Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology 9781474476263

Citation preview

Writing the Sphinx

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Recent books in the series: Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction: Mapping Psychic Spaces Lizzy Welby

The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity Michael Shaw

The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons and Dowson Kostas Boyiopoulos

Contested Liberalisms: Martineau, Dickens and the Victorian Press Iain Crawford

British India and Victorian Literary Culture Máire ní Fhlathúin

Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel Clare Walker Gore

Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form Frederik Van Dam Dark Paradise: Pacific Islands in the Nineteenth-Century British Imagination Jenn Fuller Twentieth-Century Victorian: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine, 1891–1930 Jonathan Cranfield

The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 Giles Whiteley The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry Reza Taher-Kermani Rereading Orphanhood: Texts, Inheritance, Kin Diane Warren and Laura Peters Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel Jessica R. Valdez

The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity Marion Thain

Reading Ideas in Victorian Literature: Literary Content as Artistic Experience Patrick Fessenbecker

Gender, Technology and the New Woman Lena Wånggren

Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London Lisa Robertson

Self-Harm in New Woman Writing Alexandra Gray

Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology Eleanor Dobson

Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image Lucy Ella Rose

Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle Deaglán Ó Donghaile

Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place Kevin A. Morrison

The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities Patricia Pulham

The Victorian Male Body Joanne-Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt

Forthcoming volumes: Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art Fariha Shaikh The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism Eleonora Sasso The Late-Victorian Little Magazine Koenraad Claes Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century Matthew Ingleby and Matt P. M. Kerr Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and MidNineteenth-Century Urban Development Joanna Hofer-Robinson Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science Philipp Erchinger Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical Caley Ehnes

Olive Schreiner and the Politics of Print Culture, 1883–1920 Clare Gill Victorian Auto/Biography: Problems in Genre and Subject Amber Regis Gissing, Shakespeare and the Life of Writing Thomas Ue Women’s Mobility in Henry James Anna Despotopoulou Michael Field’s Revisionary Poetics Jill Ehnenn The Americanisation of W.T. Stead Helena Goodwyn Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Literature Christopher Pittard

The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage Renata Kobetts Miller

Pastoral in Early-Victorian Fiction: Environment and Modernity Mark Frost

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

Edmund Yates and Victorian Periodicals: Gossip, Celebrity, and Gendered Spaces Kathryn Ledbetter

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture Patricia Cove

Literature, Architecture and Perversion: Building Sexual Culture in Europe, 1850–1930 Aina Marti

Cultural Encounters with the Arabian Nights in Nineteenth-Century Britain Melissa Dickson

Manufacturing Female Beauty in British Literature and Periodicals, 1850–1914 Michelle Smith

Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism Mary L. Mullen

New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1820–60 Alexis Easley

For a complete list of titles published visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www. edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ECVC Also available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Diane Piccitto and Patricia Pulham ISSN: 2044–2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

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Writing the Sphinx Literature, Culture and Egyptology

Eleanor Dobson

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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 © Eleanor Dobson, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 7624 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 7626 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 7627 0 (epub) The right of Eleanor Dobson 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 List of Hieroglyphs Introduction

vi x xii xiii 1

1. ‘Wonderful things’: Howard Carter, Literary Genre and Material Intertextuality

21

2. ‘Fairy tales’ and ‘bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts and Fabrications

59

3. ‘The master-key that opens every door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations and Palimpsests

97

4. ‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

147

5. ‘The sphinx will speak at last’: Visions, Communications and Spiritual Experience

186

Coda

221

Appendix: ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ Bibliography Index

228 232 257

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List of Illustrations

Figure I.1

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3

Figure 1.4

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Alec Ball, ‘Smith looked at it once, twice, thrice, and at the third look he fell in love’, in H. Rider Haggard, ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, 44.259 (1912), 672–85 (p. 672). Source: VisualHaggard.org

10

Harry Burton, ‘Opening the door of the second shrine’, in Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), ii (1927), pl. 12. Author’s own.

29

G. L. Seymour, ‘A blaze of light burst upon my eyes’, in J. Arbuthnot Wilson [Grant Allen], ‘My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies’, Belgravia, 37.148 (1879), 93–105 (facing p. 96). Source: HathiTrust.

30

Harry Burton, ‘View of the antechamber as seen from the passage through the steel grille’, in Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), i (1923), pl. 15. Author’s own.

31

Samuel Manning, The Land of the Pharaohs: Egypt & Sinai (London: The Religious Tract Society, [1875]). Author’s own.

42

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.5

Figure 1.6

Figure 1.7

Figure 2.1

Figure 3.1

vii

Georg Ebers, Picturesque Egypt [Egypt: Descriptive, Historical and Picturesque], trans. Clara Bell, 2 vols (London, Paris and New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1885), i. Source: Internet Archive.

46

Georg Ebers, La hija del rey de Egipto, trans. Gaspar Sentiñón, 2 vols (Barcelona: Biblioteca Arte y Letras, 1881), ii. Author’s own.

47

James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt: From the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950). Courtesy of Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries.

49

[Phillips Brothers?], Necklace, gold and Egyptian beads, c. 1902, M.384–1924 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

67

Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi, Description of the Egyptian Court Erected in the Crystal Palace (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), pp. 14, 15. Source: Internet Archive.

102

Figure 3.2

Cassell’s Household Guide: Being a Complete Encyclopaedia of Domestic and Social Economy, and Forming a Guide to Every Department of Practical Life, 4 vols (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, [1869–71]), iii [1869], p. 189. Source: Internet Archive. 105

Figure 3.3

E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 46. Source: Internet Archive.

109

E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899), pp. 29, 35, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63. Author’s own.

109

E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 53. Source: Internet Archive.

109

Figure 3.4

Figure 3.5

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viii

Writing the Sphinx

Figure 3.6

Figure 3.7

Figure 3.8

Figure 3.9

Figure 3.10

Figure 3.11

Figure 3.12

Lily Schofield, Tom Catapus and Potiphar: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (London; New York: Frederick Warne & Co., 1903), unnumbered. Author’s own.

112

H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), pp. 70, 113, 223, 235, 303. Author’s own.

116

‘Book-plate of H. Rider Haggard. By the Rev. W. J. Loftie’, in Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), p. 281. Author’s own.

120

‘Hieroglyphic book-plate of the Rev. W. J. Loftie. By the owner’, in Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), p. 288. Author’s own.

122

‘Hieroglyphic plate of Walter Herries Pollock. By the Rev. W. J. Loftie’, in Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), p. 280. Author’s own.

123

Sax Rohmer, ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’, in Tales of Secret Egypt (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1919), pp. 31–57 (p. 34). Author’s own.

125

Sax Rohmer, ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’, in Tales of Secret Egypt (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1919), pp. 31–57 (p. 57). Author’s own.

125

Figure 3.13

P. le Page Renouf and E. Naville, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation and Commentary (London: The Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1904), pl. 12 (detail). Source: Internet Archive. 127

Figure 3.14

C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, It Happened in Egypt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co.,1914), p. 146. Author’s own.

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129

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Figure 4.1

Figure 4.2

Figure 4.3

Figure 4.4

List of Illustrations

ix

W. Leadbeater, The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories (Adyar: Theosophist Office, 1911). Author’s own.

160

The Book of the Dead: Facsimile of the Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1890), pl. 17 (detail). Source: Internet Archive.

161

George Barbier, ‘Egypt’, in Richard Le Gallienne, The Romance of Perfume (New York; Paris: Richard Hudnut, 1928), p. 21. Source: Internet Archive.

162

Gustave Moreau, Cléopâtre, assise, demi nue, de face sur un trône très élevé, c. 1887, watercolour with gouache highlights, 39.5 × 25 cm. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Tony Querrec.

163

Figure 4.5

‘Palmolive: The History Back of Modern Beauty’, Photoplay Magazine, 14.4 (1918), 124. Source: Internet Archive. 167

Figure 5.1

W. T. Horton, ‘I, who myself was worshipped as a god’, in H. Rider Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), p. 20. Source: Internet Archive.

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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 byword 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 among 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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Series Editor’s Preface

xi

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 multifaceted 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 would not have been possible without Daniel Moore and David Gange. Their patience is unrivalled, and I consider it a great honour to have worked with them over the past several years. I owe a great deal to Richard B. Parkinson, too, a scholar of remarkable warmth and generosity. I am also indebted to Kathleen Sheppard, whose comments on the manuscript were expert and encouraging in equal measure. Advice from and conversations with Gemma Banks, Howard Carlton, Jennie Challinor, Rosalind Fursland, John Holmes, Roger Luckhurst, Alexander Massouras, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Sarah Parker, Rachel Starling, Will Tattersdill, John H. Taylor, Nathan Waddell, and Sara Woodward, have shaped and informed this research. My thanks extend to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Bibliographical Society for their sponsorship, and to the staff of the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, the British Library, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Records Office, New York Public Library, the Fales Library at New York University, the Alexander Turnbull Library of the National Library of New Zealand, and the Egypt Exploration Society. In particular, Richard Edgcumbe of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Elizabeth Fleming and Cat Warsi of the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, and Patricia Usick of the British Museum have guided me through the archives, quite literally bringing treasures to light. Finally, this research would not have been possible without the support of my family, Georgia, Mike and Cleo Dobson, and Jan Paget. It would have been finished much sooner if it weren’t for Wilbur.

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List of Hieroglyphs

Hieroglyph

𓎬 𓍷 𓍶 𓂀 𓇋 𓆄 𓋹 𓇹 𓁣 𓁢 𓇇

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Description

Gardiner’s Sign List Cited in Text

tyet

V39

108

cartouche

V10

115

shen ring

V9

115

Eye of Horus

D10

117

reed

M17

118

feather

H6

118

ankh

S34

118

crescent moon

N11

118

C7

126

C6

126

M15

134

god with Sethanimal head god with jackal head clump of papyrus with buds

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In memory of Jan and Dudley Paget

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Introduction

In 1856, George Eliot (1819–80) lamented the proliferation of ‘the least readable [variety] of silly women’s novels, [. . .] the modernantique species’, specifically criticising authors’ lack of ‘accurate and minute knowledge’.1 She favoured instead the writer of the rare, wellresearched novel, a work that rested upon a foundation of scholarly archaeological information and whose ‘genius [. . .] familiarized itself with all the relics of an ancient period’; this type of novel, she claimed, ‘can sometimes, by the force of its sympathetic divination, restore the missing notes in the “music of humanity,” and reconstruct the fragments into a whole which will really bring the remote past nearer to us’.2 Over the following decades, the increasing availability of scholarly volumes on the ancient world saw a revolution not only in historical fiction but across literary genres. Of course, the novels that Eliot derided still persisted – texts in which authors, in Eliot’s view, ‘make their mental mediocrity more conspicuous, by clothing it in a masquerade of ancient names; by putting their feeble sentimentality into the mouths of [. . .] Egyptian princesses’ – yet a greater sense of historical and archaeological awareness became increasingly apparent in the years following Eliot’s complaint, evident in diverse literary types, from the imperial romances of H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) and the Gothic novels of Bram Stoker (1847– 1912) to the decadent writings of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and the children’s stories of Edith Nesbit (1858–1924).3 Indeed, a reciprocal influence also existed, in which Egyptologists such as Howard Carter (1874–1939) and Arthur Weigall (1880–1934) enhanced the ‘literariness’ of their works, demonstrating the contemporary fluidity of boundaries which supposedly separate fiction and non-fiction, the entertaining and the scholarly, art and science. This book focuses on Egyptology and the literary culture that surrounded and responded to this field, from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth in the aftermath of the high-profile discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun

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in 1922. More specifically, it investigates the textual, cultural and material exchanges between literature and Egyptology across this period, from when museums and universities began to recognise the discipline as a distinct subject worthy of pursuit in the latter half of the nineteenth century, to the worldwide economic depression and the resultant major decrease in the amount of fieldwork taking place in Egypt.4 This period, I demonstrate, produced a rich literary culture of creative flexibility, collaboration and mutual influence on a hitherto unrecognised scale. Egyptology as a discipline, and ancient Egypt as subject matter, traversed perceived divisions across literary hierarchies, popular culture and countercultures. Some historical groundwork is essential at this stage, though I keep this brief so as not to repeat substantially work already done elsewhere.5 The period on which I focus was one of considerable political discord. The completion and opening of the French-owned Suez Canal in 1869 quickened the European colonisation of Africa. As a result of growing European power in Egypt, local tensions rose and Egyptians increasingly joined nationalist groups; this led to the invasion of French and British forces in 1882. The Khedive was restored, although British control was reinforced and eventually, in 1914, Britain formally imposed a protectorate over Egypt. Although Britain declared Egyptian independence in 1922, it would not be until 1956 that the last British troops withdrew.6 While these events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the immediate contextual backdrop for this project, modern European imperial designs on Egypt stretch back to Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821) campaign in Egypt of 1798–1801. The work of the scientists who accompanied the French military is often heralded as the foundation of the discipline of Egyptology, at least in the modern, western sense of the term. Certainly, Bonaparte’s invasion sparked a long-standing struggle for power in Egypt between the Ottoman Empire and European nations, in which the French and the British in particular wrestled for dominance. Interest in Egypt in Britain ballooned across the nineteenth century due to the influx of Egyptian antiquities into museums (a direct result of expanding European presence in Egypt), and Egypt’s increased appearance in the newspapers as printing technologies were revolutionised and literacy rates soared, bringing such material to everbroadening audiences. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Thomas Cook & Son made Egypt accessible to tourists on an unprecedented scale, its transport services further securing Britain’s military hold over the country.7 For those who could not boast the disposable

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Introduction

3

time or income to contemplate such a journey themselves, Egypt was the subject of all manner of more accessible entertainments across the century and beyond: mummy-unrolling demonstrations, panoramas, museum exhibits, public lectures and, eventually, even early film. Egypt made its way into a diverse array of material culture, from fashion and jewellery, to decor and book design; in the latter half of the century, as book covers became more eye-catching and literature itself more readily available, Egypt, its history and iconography were rich pickings for all manner of literary movements and genres, from decadence to detective fiction. Egypt’s versatility as signifier was such that it was at the heart of contemporaneous explorations of science and religion, magic and occultism, gender and sexuality.8 It is this relative popular appeal and accessibility that distinguishes Egyptology from comparable disciplines, such as the study of ancient Greece or Rome. Some of the field’s earliest icons such as the Italian circus-strongman-turned-archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778– 1823) were self-taught or later, once formal training became available, untaught (resulting, in Belzoni’s case and despite his many achievements, in his employment of highly destructive techniques involving dynamite). Other amateurs revolutionised the field; Amelia Edwards (1831–92) co-founded the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882 after travelling in Egypt, with a mind to financing digs through the aid of benefactors including Robert Browning (1812–89). Her subsequent studies made her a respected authority in her own right. Flinders Petrie (1853–1942), who would go on to hold the UK’s first chair in Egyptology established by Edwards’s bequest, began surveying monuments as a teenager, and developed his own ground-breaking system of sequence dating. Howard Carter worked for the EEF as an artist, learning, as it were, on the job. Without the same cultural capital as Classics – at this time, thoroughly entrenched in public-school and university education – Egyptology, and ancient Egypt, were ‘othered’ in the cultural consciousness. This ‘otherness’ along with its relative nascence as a field of study meant that the door was open – if not widely, then at least ajar – for more diverse participation: E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934) came from a working-class home; Margaret Murray (1863–1963) was appointed Junior Professor at University College London in 1898, the first female lecturer in archaeology in the UK; and Dorothy Eady (1904–81) came to Egyptology as a result of her belief that she had been an ancient Egyptian in a previous incarnation.9 Egyptology in this period has already attracted considerable critical attention in, for instance, David Gange’s Dialogues with the Dead (2013), Donald Malcolm Reid’s Whose Pharaohs? (2002) and Elliott

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Colla’s Conflicted Antiquities (2007). Such histories are noteworthy in their illumination of Egyptology’s power structures and its shaping of both British and Egyptian identities. Wider cultural engagements with ancient Egypt in Britain have been thoroughly detailed in Stephanie Moser’s Wondrous Curiosities (2006), Designing Antiquity (2012) and Painting Antiquity (2019) (indeed, Moser herself notes that much critical work on ancient Egypt’s modern reception is art historical in focus),10 while literary culture has been addressed in Maria Fleischhack’s Narrating Ancient Egypt (2015) and Molly Youngkin’s British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840– 1910 (2016), works structured around genre and gender respectively. The mummified bodies of the ancient Egyptian dead have, moreover, warranted studies of their own, their complex representations in this period detailed in Jasmine Day’s The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World (2006) and Roger Luckhurst’s The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012). While I take care not to negotiate the same paths as my predecessors, these works have undoubtedly shaped my engagement with the material at my disposal. Postcolonial and feminist methodologies, in particular, have suggested themselves to scholars addressing ancient Egypt at a crucial period in Egypt’s and Britain’s histories, and at a time when Orientalist mindsets often cast the ‘East’ as the feminised foil to the masculine ‘West’.11 Taking the road less travelled by, though one which at times intersects with these established critical routes, this book instead pays particular attention to archival sources, book history, material culture, and the historical and biographical contexts of this moment’s actors. Writing the Sphinx thus recognises and diverges from the aforementioned studies, making several key interventions in our understanding of the history of Egyptology, as well as the literary and material culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at times traversing or treading on the peripheries of established critical footprints in order to broaden their tread, and at others forging new trails entirely. My attention rests more explicitly on the points of overlap between Egyptology and literary culture, exploring literary influences upon purportedly non-fictional Egyptological publications, and resultant complex entanglements of genre; the weaving of narratives around particular artefacts, especially genuine Egyptological pieces; collaborations between Egyptologists and authors; the permeation of high and low culture by Egyptological motifs; and how Egyptology was drawn upon for both mass and exclusive audiences, influencing advertising in magazines through to secret rites performed by

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Introduction

5

exclusive, occult organisations. With a lens fine-tuned to focus in detail on specific convergences between Egyptological and literary cultures, I seek to contribute to the critical landscape the first major study that establishes the substantial and mutual debt that Egyptologists and authors owed to each other across a period of decades. In so doing, I make several significant interventions. Firstly, I emphasise the importance of the symbiotic relationship between a variety of Egyptological writings and literary cultural products where such genres have traditionally been divided, encompassing archaeological accounts, translations of ancient Egyptian texts, popular reports in magazines, expert contributions to newspaper articles, and all manner of correspondence, alongside novels, short stories, plays and poetry. The same Egyptological texts that graced the shelves of H. Rider Haggard’s and Bram Stoker’s libraries were cherished by Oscar Wilde and H.D. (1886–1961). Egyptologists who produced specialist volumes also contributed to cheaper, widely consumed periodicals. Egyptological conversations conducted between expert scholars and a fascinated public were facilitated by newspapers, in which interested readers composed letters and even poetry (hinting at the degree to which Egypt was entwined with notions of literariness) that were printed alongside responses by professional Egyptologists. These same experts were themselves ardent consumers of literature, as evidenced by allusions in their works. In 1900, for example, A. C. Mace (1874–1928) likened tourists in Egypt to those of whom he had read in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898); Arthur Weigall commented on the sensation of ‘feeling more than ever like Mr. H. G Wells’ men in the moon’ while traversing Egyptian valleys; Alan Gardiner (1879–1963) sent Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) a volume of ancient Egyptian literature, highlighting his favourite tale (‘The Story of Sinuhe’), and proudly related that the ‘great writer’ shared his preference.12 Incidentally, Margaret Murray also expressed a fondness for the works of Kipling.13 Egyptologists even turned to authors of fiction for their own perceived expertise: when writing of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, for example, Howard Carter regularly consulted the novelist Percy White (1852–1938). The connections between late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Egyptology and fiction are many, with novelists referring to Egyptologists to add plausibility to the events that their works described. As well as contributing a sense of authority to fiction, Egyptological discoveries were also instrumental in providing inspiration; Tutankhamun was not the only pharaoh to arouse

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interest among literary communities. Discoveries relating to his father, Akhenaten, stimulated a substantial fictional output.14 Professional Egyptologists sometimes turned their hands to fiction – Georg Ebers (1837–98) and Arthur Weigall the most notable, with Ebers even writing the real Egyptian scribe Pentaur (Pentaweret) into his novel Uarda (1877) – while novelists also developed keen interests in Egyptology.15 Amelia Edwards wrote sensation novels before co-founding the EEF; Robert Smythe Hichens (1864–1950) produced fiction set in Egypt before creating his travel narrative Egypt and Its Monuments (1908), while Norma Lorimer (1864– 1948) wrote of her travels in Egypt before turning her hand to Egyptian-themed fiction; amateurs such as Haggard participated in digs, handling artefacts in situ.16 In its inaugural issue, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology published reviews of scholarly volumes alongside those of Lorimer’s A Wife out of Egypt (1913) and Douglas Sladen’s (1856–1947) The Curse of the Nile (1913).17 Authors and other artists often enjoyed friendships with Egyptologists or consulted them on their work, quoted them at length, or inserted thinly veiled portrayals of these professionals into their writing.18 The French archaeologist and Egyptologist Auguste Mariette (1821–81) is credited with suggesting the premise behind Giuseppe Verdi’s (1813–1901) opera Aïda (1871), and, in some accounts, co-authoring the libretto;19 Budge read early drafts and made suggestions for Haggard and the children’s author Edith Nesbit;20 Norma Lorimer quoted long passages from Weigall in one breath and alluded to Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) in the next; and extensive extracts from the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero’s (1846–1916) works were included in volumes of poetry by the nineteenth-century poet Mathilde Blind (1841–96) and, later, the crime fiction of the twentieth-century novelist Sax Rohmer (1883–1959). Maspero was not the only scholar to have made an impression upon crime writers: the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville (1900–56) would go on to influence the writings of Agatha Christie (1890–1976), and the Egyptologists of New York’s Metropolitan Museum – including Ambrose Lansing (1891–1959), Ludlow Bull (1886–1954) and Henry A. Carey (1890–1965) – were consulted by the detective novelist S. S. Van Dine (1888–1939). These examples are a mere drop in the ocean of the wider cultural exchange taking place between literary culture and Egyptology across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book’s second key intervention is in its identification of the mutuality in diverse engagements with ancient Egypt and

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Egyptology across highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow cultures, where the middle- and lowbrow have often been privileged in terms of the scholarly attention that they have attracted. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Ezra Pound (1885–1972) all engage with this culture in ways which are not undivided from other cultural forms; considering the writing of the modernist elite alongside the popular fictions of the likes of Bram Stoker as well as magazine advertising reveals significant and unexpected commonalities. In current scholarship addressing ancient Egypt in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century culture, professional and the amateur, the elite and the pulp, are customarily separated. I suggest that such divisions are reductive: this was a culture in which a range of practices, interests and approaches were fused, from the collection of artefacts and the telling of ghost stories, to the veneration of beautiful books and the studying of hieroglyphs. All manner of Egyptological writings that we might collect under a broad and inclusive ‘Egyptological’ umbrella demonstrate and celebrate this complex culture. So far, the nuances of multiple genres of writing addressing ancient Egypt (and how audiences interacted with them) have not been explored: these modes of writing and those who consumed them extend far beyond those we might initially expect. This study thus undertakes a detailed exploration of the supposed grey areas between fiction and non-fiction, highbrow and lowbrow, texts and objects, to show that these distinctions are modern impositions on a culture of much greater subtlety that conventional approaches have been able to reveal. Egyptological culture itself functions as meaningful connective tissue, uniting disparate figures and forms in contemporary literary history. Authors and Egyptologists were drawing upon similar sources; before the turn of the twentieth century, Herodotus, the Bible, various renderings of One Thousand and One Nights and emerging translations of ancient Egyptian texts impacted upon wide varieties of writing that existed within fictional, factual and composite Egyptological categories, the Bible of course being the most accessible text across diverse nineteenth-century readerships.21 Popular culture and its countercultures drew influences from the same pool of material, expanding with Egyptology’s ever-growing body of artefacts and sites, and its effects can be traced through a variety of media from the exclusive to the commonplace. The same imagery that served as inspiration for marble and bronze mantel clocks produced by Tiffany & Co. shaped the design of

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novelty tins containing Fry’s Cocoa Extract. Through literature, art, opera, theatre, cinema, music and advertising, high-end and low-end goods and cultural forms return to identical sources with startling regularity. Finally, I stress the indivisibility of literary and material culture. In a field based around excavation, and the recovery and comprehension of artefacts, the physical object is of vital importance. We might extend such scrutiny to the physical products of literary culture, from the books in which ancient Egyptian culture is documented by scholars (themselves often produced to physically mimic the artefacts that they described), through to the creative works in which it is reimagined, in which photographic plates or whimsical illustrations appear. Historical paintings, themselves often incorporating real artefacts and details gleaned from Egyptological volumes or museums’ Egyptian collections, were reproduced as plates or illustrations in scholarly works, revealing how allusions to particular objects were often caught in cyclical patterns of appearance and reappearance.22 Artefact becomes ink, and the boundaries between object and print dissolve. Encounters with Egyptian ‘things’ were, without doubt, integral to engagement with ancient Egypt, particularly during the nineteenth century when mummy unwrapping spectacles allowed bandages and trinkets from the body to be inspected, touched and smelled.23 That the handling of the remains of ancient Egypt could prove an intoxicating experience is evident in the vogue for collecting among amateurs; mummy parts became popular tourist treasure in a morbid exercise that saw corpse become commodity.24 Nicholas Daly reads late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mummy fiction as the narrativisation of commodity fetishism, but the mesmeric properties of these fabricated mummies were also reflected in the commodity of the physical book itself.25 The adornments of texts that replicated the idols of ancient Egypt – gilded eyes staring out from book spines – transform the textual object into a fetish. Certainly, all kinds of Egyptian things act as commodities: ‘at first sight a very trivial thing [. . .], yet which is in reality a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties’.26 The replication of these ‘images’ for mass consumption does not necessarily result in the loss of the aura, defined by Walter Benjamin as a halo-like ambiance of uniqueness which fades in the age of mechanical reproduction.27 Both books (the mass-produced) and mummies (the unique) have both long been ascribed a magical potency, and, resultantly, exude their own seductive charm.28 The duplicate may not emanate the same degree of magnetism as the original but, as Guy Debord asserts, ‘mere images are transformed into

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real beings’: the substitute for the original can still exert profound preternatural power.29 In fiction, at least, this appears to hold true for Egyptian replicas. In H. Rider Haggard’s short story ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1912–13), the eponymous protagonist falls in love with an ancient Egyptian woman simply by looking upon a plaster cast of a statue of her likeness: ‘[h]e stared at the image, and the image smiled back sweetly at him, as doubtless it, or rather its original – for this was but a plaster cast – had smiled at nothingness in some tomb or hiding-hole for over thirty centuries.’30 Haggard’s cast is ascribed sentience and welcoming responsiveness: it emanates the aura not only of the original statue, but of the subject herself, as demonstrated in one of the original illustrations by Alec Ball which accompanied Haggard’s text as it first appeared in The Strand Magazine (Fig. I.1). Mass-produced replicas could also acquire an aura of their own; as Susan Stewart asserts, the book’s aura originates in ‘[t]he simultaneity of the printed word [. . .] as an object it has a life of its own, a life outside human time’.31 In the case of the artefact or its replica, it is possible that the inexpert consumer might believe that the simulacrum is indeed the real artefact that it mimics. The narrative weaved around the copy, which misleadingly claims its originality, might be enough to ensure the consumer’s faith that the Baudrillardian second-order simulacra – the mass-produced items associated with the Industrial Revolution – have ancient origins, lives of their own, reaching back to a distant past.32 Thus, when Bill Brown states that ‘a novel’s success [. . .] depends on eliding itself as the object in hand – paperback or leather-bound – on behalf of providing access to its represented world, the world residing somehow within, somewhere beyond, the printed page’, he neglects to acknowledge those books whose material trappings enhance the world beyond the text, even while gesturing towards the book’s physicality, ‘paperback or leather-bound’.33 He seemingly overlooks that the physical book itself conforms to his own definition of ‘thingness’: books exude a ‘force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems’.34 This study contends that the book’s visual and haptic physicality can contribute meaningfully to the reader’s experience of the material: the emphatically palpable book does not vanish, leaving only the psychic otherworlds generated by the escapist process of reading. Several studies, such as Nicholas Frankel’s Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (2000) and George Bornstein’s Material Modernism (2001), have shown that a consideration of the material publication of the

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Figure I.i Alec Ball, ‘Smith looked at it once, twice, thrice, and at the third look he fell in love’, in H. Rider Haggard, ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, 44.259 (1912), 672–85 (p. 672). Source: VisualHaggard.org.

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text can have profound implications for the understanding of tangible engagements with the book and the text that dwells between its covers. As James Buzard notes of the touristic fiction, poetry, travel writing and guidebooks produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘the documents [. . .] exhibit recurrent uneasiness about the gap between themselves, as texts, and the objects of their own valueladen descriptions’.35 Through the lexical representation of an object or place on the page, its double is conjured up in the imagination. Object becomes text, and text becomes object once more, albeit one conceived entirely within the mind’s eye. Illustrations, photographs and book bindings complicate the transference of information between these states, not just in literature pertaining to travel, but throughout a variety of genres. The intricate web of resemblance that spans these elements can be fully revealed only by considering them as part of the same taxonomy; generic conventions become particularly fluid, united by the subject matter of a textual and material culture that was being unearthed and understood by Egyptology’s devotees. Each of these strands runs through this study, which is organised along an axis that moves from the material to the immaterial, with a focus on physical things – books, artefacts – giving way to the ghostly doubles of such objects as perceived in hallucinations, dreams or visions. In the first chapter, I consider the generic and material conventions of writings by Egyptologists alongside those of fiction. With particular focus on the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen (1923) by Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, I compare the published version of the discovery to Carter’s original notes recorded at the time of the excavations, shedding light on a revised and romanticised account that, like the Egyptian adventure stories of Haggard and Stoker, was ensconced between gilded covers. In so doing, I conceive a kind of material intertextuality which functions as a physical counterpart to the mutual influences between fiction and non-fiction with Egyptian themes, where the gold detail that illuminates the book mimics that of ancient Egypt’s artefacts themselves. The bewitching ‘glint of gold’ that captivated Carter as he peered into Tutankhamun’s tomb was anticipated by the scarabs, cartouches and sarcophagi rendered in metallic foil on fictional and non-fictional works decades earlier, themselves responding to the flood of ancient Egyptian relics into Europe and the United States.36 The physicality of the books’ covers, pages, diagrams, illustrations, maps and plates are considered intimately entwined with the overall meaning of the volumes in question, and therefore indivisible not only from the text, but from the authors’ or publishers’ vision and the readers’ experience. Texts of all varieties of

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genres which feature ancient Egyptian subject matter, from the scholarly to the pulp, are shown to utilise the same iconography, holding a mirror up to Egypt’s material world as it could be experienced through private collections, museum exhibits and a variety of art forms. The second chapter elucidates the spectral stories and rumours which orbited particular items. Special attention is given to the relics that authors themselves possessed, the Egyptological connections such authors made, and the stories (whether factual, fictional, or hovering somewhere in between) weaved around their artefacts. Real Egyptian objects and Egyptian-themed paraphernalia were frequently rendered in text, and these depictions often take on particular spiritual or supernatural significance. Oscar Wilde’s scarab ring that recalled the rare and expensive objects in his own writings appears to have found its literary counterpart in one of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century. In Marie Corelli’s (1855–1924) The Sorrows of Satan (1895) I read the devil himself as Wilde’s double, his scarab ring represented as a live beetle within which resides the soul of a mummified princess. This demonic artefact, perched on the devil’s finger, reflects Corelli’s condemnation of Wilde, and the decadence that he, his social circles and followers represented. Corelli appears to have entertained a serious belief that Egyptian objects, particularly jewellery, allowed spiritual connections between the ancient and modern worlds, trusting that she had communicated with the original owner of her necklace of Egyptian beads in a dream. Her psychical necklace and its spectre were recorded in the memoirs of her lifelong companion (complicating speculations as to Corelli’s own sexual orientation), as was Wilde’s jewellery in the writings of his acquaintances. Significantly, however, as a focus on Corelli reveals, supernatural stories about particular artefacts were not merely the subject of conversation between authors and their acolytes, but engaged professional Egyptologists as well. Such relationships were not always symbiotic, however. Corelli stakes a claim for a kind of inherited Egyptological authority of her own, at odds with that of masculine scholarship as embodied by figures as eminent as E. A. Wallis Budge, the Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum. Nevertheless, as in the first chapter, we can observe real and textual worlds collide, where ancient Egyptian objects soften the margins of reality and fantasy, making their influence felt ekphrastically in both fictional and (purportedly) factual texts. Hieroglyphic symbols were considered by the ancient Egyptians to exert magical power, summoning ideas into being and facilitating a link between material and immaterial worlds.37 Long before

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the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, the decipherment of hieroglyphs was believed to be the key to unlocking ancient Egypt’s fabled metaphysical secrets. Scholarly scrutiny of this stele, with its multilingual script, was the first major step towards the comprehension of the ancient Egyptian language in the western world.38 Although translating the texts allowed the ghosts of ancient Egypt to rise up and speak, their communications often proved unenlightening, disappointingly quotidian or nonsensical to the modern mind. Advancements in printing technologies in the nineteenth century did, however, make the reproduction of hieroglyphic characters easier to facilitate, and while the esoteric wisdom of the ancients which many thought decipherment would exhume remained veiled, the unusual pictographic symbols themselves became more widespread in modern media. Guides to reading hieroglyphs alternated lines of ancient Egyptian script with their translations, and by the end of the Victorian era authors of fiction were harnessing the hieroglyphs’ enduring romanticism by creating their own hieroglyphic texts. These appropriations of hieroglyphs are the focus of this book’s third chapter. In some cases, Egyptologists lent their expertise to ensure scholarly accuracy within these fictions; alternatively, authors and designers consulted these experts’ hieroglyphic grammars and dictionaries to construct their own (sometimes erroneous) meanings. Analysing the use of hieroglyphs in a variety of fiction, and extending beyond considerations of hieroglyphs inked upon the page to those adorning more emphatically material objects, not only reveals networks of consultation between those with a professional and an amateur interest in ancient Egypt, but the wealth of connotations that the hieroglyphs suggested: from symbols that still retained their magical potency into the contemporary world, to a romantic script suitable for love letters and other secret correspondence. Meanwhile, increased touristic traffic to Egypt resulted in the proliferation of palimpsestic chiselling of names and dates onto the surfaces of its temples and pyramids, a mundane counterpoint to the hieroglyphic pictograms which still had the power to evoke the magical and otherworldly, while well-known symbols including the ankh and the obelisk were incorporated into European and American tomb and grave designs. Ultimately, these uses of hieroglyphs reveal a bid for immortality, whether that of the individual or, indeed, the literary works that contemporary authors were inscribing with ancient Egyptian script. Hieroglyphs also suggest the hallucinatory effect of reading and the invocation of deeper meanings lying beyond the surface of the page. Ancient Egypt’s insistence upon spiritual immortality as long as

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the written word existed was intimately tied up with the production of material things, and this concept was – to an extent – duplicated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century reading processes. Carvings and paintings asserted that the summoning of magical immaterial doubles could also be achieved by the power of the written word itself, intimately binding psychic, material and textual planes. The fourth chapter considers the exchanges between the spiritual and material worlds, linking this fundamental concept in Egyptian antiquity to the ‘internal vision’ conjured up during reading. Visions as represented internally and externally to these texts saturate fin-de-siècle culture in particular, from the high art of the aesthetes, symbolists and the early work of the canonical modernist writers through to advertising and literary potboilers, and even in the informal writings of, for example, the Egyptologist Amelia Edwards who penned a love poem from the perspective of an excavator to an Egyptian mummy addressed to her protégé, the archaeological pioneer Flinders Petrie. In fiction and in reality, these textually charged visualisations come about through the reading of stimulating passages, the smoking of opium-tainted cigarettes, and the inhalation of perfume or mummy dust. Mimicking the synaesthetic potency of these experiences, windows between fiction and reality are opened wide. The papery mummy cloths of the genuine Egyptological experience merge with the pages of the literary text; gold ornaments from digs become gilt on decorated covers. These nebulous artefacts are, in turn, projected onto dancers’ bodies (copying poses from papyri on incense-obscured stage sets); costume jewellery bears hieroglyphic markings and seems to merge with the skin, forming tattoos. As in the case of Egyptian statues of deities, modern bodies can be seen to become ‘agentic beings, fetishes that blur the taxonomies of subject and object’.39 These are innately heterotopic transferences, where elements from the ‘heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, [. . .] museums and libraries’ are transmitted onto the stage, and indeed, the early moving-picture theatres of the nineteenth century’s closing years.40 The longevity of the Egyptological tropes are such that in the early twentieth century, when movie theatres were often constructed in an Egyptianized style in a bid to emphasise the dreamlike and otherworldly, the films projected between gilded lotus columns were retellings of tales penned by nineteenth-century novelists. Combining the visual with the textual through costumes, props and intertitles, Egyptian things and the texts that defined them were represented via the most modern artistic media of the age, rendered in light projected through translucent film, the technological counterpart to drug-induced hallucination.

