of his readers) that sheer commerciality could not adequately capture the romance of Britain’s love affair with the gramophone record. In passing over the ‘blood stirring rhythms’ of jazz, he then outlined the most successful industry stories behind more traditional musical forms including the popular song (‘Valencia’), hymns (‘Hear My Prayer’), novelty songs (‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’) light opera (The Gondoliers) and classical compositions (Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’ and Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony’).48 He went on to recount anecdotes from performers and record company technicians which described this strange, transitional phase in performance capture in which singers were either resistant to the recording process or highly superstitious about its effect upon their careers. We hear of George Mozart insisting on recording in full stage make-up and of Feodor Chaliapin who spent weeks first arranging and then running away from pre-booked sessions with the Gramophone Company.49 All of this conjecture arose from a deep confusion over how to gauge and respond to the ways in which changes in musical taste had been driven by the medium of its delivery. Company after company consulted by Thompson havered over their own figures and over the relationship between public taste and commercial success. Thompson observed that ‘it [is] difficult to tell what has been the most popular record in recent years. For, owing to the big jump in sales which followed improved recording methods, all old figures

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have been surpassed.’50 Arthur Brooks of the Columbia Gramophone Company, meanwhile, noted that ‘where we used to count on selling half a million records a year we now sell two million a month’.51 Thompson’s article sought to make this bizarre terrain intelligible to Strand readers by simply ignoring the new jazz market and focusing on more traditional forms of music. This enabled him to find easily manageable analogies between the past and the present of music consumption. However, the contemporary reader of this article is inevitably struck by what is new: the sense of alienation between performer and product that characterised Theodor Adorno’s theorisation of the culture industry.52 Popular singers in the period had, until then, built their fame almost entirely upon live performances that at least fostered the illusion of connectivity between performer and audience. This new sense of technological alienation on the part of performers and entertainers could also be found in relation to other areas of the public sphere in a piece published in January 1928 entitled ‘Facing the Microphone’. The article compiled the thoughts and fears of Oliver Lodge, George Du Maurier, the actors Margaret Bannerman and Seymour Hicks, composer Sir Landon Ronald and conductor Sir Hamilton Harty, among others, as they faced up to cultural production and communication in the age of ‘Mike’ and the ‘BBC’.53 The article explained that many artists ‘suffer[ed] from nerves’ due to the ‘absence of response’, something that was particular challenging for singers and comedians. The microphone quickly became a ‘ruthless God’, revealing ‘every weakness’ of pronunciation and ‘coldly transmit[ing] it to the world’.54 The figure of Lolita was built to mitigate these potential problems and to thrive as the first of a new breed of ‘hollow’ celebrities which severed ties with the past: a cultural-industrial product. This convergence between new and old media was particularly marked in the discussion of film stars in celebrity journalism. We can observe this across the periodical marketplace, in the expensive, glossy shape of magazines such as Harper’s and Vanity Fair as well as the rising tide of tabloid newspapers that followed the Daily Mail and Daily Express, such as the Daily Mirror and the Evening Graphic. These newspapers were built on an alloy of English colloquial writing, Americanised appearance and content designed to use ‘every trick and gimmick of typography and skilfully targeted writing’ in order to fulfil principally ‘commercial’ expectations.55 The Strand made cursory nods towards this state of affairs through reprinting Harper’s articles such as Konrad Bercovici’s ‘A Day with Charlie Chaplin’, a sensational and intimate account of Chaplin that

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stands out vividly amid the rest of the magazine’s material from the 1920s.56 Bercovici depicted Chaplin as someone prone to anxiety and depression, hiding in plain sight amid the ‘indescribable tumult’ of Hollywood celebrity and constantly fearful that the gap between reality and persona would be exposed.57 An old man, part of a crowd clamouring to see Chaplin at his studio, accusingly screams ‘it ain’t he’ at Chaplin when he appears.58 Bercovici then theorised about Chaplin’s role within the new culture industry and asserted that ‘no one could have hurt them [Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks] more than those who told them they were artists and made them selfconscious’.59 Bercovici even solidified this impression by recounting a story of how the star had taken part in a Chaplin ‘imitation’ competition in San Francisco, and had been unsuccessful.60 The article was astonishingly intimate and familiar, offering pop-psychological, mythologising interpretations at every turn. The Chaplin seen living a ‘great loneliness’ in the eye of the celebrity storm makes for an odd comparison with the respectful articles that were familiar from the Strand’s early years in its Illustrated Interview series. This shift (albeit specifically in relation to American periodicals) in the production of popular biographical writing has been described and analysed by Leo Löwenthal. He identified a clear movement away from what he termed ‘idols of production’: subjects whose significance derived ‘from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences’. This interest was replaced in the 1920s by a turn towards the sphere of ‘cheap or mass entertainment’, celebrity qua celebrity.61 Bercovici’s article reads strangely as part of the Strand’s celebrity culture precisely because it was a direct symptom of the drift of Americanised attitudes and stylistic tics into the British marketplace. Interestingly, Chaplin and Fairbanks were not merely the subjects of these changes, but they attempted to take control of them for their own profit. They were among the first individuals credited with instigating a new kind of cultural-industrial complex through the formation of the United Artists film studio in 1919. The studio used the massive fame of Hollywood’s new idols to leverage productive power away from the traditional studio system. Tino Balio and Patrice Petro both identify the formation of United Artists as a crucial moment in blending the old ‘star system’ of film production with the exigencies of business, including the integration of production and distribution, technological innovation and the aggressive protection of patents: ‘The industry was in the throes of a titanic struggle for control’, writes Balio. United Artists allowed actors and

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film-makers to effectively channel their fame and celebrity into the capital required for production, thus obtaining more artistic control over their work as well as maintaining their salaries, which had become astronomical. By the end of the First World War, for a select few, acting became one of the ‘best paid’ professions ‘on Earth’.62 These new ‘idols of modernity’ were assisted in the development of a legal framework known as ‘publicity rights’ which, according to Michael Madow, allowed celebrities to ‘capture’ and ‘monopolize’ lucrative markets related to their public ‘image’.63 While a high volume of photographs and illustrations had been central to the Strand’s initial appeal in the 1890s, the 1920s show that ‘the image’ had acquired a new pervasiveness as well as partially enabling the construction of the cultural-industrial complex embodied by the likes of Chaplin and Fairbanks. We can find retrospective theorisations of this phenomenon spread across different fields in the writing of Adorno, Madow and Löwenthal, but the essential nature of the new ‘celebrity’ culture and the industrial, legal and technological bases for its emergence can be seen quite obviously at work in the Strand throughout the 1920s. A Sidney Dark article from August 1922 called ‘Toppie Edwards: The Man Who Photographs the News’ described the commercial growth and global reach of the Topical Press photographic agency. This growth had occurred in tandem with the diversification of the press, its new celebrity imperatives and the increased ease with which photographs could be taken and reproduced. ‘Toppie’ Edwards, the agency’s founder, described the business model of what he called ‘the first organization ever created for the distribution of photographs to newspapers and periodicals’.64 The agency was a symptom of the increased reach and prominence of the image; its archives contained ‘a million and a half photographic subjects and two hundred thousand negatives’. As such, ‘there [was] not a living person of any distinction’ or ‘an event of any importance that [had] happened during the last twenty years’ of which a photograph could not be sourced, supplied and paid for. Dark also described the technological and interpersonal ingenuity that enabled Edwards and his photographers to capture the most sensational images of world events, from the attempted assassination of the King and Queen of Spain during their wedding procession in 1906 to portraits of Mme Steinheil who was sensationally tried for her husband’s murder in Paris in 1908. Edwards, Dark explained, ‘hate[d] monopolies’ and always sought ways to subvert or break embargoes upon picture-taking whether they pertained to

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county cricket matches or the Paris Peace Conference. These changes resulted not only from technological developments within the industry but also from surrounding networks of transportation and reproduction which allowed events, for the first time, to be meaningfully rendered ‘global’. Within a matter of hours, photographs could be reproduced in ‘Buenos Ayres’ and ‘Birmingham’, in ‘Bucharest’ as well as ‘Bristol’.65 The most keenly desired images in the 1920s were those depicting the 1921 boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in New Jersey. This fight has huge significance within boxing history as it was by far the richest, most-publicised and widely consumed bout that had ever taken place.66 Broadcast on national radio and filmed for viewing in cinemas throughout the world, the contest for the distribution of image rights was only marginally less fraught than the fight itself. Edwards described the incredible relay that carried negatives from the New Jersey ‘ring-side’ to New York by aeroplane, by ‘fast tug’ and ocean liner to Liverpool, by ‘fast motor-car’ to Liverpool Aerodrome and then by aeroplane again to Croydon in time for its collection by the London papers.67 All this frenzy was necessary because of the increased pace of life and news: Speed is, of course, vital in everything to do with the newspaper business. The news paragraphs and the photographs that are topical today are out of date tomorrow, and it is the business of the Press photographer not only to get his picture but to hurry it to the newspaper office as speedily as possible.68