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Finally, this study turns to notions of visions and communications held to have a greater spiritual significance than the drug-induced dreams, or sensual fantasy that presaged magazine advertising of the twentieth century. Several individuals considered visions of ancient Egypt to be grounded in supernatural truth. The final chapter examines the Egyptologists on the peripheries of magical orders, including Wallis Budge and Battiscombe Gunn (1883–1950), those who took part in spiritualistic activities, such as Howard Carter, as well as the individuals who turned to and involved these specialists in their magical and spiritual undertakings. Examining the lives and works of Florence Farr (1860–1917), a leading magician in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Aleister Crowley (1875– 1947), alongside those who were more famous for their literary output including Sax Rohmer (1883–1959) and Haggard (both of whom suggested that their innate fascination with ancient Egypt might be evidence of having experienced past lives in this civilisation), it exposes networks of collaboration between Egyptologists and individuals interested in Egyptian rites and rituals, and connects these relationships with the Egyptological sites, works and artefacts to which those embroiled in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century esotericism were drawn. Egyptological experts often attempted to distance themselves from the supernatural tales that Egyptian artefacts were particularly liable to inspire, but this was by no means universal or indeed sustained over the course of individual lives and careers. Examining literary overlaps between esotericism and Egyptology during these decades illuminates one of the most intriguing aspects of cultural exchange that was taking place between this scholarly field and culture more broadly: Egyptian spirits and magical ceremonies which Egyptologists so frequently claimed had no place or potency in the modern world (besides fiction, of course) did, in fact, impress upon a number of practitioners; esotericists, meanwhile, turned to Egyptology and Egyptologists to buttress their rites, beliefs and experiences. Overall, Writing the Sphinx demonstrates the close and multifaceted interactions between literature and the Egyptological across the period in question. It argues for a collapse in perceived boundaries between books and Egyptian artefacts, where objects within the book, objects external to the book and the book as object are considered in tandem, drawing upon recent work in thing theory, the history of the book, material and cultural studies. The book can be considered a particularly versatile multimedia nineteenth- and twentieth-century vessel: it can reproduce paintings, photographs, lithographs and

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become, like the museum, a collection of objects (albeit, by necessity, a collection of reproductions, in most cases). Occasionally this study deals with objects which are now lost, and can be grasped at only through literary recollections: the book has the power to call forth the artefact from the aether. All the individuals to whom this study turns have also, by necessity, left literary traces. Many of them produced their own books, consulted each other’s books, and reproduced artefacts in their books that they had encountered at museums, whether in factual or fictional text. Egyptology – and Egypt – was at the centre of this web of collaboration, allusion and exchange. As a result of its ‘otherness’, its relative accessibility, the public fervour stirred up by its gilded discoveries and the ancient language that its scholars had so recently decoded, its high-profile practitioners (both expert and amateur) and its wide range of associations in the cultural consciousness (from magic and longevity, to sexual desire and horror), Egyptology infiltrated the libraries, lives and minds of an extraordinarily eclectic audience.

Notes 1. [George Eliot], ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, 20 (1856), 442–61 (p. 458). 2. Ibid. Eliot’s phrase ‘sympathetic divination’ anticipates claims by particular authors that they had special spiritual connections to ancient Egyptian civilisation. Eliot was likely familiar with some Egyptological works, as well as Egyptological artefacts encountered at the British Museum; see Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt,1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 66. 3. [Eliot], ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, pp. 458–9. 4. The economic depression of the 1930s also coincided with the deaths of several of the most high-profile nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptologists, including Émile Brugsch (1930), Henry Reginald Hall (1930), Mary Brodrick (1933), Archibald Sayce (1933), E. A. Wallis Budge (1934), Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1934), Arthur Surridge Hunt (1934), Albert Lythgoe (1934), T. Eric Peet (1934), Arthur Weigall (1934), James Henry Breasted (1935), Grafton Elliot Smith (1937) and Howard Carter (1939). 5. For one of the most thorough summaries of nineteenth-century British culture and its relation to Egypt, see Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 87–152. See also Eleanor Dobson, ‘Introduction’,

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

17

in Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt, ed. Eleanor Dobson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2020). See, for instance, Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises, 1882–1922 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). F. Robert Hunter, ‘Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies, 40.5 (2004), 28–54. On science and religion, see David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Sara Brio, ‘The Shocking Truth: Science, Religion, and Ancient Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 40.4 (2018), 331–44; Sara Woodward, ‘“The Sphinx will speak at last”: Theology and Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Fiction’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 2020). On magic and occultism, see Alison Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On gender and sexuality, see Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt,1840–1910; Eleanor Dobson, ‘Cross-Dressing Scholars and Mummies in Drag’, Aegyptiaca: Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt, 4 (2019), 33–54; Eleanor Dobson, ‘Emasculating Mummies: Gender and Psychological Threat in Fin-de-Siècle Mummy Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 40.4 (2018), 397–407. For the most thorough assessment of Murray’s work, see Kathleen L. Sheppard, The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology (Plymouth: Lexington, 2013). Stephanie Moser, ‘Reconstructing Ancient Worlds: Reception Studies and Ancient Egypt’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 22.4 (2015), 1263–1308 (pp. 1277–8). Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978). Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, Mace Journals 0516b fol. 24; Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamen and Other Essays (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), p. 194; Alan H. Gardiner, ‘Writing and Literature’, in The Legacy of Egypt, ed. S. R. K. Glanville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 74, n. 1. See Margaret Murray, My First Hundred Years (London: William Kimber, 1963), p. 86. On the reception of Akhenaten, see Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2000). Pentaweret also features (as ‘Pentaur’ or ‘Pent-ar’ respectively) in H. Rider Haggard’s novel Moon of Israel (1918) and George Griffith’s short story ‘The Lost Elixir’ (1903). Penawaret continued to radiate cultural ripples:

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18

16.

17. 18.

19.

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Writing the Sphinx in ‘Une cantilène de Pentaour’ (written in 1924), a poem by the Belgian writer Marguerite Yourcenar ‘based on one of lyrics in the 12th Dynasty Dialogue of a Man and his Ba, “Death is before me today”, that is preserved on a papyrus acquired in 1843 for the Egyptian Museum, Berlin’; see R. B. Parkinson, ‘“Une cantilène de Pentaour”: Marguerite Yourcenar and Middle Kingdom Literature’, in Egyptian Stories: A British Egyptological Tribute to Alan B. Lloyd, on the Occasion of his Retirement, ed. T. Schneider and K. Szpakowska (Münster: Ugarit, 2007), 301–8 (p. 302). Haggard’s involvement in the Egyptological world was such that he is included in Who Was Who in Egyptology. The entry recognizes that ‘his novels were extremely popular, several of them being based on ancient Egyptian themes’ and that ‘he had a small but choice selection of Egyptian antiquities’; see Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill, ‘HAGGARD, (Sir) Henry Rider (1856–1925)’, in Who Was Who in Egyptology, 3rd rev. edn (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1995), p. 185. ‘Notices of Recent Publications’, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1.1 (1914), 78. As Montserrat observes, Norma Lorimer’s A Wife out of Egypt (1913) refers to one ‘Professor Eritep’, based on Flinders Petrie; see Montserrat, Akhenaten, p. 152. William Henry Warner’s The Bridge of Time (1919) makes reference to one ‘Professor Dodge’, likely based on E. A. Wallis Budge; see William Henry Warner, The Bridge of Time (New York: Scott & Seltzer, 1919). In H.D.’s Palimpsest (1926), ‘Bodge-Grafton’ is a combination of Budge and Grafton Elliot Smith; see Marsha Bryant and Mary Ann Eaverly, ‘EgyptoModernism: James Henry Breasted, H.D., and the New Past’, Modernism/modernity, 14.3 (2007), 435–53 (p. 445). For the identification of the unnamed Museum Director as Gaston Maspero, and links between the protagonist and Grafton Elliot Smith in Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1912), see Eleanor Dobson, ‘Gods and Ghost-Light: Ancient Egypt, Electricity and X-Rays’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 45.1 (2017), 119–35 (p. 128). Julia Briggs suggests that ‘[t]he nicest and most level-headed of the [British Museum] officials’ in E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet is based on Budge; see Julia Briggs, Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), p. 274. Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 12; Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill, ‘MARIETTE, (Pasha) François Auguste Ferdinand (1821– 1881)’, in Who Was Who in Egyptology, pp. 275–7 (p. 276). There is a wealth of scholarship on Mariette and Aïda; see, for example, Brian M. Fagan, ‘Auguste Mariette and Verdi’s Aïda’, Antiquity, 51.201 (1977), 55; Edmund S. Meltzer, ‘Mariette and Aïda Once Again’, Antiquity,

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20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

19

52.302 (1978), 50; Jean-Marcel Humbert, ‘Mariette Pacha and Verdi’s Aïda’, Antiquity, 59.226 (1985), 101–5. Karen Sands-O’Connor, ‘Impertinent Miracles at the British Museum: Egyptology and Edwardian Fantasies for Young People’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 19.2 (2008), 224–37 (pp. 225–6). On the One Thousand and One Nights in the writings of Egyptologists, see Martin Willis, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. 123–6. Edward Poynter’s painting Israel in Egypt (1867) was, for example, reproduced in Georg Ebers’s Egypt: Descriptive, Historical, and Picturesque (1878–9), while an illustration derived from Lawrence AlmaTadema’s Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh’s Granaries (1874) featured in Ebers’s more lavish work Ägypten in Bild und Wort (1879–80). See Suzanne Marchand, ‘Popularizing the Orient in Fin de Siècle Germany’, Intellectual History Review, 17.2 (2007), 175–202 (pp. 183–4). See, for example, Gabriel Moshenska, ‘Unrolling Egyptian Mummies in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 47.3 (2014), 451–77; Kathleen L. Sheppard, ‘Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers’, Science in Context, 25.4 (2012), 525–49. Nicky Levell, Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel, and Collecting in the Victorian Age (London: Horniman Museum, 2000), p. 255. Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 84–116. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 26. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 223. David Pearson, Books as History: The Importance of Books Beyond their Texts (London: British Library; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2008), pp. 7–8; Martyn Lyons, Books: A Living History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), pp. 7–8. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 17. H. Rider Haggard, ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, in Smith and the Pharaohs and Other Stories (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith, 1920), pp. 7–74 (p. 11). Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 22. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), p. 55. Bill Brown, ‘The Matter of Materialism: Literary Mediations’, in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), pp. 60–78 (p. 60).

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34. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1–22 (p. 5). 35. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 13. 36. Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), i (1923), pp. 95–6. 37. On this subject, see Rosalie David, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt (London: Penguin, 2002). 38. Okasha El-Daly elucidates Arab philological scholarship from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, as well as the work of the seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher; see Okasha El-Daly, Egyptology: The Missing Millennium (London: UCL Press, 2005). 39. Lynn Meskell, ‘Introduction: Object Orientations’, in Archaeologies of Materiality, ed. Lynn Meskell (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 1–17 (p. 5). 40. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, Foucault, Info, http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia .en.html [accessed 25 January 2019].

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Chapter 1

‘Wonderful things’: Howard Carter, Literary Genre and Material Intertextuality

In 1923, the world well and truly under the spell of ‘Tutmania’,1 Howard Carter (1874–1939) and A. C. Mace (1874–1928) published what has come to be one of the most famous accounts of an archaeological discovery in the modern age. This, the first of the three volumes of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, was a far cry from the ‘small popular [. . .] interesting little book’ that the pair had originally envisaged.2 It includes the following description: Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway were removed, until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things.’ Then widening the hole a little further, so that we both could see, we inserted an electric torch.3

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This now fabled passage has been quoted (and misquoted) so frequently that minor details are often altered, and sometimes sections omitted – the last sentence of the passage, which concludes this chapter of the book, is customarily cut – yet two phrases remain the same in all versions: ‘everywhere the glint of gold’, and Carter’s response to Lord Carnarvon’s (1866–1923) question, ‘wonderful things’. As Scott Trafton notes, this section of the account has its origins in Carter’s excavation diary, and the passage was heavily revised and embellished before publication in the above format.4 Trafton observes that Carter and Mace’s description ‘partakes of highly developed narrative techniques that were in use well before its composition’, referring specifically to the ‘adventure tale’.5 In the preparation of this text for mass public consumption, changes to what was originally intended to be a personal document were inevitable, and these enduring and haunting phrases were among those that Carter had modified in order to enhance the sensational aspects of the narrative’s tone. The first chapter of this book examines the generic complexity and materiality of Egyptological volumes across the literary culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with an evaluation of the stylistic flexibility demonstrated in the volumes of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, it also takes as its focus the gilded covers, edges, endpapers and all of the texts’ paratextual apparatus and bibliographic code (after Gérard Genette and Jerome McGann) as significant in creating a multisensory, multimedia encounter with the text and the material relics it evokes.6 Addressing lesser-known writings by Carter comprising his diary entries as well as his account of the loss of his canary for Pearson’s Magazine – ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ (1923) – it considers the diverse audiences that Egyptologists appealed to across their publications, the tensions between public and private accounts, and the marketisation of supposedly true events sensitive to contemporaneous demand for particular literary genres. This chapter ultimately argues for a breakdown between the rigid boundaries that divide Egyptological texts from fiction-writing; fiction draws upon the conventions of scholarly volumes as scholarly volumes draw upon the conventions of fiction. Further, this symbiotic exchange can be traced not only in the text, but in the book as physical artefact.

Image, Text and Egyptological Storytelling The ‘glint of gold’ that glitters upon every surface in the tomb in Carter’s published account finds its origin in his description of ‘a

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confusion of overturned parts of chariots glinting with gold’ in his diary.7 These gilded fragments make up just a small section of the original inventory of funerary ornaments that Carter catalogues in his diary, rendered visible by the use of a candle and electric torch. In the published account, however, everything that Carter records after the first glimpse illuminated by the light of the lambent flame is excluded to allow the chapter to end at the climactic moment; indeed, Carter recognised the literariness inherent in concluding the chapter at this point, claiming (somewhat unconvincingly, given the swathes of detail in the subsequent chapter), that ‘[i]t was the discovery that my memory was blank, and not the mere desire for dramatic chapter-ending’ responsible for this break in the narrative.8 Instead of ‘gilded’ artefacts being listed in succession when hit by an electric beam, every surface is made to glitter with metallic iridescence in a hazy, dreamlike version of the discovery, where the ‘strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects’ in the diary entry transform into ‘strange animals, statues and gold’ in the published account.9 Carter and Mace emphasise the unseen and the unknown; in the original version in Carter’s journal, his reply to Carnarvon’s enquiry as to whether he can see within – ‘Yes, it is wonderful’ – does not have the same rhetorical power as ‘Yes, wonderful things’, with its more enticing connotations of items too extraordinary to describe.10 Carnarvon’s article in The Times – and the typewritten and manually corrected record of the events that formed the basis of this article, dated 10 December 1922, the day before its publication – records another variant: ‘There are some marvellous objects here.’11 In Carter’s rewritten account of events in The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, unknown ‘things’ shimmer through a ‘mist’ that simultaneously obscures and tantalises.12 Carter evidently took pleasure in heightening the literariness of his account; he deemed this famous phrase adapted from his diary – ‘everywhere the glint of gold’ – worthy of repetition in the second volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen published in 1927.13 It is evident that the original passage in Carter’s diary is more selfconsciously literary than many of his other entries, suggesting, as one might expect, that he found this moment particularly stimulating; most are brief fragments of pragmatic, scholarly record that are not even shaped into complete sentences. These efficient notes – utilitarian statements about the work that had been achieved that day – do not make for a thrilling read and Carter clearly knew that they would not be as commercially viable as an embellished account. The details that Carter and Mace overlook in the final version include the drier

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archaeological necessities – the ‘preliminary notes’ that were made before breaking through into the sepulchre – and Carter’s matterof-fact conclusion to his diary entry, in which he records how they closed up the hole into the tomb, rode back to their accommodation and requested that the Chief Inspector of the Antiquities Department join them in inspecting the site with electric lights the next day. Through stylistic enhancement and omission, and with the aid of Carter’s ‘dear friend Mr. Percy White’ (1852–1938), ‘the novelist’ and Professor of English Literature in the Egyptian University’, who provided ‘ungrudging literary help’, the original diary entry was reworked into a marketable, romanticised version of events that succeeded in capturing the popular imagination and allowed Carter, ‘not only [. . .] a learned expert [but] an archaeologist gifted with imagination’, room to flex his literary muscles.14 Letters from White to Carter dated 1925 and auctioned by Bonhams in 2012 include a couple of sentences that indicate that White himself may well be the author of the famous phrase ‘wonderful things’. White states, ‘I’ve received all your diaries to date & have recast them into narrative form. They will need, of course, revision.’15 This communication, written in 1925, comes after the publication of the first volume of Carter’s three-volume work, so White refers to the preparation of the second volume, but there is room to speculate that he had an equal hand in the first, and may well have tweaked Carter’s response to Carnarvon’s question noted in his excavation journals. In so doing, White, on a small scale, may have had a hand in rewriting history. White had a moderately successful career in the early twentieth century, though his work attracted criticism for its more sensational qualities. His novel Cairo (1914) had been described by a reviewer for The Spectator as a ‘melodrama of a popular, not uncommon type’, not altogether dissimilar to Carter and Mace’s publication: Mr. White cannot help being clever: he possesses the enviable power of seeing below the surface, and of creating brilliant atmospheric effects: if he would rid himself of the sense of plot and of adventure, he might do some admirable work on broad and individual lines.16

Given White’s expertise at ‘creating brilliant atmospheric effects’ to heighten ‘the sense [. . .] of adventure’ in his fictional narratives, it is clear why Carter enlisted his aid in enhancing his own (predominantly) factual account. Indeed, the style of Carter and Mace’s publication was so perceptibly literary that those involved with the

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excavation, their associates and the press, repeatedly drew parallels between this supposedly factual text and classical myths, legends, romance, Gothic and genre fiction. The most notable exception was the writer Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) – who married Evelyn Gardner (1903–94), Carnarvon’s niece, in 1929 – who praised ‘Carter’s books and the official catalogue’ as ‘accurate and restrained accounts’.17 Most read this narrative rather differently. One reviewer of the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen pronounced that Carter ‘has produced a mystery story for the bedside electric light’.18 Lady Burghclere (1864–1933), Carnarvon’s sister, described the events as ‘[a] story that opens like Aladdin’s Cave, and ends like a Greek myth of Nemesis’, while the Daily Mirror considered it ‘the most romantic episode in the history of Egyptian research’.19 In a piece entitled ‘The Greatest Archaeological Romance of the Centuries’, the Mid-Week Pictorial stated that, when reading the accounts, ‘[i]t is as though one stepped on the magic carpet of Oriental story’.20 Mace himself even attributed the sensation stirred up by the tomb to ‘the fact that we are all, even the most prosaic of us, children under our skins, and thrill deliciously at the very idea of buried treasure, sealed doorways, jewelled robes, inlay of precious stones, kings’ regalia’. The discovery of the tomb cache, he declared, allowed one to ‘openly and unashamedly indulge an intellectual appetite that has hitherto been nourished surreptitiously on detective stories and murder cases in the press’.21 Mace, too, in this description, favours a highly embellished style perceptible in this first of the three volumes, indicative of his own contributions alongside those of Carter and White. Evidently, the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen chimed with a variety of literary genres in the minds of its readers as well as its writers. Beginning with a biography of Carnarvon, and including facsimiles of letters, as well as a number of photographs, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen engaged with a range of media and narrative styles, anchoring it within the centre of a nebulous body of Egyptological literature that experimented (however subtly) with literary and scholarly conventions. Expert readers, however, were not so easily beguiled. So evident was the hybridity of Carter and Mace’s publication that, when it was reviewed in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology by Stephen Glanville (1900–56), it was criticised as unsuccessful in its attempts ‘to do justice to the archaeological revelation which it commemorates’.22 Glanville lamented – erroneously – that the book would have little appeal to either the general public or to Egyptologists as a result of its generic heterogeneity. Yet while he considered it an ‘unscientific’

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account, he remarked that it would nevertheless impart something ‘expected from more serious study’ to ‘whoever finds the leisure to read this book’, Egyptologist and layperson alike.23 Rising from the ashes of its predecessor, the Archaeological Report (1892–1911), The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology itself aimed to appeal to both specialist and lay readers. In its first issue in this new guise, the editorial statement declared that the publication ‘will contain articles, some, specialized and technical, intended mainly for experts, others, simpler in character, such as will be intelligible to all who care for Egypt and its marvellous interests’.24 Ultimately, though, Glanville’s views on Carter and Mace’s publication are ambiguous and sometimes contradictory. He makes a point of noting that only a fraction of the tomb’s contents are described in any detail and yet praises that the catalogue is relayed ‘without being monotonous’.25 While he notes that Carter is prone to ‘stylistic lapses’, he relishes the ways in which ‘Mr. Carter works up the excitement of the “treasure-hunt” [. . .] till the reader is strung to the right pitch to receive the dénouement of the discovery’, using a literary term to underline that the climax of the account’s events resembles that of novel or play.26 Glanville, for all his criticisms, cannot help but admire Carter’s skill as a storyteller. The heightening of tension before the moment in which Carter first peers into the tomb is one of the major alterations between Carter’s published account and his original diary entry. As Trafton asserts, ‘the shift from one to the other is largely one of narrative suspense’.27 The ‘cliffhanging break and the delayed, reflective renewal’ in particular, align Carter’s writing with ‘dramatic principles taken directly from popular fictions of many kinds’.28 This appeal to the popular imagination appears to have been the major cause of Glanville’s conflicted opinion of the text. While, as an Egyptologist, he can neither fully laud nor condemn the book, he allows himself to be seduced if not convinced by Carter’s captivating prose. Just as Egyptological or factual volumes borrowed from popular fiction, so fictional texts included scientific or pseudo-scientific elements. Several critics have established the generic overlaps between archaeological writing and disparate literary modes. Martin Willis notes similarities between the literature of archaeology and that of travel, while parallels have also been drawn between travel writing and adventure fiction, scientific essays, biographical or historical writing, and journalism. 29 Statistical studies indicate that publications with geographical, travel or historical subject matter fulfilled similar functions to the burgeoning body of juvenile fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in terms of sales data, these categories would appear to be

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analogous.30 Equally, of the considerable body of scholarship that has investigated adventure fiction – or ‘New Romance’ – and its relationship to ‘the rhetorical modes of fact-based science’, most scholars cite the use of ‘footnotes, maps, photographs, glossaries, and appendices’ as features transplanted from one genre to another.31 Critics of the novelist H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925), in particular, have noted intertextual dialogues between his fiction as it was serialised in newspapers, and archaeological reports from Egypt, as well as imperialistic journalism and illustration.32 The adornments of Egyptological texts – pyramids, obelisks, hieroglyphs and scarabs among the most common symbols used to announce a book’s contents – were emblematic of a material intertextuality that typified volumes drawing upon ancient Egypt. Fiction with Egyptian themes was often published with visual trimmings that emulated those of the illustrated gift book – such as embossing or gilt on the covers, and the inclusion of plates – although these were invariably produced via cheaper methods in order to replicate this imagery for the middle-class mass market.33 What these generic overlaps reveal is a broader ‘umbrella’ Egyptological genus that defies traditional categories of fact and fiction, and is instead characterised by versatility, permeability and a certain corporeality. These inter-generic dialogues should not surprise us. As David Fishelov states in Metaphors of Genre (1993), across eras and artistic movements ‘there is always a latent demand for innovation from the artist’.34 Here, Fishelov identifies the reader’s role in the motivation of generic transformation. As the consumer seeks out a combination of the familiar and the novel, works are produced to appeal to this dual desire. Hence, texts seize upon the conventions of alternative literary modes and separate discourses (including those of the museum), and, across genres, book bindings replicate and twist imagery to create an object that is fresh and yet unthreatening, with an established target audience. Key to an understanding as to why different generic conventions can be deployed with such success is a consideration of the omnivorous consumption habits of the market. To assert that particular demographics desired only specific genres or exclusively ‘high’ or ‘low’ forms of culture would be an underestimation of the diversity of heterogeneous consumer tastes and practices. In relationship to Egyptological works, generic divisions based on textual form or intended audience are largely unhelpful, and divide publications which are more rewarding when considered in tandem, as part of a greater body united by content. In the case of texts concerning ancient Egypt in the period, inter-generic relationships and a collective substantiality based on the same sorts of iconography

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appear to be crucial.35 If, as John Hartley proposes, we comprehend genre ‘as a property of the relations between texts’, we can tease out intertextual meanings both internal and external to established generic categories in productive ways.36 Approaching genre from the perspective promoted by Franco Moretti – ‘slicing up and reordering the continuum of literary history’ – does not necessarily involve a reversal of this openness to generic relationships: instead of branding these texts with monolithic definitions that cannot fully describe the complexities of each individual book, they might be understood by conceiving them as existing within structures akin to ‘trees from evolutionary theory’, as different species within the same genus.37 Returning to The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, and turning to the volumes’ paratextual materiality and its relationship to the text’s complex generic make-up, the relationship between the text of the published account and the accompanying photographs is used to further the curious and theatrical tone that Carter is so careful to craft.38 Harry Burton (1879–1940) of the Metropolitan Museum in New York took thousands of photographs of the site, the relics and the archaeological process, habitually shooting the pictures to accentuate the ‘strangeness’ of the tomb and its artefacts. Burton’s work is certainly historically significant: he was responsible for shooting ‘the first [. . .] moving film footage ever taken in the history of archaeology’ on the dig.39 In the second volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, Carter recognises Burton’s documentary dexterity as well as his artistic flair, praising ‘[t]he very skilful photographs he has made [which] are of extraordinary beauty as well as of great archæological value’.40 In this second volume in particular, one image highlights Burton’s careful composition and dramatic use of lighting. Plate 12 depicts Carter ‘opening the door of the second shrine’, which as the accompanying text notes, revealed nothing more than ‘a third shrine [. . .] sealed and intact’ (Fig. 1.1).41 The tools of Burton’s trade are visible in this image, however, and suggest something far more tantalising behind the door. A flood lamp is directed so that it points through the doorway, giving the impression of light being reflected from within (given Carter’s famous phrase, we might assume that this luminosity indicates an enormous quantity of gilded artefacts just beyond our vision). The composition of the photograph – Carter’s posed wonderment and the mysterious illumination – is a glamorised representation that would have indulged the popular imagination. Yet Carter himself could see no glowing treasures. Rather than a detached scholarly record, Burton’s image intentionally amplifies the dramatic atmosphere within the tomb.42

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Figure 1.1 Harry Burton, ‘Opening the door of the second shrine’, in Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), ii (1927), pl. 12. Author’s own.

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Figure 1.2 G. L. Seymour, ‘A blaze of light burst upon my eyes’, in J. Arbuthnot Wilson [Grant Allen], ‘My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies’, Belgravia, 37.148 (1879), 93–105 (facing p. 96). Source: HathiTrust

This photograph in particular gestures towards the extensive tradition of adventure fiction, recalling the single illustration by G. L. Seymour with which Grant Allen’s (1848–99) burlesque ‘My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies’ (1879) first appeared in Belgravia (Fig. 1.2).43 The source of light in the image accompanying Allen’s text is revealed to have been produced by the mummies that inhabit the pyramid that the protagonist is exploring, who come to life once every thousand years. While the implication of Burton’s image is far more mundane than the account put forth in Allen’s supernatural fiction – or else in Charlotte Bryson Taylor’s (1880–1936) novel In the Dwellings of the Wilderness (1904) which also uses the trope of a mysterious light-source shining from within a newly opened tomb – the presence of the light, which bespeaks unfathomable quantities of treasure, conforms, in its extravagant hyperbole, to the conventions of the Gothic or imperialistic adventure story. This heightened ‘strangeness’ is further emphasised by the image accompanying Carter’s famous passage in the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen detailing the omnipresent ‘glint of gold’ reflecting off the tomb’s ‘wonderful things’. On the page facing the passage’s conclusion is one of the book’s seventy-nine plates (Plate 15; Fig. 1.3),

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Figure 1.3 Harry Burton, ‘View of the antechamber as seen from the passage through the steel grille’, in Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), i (1923), pl. 15. Author’s own.

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yet, unlike most of the other images, the black-and-white photograph does not correspond with the moment Carter and Mace describe on the opposite page. While the artefacts barely visible through the opening of Plate 15 are those that Carter first saw when he held his candle to the spyhole into the antechamber, the accompanying image is from a different perspective. Instead, it shows a view into the antechamber after it had been fully opened, behind a steel gate which was installed on 17 December 1922, over three weeks after the primary breakthrough (notably, not indicated in the caption), and lit from within by electric lighting. The decision to insert the plate at this point, whether Carter’s, Mace’s or the publisher’s, is largely artistic. Photographs of the view of the first glimpse into the tomb, if taken, were inadequate; Carter notes in his journal entry on 25 November 1922: ‘Made photographic records, which were not, as they afterwards proved, very successful.’44 Burton’s services had not yet been requested, and, while other members of the dig had their own photographic equipment, lighting conditions at this time – before the installation of electric lighting in the tomb – were likely unsuitable for photography. This image was, perhaps, the closest the Burton could visually approximate to the moment recorded in the text. Burton’s ingenuity is again apparent, paralleling either the authors’ or publisher’s creativity in the placement of this photograph at this point: the picture complements Carter’s description, the metal grille which distorts and partially obscures the funerary ornaments offering a substitute for the more romantic spectral mist in the written account. One particular item is discernible: a stretched, misshapen animal form that stares back with a stylised Egyptian eye. There is so little sense of scale in this image that the opening that reveals the illuminated objects at the end of the passageway might be actual size, creating the effect whereby the reader feels that they themselves might put their eye to the aperture and peer into the tomb. This particular view is enlarged just three plates further on; Plate 18 shows the ‘Interior of Antechamber: The Hathor Couch’ and the offerings that surround it. The ‘strange animals’ that Carter describes are only revealed to be pieces of furniture in the subsequent chapter, although he continues to emphasise their monstrous theatricality. Carter relates how he first observed these ‘[u]ncanny beasts’, ‘their brilliant gilded surfaces picked out of the darkness by our electric torch, as though by limelight, their heads throwing grotesque distorted shadows on the wall’.45 Even after this narratorial peak, Carter and Mace continue to report their discoveries with a sensational inflection, and having gazed down the rabbit hole at peculiar creatures in Plate 15,

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the reader (and the archaeologists) might as well have fallen into Wonderland. Working alongside White, whose creative input was acknowledged in the volumes of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, Carter also published ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, an account which has since received negligible critical attention.46 This narrative, the story of the canary that Carter had acquired and sadly lost on the dig, published in Pearson’s Magazine in November 1923, is written from White’s perspective, but largely recounted as if listening to Carter telling the story in conversation. A disclaimer written by Carter prefaces the story: ‘[s]o many inaccurate accounts of the incident have been circulated, that I thought it worth while to publish, in conjunction with my friend Percy White, the novelist, the following account of the death of my canary.’ It is branded ‘A true incident connected with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen’, but reads more like a short story typical of the kind of fantasy or Gothic horror material that Pearson’s so frequently printed. By this point Pearson’s had a history for publishing Egyptian narratives with a supernatural twist: August 1909 had seen the publication of an issue which promised a ‘true ghost story’ within, and featured an image of the artefact that had come to be known as the ‘unlucky mummy’ on the front page. While Carter met stories of the curse of Tutankhamun with exasperation, his frustration evidently did not stop him from making his own contribution to the swelling rumours. He enlisted the aid of the very novelist who had contributed to the works through which already Carter had expressed this distaste, while simultaneously and deliberately drawing upon the literary genres whose success was indebted to their supernatural atmosphere. Carter’s motives are further complicated by the fact that there appears not to have been an effort to suppress the story of the canary prior to the writing of ‘The Tomb of the Bird’; a reporter from The New York Times was shown around the tomb and (although it is not clear by whom) told the tale: Incidentally, the day the tomb was opened and the party found these golden serpents in the crowns of the two statues there was an interesting incident at Carter’s house. He brought a canary with him this year to relieve his loneliness. When the party was dining, that night there was a commotion outside on the veranda. The party rushed out and found that a serpent of similar type to that in the crowns had grabbed the canary. They killed the serpent, but the canary died, probably from fright.47

Perhaps the chilling narrative was shared with visitors in order to heighten their experience of the tomb. Bearing in mind that variants

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of this narrative were already in circulation, Carter’s publication of the story may have been, somewhat paradoxically, an act of retaliation: Weigall – who was covering news of the tomb for the Daily Mail, attempting to thwart Carter and Carnarvon’s deal to release information only to The Times – had included a section on Carter’s canary in Tutankhamen, and Other Essays earlier that same year, capitalising upon the success of the discovery and the supernatural rumours that were then spreading rapidly.48 Carter, then, might be seen to have struck back at Weigall by offering his own supernaturally charged, first-hand version of events. Carter’s rejection of the rumours of a mummy’s curse continued into the second volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen published in 1927, in which he not only claimed that ‘[i]t is not my intention to repeat the ridiculous stories which have been invented about the dangers lurking in ambush, as it were, in this tomb’, but ‘[i]f it be not actually libellous it points in that spiteful direction, and all sane people should dismiss such inventions with contempt’. While Carter observes that ‘[s]imilar tales have been a common feature of fiction for many years’ – narratives which ‘are mostly variants of the ordinary ghost story’, in his opinion ‘a legitimate form of literary amusement’ – this did not deter him from drawing upon supernatural tales in his own volumes, or indeed in ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, which, with its situation in Pearson’s, lent it a particularly (fictional) literary quality.49 The tone of ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ is conflicted: the authors are quick to criticise ‘willing victims of occult romanticism, who haunt psychic tea-parties, and whenever a tomb is opened, persuade themselves that forces long dormant have been let loose on an intruding world’ and, specifically, theories regarding ‘elementals’, a term that recalls the warnings issued by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) that these spirits were guarding the pharaoh’s tomb, as well as Algernon Blackwood’s (1869–1951) supernatural short story ‘The Nemesis of Fire’ (1908).50 Meanwhile, the picture they paint is one infused with Gothic tropes: the tomb itself is ‘spectral’, and the valley ‘haunted’ – anticipating Carter’s Gothicized descriptions of the silence of Tutankhamun’s tomb in which ‘you could almost hear the ghostly footsteps of the departing mourners’ – and Carter readily acknowledges that ‘[t]here is romance in [the story] – and mystery too’.51 The canary itself, which Carter overhears singing in a café, ‘became almost an obsession’, and, having acquired it, as he approaches the site of the archaeological dig with the bird, he notices that ‘its wonderful singing became more and more joyful’.52 Carter notes that ‘[i]t looked at you as though it were something more than

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a bird – and with strange eyes as though some other intelligence were at work in that little yellow head’, hardly encouraging his readers to accept the remarkable bird and the misfortune that befell it as entirely commonplace.53 Events then take an unsettling turn: when the steps down to the tomb are discovered, the bird’s singing stops. And on the day that the tomb’s seals are broken and Carter first enters the pharaoh’s final resting place, he receives news that a cobra has killed the bird; its death is expressed in such a way that suggests some kind of supernatural agency: as I realised what had happened, the significance which accompanies a moving and odd coincidence made itself felt even through the overwhelming excitement of the moment, for the ray of light from our candle revealed the contents of the ante-chamber to the tomb, and shone on the head of the King bearing on his forehead the Uraeus – the symbol of royalty and protection – the cobra!54

Here Carter makes it seem as if the light from the candle falls immediately upon a Uraeus (presumably that crowning one of the two guardian statues) rather than the gilt couches which he records as perceiving first in the original volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen.55 This detail corresponds instead with his journal entry, in which he describes the light first revealing ‘two strange ebony-black effigies of a King, gold sandalled, bearing staff and mace, [which] loomed out from the cloak of darkness’, suggesting – contrary to what one might naturally assume – that there are details in this narrative which are more accurate than in the more scholarly account.56 Carter’s pocket diary, meanwhile, records that on 24 November 1922 ‘Lady E. arrived. and brought bird.’ – in Carter’s pocket diaries and journals the canary is never mentioned again.57 Given that Carter’s pocket diaries also record that the steps were discovered on 5 November and here the bird is recorded as arriving on 24 November, the timeline that Carter and White provide in ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ does not correlate with more reliable records: the detail about Carter’s canary stopping singing when the steps are discovered can only be a fabrication. A little more digging suggests a happier ending for the canary. While it is of course plausible that Carter replaced the original bird,58 the diaries of Minnie Burton, Harry Burton’s wife, make reference to a canary belonging to Carter as late as 16 April 1924. Burton records on this date that she ‘brought Mr Carter’s canary to Mr Parissis the Bank Manager’ whom she met at the Luxor Hotel.59 A sinister end for the bird, however, certainly makes for a better story.

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Emphasising the tale’s nods to adventure fiction, the illustrator Howard K. Elcock decorated the text of ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ with hieroglyphs, religious iconography and tomb architecture around the edges of the text, along with a half-page illustration of the dénouement, an image replete with pith helmets akin to the artistic subjects of The Boy’s Own Paper or an H. Rider Haggard novel. Elcock was a versatile illustrator: bookending his work for ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, he provided material for Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ (1923) and Agatha Christie’s (1890–1976) ‘While the Light Lasts’ (1924). He also produced ‘drawings to illustrate the activities of spiritualists such as Daniel Dunglas Home [1833–86] and tourism posters for various train companies’, demonstrating his ability to produce images designed to capture the eye as well as to stir up any supernatural proclivities.60 Furthermore, prior to ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, Elcock had already illustrated a story with Egyptian themes for Pearson’s Magazine: Austin R. Freeman’s (1862–1943) ‘The Blue Scarab’ (1923). Through his work on ‘The Blue Scarab’, appearing a matter of months before ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, Elcock gained experience illustrating Egyptian-themed mystery fiction, standing him in good stead for Carter and White’s purportedly factual – though no less fantastical – text. In the borders that surround the text of ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, Elcock blends imagery from genuine artefacts – one scene shows the opening of the mouth ceremony from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer (Elcock was, however, less fastidious when it came to the transcription of names within cartouches) – with illustrations of details from Carter and White’s story, such as images of the canary, the cobra, and the genuine funerary ornaments from the tomb itself, including the iconic pair of guardian statues. The illustrations in ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ clearly merge Egyptological fact with fancy, in parallel with the subtle, sophisticated compositions of Harry Burton’s photographs in The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, which enhance the cinematic aspects of the discovery not merely in order to showcase his artistic talent but, in the context of the volumes, in order to further beguile the reader. While doing so via different media, illustrative material in both publications seeks to dazzle. Most significantly, ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ illuminates how Carter and White were aware of, and playing to, a diverse readership through their collaborative projects. Comparing the beautiful and lavishly produced volumes of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen with ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ brings into focus the ways in which these works were marketed. ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, published in the same year as the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen (with its photographic

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plates, endpapers decorated in coloured ink, and gilt highlights on the covers), is clearly directed towards an audience with less disposable income, or indeed less of a sustained interest in the scholarly rigours of Egyptology, than The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen. The issue of Pearson’s in which ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ appeared was priced at a shilling, while the first and second volumes of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen cost a hefty thirty-one shillings and sixpence each, the third being priced at a more modest eighteen shillings.61 Instead, ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ appeals to those with an appetite for the mysterious and the uncanny, perhaps individuals who had been casually following stories of the curse in the newspapers. While the well-made book (produced as sheets of inked paper and protected by boards with elaborate gilt decorations) evokes the mummy in papery wrappings inscribed with text and contained within a sarcophagus embellished with hammered gold, the pages of the middle-class magazine could still suggest an Egyptian past. While this format could not aspire to the pharaonic grandeur evoked in more expensive volumes, its line drawings could still recall images of papyrus, ‘the earliest form of paper’, marked with simple strokes of ink.62 Common to both publications, however, was the notion that a range of literary genres were at play: as this chapter has already demonstrated, readers of and contributors to The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen likened the volumes to all variety of literary types. ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ followed suit, drawing upon the romance, the mystery, the Gothic story and the adventure tale, as well as the memoir. Carter and Mace certainly had an abundance of material at their disposal to inform the tone of the record presented in The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen; theirs was by no means the first Egyptological text to owe its readability to an emphasis upon the fanciful and the sensational. The Australian anthropologist Grafton Elliot Smith (1871– 1937) produced a monograph in the same year, Tutankhamen: and the Discovery of his Tomb by the late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter (1923), in which he recommended additional reading, including Arthur Weigall’s The Life and Times of Akhanaton (1910). This, he states, ‘gives a popular and romantic picture of his conception of the history of the times of Tutankhamen and his father-in-law’ (my emphasis).63 Clearly, Egyptological texts were not necessarily empirical accounts recorded by impartial observers, but could be emotionally charged exercises in which writers injected imaginative colour into the facts. Smith’s own prose is far from dry, but maintains a loftier and more scholarly register than that of Carter and Mace’s volume (the binding anticipates its less sensationalised prose: the cover is plain

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save for the uncoloured impression of a couchant sphinx). Smith would shortly come to brush with the literary elite when, in the following year, he was contacted by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) who requested that he contribute an article to his magazine The Criterion.64 The resultant essay, ‘The Glamour of Gold’ (1925), would exploit the magnetism of Carter’s famous phrase, commenting on ‘the peculiar magical properties attributed to gold’, and the origins of its veneration within ancient cultures, with particular emphasis upon Egyptian civilisation.65 Smith’s selection of gold’s unique appeal as the subject for his essay can be seen as his response to the contemporary fascination with the extensive use of gilding on Egyptian artefacts – the metal representing ‘the luminous fluid of the sun’ – in light of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, whose funerary ornaments were gilded with ‘almost incredible lavishness’.66 It was, so often, gold that captured the imagination: Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) saw fit to write to Virginia Woolf (1882– 1941) from Egypt of how she ‘went down into the bowels of the earth and looked at Tut-ankh-amen. At his sarcophagus and outer mummycase, I mean. This is merely of gilded wood. The inner one is at Cairo, (I saw it,) and is of solid gold.’ The Valley of the Kings commands fascination in its contrasts: the ‘austere hills’ above and, underneath the surface, ‘undiscovered Kings lying lapped in gold’.67 Perhaps it was as a result of the near-unbelievable glamour of the cache – a golden glamour that provoked fascination in so many who encountered the gilded artefacts – that Smith did not begrudge Carter and Mace their descriptive account of 1923, instead remarking that ‘[a]rchæologists familiar with all the marvels of Egyptian art [. . .] have exhausted their vocabularies of wonder and admiration in attempting to depict the splendours of Tutankhamen’s tomb’.68 Scholarly writing, in Smith’s opinion, inevitably fell short of doing justice to the indescribable brilliance of the hoard. Smith’s engagement with texts produced by amateur enthusiasts is also evident in his volume; he reveals a dismissive familiarity with theories proposed in unrestrained and improbable imaginings of subsequent findings: I do not propose to enter into any further discussion of the contents of the wonderful shrine or canopy which is to be investigated next winter, nor to attempt to anticipate the result of the examination of the socalled ‘canopic’ chest, which is said to be a unique example of the sculptor’s art. The experience gained in investigating the contents of such chests in other tombs gives one confidence in assuming that the heart of Tutankhamen will not be found in it, as so many writers imagine,

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but that its four compartments will contain respectively the liver, lungs, stomach and intestines of Tutankhamen, his ‘heart and reins’ being left in his body.69

It is difficult to avoid reading Smith’s use of the all-encompassing term ‘writers’ as somewhat derogatory. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun sparked a flurry of literary activity that did not necessarily restrict its minutiae to unyielding historical axioms (literature that was considered frivolous and, worse yet, poorly researched). As Smith affirms, the public was often particularly concerned with the pharaoh’s heart, both literally and metaphorically. After the opening of the tomb, poetry speculating upon Tutankhamun’s amorous affairs filled the newspapers almost instantaneously, and within a matter of months titles such as Archie Bell’s (1877–1932?) King Tut-Ankh-Amen: His Romantic History (1923) and Richard Goyne’s (1902–1957) The Kiss of Pharaoh: The Love Story of Tutankhamen (1923) were gracing bookshop shelves.70 Bell’s novel physically incorporated the imagery of the tomb itself, with its blue covers featuring lettering, scarabs and the distinctive funerary mask of Tutankhamun picked out in gold, iconography with which his readership were, by this stage, more than familiar.

The Book as Artefact Egyptologically inflected books were intentionally presented as beautiful items recalling ancient treasures, intended for both use and, like the museal artefact, display. Unlike the artefact, however, the commercially produced book could not conform to idealist aesthetical notions of the highest forms of art because it was so rarely the result of one single autonomous ‘artist’, but instead a collaborative effort by multiple writers, editors and illustrators who all contributed to the finished work.71 Rather than, for example, a painting or sculpture in a gallery or an artefact in a museum, where one may look but not touch, these objects asserted their existence within a culture that is utterly sensuous. They, unlike the artwork or genuine artefact, were affordable and touchable, and acted as a ‘way in’ to the materiality of ancient Egypt that was as safe to be handled as it was perused. Drawing upon the gilded glamour of the ancient Egyptian artefact, it was the material book, rather than high art, that symbolised a version of ancient Egypt that had been tamed. The gilt scarab on the front of Carter’s volume, for example, provides a replica image

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of the artefact that could be freed from the confines of the museum. Evidently, rather than the simple transference of the conventions of one or more textual discourse to another, the transmission of imagery and generic customs moved across a multi-directional and multimodal web of influence that traversed bourgeois culture. The employment of such symbolism on the boards of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen was one of the aspects of Carter and Mace’s publication that Glanville saw fit to praise. He lauded the ‘simple cover suggestive of the gold ornamentations found everywhere on the objects’, another way in which the physical adornments of popular fiction were mirrored in Carter and Mace’s polished product.72 Egyptological books of the period were no less likely to make use of gilt cover illustrations than novels, whose front boards frequently displayed a motif in metal foil. The scarab design and lettering that aureate the cover of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen visually align the text with the popular literature whose style it frequently channels, including Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; 1912), itself inspired in part by Carter’s discovery of Hatshepsut’s tomb in 1902, which also featured a scarab design.73 The similar scarab on Carter and Mace’s cover, however, also asserts its own authenticity; as the reader of the volume will discover, it is a reproduction in gilt taken from a photograph of a genuine artefact discovered in the tomb. Plate 65 depicts this ‘gold pendant’ which takes ‘the form of Kheperu·neb·Re, the first cartouche of Tut·ankh·Amen’.74 In a similar move, the endpapers were printed with green abstract patterns, the originals of which can be found upon ‘one of the greatest artistic treasures of the tomb’, ‘a painted wooden casket’, of which numerous photographic plates are included, as well as the king’s cartouches.75 This method of material imitation directly evokes parallels between the casket and the book: both are containers, and more specifically, vessels that enclose Egyptian treasure. The German edition published by F. A. Brockhaus featured instead the back-panel of Tutankhamun’s throne, showing him and his sister-wife Ankhesenamun picked out in gilt and ochre; Alan Gardiner (1879–1963) purportedly described this artefact as ‘in a sense a carved book’, emphasising its ability to convey narrative.76 The materiality of the volumes of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen soften the boundaries between the tomb artefacts and the physical books themselves. The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen responds to the substantial mimetic tradition of texts of all genres, with the exteriors of volumes with Egyptian themes matching the grandeur and luxury of the subject matter, a practice influenced by nineteenth-century illustrated gift books. At

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their peak in the 1860s, these decorative items were ‘aesthetic objects combining instruction, entertainment, decoration, cultivation, and conspicuous consumption’, and whose contents ‘typically included works of travel and adventures in exotic lands’, among others.77 Prized for their abundant illustrations and ornate covers, they appealed to a middle-class and largely female market, before their decline in the late nineteenth century. Egypt, however, remained a suitable subject for the luxuriously produced book, and one which, as a result of the sheer diversity of genres which adopted its themes and trappings, escaped being marketed towards a particular gender. Luxurious larger volumes of Egyptiana continued to appear across literary categories throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Samuel Manning’s (1822–81) The Land of the Pharaohs (1875), a travelogue (Fig. 1.4), appeared in quarto format in a variety of coloured cloths particularly appropriate to ancient Egypt (red, royal blue, purple and emerald green), and seems to actively evoke the famously lavish editions of Jules Verne’s (1828–1905) series of Voyages extraordinaires (1863–1905) published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel. With its arched title banner, gilded edges, elaborate cover illustrations and details picked out in gold and black, the implication is that between the covers resides a fantastical voyage to rival Verne’s fictional accounts which, although tales of adventure, were marketed as ‘educational fiction [which] popularized scientific discoveries’.78 The material genealogy may be even more complex; Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) was purportedly inspired in part by advertising materials for global tours published by Thomas Cook earlier that year.79 Thus we see publicity documents inspiring adventure fiction, which in turn colours travel narrative, and fact and fiction begin to bleed into one another through complex chains of influence. As well as nodding to the bedizened covers of Verne’s Voyages, the binding of The Land of the Pharaohs also references the materiality of ancient Egypt itself, with its dark embossed designs that echo stylised representations of Egyptian gods and other scenes from wall paintings or, somewhat more appropriately, the panels of deities, men and beasts with which the ancient Egyptians decorated their own texts.80 Other Egyptian travelogues included the bestselling A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) by the novelist and soon-to-be cofounder of the Egypt Exploration Fund, Amelia Edwards (1831–92), which saw a variety of elaborate cover designs emblazoned with ancient Egyptian symbolism, reprinted into the closing years of the nineteenth century, as well as cheaper softcover versions. Even texts envisioned for more practical purposes featured elaborate decoration, particularly on their covers. Guidebooks for travellers,

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Figure 1.4 Samuel Manning, The Land of the Pharaohs: Egypt & Sinai (London: The Religious Tract Society, [1875]). Author’s own.

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intended to be removed from the security of the Victorian and early twentieth-century library and consulted in the desert, on the Nile, or en route to Egypt, featured similar ornamentation. These guides commonly contained historical or archaeological information provided by expert scholars, as well as travel advice and useful local information, and so developed into fusions of a variety of discourses. Thomas Cook & Son commissioned the well-known Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934) to produce The Nile: Notes for Travellers in Egypt in 1886, with new editions produced until the final (twelfth) edition in 1912.81 A copy provided to each tourist who chose to cruise the Nile with Cook, its front cover featured gilt cartouches, while the edges and endpapers were coloured with combed marbled ink.82 Other guidebooks, such as Baedecker’s and Murray’s also featured gilt text on covers and spines, editions of which were also written by or featured contributions from Egyptologists, notably the 1900 edition of Murray’s written by May Brodrick (1858–1933). It was Budge’s compendium, however, that was most preoccupied with its own materiality. Before the book is even opened, its binding reveals that it is part of a broader Egyptological hybrid genre, and hints at its author’s specialist knowledge, imparted in an accessible and stimulating fashion. Scholarly works of Egyptology were less likely to sport the markedly conservative, plainer covers frequently associated with archaeological works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While these publications were produced to a very high quality, and with beautiful illustrations, diagrams and maps, their fine covers often featured nothing more ostentatious than the title and author’s name stamped in gilt. One reason for this comparative exterior plainness was the nineteenthcentury reverence for the Classics, making archaeological works on classical sites better suited to the traditional upper-class library. These works, with their luscious interiors, would be rebound in the same style as the existing collection within the library, to the owner’s preferred design. There were, however, exceptions to this rule. When Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) went about supplementing the texts of the Edwards Library at University College London, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) himself was requested to present the expensive (£33) folios of Karl Richard Lepsius’s (1810–84) Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (1849–59); these volumes intended for a wealthy reader demonstrate that Egypt as subject matter was not exclusively the reserve of the middle classes.83 Nevertheless, such volumes from the mid-nineteenth century predate the rapid growth of popular interest in Egyptology that flourished later in the century, by which time more extravagant covers appealed to a market with the disposable

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income for literature, but not necessarily for the rebinding of volumes. Indeed, the audience for these works is wider still. As Amara Thornton records, archaeological works featured in the catalogues of subscription libraries in the early twentieth century; ‘by 1920 readers came from both the lower middle and working classes’.84 These works were thus accessible to a broad cross-section of readers beyond the rather narrower social groups to which their bindings were originally designed to appeal. The ostentatious covers of Egyptological texts, written by scholars who may not have enjoyed a traditional university education, were not intended to be removed for rebinding – a common practice for wealthier consumers well into the latter half of the nineteenth century – but to be left as they were, to create colourful mismatched collections of spines on less exclusive shelves.85 Indeed, even the most deluxe editions, such as Gaston Maspero’s (1846–1916) twelve-volume History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria (1903–4), published by the Grolier Society and limited to a thousand copies (boasting ‘over twelve hundred coloured plates and illustrations’, half leather bindings and marbled boards and endpapers), were not intended for rebinding.86 With the exception of the works of the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), archaeological texts focusing on sites of classical relevance did not offer the same visual theatricality as works by the contemporary giants of Egyptology. The covers of Schliemann’s publications were bound in brightly coloured cloth, stamped with eye-catching and elaborate gilt illustrations that reflected the textual content (Schliemann, too, discovered remarkable caches of gold treasure). These works were, however, characterised by ‘enthusiasm, wild fantasy, and patent self-aggrandizement’, in contrast to more scholarly works.87 In Schliemann’s case, his susceptibility to romance and fabrication, along with his dubious methods, called his professionalism into question; this is reflected in the theatrical covers of his works, less suited to the aristocratic library. Clearly, his work was more aligned with works on Egypt, where associations of material decadence and the liberal use of precious metals particularly within tomb caches, encouraged stylised gilded designs on the bindings of texts of a variety of genres. The iconography selected to embellish the book with the glamour of ancient Egypt’s materiality often proved remarkably appropriate. Gilt obelisks that lent themselves to placement on spines emulated their genuine counterparts, which represented petrified rays of sunlight, and whose pyramidions, covered in gold or electrum, served the same purpose as these embellishments: to catch the light.88

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Picturesque Egypt (1878) by the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers (1837–98) is a more scholarly work, and a remarkably attractive volume, with its antique bronze-tone boards, pyramids and obelisk embossed in black and sprays of golden foliage framing the cover (Fig. 1.5). Folio size, it is physically akin to the illustrated gift book, while its stylised fonts evoke the experimental typefaces more commonly found on the fronts of niche art journals. This cover is a glamorous Orientalist mishmash; Egyptian ibises and lotus flowers are the doubles of waterlilies and cranes, typical motifs of japonisme.89 Ebers’s other works were also lavishly presented, including his twovolume Ägypten in Bild und Wort (1879–80), which appeared with full-colour maps, gold embossed covers, gilt edges, and turquoise glass pearls on the fronts and spines, evoking the treasure bindings of medieval religious books.90 Ebers also published fiction with opulent bindings, establishing a physical connection between his scholarly output and his fictional tales (the most celebrated of which were set in ancient Egypt), thus promoting, within his own oeuvre, a variety of material intertextuality. One two-volume Castilian Spanish edition of his 1864 work Eine ägyptische Königstochter (An Egyptian Princess, also known as The Daughter of the King of Egypt) entitled, in this case, La hija del rey de Egipto (1881), features a cover designed by the Spanish artist Arturo Mélida (Fig. 1.6). Perhaps as a result of his brother José Ramón Mélida’s (1856–1933) archaeological experience, Arturo Mélida’s (1849–1902) design displays a particular sensitivity to Egyptological discovery: with its central ushabti figure inscribed with genuine (though garbled) hieroglyphs, a gilded scarab and winged solar disc flanked by two royal cobras, along with lotus flower motifs (which are also printed in coloured ink on the edges of the book in place of the more usual gilt), Mélida had certainly consulted extensive source material, further demonstrated by the work’s beautiful watercolour illustrations.91 Mélida’s and Ebers’s joint commitment to archaeological accuracy permeates both the text and materiality of the book, creating a work akin to an Egyptological artefact, both in its appearance and the information it conveys about the ancient world. A review of Ebers’s novel The Bride of the Nile (1887), published in The Spectator, suggests that reading widely across Egyptological genres was beneficial to an understanding of his fiction; ‘[t]he historical accuracy and truthfulness of description [. . .] are so incontestable, that [. . .] in order to appreciate or render justice to these qualities, the reader should possess a certain knowledge of ancient Egyptian history and life.’ The anonymous reviewer recommends that Ebers’s readers

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Figure 1.5 Georg Ebers, Picturesque Egypt [Egypt: Descriptive, Historical and Picturesque], trans. Clara Bell, 2 vols (London, Paris and New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1885), i. Source: Internet Archive.

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Figure 1.6 Georg Ebers, La hija del rey de Egipto, trans. Gaspar Sentiñón, 2 vols (Barcelona: Biblioteca Arte y Letras, 1881), ii. Author’s own.

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cultivate a broader textual commitment to ancient Egypt – indeed suggesting that they ‘should have penetrated himself – so to speak – with the atmosphere of the times and surroundings’, acquiring a level of basic historical knowledge that might be gleaned from popular or more specialist Egyptological volumes, or even in the historical information included within tourist guides, such as Budge’s. Other responses to Ebers’s work were not so generous. In the prefaces to the early editions of his An Egyptian Princess (1864), Ebers endeavours to defend his work against criticism that the historical novel was not the appropriate form for the diffusion of his knowledge, sometimes naming specific reviewers in his rebuttals.92 Ebers, whose novels fall within the nineteenth-century category of the German Professorenroman, was compelled to argue for his – and his colleagues’ – authority, when his choice of genre was called into question. The bending of generic conventions in Egyptologists’ publications was, of course, as this chapter’s work on Carter has demonstrated, a much more widespread practice. The American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), who aided Carter in deciphering the seals discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb, produced a work with a cover design of remarkable longevity, most likely created by Emma Redington Lee (1874–1973) of the New York firm Decorative Designers.93 Breasted’s A History of Egypt was first published in 1905 priced at five dollars, saw a new edition in 1909 and was issued in regular reprints (many of these following the media sensation of Carter’s discovery) with the same timeless binding in various colour combinations until the 1950s.94 In these later versions the blocking of ink and metal foil on cloth was replaced by a cheaper printed dust jacket, although significantly this featured the same design (Fig. 1.7). While the use of gilt on the covers of early editions is far from abstemious, its symmetrical design tends towards a more abstract modernist aesthetic (itself more redolent of ancient Egyptian art), prefiguring art deco style, which was to incorporate motifs from ancient art from around the globe.95 Indeed, Jeffrey Abt notes ‘the book’s richly colored binding, including gold-leaf finishing on the top edges of the text block’, making the volume ‘especially attractive’; while ‘[t]he high quality of the book’s production added to its cost, [. . .] Scribner’s may have justified the expense as necessary to counterbalance its fearsome bulk, which, the publisher feared, might otherwise daunt a popular readership.’96 Contrasting with the busier, more ostentatious Victorian designs of Manning’s and Ebers’s covers, with their freeform, detailed illustrations and, in the case of Ebers, outlandish fonts, the boards of Breasted’s work not only exude Egyptian luxury in the intricacy of

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Figure 1.7 James Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt: From the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950). Courtesy of Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries.

the gilt design in tandem with the deep-blue cloth and carnelian-red accents, but offers a more accurately Egyptian style and level of detail than its nineteenth-century precedents. While the typeface is relatively sober in comparison to the earlier examples, pyramidal word dividers add a touch of the exotic to the title’s lettering. It is evident that these works are caught between complex notions of the materiality of the book, including the production of expensive, niche works which were being elaborately decorated – beautiful items suited to being given as

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gifts – and popular fiction (of a variety of genres) which was becoming increasingly theatrically packaged to catch the eye of the prospective buyer. The elaborate gilt cover does not signify one single concept, and, adopted by other artistic genres, confuses processes of literary taxonomy, mirroring the blurring of semantic boundaries taking place within the text itself. While there are notable stylistic differences between the volumes of Manning, Ebers and Breasted, they were all produced within a specific tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century material culture associated with the visual devouring of Egypt by eager consumers. Recalling events of the Georgian period, when the Italian explorer Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) published his Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs, and excavations, in Egypt and Nubia (1820), over a hundred years before Carter and Carnarvon’s breakthrough, this tradition encompasses the assimilation of textual material by the reader, as well as titillating visual media, particularly that which is tactile. Carter himself honoured Belzoni’s publication in The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, in which he states that it ‘is one of the most fascinating books in the whole of Egyptian literature’, despite the fact that the Narrative ‘was dismissed and patronized by [its] contemporaries as a naive text written in a crude and broken English’.97 Carter’s appreciation of Belzoni perhaps relied upon the similarities between their works. Both Belzoni’s Narrative and Carter’s The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen depict their subject matter with an air of ‘Gothic sensationalism’.98 They were also visually beautiful. Belzoni’s account was actually published in two parts: a quarto volume of Belzoni’s narrative accompanied by a teal watered-silk folio of hand-coloured lithographic plates, produced while the process was still in its infancy.99 Both featured gilt on the spines, and together comprised a visually striking set of documents that were to be used in tandem. Other versions appeared too, including one for children, The Fruits of Enterprize: Exhibited in the Travels of Belzoni in Egypt and Nubia (1821), with illustrations based upon Belzoni’s plates. The popularity of this work alone resulted in nine separate editions, the latest published in New York in 1850.100 Visual and tactile, Belzoni’s multimedia product, and the works it prefigured, precipitated the merging of late nineteenth-century adventure fiction and the conventions of scholarly writing. These were stimulating works that promoted multisensory engagement and a way of reading that was non-linear. Instead of a simple turning of the page, the act of reading involved folding out maps, turning the book to

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examine illustrations, diagrams or photographs from the correct angle, flicking through to indexes at the end, and skimming down to footnotes and back up to the main body of the text. As such, an awareness of the materiality of the book is ever present. Carter and Mace’s photographic plates, produced a century after Belzoni’s hand-coloured lithographs, command scrutiny in similar ways. Printed on different paper to the body of the text, their visual and tactile dissimilarity from the rest of the material emphasise the multimodality of these composite works as part of a conscious reading experience. As the texts I have discussed demonstrate, these cross-genre exchanges were physical as well as textual, and permeated the bindings of the book as well as its pages, operating as a kind of material intertextuality. While Gerard Curtis argues for a re-evaluation of the intimate connection between word and image in the late nineteenth century that led some Victorians to label their culture ‘hieroglyphic’ – in other words, defined by imagery laden with symbolic meaning – the self-conscious, exaggerated materiality of literature concerning Egypt can be seen to function in a particularly hieroglyphic manner.101 Before the covers of the Egyptological text were even opened, the binding, with its abundance of ancient and contemporary symbolism, identified the work as part of an expansive Egyptological genus that embraced a variety of related species of writing. The content often drew upon assorted literary and material traditions that habitually privileged the image as much as they did the word, while its gilded shell recalled the illustrated gift book and other objects of leisure, the adventure novel, the travel guide and the museal artefact itself. Egyptological texts of all varieties, too, relied upon the glamour of gold, sensation, theatricality and Gothic thrills (sometimes even enhanced by the input of writers known for their fictional output), as did contemporaneous fiction that took Egyptology as its subject matter. Egyptological fiction, non-fiction, and the texts that self-consciously occupy the vast space in between these poles, relied upon a diverse span of consumer tastes that were catered to by balances struck between generic conformity and innovation, as well as the packaging of a text in such a way as to appeal to a magpie-eye. As we have seen, these texts and objects existed as part of a multi-generic, multi-modal feedback loop in which Egyptology exerted its influence on literature, and literature on Egyptology, across subject matter, mode and materiality: the ‘wonderful things’ which appealed to expansive readerships took diverse but recognisable and subtly shifting forms.

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Notes 1. While the term ‘Tutmania’ was used to refer to the fascination for all things Tutankhamun in the 1920s and beyond, the appropriateness of the suffix ‘mania’ in the wider context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century attraction to ancient Egypt, most often termed ‘Egyptomania’, has since been debated. For a discussion of ‘Egyptomania’ and other terms, see, for instance, Ronald H. Fritze, Egyptomania: A History of Fascination, Obsession and Fantasy (London: Reaktion, 2016), p. 10. The earliest printed usage of ‘Egyptomania’ (as the French ‘l’égyptomanie’) occurred in 1797; see Noreen Doyle, ‘The Earliest Known Uses of “l’égyptomanie/ Egyptomania” in French and English’, Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 8 (2016), 122–5. 2. Letter A. C. Mace to Winifred Mace, 24 April 1923, quoted in Christopher C. Lee, The Grand Piano Came by Camel: Arthur C. Mace, the Neglected Egyptologist (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992), p. 96. 3. Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), i (1923), pp. 95–6. 4. Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 86. 5. Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 86. 6. Gérard Genette, Paratexts, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 7. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA i.2.1.35, Howard Carter’s excavation diaries, 26 November 1922, fol. 35, http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/discoveringTut/journals-and-diaries/ season-1/journal.html [accessed 31 January 2014]. 8. Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 98. 9. TAA i.2.1.35, fol. 35; Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 96. 10. TAA i.2.1.35, fol. 35; Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 96. Carter’s infamous phrase was to be repeated by Agatha Christie’s celebrated detective Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile (1937), who exclaims, ‘There are very wonderful things to be seen in Egypt, are there not?’; see Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 113. 11. ‘The Egyptian Treasure. Story of the Discovery. A Graphic Account by Lord Carnarvon’, The Times, 11 December 1922, p. 13; London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.347. Arthur Weigall, meanwhile (neglecting to mention that he was not present at the moment he describes), has Carter exclaim, ‘Wonderful! Marvellous!’; see Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamen and Other Essays (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), p. 40. Weigall himself

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12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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had uttered a similar phrase describing the removal of items from a tomb he had discovered in 1905 in a letter to his wife: ‘The things are more and more wonderful’; see London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.725 5.3.1, fol. 9. Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 96. Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), ii (1927), p. 53. Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. xvi; Lady Burghclere, ‘Introduction: Biographical Sketch of the Late Lord Carnarvon’, in Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, pp. 1–40 (p. 30). White was also acknowledged in the preface to the second volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: ‘There is one old friend, of many years’ standing – Mr. Percy White, who insists that any assistance that it may have been in his power to give me, has had its own reward, as a labour of love. I must nevertheless embarrass him with my warmest thanks for helping me in the compilation of this volume, although for his sake I will say no more’; see Carter, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, ii, p. xxiv. ‘Lot 39, Carter (Howard)’, Bonhams, 12 June 2012, https://www. bonhams.com/auctions/20137/lot/39/ [accessed 2 February 2018], xii. ‘Cairo. By Percy White. (Constable and Co. 6s.)’, Spectator, 30 January 1915, p. 164. Evelyn Waugh, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (London: Duckworth, 1930), p. 108. Waugh lamented how ‘the public imagination wallowed in superstitious depths’ after Carnarvon’s death. ‘Howard Carter Records his Brilliant Adventure: His Story of Finding and Entering the Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen’, The New York Times, 27 January 1924, p. 5. Lady Burghclere, ‘Introduction’, p. 1; ‘Lord Carnarvon’s Death’, Daily Mirror, 6 April 1923, p. 5. ‘The Greatest Archaeological Romance of the Centuries’, Mid-Week Pictorial, 7 February 1924, pp. 15–23 (p. 15). A. C. Mace, ‘Work at the Tomb of Tutenkhamon’, Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 18.12 (1923), 5–11 (p. 5). S. R. K. Glanville, ‘The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen, Discovered by the Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter. By Howard Carter and A. C. Mace. With 104 Illustrations from Photographs by Harry Burton. Vol. i. Cassell and Co., Ltd. 1923. Pp. xxiii+231’, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 11.3/4 (1925), 342–3 (p. 342). Ibid. ‘Editorial Statement’, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1.1 (1914), 1. Glanville, ‘The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen’, p. 343. Ibid. Trafton, Egypt Land, p. 88. Ibid.

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29. Martin Willis, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), pp. 115–41. See also Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins / Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), esp. p. 2, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), esp. pp. 57–8. 30. Simon Eliot, ‘Some Trends in British Book Production, 1800–1919’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing & Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 19–43. 31. Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 14. 32. Such criticism includes Richard Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt’, in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 218–44 (p. 221); Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Mummy’s Curse: A Genealogy’, in Magic, Science, Technology and Literature, ed. Jarmilla Mildoft, Hans Ulrich Seeber and Martin Windisch (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006), pp. 123–38; Julia Reid ‘“Gladstone bags, shooting boots, and Bryant & May’s matches”: Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic’s Serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s She’, Studies in the Novel, 43.2 (2011), 152–78 (p. 155). 33. On printing for the mass market, see Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 34. David Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 89. 35. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 128–9. While Stam specifically addresses genre in relation to film, his analysis equally applies to literature and other art forms. 36. Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery and John Fiske, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 128. 37. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verson, 2005), p. 12; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2007), p. 2. 38. Luckhurst observes that the theatricality of the events extended to the act of excavation itself. At the opening of the burial chamber, ‘they arranged two arc lamps, one either side of the door, and a wooden stage to stand on, the invited handful of dignitaries sitting in rows of chairs to witness the opening’; see Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 7.

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39. Bridget Elliott, ‘Art Deco Worlds in a Tomb: Reanimating Egypt in Modern(ist) Visual Culture’, South Central Review, 25.1 (2008), 114–35 (p. 121); Thomas Hoving, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 12. 40. Carter, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, ii, p. xx. 41. Ibid. p. 44. 42. Christina Riggs refers to this image as capturing a ‘stage set’ in the introduction to Christina Riggs, Photographing Tutankhamun: Archaeology, Ancient Egypt, and the Archive (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 43. G. L. Seymour would go on to illustrate Stanley Lane-Poole’s Cairo: Sketches of its History, Monuments, and Social Life (1892), bringing the divide between fictional and non-fictional works with Egyptian subject matter. 44. TAA i.2.1.33. 45. Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, pp. 98–9. 46. While details from this account are relayed in several subsequent studies, very few refer to ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ specifically. The text of ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ is, however, included in the first volume of Bloomsbury’s recent reprint of The Tomb of Tutankhamun (2014). In the foreword by Nicholas Reeves, Reeves states that that ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ ‘is the tale which inadvertently spawned the curse story [. . .] by Carter’s erstwhile rival, Arthur Weigall’; Nicholas Reeves, ‘Foreword’ in Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tutankhamun, 3 vols (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), i, pp. vii–viii (pp. vii–viii). The story was, in fact, one of a range of anecdotes that contributed to supposed ‘evidence’ of supernatural forces at work, and Weigall’s version of these events appeared in print before Carter’s. Aside from this modern edition of The Tomb of Tutankhamun the only other citation of ‘The Tomb of the Bird’ occurs in Nicholas Reeves and John H. Taylor’s Howard Carter: Before Tutankhamun (London: British Museum Press, 1992), p. 198. 47. ‘Times Man Views Splendors of Tomb of Tutankhamen’, The New York Times, 22 December 1922, p. 1. 48. Weigall, Tutankhamen, and Other Essays, p. 110. 49. Carter, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, ii, p. xxv. 50. Howard Carter and Percy White, ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, Pearson’s Magazine, 56 (1923), 433–7 (p. 434). See also Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Nemesis of Fire’, in John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (Boston, MA: John W. Luce and Co., 1909), pp. 143–241. 51. Carter and White, ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, pp. 433, 434; Carter, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun, ii, p. 53. 52. Carter and White, ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, pp. 435, 436. 53. Ibid. p. 435. 54. Ibid. p. 437. 55. See Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 98.

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56. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA i.2.1.35. 57. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA i.2.21.187. 58. T. G. H. James is of the view that the original canary was replaced; see T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London: Kegan Paul International, 1992), p. 352. The acquisition of the bird is discussed on pp. 251–2. A photograph of Carter with a canary taken in 1923 was sent to The Times, likely by Carter himself. On the reverse of the image was carefully noted that this bird is the ‘second one’, the first having ‘died’, and that ‘Mr Carter’s story about his [first] canary appeared in “Pearson’s Magazine”’; see Christina Riggs, Tutankhamun: The Original Photographs (London: Rupert Wace Ancient Art / Burlington Press, 2017), p. 8. The Times never published the photograph, perhaps because Carter’s account of what befell the bird was too lurid to appeal to its readership. The cautiously worded note to the editors also suggests that the image was at risk of undermining Carter’s narrative about the original canary’s fate. 59. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, M. Burton MSS, Minnie Burton Diary, 16 April 1924, p. 179. 60. Alistair Duncan, No Better Place: Arthur Conan Doyle, Windlesham and Communication with the Other Side (London: MX Publishing, 2015), p. 310. Elcock would illustrate a further six Sherlock Holmes stories. 61. Amara Thornton, Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People (London: UCL Press, 2018), p. 11. 62. Lyons, Books, p. 21. 63. G. Elliot Smith, Tutankhamen: and the Discovery of his Tomb by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1923), p. 13. 64. T. S. Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, 5 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011–15), ii (2011), pp. 155–6. 65. G. Elliot Smith, ‘The Glamour of Gold’, The Criterion, 3.11 (1925), 345–55 (p. 346). 66. Ibid. pp. 347, 352. 67. Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 104. The letter is dated 29 January 1926. With this, Sackville-West sent a postcard depicting the entrance ‘to the tomb of Rameses’, noting that the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb is beneath it, and that ‘[t]wo days ago they found two more chambers full of things’; see p. 102. 68. Smith, Tutankhamen, pp. 100–1. 69. Ibid. pp. 101–2.

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70. A later example, Honey of the Nile written and illustrated by Allena Best (working under the pseudonym Erick Berry), was published in 1938. 71. W. B. Gallie, ‘The Function of Philosophical Aesthetics’, in Language and Aesthetics, ed. William Elton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), pp. 13–35 (p. 14). 72. Glanville, ‘The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amun’, p. 342. 73. William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 38. 74. Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 209. 75. Ibid. p. 110. See pl. 21, 50–4 for views of this casket. 76. Hoving, Tutankhamun, p. 173. Unfortunately, Hoving does not provide a reference for the origin of this information. 77. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), p. 2. 78. Lyons, Books, p. 164. 79. Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), p. 150. 80. Megan L. Benton, ‘The Book as Art’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 493–507 (p. 501). A later edition of The Land of the Pharaohs, revised and partly rewritten by Richard Lovett, was published in 1897, with ochre or navy-blue cloth boards, suggesting the blue-andgold palette famously associated with ancient Egypt. 81. Derek Gregory, ‘Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel’, in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 114–50 (p. 118). 82. Ibid. 83. Rosalind M. Janssen, The First Hundred Years: Egyptology at University College London, 1892–1992 (London: UCL, 1992), p. 8. 84. Thornton, Archaeologists in Print, p. 124. 85. David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 84. While less theatrical publications, such as those issued by the Egypt Exploration Fund, were more conservative in their bindings, they nevertheless reproduced beautiful photographs and illustrations that sought to duplicate ancient Egyptian originals. 86. G. Maspero, History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, ed. A. H. Sayce, trans. M. L. McClure, 12 vols (London: The Grolier Society, 1903), i, p. iii. 87. Curtis Neil Runnels, The Archaeology of Heinrich Schliemann: An Annotated Bibliographic Handlist (Boston, MA: Archaeological Institute of America, 2002), p. 15.

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88. Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA: Burndy Library, 2009), p. 14. 89. Egyptian motifs also found their way on to covers of works with Far Eastern subject matter; Egyptian-style lotus flowers adored the front board of Elizbeth Yates’s Glimpses into Chinese Homes (1887), for example. 90. P. J. M. Marks, The British Library Guide to Bookbinding: History and Techniques (London: British Library, 1998), p. 56. 91. I am grateful to Richard Parkinson for casting an expert eye over this image. The combination of ankh and flail in the hands of the ushabti is an unusual one: the crook and flail were usually combined, denoting kingship; alternatively, an ankh was held in each hand. A similar ushabti adorns the book’s spine; this figure holds an ankh and a was sceptre, symbolic of the pharaoh and his power over chaos. 92. See David Huckvale, Ancient Egypt in the Popular Imagination: Building a Fantasy in Film, Literature, Music and Art (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), p. 120. 93. Emma Redington Lee often worked under the name Lee Thayer. Decorative Designers provided designs for other Egyptian-themed works including Gilbert Parker’s The Weavers (1907), Robert Hichens’s Egypt and its Monuments (1909) featuring a cover design by Emma Redington Lee, and C. Bryson Taylor’s The Dwellers in the Wilderness (1904), with its cover and illustrated capitals attributed to Bertha Stuart. 94. The new edition of 1909 was reprinted in 1910, 1911, 1912, 1916, 1919, 1921, 1923, January and October 1924, 1926, 1928, 1929, 1931, 1935, 1939, 1945 and 1950. In all of these reprints, the preface remained that which Breasted had written on 1 September 1905. 95. On art deco and ancient art, see Richard Striner, ‘Art Deco: Polemics and Synthesis’, Winterthur Portfolio, 25.1 (1990), 21–34, esp. p. 23. 96. Jeffrey Abt, American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), pp. 103–4. 97. Carter and Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, i, p. 68; John Whale, ‘Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 218–36 (p. 229). 98. Whale, ‘Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art’, p. 231. 99. Michael Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography (London: British Library, 2001), p. 24. 100. John Romer, Valley of the Kings (London: O’Mara, 1988), p. 62; John William Pye, ‘A Look at Early Children’s Books on Egypt: The Rediscovery of Ancient Kemet on the Nursery Shelves of the 19th Century’, KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, 9.2 (1998), 76–82 (p. 78). 101. Curtis, Visual Words, p. 4.