Of course, this was precisely the kind of pace that the Strand itself could describe but was prevented from participating in both by instinct and by the more sedate rhythms of its production. In short, the Strand was again betraying a very clear sense that the tenor of the age had changed. More importantly, it finally started to show a self-conscious awareness that the age itself might be described as ‘modernist’. Harold Abrahams’ ‘A New Race of Men’ reads as a vociferous defence of the contemporary scene against the gripes of those who argued that ‘the present young man and young woman are invertebrate’ and that the ‘orators’, ‘actors, soldiers, authors’ and ‘heroes’ of the past were nowhere to be found amid the general backslide into a ‘modern fall’.69 His argument was explicitly designed to counteract narratives of cultural pessimism by offering up anecdotes from across the modern world which asserted that ‘the twentieth century [could] more than hold its own’.70 For example,

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Abrahams stated that the exploits of ‘Antarctic explorers, Everest climbers and Atlantic fliers compare very favourably with any of the labours of Hercules’.71 This ‘new race’ of men and women, who had been raised in the post-war environment with all of its ‘speed’ and ‘noise’, reflected this world more obviously than any set of pre-war values. Elsewhere, we see Mandel’s analysis of the post-war, militarily inflected industrial boom vindicated in several pieces. ‘Flying for a Living’ was a report from Croydon Aerodrome which had featured incidentally in the distribution of the Dempsey/Carpentier photographs. The site had risen from the commercial merging of wartime sites to provide air defence for the South of England. Stripped of this utility, it had become the hub of a new air-travel trade: ‘the jumpingoff place for the airways of Europe, the Near East, and the British Empire’.72 The aerodrome used military technology to shrink the appreciable size of the globe by placing ‘Berlin, Moscow, old Madrid or Karachi’ within the reach of a single, easy flight. The site was maintained and run for the benefit of the five largest European airlines: Imperial Airways (British), the French Air Union, the German Luft Hansa, the Royal Dutch Air Line and a Belgian company (most likely Havena).73 The European powers, so recently at war, were now sharing commercial airspace and competing for business, all fuelled to varying extents by government subsidies.74 The aerodrome was significant not only for the way it remapped the contemporary experience of space and globalisation but also because it was a microcosm of the world as it may well be in the age ahead of us. This, indeed, is what you feel most strongly about this air centre – that it is somewhat in advance of our time; only a few years, perhaps, but sufficiently so to make even the 1929 motor-car . . . just a little – well, passé.75

More than anything, the article is concerned with stripping away Victorian notions of fabulism surrounding technology. Rather than awe at ‘Wellsian’ spectacle, the anonymous author quickly becomes inured and locates the aerodrome’s importance in relatively spartan political and economic terms. The article’s emphasis on the ways in which wartime technologies could be commodified, industrialised, put to work and divert established networks of power away from monarchs and governments and towards corporations was highly prescient. The author, indeed, makes the whimsical observation that they felt ‘Einsteined well into the 1950s’.76

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This sense of a conscious passage into the future was repeated in Professor C. H. Reilly’s article on ‘Modern Adventures in Architecture’. Reilly is best remembered as an advocate of neoclassicism in architecture and as a light critic of the stricter, harder lines of modernism. His piece brought together a series of sketches of the architectural and cultural revolutions in cities around Europe where post-war reconstruction and a purposeful separation from the past were clearly in evidence. Reilly wrote that a herd instinct is . . . telling us all just now very strongly that we belong to a new age. We felt it before the war. Painters and sculptors had begun to show it in their work . . . We now want to dissociate ourselves from that silly old Europe that . . . plunged us all into the abyss.77

The race towards architectural revolution was presented as a war of ideas and knowledge production. France and Germany, in particular, encouraged the work of Le Corbusier and Eric Mendelsohn in building ‘machine-like’ houses that resembled ‘hygienic incubators’ and structures that reflected contemporary taste and ‘the new age of mathematical and physical conceptions such as relativity’.78 These changes were facilitated by the new discovery of ferro-concrete which allowed designers and builders to adapt to the increasing battle for horizontal space in the modern city by building vertically in ways that were far simpler and more uniform than had previously been the case. The clean lines and mechanistic style of Le Corbusier may have left Reilly feeling cold but he correctly identified the ‘modernist schools’ around Europe which, in dialogue, would build a ‘new architecture’.79 The Strand at last detected the spirit of modernism as being abroad in the world of art as well as in architecture and, in 1927, sought to bring the new practitioners of ‘non-representational art’ before ‘the bar of Public Opinion’ in an article entitled ‘Puzzles in Paint’.80 The two-handed article took the form of a debate between the journalist Arthur Lawrence (for the ‘prosecution’) and the Daily Mail’s art critic Paul Konody (for the ‘defence’). For Lawrence, the obscurantist predilections of Paul Klee, Andre Masson, Vincent van Gogh and Lawrence Atkinson had been fuelled by pretentious art critics spewing a ‘vast library of muddled thinking’ while honest gallery-goers were apt to be revolted or have their ‘mental poise . . . disturbed’.81 Konody responded with a degree of shock and affected surprise, assuming that these culture wars had been long since fought and won. He wrote that

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I thought that everybody now liked our modern artists’ work and understood it. I though this because Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, and all the other ’isms, which are merely names for different varieties of modern art, had now been before the public so long that everyone was used to them.82

This was perhaps the most damning element of Konody’s defence, that he was genuinely surprised that any defence was still required. His sense was that the modern paradigms of art have been firmly established alongside more traditional forms and that the ‘storms of abuse’ that attend new movements in all of the arts had long since lost their heat. The Strand was thus made to appear like a misguided sentinel, keenly patrolling a border that no combatants contested. This awkward mixture of grandiosity and futility became pervasive. Anxieties about the magazine’s place in the world sat uncomfortably next to the language and attitudes that attended a past cultural authority now much denuded. As testament to this, in 1929 Clifford Hosken published a beautifully elegiac article revisiting ‘The Story of the Strand’ which looked back to the first issue of the magazine from January 1891 and examined how the London street had changed in the intervening years. In discussing both the changing face of The Strand and the multitude of human endeavours that it had staged over the centuries, he also sought to draw allusions between the fate of the magazine that bore its name and its drift towards the margins of British cultural life. The Strand was imagined as at once ageless and palimpsestic, its fortunes waxing and waning according to the whims of ‘fashion’, ‘taste’ and ‘improvements’ while it retained a core of its ‘friendly, shabby, busy’ past as the traditional connecting route between London and Westminster.83 Newer buildings, shards of Reilly’s modernist tendencies, sat uncomfortably amid the humble and ‘homely’ background which, personified, knew that it would ‘absorb them all in time’.84 The Strand in 1929 bore all the signs of the changing times: the thoroughfare had been widened to make the road fit for motor cars and Victorian theatres with their memories of ‘full-blooded melodrama played with all the sturdy sentiment of the age’ had been abandoned to make way for ‘cinema theatres’.85 Thankfully, its resilient ‘suspicion towards enterprise’ meant that attempts to tear down St Mary Le Strand church were resisted. Elsewhere, however, ‘the spirit of the traders triumphed. The palaces decayed, the noble and the great moved away.’86 The Victorian arcades and toyshops, like the ‘eighteenth’ or ‘seventeenth’ century

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bookshops ‘did not survive the old Queen’.87 The famous restaurant and theatre, the Gaiety, was forced to move by the widening of the street and never quite recovered the ‘wonderful scenes of revelry’ glimpsed during the death throes of the Victorian era on Mafeking Night in 1901. The spirit of the ‘old’ Strand was to be essential for ‘future generations . . . living in the dreadful future ages of material commercialism’ to have their sense of newness and novelty challenged and curbed by memories of ‘old’ England. The tastes and imperatives that were going to shape the city in the future were unlikely to be meaningfully connected to the varied traditions outlined in Hosken’s article. The buildings, the people, their trade, their art and culture were all being subjected to radical changes and becoming gently severed from the tethers connecting them to the Victorian period. Reading the Strand all the way through from 1891 to 1929 makes this sensation palpable as, one by one, the strategies for containment and retrenchment were exhausted and its readers found themselves reluctantly occupying a manifestly changed historical moment.

The Late Conan Doyle Amid this unstable mixture of old and new, Strand readers could also find Conan Doyle plotting a determined course through the rubble and attempting to negotiate a place for himself. This phase of Doyle’s career is often neglected or forgotten entirely. The urge to round off, to reduce his final decade of writing to a steady and culturally otiose decline, is common. Doyle’s last fiction is intriguingly positioned: the work of a hugely influential and famous author who was still widely known and read but whose new works were produced for ever-reduced prices and for ever-decreasing readerships. He wrote to Greenhough Smith in the late 1920s on this subject: ‘I have never at any time felt the least annoyance with the Strand over the depreciation of my prices. I could not do better elsewhere and it was a pure matter of business.’88 The straitened circumstances of their commercial relationship was also attested by the fact that Doyle’s ‘list’ (the small number of people to whom free copies would be sent upon publication) was now ‘a matter of business’.89 At first glance his late pieces can appear to be the worst kind of bric-a-brac, the residual sediment of a decent mind and a great career. I would like to suggest, however, that when placed alongside the material discussed above, interesting patterns of what Ayers calls

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‘promises and refusals’ are at play as Conan Doyle tests the limitations and potentialities of the new age. This is true both of his substantial work (‘When the World Screamed’, ‘The Death Voyage’) and of the merely incidental (‘The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper’, ‘The Parish Magazine’). The best place to begin this integration is with a story that appeared posthumously in December 1930 (his last credited appearance in the Strand as an author of original work): ‘The Last Resource’. The story is not well remembered; indeed, one struggles to find a single reference to it in any critical text published on Doyle since its first appearance. Yet it represents an interesting venture on the part of both author and magazine. The story is a self-conscious attempt to mirror some of the coarser elements both of hard-boiled American crime fiction and the crime cinema that had sprung from its narrative conventions. In mimicking these trends, the story served as a kind of sad lament on the new American mass cultural hegemony while, at the same time, it was unable to disavow its own fascination with the genres’ ‘glamour’ and ‘vice’.90 The story’s English narrator and an associate are drawn to an American raconteur named ‘Kid Wilson’ and his tales of American gangsterism. Their horrified fascination forms part of the frame narrative to one of Wilson’s anecdotes: ‘the world of which he spoke was one which was unknown to us, and yet he had, in his own rough way, the art of bringing it home to us’.91 As Mike Ashley has observed, one of the new symptoms of a splintering periodicals market after 1918 was the emergence of cheap compendiums of American or Americanised crime fiction. These were designed to mirror the writing of the seminal American pulp periodical Black Mask and to cater to tastes more violent, lurid and sensationalist than the more sedate English tradition.92 This bifurcation within the genre staged another contest between British and American value; anxieties about this contest percolated through both countries’ literary periodicals in the 1920s. The New York Times famously used the occasion of Conan Doyle’s death in July 1930 to claim the future of crime fiction as an American preserve: The author of Sherlock Holmes passes at a time when the crime and mystery story flourishes quantitatively as never before. In respect to quality, there may be doubts. The alleged cheapening by mass-production has unquestionably come true . . . Stories [of the English kind] began to appear between covers at the price of two dollars that were not perceptibly superior to the detective yarn purchasable for one-tenth that price in the ‘pulp’ magazines.93

Even a cursory survey of the English literary press’s reaction to the new American crime fiction confirms the sense that an ‘enervated’

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tradition was entering into a battle with one considerably more vigorous.94 In a comment piece entitled ‘Death to the Detectives’ published in the Bookman in 1933, Eustace Portugal surveyed the emaciated scene of domestic detective fiction and determined that ‘it is a pleasant fancy to visualise a hundred or so detectives, picked from the pages of modern murder novels, being lured to, say, the Albert Hall and there made victims of another gunpowder plot’.95 Against the ‘neat’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘flippant’ contributions of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Rufus King’s Lieutenant Valcour were particular praised. Of Spade, Portugal observed that ‘it would be no use putting [him] in the Albert Hall supposing one wanted to, he would start a civil war’.96 There was a pervasive sense that the classical English model of detective fiction, complete with old-world class, would be easily outmuscled. Elsewhere, critics were stumbling over examples of working-class, multi-ethnic American slang and the exotic world of ‘lower dives’ from which it sprang.97 Within this context, ‘The Last Resource’ seems to offer a selfreflexive examination of the hard-boiled genre and its place within British culture. One of the striking dissimilarities between the newer species of American crime writing and the more venerable British strains exemplified (one might now say fossilised) by Conan Doyle was its explicit attempt to broaden criminality far beyond a single aberrant individual. In the fiction of Dashiell Hammett, for example, the entire superstructure of society seems corrupted. In Red Harvest, violence, augmented by advances in automatic weaponry and explosives, spills out into non-localised confrontations that better resemble urban warzones than the comparatively genteel confrontations of Baker Street. While Sherlock Holmes would exert a near-constant fascination for makers of film and television later in the century, the great period of highly successful gangster films that would begin in 1930 with Scarface would draw its aesthetic and ideological inspiration from Hammett more than Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie.98 These films would strengthen the American cinematic successes that had been established in the 1920s and further the predominance of an Americanised inflection in new variations upon timeworn genres and media. Accordingly, in ‘The Last Resource’, Doyle mimics the Hammettian style and social pessimism in stertorous American slang: The whole city seemed to have gone rotten, from the mayor down to the bellhops. The crooks had it in their hands, the bootleggers, the hi-jackers, the thugs, the racketeers, the hold-up men, and the likes. . . . The police were got at, the judges were made safe, the district attorney was squared, the mayor was seen.99

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The story is effectively a fantasy of violent retribution. In Kid’s tale, an ‘ordinary citizen’ and war veteran named Gideon H. Fanshawe circumvents the broken justice system, rounds up ‘three hundred automobiles full of hard-boiled [criminals]’, confines them to the town hall and ‘massacres’ them with a battery of machine guns.100 The ineptitude of the story, trapped between pastiche and parody, adequately captures a disjunction between the late Victorian model of the popular short story and the style and content of 1920s popular culture against which it can only offer a rather meagre critique. As the machine guns begin to fire, it is easy to read the fantasy of a lost power being violently reclaimed. By providing a facsimile of Hammett’s overt critiques of capitalism, Doyle is also able to stage his own more genteel assault upon the values of commercialism. In their influential account of the socialist underpinning of Hammett’s hardboiled style, Carl Freedman and Christopher Kendrick argue that Red Harvest’s central conflict between ‘legitimate’ capitalism and ‘illegitimate’ gangsterism masks the idea that all labour is exploitative and all capitalists merely gangsters.101 For Conan Doyle this conclusion would be too radical, yet it is sufficient at this point to note that corruptive streams of money and influence are also wiped out along with the murderers and extortionists. More troublingly, this purge also sweeps out the influence of mass immigration which is unilaterally blamed for the spread of corruption. During an impromptu ‘trial’, the assembled crooks and tainted officials are addressed with the following speech before being dispatched: You came here and Amurrca welcomed you. She could not have been more generous. Within a year she put you on an equality with the oldest citizen . . . And what have you done for Amurrca? You have broken her laws, made the name of her cities a scandal, corrupted her citizens with your ill-got money, broken down her legal system, killed her guardians of the peace when you could not corrupt them. In a word, you have done such things that at long last we, who are the real people, have had to come forth.102

The promise of this redemption is ecstatic and yet the story pulls back in order to limply recast Wilson’s story as a ‘dream’ and ‘a vision’ of what might be to come in the near future.103 The story was purely reactionary in its critique yet, when the narrator asserts that ‘the money was all on the side of the crooks’, we see one of a series of challenges to the corrosive power of capital in Conan Doyle’s late work.104