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Chapter 2

‘Fairy tales’ and ‘bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts and Fabrications

At Christmas 1871, the writer and social theorist Harriet Martineau (1802–76) had a lock of mummy hair and a strip of wrapping cloth sent to her great-nephew, Ernest, as a ‘real curiosity for his museum’. The letter accompanying these relics records not only the moment of their disinterment – ‘[t]his lock of hair is very old; – several thousand years old. Harriet Martineau saw it cut from the head of a mummy, dug out of a tomb at Thebes, on the Nile, in 1847’ – but also speculates as to their origin within a biblical chronology – ‘[i]t grew on the head of a woman who lived probably before Joseph was Pharaoh’s Minister in Egypt; – perhaps before Abraham went there!’1 This practice of imagining ancient Egyptian objects in their original contexts (contexts which, somewhat inevitably, made reference to Moses, Joseph and ‘the pharaoh of the Exodus’) was far from uncommon. In the nineteenth century, organisations such as the Egypt Exploration Society (previously the Egypt Exploration Fund) sought to find archaeological evidence to support biblical accounts; as David Gange records, ‘[t]he Fund took the text of Exodus chapters 1–15 and made it as much a handbook to excavation as the Iliad had been to Schliemann.’2 Moreover, the Religious Tract Society, a publisher of Christian literature, produced a number of Egyptological volumes which wove tales with didactic motives around Egypt’s monuments. This was by no means an exclusively nineteenth-century phenomenon. Several individuals attempted to establish Tutankhamun’s connections to the Bible after details of the high-profile excavations were published in the press. One invested individual posted a copy of W. S. Auchincloss’s Standard Chronology of the Holy Bible (1914) to Howard Carter (1874–1939), ‘with a hope that you may be able to identify Tutankhamen with the Pharaoh of the Exodus’.3 This impulse to verify particular biblical accounts was, however, only a single thread within a greater collective desire to imagine, create or embellish the

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story behind an artefact, to attach a narrative to an item or place in order to increase the fascination it demanded. Indeed, while many Egyptologists went on digs with religious agendas, particularly in the nineteenth century and to a lesser degree in the twentieth, other individuals to whom such objects passed attached alternative significances to these antiquities. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the final decades of the nineteenth century saw a boom in the popularity of Egyptological works: gilded books which might be considered substitutes for the artefacts which are described therein. Corresponding with the rise of mass tourism to Egypt and an increased availability of Egyptian artefacts (and convincing fakes) not just to tourists abroad but at home on western soil, more individuals were able to acquire their own relics and, with newfound Egyptological knowledge garnered from their expanding libraries, were able to research, interpret and, indeed, invent details about these objects’ ancient pasts. This chapter first examines the artefacts around which such narratives are constructed, before turning to a focused analysis of a necklace belonging to the popular author Marie Corelli (1855–1924), about which are recorded a number of supernaturally inflected tales.4 Exposing and interpreting the stories woven about this artefact, it is possible to unpick the ways in which objects could stimulate the popularisation of Egyptological ideas, along with notions that were – often much to Egyptologists’ dismay – inaccurate and fanciful. Uncovering and scrutinising Corelli’s necklace, as well as other Egyptian artefacts that feature in a variety of narrative modes (extending beyond literary fiction to oral storytelling, letter-writing, memoirs and tabloid journalism), this chapter demonstrates how the boundaries of reality and fancy were transcended in stories of ancient relics. We have already seen in the previous chapter how Egyptological narratives (and volumes) were influenced by the conventions of diverse fictional types. In this current chapter, I focus on a complementary phenomenon: the production of fictional narratives attached to real artefacts, demonstrating the frustration of Egyptological fact in a bid to create sensationalist (and newsworthy) stories. Concluding with an evaluation of the conversations with both amateurs and professionals in which Corelli was engaged, this section demonstrates the softening of factual and fictional distinctions encouraged by objects in both museum and private settings. In doing so, this chapter stresses the fluidity of highbrow and lowbrow writing on Egypt: on the one hand, factual scholarly record and specialist press statements, and on the other, rumour, superstition and pulp fiction. Suspended in the vortex each object stirs up, these seemingly disparate discourses begin to merge; fantastical statements

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issued by authors of fiction are believed as truth by superstitious members of the public, while Egyptological experts endeavour to reassert their own authority, ridiculing the tales of curses in which the objects that they studied had become so tightly bound. This chapter is indebted to the work of Dominic Montserrat and Roger Luckhurst, who have both identified instances in which the attachment of fanciful narratives to relics takes place, specifically with regards to Egyptian artefacts. Montserrat recognises a trend that saw fictional ‘biographies’ fabricated to accompany anonymous mummies, even those within seemingly respectable museum settings, emphasising their sensational reliance on ‘perfumes, poison and gold’ which objectifies and sexualises these bodies.5 Luckhurst, meanwhile, unearths a process to which he refers as ‘counter-narrative’, which produces tales that simultaneously correspond to and diverge from official museum narratives.6 In The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012), Luckhurst identifies a number of curse tales, most often associated with real artefacts, including the British Museum’s ‘Unlucky Mummy’, a painted wooden mummy board of the 21st Dynasty.7 Although stories exist of cursed artefacts from a variety of cultures, Luckhurst’s focus on Egyptian items demonstrates the extensive popularisation of the notion that even the most subtle of involvements with Egyptian antiquities could bring ruin. In keeping with the late Victorian and early twentieth-century trend for the construction of supernatural tales around Egyptian relics elucidated by Luckhust, this section charts the creation of narratives surrounding artefacts perceived to maintain their magical potency after they had been unearthed. Pieced together from snippets of novels, memoirs, correspondence, wills and newspaper articles, it traces these stories as they appear in both manuscript and typescript to create comprehensive myths that offer an eerie complement to the ancient Egyptian objects that individuals found in their possession.

Ekphrastic Writings These tales do not function entirely as fictions. While they were, no doubt, embellished, embroidered and exaggerated, the very existence of the artefact tethers these stories to the real world: they offer a supernatural and sensationalised counterpoint to Egyptological descriptions and analyses that accompany artefacts in the museum setting (although these too, as Montserrat has demonstrated, might not be entirely trustworthy), instead functioning as alternative narratives

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in which the artefact refuses to be confined within the strictures of scholarly archaeology. The individuals who construct these counternarratives often appear to believe that they can, like one character in Algernon Blackwood’s (1869–1951) ‘Descent into Egypt’ (1914), ‘read living secrets beneath museum labels’, and Corelli in particular attempted to project an air of mystic authority in contrast to the Egyptologists themselves.8 Yet it is important to note that these narratives by no means exist entirely outside of Egyptological discourse: often, the artefacts and the tales they engender become part of a broader conversation in which specialists and dilettantes communicate, however begrudgingly. Scholarly progress, authors of these narratives speculated, might even prove aspects of these fictional stories true; as H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) wrote in the preface to the 1907 edition of his novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), ‘[i]magination has been verified by fact; the King Solomon’s Mines I dreamed of have been discovered, and are putting out their gold once more, and, according to the latest reports, their diamonds also.’9 Egyptologists, too, were by no means averse to this rhetoric. Georg Ebers (1837–98) writes in the preface to the fourth edition of An Egyptian Princess that ‘there is something almost “providential”’ in his writing of this novel.10 He records that one of the characters – ‘an oculist from Sais, who wrote a book upon the diseases of the visual organs’ – has been found to have had a real historical counterpart subsequent to the publication of Eber’s story; what once ‘existed only in the imagination of the author and readers of “An Egyptian Princess,” is now an established fact’. He claims to have ‘felt like the man who had dreamed of a treasure, and when he went out to ride found it in his path’. Both Haggard and Ebers use the metaphor of dreaming to emphasise their sympathetic connections to the past, which we shall see, too, with Corelli. The move towards authentication, cataloguing and scholarly accuracy in Egyptology, along with a widespread desire to attach stories and anecdotes to objects, resulted in accounts of the moment of excavation and speculations as to the relics’ original historical settings becoming alloys of real and imaginary narratives surrounding the artefacts and the individual to whom they once belonged. This process was by no means exclusive to Egyptian relics, although Egyptian artefacts are far more often ascribed a continuing magical potency than the remnants of other ancient civilisations.11 Using an artefact as the basis for literary inspiration was by no means new by the late nineteenth century. Ekphrastic poetry stretches back to antiquity, and enjoyed a significant revival in the early nineteenth century. The Romantic poets, through such

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well-known contributions as ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819), breathed new life into this literary tradition, which continued to flourish long after the nineteenth century had drawn to a close. Marianne Moore’s (1887–1972) poem ‘An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish’ (1924), for example, was inspired by an 18th Dynasty British Museum artefact from el-Amarna acquired in 1921 and reproduced in The Illustrated London News in the same year. As in many of its Romantic predecessors, the poem was not inspired by a moment in which artefact and poet were brought together in the same time and place, but rather encounters with artefacts as they were described and depicted in other pieces of literature, predominantly the press.12 Real artefacts were also engulfed by longer poetry and prose narratives which used objects as doorways into fictional worlds. While early examples include William Wordsworth’s (1770–1850) poem ‘An Egyptian Maid; or, The Romance of the Water Lily’ (written 1828; published 1835) – inspired by a sculpted bust on display at the British Museum that was often thought to depict the goddess Isis emerging from a lotus flower – most instances occur later in the century, as museums opened their doors to an ever-expanding public, introducing new writers (and readers) to these ancient relics.13 The incorporation of genuine artefacts into these fictional narratives serves to anchor in reality the other (invented) parts of the text. In R. Austin Freeman’s (1862–1943) detective novel The Eye of Osiris (1911), for example, the female protagonist feels a particular affinity with an individual named Artemidorus. This is a real artefact: a human mummy inside a cartonnage mummy-case acquired by the British Museum in 1888.14 A passage in the novel is devoted to describing Artemidorus in considerable (and accurate) detail: We stood awhile gazing in silence at the mummy – for such, indeed, was her friend Artemidorus. But not an ordinary mummy. Egyptian in form, it was entirely Greek in feeling; and brightly coloured as it was, in accordance with the racial love of colour, the tasteful refinement with which the decoration of the case was treated made those around look garish and barbaric. But the most striking feature was a charming panel portrait which occupied the place of the usual mask. This painting was a revelation to me. Except that it was executed in tempera instead of oil, it differed in no respect from modern work. There was nothing archaic or even ancient about it. With its freedom of handling and its correct rendering of light and shade, it might have been painted yesterday; indeed, enclosed in an ordinary gilt frame, it might have passed without remark in an exhibition of modern portraits.15

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Freeman goes on to describe another genuine artefact: ‘a fragment of a coloured relief labelled: “Portion of a painted stone tablet with a portrait figure of Amen-hetep IV”’, observing ‘the frail, effeminate figure of the great king, with his large cranium, his queer, pointed chin and the Aten rays stretching out their weird hands as if caressing him’.16 Freeman invents other artefacts within the novel’s British Museum, but their inclusion among real objects lends them a form of spectral reality, where they at once exist and do not exist within an actual place reproduced (mostly) accurately within a fictional text. When describing these ancient objects, moreover, Freeman emphasises their appeal to modern tastes, or else their impact on the modern imagination: these are not merely dry relics from antiquity, but objects that still have the power to evoke wonder in the modern world. More famously, when writing She (1887), H. Rider Haggard drew inspiration from a genuine artefact: a ring he owned, whose hieroglyphic signs were faithfully reproduced as a line drawing in gilt on the novel’s cover and amid the text itself. As we shall see in the next chapter, Haggard’s collection of rings made a noteworthy impression upon his Egyptian-themed fiction. There is also another artefact of interest in She: the Sherd of Amenartas, a fragment of pottery whose inscription in uncial and cursive Greek scripts, along with the hieroglyphs from the Egyptian ring, functions as the genealogical text which marks the beginning of the protagonists’ adventure. While the Sherd of Amenartas was an invented artefact, Haggard’s sister-in-law created a model to Haggard’s specifications, and it is from this fabricated object that facsimiles were produced in She itself.17 Haggard housed his real and fake objects and his literary works together; an interview reveals that his study contained his ‘strings of beads from the necks of mummies’, his Egyptian rings, the manuscript of She and the manufactured potsherd which he kept ‘over the mantelpiece’.18 The text of She, therefore, though an invented story, serves to bind the genuine artefact (the ring) with its fabricated cousin (the potsherd), both narrativising the artefact and engaging in a reverse process, one which Luckhurst terms ‘artefaction’.19 Haggard’s publication history is also noteworthy: his agent A. P. Watt (1834–1914) oversaw the serialisation of She in The Graphic, a periodical that, as Julia Reid observes, ‘blurred the boundaries between fiction and fact’, before it was published as a novel.20 Likewise, Haggard’s novel Cleopatra (1889) first appeared in serial form in The Illustrated London News; as Richard Pearson notes, this was ‘the newspaper most keen to depict (literally) the sensational discoveries’ that Egyptologists were

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bringing to light.21 Over the course of the Tutankhamun excavations, The Illustrated London News reproduced lavish colour images of the excavations along with specially commissioned illustrations from the excavators’ accounts, on pages with special headers featuring cobra and vulture motifs: that these headers were in use before the sensation caused by the discovery speaks to the publication’s long-standing commitment to ancient Egyptian subject matter. In 1856, the traveller and geologist John Auldjo (1805–86) presented his close friend the novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803–73) with two skulls excavated from Pompeii.22 Auldjo labelled these skulls Arbaces and Calenus: two fictional characters (both priests of the Egyptian mother deity, Isis) from Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). As Simon Goldhill notes, these objects retrospectively interact with Lytton’s text, published over two decades prior; Lytton’s novel ‘uses archaeology as a science of truth to ground its story [. . .] in the real, and returns to the excavation in Pompeii to find both the foundation and authorization, or even authentication, of its own truth’.23 The skulls were displayed in Lytton’s home as ‘signs of the reality of the story’. Referring to this practice as the ‘wilful manipulation of levels of fiction and reality’, Goldhill speculates that Auldjo’s macabre gift represents ‘a sign of [Lytton’s] fictional mastery over the real of history’.24 While this may well be true in this case of self-referential and out-of-sequence storytelling, and even in the case of Haggard’s sherd, the tale of Corelli’s necklace to which we now turn is more complex. The narrative she tells cannot be categorised confidently as a fiction, nor is it factually accurate; it exists in multiple forms, told with variations by several sources. Particularly significant, and what binds the story of Corelli’s necklace with Lytton’s skulls and Haggard’s potsherd – besides the fact that these objects all have ties to ancient Egypt – is that all of these narratives orbit real physical things, even if these objects are not quite what the writers (and their coteries) claimed. What differentiates Corelli’s artefact and the tales it stimulated from these other objects, is Corelli’s assumption of an Egyptological authority counter to that of conventional Egyptology. Throughout the literature and culture of the fin de siècle, Egypt – and the East more generally – is used to represent exoticism, mysticism and magic, and narratives that draw upon genuine artefacts often attempt to harness these associations. As a result of its reputation for mystical advancement, ancient Egypt proved a powerful influence upon alternative religions and sects during the late Victorian magical revival, including spiritualist and Theosophist groups. Although

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careful to distance herself from such alternative systems of belief, Corelli demonstrates an intimate awareness of several of the theories to which spiritualists and Theosophists subscribed. This was indeed recognised at the time: in his review of Ziska (1897), the journalist and spiritualist W. T. Stead (1849–1912) described the work as ‘the latest phase of Marie Corelli’s dealing with occultism’.25 Throughout her fiction, the fascination, awe and respect which ancient Egyptian objects inspired in her is clear. This was coupled with a dismissal of those who engaged with Egypt on a superficial level, whom she typified as ‘the blandly-smiling, white-helmeted, sun-spectacled, perspiring horde of Cook’s “cheap trippers”’ who see the Sphinx ‘as a fine target for empty soda-water bottles’.26 Corelli was engaged in a process of fashioning herself as a spiritual authority, an individual whose understanding of Egypt extended far beyond the quotidian material plane. As such, she is particularly interesting when considered within the culture of supernatural narrative invention that surrounded Egyptian artefacts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The tales she contributes – recorded by her, her friends and anonymous scribes – are products of oral storytelling, rumour and gossip, and support the notion that Corelli had a particularly significant and mystical relationship with ancient Egyptian materiality. Unlike the Egyptologist, who pieces together fragments of the past through scholarly study, Corelli believed that she was granted privileged access to antiquity through a spiritual bond with one specific artefact: a necklace made from Egyptian beads (Fig. 2.1).

Egyptological Authority and Gender The history of this object can be carefully reconstructed from Corelli’s literary oeuvre and a range of archival materials. Central to this is a curious manuscript detailing a ‘Forgotten Legend’, the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ (transcribed in full in the Appendix). This document, which has hitherto escaped scholarly attention, consists of a few sheets of paper in a discoloured envelope in the collections at Kresen Kernow in Redruth, outlining the peculiar history of how Corelli came to possess the titular ornament, supposedly a gift from Sir John Aird (1833–1911), fulfilling a prophecy related to her years prior.27 When considered in tandem, the tale and the necklace exemplify the kinds of narrative invention that ancient Egyptian artefacts inspired, and the kinds of authority which the tellers of these tales assumed. This object and the documents that refer to it illuminate

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Figure 2.1 [Phillips Brothers?], Necklace, gold and Egyptian beads, c. 1902, M.384–1924, Victoria and Albert Museum, London © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

autobiographical threads within Corelli’s literary output that serve not only to fortify her unwavering fascination with Egypt’s ancient civilisation, but shine light onto the kinds of alternative mystical authority that women in particular assumed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, encouraged by and coinciding with the rise of spiritualism, Theosophy and occultism more broadly.28 They also contribute to Corelli’s development of her own heavily romanticised personal mythology. Born Mary Mackay (although even this is contentious), Corelli created a new name, date of birth and personal history for herself; as one biographer pithily notes, ‘her greatest work of fiction was her own life’.29 Attempting to control the images of herself which made their way into print, Corelli claimed that she preferred to remain hidden, a ‘“Veiled Prophet”

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darkly mysterious’.30 Corelli has earned a particular reputation for fantasy and fabrication, and thus the veracity of the story outlined in the manuscript is dubious at best. The document is handwritten by an unidentified writer, and records ‘the story of an Egyptian necklace, 4000 years old belonging to Miss Marie Corelli as told by herself’.31 The tone of the piece, and several of the biographical details to which it refers, confirms that the story was Corelli’s own. Her penchant for invention, however, and the lack of evidence supporting some of its major claims, indicates that the account is, like so many of Corelli’s, a blending of fact and fancy for the sake of a compelling narrative, the principal purpose of which is to shroud herself in mystery. The story retrospectively suggests an otherworldly source of inspiration for certain features of her fin-de-siècle novels The Sorrows of Satan (1895) and Ziska (1897), works which associate late nineteenth-century Egypt with demons and vengeful spirits. Moreover, it invites a reassessment of Egypt as depicted in Corelli’s factual and fictional writings in light of the anxieties she expresses towards ancient Egyptian artefacts themselves. Aside from the auction catalogue for Corelli’s effects listing among her possessions ‘Rudge: Egypt and Chaldaea, 6 vols’ – misspelling the surname of the Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934) – along with a reference to Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead in her correspondence, there is little evidence in her work that Corelli studied contemporary (scholarly) Egyptological literature.32 In Ziska, in a rare nod to a historical context, Corelli refers to a carving as ‘of the date of the King Amenhotep, or Amenophis III., of the Eighteenth Dynasty’.33 This detail is perhaps drawn from the section of A Guide to the Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum (1880) relating to the Egyptian Galleries, written by the Scottish archaeologist Alexander Stuart Murray (1841–1904), in which he describes the museum’s ushabtis as ‘of the time of the king Amenhotep, or Amenophis III., of the 18th dynasty’.34 Elsewhere, the meticulous compilation of details regarding the amenities of Egypt’s hotels evident in Ziska demonstrates Corelli’s desire to visit Egypt; she wrote a letter to her publisher in 1887 expressing her jealousy that Haggard’s literary success had enabled him to fund a trip to the country, implying that she had been consulting travel guides for factual material for her novels with Egyptian connections.35 Aside from these references to popular guidebooks, which frequently had expert authors, Corelli’s literary allusions concerning Egypt tend to refer to a single work from 1672: The Egyptian History, treating of the Pyramids, the inundation of the Nile, and other prodigies of Egypt, according to the opinions

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and traditions of the Arabians.36 Corelli often refers to this text under different titles, but she universally uses it as a means of justifying her authority on ancient Egyptian subjects, and frequently to claim that the Egyptians had access to the technologies thought (by the unenlightened) to have been originally developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first mention of the volume appears in Ardath (1889), in which Corelli asserts that the book reveals information that it does not actually contain.37 In The Soul of Lilith (1892), a sizeable passage is quoted accurately.38 Subsequent references can be found in Ziska, her non-fictional Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct (1905) and The Life Everlasting (1911).39 It was via this outdated volume, too, that Corelli positioned herself within a media frenzy, sparking suggestions of a curse associated with Tutankhamun’s tomb; after The Life Everlasting, the next mention of The Egyptian History is in her oft-cited and tragically prescient letter to the New York Times predicting that Lord Carnarvon (1866–1923) would not recover from the illness that had befallen him in Egypt. In this case, Corelli employs the book to indicate that she has access to knowledge at odds with disenchanted contemporary Egyptological thought. Through her reference to this work Corelli situated herself within Egyptological conversations, not only conducted via private correspondence but also through the press: the British Egyptologist Henry Reginald Hall (1873–1930) responded to Corelli’s statement by dismissing The Egyptian History as ‘a collection of fairy tales’,40 while in an interview Budge branded her theories ‘bunkum’.41 Corelli seized upon and extended this dialogue, writing a letter of rebuttal to the papers while scribbling a personal note to Budge, with which she included a cutting of the article in question: ‘BRITISH MUSEUM OFFICIAL’S REPLY TO MISS MARIE CORELLI’. She stakes her claim to authority by quoting not only from The Egyptian History (even giving Budge the page number from which she transcribes), but from the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1895) which Budge himself had translated. Finally, she chastises him: I have always been interested in Egyptian ‘mysteries’ and have quite a collection of rare books on this our subject – so I hope I may be forgiven for asking you not to consider every woman a fool with a ‘bunkum’ theory!42

Corelli explicitly raises the issue of gender here, implying that Budge’s disdain for her ideas is the result of her sex rather than her ignorance.

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The authority that she attempts to convey is one intimately caught up not only in the quantity of books in her library addressing Egyptian subjects, but also on the rarity of these volumes. It is telling, of course, that she describes these as works on ‘Egyptian “mysteries”’ rather than Egyptology, aligning herself with feminine occultism rather than Budge’s more masculine scholarship. As Corelli states in Ziska, ‘archaeologists are the narrowest and driest of men, – they preconceive a certain system of work and follow it out by mathematical rule and plan, without one touch of imagination to help them to discover new channels of interest or historical information’.43 These words, which issue from the mouth of the ghostly Ziska, certainly channel Corelli’s own views. While the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1846–1916) credited Corelli with a degree of Egyptological knowledge, proposing that she had based the eponymous Ziska on the ancient Egyptian femme fatale Tabubu, who appears in ‘First Setne’, a Graeco-Roman Egyptian tale (revealing, significantly, that Corelli’s work did not go unread by Egyptologists), it is most probable that the idea for Ziska’s character came from The Egyptian History.44 The specific passage likely to have inspired Corelli describes one of the spirits of the pyramids. Taking ‘the form of a naked Woman’, the spirit is romantically desirable and dangerous: ‘when she would provoke any one to love and make him distracted, she laughs on him, and presently he approaches her, and she draws him to her, and she besots him with love, so that he immediately grows mad’.45 While her engagement with actual Egyptological scholarship is minimal, her interactions with Budge (in their correspondence and in the press) place her within public and private Egyptological forums. Indeed, Corelli sometimes fabricated dealings with those involved in Egyptological spheres in order to position herself on the edge of the discipline: she claimed not only to have been in contact with Carnarvon before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but that he had taken a volume of her fiction with him on his final visit to Egypt, attempting to promulgate her particular supernatural authority that was recognised, if not by Budge, then by other members of the Egyptological community. This, like so many of Corelli’s claims, is almost certainly fabricated. The narrative outlined in the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ manuscript is characterised by the same doubtfulness: I treat the first part of the tale that Corelli tells largely as an invention. The narrative commences with Corelli’s receipt of a letter from ‘the wife of Père Hyacinth [sic]’, Emilie Loyson (1833–1910), after the publication of Corelli’s first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886).46 I suspect this detail to have been invented, as Corelli received a letter

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from Père Hyacinthe (1827–1912) himself, dated 8 March 1890, confirming that she had written to him prior, sending one of her books; this suggests that she initiated contact between herself and the Loysons four years after the publication of A Romance of Two Worlds.47 Hyacinthe related, ‘J’ignore malheureusement l’anglais et n’ai pu lire votre lire, mais Madame Loyson m’en a fait un grand éloge. Elle a tousjours un vit désir d’en donner une traduction française’, though, one assumes, this never materialised due to the state of her health.48 Corelli had published four novels by the time of her receipt of Hyacinthe’s letter, though it is likely that the book that she sent was A Romance of Two Worlds. It is, of course, possible that Emilie Loyson wrote to Corelli separately after this, though the very fact that Hyacinthe’s letter was thought worthy of inclusion in an album of letters while the more interesting letter from his wife was not, suggests that the latter never existed, and that the former provided the kernel of inspiration for Corelli’s narrative. Emilie Loyson, Corelli asserts, related that ‘[s]he was able [. . .] to tell the Past of people [. . .], the previous existence of the soul of a person in a different body’.49 According to one of Loyson’s visionary dreams, in a past incarnation Corelli ‘had been an Egyptian Princess – a very great & mighty princess of royal blood’, whose mummy, at that time, lay undiscovered in Egypt. The preserved body, Loyson purportedly claimed, was wearing a necklace along with a brass plaque, upon which was an engraving of the princess’s own face – identical to Corelli’s – and ‘that some day, she was convinced, that necklace would again belong to its rightful owner’.50 The dream also revealed that during her previous life as the Egyptian princess, Corelli had been murdered by a male lover, and, Loyson warned, if she did not take care, the same fate might again befall her. The first part of the tale concludes with Corelli stating that she did not believe in reincarnation at this point in her life, and that she put the letter from her mind. Although reincarnation was not a concept to which the ancient Egyptians subscribed, such beliefs were regularly attributed to them in mystical and popular literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the most notable works which feature the reincarnation of the ancient Egyptian soul are Grant Allen’s (1848–99) ‘The Miraculous Explorer’ (1894), Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; 1912), Guy Boothby’s (1867–1905) ‘A Professor of Egyptology’ (1904), and George Griffith’s (1857–1906) The Mummy and Miss Nitocris (1906).51 Haggard’s She (1887) was an influential precursor to these examples: although of Greek heritage,

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the Priest of Isis, Kallikrates, has a modern double in Leo Vincey. Details from her novel The Sorrows of Satan, however, suggest that Corelli’s use of the theme was not the sole result of its popularity in contemporary fiction, but in fact her own developing spiritual beliefs, mirroring the claims she makes regarding Loyson’s correspondence. In The Sorrows of Satan, the devil makes a pet of a beetle that emerges from the body of a female mummy. The creature is discovered after the unwrapping of the mummy, upon whose chest rests ‘talismans [which] described her as a princess of a famous royal house’, ‘[s]everal curious jewels’ and ‘a piece of beaten gold quarter of an inch thick’.52 This description is reminiscent of the jewellery and gilded plaque that, Corelli asserted, Loyson had claimed were adorning the mummified remains of Corelli’s Egyptian predecessor interred somewhere beneath Egypt’s sands. These similarities aside, however, the mummified princess in the novel is not meant to represent Corelli; as many critics at the time commented, she created an idealised self-portrait in the character of the angelic Mavis Clare. In contrast, the beetle that emerges from the mummy’s body in The Sorrows of Satan houses the princess’s reincarnated spirit, ‘an evil creature’ with ‘a wicked, brilliant, vampire soul’.53 Nevertheless, the parallels between the two bodies of Egyptian princesses that Corelli conjures up – one in the narrative of Loyson’s dream and the other in her novel – are significant. Corelli can be seen to intentionally confuse fact and fiction, tangling both in a complex process of creative mythmaking which relies not only upon her own highly developed spiritual sensibilities, but also upon those of impartial (if invented) correspondents. Towards the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist witnesses the unwrapping of a female mummy for himself. To his horror, the mummified woman bears a startling resemblance to his late wife: I, who had never witnessed the unrolling of a mummy before, watched the process with great interest and curiosity. As one by one of the scented wrappings were removed, a long tress of nut-brown hair became visible, – then, those who were engaged in the task, used more extreme and delicate precaution, Lucio himself assisting them to uncover the face. As this was done, a kind of sick horror stole over me, – brown and stiff as parchment though the features were, their contour was recognisable, – and when the whole countenance was exposed to view I could almost have shrieked aloud the name of ‘Sibyl!’ For it was like her! – dreadfully like! – and as the faint, half-aromatic half-putrid odours of the unrolled cerements crept towards me on the air, I reeled back giddily and covered my eyes. Irresistibly I was reminded of the subtle French perfume exhaled

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from Sibyl’s garments when I found her dead, – that, and this sickly effluvia were similar!54

There are certainly implications of reincarnation at this moment. The mummified woman, like the protagonist’s wife, committed suicide by taking poison. Furthermore, the ornament that adorns this mummy, unwrapped before the protagonist, is decorated with an engraving resembling the face of his deceased spouse.55 Corelli recalls in her ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ that when she first received Loyson’s supernaturally charged letter she ‘was very young, + did not believe in the previous existence of the soul as I do now’.56 Evidently, she entertained such notions with greater open-mindedness when the manuscript describing her receipt of the letter was written in the twentieth century; the emergence of the theme of reincarnation in her work of the 1890s suggests this as the period when such ideas took root. Harnessing the concept of ancient jewellery bearing the likeness of a modern woman, supposedly a concept first revealed to her in Loyson’s letter, Corelli adds a certain autobiographical frisson to her novel’s plot. In Ziska too, written in 1896, the year after The Sorrows of Satan was published, ancient Egyptian souls appear in contemporary bodies that mirror their originals to a startling degree. The features of the eponymous Ziska, believed to be a Russian princess, but in fact the ghost of an ancient Egyptian dancer, replicate those on a bas relief, ‘line for line alike’.57 Other characters note that the two ‘might be twin sisters’, and stand ‘in silent and superstitious wonderment’ at the ‘uncanny’ resemblance.58 While Ziska is not a reincarnation of an ancient spirit, but rather the spirit itself, the soul of her former lover has found a modern identity. The French artist Gervase and the ancient warrior Araxes share a ‘remarkable similarity of contour and expression’.59 It is ‘a startling likeness. The same straight, fierce brows, the same proud, firm mouth, the same almond-shaped eyes were, as it seemed, copied from the ancient entablature and repeated in flesh and blood in the features of Gervase.’60 Corelli sidesteps the issue of the well-known stylisation of ancient Egyptian art in this case, stating that the correspondence between the wall carvings and the individuals in question was ‘[a]llowing for the peculiar style of drawing and design common to ancient Egypt’.61 As in The Sorrows of Satan, albeit to a lesser extent, items of jewellery are connected to the previous or subsequent incarnations. As Gervase mentions of Ziska, ‘[i]t seemed that the jewels she wore upon her rounded arms and slender ankles were all love-gifts from me – every circlet of gold,

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every starry, shining gem on her fair body was the symbol of some secret joy between us.’62 There are more to the parallels between the narrative of Ziska and Loyson’s letter, however. Just as Loyson had warned Corelli about a dangerous romance to be avoided, lest her murderer in her previous life kill her again, Ziska is revealed to have died as a result of Araxes’s uncontrollable passions. Thus, when the narrator of The Sorrows of Satan describes Egypt as a land ‘where the opened tombs and coffins expose once more to the light of day, faces that are the very semblances of those we ourselves have known and loved in our time’, Corelli might not have merely been anticipating the return of her own ancient doppelgänger in mummy form along with the mysterious necklace, as Loyson had foreseen, but, more troublingly, the enigmatic lover whom she must avoid at all costs.63 This warning to avoid a male lover might have offered Corelli an excuse as to why she had never pursued any romantic relationships with men. Although she felt a turbulent passion towards the painter Arthur Severn in later years, her spinsterhood has given rise to speculation among some modern critics that the relationship with her lifelong companion, Bertha Vyver (1854–1941), may have been a romantic one.64 This theme of the ancient Egyptian double (both of the human body, and of ancient jewellery) was a fairly common trope in contemporary literature. In Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; 1912), the heroine, Margaret Trelawny, wears Egyptian jewellery, establishing her connection to ancient Egypt before her physical and psychical connection to the ancient Egyptian queen Tera becomes apparent. Indeed, when the protagonist, Malcolm Ross, first sets eyes upon her ‘at [a] ball in Belgrave Square’, he describes her as: A queenly figure! tall and slim, bending, swaying, undulating as the lily or the lotus. Clad in a flowing gown of some filmy black material shot with gold. For ornament in her hair she wore an old Egyptian jewel, a tiny crystal disk, set between rising plumes carved in lapis lazuli. On her wrist was a broad bangle or bracelet of antique work, in the shape of a pair of spreading wings wrought in gold, with the feathers made of coloured gems.65

In this moment, Margaret inspires fear and ‘awe’ in Ross through her regal appearance and demeanour. When Tera’s sarcophagus is opened, the jewel which Margaret has worn in her hair is shown to have a twin, which only serves to emphasise the physical resemblance between living woman and dormant queen:

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This woman – I could not think of her as a mummy or a corpse – was the image of Margaret as my eyes had first lit on her. The likeness was increased by the jewelled ornament which she wore in her hair, the ‘Disk and Plumes’, such as Margaret, too, had worn. It, too, was a glorious jewel; one noble pearl of moonlight lustre, flanked by carven pieces of moonstone.66

Margaret’s response to the uncovering of Tera’s jewels is one of ‘ecstasy’.67 Observing that the linen gown laid atop Tera’s nude body is ‘no cerement’ but ‘a marriage robe’, she dresses Tera and adorns her with all of her jewellery.68 The jewels themselves mimic the cosmic alignment between Margaret and Tera; born at the very moment in which her Egyptologist father broke through into Tera’s tomb, Margaret increasingly comes to channel the queen’s spirit over the course of the novel. In the jewels themselves this is symbolised through their celestial connotations: not only is the titular jewel a ruby inscribed with the asterism of the plough, the queen’s jewelled girdle unites imagery of sun, moon and stars: it ‘shone and glowed with all the forms and phases and colours of the sky’.69 Most of the stones ‘seemed to hold a living star’, while at the centre is a ‘great yellow stone’ which gleams ‘as though a veritable sun lay within’, flanked by ‘two great moonstones of lesser size, whose glowing, beside the glory of the sun-stone, was like the silvery sheen of moonlight’.70 In Stoker’s bleak original ending to The Jewel of Seven Stars, the experiment that seeks to revive the ancient queen goes terribly awry. Her body disappears, and all of the characters except Ross are left dead. The novel was reissued in 1912 with a happier, more traditional conclusion. In the later version, Ross and Margaret marry after the experiment seems to fail: there is, however, an implication that the soul of Tera has migrated into Margaret’s body, again a notion emphasised by the ancient jewellery. On their wedding day, Margaret wore the mummy robe and zone and the jewel which Queen Tera had worn in her hair. On her breast, set in a ring of gold made like a twisted lotus stalk, she wore the strange Jewel of Seven Stars [. . .]. At the marriage the sunlight streaming through the chancel windows fell on it, and it seemed to glow like a living thing.71

In Stoker’s novel, as in Corelli’s writing, material artefacts, carvings and jewellery allow access to greater spiritual truths connecting the modern and ancient worlds. Certainly, and as Piya Pal-Lapinski has

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noted, Stoker’s narrative was produced and published at a time when Egyptian revival jewellery was enjoying something of a peak in popularity: she connects the items of jewellery in The Jewel of Seven Stars to pieces by René Lalique (1860–1945).72 Romantic notions of reincarnation may well have been behind this renewed interest in Egyptian-inspired jewellery, likely working hand in hand with this trope in the works of Stoker, Corelli and their contemporaries, rebirth being a theme that Lizzie Glithero-West has recently connected to Egyptian revival jewellery of the 1920s.73 Corelli claimed that Loyson’s letter was received far in advance of the composition of these fin-de-siècle novels, in which the bejewelled bodies of ancient Egyptians correspond to those of their modern incarnations. By the point of the composition of the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, having observed ancient jewellery adorning the hands of those with whom she mixed in the 1890s, and having written novels addressing such themes, the invention of correspondence form Loyson casts a supernatural shadow back on Corelli’s experiences of Egyptian jewellery at the fin de siècle. There were certainly parallels between the ancient Egyptian subject matter in her writing of this time, and individuals who sported ancient jewellery, which corresponds with her burgeoning beliefs that such items might be magically potent. The year in which The Sorrows of Satan was published, 1895, was, after all, also the year of the trials of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). While the novel proved incredibly successful, Corelli blamed the scandal surrounding the trials for a decline in sales figures.74 Wilde and Corelli had enjoyed an amicable relationship in the late 1880s and early 1890s. He had praised her work, and invited her to contribute to The Woman’s World, of which he was then the editor.75 Subsequently, they encountered one another at several social events and – on the surface, at least – seemed to share a reciprocal admiration of each other’s writing.76 By 1895, however, their relationship had soured.77 Wilde’s high-profile sexual misdemeanours and his involvement in the decadent movement lost him countless friends and supporters, and while Corelli and Wilde’s friendship had begun to deteriorate a number of years before this scandal, it was over the course of these defining years that Wilde came to publicly embody the decadence, debauchery and immorality that Corelli vehemently opposed, so much so that in a letter of 1922 Corelli referred to Wilde as ‘that pestiferous creature [. . .] fortunately no longer living’.78 Numerous sources recall a ring (now presumed lost) that Wilde sported, which featured ‘a large scarab’; ‘a beetle of green stone’; ‘un scarabée d’Egypte en lapis-lazuli’ ‘port[é] en chaton mobile’.79