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The failure of ‘The Last Resource’ and its alignment with selfconsciously moribund cultural tendencies at least establishes a basis for analysing Doyle’s more explicit and measured critiques of the globalising tendencies that began to emerge in the 1920s. While later postmodernists like Lyotard were keen to announce the effective demise of the nation-state once its epistemic and ideological powers had begun to be challenged, Doyle saw its rehabilitation as the only way to mitigate the depreciating effect of consumerism and unfettered capitalism. However, the cost of preserving old affinities would be to jettison or modulate many traditional attitudes, beliefs and behaviours. In June 1928 Conan Doyle could be found arguing for the abolition of ‘blood sports’ on the grounds that they were no longer justifiable ‘in a more advanced age’.105 The ability to hunt specially bred game did not, he argued, distinguish between the ‘coward’ and the ‘brave’, between the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’ and might well ‘blunt our own better feelings, harden our sympathies, brutalize our natures’.106 Such an argument is intriguingly doubled, suggesting that the nature and sympathies of humanity had been quite blunted enough in the war and that, as a consequence, perhaps the ‘age’ was not so very ‘advanced’ after all. Rather than provide the everyday preparation for war, sport now appeared to mirror its baseless brutality. The war’s pervasive and shocking descent into ‘barbarism’ had broken this sturdy ideological connection and rendered it distasteful and out of date. This is not to say that Doyle’s feelings on the subject of grouse shooting and fox hunting had been fixed throughout the years, but his arguments for abolition in 1928 were new and pressing.107 The strains of chivalry on display in the most recent war were no longer bound so analogously to the conduct of sport; the ideological connection based upon gentlemanly and class-bound codes had been severed. For the Strand Magazine in general, this profound connection had never been in question; J. Crawford-Wood had written in November 1903 that ‘of all men who ride to hounds I think the soldier stands pre-eminent . . . The Iron Duke is popularly supposed to have said that hunting was the finest education for a soldier. Far be it from me to dispute the veracity or to disparage the potency of the statement.’108 Noticeably, Doyle’s opponents in the debate were far keener to attempt a resuscitation of the spectre of Victorian notions of chivalry. The famous chronicler of romanticised public school life, H. A. Vachell, contended that the ‘rigorous etiquette’ of sportsmen was reinforced by the ‘valiant’ confrontation of difficulty

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and personal danger. Were such men to be beholden to the moral hysteria of ‘minor poets’, he wondered?109 Sir Claude Champion De Crespigny deprecated that long-standing traditions should be threatened by ‘faddists’ given that ‘the best men to hounds make the best leaders in war’.110 The symposium is significant in that it allows us to better conceptualise where Conan Doyle stood in relation to the ‘establishment’ voices which most echoed those of the Strand’s past. The fervour of his religious dissent had waned within the Strand and, instead, was replaced by a more careful critique of the magazine’s traditional ideological foundations. Clearly, his analysis of the war was modulated by its immediate aftermath. The victory of 1918 would, he argued, quickly become pyrrhic if deep, structural changes were not wrought to modify and mitigate the emergent forces that he identified as prompting the conflict in the first place. As far back as 1917 Doyle had argued in tandem with H. G. Wells that massive labour and welfare reforms would be necessary in the event of a victory to prevent the transformation of ‘modern man into the most dangerous type of savage’.111 Money saved from a reduced military budget should be spent, he argued, on widening education, increased pensions, ‘subsidized scientific research’ and a concerted effort to address ‘the subject of poverty and disease in a drastic fashion’.112 Doyle also argued passionately that the class conflict between labour and capital must be addressed through ‘some form of profitsharing or co-operation’ while adding that, to share in the profits, ‘labour’ must also expect a share of the losses when they occur. This thesis, proposed in 1917, can be seen as remarkably prescient in foreshadowing the failures of the coming post-war settlement, the long slump towards the 1939 conflict and, finally, the socialist reforms post-1945. Doyle’s diagnosis was both radical and broadly vindicated by the general trends of history after his death. The events of the years following the conflict legitimate to some degree his attempts in fiction to find solutions to the problems of modernity as he construed them. Doyle concluded his contribution to the ‘blood sports’ symposium with an aside on the role of science and technology in the future. Significantly, whereas his previous pronouncements on the subject had been treated with a great deal of seriousness, even by 1917 he declared himself ‘not competent to speak’ in detail.113 However, he did note the ‘immense impetus’ that the war had given to the development of the ‘submarine’ and the ‘airship’ and predicted that this fervour would translate directly in the post-war world of business

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and trade. This fusion would prove, according to Mandel, to be one of the chief catalysts for growth under late capitalism and precipitate precisely some of those social trends that Conan Doyle had come to fear. He seemed ambivalent about this legacy and observed that, having lived through ‘the most wicked epoch of the world’s history . . . all changes are likely to be for the better’.114 Clearly, Doyle believed that, if future generations were to be trusted with the industrial and technological fruits of the war, then significant moral reform and ‘temperance’ would be the only way to safeguard an enduring peace. This attitude fed directly into ‘The Death Voyage’ which was published in October 1929. The story dramatised an alternate ending of the First World War and, thus, an alternate vision of Europe’s future affinities. Doyle appeared within the tale as a conspicuous narrator, saturated by the eschatological tropes of the weatherbeaten storyteller: It was a winter evening, and as I sat by a dwindling fire in the twilight my mind hit upon a strange line of thought. Musing over the great crises of history, I could see that the chief actor in each had always come to a dividing of the ways . . . He took the one, and the annals tell what came of it . . . Is it possible for the human imagination to follow up the course of events that would have resulted?115

In this re-imagined version of events, Kaiser Wilhelm, confronted by the decay of his internal support and the collapse of his global prestige, decides against an apparently prudent flight to Holland which would facilitate peace negotiations with Woodrow Wilson and leave his honour ‘untouched’: ‘You are best serving the country,’ he is told by an adviser, ‘by sacrificing your own feelings and vanishing from the scene.’116 In reality, Wilhelm chose to board the train bound for Holland and so precipitated the abolition of the German monarchy, the Versailles treaty negotiations, the failed German revolution and the creation of the Weimar Republic. In the story, Wilhelm diagnoses an important historical juncture and decides instead that ‘there is something higher than honour. There is that super-honour which we call heroism, when a man does more than what is required of him.’117 He decides to lead one final, doomed assault on the British fleet and to immolate himself in the inevitable conflagration. He proceeds from Spa not to Holland but instead to the port city of Kiel where his fleet (festooned in the red flags of the revolutionaries) is docked. His bravery encourages a counter-surge of fealty for the fading prestige and political capital

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of the aristocracy. Wilhelm tells a young captain that ‘from what I hear Prince Max of Baden has probably of his own initiative freed all Germany by now’, to which the captain responds ‘I have no wish to be freed. You are always my master.’118 Wilhelm ‘abdicates’ the throne and abandons all claim to the title of ‘Emperor’ (‘Call me Wilhelm von Hohenzollern if you wish. It matters not.’)119 As a consequence, his journey into the ‘very centre of revolutionary disturbance’ and his honest desire to speak as ‘as a German speaking to Germans’ wins over his wavering naval forces and encourages them to confront the vastly superior British fleet. They conduct this sea battle while symbolically flying the German ‘flag of war’ alongside the ‘red revolutionary ensign’.120 This futile gesture (or, as Conan Doyle preferred, ‘great adventure’ or ‘supreme sacrifice’)121 results in a renewed mutual kinship and respect between the two armies ‘who on either side came of the Viking blood’.122 The story’s conclusion expounds at considerable and remarkable length upon the results of this conflict as perceived from Wilhelm’s perspective: Yes, half the blood in his own veins flowed from the same source as that which was in the crews of the grey ships over yonder. By what extraordinary mishandling of chances and by what evil ordering of events had it come about that he was now in such deadly conflict with them? Why was it necessary when German industry was already conquering the world by its industry and circling the globe with its colonies?123

The key political gesture underlying the story was that fundamental changes in political representation and the decay of older forms of social hierarchy need not mark the end of certain values with which they were associated. The abolition of the German monarchy, for example, need not signal the decay of its espoused values of gentlemanly honour and chivalry. Subjects relieved of the obligation of fealty to their superiors might recommit of their own free wills to ideals higher than themselves. The base drive for political and economic capital that resulted in inter-Imperial European rivalries came to obscure their deep kinship. While clearly influenced by nostalgia, Doyle also sought to depict the 1920s as a moment trapped between two barbarisms where only a more considerate post-war settlement across Europe could build a European model to rival ‘Bolshevik’ Russia, of which he was profoundly mistrustful.124 It seems fair to speculate, at least, that in this vision of the twentieth century the post-war settlement would