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Indeed, it appears that the jewel was an essential part of his persona. The writer and aesthete Harold Acton (1904–94) described that when Reggie Turner (1869–1938), an associate of Wilde, impersonated him, ‘his gestures became sculptured and hieratic and his fingers sprouted scarab rings [. . .] as if Oscar’s spirit had taken possession of him’.80 If Wilde’s ring was a genuine antiquity and not an Egyptian revival piece, he may have procured it from his father, the amateur archaeologist Sir William Wilde (1815–76), who had brought back artefacts from his trip to Egypt in 1837.81 This, along with the declaration he made on his 1882 lecture tour of the United States that there was ‘nothing to my mind more coarse in conception and more vulgar in execution than modern jewellery’, suggests that it is likely that Wilde’s ring was a genuine antiquity (or else an antique scarab in a modern setting).82 Wilde’s followers and contemporaries wore similar jewellery; it is possible that the scarab ring became, like the green carnation (another amalgam of the natural and the artificial), a tacit symbol of homosexuality. Robbie Ross, with whom Wilde engaged in his first homosexual affair, also wore a ‘large turquoise blue scarab ring’, and on the same finger upon which Wilde wore his own: the little finger of the left hand.83 Perhaps there was a kind of romantic significance in wearing a ring on the finger next to that on which the wedding ring is traditionally worn. Although these individuals may have worn ancient Egyptian trinkets as unique objects upon which to muse and evoke the ghosts of bygone eras, they also suggested the decay of ancient civilisation, and the perceived debauchery and depravity with which male homosexuality was associated in the nineteenth century. Lynn Meskell identifies the ‘spectral allusions to the homoerotic’ in nineteenth-century painting and literature dealing with Egyptian themes, particularly in the Egyptologically inflected writings of those admired by Wilde and his acolytes: Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), Théophile Gautier (1811–72), Maxime Du Camp (1822–94) and Gustave Flaubert (1821–80).84 Furthermore, Antinous, lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian and an individual whom Wilde found particularly compelling (referring to him, as we shall see in the fourth chapter of this book, in The Picture of Dorian Gray [1890; 1891], The Sphinx [1894], and the extended version of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ [1921]), drowned in the river Nile, an Egyptian backdrop to a tragic tale of Uranian love.85 Corelli, who witnessed her former friend’s fall from grace, may have attached a special significance to the scarab ring; this relic may even provide the key to understanding the shift in Corelli’s understanding of, and engagements with, ancient Egyptian jewellery. Wilde

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had himself referred to the materials from which ancient Egyptian jewellery was constructed in his fairy tale ‘The Young King’ (1891), in which the titular monarch dispatches merchants ‘to Egypt to look for that curious green turquoise which is found only in the tombs of kings, and is said to possess magical properties’.86 The significance of rings in his fiction is also noteworthy; the final sentence of Wilde’s own Faustian tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray, refers to Gray’s monstrous corpse: ‘[i]t was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was’.87 Camille Paglia goes so far as to even read this iconic moment through an Egyptian lens, the painting as a funerary portrait of the subject in life hovering over the mummylike and ornamented body. Dorian remains beautiful ‘only at the price of perversion, decadence, and mummification. The novel’s final lines bring this mummy literally before us: Dorian’s “withered, wrinkled” corpse.’88 Paglia (not entirely accurate in her analogy from an Egyptological perspective) compares the portrait to ‘the ka or double of the deceased in Egyptian tombs, heaped with toys and furniture. The horrified discoverers breaking into the chamber are like archaeologists finding the king’s mummy thrown upon the floor by grave robbers.’89 That the discoverers identify the corpse through the ring that he wears also evokes the relics inscribed with the identity of mummified pharaohs in their tombs. Thus, in Wilde’s fiction, jewellery is intimately entwined with notions of identity, and ancient Egyptian materials are not only rare and desirable, but potent and macabre. There is certainly evidence to suggest that Corelli was drawing inspiration both from Wilde’s writing and his persona. Jill Galvan and Stephan Karschay have exposed an array of parallels between Wilde’s controversial novel and Corelli’s reworking of similar themes, confirming Wilde’s influence upon her writing.90 In accordance with these readings of Wilde into Corelli’s texts, a closer examination of the treatment of ancient Egypt in The Sorrows of Satan suggests that Wilde’s scarab ring has a counterpart in Corelli’s novel. The devil’s familiar, the beetle with the ‘vampire soul’ discovered within the partially consumed flesh of a mummy, is ‘a brilliant winged insect coloured with all the tints and half-tints of the rainbow’. This, like Wilde’s scarab ring, customarily perches on ‘its protector’s hand’.91 Comparisons between the beetle and precious stones suggest its parallelism with jewellery: its body shines ‘with the hues of an opal’ and has the appearance of ‘a beautiful iridescent jewel’.92 A morbid survival of ancient Egypt that evokes decay and death, Satan’s familiar hints not only at connections between Corelli’s devil and Wilde himself, but a supernatural power

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inherent in ancient Egyptian objects (presaging Corelli’s invention of the mystical promises of Loyson’s letter). Certainly, the beetle, having fed upon a mummified body, itself extravagantly anointed and embalmed, is an omen of the downfall that follows sensual excesses. If Wilde’s ancient trinket had symbolised ill-fortune and degeneration, these promises were fulfilled in 1895.

Dream and Intuition The second part of the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ (more firmly anchored in fact than the first part, although likely heavily embellished) concerns the titular item of jewellery itself. By the time of the manuscript’s composition, Corelli had indeed received a necklace made, in part, from ancient Egyptian beads ‘dug up during the excavations at Philae’ ‘during the construction of the great Nile barrage’, and presented to her by Sir John Aird.93 The necklace is, presumably, an early twentieth-century construction, although some of the beads are ancient in origin. Twenty contemporary hollow gold pendants shaped like lotus flowers hang from granulated gold tube-shaped beads, and the hook which fastens the necklace (also contemporary) features a spray of three lotus flowers. Most of the beads on the necklace appear to be Egypto-Roman, including a number of glass beads produced via the millefiori technique, as well as others made from garnet and carnelian. The bugle beads, made from Egyptian faience with a blue glaze, were considered by Victoria and Albert Museum staff on receipt of the necklace in 1924 ‘perhaps of the XII Dynasty (about 2500 B.C.)’.94 When Aird gave Corelli the necklace, it was enclosed within a leather case with ‘Presented to Miss Marie Corelli by Sir John Aird, Bart.’ picked out in gilt lettering. Aird’s ventures in Egypt lasted from 1898 to 1902, meaning that the beads were most likely acquired during this period. Aird was created a baronet on 5 March 1901; he is referred to as ‘Sir John Aird’ throughout the manuscript and on the leather case accompanying the necklace, suggesting this year for Corelli’s earliest receipt of the item. Shirley Bury speculates that the original beads were fashioned into this item of jewellery by Phillips Brothers, one of the most important jewellers’ firms in London working in revivalist styles throughout the Victorian era, and one which benefited from the patronage of the Prince of Wales (1841–1910), who himself commissioned copies of Egyptian jewellery set with scarabs, among other pieces.95 This company, however, closed in 1902, meaning that any window in which

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Aird might have commissioned the piece from Phillips must have been small. Other potential firms renowned for their work in the archaeological style of jewellery which could have feasibly produced the piece include Castellani and Giuliano, which closed in 1914 and 1930 respectively. Nevertheless, I am inclined to concur with Bury’s theory that the piece is a Phillips Brothers creation. Bury records that one of the Phillips Brothers’ necklace designs featured ‘alternating scarabs and lotus flowers’, with the lotus charms similar to those used in a necklace showcasing ‘a collection of dried green Brazilian beetles’ ‘made for Lord Granville’s [1815–91] second wife in 1884 or 1885’; these lotuses recall those used for Corelli’s necklace.96 While there are no maker’s marks on the necklace itself, nor visible on or within the presentation case, the spray of three lotus flowers on the fastening hook recalls one of the marks of Phillips Brothers: the three ‘Prince of Wales’ feathers symbolising their royal patron.97 In her will, Corelli left the necklace to the South Kensington Museum in London (by the time of her death, renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum); she emphasised its antique significance and described it as ‘the unique Egyptian necklace presented to me by Sir John Aird and valued by him at £1,000’, specifying that it become part of ‘the National collection of Egyptian ornaments dating 4,000 years B.C.’.98 Corelli does not appear to have known that the Egyptian beads of the necklace derive from various periods in the country’s history. The different sources for components of the necklace led the staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum to record upon its inspection that ‘it is worthy of being exhibited in the Museum’ ‘with a properly worded label’ explaining the necklace’s complex makeup.99 Corelli certainly appears to have had a shaky grasp of the age of the earliest beads. In the ‘Story of the Egyptian Necklace’ the item is described as ‘4000 years old’, while in Corelli’s will she claims that it was fashioned 4,000 years before Christ.100 Aside from the Egyptian necklace’s appearance in the will and its reproductions in the press, the only other mention of it in previously known material before its bequeathment occurs in Bertha Vyver’s Memoirs of Marie Corelli (1930).101 This latter section of the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ recounts a supernaturally charged anecdote which relates to a similar biographical narrative within Vyver’s work. In Vyver’s version of events, ‘a curious happening’ took place, involving a mysterious clairvoyant encounter with the spirit of an ancient Egyptian. Corelli had promised to lend the necklace to the actress Constance Collier (1878–1955), who was to play the part of the Egyptian queen in a production of Shakespeare’s

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Antony and Cleopatra. Vyver recalls how the night before the performance Corelli was contacted by the necklace’s ancient Egyptian owner in a dream, warning her against the necklace being used in the production. Corelli made her excuses, and Collier wore a substitute item of jewellery. As Vyver recounts, ‘Cleopatra, in a passionate scene with Antony, tore the necklace she then wore from her throat and it fell in fragments on to the stage. Marie turned to me in the box, “How lucky it was not my necklace!”’102 Corelli’s prophetic and mediumistic dream supposedly saved her own relic from destruction at the hands of Collier, fully immersed in the intensity of the moment. When we consider Vyver’s version of this tale alongside the fuller one in the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ manuscript, Corelli’s dream safeguarding against the destruction of her own ancient Egyptian jewellery on stage a decade later takes on new resonances. According to the narrative Corelli claimed to have received in Loyson’s letter, her acquisition of the necklace is the fulfilment of a prophecy; Aird’s gift satisfies Loyson’s prediction that an Egyptian necklace, purportedly that of a previous incarnation, would again be Corelli’s. Comparing the versions of events in the two sources also highlights some discrepancies, including the number of times Corelli was supposed to have experienced the dream. In Vyver’s account the spectral visitation occurs only the night before the play; in Corelli’s, she claims to have had the dream ‘three nights running’, playing upon the notion of three as a magical number, while simultaneously emphasising the dream’s importance through its repetition: A few nights before the Play, i [sic] had a dream, in which a shadowy figure appeared to me warning me on no account to move the necklace from its present position. This happened three nights running. I wrote & told Miss Collier who said she w.d on no account wear the necklace, so it stayed in my room at Mason Croft, where it has remained ever since.103

Moreover, Corelli’s statement that Loyson’s letter had revealed that the necklace would be discovered with the mummy of an Egyptian princess, an individual linked to Corelli through their shared reincarnated soul, means that the ‘shadowy figure’ of Corelli’s account is not merely an ancient Egyptian spirit as Vyver’s version of events implies, but presumably Corelli’s ancient Egyptian former self. The notion might not merely have occurred to Corelli as a result of the themes which had been emerging within her writing and other supernaturally inflected stories at the fin de siècle, but of the symbolism of the necklace itself. The modern gold pendants are shaped like lotus

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flowers, which, were widely regarded in contemporaneous Egyptology to symbolise rebirth, regeneration and the solar cycle – concepts tantalisingly close to the concept of reincarnation.104 Corelli’s beads, according to these details, are unlikely to have ever graced a modern throat. Aird had apparently related ‘that his wife refused to wear it, because it had been on a mummy’.105 Collier would not wear it for the performance of the play, seemingly treating the dream’s warning as if it were a genuine otherworldly encounter. Corelli herself admitted that ‘I think it had brought me luck & regard it as a mascot but I would not wear it for anything’.106 Believing that the necklace would bring her prosperity as long as she did not actually wear it, she may have associated the jewellery with the potential to cause misfortune, having noted the persistence with which Aird had insisted that the necklace be hers. As the manuscript records, ‘Sir John Aird was ill – very ill – dying in fact’, and believed that ‘it would probably help him to recover it if I took it, or it might very likely, [sic] cause his death if I refused’.107 Corelli gamely agreed to receive the necklace and Aird duly overcame his illness; his recovery is conveniently attributed in the manuscript to the reunion of the artefact and its rightful owner. Corelli’s narrative has several fictional antecedents. One of the earliest stories of the mummy’s curse, Jane Austin’s (1831–94) ‘After Three Thousand Years’ (1868), deals specifically with a necklace removed from a mummy which brings death to the modern wearer. While there is no evidence to suggest that Corelli had encountered this tale, there are a number of features in common: not only is the mummy in each case the body of a princess, but the misfortune the necklace brings is directly concerned with a violent death and spurned love: in ‘After Three Thousand Years’ the papyrus inscribed with a hieroglyphic message is deciphered to read ‘See me, the beloved of a king. I scorned him for a lesser love, and thus I lie’.108 The necklace’s original wearer had, it transpires, been murdered by having the necklace placed about her throat: the beetles strung upon the chain once thought to be inert decorations are revealed to be dormant poisonous creatures. When the female protagonist, Marion Harleigh, learns that her fiancé has been romantically pursuing her cousin, she uses the necklace, a gift from him to her before his transgressions, to take her own life, becoming the mummy’s modern counterpart. Corelli believed (or claimed to believe) that the necklace had power to cause illness in the wrong hands, and was reluctant to wear it, revealing (along with her nocturnal visitations from the ‘shadowy figure’ of her counterpart in antiquity) an understanding of the potency

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of ancient Egyptian magic embodied by and within the object, and the misfortune it might bring. This is probably why it was one of the few items that Corelli donated to an organisation rather than to an individual in her will. Most of her possessions were instructed to be left as they were in Mason Croft (the house that she shared with Vyver in Stratford-upon-Avon) after her death, but Corelli may well have believed that the necklace was safest away from her trusted companion and other persons who did not share her sympathetic spiritual connection with its former owner through the process of reincarnation. Rather than run the risk of exposing any of her loved ones to misfortune, Corelli ensured that the necklace’s threat could be enclosed securely within the confines of a museum display case. As she claimed in the manuscript, the mummy upon which Aird had found the necklace ‘had been kept at the museum in Cairo’, while the gold plaque seemingly depicting Corelli’s face ‘he gave to the British Museum’.109 There is no evidence that Aird in fact bequeathed any objects to either the Cairo Museum or the British Museum, implying that Corelli invented these donations as a means of heightening the perceived archaeological significance of her necklace. By donating her own relic after her death to a similar institution she could ensure that all of the objects which she claimed Aird had uncovered would be contained safely within the walls of respected, scholarly institutions, if not in reality then at least within the imaginary boundaries of the narrative she weaves in the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’. Haggard, in donating ancient Egyptian items from his own collection to museums, might have been perceived by Corelli as fluidly negotiating any boundaries between scholarly Egyptology and amateur interest in the subject.110 Her own bequeathment might be seen as attempting to achieve a similar reputation as the owner of Egyptological objects of national importance, worthy of protection in glass cases. It is fitting that when the Wildean devil is not wearing the jewel-like beetle on his hand in The Sorrows of Satan, he keeps it in a box made of ‘crystal’, where it can be observed as in a display case, no longer a trinket that bespeaks its wearer’s decadence, but an artefact of archaeological significance.111 The removal of the object from the individual and its confinement within a display case that evokes those of the museum render it neutral. Until its containment, however, the artefact has the potential to invoke corruption, illness and degeneration in the wrong hands. Wilde’s scarab ring, which Corelli may have connected with inevitable ruin or at least ill-fate by the late nineteenth century, surely contributed to this sense of unease at the ancient magic still lingering in the modern world. If Corelli associated plundered Egyptian jewellery

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with impending doom at this stage, it goes some way to explaining why she became so embroiled in rumours of curses after the discovery of the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922. When Lord Carnarvon fell ill after a mosquito bite became infected, Corelli was by no means alone in giving statements to the press concerning potential causes of this misfortune. Of those who offered their opinions on the mysterious deaths that were apparently in store for those responsible for the excavations, popular authors appear to be a key demographic. Corelli, along with Haggard, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), who had all written stories with ancient Egyptian themes, gave statements to the press, contributing their knowledge of either the supernatural veracity or else scientific improbability of the curse of Tutankhamun in order to promote or suppress rumours of occult forces at work. Evidently, having written about Egyptian mummies and ghosts in their fiction lent these authors some degree of Egyptological authority, albeit one entwined with mysticism. Corelli, in what appeared to be a characteristic display of supposed uncanny prophecy, said that she had foreseen that ‘dire punishment’ would befall those who broke into the tomb two weeks before Carnarvon’s death, which catalysed the widespread popularisation of the contemporary legend of the mummy’s curse.112 Rather than the more supernatural explanation of elemental spirits exacting revenge proposed by Doyle, Corelli, writing to The New York Times, speculated that ancient Egyptian funerary ornaments themselves had resulted in the deaths and misfortunes of those associated with the excavation: I cannot but think some risks are run by breaking into the last rest of a King of Egypt whose tomb is specially and solemnly guarded, and robbing him of his possessions. According to a rare book I possess, which is not in the British Museum, entitled ‘The Egyptian History of the Pyramids’ [. . .], the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb. The book gives long and elaborate lists of the ‘treasures’ buried with several of the kings, and among these are named ‘divers secret poisons enclosed in boxes in such wise that they who touch them shall not know how they come to suffer.’ That is why I ask: ‘Was it a mosquito bite?’ that has so seriously affected Lord Carnarvon.113

The passage which Corelli claims to quote from The Egyptian History of the Pyramids is not found in the original text. There are mentions of ‘Poisons and Mortal drinks’ conserved within a pyramid, but these are accompanied by ‘wholesome Preservatives and Antidotes’, a detail

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which Corelli neglects to mention.114 Whether the result of vengeful elementals seeking paranormal retribution as Doyle claimed, or, as Corelli professed, subtle poisons with which the funerary ornaments had been laced, plundering tombs filled with ancient treasures was perceived, not just by Corelli, as a hazardous endeavour. Certainly, Corelli treated her own relic with caution. A further reference to the risks of pillaging the resting places of the dead appears in a letter she composed just three months before her own death, revealing a lasting respect for the notion that dangers lurked within Egyptian graves: Dear Mr Clive Holland I have just read your interesting article in ‘The Saturday Mercury’ – on the curses of old Egypt – and I send you with this my ‘Ziska’ – which was written as a sort of ‘pot-boiler’ when I was but a mere girl. It is the book the late Lord Carnarvon took with him on his last journey to Luxor. I think you may be interested in it – as though I have never been to Egypt, I seem to have ‘visualised’ something like the tomb of Tutankhamen in the story. I warned Lord Carnarvon of possible evil, – and I do not think any good will come of disturbing the dead. Please excuse the ‘cheap’ edition – I have no other by me – and it will serve to read – as indeed I should like you to read it – carefully. Sincerely yours Marie Corelli115

There is no evidence elsewhere to support Corelli’s claim that Carnarvon brought a copy of Ziska with him on his last journey to Egypt, nor that Corelli had even been in contact with Carnarvon, let alone cautioned him as to the ‘possible evil’ awaiting him in Egypt’s tombs. As is so often the case with Corelli, her taste for invention serves to weave a more compelling narrative which allows her to boast not only an expert knowledge but also an enhanced supernatural awareness. Her penchant for melodrama and scaremongering is evident in the suggestion that Ziska was the one book Carnarvon thought to take with him, her underlining of ‘carefully’, and the meiotic quotation marks around ‘visualised’, suggesting that the process by which she wrote her novel might have been more mystical than even she cares to admit. By claiming that excavators read her fiction in such a manner, she positions her work as a supernaturally insightful scholarly source (albeit reprinted cheaply in pulp-fiction formats), and an alternative to traditional Egyptological authority. She had, in fact, sent a copy of Ziska to Haggard around the same time, perhaps attempting to

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establish her connectedness to Egyptological circles through the distribution of her work to an individual who had penetrated these groups with greater success.116 Most tellingly, Corelli refers to only one of her characters as an Egyptologist across the whole of her work: the Egyptian spirit Ziska. Other characters cannot approach this first-hand wisdom that Ziska herself possesses. Indeed, scholars of all disciplines are not privy to the truth to which Ziska, and, to a degree, her reincarnated lover Gervase, have access. Gervase comes to have an epiphany in which ‘[h]e recognised himself as Araxes – always the same Soul passing through a myriad changes, – and all the links of his past and present were suddenly welded together in one unbroken chain, stretching over thousands of years.’117 Perhaps this fictional realisation mirrors one which Corelli seems to have fabricated for herself, claiming to be the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess in order to assume a position as an unparalleled authority. However, this connection to the past is by no means entirely immaterial, her necklace functioning as the material link to what she claimed – and perhaps believed – to be her previous incarnation. While defining the distinction between Corelli’s fiction and her autobiographical accounts proves challenging, her attitude towards the significance of Egyptian objects does appear to shift. At first, their magic is limited to the pages of her novels, but by the twentieth century, after her receipt of the necklace, their power is very much situated in the real world. As a result of this perceived spiritual connection to ancient Egypt via this relic, she began to issue warnings about misfortune to the press and in her own private correspondence. Corelli’s self-appointed role as an inheritor of ancient Egyptian spiritual truths, and her spiritual encounters with the material, transform her, in her own eyes at least, into a specialist whose grave warnings should be heeded at all costs. As this consideration of Corelli’s writings and artefacts reveals, part of an object’s worth is in the stories one can tell about it. Forged Egyptian Antiquities (1912) by T. G. Wakeling supports this view: despite its Egyptological trappings with the image of a canopic jar gracing the front board and the title page enclosing its information along with a scarab hieroglyph within the bronze outline of a cartouche, this volume is less a guide to identifying forgeries and more a series of stories surrounding Wakeling’s acquisitions. Crowded with anecdotes in which, after dinner, Egyptologists are coerced by their hosts and hostesses into inspecting their acquisitions and assessing whether or not they are genuine, Wakeling’s text suggests that an object’s value lies not in its

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authenticity but in the worth of the story behind it. The fake relics that Wakeling has acquired may not be of scholarly import like those deemed authentic by the Egyptologists he invites to dinner, but these objects still hold a certain narrative power. This notion was seized upon not only by authors with a reputation for fictionalising their own lives, like Corelli, but indeed even by those with better-recognised scholarly Egyptological interests, like Haggard. Reality and make-believe were confused, as scandal and superstition influenced how objects in both private collections and those in museums on display for the general public were encountered and interpreted, and highbrow and lowbrow discourses collided. These relics might appear in gilt on the covers of Egyptological works, but they might have magical, spectral doubles too, in the cheap, accessible and stimulating pages of pulp fiction.

Notes 1. Birmingham, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Martineau family papers, HMM/H/4. 2. David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 180. Interpreting evidence with biblical accounts in mind was also a common practice in early geology, although many geologists used their evidence to suggest flaws in the biblical story of creation; see Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 4, 29–30, 41. 3. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA ii.3.1, 15 February 1923. This volume had an introduction written by the eminent Assyriologist Archibald Henry Sayce, a scholar whom Carter had first encountered in 1892; see T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London: Kegan Paul International, 1992), p. 38. 4. The necklace is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was on display until 2008 when it was moved to storage; [Phillips Brothers?], Necklace, gold and Egyptian beads, c. 1902, M.384–1924, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 5. Dominic Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains: Mummies and the Erotics of Biography’, in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity, ed. Dominic Montserrat (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 162–97 (pp. 163, 170). 6. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Science versus Rumour: Artefaction and CounterNarrative in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum’, History and Anthropology, 23.2 (2012), 257–69.

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7. The Unlucky Mummy, 21st Dynasty, wood and plaster, 168.5 × 38 × 12 cm, EA 22542, British Museum, London. 8. Algernon Blackwood, ‘A Descent into Egypt’, in Incredible Adventures (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), pp. 241–335 (p. 286). 9. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (London: Cassell and Company, 1907), p. 8. Haggard refers to the goldfields of Matabeleland, casting a religious and mythological veil over recent events. His use of the term ‘discovered’ is misleading, suggesting an archaeological narrative at odds with reality. 10. Georg Ebers, An Egyptian Princess, trans. Eleanor Grove, 2 vols, rev. edn (New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1880), i, p. xv. 11. Stories of cursed or magical objects from other lands and times proliferated at this period; see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 28.3 (1985), 243–52. Within this trend, ancient Egypt is unique in the ease of movement of these tales across boundaries of fiction and fact. 12. ‘An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish’ first appeared in Moore’s collection Observations (1924); the poem suggests that the bottle was used to hold water, while in reality it would have been used for oil or scent. An image of the artefact appeared in The Illustrated London News, 6 May 1921. See Vessel, 18th Dynasty, glass, 14.1 × 7 × 3.6 cm, EA 55193, British Museum, London. Tim Chamberlain states that ‘[i]t seems almost certain [. . .] that no single match will ever be made’ for Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’; however, he records a number of genuine artefacts which appear to make up Keats’s composite: the Townley Vase and one of the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, and the Sosibios Vase in the Musée du Louvre; see Tim Chamberlain, ‘The Elusive Urn’, British Museum Magazine, 52 (2005), 36–8. See The Townley Vase, c. second century ce, marble, c. 1.06 m, 1805,0703.218, British Museum, London; The Parthenon Sculptures, 438–432 bce, marble, 1816,0610.86, British Museum, London; Volute krater, c. 50 bce, marble, 78 cm, MR 987 [n° usuel Ma 442], Musée du Louvre, Paris. 13. William Wordsworth, ‘The Egyptian Maid; or, The Romance of the Water Lily’, in Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1835), pp. 45–68. The artefact that inspired this poem, now known as ‘Clytie/Antonia’, is still on display at the British Museum; see Clytie/Antonia, c. 40–50 ce, marble, 57.15 cm, 1805,0703.79, British Museum, London. This artefact is Roman rather than Egyptian: Wordsworth’s attachment of an Egyptian-themed narrative to the bust perhaps hints at an increasing fascination with Egypt in the early nineteenth century, encouraging him to turn to fancy rather than fact when writing the poem. Of course, the incorporation of the Egyptian goddess Isis into the

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

89

Graeco-Roman pantheon might have complicated contemporaneous interpretations of the bust. Mummy case / cartonnage / human mummy, plaster, linen, lime wood, human tissue and gold, early second century bce, 171 cm, EA 21810, British Museum, London. This artefact also features in other early twentieth-century fiction, notably Dora McChesney’s London Roses: An Idyll of the British Museum (1903); see Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 144–5. R. Austin Freeman, The Eye of Osiris: A Detective Romance (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), p. 95. Ibid. p. 97. See Stela, c. 1350 bce, limestone, 8.5 × 9.5 × 3.4 cm, EA 24431, British Museum, London. Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998), p. 15. The sherd is housed at the Norwich Castle Museum: www.norfolkmuseumscollections.org/collections/objects/object-4062191913.html [accessed 6 May 2015]; see Pottery sherd (pottery), c. 1886, ceramic, 250 × 195 cm, NWHCM: 1917.68.7.1, Norwich Castle Museum, Norwich. The same sister-in-law, Agnes Barber, also created the map that served as the frontispiece of King Solomon’s Mines; see Harry How, ‘Illustrated Interviews. No VII – Mr. H. Rider Haggard’, Strand Magazine, 3 (1892), 2–17 (p. 14). How, ‘Illustrated Interviews’, pp. 7, 14. Luckhurst, ‘Science versus Rumour’, p. 266. Julia Reid, ‘“Gladstone bags, shooting boots, and Bryant & May’s matches”: Empire, Commerce, and the Imperial Romance in the Graphic’s Serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s She’, Studies in the Novel, 43.2 (2011), 152–78 (pp. 153, 155). Richard Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality Beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt’, in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 218–44 (p. 221). Simon Goldhill, ‘A Writer’s Things: Edward Bulwer Lytton and the Archaeological Gaze; or, What’s in a Skull?’, Representations, 119.1 (2012), 92–118 (p. 96). Ibid. p. 104. Ibid. p. 111. [W. T. Stead], ‘“Ziska,” the Problem of a Wicked Soul’, Borderland, 4.2 (1897), 213–15 (p. 213). Marie Corelli, Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1897), pp. 11–13. Redruth, Kresen Kernow, Coode and French, of St Austell, solicitors, Records of Sawle of Penrice, St. Austell, Miscellaneous, CF/2/768,

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28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

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Writing the Sphinx ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, c. 1910. Holidays taken by Corelli in Cornwall in 1904, 1911 and 1914 suggest these years as possible times of composition, which might go some way to explain the manuscript’s Cornish location, 1911 being the most plausible. For Corelli’s Cornish holidays, see Teresa Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 180, 186. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 89–92. Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli, p. 1. New York, The New York Public Library, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, Berg Coll MSS Corelli, Marie Corelli to G. B. Burgin, 10 July 1893. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 1. Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Morgan family of Stratford-upon-Avon, DR137/149, 20, ‘Mason Croft’ auction catalogue, 28–30 October 1943. The auction catalogue does not list by name the vast majority of Corelli’s books, so it is possible that she owned a number of other Egyptological works. Corelli, Ziska, p. 225. [Alexander Stuart Murray], A Guide to the Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1880), p. 90. Perhaps given her use of Murray’s guide to the Egyptian Galleries as a source for Ziska, it is no coincidence that Corelli includes a Scottish character named Murray in her novel. The Guide only contains the phrase quoted until the 1888 edition. New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Corelli–George Bentley Correspondence, Marie Corelli to George Bentley, 16 March 1887, quoted in Annette Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 90. See also Eleanor Dobson, ‘A Tomb with a View: Supernatural Experiences in the Late Nineteenth Century’s Egyptian Hotels’, in Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth Century Literature: Nation, Hospitality, Travel Writing, ed. Monika Elbert and Susanne Schmid (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 89–105. The Egyptian History, treating of the Pyramids, the inundation of the Nile, and other prodigies of Egypt, according to the opinions and traditions of the Arabians (London: 1672). Corelli writes in a footnote that ‘[t]he Phonograph was known and used for the utterance of Oracles by one Savan the Asmounian, a Priest-King of ancient Egypt’; Marie Corelli, Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1889), ii, p. 295. In The Soul of Lilith Corelli describes the effects of mental ‘magnetism’ in which the Egyptian priests were supposedly well versed, including

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39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

91

an asterisk within the body of the text which corresponds to a reference to The Egyptian History; Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1892), i, p. 188. In Ziska the reference to The Egyptian History is a passing mention of the priest Saurid; Corelli, Ziska, pp. 271–2. In Free Opinions Corelli uses The Egyptian History to claim that ancient Egyptians had mastered wireless telegraphy, referring to Saurid; Marie Corelli, Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1905), pp. 289–90. In The Life Everlasting Corelli once more asserts that ‘“wireless telegraphy” and “light-rays” [. . .] were familiar to the Egyptian priests’; Marie Corelli, The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance (New York: A. L. Burt, 1911), p. 38. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA iii.21.1, ‘Carnarvon’s Death Spreads Theories about Vengeance’, The New York Times, 6 April 1923, pp. 1, 3 (p. 1). London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.603 E.21, newspaper clipping, ‘British Museum Official’s Reply to Miss Marie Corelli’. London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.603 E.21, ‘Letter to Budge from Marie Corelli’, 8 April 1923, fol. 4. Corelli, Ziska, p. 271. Steve Vinson, ‘They-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed: Arsake, Rhadopis, and Tabubue; Ihweret and Charikleia’, Comparative Literature Studies, 45.3 (2008), 289–315 (p. 306); Gaston Maspero, Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt, trans. Mrs. C. H. W. Johns (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), p. 116. Maspero describes Ziska as ‘one of [Corelli’s] stranger books’, implying that he had read a selection of her work. As Joan Rees records, ‘Maspero was a keen reader of both English and French novels’: Amelia Edwards, the founder of the Egypt Exploration Fund, asked him for feedback on her fictional work; see Joan Rees, Amelia Edwards: Traveller, Novelist & Egyptologist (London: Rubicon, 1998), p. 55. The Egyptian History, pp. 54–5. As Corelli’s biographers have recorded, Corelli received a flurry of correspondence in the wake of the publication of A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), and several readers wrote to her of matters pertaining to ‘theosophy and psychical research’; see Thomas F. G. Coates, Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman (Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs & Co, 1903), p. 57; Federico, Idol of Suburbia, p. 6. It is plausible, then, that such a letter might have been written and received. Considering Corelli’s penchant for fantasy, however, it is likely that the letter is invented, a ‘text’ of her own creation, attributed to another. Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Marie Corelli, Hyacinthe Loyson to Marie Corelli, 8 March 1890, DR777/50/f.13.

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48. ‘Unfortunately I do not know English and could not read your book, but Mrs Loyson praised it. She has a desire to provide a French translation.’ All translations in this chapter are my own. 49. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fols 1–2. 50. Ibid. fol. 2. 51. That reincarnation is used in these narratives does not necessarily indicate the authors’ ignorance when it comes to Egyptological publications. R. B. Parkinson notes that elements of Guy Boothby’s ‘A Professor of Egyptology’ were derived from publications by Flinders Petrie and Gaston Maspero. ‘The story’s title’, he claims, ‘suggests the extent to which Egyptian culture was inseparable from its specialist academic frame, even as a curiosity’; see R. B. Parkinson, Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry: Among Other Histories (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 249. 52. Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (London: Methuen, 1895), p. 56. 53. Ibid. p. 57. 54. Ibid. p. 451. 55. Ibid. p. 452. 56. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 3. 57. Corelli, Ziska, p. 230. 58. Ibid. p. 231. 59. Ibid. p. 227. 60. Ibid. pp. 227–8. 61. Ibid. p. 228. 62. Ibid. p. 251. 63. Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan, p. 452. 64. See, for example, Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction Books, 1981), pp. 214–15. 65. Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, ed. David Glover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 55. 66. Ibid. p. 204. 67. Ibid. p. 203. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. p. 202. 70. Ibid. pp. 202, 203. 71. Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, p. 241. 72. Piya Pal-Lapinski, The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire, 2005), p. 103. For discussions of Egyptian revival jewellery, see, for example, Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria (London: British Museum, 2010), pp. 376–84. 73. Lizzie Glithero-West, ‘Tutankhartier: Death, Rebirth and Decoration; Or, Tutmania is the 1920s as a Metaphor for a Society in Recovery after World War One’, in Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination:

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74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

93

Art, Literature and Culture, ed. Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 127–44. Eileen Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend: A Biography (London: Jarrolds, 1953), p. 164. Ibid. pp. 76, 98. Ibid. pp. 103, 111, 134. Wilde was later to condemn Corelli’s writing during his imprisonment; see Bigland, Marie Corelli, p. 164. The turning point in their relationship might have roughly corresponded with the appearance of The Silver Domino (1892), which Corelli had co-authored with her half-brother Eric Mackay, and whose critiques of other writers necessitated its anonymous publication. Wilde was caricatured as ‘the tame Elephant, who is a sort of grotesque pet of ours’. Corelli’s motive is likely to be one of vengeful retaliation: ‘I know perfectly well who it was that lifted me up a while ago in a journal that shall be nameless, and did his utmost to smash me utterly by the force with which he threw me down again.’ The time of Wilde’s perceived slight is uncertain, however, as Corelli claims that ‘[h]e didn’t know who I was then, and he doesn’t quite know now’. Ultimately, Corelli’s vitriol indicates that their embitterment predated 1892; see [Marie Corelli and Eric Mackay], The Silver Domino: or, Side Whispers Social & Literary (London: Lamley and Co, 1892), pp. 165–80. Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Marie Corelli, Marie Corelli to Anna Maria Nairne Greenwood, 14 November 1922, DR627/10. William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein, 1872–1900 (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), p. 86; Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1906), p. 289; André Gide, Oscar Wilde: In memoriam (souvenirs); le ‘De Profundis’ (Paris: Mercure de France, 1946), p. 36. Lapis lazuli is blue rather than green, so it is likely given these conflicting details that some sources misremembered this item. It is believed that Hugh Walpole procured Wilde’s scarab from A. J. A. Symons after Wilde’s death; a letter from Walpole to Symons exists stating, ‘I’d like to buy Oscar’s scarab if it isn’t too costly’; Wellington, National Library of New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull Library, Outward correspondence – A J A Symons, MS-Papers-0007-13, Hugh Walpole to A. J. A. Symons, 14 July 1938. There is, however, no further existing correspondence in which the ring is mentioned in this archive. Tracing Wilde’s ring becomes more convoluted considering Walpole’s ownership of another scarab ring, which he was recorded as wearing as early as 1930. A feature on Walpole in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle records that he sports ‘as [his] only jewel a quaint scarab ring on his little finger’; see Inger Ohl, ‘British Author in Brooklyn’, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 January 1930, p. 11. It is noteworthy that a

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94

80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87.

88.