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have been more fair and mght potentially have obviated the economic deprivation that laid the foundations for Nazism. Alongside this, imperialism (fundamentally a force for good in Conan Doyle’s eyes, before it became perverted by commercial and economic necessities) could have been resuscitated and secured Britain’s position of prestige in the world, reducing its reliance upon the likes of ‘Lolita and her Señoritas’ to do the job instead. If we fuse these global suppositions with Doyle’s domestic observations in ‘What Reform is Needed’ and ‘What Will Britain be like in 1930’, we find him presenting a rather radical reformulation of ‘Victorian’ values in a way that might fit them for enduring purpose into the new millennium. This assemblage of ideas, cobbled together in the ‘twilight’ of Doyle’s life and career, might appear fragile and rather desperate, born of a simple desire not to see the world of his younger days fade completely from view.125 While one cannot discount this interpretation, it also demonstrates that Doyle’s fiction was still restlessly engaged with the contemporary moment and battling, however clumsily, with the vicissitudes of modernity. Doyle expounded upon many of these issues in the final Challenger narratives which appeared in 1928 and 1929. In revisiting the character for a second time he offered a commentary on the ways in which his own work and thought should be re-evaluated. Challenger’s virtue as an engine for new fiction (as opposed to Sherlock Holmes) was that he was a scientist perpetually engaged in cutting-edge research. As such he could reliably be pressed into service to address the epistemological crises of any particular moment. ‘When the World Screamed’ and ‘The Disintegration Machine’ ignored The Land of Mist and returned to the ‘fictional’ landscape of The Lost World. Malone worked for The Daily Gazette once more, Challenger’s wife was alive and no character made any reference to spiritualism. The characters were reintegrated into a modern environment and the nature of this reintegration allowed Doyle to complete his retreat from making an explicit case for spiritualism in the Strand. This retreat, or acquiescence to the demands of his medium, had been explicitly referred to in his letters to Greenhough Smith and, outright, in his 1928 survey of premonitions and dreamvisions in the Strand entitled ‘The Dreamers’, where he wrote that he had ‘no desire to put forward propaganda which would be out of place in a popular magazine’.126 ‘When the World Screamed’ was narrated by a new character called Peerless Jones, an expert in artesian borings, hired by Challenger to build a 100ft spike. Challenger has spent several years overseeing a project to drill through the earth’s crust and wishes to prove

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his ‘echinal Earth’ theory: ‘that the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed, as I believe, with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own’.127 He intends to prove this by aggressively penetrating its ‘glistening’, ‘slimy’ central nervous cortex with Jones’s oversized knitting needle.128 Challenger’s justification for this is to ‘let the earth know that there is at least one person, George Edward Challenger, who calls for attention – who, indeed, insists upon attention’.129 The earth is portrayed as a giant, dormant mass waiting to be alerted to Challenger’s presence. In exhorting Jones, Challenger roars ‘raise your mind above the base mercantile and utilitarian needs of commerce. Shake off your paltry standards of business.’130 Conan Doyle’s desire in The Land of Mist to provoke a violent confrontation with the readership’s spiritual complacency becomes, in ‘When the World Screamed’, imaginatively recast as a fantasy of violent penetration. The dormant, monistic mass of the earth can be read as an expression of a fantasised image of the mass market that might actually respond to exhortation. Challenger frequently calls attention to the receptiveness of the earth’s ‘sensory cortex’: ‘all nerves and sensibility’.131 It is one of the curiosities of Conan Doyle’s late career that this story, and Challenger’s ‘echinal Earth’ theory in particular, would go on to make a significant contribution to continental philosophy in the shape of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: ‘He [Challenger] explained that the earth –The Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule – is a body without organs.’132 The ‘body without organs’ became a metaphor for describing a single, unified and undifferentiated whole. This book is not overmuch concerned with the complex legacy of this idea and its various disputations, but the concept was evidently important for Deleuze and Guattari’s deconstruction of notions of ‘territory’ and ‘territoriality’ as they sought to negotiate the barbed terrain of individual subjectivity under late capitalism. This complicated conceptual legacy is, however, testament in a small way to the prescience of Conan Doyle’s view of human kinship and the depreciating effects of consumer capitalism. Given that Doyle struggled to apprehend the sense (or even the sanity) of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, it seems highly improbable that he would have viewed Deleuze’s writing with anything more than concerned disbelief.133 Yet across the decades, and within the particular context of Doyle’s views in the late 1920s, Deleuze and Guattari appear to do little more than take the notion to its logical,

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fully committed conclusion. If divides between races are artificial ‘strata’, as perceived by Wilhelm in the final moments of ‘The Death Voyage’, then why not all divisions of nationality, gender, continent and class? This suggests a further submerged ideological connection between Conan Doyle and the multivalent culture of postmodernism that would arise after his death. Challenger’s experiment was also significant in that it embraced the new cultural taste for sensation and empty spectacle by being almost pure performance. His ‘hypothesis’ of an ‘echinal’ earth had been adequately and conclusively proved by his mining expedition; the dropping of a huge spike is only justified in terms of visibility, prestige and popular impact. Challenger plans the grand act to ordain himself as a genius before the world’s media and to egotistically alert the very earth itself to his presence. ‘When the World Screamed’ represents a more socially acceptable inversion of the quest narrative than The Land of Mist. Instead of tracing the liminal spaces of the soul, Challenger and Malone are interrogating the nature of earth beneath their feet. In this way the story offers another way in which the colonially inflected quest romance, one of the generic pillars upon which the Strand’s success had been built, could be rewritten for the era of the knowledge economy. A generation of scientists like Challenger could undergird the existing, failing model of empire and reassert old nationalisms through new epistemologies. In support of this hypothesis, ‘When the World Screamed’ depicts Challenger’s only unambiguous triumph. It is ultimately a beleaguered and compromised fruition of Conan Doyle’s ideological struggles throughout the twentieth century. At the story’s conclusion, F. E. Hiley provides an illustration of Doyle’s eulogistic final sentences (Fig. 6.1): From every part of the field there came the cries of admiration . . . Surely, that picture will be fixed forever, for I heard the cameras clicking around me like crickets in a field . . . Challenger the super scientist.134

Challenger is, in this way, extended the gift of immortality through the medium of the photographic lens. His new fame and success is built upon a manipulation of new media and a firm grasp of economics. The entire Hengist Down project was made possible by the bequeathed fortune of a millionaire named Betterton who left his entire estate to Challenger on the understanding that it be used ‘in the interests of science’.135 Challenger was able to use his massive financial reach to recast himself as a captain of industry rather than a lone

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Figure 6.1 Illustration by F. E. Hiley taken from Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (II)’, Strand Magazine, May 1928, pp. 443–51, p. 451.

‘expert’ voice (as in The Poison Belt). The finest engineering, artesian boring, ballistics, mining and excavation expertise were available to him. Moreover, on his Hengist Down base, he constructed a microcosm of modern society, which Malone explains to Jones on their first visit to the site:

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‘There’ – he pointed to a cluster of pleasant red-roofed bungalows – ‘are the quarters of the men. They are a splendid lot of picked workers who are paid far above ordinary rates. They have to be bachelors and teetotallers, and under oath of secrecy . . . That field is their football ground and the detached house is their library and recreation room. The old man is some organiser, I can assure you.’136

Challenger’s moment of success and public vindication tastes sweet not just in its own terms but also because it represents a propitious mixture of old and new: a knowledge economy fuelled by primary industry; a richly rewarded labour force deeply invested in their employer’s concerns; an empire built upon science; and, lastly, a contemporary celebrity culture valorising scientists rather than actors and singers. The bonded homosocial group that first travelled across the world in The Lost World and then fought for their survival in a single small room in The Poison Belt before forming a lobbyist group for a general religious education of the masses in The Land of Mist finally and successfully becomes a company; an ethical corporation. ‘The Disintegration Machine’, meanwhile, was explicitly concerned with the technocratic turn in the arms industry, weapons of mass destruction and the balance of power between states and corporations in the late 1920s. The Gazette sends Malone and Challenger to investigate a Latvian inventor named Theodor Nemor who claims to have produced a machine that can disintegrate and reintegrate matter. Nemor naturally turns out to be a cackling, grotesque degenerate, whose considerable intellect has been perverted by his cruelty and avarice. Malone writes ‘I can still see him now . . . rubbing his long, thin hands together and surveying us with his . . . cunning yellow eyes . . . all low and repulsive’.137 Nemor’s machine exerts a ‘disrupting power’ that breaks apart the molecular structure of any object or animal that enters its reach.138 He has entered the open market with the machine and intends to sell it to whichever government is prepared to pay the highest price; Malone and Challenger observe a group of Russians leaving Nemor’s apartment as they arrive and the inventor seems happy to gloat over his potential wealth and the destruction of the British empire: I was about to say that the British Government had lost its chance. What else it has lost it may find out later. Possibly its Empire as well . . . I could imagine the whole Thames valley being swept clean, and not one man, woman or child left of all these teeming millions.139

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London’s ‘teeming millions’ would be happily sacrificed for the ‘millions’ of pounds to be gained from selling his invention as an instrument of war. This connection was crucial because it highlighted the machine, not just as a disintegrator of molecules but of traditional, nationalist ideologies. Its enormous destructive potential foreshadowed the atomic and hydrogen bombs of the later century and predicted a kind of conflict almost entirely divorced from the tradition of heroism and chivalry to which the Strand had traditionally subscribed. Despite the physical existence of a prototype machine, Doyle prioritises the knowledge over the object; Nemor has kept the power source for his machine a secret, known only to himself. He confides this to Challenger and, tapping his forehead, says ‘this is the safe in which the secret is securely locked – a better safe than any of steel’.140 ‘The Disintegration Machine’ hardly taxes the reader in unpicking its political context; the threat of continental Europe for Britain has developed to include the ideological conflict between Western capitalism and Eastern communism. The Sherlock Holmes stories that dealt with balancing these contesting powers understood that knowledge was a principal determinant. Knowledge, usually in the form of a letter leaked from the purposely closed system of one country into another, raised a potential flux of power that could re-order the delicate balance of alliances. Nemor, however, exists entirely removed from these constraints and is willing to cash in on his machine regardless of the ideology, nationality or morality of the buyer. His knowledge exists free from ideology and free from a territorialised understanding of politics, which heightens both its use-value and its potential danger. Counterintuitively, this anarchic freedom was construed as dangerous precisely because it threatened to reassert and sharpen national differences as European powers might enter into free-market competition for Nemor’s services. These two stories enact different versions of the same paradigm, a paradigm that Lyotard discussed as developing naturally in postmodern societies. His understanding of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is that it would become commodified; incorporated into the same economic systems that span nations and previously controlled colonial territory, the battle for raw materials and cheap labour.141 Lyotard suggested that, as two dominant models, the multinational corporation and the ‘computerisation’ or digital cataloguing of knowledge would converge, with the result that knowledge would become deterritorialised. This battle for the ‘knowledge commodity’ is plainly visible in ‘The Disintegration Machine’. The story

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takes place at an intermediary stage in Lyotard’s scheme of events. Nemor knows perfectly well that his machine (which amounts to the ‘knowledge’ in his head) is a valuable commodity. The scramble to recompense Nemor for this knowledge is conducted at the level of nations rather than companies, but Nemor himself is a prototype figure able to produce knowledge independently of national or political ideology.142 In the machine’s unfinished final function, Doyle again finds a fictional mechanism for halting the ‘natural’ progression of capitalism along the lines that Lyotard predicted. Understanding the fluctuating patterns of promise and refusal that take place on political and international levels in the more serious later work of Conan Doyle allows for a simultaneous reappraisal of his quieter, domestic fiction. The settings and prose at work in stories such as ‘The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper’ and ‘The Parish Magazine’ can initially appear limp and platitudinous, yet, in smaller ways, they too were wrestling with similar challenges. ‘Spedegue’s Dropper’ is remembered fondly, at least in cricketing circles, because it describes the unlikely series of events whereby a village cricketer named Tom Spedegue earns an England Test debut against Australia at Lord’s. The plot is highly simplistic but the great pleasure of the story lies in the small details of the character’s background and the way in which cricketing orthodoxies come to stand as an emotional substitutes for the struggle between tradition and modernity in everyday life. Spedegue, asthmatic and prone to ‘palpitations’, is the very antithesis of the modern professionalised sportsman.143 His claim to national attention lies in his artfully perfected ‘lobbed’ slow deliveries which arc high above a batsman and descend ‘at a very sharp angle on to the stumps’.144 Spedegue has been developing the delivery for his own amusement until he is discovered by a former first-class cricketer named Walter Scougall, whose sporting career was ended by the war which ‘broke his heart for games’.145 For both men, the ailing Spedegue and the stricken Scougall, the ‘pure lunacy’ of the delivery provides a new impetus; their preoccupation mirrors the state of England as the decisive Test match approaches: All England was absorbed in one question at that moment. Politics, business, even taxation had passed from people’s minds. The one engrossing subject was the fifth Test Match.146

The selection committee in London are ‘harassed’ by the glare of public attention that is only intensified by a hysterical sports media criticising their every move. Their wits and their appreciation for the

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game have been deadened by hours poring over the statistics from English domestic cricket and balancing bowling averages against fielding deficiencies. Against this high-pressure aridity (all too familiar to followers of and commentators upon contemporary sport) Scougall’s slogan, ‘new blood and a complete surprise’, catches the mood of the moment. Despite their fears the committee select Spedegue, and one member remarks that ‘I’ll have a taxi waiting at the gate and a passport in my pocket.’147 We see a barrage of press headlines speculating wildly about Spedegue’s identity (‘a world-famed cricketer . . . not permitted to reveal his true self’, ‘a coal-black gentleman from Jamaica’, ‘a half-caste Malay’) and then decrying his selection (‘the true place for Mr. Thomas Spedegue, however artful he may be, is the village green and not Lord’s’).148 Forty thousand people gather to watch the Test in which Spedegue wavers but ultimately triumphs. The crowd are presented with a spectacle that mirrors the experiment at the heart of ‘When the World Screamed’ inasmuch as it uses the facade of contemporary, professionalised sport to re-enchant the metropolis and its opinion leaders. The spectacle is designed to subtly reconnect everyone present with the grand and increasingly dormant traditions of amateurism and sheer enjoyment which are in danger of being erased from the game. In effect, beneath its surface, the story enacts a form of resistance to the nascent commodification and professionalisation of sport and its reportage. These kinds of domestic interventions form a crucial part of Conan Doyle’s greater battles because they were staged within an explicitly domestic, localised arena. They prioritise the eccentric and specific characteristics of Englishness that can be articulated against tendencies towards the international, the cosmopolitan, the American and the global. This reading is borne out elsewhere in ‘The Parish Magazine’, a much slighter narrative which similarly couches a reactionary critique of young people, the press and contemporary popular culture within a dewy-eyed nostalgia. The story features Mr Pomeroy, a local printer, who is rushed by two young visitors into producing an urgent run of the eponymous publication. In his haste, he overlooks the many low-key slanders and insults to local residents that the magazine contains: a bishop is accused of place-seeking; a man is accused of stealing hymn books from the church; an old major requires a new set of false teeth. Pomeroy realises the consequences of his actions only when confronted by a series of outraged letters which impugn his decency and threaten legal action.149 The story is mercifully brief and collapses quickly like an under-cooked soufflé when Pomeroy discovers that no harm has been done and that he has

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simply been made the subject of a practical joke by an insufferable collection of individuals calling themselves ‘the Rotherheath Society of Bright Young People who endeavour to make the world a merrier and more lively place by the exercise of our wit’.150 The story generates whatever tension it is able to muster from floating the idea of the young pranksters as cruel and motiveless before revealing them to be kindhearted and in search of harmless fun. The story gazes at the new youth through eyes grown tired with years and sees what it wishes to see. Pomeroy’s conclusion at the end of the story that ‘youth will be served, and it would be a dull world without it’ neuters any negative possibilities and erects a flimsy fantasy that the younger generations are really exactly the same as their parents and grandparents, only moving a little quicker through the currents of contemporary life. These young people, indeed, are natural Strand readers, only temporarily distracted from their true culture by a transient fixation upon the new. By the time the story appeared in the Strand, however, Conan Doyle was dead and the last remaining vestiges that tied the Strand to its high period of success would soon be gone as well. Arthur Conan Doyle died on 7 July 1930 after a series of wellreported heart problems that had rendered him bed-ridden for some months. This year also marked the retirement of Greenhough Smith and the beginning of a short period during which a series of important Strand contributors were to pass away: W. W. Jacobs, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, Stacy Aumonier, Edgar Wallace and Cyril McNeile. Reginald Pound wrote that Smith’s last few years were ‘clouded’ only by ‘the loneliness of one who outlives his friends’.151 Away from the pages of the Strand, Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger began new lives on the stage and cinema screen and in endless permutations of radio and, later, television adaptations. Holmes became the model of multimedia reinvention, a name regenerated with a new face for every generation and every new form of expression. The Strand and Conan Doyle himself, from our postmillennial vantage point, were vanishing mediators bequeathing the twentieth century some of its most enduring narrative paradigms. Why should this be the case? Since the demise of Conan Doyle and the Strand, the culture industry has proliferated in scope, reach and diversity; it has been revolutionised many times over by unimaginable leaps in technology. Yet amid this tumult, something about the stable narrative and character qualities of Sherlock Holmes and his late Victorian coterie remains to some extent unchanged from the 1890s. Many attempts have been made to account for this strange phenomenon but none of them prioritise the role of the Strand itself. It is my contention here that the magazine stumbled upon a serendipitous