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Writing the Sphinx scarab ring appears in two of Walpole’s novels, The Inquisitor (1935) and The Killer and the Slain (1942). Walpole’s will, written in 1937 with codicils added in 1939, only mentions a single scarab ring, which he left to his partner, Harold Cheevers; see Hugh Seymour Walpole, ‘Last Will & Testament’, https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk [accessed 22 May 2014]. It is most likely that Walpole managed to acquire Wilde’s ring from Symons after amending his will in 1939, hence its omission from his bequests. In James Agate’s autobiography he records that on 11 April 1940 he ‘admired Hugh’s latest acquisition – the scarab ring which Wilde never stopped twirling throughout the trial’; see James Evershed Agate, Ego 4: Yet More of the Autobiography of James Agate (London: G. G. Harrap, 1940), p. 224. Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 65. William Wilde’s interest in Egyptology has been more commonly associated with Bram Stoker’s fascination with Egypt; Stoker had been a regular guest at the Wildes’ home in his youth, and a mummy procured by William Wilde in Egypt and brought back to Dublin has been proposed as the inspiration for Stoker’s mummy story, The Jewel of Seven Stars; see Carol A. Senf, Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 76. Oscar Wilde, Essays and Lectures (London: Methuen, 1909), p. 169. Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), p. 15. Lynn Meskell, ‘Consuming Bodies: Cultural Fantasies of Ancient Egypt’, Body & Society, 4.1 (1998), 63–76 (p. 63). Hadrian founded the city of Antinopolis, the centre of the cult of Antinous, after Antinous’ death. Antinous was deified, and closely associated with the Egyptian god Osiris. As Cécile Evers records, some iconographic representations thought to be of Antinous are ‘Egyptianizing’: such depictions of ‘Osirantinous’ show him wearing a nemes headdress; see Cécile Evers, ‘Images of a Divine Youth: The Brussels Antinous and its Workshop’, in Hadrian: Art, Politics and Economy, ed. Thorsten Opper (London: British Museum, 2013), pp. 89–99 (p. 92). Oscar Wilde, ‘The Young King’, in A House of Pomegranates (London: James R. Osgood McIlvaine, 1891), pp. 1–26 (p. 6). Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–13), iii: ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts’, ed. Joseph Bristow (2005), p. 357. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), p. 514. Intriguingly, Montserrat proposes ‘that Oscar Wilde saw or read about Petrie’s exhibition of mummy portraits in the summer of 1888, and that this may, in some way, have influenced [. . .] The Picture of Dorian Gray’; see Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains’, pp. 178–9.

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89. Paglia, Sexual Personae, p. 529. 90. Jill Galvan, ‘Corelli’s Caliban in a Glass: Realism, Antirealism, and The Sorrows of Satan’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 57.3 (2014), 335–60 (p. 338); Stephen Karschay, Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 168–208. 91. Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan, p. 55. 92. Ibid. 93. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 5; Bertha Vyver, Memoirs of Marie Corelli (London: Alston Rivers, 1930), p. 186. Aird contributed information on the Aswan Dam and Asyuṭ Barrage for the second edition of Cook’s Handbook for Egypt and the Sûdân overseen by Budge; see E. A. Wallis Budge, Cook’s Handbook for Egypt and the Sûdân, 2nd edn (London: T. Cook & Son, 1906), p. v. 94. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, Metalwork Department, Register, vol. 10, fol. 403 (M.384– 1924). This appraisal seems somewhat inaccurate. 95. Shirley Bury, Jewellery: The International Era, 1789–1910, 2 vols (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991), ii, p. 760. A necklace with similar lotus pendants features in Theo Douglas’s Iras: A Mystery (1896); in Douglas’s novel the ancient Egyptian woman who owns the necklace fades away as pendants are stolen. The cover of the first edition depicts this item of jewellery. 96. Ibid. pp. 465, 482. 97. Ibid. p. 465. 98. Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Marie Corelli, Typescript copy of Marie Corelli’s will, 5 June 1922, DR777/123, 6. 99. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, MA/1/C2734, fol. 3. 100. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 1. 101. Both Vyver and Ransom set the year of this occurrence as 1903 (Ransom presumably following Vyver). In fact, the opening night of the revival of the play was 27 December 1906. 102. Vyver, Memoirs of Marie Corelli, pp. 186–7. 103. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 6. 104. Such notions can be found in contemporary popular Egyptological works, including E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1904), ii, p. 138. 105. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 4. 106. Ibid. fol. 6. 107. Ibid. fol. 5. 108. Jane Austin, ‘After Three Thousand Years’, Putnam’s Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and National Interests, 2.7 (1868), 38–45 (p. 41). 109. ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’, fol. 3.

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110. Haggard famously donated several items to the Norwich Castle Museum. A number of these items – including a mummy – are now housed at the World Museum in Liverpool. Other donations (several of them forgeries) were made to the British Museum in 1887, 1921 and 1922. 111. Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan, p. 54. 112. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 9. 113. Marie Corelli, ‘Pharaoh Guarded by Poisons’, Daily Express, 24 March 1923, p. 5. 114. The Egyptian History, p. 37. 115. New York, New York University, Fales Library & Special Collections, 63.6.1-0.1578, Folder 8 Letters 1923–24, Marie Corelli to Clive Holland, 21 January 1924. The Clive Holland to whom Corelli writes is likely the same Clive Holland who authored ‘An Egyptian Coquette’ (1898) and Things Seen in Egypt (1908). 116. H. Rider Haggard, The Private Diaries of Sir H Rider Haggard, 1914–1925, ed. D. S. Higgins (London: Cassell, 1980), p. 270. 117. Corelli, Ziska, p. 345.

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Chapter 3

‘The master-key that opens every door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations and Palimpsests

Religious books, variants of the Ritual, moral essays, maxims, private letters, hymns, epic poems, historical chronicles, accounts, deeds of sale, medical, magical and astronomical treatises, geographical records, travels, and even romances and tales, are brought to light, photographed, facsimiled in chromo-lithography, printed in hieroglyphic type, and translated in forms suited both to the learned and to the general reader. [. . .] So the old mystery of Egypt, which was her literature, has vanished. The key to the hieroglyphs is the master-key that opens every door.1

In many accounts, the most significant moments in Egyptology’s history are intimately concerned with text. Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769– 1821) expedition from 1798 to 1801 resulted in the production of the influential multi-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809–29); 1799 saw the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which provided the ‘key’ to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs through its accompanying demotic and ancient Greek scripts; the following decades saw the study of ancient Egypt transform within the museal and eventually university settings, blossoming from one aspect of generalised Oriental history into an increasingly specialised pursuit with its own experts and, of course, publications.2 It was in the latter half of the nineteenth century, David Gange has shown, specifically in ‘the 1870s and 1880s’ that Egyptology became defined as a discipline, and the influence of decipherment became truly evident in a more widespread cultural interest in Egyptology and the work of the Egyptologists themselves.3 Once part of eclectic private collections that evoked earlier Wunderkammer, Egyptian antiquities were assimilated into discourses centred on logical categorisation and, importantly, the production of accompanying text grounded in academic rigour.4 Those that were inscribed with

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hieroglyphs were increasingly pored over: bolstered by Jean-François Champollion’s (1790–1832) success in deciphering the Rosetta Stone, translations of hieroglyphic texts were increasingly attempted and scrutinised as professionals and amateurs alike strove to comprehend Egypt’s forgotten lore. This chapter demonstrates the increase in the visibility of hieroglyphs in public and private spaces over the nineteenth century and, in particular, the appearance of hieroglyphs within books. A rise in amateur interest in hieroglyphs produced a textual culture that saw an explosion of understanding in Egyptian symbolism facilitated by hieroglyphic dictionaries, grammars and guides sporting specially designed typefaces. This chapter identifies the subsequent mushrooming of popular understanding of ancient Egyptian symbolism and dabbling in translation, facilitated by the comparative ease with which hieroglyphs could be rendered on the page, thanks to developments in printing technologies and the creation of hieroglyphic typefaces. Increasingly visible and available to amateurs, hieroglyphic writing came to symbolise romance and longevity. And, just as individuals carved their names into Egyptian monuments (creating palimpsests of ancient and modern writing) in a bid for immortality, literary authors also turned to the endurance of the hieroglyph to lend their works something of the symbols’ perceived permanence. The results of such a significant shift in attitudes towards ancient Egyptian writing also include the establishment of a culture of artistic collaboration and consultation, which saw writers and Egyptologists co-authoring new hieroglyphic messages for insertion into fictional works. Even before the earliest modern European steps forward in hieroglyphic decipherment in the 1820s, ancient Egypt was seemingly defined by text. Greek and Hebrew writings on this fabled civilisation combined with texts in ancient Egyptian scripts which had passed through the centuries unreadable, comprising a polyphonic (and, for a time, partially mute) corpus. Unlike Greece and Rome, also associated with copious quantities of writing, Egyptian texts were apparently composed of mysterious pictographic symbols that tantalised with their hidden, magical denotations. While Mesopotamian cuneiform and Scandinavian runes were, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, receptive to the projection of the individual’s own meanings onto apparently unreadable words and letters, the abstracted yet recognisable pictorial forms of the Egyptian hieroglyphs themselves and the high-profile artefact that facilitated the first substantial advances in decipherment – the Rosetta Stone – fuelled public interest in this script in particular. Following hieroglyphic decipherment,

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translations of this writing, along with Egyptological commentary from experts, were produced in high volume. The material ‘things’ of ancient Egypt were complemented by these novel textual elucidations, contributing to the notion that Egypt was a place constructed of all varieties of text: this seemed quite literal in Egypt itself, where hieroglyphs covered every sort of supporting structure in ancient Egyptian monuments and statues. The American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900), in his account of his travels in Egypt, asked, ‘Can one expect [. . .] to say anything new about Egypt? How many volumes, during two thousand years, have had this mysterious land for their theme!’, before imagining that, ‘if the lines written about Egypt were laid over the country, every part of it would be covered by as many as three hundred and sixty-five lines to the inch’.5 The image of a tapestry of text sprawling out over the Egyptian landscape simultaneously reflects and anticipates both figurative and literal notions of Egypt as a textual site, its reputation founded upon thousands of years of textual production, and its artefacts and monuments inscribed with its own distinctive symbols. When Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) remarked that in Egypt, ‘splendid things gleam in the dust’, the most noteworthy things often proved to be texts themselves.6 When Bernard Grenfell (1869–1926) and Arthur Hunt (1871–1934) excavated Oxyrhynchus between 1896 and 1906, Grenfell recalled that ‘merely turning up the soil with one’s boot would frequently disclose a layer of [Greek] papyri’.7 Warner had envisaged an immaterial carpet of text covering the Egyptian sand, but its tangible counterpart was sometimes concealed just beneath the surface. The Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (1880–1934), furthermore, saw Egypt’s ancient script inscribed throughout the landscape: Overhead there flies the vulture goddess Nekheb, and the hawk Horus hovers near by. Across the road ahead slinks the jackal, Anubis; and under one’s feet crawls Khepera, the scarab; and there, under the sacred tree, sleeps the horned ram of Amon. In all directions the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians pass to and fro, as though some old temple inscription had come to life. The letter m, the owl, goes hooting past. The letter a, the eagle, circles overhead; the sign ur, the wagtail, flits at the roadside, chirping at the sign rekh, the peewit. Along the road comes the sign ab, the frolicking calf; and near it is ka, the bull; while behind them walks the sign fa, a man carrying a basket on his head. In all directions are the figures from which the ancients made their hieroglyphical script; and thus that wonderful old writing at once ceases to be mysterious, a thing of long ago, and one realises how natural a product of the country it was.8

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While Weigall claims that the hieroglyphs’ omnipresence in the natural world results in the loss of what others perceived to be their unique mysterious qualities, this was by no means a common opinion. His statement – notably made in the twentieth century – hints at an increasing sense of disenchantment when it came to hieroglyphic symbols, which, for a minority, had been steadily occurring since decipherment. For others, decades after their translation, the hieroglyphs retained much of their totemic power. Comprised of a range of signs that retained their pictorial qualities, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were markedly distant from the ancient Greek and Roman alphabetic systems. The number of graphemes in use in written Egyptian varied over time, decreasing from roughly 1,000 in the Old Kingdom to around 750 in the second millennium bce, and then soaring in quantity into the many thousands during Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt, culminating in a catalogue of glyphs that dwarfs the Greek and Roman alphabets.9 With the exception of early Greek which was arranged from right to left and later in boustrophedon, Greek and Latin were written from left to right, aligning them with contemporary European languages. Egyptian hieroglyphs announced their textual difference through their most frequent layout from right to left, and often vertically, and with the symbols ‘facing’ (literally, in the case of those depicting people or animals) either direction.10 In some complex documents, moreover, ‘the directional axes of decipherment frequently shift despite the static orderliness of the framed text’; in other words, some hieroglyphic texts include multiple lines of script that are meant to be read in different directions.11 Hieratic and demotic scripts further complicated a system of writing that seemed to revel in its exaggerated ‘otherness’, something conspicuously separate from the modern and, indeed, even the ancient writing with which people were most familiar. Egyptologists debated the accuracy of Champollion’s and Thomas Young’s (1773–1829) methods, and subsequent translators frequently harboured their own biases, offering contradictory interpretations of the same text, resulting in composite and palimpsestic explanations for the same hieroglyphs.12 An additional difficulty in publicising knowledge lay in the current processes of reproducing the symbols and making them available to a mass readership. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) teasingly bemoaned the ‘deficiency of American printingoffices in hieroglyphical type’ in his burlesque ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845).13 His jibe was grounded in fact: hieroglyphs are conspicuous by their absence in the most popular books on Egypt

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several decades after the ground-breaking endeavours of Champollion and his contemporaries. This scarcity persisted, and indeed, as Poe’s work was reprinted and re-appropriated in the 1880s and 1890s (with especial popularity in France and among the devotees of the symbolist and decadent movements), his observation still retained a great deal of relevance; hieroglyphic type remained a relative rarity.14 Yet as the century progressed the characters were becoming gradually more visible. Early in the nineteenth century, artists were commissioned to produce engravings of the hieroglyphic script, a method that treats the hieroglyphs as pictorial illustrations. This proved so time-consuming that lithography became the primary means by which Egyptological volumes were produced; efforts were made to create movable types, though it was not until the early 1850s that a font was completed, and it was some time before the European typefaces made their way across the Atlantic.15 British Museum officials Samuel Birch (1813–85) and his successor, Peter le Page Renouf (1822–97), published ancient Egyptian grammars printed with typographical hieroglyphs. In 1854, Owen Jones (1809–74) and Joseph Bonomi (1796– 1878) produced their Description of the Egyptian Court Erected in the Crystal Palace to accompany the band of hieroglyphs over the columns of the Crystal Palace’s Egyptian Court (Fig. 3.1). Much of the writing was copied from authentic archaeological sites, but invented hieroglyphs were interspersed among them, recording the names of Queen Victoria (1819–1901), Prince Albert (1819–61) and the directors of the Crystal Palace Company, rendered in the same silhouette-style script. The printed translation (neatly handdrawn rather than typographically produced), likely undertaken by Bonomi, does not simply record the meanings of the hieroglyphs but, as a result of careful spacing so that each word or phrase comes directly below its corresponding hieroglyph(s), reveals that some of them can be read without the English, encouraging the reader to take on a more active role as interpreter.16 For example, on the most basic level, the symbols for ‘flowers’, ‘birds’ and ‘beasts’ depict the things they represent, and can be read without expert knowledge of the writing system. These are exotic forms which are, in some cases, carefully selected to appeal to the ‘reader’s’ imagination: the plant used to depict ‘flowers’ is a papyrus clump, and the ‘beasts’ are crocodiles (rather than cattle, which would be the more authentic ancient Egyptian choice). Most satisfying are combinations of hieroglyphs which can be read together to construct more complex meanings. Celebrating Victoria as ‘the ruler

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Figure 3.1 Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi, Description of the Egyptian Court Erected in the Crystal Palace (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), pp. 14, 15. Source: Internet Archive.

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of the waves’, the cartouche in question contains an arm brandishing a flail, and undulating lines representing water, a construction which demonstrates Bonomi’s balance between playfulness and authenticity when producing hieroglyphic messages for the perusal of the general public.17 By contrast, the hieroglyphs which cannot be read in this way – the vast majority – become even stranger, more bizarre and illogical to the mind of the amateur translator. Another European museum provides an apt metaphor for other kinds of Egyptological and cultural interplay. The Egyptian courtyard of the Neues Museum in Berlin completed in 1855, since destroyed by Allied bombs during the Second World War, weaved together the authentic and inauthentic in a way that illuminates the dramatisation, theatricality and illusion put to use by Egyptologists in a bid to popularise their work, a sense of creativity with regards to Egyptian subject matter that would be adopted by literary authors later in the century. With its painted hieroglyphs and sixteen grand multi-coloured columns executed to emulate those of ancient Egypt (specifically Karnak), the room mimicked the courtyard of an Egyptian temple as it might have looked at the height of Egyptian civilisation. The courtyard was not merely a loyal simulacrum, however, but a creative pastiche. Real Egyptian statues were placed in the centre surrounded by modern reproductions and inventions. Guidebooks neglected to separate the genuine from the replica; even the museum’s décor was catalogued, along with genuine artefacts and their simulacra, creating an immersive exhibit experience in which the ordinary visitor was unlikely to have distinguished between the real from the fabricated.18 As Dan Karlholm records, in a gesture akin to the celebration of Queen Victoria in the symbols that decorated the Crystal Palace, on the Neues Museum friezes ‘Prussian eagles and iron crosses [were] interspersed among the hieroglyphs’. He elaborates: This reminds us [. . .] of the political direction of this theatre. The fieldtrip to Egypt, from which most of these findings derived, was organized by the king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and paid for by the state. Part of the exhibition value [. . .] of all of this archaic splendour was to honor, and relatively crudely signify, the power and glory of the Pharaoh of Prussia.19

This was, then, a culture of replicas, exaggeration and embellishment of scholarly truths by omission, working concurrently with the museum’s academic atmosphere which served to tether sensational

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encounters with Egypt to a carefully curated version of reality. The Neues Museum is particularly significant given the high esteem in which German Egyptology was held. Egyptological discourse, and the cultural artefacts it stimulated, spanned countries, and – through the rapid increase in interest in Egyptology in the United States – continental borders. Both the Neues Museum and the Crystal Palace can be seen to engage with hieroglyphs in a creative way, demonstrating how, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian symbols were beginning to be understood as a textual and pictorial system that could be adopted for modern meaning rather than simply decoded. These early instances of imaginative manipulation of the ancient Egyptian language by professionals laid the groundwork for subsequent collaborative projects in which hieroglyphs were employed to express modern messages in works of popular fiction. It is fitting that the Crystal Palace was described ‘as a book’ within the hieroglyphic message itself; the Egyptian symbols and Bonomi’s translation make the hieroglyphs readable, constructing the Palace as a textual as well as decorative space. While hieroglyphs do not appear in The Grammar of Ornament (1856), a beautifully illustrated sourcebook of various styles from around the globe and throughout history, assembled by Owen Jones, the designer of the Palace’s Egyptian Court, their appearance at the Crystal Palace and in other ornamental compendia marks a significant shift in perceptions of ancient Egyptian symbolism, developing from a visual style that was considered either elite (since Bonaparte’s expeditions) or vulgar (‘primitive’ in comparison to the fluid drapery of the classical world), to one that was more widely accessible and integrated within a western tradition.20 Once furnishing the residences of eccentrics – such as George IV’s (1762–1830) Brighton holiday home, the Royal Pavilion – the ancient Egyptian aesthetic filtered down from museums and the collections of wealthy connoisseurs into the public space and the middle-class home via such large-scale projects as the Egyptian Court.21 Of course, this transference was not only achieved through public display and exhibition; increased proliferation of text and developing modes of graphical reproduction allowed descriptions and images of Egyptian iconography to become far more culturally widespread. These tangible sources were particularly important: unlike an exhibition experience which is usually limited to a certain and defined amount of time, hard copies and material artefacts could be purchased and sporadically enjoyed over an extended, undetermined period.

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Figure 3.2 Cassell’s Household Guide: Being a Complete Encyclopaedia of Domestic and Social Economy, and Forming a Guide to Every Department of Practical Life, 4 vols (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, [1869–71]), iii [1869], p. 189. Source: Internet Archive.

Later in the century, Cassell’s Household Guide suggested a do-it-yourself alternative to an expensive flowerpot featuring an ‘Etrusco-Egyptian’ style (Fig. 3.2). Recommending ‘a larger design for the centre and smaller ones dotted over the plain ground’ in order to ‘bear a closer resemblance to the vases which they are intended to imitate’, this domestic decorative item seeks to replicate the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century homeware produced by Wedgewood.22 Vases, teapots, cups and urns were among the pieces that Wedgewood manufactured, in red-and-black or red-and-white ceramic (and, less commonly, blue and white), which, due to their embellishment with ‘pseudo-hieroglyphs’, were

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known as the ‘hieroglyphic group’.23 These luxury goods, created prior to the breakthroughs of Champollion, were hybrid objects, mixing ancient Egyptian imagery with motifs such as Greek meanders and sphinxes, Islamic symbols and signs of the zodiac. The Cassell’s imitation, ‘painted with two or three coats of light red-oil paint’ evidently in a bid to replicate Wedgwood’s most frequently adopted palette for Egyptian-inspired ceramics, is much truer to genuine Egyptian hieroglyphs than its costly predecessors.24 While a grouping of the Etruscan and the Egyptian speaks to a kind of Orientalist composite past, and the central figures evoke neither of the styles in question but rather a generic primitivism, the author of the article specifically recommends the consultation of ‘[a]ny illustrated work on Egypt [which] will give a variety of figures and animals suitable for the purpose’, suggesting a move, post-decipherment, towards the increasing availability of Egyptian iconography as methods of book production evolved.25 There is certainly an accompanying gesture towards scholarly accuracy here: there are no astrological, Islamic or Greek symbols accompanying the Egyptianate forms. In the accompanying illustration, the three animal figures near the rim of the pot, silhouetted like the symbols in Bonomi’s guide to the Crystal Palace hieroglyphs, mimic, in part, familiar signs. The horned viper and the two varieties of bird (a stork/heron and a duck/waterfowl) not only suggest the most instantly recognisable zoomorphic hieroglyphs, but all animals face the same direction, as if they were a genuine text awaiting translation. At the base, the snake and repeated horned viper face a scarab – again, all are based on real hieroglyphic symbols (though serpents in ancient Egyptian art are never coiled), and the symmetry of this section mimics genuine iconography, suggesting that the artist consulted authentic ancient Egyptian imagery when producing the design. This contrasts with the earlier Wedgwood examples, which featured ‘wreathes of fake hieroglyphs’ emptied of any semblance of linguistic content.26 These figures, and the silhouette style, imply that the illustrated works on Egypt to which the author refers the reader might feature hieroglyphic type. Indeed, the increase in accuracy of the hieroglyphic forms, along with their two-dimensional representation as a painted silhouette instead of ‘bogus hieroglyphs [. . .] in black “basalt”’ bas-reliefs, reveals the influence of the diffusion of genuine hieroglyphic imagery later in the nineteenth century.27 The invasion of the Victorian home by ancient Egyptian symbolism in

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this form – one suggesting that these pictograms, unlike their predecessors, might be decoded and understood – occurs after the publication of Birch’s grammars, marking the hieroglyphs’ movement from the original monuments and artefacts, into the printing offices, and then finally breaking free of the confines of the page. Cassell’s Household Guide, with its sections on managing the various ‘Servants of the House’ was directed towards a middle-class (and predominantly female) audience. A couple of decades later, as Gange records of the ‘strange Egyptology classes’ of the then Assistant Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934), women were ‘admitted [. . .] but expected [. . .] to sew “tableaux” of Egyptian temples’.28 Egyptological knowledge, then, and particularly architectural iconography and hieroglyphic pattern were expected and encouraged to become engulfed into the domestic sphere via interested female parties. Egyptian grammars, increasingly purchased as part of the eclectic libraries of the middle-class home, were complemented by arts and crafts which increasingly drew upon Egyptological scholarship. The late nineteenth century saw the publication of several popular guides to reading hieroglyphs that capitalised upon this widespread public familiarisation with the symbols, including Budge’s First Steps in Egyptian: A Book for Beginners (1895), An Egyptian Reading Book for Beginners (1896) and Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics (1899). Hieroglyphic dictionaries and grammars published by Budge and Alan Gardiner (1879–1963) proved lucrative ventures in the 1920s, printed using esteemed typefaces – Budge, using Harrison & Son’s expanded version of the long-established German Theinhardt font originally manufactured under the watchful gaze of Richard Lepsius (1810–84), and Gardiner the newer Oxford University Press typeface created by the Egyptologists and artists Nina (1881–1965) and Norman de Garis Davies (1865–1941).29 Evidence suggests that these scholarly guides were consulted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors; in fictional texts where hieroglyphs are reproduced an effort is often made towards linguistic accuracy, which gestures towards the noteworthy prevalence of translation guides. From the nineteenth century well into the twentieth, authors consulted Egyptologists on the appropriate hieroglyphs to reproduce in their texts, while, comparably, efforts were taken by the general public to ensure the appropriateness and accuracy of their hieroglyphic writings for all kinds of purposes: the volume of letters received by the Egyptologists

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of the British Museum concerning translation is testament to a universal effort towards philological accuracy on the part of amateur linguists.

Magic and Protection Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), who enlisted Budge’s aid in the preparation of her children’s novel The Story of the Amulet (1906), imbued the titular talisman of her narrative with greater symbolic significance than the bare text alone reveals. In the accompanying illustration (Fig. 3.3), the charm is a tyet, also known as the knot of Isis. The amulet is described as ‘made of a red, smooth, softly shiny stone’; in Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead (1898), spell 156 details the ritual performed ‘over a buckle of carnelian’, and in his Egyptian Magic (1899), he relates how the tyet ‘is usually made of carnelian, red jasper, red glass, and of other substances of a red colour’.30 A British Museum amulet’s similarity to the illustrations suggests that Budge had shown Nesbit this example which forms the basis for her literary amulet; this object, made from red jasper, goes by the number EA 20639. Yet, between the covers of the novel, this authentically tangible artefact becomes ink on the page. Its rendering in two dimensions as an enlarged line drawing, simulating facsimiles of actual amulets and the outline hieroglyphs which were commonly used in contemporary guides to the Egyptian language, asserts its dual nature as artefact and hieroglyph V39.31 In Egyptian Magic, the chapter on amulets sees the physical form of each represented by its corresponding hieroglyphic symbol (Fig. 3.4). In Nesbit’s novel, the magic of the talisman itself is mirrored by its secondary existence as a symbol within an enchanted text, its verbal complexity complicated by its inscription, a series of smaller hieroglyphs etched onto a larger hieroglyph, and its position on the page, surrounded by type. The amulet can be seen, in this sense, to represent the multifaceted power of the written word, with which Nesbit infuses her narrative. Budge provided Nesbit with the inscription on the amulet – ‘Ur Hekau Setcheh’ – which also appears flanked by Nesbit’s text (Fig. 3.5), rather than appearing on a separate page as is the case with the novel’s illustrations by H. R. Millar (1869–1942).32 The cursive glyphs expose the transcription process; rather than reproduced typographically in the more formal style of hieroglyphs that would usually appear carved into a stone artefact such as the amulet, the

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Figure 3.3 E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 46. Source: Internet Archive.

Figure 3.4 E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899), pp. 29, 35, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63. Author’s own.

Figure 3.5 E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 53. Source: Internet Archive.

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fluidity of the script suggests comparatively rapid handwriting on a paper (or papyrus) surface. Evoking the moment at which Budge transcribed the characters for Nesbit, the symbols – like many reproduced in novels and hieroglyphic guides – read from left to right. This orientation of the graphemes denotes them as something that will eventually be read by modern western eyes, rather than a mere illustration. As Julia Thomas claims, ‘Victorian [. . .] illustration crossed the boundary between text and image. This overlap was even more explicit because words themselves were frequently part of these images.’33 While Thomas specifically refers to narrative illustration, her claims are particularly appropriate in consideration with all varieties of illustrative or diagrammatic material occurring in texts with an ancient Egyptian theme. Hieroglyphs themselves exist outside of traditional western notions of image or word. They operate simultaneously as pictures which are ‘written’ and words which are ‘drawn’. The glyphs are clearly demarcated as text that is ‘other’ in Nesbit’s novel. Bordered above and below with Nesbit’s own typescript, the glyphs are conspicuous by the silence they produce when the text, as a children’s novel, is read aloud. That the symbols cannot be pronounced when they are first encountered highlights the magical quality of the sound when the words, towards the novel’s conclusion, can finally be vocalised, in keeping with the ancient Egyptian concept that magic was animated by performance. As Virginia Zimmerman records, ‘Nesbit casts the amulet as a maternal figure’; it speaks in a voice ‘like [. . .] the voice of your mother when you have been a long time away, and she meets you at the door when you get home’.34 The voice of the artefact is thus equated with the mother’s, the very voice most likely to be reading Nesbit’s novel aloud to her child; simultaneously, Nesbit enchants the mother’s voice with all of the magical potency of the hieroglyphic artefact itself. In keeping with genuine ancient Egyptian belief about the supernatural potency inherent to the speaking of text, and the prevalence of the motif of the magic spell in children’s fiction, the hieroglyphic words are an incantation: ‘as soon as you say the name out loud the thing will have power’.35 Nesbit harnesses the notion of spoken magic, where the moment of reading aloud sees the text or symbol rendered in ink on the material page become immaterial, invisible and ephemeral. It is itself a kind of conjuring which draws the mystical out of the mundane object. Inscriptions which at first seem to the children as ‘not reading’ but simply ‘pictures of chickens and snakes and things’ are eventually revealed to be descended from the writing

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system used in Atlantis: the commonplace becomes chimerical.36 Connected to the secret society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group that often used ancient Egyptian symbolism in its magical rites, it is likely that Nesbit attached a very real mystical significance to the ancient Egyptian iconography of her text.37 The children’s initial reading of the hieroglyphs emphasise flexible and light-hearted interpretations of the symbols in a way that is particularly appropriate for children’s literature. Several texts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see hieroglyphs as comical, from Poe’s ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, in which new symbols are invented – the term ‘politics’ is drawn as ‘a little carbuncle-nosed gentleman, out at elbows, standing upon a stump, with his left leg drawn back, his right arm thrown forward, with his fist shut, the eyes rolled up toward Heaven, and the mouth open at an angle of ninety degrees’ – through to life insurance advertisements nearly a century later, describing Tutankhamun’s widow writing ‘in a fervid torrent of birds, beetles, giraffes, and intaglio exclamations’.38 Even in The World’s Desire (1890), a somewhat sombre novel co-authored by H. Rider Haggard (1856– 1925) and his friend the writer and anthropologist Andrew Lang (1844–1912), the Greek hero Odysseus is left perplexed by the symbols: ‘pictures, tiny and cunningly drawn, serpents in red, and little figures of men sitting or standing, axes and snakes and birds and beetles!’39 It is within the field of children’s literature such as Nesbit’s, however, that hieroglyphs are drawn upon in the most charming and creative ways, emphasising not only the hieroglyphs’ introduction into the domestic sphere, but into the nursery in particular.40 Lily Schofield’s (1871?–1953?) narrative poem The Hippopotamus Book (1905), a comically small volume for one addressing such a large animal, pokes fun at ancient Egyptian writing. Upon finding what he mistakenly believes to be a new island in the Nile, Prince Boochus Egyptus orders that his ‘ensign, the cockroach, be tied to a stick’ and staked into the land. This symbol, in its requisite oval cartouche, is, of course, a spoof of the scarab beetle, sacred to the ancient Egyptians. As ‘cockroach’, ‘scarab’ and ‘beetle’ are all disyllabic, Schofield’s choice is not one of metrical regularity but based entirely upon the comedy inherent in contrasting the solemnity of ancient Egyptian carvings with the undesirability of the cockroach. Schofield’s earlier work Tom Catapus and Potiphar: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (1903), another children’s narrative poem, also employs hieroglyphs comically, uniting the

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Figure 3.6 Lily Schofield, Tom Catapus and Potiphar: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (London; New York: Frederick Warne & Co., 1903), unnumbered. Author’s own.

verse and illustrations (both created by Schofield) that relate the adventures of Potiphar and his cat, Tom Catapus. The hieroglyphs depict the events outlined in her poetry, a visual companion to the text which duplicates the characters and objects rendered in the accompanying images. For instance, when the fishing line with which Potiphar catches his and Tom Catapus’s dinner breaks, Tom Catapus suggests fixing a hook to his tail as an alternative. The hieroglyphs that mirror this part of the narrative depict a figure fishing, a cat with an elongated tail, the tail with a hook, and the jagged line that mimics the sign depicting a wave (Fig. 3.6).41 Not only do these symbols serve to emphasise Schofield’s dual role as poet and illustrator, they also contribute to light-hearted reading processes in which there is another element to be ‘read’; decipherment becomes, quite literally, child’s play. The inspiration for Tom Catapus appears to be a genuine ancient Egyptian cat mummy, housed at the British Museum. The final verse of Schofield’s poem reads:

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And when Tom died, they had him stuffed, And now across the sea, In London’s great Museum where The public enters free, A case contains a mummied form – Dear children! it is he!42

The accompanying illustration depicts a mummified cat in a glass case, which bears a striking resemblance to the British Museum object EA 6752, and the book itself mimics the mummified artefact in its coarse fabric boards.43 While Nesbit, like Schofield, plays with notions of the artefact in the physical trappings of the book, and draws upon the humorous connotations of the hieroglyphs, the lengths to which she goes in ensuring their philological accuracy, however, suggests a more solemn respect for ancient Egyptian civilisation. In consulting an Egyptologist to lend veracity to the magical claims of her novel, Nesbit situates the fantastical origins of the ancient Egyptian script in a mythological past, connecting the writing to the magical and unknowable. A decade after Nesbit’s novel, the novelist and archaeologist E. F. Benson (1867–1940) wrote ‘The Ape’ (1917), a story of ancient Egyptian magic based on a similar sentiment: the magical repercussions of the speaking aloud of hieroglyphic inscriptions.44 The magical energy of the simian artefact after which Benson’s short story is named is revealed only after its two fragments, each containing part of its ‘legend’, are brought together. While a monstrous presence is apparent at the coming together of the pieces, and thus the physical restoration of the full text, it takes the vocalisation of the secret name – a concept which Benson has learned from contemporary Egyptological volumes, possibly Budge’s Egyptian Magic or The Gods of the Egyptians – three times to reveal the full extent of the artefact’s power: the summoning of an army of demon-apes.45 Commonly held to be a mystical number and frequently occurring in fairy tales, three is also particularly hieroglyphic: in ancient Egyptian writings the same hieroglyph depicted three times denoted plurality of the word in question. Ultimately, however, the statuette’s magic is dark, and the object and the magical words inscribed upon its surface are destroyed. Yet this sense of resolution is complicated by the knowledge that the secret name, ‘Tahu-met’, has been revealed – it has been said aloud, and, through the publication of Benson’s story, has been printed in ink for the English-speaking reader to pronounce at will.46 Like Nesbit’s transcription of ancient Egyptian phonemes into English, Benson’s reproduction of the word translates

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the power of the ancient Egyptian spell into the modern world and into the hands of the common reader. H. Rider Haggard also responded to the magical importance that the ancient Egyptians gave to the written name. On the spine of the first edition of Cleopatra (1889), a text which, in its opening pages, announces that its plot ‘lacks historical confirmation’, is the eponymous queen’s name in hieroglyphs inscribed in gilt within a cartouche.47 Although Haggard’s alterative history of Cleopatra VII does not describe the same Cleopatra whose name, along with that of Ptolemy V Epiphanes, led to the earliest advancements in the translation of hieroglyphs, the historical significance of the cartouche is undeniable: the name Cleopatra, as it is reproduced on the spine of Haggard’s novel, serves a dual but contradictory purpose that reflects the inconsistent ways in which hieroglyphs were comprehended in the popular consciousness.48 On the one hand, it symbolises historical accuracy, evoking the masses of historical information concerning ancient Egypt’s past translated using Young’s and Champollion’s work. Simultaneously, however, it evokes the unshakeable, unknowable, exotic and untranslatable aura of the letters themselves. Haggard’s novel is informed by history – indeed, Andrew Lang wrote to him saying that Cleopatra is ‘too full of antiquarian detail [. . .] to carry the general public with it’ – but also presents a dreamlike interpretation of an event that guesses at solutions to the puzzling gaps within the historical record.49 Haggard’s fantasy in no way approaches the status of a historically accurate account, despite his statement in the preface that [t]o such students as seek a story only, and are not interested in the Faith, ceremonies, or customs of the Mother of Religion and Civilisation, ancient Egypt, it is, however, respectfully suggested that they should exercise the art of skipping, and open this tale at its Second Book.50

Nevertheless, Haggard’s romance was considered by some an effective vessel for the transmission of historical knowledge to the reader: W. E. Henley (1849–1903) wrote that ‘[t]he invention throughout is admirable – is good enough, indeed, to carry off the archaeology and the archaical style, though they are both large orders.’51 It remains significant, too, that Haggard claims that the novel’s central premise of native Egyptian rebellion against the Ptolemaic Dynasty is ‘not in itself improbable’, the cartouche serving – as museum artefacts did in the historical paintings of artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) – as a kind of anchor in fact,

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a demonstration of established knowledge.52 Haggard would continue to use cartouches on the covers of his fiction until his final Egyptian novel, The Queen of the Dawn (1925), in this case reproducing accurate translations of the heroine’s epithets. The frame narrative utilised by Haggard in Cleopatra asserts that the body of the novel itself has been translated by ‘a learned acquaintance [of the editor] well versed in Hieroglyphics and Demotic writing’.53 In a nod to the very earliest steps in the translation of hieroglyphs in the 1820s – an allusion also made by Poe in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ and in Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s (1851–1920) poem ‘At Philae’ (1894) in which Cleopatra is described as ‘she whose name, | Graved on her obelisk, became the key | Whereby men read of Egypt’,54 – the first words to be translated from the scrolls are names: ‘Cle – Cleo – Cleopatra – Why, my dear Sirs, as I am a living man, this is the history of somebody who lived in the days of Cleopatra, the Cleopatra, for here’s Antony’s name with hers!’55 One can only assume that, as was the case in Champollion’s process of decipherment, the names are the first words to be translated because of their conspicuous containment within cartouches. The cartouche (V10) – an extended shen ring (V9) – was meant to confer eternal protection upon the royal name enclosed with it; Budge proposes ‘that the idea underlying the use of the preservation of the name of the deceased in perpetuity, or as long as the solar disk continued to revolve in the sky’, is the symbol’s purpose.56 In Haggard’s Cleopatra the device was employed by the wood engraver Edward Whymper (1840–1911) in a number of illustrated capitals at the opening of new chapters, a feature typical of Victorian works which sought to fuse text and image (Fig. 3.7).57 In many, he used the shape of the cartouche to represent the letter o, blending the conventions of the ancient language with modern western writing; in others, he contained the opening word of the chapter within the ring, in an act which, metaphorically, grants Haggard’s text magical protection. Whymper used his role to make visual and explicit some of the subtler implications of the text. As Lucy Hughes-Hallet notes of one illustrated capital in particular, Cleopatra’s removal of a jewel from the chest cavity of a mummified pharaoh in the text is depicted as a sexual act in Whymper’s image.58 Certainly, Whymper treated the capitals as if they themselves were hieroglyphs, combining word and image in such ways as to reveal deeper, hidden meanings. His inclusion of his own initial within most of the capitals – and sometimes within a cartouche-like oval – reveals a sense of pride and ownership, and perhaps a bid for his own immortality secured

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Figure 3.7 H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), pp. 70, 113, 223, 235, 303. Author’s own.

between the pages of Haggard’s book. Other notable practices of inscription occur within the novel’s full-page illustrations, the work of Maurice Greiffenhagen (1862–1931) and R. Caton Woodville (1856–1927).59 In one of Woodville’s images he includes the word ‘Meisenbach’ opposite his own signature, referring to the brand of pen with which he drew the design. Bringing the process of inscription to the forefront of the reader’s mind – and in a distinctly modern form given that Karl Meisenbach’s company was established in 1880 – Woodville creates a palimpsestic composite, where modern utensils assert themselves on the very surface of an image of antiquity. Combining text and image in a self-conscious display of scribesmanship, Woodville establishes the hieroglyphic significance of the image which illuminates and contributes to the reception of the accompanying text. Alongside Whymper’s illuminated capitals, processes of writing and illustrating in Cleopatra merge. This complexity, emblazoned across the exterior of Haggard’s novel and encoded within the accompanying illustrations, raises another question central to this study. Considering the materiality of

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the book reveals much about late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury notions of authority and meaning. Maintaining an awareness of the text’s physicality is also apt given the inherent materiality of ancient Egyptian texts. The Rosetta Stone, after all, was hardly a ‘document’ in the traditional sense – although, as R. B. Parkinson rightly observes, it is usually ‘reproduced as a black and white flat surface, as if silently ignoring its existence as an ancient monumental artefact and subsuming it into the world of Western printing’ – but a huge stele, whose physicality – as well as its text – demands attention.60 When Gérard Genette observes that text is ‘rarely presented in an unadorned state’, his statement might apply to any system of writing from any era, from Egyptian papyri to Victorian historical novels, and thus his insistence upon a consideration of the ‘paratextual’ apparatus can be considered universally significant.61 As we have seen in the first chapter of this volume, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts that address ancient Egypt, or indeed Egyptological texts themselves, the book often physically imitates the object that it describes in text, the paratexual apparatus linking the written words back to the original artefact. Through scientific line drawings, photographs and gilt covers, these books often aim to stand in as a substitute for the unique material article. Self-conscious material trappings echo some of the physical vessels of ancient Egyptian texts themselves, often in striking ways. The ancient Egyptian relics that have arguably provided the most morbid fascination for modern audiences – mummies – are also inscribed with text and bound, like books, in fabric decorated with gold. We see this trope appearing within the gilded fabric covers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century books, too: in his detective novel The Eye of Osiris (1911) R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943) features an Egyptologist’s body with a ‘tattoo mark’ of the ‘Utchat – the Eye of Horus – or Osiris’ (D10) – in vermillion ink ‘across the chest, near the top of the sternum’.62 The missing Egyptologist, John Bellingham, is identified by this distinguishing physical feature, emblazoned across his dead body secreted within a sarcophagus, swapped for the mummy which it had originally enclosed. He also wore this symbol on a replica of ‘a beautiful little ring of the eighteenth dynasty [. . .] said to have belonged to Queen Ti, the mother of [. . .] Amenhotep the Fourth’, giving a second copy to his niece, Ruth, to commemorate their shared interest in Egyptology as well as their familial bond.63 Bellingham, Ruth relates, attached ‘a sentimentally superstitious affection’ to this symbol to which he ‘had a queer sort of devotion’, a device that ‘signifies that the great judge of the dead looks down on men to see that

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justice is done and that truth prevails’.64 This sentiment is, of course, central to the detective genre, and the novel’s conclusion sees the truth of Bellingham’s disappearance revealed. Ruth gives her copy of the ring to the protagonist-narrator, Paul Berkeley, ‘in case we should drift apart on the eddies of life’.65 When Berkeley wears the ring he finds that ‘its tiny eye of blue enamel looked up at me so friendly and companionable that I felt the glamour of the old-world superstition stealing over me, too’; the hieroglyphic symbol is evidently imbued with a sense of magic, unusual given the detective genre’s customary negation of the supernatural.66 These duplicate rings contribute to The Eye of Osiris’s emphasis upon themes of doubling, substitution and imitation. The novel’s first-edition covers feature the eye of Horus motif stamped in green, white and black on tan cloth. The appearance of the original dust jacket is even more revealing: the eye of Horus printed in an earthy red ink onto flesh-tone paper directly mimics the tattoo emblazoned across the Egyptologist’s chest. This is, then, a novel that not only suggests the interchangeability of the Egyptologist’s and the mummy’s bodies, but that these objects are in turn exchangeable with the physical book itself. It also emphasises the body itself as a site primed for hieroglyphic inscription. Indeed, Haggard frequently described ancient Egyptian bodies – or the bodies of modern individuals with a spiritual connection to ancient Egypt – as marked with hieroglyphic symbols. In Cleopatra the eponymous queen has a tattoo on her breast, a ‘leaf-mark’ ‘pricked there in honour of great Osiris’.67 Although further description of the tattoo is not forthcoming, the symbol is possibly the reed leaf hieroglyph (M17), perhaps a mistaken allusion to the Ma’atfeather (H6). In Haggard’s later work Morning Star (1910), conspicuous for its relative lack of hieroglyphs, when the female protagonist Neter-Tua is born, it is discovered that ‘on her breast was a mole [. . .] shaped like the holy Sign of Life’, emblematic of her favour with the gods.68 Here Haggard refers to the ankh (S34) a common talisman as well as a familiar hieroglyphic character.69 In The Ivory Child (1916) the aptly named Luna Holmes has ‘a curious white mark upon her breast, which in its shape exactly resembled the crescent moon’, another hieroglyph (N11).70 As Haggard’s famed protagonist, Allan Quatermain, notes, the Egyptian goddess ‘Isis [was] symbolized in the crescent moon, the great Nature goddess, the mistress of mysteries’.71 Of course, the hieroglyphs serve different purposes in these novels. All adorn the breasts of powerful female characters, and yet while Cleopatra’s tattoo is an unnatural inscription upon the body, highlighting her unusual sexual allure and (through the reference to Osiris)

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her masculine, kingly qualities, Neter-Tua’s and Luna Holmes’s birthmarks, by contrast, are at once natural and supernatural imprints. These fictional characters are inscribed with ancient Egyptian writing, echoing the spells and charms that cover the coffins and bandages that enclosed mummified bodies. These pictographic markings also draw attention to Haggard’s own text-making processes. Haggard’s use of these symbols highlights issues of printing, lettering and practices of inscription upon a blank surface, writing and the creation of fictions. It is significant that Haggard also had a particular passion for collecting and wearing ancient Egyptian – or Egyptian-inspired – rings. His friend and fellow author Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) alluded to Haggard’s collection in the character of ‘Hackman of the British Museum’ in ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension’ (1894). Hackman is an enthusiast with a passion for ‘scarabs’ who ‘has a way of carrying really priceless antiquities on his tie-ring and in his trouser pockets’.72 Haggard customarily wore a ring on his tie,73 and suffered an unfortunate incident involving the damaging of a ring which once belonged to the queen Tiye as he exited a hansom cab.74 One artefact inspired the scarab that shined in gilt hieroglyphs on the front cover of She (1887). His collection also included a ring ‘with hieroglyphics engraved upon it signifying “Haggard” (as an Egyptian might have written it) “the Scribe makes an offering to the God of Dawn”’.75 The commissioning of such pieces spelling names phonetically seems to have been fairly common among those with a particular interest in ancient Egypt, authors and Egyptologists alike. Howard Carter (1874–1939), for instance, owned such a piece denoting ‘Howard’ written vertically on a scarab –

𓎛 𓃛 𓂋 𓂧 – while his patron, Lord Carnarvon (1866–1923), was known to sign his name accompanied by one of Tutankhamun’s cartouches, subsequent to the discovery.76 Wearing ancient Egyptian lettering on his fingers, constantly visible when writing his fictions, Haggard’s marking of his characters’ bodies echoes the effects of his own ornaments: labelling himself as ‘the Scribe’, he wears text as he creates it. It is Cleopatra that is at the centre of this web of real and invented pictograms, which

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Figure 3.8 ‘Book-plate of H. Rider Haggard. By the Rev. W. J. Loftie’, in Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), p. 281. Source: Internet Archive.

move from Haggard’s body, through the pages of his novels to the skin of his characters, and back again. His wearing of genuine and invented Egyptian inscriptions on rings anticipates the gloves donned by flappers sporting Tutankhamun’s cartouches after the discovery of his tomb, as hieroglyphs became increasingly commercialised, popularised and reproduced on the surface of the body. The connection that Haggard consciously sought to cultivate between ancient Egyptian writing and his own was such that he commissioned the creation of a bespoke bookplate and ink stamp with which he branded his outgoing letters (Fig. 3.8). The Strand Magazine, whose interest in Haggard, his home, history and possessions resulted in several interviews and features, included a copy of the image which adorned Haggard’s correspondence and the inner covers of his books in a short feature on bookplates: A characteristic smack of Mr. Rider Haggard is contained in [. . .] a quaint hieroglyphical device, designed for his use by the Rev. W. J. Loftie, who is a recognized expert in hieroglyphics. The meaning of this plate is ‘Rider Haggard, the son of Ella, Lady of the House, makes an oblation to Thoth, the lord of writing, who dwells in the Moon.’ This is certainly a thoroughly characteristic label for the books of the writer of ‘She,’ of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’ and of ‘Cleopatra.’77

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Elsewhere it was noted that ‘few can read’ Haggard’s bookplate, ‘as it is composed of strange hieroglyphics’, and commentators frequently remarked upon the suitability of the hieroglyphic design given the content of his literary works.78 As the translation suggests, Haggard’s particular reverence for ‘the lord of writing’ is echoed in the most prominent hieroglyph (enlarged in an allusion to the ancient Egyptian tendency to use scale to express hierarchy), the ibis – 𓅞 (G26) – the primary animal associated with Thoth, the god of knowledge and magic, and the scribe to the gods who was said to have invented the hieroglyphs themselves.79 Thoth could also take the form of a baboon, connecting the act of writing with one of Haggard’s protagonists, L. Horace Holly, referred to as the ‘baboon’ in She.80 Holly, the scribe of the main story of the framed narrative, thus resembles an ancient god of writing. Combining ancient Egyptian symbols that venerated Thoth with his own fictions, and pasting the bookplate between the covers of works by others which made up his library, Haggard projects the magical and the arcane onto a range of texts. Rather than referring to his heritage through a traditional coat of arms, Haggard’s allegiance is to antiquity. Although he casts aside medieval heraldic tradition, the design nevertheless honours his family, specifically his mother, Ella, from whom he inherited his passion for ancient Egypt.81 It was to his mother that Haggard dedicated Cleopatra, hoping ‘that it may convey to your mind a picture, however imperfect, of the old and mysterious Egypt in whose lost glories you are so deeply interested’. In the dedication Haggard expresses that he had ‘for a long while hoped to be allowed to dedicate some book of mine to you’ and that this novel – his tenth, at that point, and his work most explicitly concerned with ancient Egypt – is ‘the one I should wish you to accept’.82 His mother’s reaction upon opening a copy of the book to find the message he had written for her was, according to a letter from Haggard’s father, ‘not without tears’.83 The creation of Haggard’s hieroglyphic emblem by William John Loftie (1839–1911) is significant. Loftie was a clergyman and archaeologist, who procured rings owned by the Egyptian queens Tiye and Nefertiti for Haggard and Lang.84 He also designed his own unique bookplate composed of hieroglyphs which had first featured on the title page of his travelogue, A Ride in Egypt (1879) (Fig. 3.9). In Loftie’s bookplate, ‘[t]he hawk, copied from one of the walls in the Temple of Philæ, holds the symbol of life and death (the crux ansata) towards five hieroglyphics, which signify V V. J. L. Above is the inscription The Lord Horus, the son of Isis’: this is a text of archaeological and linguistic accuracy.85 Loftie also created a small hieroglyphic device

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Figure 3.9 ‘Hieroglyphic book-plate of the Rev. W. J. Loftie. By the owner’, in Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), p. 288. Source: Internet Archive.

representing the initials of Walter Herries Pollock (1850–1926), who, incidentally, co-authored a parody of Haggard’s She – He (1887) – with Lang (Fig. 3.10). With his own interests in collecting and textual invention paralleling Haggard’s own, the bookplate highlights networks of exchange in which hieroglyphic text, like inscribed artefacts themselves, was something to be bestowed and circulated. With interviewers reporting how ‘Mr. [E. A. Wallis] Budge addresses his most promising disciple in hieroglyphics’,86 it is evident that, though an amateur, Haggard was dedicated to the meanings and manipulations of ancient Egyptian scripts. The association Haggard felt between modern writing and that of ancient Egypt was becoming more commercially widespread. In an age in which ancient Egypt’s persisting glamour was commonly drawn upon for purposes of advertising, myriad products echo this sense of literary or artistic creation that proves culturally indelible across the millennia. Typewriters and pens often employed familiar ancient Egyptian forms – obelisks, sphinxes, pyramids and hieroglyphs – as part of their promotional imagery, while novelty inkwells in the form of pharaohs or sphinxes (often inscribed with ancient Egyptian writing) abounded. Pencils were made in the form of gilt and enamelled mummies (with the lead concealed inside),

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Figure 3.10 ‘Hieroglyphic plate of Walter Herries Pollock. By the Rev. W. J. Loftie’, in Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), p. 280. Source: Internet Archive.

which could also be worn as jewellery.87 Wedgewood produced colourful majolica desk sets in which the ink was contained inside miniature canopic jars, the vessels within which the Egyptians stored the viscera removed from the dead body as part of the mummification process. Although almost certainly untrue, rumours circulated about American paper mills using linen stripped from Egyptian mummies during cloth shortages; macabre fantasies identified mummies as producing new surfaces on which to write.88 Certainly, there had been a trade in paint made from ground mummy parts; one frequently recounted anecdote records Lawrence AlmaTadema (1836–1912) and Edward Burne Jones (1833–98) giving a tube of the pigment an impromptu burial upon learning that it was made from human remains.89 As the practice of creating paint from mummies was falling out of fashion, however, tailing off around 1925, ancient Egypt was providing other ways to mark and inscribe. To align the tools of writing and drawing with ancient Egypt is to express hope for the longevity of the process’s products, and to invite the contemplation of the deeper meanings of Egyptian script as supernaturally charged. Invocations of hieroglyphic symbolism, in particular, highlight the magical status of the written word in ancient Egyptian culture. Believing that the survival of the written name equated to the survival of a person’s reputation and identity, the Egyptians regarded hieroglyphs as conferring ‘a magical kind of life’ upon the object or person represented, ‘a life that could be sustained as long as the image itself survived’.90

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Romance and Mystery Levels of hieroglyphic accuracy vary from fictional text to fictional text. Often the consultation of a professional results in an exact translation, yet frequently amateur enthusiasts were tempted to create their ancient Egyptian texts independently, substituting their own research for expert guidance. The celebrated crime writer Sax Rohmer’s (1883–1959) interest in Egypt manifested in several novels and short stories. In his Fu Manchu tales, the narrator is often one Dr Petrie, whom fans of Rohmer’s work have declared to be the son of the famed Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie (1853–1942).91 While these suggestions are light-hearted, it is likely given Rohmer’s long-standing fascination with Egypt that he had this most celebrated of Petries in mind when choosing this character’s name. Elsewhere, Rohmer’s admiration of Egyptological experts is evident: in The Green Eyes of Bâst (1920) the journalist who investigates the mysterious feline eyes of the title, Jack Addison, consults Gaston Maspero’s (1846–1916) Egyptian Art (1913), quoting extensive passages revealing his – and Rohmer’s – respect for ‘the great Egyptologist’.92 Garland Cannon, meanwhile, not only records that the ‘Oriental’ word Rohmer used in the greatest number of his works was ‘Egyptian’, but also uncovers evidence suggesting that works by John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), George Rawlinson (1812–1902), Budge and Francis Llewellyn Griffith (1862–1934) were among the scholarly volumes of Rohmer’s library.93 Rohmer’s reverence for these eminent Egyptologists led him to employ hieroglyphs in a short story, ‘The Death Ring’ (1917), which became ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’ in a collection of narratives with Egyptian themes and settings, Tales of Secret Egypt (1918). While Rohmer’s knowledge of ancient Egypt gleaned from his reading of the works of the great Egyptologists is impressive, hieroglyphs proved tricky to master. The protagonist of ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’, Neville Kernaby, receives a note from the Imám Abû Tabâh, a character with whom he associates in the first six stories in the collection. The message warns that a ‘[g]rave peril threatens’.94 In order to avoid harm, Kernaby must avoid the hieroglyph that Abû Tabâh transcribes (Fig. 3.11). The ring, which is the tale’s focus, is the location of this ill-fated glyph, described as ‘the queer device which symbolized the Ancient Egyptian god, Set, the Destroyer’.95 Rohmer includes a facsimile of the ring’s cartouche which features the symbol, after the name of the pharaoh Sneferu (Fig. 3.12).

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Figure 3.11 Sax Rohmer, ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’, in Tales of Secret Egypt (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1919), pp. 31–57 (p. 34). Source: Internet Archive.

Figure 3.12 Sax Rohmer, ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’, in Tales of Secret Egypt (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1919), pp. 31–57 (p. 57). Source: Internet Archive.

By adding another hieroglyph to the cartouche, Rohmer reveals his understanding of determinatives: the ideograms which act as classifiers at the end of words. Rohmer intends the additional hieroglyph not to result in the production of a different vocalised sound, but rather to mark the name as belonging to a group of Set-like associations. By choosing Sneferu as the ring’s original owner, he also reveals historical knowledge of the cartouche itself: Sneferu was the first pharaoh to have his name immortalised within this device, and the convention endured.96

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Rohmer is mistaken, however, when he claims that the supplementary hieroglyph depicts Set. Instead of the symbol Rohmer appears to have intended to illustrate – (C7) – he uses a visually similar emblem of the jackal-headed god Anubis, holding the ankh representing life (C6). Rohmer’s slip is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Not only does it suggest an amateur familiarity with books on hieroglyphs and their meanings, a kind of have-a-go attitude that guides to reading ancient Egyptian text encouraged, but the appearance of the cartouche itself indicates a particular process of creation. The hieroglyph of Anubis holding the ankh is squeezed into the far-right side of the cartouche, while all of the other hieroglyphs have space between them, supposedly for ease of reading. What this implies is that Rohmer copied Sneferu’s cartouche from an Egyptological text, most likely one on the subject of hieroglyphs, and then traced the symbol depicting Anubis in the gap, creating a fictive (if somewhat slapdash) twist on Egyptological reality. Rohmer’s enthusiasm for hieroglyphic symbolism was such that the letterpress design he used from the 1920s onwards appears to depict a scarab pectoral pendant contained within a basket. Unlike Loftie’s designs for bookplates, including the intricate hieroglyphic composition for Haggard, Rohmer’s letterpress motif is somewhat simplistic, demonstrating a kinship with Egypt that veers away from the philological, and, rather than a bespoke design, specifically embraces iconography reproduced in Egyptological works. The source for Rohmer’s Egyptian motif appears to be Peter le Page Renouf and Édouard Naville (1844–1926)’s The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation and Commentary (1904); one of the plates depicts a vignette from a papyrus held at the Louvre which is in essence a slightly more detailed version of Rohmer’s design.97 The vignette corresponds to spell 30, the ‘Chapter whereby the Heart of a person is not kept back from him in the Netherworld’, and shows a heart scarab pendant in a woven basket (Fig. 3.13).98 Of course, the context in which this illustration occurs – a volume addressing the Book of the Dead – suggests that this funerary artefact depicted on Rohmer’s correspondence might serve to ensure his own immortality after death, similar to the uses of cartouches by Haggard’s illustrators. Branding his own writing with ancient symbols, Rohmer also appears to be seeking longevity in explicitly literary contexts. As a result of the Chinese heritage of Fu Manchu, Rohmer’s most famous character, the publishers of Tales of Secret Egypt – McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie – produced Rohmer’s works with a symbol emulating, at least to those with little experience of Far Eastern scripts,

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Figure 3.13 P. le Page Renouf and E. Naville, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation and Commentary (London: The Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1904), pl. 12 (detail). Source: Internet Archive.

a Chinese character embossed on the front cover. Their spines, however, were adorned with the English text and stylised floral motifs in gilt, the symmetrical organic shapes resembling clumps of the papyrus plant as depicted by the Egyptians, similar, incidentally, to those found on such Egyptological volumes such as the Grolier Society’s lavishly produced History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia and Assyria (1903–6), written by authorities including Maspero. The publishers appear to have recognised and reproduced Rohmer’s fascination with ‘eastern-ness’ of all kinds, the combination of royalblue cloth and gold detail, ancient Egyptian symbolism with an uneducated nod to the traditional (if invented) Chinese, covering vast expanses of space and time with a single design. This iconographic amalgam reflects the combination of the Egyptian and the Asian which Rohmer employed within his own narratives. In Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), the antagonist Antony Ferrara is the spiritual son of Hortotef, an Egyptian high priest of the Temple of Ra (based on Hordedef – a real historical and literary figure – in ‘The Tale of King Cheops’ Court’), and the Witch-Queen, the high priestess of a black magic cult who was herself ‘not an Egyptian, but an Asiatic’.99 This detail as to her racial origins is not as implausible as one might first assume, given that ‘intermarriages between the royal houses of Egypt and Asia’ were indeed recorded.100 It is of significance, too,

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that the face of Rohmer’s most famous villain, Fu Manchu, ‘saving the indescribable evil of its expression, was identical to that of Seti, the mighty Pharaoh who lies in the Cairo Museum’; it is appropriate that the mummy Rohmer chooses is one whose name evokes Set, the god of disorder, violence and – most tellingly of all – foreigners.101 Rohmer’s insistence on cultural fusion, perhaps revealing a smattering of Egyptological knowledge, is complemented by his bold but inexpert use of Egyptian hieroglyphs and his publishers’ invention of mock-Chinese characters. There are, however, parallels between ancient Egyptian and Chinese scripts which highlight a greater figurative connection behind what might at first seem to be an unskilled employment of the symbolism of two historically and geographically distinct cultures. Samuel Birch, for instance, who excelled in and revolutionised Egyptology at the British Museum, came to the discipline as a sinologist.102 Both the ancient Egyptian and Chinese languages used phonetic and determinative signs and, early in these written languages’ development, pictograms portraying the same entities were directly comparable in appearance.103 Resultantly, some scholars claimed that Chinese might be a possible ‘key’ to decipherment, or that Chinese characters were themselves derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, coupled with analyses that suggested cultural exchange between these civilisations.104 And while knowledge of Chinese was never ‘lost’, as was the case with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, China held a similar mystical fascination across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a parallelism which, as Angus Fletcher has observed, is apparent in the works of Ezra Pound (1885–1972), aesthetically distinct from popular fiction such as Rohmer’s, yet bound to it through this embracing of ancient symbolism.105 Chinese and Egyptian pictograms – so different from the Latin alphabet – seemed numinous and transcendent in comparison not only to modern writing but to other ancient scripts. Thus, the faux-Chinese pictogram combined with traced Egyptian hieroglyphs in Tales of Secret Egypt hints at transcendent complexity, an ancient spirituality that familiar lettering could not evoke. Other twentieth-century texts to feature invented hieroglyphic messages put them to different ends, though still drawing upon this common evocation of longevity or indelibility associated with the hieroglyphs used in the works of Haggard and Rohmer and in the bookplates designed by Loftie. C. N. (1859–1920) and A. M. Williamson (1858–1933)’s novel It Happened in Egypt (1914) features a marriage proposal in the form of ‘a love letter in hieroglyphics, [to be] unearthed by moonlight’, which the

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hopeful protagonist buries in the sand, trusting that the woman he loves will disinter it, translate it, and appreciate its personal meaning (Fig. 3.14).106 She misunderstands, however, believing the letter to be both written by and intended for other members of their party; the narrator is left awaiting either ‘an hieratic acceptance or a demotic refusal’.107 While the enclosure of some of the words within brackets in the English version of the text suggests a familiarity with the conventions of translation, the hieroglyphic message is laced with errors, suggesting that the Williamsons did not seek expert assistance in its creation: the syntax, for example, is modern English rather than ancient Egyptian, produced by plucking words from bilingual texts. Egyptological guidance most probably took the form of dictionaries, grammars and guides to translation, written by experts but applied by neophytes. The romance inherent in the creation of a hieroglyphic marriage proposal by a husband-and-wife authorial team is difficult to overlook. Certainly, the composition, reception and translation of love notes written in an ancient format evokes a sense of longevity of

Figure 3.14 C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, It Happened in Egypt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co.,1914), p. 146. Author’s own.

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sentiment. Seen through the rose-tinted glass with which modernity was liable to view antiquity, the mysterious symbols which had survived millennia and been etched onto bridal cake boxes in the nineteenth century still signified a somewhat eccentric though unshakeable affection decades later.108 Hieroglyphic messages continued to be created for works of fiction well into the 1920s, becoming a trope of mystery and crime novels. For example, the hieroglyphic note in R. Austin Freeman’s (1862–1943) ‘The Blue Scarab’, published in Dr. Thorndyke’s Case-Book (1923) and in Pearson’s Magazine, leads to buried treasure, once decoded. Rather teasingly, in ‘The Blue Scarab’ this object is shown to an Egyptologist, ‘M. Fouquet’, who declares the inscription ‘just a collection of hieroglyphic characters jumbled together without sense or meaning’.109 The script itself is made up entirely of phonetic symbols which spell out the English message written underneath their corresponding hieroglyphs in the transliteration. While there is romance in the idea of hieroglyphic writings that cannot be decoded by experts, to a contemporaneous Egyptologist the message would be quickly and easily identified as English rather than Egyptian. Conveniently, it is revealed that Fouquet does not speak English. Regardless, in creating this scarab, a key to a long-standing mystery, having already written The Eye of Osiris the decade prior, Freeman exhibits his continuing interest in Egyptian symbolism, seemingly revelling in producing his own hieroglyphic message unassisted by experts. ‘Any intelligent person’, the detective Dr Thorndyke declares, ‘could master the Egyptian alphabet in an hour.’110 The Scarab Murder Case (1929) by the American art critic Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939) integrates the appropriation of Egyptian hieroglyphs for notes passed between lovers into the mystery genre, uniting their employment in romance and detective fiction by the Williamsons and Freeman before him; it is in this later example where we see hieroglyphs as a tool to blur generic boundaries. Published under the pseudonym S. S. Van Dine, the novel is dedicated to Ambrose Lansing (1891–1959), Ludlow Bull (1886–1954) and Henry A. Carey (1890–1965) who worked in the Egyptian department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.111 Wright had recently befriended these curators, having spent much of his spare time perusing ‘the Egyptian, Greek, and Renaissance rooms’.112 Not only does the dedication imply expert help with the hieroglyphs and other details, passing references to ‘Doctor [Albert] Lythgoe, the Curator of the Egyptian department of the Metropolitan Museum’ hint that Van Dine may rubbed shoulders

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with an even greater selection of the museum’s Egyptologists than he originally credits in the dedication.113 The novel reproduces numerous hieroglyphic symbols. The inclusion of hieroglyphs in a footnote (in the American edition) is particularly unusual: when Egyptian texts are quoted in fictional texts, it is usually in the English translation with no reference to the original pictograms. Van Dine’s use of hieroglyphs in this manner puts the reader on a par with the polymathic Vance who is, evidently, as well versed in Egyptology as the Egyptologists themselves. Indeed, one contemporary reviewer claimed that the novel ‘might almost serve as a handbook on Egyptology’.114 In contrast, when Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and her niece Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913), using the pseudonym Michael Field, borrowed a quotation from the Book of the Dead – ‘Osiris knoweth his day when he shall be no more’ – as an epigraph at the beginning of ‘Inevitable Death’ (one of five Egyptian-inspired sonnets), the extract was given in English with no accompanying hieroglyphs.115 Unlike the ancient Greek epigraphs which introduce several of their other works without supplemental translation, this quotation exists simply in the English. There are a number of reasons as to why this was the case. The quotation is likely from the translation of the Book of the Dead begun by Renouf and completed by Naville, and while vignettes depicting some of the chapters of the Book of the Dead are included in this volume (as Rohmer evidently knew), there are none representing this particular chapter.116 Tracking down hieroglyphs – especially given the authors’ inexperience with the ancient Egyptian language in the original – might have proven too difficult (or lengthy) a task; perhaps Bradley and Cooper assumed that the traditional education (in ancient Greek but not ancient Egyptian) that their readers were likely to have received justified not including the ancient language in its original form; perhaps even the comparative ease of printing without hieroglyphic characters was part of this decision. In comparison, Van Dine’s twentieth-century text benefits from the methods of mass printing (as opposed to Field’s relatively small print runs characteristic of the proponents of aestheticism), conforming to the expectations of detective fiction in reproducing ‘factual’ images, and monopolising upon the vogue for Egypt which dominated the 1920s after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. In another footnote, Van Dine’s narrator discusses the spelling of the name of one of the novel’s characters, Meryt-Amen: ‘The more correct English spelling of Mrs. Bliss’s name would have been MeryetAmûn, but the form chosen was no doubt based on the transliterations of Flinders Petrie, Maspero, and Abercrombie.’117 Of this trio of

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Egyptologists, Abercrombie is fictional. Occasionally referred to as ‘old Abercrombie’, he is Meryt-Amen’s father, who, the reader learns, ‘died in Egypt in the summer of 1922’.118 Van Dine’s meaning could not be more transparent. At the time of the publication of The Scarab Murder Case, Petrie was a septuagenarian and Maspero long dead. By specifying the time of Abercrombie’s death as sometime between June and August 1922, Van Dine indicates that he has no place in the Egyptological world subsequent to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, which would occur just months later. Petrie and Maspero are, by association, dismissed as obsolete, particularly damning given that Petrie was Carter’s tutor, and A. C. Mace (1874–1928) his nephew.119 Similarly, Budge is branded antiquated as a result of the differences in the hieroglyphic transliterations he proposes: ‘The u transliteratives of Budge – the quail chicks – are recorded as a w in Gardiner’; ‘Budge lists an ideogram with a khu value – a bird with spread wings – that isn’t even tabulated in Gardiner or the “Wörterbuch”.’120 In Van Dine’s whodunit, Alan Gardiner (1879–1963), the philologist who aided Carter in recording the inscriptions on a number of funerary objects in Tutankhamun’s tomb, is heralded ‘the true modern scholar’.121 The primi uomini of Egyptology, Van Dine suggests, were the modern translators, exegetists and decipherers of text, their names peppering the modern magazines which painted them as heroes. The invented letter from one lover to another written in hieroglyphic script is the most impressive use of the ancient Egyptian language in The Scarab Murder Case, and no doubt the result of expert input. The translation is provided later in the text: Beloved of Amen, stop I here until comes brother mother my. Not wish I should-endure situation this. Have-placed I in heart my should-act I for sake well-being our. Shalt-know thou thing every later. Shalt-be-satisfied thou toward me when are-free we from what-blocks-way, happy-are we thou together-with me.122

It is significant that although the hieroglyphic letter may first appear to be constructed using a hieroglyphic typeface, upon closer inspection it is evidently the work of a meticulous draughtsperson, although the copyist certainly appears to have referred to Gardiner’s font as a model. Even decades into the twentieth century, when Egyptologists are enlisted for their experience and linguistic expertise, hieroglyphs in fiction remain hand-drawn; the hieroglyphic font remains a feature of the scholarly work, while in other writings – for example the typewritten notes produced by Egyptologists themselves (and indeed

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some Egyptological publications) – space is allowed for the hieroglyphic symbols to be drawn in by hand. The hieroglyphs, in Van Dine’s novel, are incorporated into the collection of textual embellishments in the form of charts and visual aids. As part of the body of evidence for the case, the letter is represented in the same neat hand-drawn outlines of crime-scene layouts and other explanatory diagrams, themselves evoking drawings of tomb arrangements undertaken by archaeologists. In Vane Dine’s case, this culture of copying and reproduction is light-hearted. In a teasing nod to the expert scrutiny of the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptologists to whom the novel is dedicated, he jests that the hieroglyphic letter’s creator is ‘rather weak on grammatical endings’.123 These allusions to methods of translation and transliteration, both outdated and cutting edge, reveal that over a century after the first major steps were made in the mission to decipher the hieroglyphic script, debates persisted. While the Egyptologists involved in the Tutankhamun excavations – many of them loaned from the Metropolitan Museum – benefited from the celebrity and journalistic glory of their discoveries, the luminaries of the Victorian and Edwardian eras were shunned by some and glorified by others. The tongue-in-cheek process of inventing hieroglyphic texts with the aid of dictionaries and grammars that emerges in twentieth-century texts was made possible through the sheer proliferation of competing volumes and methods that accompanied Egypt’s explosion of importance in contemporary culture. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the translation of hieroglyphs did not herald a purely scholarly and objective reassessment of ancient Egyptian culture and history. Myths and misconceptions that had existed long before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone persisted: there was (and, to some degree, still is) an emphatic cultural reliance upon this mythical rather than historical Egypt. Ancient Egypt was perceived as being constructed of text before linguistic breakthroughs resulted in the comprehension of its own writings, and the threads of some of these unreliable sources appear to be woven all too permanently into Egypt’s textual fabric. Herodotus’ assertions that the Great Pyramid’s only purpose was as a tomb for a tyrannical Cheops, and his account of the bloodthirsty Nitocris drowning her guests in a subterranean chamber, for example, continued to serve as literary stimuli. Nitocris in particular underwent something of a twentiethcentury revival among notable literati. Works indebted to Herodotus include George Griffith’s (1857–1906) The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension (1906), Tennessee Williams’s (1911–1983) ‘The Vengeance of Nitocris’ (1928), and ‘Imprisoned

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with the Pharaohs’, a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft (1890– 1937) although first published under Harry Houdini’s (1874–1926) name in 1924, and then later under Lovecraft’s in 1939, when it was retitled ‘Under the Pyramids’. Even with a multitude of more trustworthy ancient Egyptian accounts becoming increasingly available, old and established stories proved difficult to ignore. New translations of hieroglyphs which proved the erroneousness of older beliefs, or which may have made more reliable substitutes for classical or biblical sources, did not expunge more fanciful ideas of the ancient Egyptian writing system as concealing magical secrets and esoteric truths. Yet the scholarly works of Egyptology also played their part in the production of popular texts, and the historical inaccuracies and wild speculations that inevitably crept into some of the more influential volumes have afterlives of their own. What emerges as significant from within this complex matrix of text, lettering, pictograms and material objects is that their meanings extend far beyond any single simple definition. Just as a gilt scarab emblazoned across the front of a book can stand in for the original artefact plucked from within a tomb cache, a cartouche printed within its pages can summon up historic moments of linguistic inspiration. Invented hieroglyphic messages draw attention to the consultation of Egyptological works, or moments in which Egyptologists scribble Egyptian messages for their literary acquaintances and friends. What a number of these individuals have in common is a desire to inscribe Egypt’s writing – whether real or imaginary – onto themselves, and to inscribe themselves onto Egypt in return. This wish was widespread and, often, literal. In the early nineteenth century, the associations between the hieroglyphs and eternal afterlives saw the symbols chiselled onto churchyard tombstones, obelisks and often buildings. In parallel with Haggard’s desire for literary permanence by drawing upon the symbolism of the cartouche, signs carved into rock conveyed aspirations to immortality. Unlike fragile papyri, Egyptian stone monuments proved themselves particularly robust, and nineteenth- and twentieth-graves featuring Egyptian symbolism can be seen to intend to defy the millennia in similar ways. In the early nineteenth century, the fashion for Egyptian iconography was strongly influenced by Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign; in Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery, the pyramidal grave of the Feuquières and Lecomte families features the hieroglyph depicting a clump of papyrus plants (M15) symbolic of rebirth and regeneration, a motif which, over a hundred years later, would adorn the elevator doors of New York City’s Chrysler Building. Other tombs feature pyramids, obelisks, ouroboroi and scarabs

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holding aloft sun discs.124 Egyptologists particularly appreciated this trend: Champollion’s grave is marked by a stone obelisk inscribed with his name, Petrie’s tombstone is inscribed with his name and an ankh, and Amelia Edwards’s (1831–92) grave features both a sizeable stone ankh and an obelisk, chosen for her by Petrie and another Egyptologist, Kate Bradbury (1854–1902).125 The most Egyptologically influenced grave, however, is that of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61). Situated in the English Cemetery in Florence, it features a sun disc copied from Champollion’s Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie (1845), not only duplicating ancient Egyptian iconography, but that directly derived from a celebrated Egyptological work. The inverse of this practice – and its parallel in Haggard’s and Carter’s wearing of rings inscribed with their names spelled out in hieroglyphs – was already well established. Rather than marking the modern tomb or the modern body with Egyptian writing, tourists flocking to Egypt had long been marking Egypt’s ancient monuments with modern writing. Flaubert wrote a letter to his mother relating his accounts of tourist carvings on temple walls: In the temples we read travelers’ names; they strike us as petty and futile. We never write ours; there are some that must have taken three days to carve, so deeply are they cut into the stone. There are some that you keep meeting everywhere – sublime persistence of stupidity.126

Haggard recorded this exercise with somewhat more patience in his autobiography, in which he states how he proceeded up the Nile, inspecting all the temples and the tombs of the kings at Thebes, to my mind, and so far as my experience goes, the most wondrous tombs in all the world. So, too, thought the tourists of twenty centuries or more ago, for there are the writings on the walls recording their admiration and salutations to the ghosts of the dead; and so, too, in all probability will think the tourists of two thousand years hence, for the world can never reproduce such vast and mysterious burying-places, any more than it can reproduce the pyramids.127

This sense of Egypt’s permanence that Haggard suggests (the very reason for the inscription of the modern name within cartouches, and the modern graffiti disfiguring these monuments) was evoked in the poetry of Rupert Brooke (1887–1915). Writing of the pyramids, Brooke commented: ‘Thus will they stand, and watch the mad world sway | Pulsing in endless haste, | Till the red dawn of that last day |

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When Earth shall vanish and the pale-starr’d waste, | Of Heav’n, as a robe out-worn, be cast away’, anthropomorphising these Egyptian monuments as guardians of the world, watching over humanity until the end of time.128 Similarly, he conceived that the Sphinx of Giza ‘shall lie, when we and our are gone | Out of all history, vanished quite away | Into the long rest of Oblivion, | Still gazing eastward, waiting for the light’.129 It is no wonder that Egypt’s monuments were so susceptible to modern inscription, that ‘in the desert’s awful frame’ one might expect to glimpse a holidaymaker ‘[n]otch[ing] his cockney initials on the Sphinx’.130 There is derision implicit here, but tourists were not the only demographic seeking to make their mark: Champollion himself inscribed his name, spelled ‘Champoléon’ presumably in a bid to mimic Napoleon, on a pillar of a temple at Karnak. Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) wrote his name on the wall of the burial chamber in the pyramid of Khephren, ‘his mark of conquest’.131 Ruth Hoberman discusses a similar notion in a cartoon that appeared in Punch in 1916, depicting a boy breathing on the glass of a British Museum display case. As Hoberman notes, ‘[t]he boy breathing on the glass could be read [. . .] as responding to the mummies in quite personal terms: they remind him of his own future obliteration, and he responds by writing his initials on the glass, mirroring both their attempt at self-preservation and its futility.’132 Egypt was, as this chapter demonstrates, as much a surface for the inscription of text as it was constructed from text, functioning as a palimpsest with layers of writing and meaning etched over each other and stretching back thousands of years. Instead of decipherment offering an entirely fresh understanding of hieroglyphs, their enigmatic potency proved inerasable, and led to their proliferation across literary genres seeking to draw upon this mystique, representing – in various contexts – white magic or dark forces, eternal love and mysterious messages, as well as the cultural immortality of authors, illustrators and Egyptologists alike. Carvings that had survived millennia were overwritten with the markings of those who wished to achieve a similar permanence within the greater narrative of humanity, to express their dream of enduring significance on top of writing that continued to represent a kind of primal inner truth and uncanny longevity.