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mixture of form and content that did not simply feature the Sherlock Holmes stories but instead created a thriving textual world into which the character was integrated. The comparison is imperfect in a number of ways but this may also help to explain why Sherlock Holmes’s early appearances in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four garnered so much less critical and commercial attention. When Hegel wrote that ‘the owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering’, he was referring to philosophy’s delayed capacity for understanding the world around it, but also to the ways in which historical epochs become aware of their own character. Thus it is not surprising that much of the dominant Victorian ‘stereotype’ is built upon cultural props that only appeared very late in the nineteenth century. I would include the Strand among those lateappearing determinants. In the early scenes of Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, for example, the 1901 setting is articulated through a short discussion about the then ongoing serialisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles (‘sarcastic devil, that Holmes!’). This might also account for the peculiar imaginative potency of the magazine and Conan Doyle and Holmes as its totems: it helped to provide a waning age with self-definition. This process has obscured the fact that Doyle was one of the few Victorian populists who lived to see the dawn of the first media age and to face the knotty issues pertaining to intellectual property, royalties and new forms of piracy. His laissez-faire attitude towards many of these issues early on was replaced by a keen desire to capitalise upon the commodification of his literary ideas. In recent years, since punitive lawsuits have been brought against novelists, anthologists and film-makers, it can reasonably be argued that the Doyle estate has entrenched itself on entirely the wrong side of contemporary fan culture. Doyle’s dictum to the actor William Gillette that ‘you may marry or murder or do what you like’ with Sherlock Holmes has become a byword for all the cultural products smart enough to encourage the kinds of creative fan engagement precipitated by the age of the internet and the domestication of culture industry technology.152 These perpetual revolutions constantly devour their own children, however, and the Strand was left behind so that Sherlock Holmes could be liberated and live forever. The young people of Rotherheath, like the crowds at Lord’s and Hengist Down, like the newspaper readers of ‘The Disintegration Machine’ and The Land of Mist, those gathered round to listen to Kid Wilson’s stories and all of those other imagined audiences, whether receptive or recalcitrant, would finally and conclusively be lost to the realities of the new century.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, p. 4. Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 120–1. See Alford, Depression and Recovery? Alford, Depression and Recovery?, p. 16. See also Aldcroft, The Inter-War Economy. Aldcroft, The Inter-War Economy, p. 137. See also the seventh chapter of Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, British Industrial Capitalism Since the Industrial Revolution, pp. 131–55. Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s, p. 3. Bloom, Bestsellers, p. 79. Mandel, Late Capitalism, p. 251. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 5. See Pordzik, ‘England’s Domestic Others’, pp. 71–88 and, especially, Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Harrison, ‘Empire Free Trade’, pp. 755–6. See Voegler, Austin Harrison and the English Review. For specific instances of the issues under discussion, see Jameson, ‘England and America’; Nash, ‘Power as an International Force’; Lawton, ‘The Root of Unemployment’; Hurd, ‘Are Submarines Worth While?’; Lawton, ‘The New Age of Coal’; Roberts, ‘The Making of Germany’; and Roberts, ‘Citizenship in the Factory’. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and the Consumer Society’, p. 18. ‘George Newnes, Ltd.’, The Times, 19 June 1925, p. 23. Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 135. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 136. ‘George Newnes, Ltd.’, The Times, 13 June 1927, p. 21. ‘George Newnes, Ltd.’, The Times, 27 June 1929, p. 27. Pound, The Strand Magazine, pp. 165, 166, 167, 169. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 151. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, pp. 8–9. See Davis, Living Up to the Ads. Unpublished letter, Toronto Public Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, No. 59. Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 169. The equation of Maugham’s career with the ‘brackish’ American magazines comes from Wilson’s ‘The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham’, p. 729. Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 169. Johnson and Prijatel, The Magazine from Cover to Cover, pp. 5–7. Hiebert and Gibbons, Exploring Mass Media, p. 177. This complex process is described in depth by Cox and Mowatt in their article ‘Vogue in Britain’.

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226 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Rosen, ‘Finding a Niche, From Ferrets to Tattoos’. Bishop, ‘Re:Covering Modernism’, p. 287. ‘Victorian Fiction’, p. 23. Pound, The Strand Magazine, pp. 152, 146. ‘Farewell to the Strand’, p. 5. Millard, ‘The Girl with the Hollywood Face’, p. 492. Ibid., p. 492. Ibid., p. 494. Ibid., p. 495. Ibid., p. 495. Ibid., p. 499. Glancy, ‘Hollywood and Britain’, p. 57. Blake, ‘Americanisation and Popular Music in Britain’, p. 152. See, for example, ‘Madame Marie Roze’, p. 269; ‘Illustrated Interview: Madame Albani’; Schlesinger, ‘Covent Garden Stars in Their Favourite Roles’; and Patti, ‘My Operatic Heroines’. Thompson, ‘Britain’s Favourite Gramophone Records’, p. 70. Ibid., pp. 71–2. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 75. ‘Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it. In capitalist times, the traditional anti-mythological ferments of music conspire against freedom, as whose allies they were once proscribed. The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success. His delight in the moment and the gay façade becomes an excuse for absolving the listener from the thought of the whole, whose claim is comprised in proper listening’ (Adorno, The Culture Industry, p. 32). Lawrence, ‘Facing the Microphone’, p. 76. Ibid., p. 76. Conboy, The Press and Popular Culture, p. 120. The article appeared in the Strand of April 1929 after appearing in Harper’s of December 1928. Bercovici, ‘A Day with Charlie Chaplin’, p. 338. Ibid., p. 339. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 343. Löwenthal, Literature and Mass Culture, p. 206. Balio, United Artists, p. 5. See also Petro, Idols of Modernity. Madow, ‘Private Ownership of Public Image’, pp. 130–1. Dark, ‘ “Toppie” Edwards’, p. 187. Ibid., p. 190. See Waltzer, The Battle of the Century. Dark, ‘ “Toppie” Edwards’, p. 191.

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Conclusion 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

227

Ibid., p. 191. Abrahams, ‘A New Race of Men’, p. 158. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 160. ‘Flying for a Living’, p. 373. Ibid., p. 373. Lyth, ‘The Changing Role of Government in British Civil Air Transport’, p. 66. ‘Flying for a Living’, pp. 373–4. Ibid., p. 375. Reilly, ‘Modern Adventures in Architecture’, p. 506. Ibid., pp. 508, 510. Ibid., p. 513. Lawrence and Konody, ‘Puzzles in Paint’, p. 338. Ibid., pp. 341, 338. Ibid., p. 342. Hosken, ‘Main Street – London’, p. 260. Ibid., p. 261. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 265. Unpublished letter, Toronto Public Library, Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, No. 66. Ibid., Doyle, ‘The Last Resource’, p. 605. Ibid., p. 605. Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers, pp. 211, 215. ‘American Detective Fiction’, p. 13. See Dover, Making the Detective Story American, p. 12. Portugal, ‘Death to the Detectives!’, p. 28. Ibid., p. 28. See Keverne, ‘Sleuths’, p. 157, and Magill, ‘All Horrid’, p. 171. Wilt’s Hardboiled in Hollywood offers a well-rounded examination of the ‘cross-fertilized’ relationship (p. 1). Doyle, ‘The Last Resource’, p. 606. Ibid., p. 612. See Freedman and Kendrick, ‘Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest’, p. 210. Ibid., pp. 612–13. Ibid., p. 612. Ibid., p. 606. ‘Blood Sports – Should They be Abolished?’, p. 508. Ibid., p. 508. Miller conjectures that his ‘hitherto . . . marked distaste for blood sports’ was overcome in order to ‘impress Jean Leckie’. Miller, The Adventures of Conan Doyle, p. 191.

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228 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

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Twentieth-Century Victorian Crawford-Wood, ‘Some Hunting Myths’, p. 563. ‘Blood Sports – Should They be Abolished?’, p. 509. Ibid., p. 512. ‘What Will England Be Like in 1930?’, p. 165. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 166. Doyle, ‘The Death Voyage’, p. 343. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 348. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid., p. 350. Ibid., p. 352. Ibid., p. 356. Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 360. Lellenberg et al. (eds), A Life in Letters, p. 345. Doyle, ‘The Death Voyage’, p. 343. Doyle, ‘The Dreamers: Notes from a Strange Mail-Bag’, p. 536. Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (I)’, p. 318. Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (II)’, p. 449. Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (I)’, p. 319. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 319. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 45. Lycett, Conan Doyle, p. 329. Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (II)’, p. 450. Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (I)’, p. 316. Ibid., p. 323. Doyle, ‘The Disintegration Machine’, p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 5. Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed (I)’, p. 320. Doyle, ‘The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper’, p. 316. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 317. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., p. 320. Doyle, ‘The Parish Magazine’, p. 143. Ibid., p. 146. Pound, The Strand Magazine, p. 152. Kabatchnik, Sherlock Holmes on the Stage, p. 9.

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Index

Austin, F. Britten, 9, 151–3, 169 ‘In the Hindenberg Line’, 152 ‘Peace’, 153 ‘They Come Back’, 152–3 Bell, R. S. Warren, 148 Besant, Walter, 31–2 Boer War, 43, 45–7, 50–3, 56–62, 137–8, 145, 170 Bookman, 8, 57, 62 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 111 Cecil, Edward, 165–6 Chaplin, Charlie, 169, 200–2 Chesterton, G. K., 183, 223 Childers, Erskine, 123 Churchill, Randolph, 66 Churchill, Winston, 119 cinema, 126, 132–4, 160, 190, 206 British cinema, 198–9 influence on fiction, 169, 209–10 Sherlock Holmes fan culture, 223–4 Courier’s Weekly, 85–6 Daily Mail, 7, 8, 92–3, 200, 205 Dangerfield, George, 39–40, 45, 107–8 Delanda, Manuel, 57–9, 80n Deloncle, François, 63–4

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divorce, 91, 92, 113–14; see also marriage Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1–3, 4–5, 6, 7–13, 20, 23–7, 77, 83–4, 100, 105–7, 114, 120–1, 154, 159–62, 169–70, 187–8, 191–2, 193–4, 207–8, 212–13, 223–4 Boer War, 43–7, 49–51, 60–2 death, 223 First World War writings, 146–7 ‘The Abbey Grange’, 91–2 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 27–31 ‘Black Peter’, 91 ‘The Blanched Soldier’, 60–2 ‘A Case of Identity’, 27–8 ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’, 90 The Coming of the Fairies, 170–1, 172–5 ‘The Copper Beeches’, 28 ‘Danger!’, 107, 143–6 ‘The Death Voyage’, 213–15 ‘The Disintegration Machine’, 215, 219–21 ‘The Empty House’, 89–90 ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, 28 ‘The Golden Pince-Nez’, 91 ‘The Horror of the Heights’, 107, 126–9

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252

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The Hound of the Baskervilles, 63, 67, 71–4 The Land of Mist, 175–83 ‘The Last Resource’, 208–11 The Lost World, 11, 107, 121–3, 130 ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’, 29–30 Memories and Adventures, 26, 120 ‘The Missing Three Quarter’, 90, 91 ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, 30 ‘The Norwood Builder’, 89, 91 ‘The Parish Magazine’, 222–3 The Poison Belt, 129–32 ‘The Priory School’, 91 ‘The Prisoner’s Defence’, 142–3 ‘The Red-Headed League’, 28–9 The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 85–92 Round the Fire Stories, 84 Sir Nigel, 87, 94–9 ‘The Solitary Cyclist’, 90 ‘The Stockbroker’s Clerk’, 28, 54 ‘The Story of Spedegue’s Dropper’, 221–2 ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, 120 ‘The Three Students’, 54–5, 90, 112 The Uncharted Coast, 162–3 The Valley of Fear, 146 The Vital Message, 174 ‘The Voice of Science’, 24–6, 51–3

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‘When the World Screamed’, 215–19 The White Company, 23 Egerton, George, 9, 167–8 Einhaus, Ann-Marie, 125, 135–6, 151 English Review, 190 L’Exposition Universelle, 43, 62–4, 66 Fagan, Hymie, 134–5 First World War, 13, 105–7, 121, 134–54, 213–15 impact upon 1920s, 187, 189 impact upon spiritualism, 160 Freeman’s Journal, 18 Fussell, Paul, 106 Good Words, 83–4 Grand, Sarah, 9, 167–8 Guest, Anthony, 38–9 Hammett, Dashiell, 209–10 hardboiled fiction, 208–10 Hardie, Kier, 119 Harper, Harry, 114–15 Harrison, Austin, 190 Hay, Ian, 20–1 historical novel, 93, 96–9 Hoberman, J., 9 Hobson, John Atkinson, 152, 153 Hopwood, Aubrey, 112–13 Hornung, E. W., 31 Jackson, Kate, 5–6, 19, 26–7 Jacobs, W. W., 20, 36, 101, 116, 147, 151, 223

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Index Jameson, Fredric, 10–11, 187–8, 191 Jepson, Edgar, 116–18 Kent, Marianne, 32 Kerr, Douglass, 3 The Nigel novels, 95–6 Lankester, Edward Ray, 48, 138–40 late capitalism, 187–91, 213–16 Lawrence, D. H., 9, 163–5 Lawson, Thomas, 116 Lockyer, Norman, 65–6 Lodge, Oliver, 160–1, 175, 200 Lombroso, Cesare, 72–4 Lucy, Henry W., 37–8, 66, 71 Luk-Oie, Ole, 136–7 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 187, 189, 211, 220–2 McDonald, Peter, 6, 84–5 McNeile, Cyril see Sapper Mansford, Charles J., 32–4 marriage, 30–1, 91–3, 113–14, 165–6; see also divorce Marsh, Richard, 124–5, 149, 150–1 ‘The Limerick’, 125 ‘Looping the Loop’, 125–6 ‘On the Film’, 126 ‘On the Way Home’, 150–1 Maugham, Somerset, 194, 225n Meade, L. T., 23, 111 Millard, J. D., 197–8 Modernism architecture, 205 art, 205–6 literature, 8–13, 135, 190, 195–6

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253

Morrison, Arthur, 30, 116 Mussell, James, 4, 6 Nesbit, E., 101 Newnes, George, 5–6, 19–21, 24, 26–7, 35–6, 39–40, 51, 88, 92, 195 The Captain, 100 company accounts, 101–2, 167–8, 191–3 death, 101–2 Liberal politics, 17–18 Lucy, Henry W., 38. starting the Strand, 17–24 Stead, W. T., 15–18 Oppenheim, E. Philips, 20, 56–7, 168 Pall Mall Gazette, 16–19, 21, 37 Pemberton, Max, 97 periodical studies, 3–7 Philips, Austin, 33–4 Postmodernism, 11–13, 187–9, 211, 217 role in periodical studies, 3 Pound, Reginald, 6, 38, 81n, 154n, 191–4, 196, 223 Review of Reviews, 5, 15–16, 20, 21, 23, 97, 105, 124, 145 First World War, 143, 145 Sandow, Eugen, 47–8 Wells, H. G., 74–5 Roberts, Morley, 118–19 Romer, Mark Lemon, 68 Sandow, Eugen, 43–5, 46–9 ‘My Reminiscences’, 50–1 Sapper, 20, 149–50, 151

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254

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SciPer (Science in the NineteenthCentury Periodical), 4 Shaw, George Bernard, 20, 169–71 Sims, George R., 35 Smith, Herbert Greenhough, 13, 20, 26, 74, 99, 119, 164, 172, 174, 191–4, 207, 215 retirement, 223 spiritualism, 162, 174–5, 191–3 The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 146–7 The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 84–6, 88, 90 Spectator, 4, 54, 93, 149 Stacpoole, Henry de Vere, 168–9 Stead, W. T., 15–17, 123–4 Steevens, Harold, 142–3 Stephen, Leslie, 123–4 Steppings-Wright, H. C., 137 Strand Magazine, 1–2, 9–13, 27–40, 62–4, 84–93, 99–102, 108–19, 123–7, 132–4, 163–9, 187–9, 191–6, 197–207, 211–12, 223–4 beginning, 15–27 Boer War, 51–62 closure, 196–7 criticism, 4–7

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First World War, 105–7, 134–54 historical fiction, 93–9 physical culture debate, 43–9 science, 64–77 spiritualism, 159–63, 183 The Times, 15–16, 69, 192, 196 Wallace, Edgar, 148–9 Welfare reform, 212–13 Wells, H. G., 5, 46, 69–70, 71, 84, 105, 121, 212 spiritualism, 169–71 welfare reform, 212 The First Men in the Moon, 62, 67–70, 74–7 The Time Machine, 2 Wilhelm II, 110–11, 138–41, 213–15 Wodehouse, P. G., 2, 9, 20, 100–1, 126, 147, 167–8, 194 ‘Parted Ways’, 147–8 ‘A Prisoner of War’, 148 ‘Something to Worry About’, 133 ‘The Wire Pullers’, 100–1 Wolfe-Barry, John, 66 Wolff, Michael, 4, 39 Wynne, Catherine, 3

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