Notes 1. Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1877), pp. xiii–xiv.

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2. In 1866, the British Museum saw fit to create a distinct department of Egyptian and Oriental Antiquities, while University College London established the first academic post for a Professor of Egyptian Archaeology in 1892. 3. David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1–2. 4. See, for example, Jonah Siegel, ‘Introduction’, in The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources, ed. Jonah Siegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3–10. 5. Charles Dudley Warner, Mummies and Moslems (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1876), p. viii. 6. Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 107. 7. Bernard Grenfell, ‘Oxyrhynchus and its Papyri’, Archaeological Report (Egypt Exploration Fund) (1896–7), 1–12 (p. 7). Gange notes the influence of the discovery of the Oxyrrhynchus papyri on the fiction of Norma Lorimer and E. F. Benson, among others; see Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 253. 8. Arthur Weigall, The Tomb of Tutankhamen and Other Essays (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), pp. 255–6. 9. Antonio Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 12; Richard Parkinson, Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (London: British Museum Press, 1999), p. 56. 10. Alan Henderson Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 25. 11. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: The Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 125. 12. As T. G. Wakeling states, ‘I have heard a story that two savants read an inscription, the one beginning from right to left, and the other from left to right, and both made sense of it’; see T. G. Wakeling, Forged Egyptian Antiquities (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1912), p. 136. Wakeling’s story is likely tongue-in-cheek: even amateur translators would be aware that hieroglyphs are meant to be read towards the faces of any animal or anthropomorphic glyphs. Mark Twain also poked fun at competing translations in ‘As Concerns Interpreting the Deity’ (1905); see Mark Twain, ‘As Concerns Interpreting the Deity’, in What is Man? And Other Essays (New York; London: Harper & Brothers, 1917), pp. 265–74 (pp. 265–6). 13. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, American Review: A Whig Journal, 1.4 (1845), 363–70 (p. 366). 14. Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press 1981), pp. 28–9; Michael Twyman, Early Lithographed Books: A Study of the Design and Production of Improper Books in the Age of the Hand Press

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15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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Writing the Sphinx (London: Farrand Press & Private Libraries Association, 1990), p. 135. Twyman details the particular significance of lithography in the reproduction of hieroglyphs (and the concurrent use of letterpress printing with lithography) in Egyptological texts; see pp. 36, 38, 126–42. Barbara Lüscher, ‘Studying the Book of the Dead’, in Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, ed. John H. Taylor (London: British Museum Press, 2010), pp. 288–309 (p. 295). J. R. Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936 (London: C. Hurst, 2004), p. 74. As Erik Iversen notes, the hieroglyph for water is particularly historically significant. While the Egyptological efforts of the seventeenth-century German polymath Athanasius Kircher are often derided, Kircher was ‘the first to have determined the phonetic value of an Egyptian hieroglyph’, this sign being the hieroglyph for water; see Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen: Gec Gad Publishers, 1961), pp. 96–7. Dan Karlholm, Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (Bern: P. Lang, 2004), pp. 231, 233. Ibid. p. 233. Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 135. While Jones did not include any images of hieroglyphs in his choice selections of ancient Egyptian design, he does note that ‘every flower or other object is portrayed, not as a reality, but as an ideal representation. It is at the same time the record of a fact and an architectural decoration, to which even their hieroglyphical writing, explanatory of the scene, by its symmetrical arrangement added effect’; Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day & Son, 1856), p. 23. James Stevens Curl, The Egyptian Revival: An Introductory Study of a Recurring Theme in the History of Taste (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), pp. 143–4. Cassell’s Household Guide: Being a Complete Encyclopaedia of Domestic and Social Economy, and Forming a Guide to Every Department of Practical Life, 4 vols (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, [1869–71]), iii [1869], p. 189. Diego Saglia, ‘Consuming Egypt: Appropriation and the Cultural Modalities of Romantic Luxury’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24.3 (2002), 317–32 (p. 322). Cassell’s Household Guide, p. 189. Ibid. Saglia, ‘Consuming Egypt’, p. 332. James Stevens Curl, The Egyptian Revival: Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 194. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 213.

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29. Lüscher, ‘Studying the Book of the Dead’, p. 296. 30. E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), p. 46. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead: The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1898), p. 285; E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899), p. 43. 31. Each hieroglyph referred to in this chapter is represented in the ‘List of Hieroglyphs’ at page xiii. 32. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet, p. 53; Julia Briggs, Edith Nesbit: A Woman of Passion (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), pp. 272–3. 33. Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 5. 34. Virginia Zimmerman, ‘Excavating Children: Archaeological Imagination and Time-Slip in the Early 1900s’, in Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900– 1930, ed. Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 63–82 (p. 76); Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet, p. 67. 35. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet, p. 53. 36. Ibid. 37. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 61. For a detailed discussion of the significance of the power of the spoken word to the Golden Dawn; see Alison Butler, Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 88. 38. Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, p. 366. The advertisement in question, entitled ‘The Truth About Tut-Ankh-Amen’, was placed by the Prudential Insurance Company of America. 39. H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, The World’s Desire (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), p. 118. In the preface the authors refer to the implications of the discoveries by Schliemann and Petrie, as well as the fictional work of Georg Ebers, establishing the novel’s relationship to a range of archaeological and scholarly sources; see pp. ix–x. 40. Hieroglyphs appear to have held a particular appeal for children. Howard Carter received a letter from a child – Luke Mahon from Ireland – in the wake of the Tutankhamun discovery, reading: ‘With best wishes for your great discovery I am wishing I was an Egyptolisty [sic] like you. I am 6 now, praps [sic] I will be one when I am grown up. I love all about Tutenkamen [sic]’. The front of the letter features painted hieroglyphs, including one of Tutankhamun’s cartouches (inaccurately transcribed); Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA ii.3.14. 41. Lily Schofield, Tom Catapus and Potiphar: A Tale of Ancient Egypt (London; New York: Frederick Warne & Co., 1903), unnumbered. 42. Ibid.

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43. Animal mummy, after 30 bce, linen and cat tissue, 51 cm, EA 6752, British Museum, London. 44. Benson wrote several other tales set in Egypt, including another featuring threatening primates entitled ‘Monkeys’ (1933). ‘The Ape’, however, is his story which most strongly suggests linguistic knowledge. 45. The particular myth from which Benson likely learned the concept of the ‘secret name’ is one in which the goddess Isis obtains power over Ra by learning his secret name; see ‘Isis and the Name of Ra’, Digital Egypt for Universities (2003), http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/ digitalegypt/literature/isisandra.html [accessed 24 November 2015]. 46. E. F. Benson, ‘The Ape’, in The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories (London: Cassell, 1920), pp. 184–209 (p. 194). ‘Tahu-met’ is perhaps evocative of ‘Am-met’ the funerary deity in Egyptian mythology who would devour the heart of the deceased if it was found to be heavier than the feather of Ma’at. 47. H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), p. viii. 48. Cartouches proved essential to nineteenth-century decipherment: Thomas Young had identified Ptolemy’s cartouche by 1816; see Parkinson, Cracking Codes, p. 31. 49. H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, ed. C. J. Longman, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), i, p. 269. ‘Of course I see it is a book you have written for yourself’, Lang stated, ‘[b]ut the B.P. [British Public] must also be thought of.’ 50. Haggard, Cleopatra, p. viii. 51. Haggard, Days of My Life, i, p. 277. 52. Haggard, Cleopatra, p. viii. 53. Ibid. p. 8. 54. John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 56; H. D. Rawnsley, ‘At Philae’, in Idylls and Lyrics of the Nile (London: David Nutt, 1894), pp. 145–7 (p. 145). 55. Haggard, Cleopatra, pp. 8–9. 56. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Mummy: Chapters on Egyptian Funereal Archaeology (Cambridge: University Press, 1893), p. 265. 57. Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, p. 7. 58. Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 305. 59. As well as illustrating several works by his close friend H. Rider Haggard – many of these dealing explicitly with ancient Egyptian elements (She: A History of Adventure [1887], The World’s Desire [1894], Ayesha: The Return of She [1905], She and Allan [1921], and, of course, Cleopatra [1889]) – Maurice Greiffenhagen also worked on factual works tethered to Egyptological scholarship including Donald Alexander Mackenzie’s Egyptian Myth and Legend (1907). Greiffenhagen’s illustrations are ‘full of well-researched detail’; see R. B. Parkinson,

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60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

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Reading Ancient Egyptian Poetry: Among Other Histories (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 239. Greiffenhagen also produced a painted portrait of Haggard, now at the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery; Maurice Greiffenhagen, Sir Henry Rider Haggard, 1897, oil on canvas, 211 × 132 cm, NWHCM: 1925.92, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich. This – the creation of realistic portraiture and illustrations of Haggard’s novels by the same artist – further complicates the interchangeability of ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ across Haggard’s biography and literary output. Parkinson, Cracking Codes, p. 43. Gérard Genette, Paratexts, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. R. Austin Freeman, The Eye of Osiris: A Detective Romance (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911), p. 255. Ibid. p. 69. Bellingham is also revealed to have worn ‘a very fine scarab of the eighteenth dynasty fashioned of lapis lazuli and engraved with the cartouche of Amenhotep III’ ‘suspended from his watch-chain’. Ibid. pp. 69, 227. Ibid. p. 227. The giving of the ring at this point, just after Ruth rejects Berkeley’s romantic advances, foretells their reconciliation and the fulfilment of a romantic union at the end of the novel, suggesting that they will be married. Ibid. p. 228. Haggard, Cleopatra, p. 151. The female body is also tattooed in Mr. Meeson’s Will (1888), in which the titular document is tattooed across a woman’s shoulders. H. Rider Haggard, Morning Star (London: Cassell and Co., 1910), p. 30. Incidentally, Haggard dedicated Morning Star to ‘one of the world’s masters of the language and lore of the great people who in these latter days arise from their holy tombs to instruct us in the secrets of history and faith’, his friend and renowned translator of hieroglyphs, E. A. Wallis Budge; see p. v. The ankh is an important symbol in Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), the sequel to Haggard’s more famous She. In this text, Ayesha resides in a temple shaped like the ankh, denoting her magical power over death. This symbol is reproduced in gilt three times on the first-edition cover. H. Rider Haggard, The Ivory Child (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1916), p. 39. Ibid. p. 70. This phrase is, of course, evocative of Haggard’s famous femme fatale, Ayesha, first appearing in She (1887). Rudyard Kipling, ‘An Error in the Fourth Dimension’, in The Day’s Work (New York: Doubleday and McClure Co., 1898), pp. 337–59 (p. 342). Haggard gave Kipling an ancient Egyptian ring; see Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 197. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 188.

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74. Harry How, ‘Illustrated Interviews. No VII – Mr. H. Rider Haggard’, Strand Magazine, 3 (1892), 2–17 (p. 6). How spells ‘Tiye’ as ‘Taia’. 75. Ibid. p. 5. 76. London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.1660 6.4.8. This folder contains negatives of photographs taken by T. G. H. James of items in the possession of Bruce Lovegrove including Carter’s ring. Carter often signed his name in hieroglyphs and alongside hieroglyphic messages (for example, London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.667 3.2.3 and AESAr.1866 3.2.1), as did the Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart (Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, Foucart Visitor’s Book, p. 23, http://www. griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/4fouvisb.html [accessed 8 December 2015]). This practice stretches back to Champollion, who was quick to write his own name in hieroglyphs after his own breakthroughs in deciphering phonetic symbols. 77. ‘Book-Plates’, The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, 39 (1910), 472–3 (p. 473). This is not a perfect translation. 78. Charles Dexter Allen, Ex Libris: Essays of a Collector (Boston, MA, and New York: Lamson, Wolffe, and Company, 1896), p. 78. 79. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, or, Studies in Egyptian Mythology, 2 vols (London: Methuen, 1904), i, p. 408. 80. H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887), p. 108. 81. Stephen Coan and Alfred Tella, ‘Introduction’, in Rider Haggard, Mameena and Other Plays: The Complete Dramatic Works of H. Rider Haggard, ed. Stephen Coan and Alfred Tella (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), pp. 1–48 (p. 7). 82. Haggard, Cleopatra, p. v. 83. Haggard, The Days of My Life, i, p. 272. 84. Haggard, The Days of My Life, i, p. 82; Egerton Castle, English Bookplates: Ancient and Modern (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), pp. 281–2. For images of plaster impressions of the rings and an account of their acquisition by Loftie, see Aylward M. Blackman, ‘The Nugent and Haggard Collections of Egyptian Antiquities’, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 4.1 (1917), 39–46. Loftie features in Who Was Who in Egyptology; see Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill, ‘LOFTIE, (Revd) William John (1839–1911)’, in Who Was Who in Egyptology, 3rd rev. edn (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1995), pp. 258–9. Lang’s ring, which depicted the god Bes, featured in Haggard’s short story ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1912–13); see Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 197. 85. Castle, English Bookplates, p. 282. Castle makes a number of errors: the ankh only symbolises life, not death, and there are three hieroglyphs, not five. Loftie could have made this design more authentic by positioning the hawk facing in the same direction as the hieroglyphs.

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86. ‘Rider Haggard at Home’, The Palace Journal, 2.45 (1888), 645. 87. Vivienne Becker, Antique and Twentieth Century Jewellery: A Guide for Collectors (London: N.A.G., 1980), p. 176. 88. Heather Pringle, The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession & the Everlasting Dead (London: Fourth Estate, 2001), p. 190. A comic poem by Tom Taylor addresses this theme; see Tom Taylor, ‘Musings on Mummy Paper’, in The Comic Poets of the Nineteenth Century: Poems of Wit and Humor by Living Writers, ed. W. Davenport Adams (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1876), pp. 246–8. 89. Victoria Finlay, The Brilliant History of Color in Art (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2014), p. 82. 90. Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long and Benjamin Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA: Burndy Library, 2009), p. 19. 91. David Braveman, ‘Good Old Petrie’, The Rohmer Review, 3 (1969), 18–22; Evelyn A. Herzog, ‘On Finding Petrie’s Correct Name’, The Rohmer Review, 18 (1981), 24–8. 92. Sax Rohmer, The Green Eyes of Bâst (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Macknenzie, 1920), p. 64. 93. Garland Cannon, ‘Sax Rohmer’s Use of Oriental Words in his Fiction’, OAKTrust (2005), http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/ handle/1969.1/2820/CannonFinal.pdf [accessed 8 December 2015], pp. 1–79 (pp. 20, 74–8). 94. Sax Rohmer, ‘The Death-Ring of Sneferu’, in Tales of Secret Egypt (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1919), pp. 31–57 (p. 34). 95. Ibid. p. 35. 96. Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 48. 97. P. le Page Renouf and E. Naville, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation and Commentary (London: The Society of Biblical Archaeology, 1904), pl. 12. 98. Ibid. p. 74. 99. Sax Rohmer, Brood of the Witch-Queen (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1936), p. 194. Ancient Egyptian antagonists are often racially ambiguous; examples include Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1898). For ‘The Tale of King Cheops’ Court’, see R. B. Parkinson, Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 295–6. 100. Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter (London: Cassell and Co., 1923), i, p. 47. 101. Sax Rohmer, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (New York: McKinley, Stone & Mackenzie, 1916), p. 132. 102. George Sarton, A History of Science: Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 23.

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103. Ibid. p. 22. 104. Robert Bagley scrutinises beliefs by some (including Joseph de Guignes) that Chinese culture was the result of ancient Egyptian colonisation, due (in part) to similarities between Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs; see Robert Bagley, ‘Was China an Egyptian Colony?’, in Decorum and Experience: Essays in Ancient Culture for John Baines, ed. Elizabeth Frood and Angela McDonald (Oxford: Griffith Institute, 2013), pp. 195–204. 105. Angus Fletcher, ‘Ezra Pound’s Egypt and the Origin of the Cantos’, Twentieth Century Literature, 48.1 (2002), 1–21. Fletcher argues that, like China, ‘Egypt is important to Pound because it exists in opposition to the Greece of his Victorian precursors’; p. 9. Pound’s Egypt (in his early works) is, however, unlike Rohmer’s, ‘an imaginary site’: ‘the Egypt of “Three Cantos” exists only within Pound’s imagination and is inhabited only by unreal beings like Hotep-Hotep’. 106. C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson, It Happened in Egypt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co.,1914), p. 145. The motif of the hieroglyphic love letter occurs in several twentieth-century texts, among them George Horace Lorimer’s The False Gods (1906). In Lorimer’s novella, the protagonist steals a letter partially written in ‘a succession of scrawls and puerile outline pictures, such as a child might have drawn’, unbeknown to him from an Egyptologist to his wife; see George Horace Lorimer, The False Gods (New York: D. Appleton, 1906), p. 41. While there is no image of the letter, another Egyptologist is on hand to provide a translation, informing him that the writing is in fact ‘a queer jumble of hieroglyphics and hieratic writing’; p. 42. The message itself is suitably lofty: My heart’s dearest, my sun, my Nile duck – the hours are days without thee, the days an æon. The gods be thanked that this separation is not for long. For apart from thee I have no life. That thing that I have to do is about done. May the gods guard thee and the all-mother protect thee. I embrace thee: I kiss thine eyes and thy lips. See p. 43. There is, of course, an element of comedy here, not merely in the use of ‘Nile duck’ as a term of endearment. ‘[W]ho could have known’, the protagonist asks himself, ‘that a grown man would indulge in such fool monkey-business as writing love-letters in hieroglyphics to his own wife?’; pp. 85–6. 107. Williamson and Williamson, It Happened in Egypt, p. 146. 108. Lynn Parramore, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in NineteenthCentury Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 33.

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109. R. Austin Freeman, ‘The Blue Scarab’, in Dr Thorndyke’s Casebook (Long Preston: Dales, 2008), pp. 63–101 (p. 69). It is likely that Freeman derived the name ‘Fouquet’ from the French physician Daniel Marie Fouquet (by this time deceased), who had participated in several high-profile examinations of mummies. 110. Ibid. p. 99. 111. S. S. Van Dine [Willard Huntington Wright], The Scarab Murder Case (London: Cassell & Co., 1930), p. 5. 112. John Loughery, Alias S. S. Van Dine: The Man Who Created Philo Vance (New York: Scribner, 1992), pp. 214, 216. 113. Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case, p. 73; Warren R. Dawson and Eric P. Uphill, ‘HALL Lindsley Foote (1883–1969)’, in Who Was Who in Egyptology, 3rd rev. edn (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1995), p. 187. Van Dine also refers to George Reisner, the Boston Museum’s curator of Egyptian Art and Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University; see Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case, p. 89. In the original American edition published by Scribner’s, Van Dine mentions Lindsley Hall, who aided in the drawing of plans of the main chamber in the Tutankhamun excavations. 114. Eugene Reynal, ‘A New Van Dine Tale: The Scarab Murder Case. By S. S. Van Dine. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1930. $2.’, The Saturday Review of Literature, 24 May 1930, p. 1062. 115. Michael Field, ‘Inevitable Death’, in Wild Honey from Various Thyme (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 87. 116. Renouf and Naville, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 17. The passage reads: ‘Osiris knoweth his day, and that it is in his lot that he should end his being, and be no more.’ 117. Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case, p. 77. Van Dine does not appear to be aware that Petrie was not a philologist. 118. Ibid. pp. 137, 138. 119. Thomas Hoving, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 116. 120. Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case, p. 224. The ‘Wörterbuch’ refers to Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow’s Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache (192–53), an ancient Egyptian dictionary. 121. Ibid. p. 223. 122. Van Dine, The Scarab Murder Case, pp. 301–2. Minor variations between different editions of The Scarab Murder Case with regards to Egyptological details perhaps suggest the continued influence of Egyptologists on Van Dine’s text after its original publication. 123. Ibid. p. 223. I am indebted to Richard Parkinson, who proclaims Van Dine’s statement to be accurate: the tenses are shaky, perhaps a deliberate choice on the part of the Egyptologists who constructed this message.

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124. See, for example, the tomb of Charlotte Émilie Dias Santos (1811–27) designed by Pierre-Alphonse Fessard (1832) and the tomb of PierreAndré Latreille designed by Louis-Parfait Merlieux (1833). 125. Joan Rees, Amelia Edwards: Traveller, Novelist & Egyptologist (London: Rubicon, 1998), p. 69. Howard Carter’s original gravestone has been replaced with a new stone with an epitaph taken from an artefact to which Carter referred as the ‘Wishing Cup’: ‘May your spirit live, may you spend millions of years, you who love Thebes, sitting with your face to the north wind, your eyes beholding happiness.’ The ‘Wishing Cup’, discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb, is now housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo; Lotus chalice, 18th Dynasty, alabaster, 18.3 × 28.3 cm, JE 67465., Egyptian Museum, Cairo. At the foot of Carter’s grave is another Egyptian quotation: ‘O night, spread thy wings over me as the imperishable stars’, which, as Joyce Tyldesley elucidates, is ‘a version of the hymn to the sky goddess Nut, which is inscribed inside many New Kingdom coffins’; see Joyce Tyldesley, Tutankhamen’s Curse: The Developing History of an Egyptian King (London: Profile, 2012), p. 101. 126. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 160. Steegmuller records that Flaubert’s companion on his Egyptian travels, Maxime Du Camp, also expressed his distaste regarding the carving of modern names into the monuments. One reader saw fit to goad him by inscribing Du Camp’s name onto Egypt’s landmarks. 127. Haggard, The Days of my Life, i, p. 259. 128. Rupert Brooke, The Pyramids (Rugby: Rugby Press, 1904) unnumbered, i. 129. Ibid. v. 130. James Russell Lowell, ‘Sonnet. On being asked for an Autograph in Venice’, in Heartsease and Rue (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1888), p. 111. 131. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 96. 132. Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 5.

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Chapter 4

‘Drunk on the dead’: Intoxication, Perfume and Mummy Dust

Although the most famous invocations of ancient Egypt’s impact on modern minds are visual – such as Howard Carter’s (1874–1939) ‘wonderful things’ – Egypt could enter the body and invade the consciousness by other routes, and not every sensation that conjured visions began from a visual stimulus. Inhalation or ingestion of exotic substances could call forth visions of Egyptian antiquity. Countless archaeological reports refer to the pungent smell of spices that were used to embalm the bodies of mummies, or perfumes that had rested undisturbed in tombs retaining their scent over the centuries, facilitating Egyptological experiences that approached the ancient Egyptian world as it was, its substances drawn inside, and affecting, the modern body. Especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the practice of unrolling mummies in lecture theatres was at its fashionable peak, ‘mummy fragments, associated artefacts and particularly the wrapping cloths impregnated with spices and resin were passed around audiences to be touched, smelt and tasted’.1 In fiction, close encounters with ancient Egyptian substances called forth hallucinations of the past, textual counterparts to opiated tinctures and cigarettes which themselves evoked a timeless decadence. These visions proved akin to reading processes, in which immersion within a text – whether factual, fictional or occupying an ambivalent space in between – stimulates images within the reader’s mind. Ultimately, the material experience of ancient Egypt could provide something that the hallucinogenic text aimed to emulate. This chapter focuses on the intoxicating substances and visions evoked by all manner of ancient antiquities and the modern commodities that sought to imitate something of their appeal, both in text and culture more broadly. In doing so it charts changes to fantasies of ancient Egypt and the methods of envisioning such fantasies: from the pages of factual texts, through the fictions of authors and poets, to

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cinema, and from the unique artefactual experience, through to mass commodity culture. It reveals how the commercialisation of Egyptian glamour took the unique, the bespoke and the luxurious out of the hands of the cultural elite, the privileged and, to an extent, the avant-garde – particularly, at the end of the nineteenth century, the aesthetes, decadents and symbolists, drawing upon figures such as Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) – and into the laps of the masses. Beginning with an examination of factual and fictional portrayals of the ingestion of the dust and effluvia of mummies, accounts characterised by Gothic and aphrodisiac overtones, various hallucinogenic states are brought into alignment: the internal visualising of the reading process, nightmarish opium-induced visions, and the ancient and eastern fantasies associated with incense, cigarettes and perfume. It was via these latter channels that Egyptian fantasy became, most explicitly, a mass commodity, in which consumers were flattered into purchasing products by advertising that assumed a prior knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphic text. Moving on to a discussion of the seductive eastern enchantresses once confined to the pages of fiction, or conjured up through close contact with Egyptian fumes or expensive and inebriating vapours, the conclusion of this chapter remarks upon the ways in which these figures were presented in theatre, dance and, later, cinema, becoming mechanically reproduced and accessible via commercialised mass envisioning, within settings drawing upon Egyptian architecture.

Substances and Sensuality The accidental ingestion of mummies played a part in one of the most famous proto-Egyptological texts of the nineteenth century, Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s (1778–1823) celebrated work Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs, and excavations, in Egypt and Nubia (1820), which Howard Carter so admired. Belzoni relates the ‘suffocating air, which often causes fainting’ inside Egyptian tombs, where ‘dust [. . .] enters into the throat and nostrils, and chokes the nose and mouth to such a degree, that it requires great power of lungs to resist it and the strong effluvia of the mummies’.2 Although he discloses that he has no sense of smell, Belzoni relates that he could nonetheless ‘taste that the mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow’.3 Later in the century, and drawing upon accounts such as Belzoni’s, the inhalation of mummy dust and its powerful perfumes was to cause drowsiness, trance states and strange

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visualisations in literature. Louisa May Alcott (1832–88), in ‘Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse’ (1869), published anonymously at the same time as her more famous – and more wholesome – Little Women (1868–69), includes details that echo Belzoni’s Narrative. In the Great Pyramid, her characters, at first ‘half choked with dust and close air’, fall prey to visions after setting light to a mummy ‘from which a strange aromatic odor came’: A dull blaze sprung up, and a heavy smoke rose from the burning mummy, rolling in volumes through the low passages, and threatening to suffocate us with its fragrant mist. My brain grew dizzy, the light danced before my eyes, strange phantoms seemed to people the air, and, in the act of asking Niles why he gasped and looked so pale, I lost consciousness.4

Mimicking the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs, smoking a mummy produces synesthetic, dreamlike results. Through inhalation, unknown substances penetrate the lungs, bloodstream and brain, exerting their strange effects on the mind, resulting in states of intoxication. The ‘strange phantoms’ that appear before the narrator imply that the entering of the modern body by that of an ancient Egyptian via its suspension as smoke particles allows a kind of supernatural access to the past. Alcott’s depiction of the inhalation of the smoke from a burning mummy did, in fact, have a counterpart in reality: powdered mummy (‘mummia’) was sold by apothecaries as a treatment for a variety of complaints, a panacea whose use, by the nineteenth century, stretched back hundreds of years.5 Whether consumed medicinally or else inhaled unintentionally, literary bodies invaded by ancient dust were susceptible to experiencing aphrodisiac effects, rousing sexual fantasies of Salomes, Cleopatras and other serpents of the Nile. Richard Marsh’s (1857–1915) novel The Beetle (1897) features a reversal of this process, in which ancient devotees to the worship of Isis sacrifice young English women and consume their ashes, causing the worshippers to become ‘drunk with an insensate frenzy, delirious with inhuman longings’.6 The sacrificial process itself is sadistic and sexualised, supposedly contributing to the ashes’ potent aphrodisiac properties. A visual representation of the rites depicts ‘a naked white woman being burned alive’ on an altar, ‘secured by chains in such a fashion that she was permitted a certain amount of freedom [. . .] to contort and twist her body into shapes which were horribly suggestive of the agony which she was enduring’.7 Evidently, consumption of mummia had cannibalistic

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implications, which contributes to Marsh’s damning version of the process that highlights the moral issues surrounding the ingestion of material derived from human bodies. His deliberate sexualisation of the process gestures towards the depraved decadence of those who continued to consume powdered mummy as the practice waned, as well as burgeoning associations between ancient Egypt and transgressive sexual appetites. While the medicinal practice of ingesting powdered mummy for a range of ailments had all but ceased by the beginning of the twentieth century, the spices, perfumes and dust of the dead were still making their way inside western bodies, not only in narratives such as Alcott’s but in real confrontations with the relics of antiquity. Rupert Brooke’s (1887–1915) poem ‘Mummia’ (1911), written in November 1910 and originally entitled ‘Mummy’, played explicitly with the suggestions that inhaling ancient Egyptian particles might produce sexually stimulating results.8 The two opening stanzas describe the aftermath of ingestion of powdered mummy by ancient lovers: inspiring the limbs with ‘fire’, causing those who had devoured the substance to become ‘[d]runk on the dead’, finding the passions that stirred individuals who have been gone ‘[t]en centuries’ contributing to their own excitement.9 In keeping with a literary tradition extending from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Brooke’s poem glamorises close – and sensual – contact with the relics of the past. His friend Arthur Ewart ‘Hugh’ Popham (1889–1970) was appointed to the British Museum in 1912 as an assistant in the Department of Prints and Drawings, a position which Brooke envied, as he claimed to harbour desires to steal into the Egyptian rooms after dark in order ‘to embrace a female mummy’.10 The ambiguity of the word ‘embrace’ is such that it is unclear whether Brooke’s desire is to hold the mummy in his arms, to bestow a kiss, or – in the term’s more euphemistic sense – to engage in sexual intercourse. While Brooke purportedly believed the primary cause of death in ancient Egyptian women to be syphilis, a misconception that one might expect to have dampened his desire (and one which suggests the latter meaning of ‘embrace’), he nevertheless expressed hope that he might ‘find a clean one’.11 Evidently fantasies about mummified remains were not merely confined to the pages of fiction, in which bodies could be depicted as idealised and lifelike (often alive yet dormant, rather than dead), but could be entertained in the real world.12 In Brooke’s poem, while the contemporary lovers do not literally consume the ‘spiced imperial dust’ as Brooke claims their counterparts did in antiquity, they feel all of the effects

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described as if they have, vampire-like, imbibed the ancient Egyptians’ ‘blood’.13 Spice (in a culinary sense, at least) was, as Helena Michie observes, connected to masculine sexual impulses, and the consumption of spice by young woman associated with masturbation.14 Dust made from bodies infused with oils and spices, then, has particular aphrodisiac connotations, particularly when consumed by women. The consequences in Brooke’s poem are not limited to the stirring up of desire between the couple, but emphasise supernatural intensity stimulated by imagined spices. As when the smoke from Alcott’s mummy is inhaled, the dead are made perceptible: ‘ghostly hands’ participate in the couple’s lovemaking, while ‘[t]heir whispering voices wreathe | Savage forgotten drowsy hymns | Under the names we breathe’.15 The trope of mummies inspiring romantic passion was so widespread that even the novelist Amelia Edwards (1831–92), oft-lauded as the ‘godmother’ of Egyptology (and whose factual and fictional works are usually clearly divided), composed a poem of desire for a female mummy from the standpoint of a male archaeologist. Entitled ‘To his mummy (who is older than he)’, this work – included in an album of materials relating to Edwards held at the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford – has hitherto escaped scholarly attention, warranting its reproduction here in full.16 Edwards recognises her poem’s somewhat dubious quality, signing it ‘with many apologies’: What shall I call thee? Mummy, – sweetheart mine, Where shall I find thee? . . . if in truth I dare To disinter thee from the desert plain And carry off thy body to afar. Where shall I find thee? Burrowing with my hands Full deep in earth, as when they seek to meet Some prized treasure. Yes, to far off lands We’ll travel now this summer fair my sweet. Thy home shall be some great museum, grand With all the splendours art can cast around, Where thou shalt soon midst wond’ring peoples stand, Nor think ere more to lie in native ground. Yes come, I know thou wilt! For well nigh due Is now another find; since two days past I have not seen a portrait, and anew I seek to find another love at last.

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I waked last night from dreams of finds, and lo! Five new tombs have we opened now today, And sure in one of them, deep down, full low, Thy smiling face is lying! Come away! Away dear love to meet and greet the sun, Which yet thou hast not seen for ages past, When thou lay down, Europe had scarce begun To run its course, which thou shalt see at last. Swift, swift, we’ll travel to my Northern shore Dear lady! From the drowsy East fly fast, Darkness & ignominy are no more, Thy treasured features now are mine at last.

One might assume that Edwards’s fantasy was more tongue-in-cheek than Brooke’s: in her poem the persona is a male Egyptologist, creating more distance between the poet and the poetic ‘voice’. This is somewhat complicated, however, by the question mark that hangs over Edwards’s sexuality; that her close and loving relationships with women were more than platonic friendships has been the subject of speculation.17 Assuming a male ‘voice’ here may allow Edwards access to a socially acceptable mouthpiece through which to indulge in same-sex fantasy. Supporting the former rather than the latter interpretation is the fact that Edwards’s poem was not published; it was intended to be read only by its recipient, indicated as ‘Wilm. F. P’: William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942). This was a work written by one Egyptologist for another (and Petrie’s receipt of the poem is by no means certain). Yet Edwards’s and Brooke’s poems share several similarities, not merely in the eroticisation of ancient Egyptian culture – Edwards is uncharacteristically explicit in describing a desire to ‘carry off thy body’ with its connotation of rape, as well as a penetrative impulse: ‘Burrowing with my hands | Full deep in earth, as when they seek to meet | Some prized treasure’. Rather, these fantasies are both predominantly psychological in nature: in the lines ‘I waked last night from dreams of finds, and lo! | Five new tombs have we opened now today’, Edwards connects acts of excavation to hallucinatory and strangely prophetic dreams. Central to these and other imaginings of ancient Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are notions of internal vision, whether supernatural or mundane in nature. As Georges Poulet records in ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, the act of reading brings about a ‘remarkable transformation’ in perception: ‘[n]ot only does it cause

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the physical objects around me to disappear, including the very book I am reading, but it replaces those external objects with a congeries of mental objects in close rapport with my own consciousness.’18 Alcott, Brooke and other authors dealing with Egypt’s intoxicating substances complicate reading processes by calling forth visions within visions, the hallucinations of their characters made hazier still as they are imagined in the reader’s mind’s eye. Reading is the penetration of the mind by text – or, rather, ‘the cogitations of another’. ‘[T]he extraordinary fact in the case of a book’, Poulet states, ‘is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you.’19 This act of infiltration has a physical counterpart that mirrors that of the invasion of the lungs by mummy dust: as Carolyn Steedman records, the ‘fevers of scholarship’ can be brought on via the dust of the book’s ‘components (leather binding, various glues and adhesives, paper and its edging, and decreasingly, parchments and vellums of various types)’.20 And Egypt has a particular potency in these situations; Andrew Stauffer has identified the dust-producing paper and De Quincean disintegrating mummies that haunt the works of Charles Dickens (1812–70), stating that ‘Egyptian mummies swathed with linen rags and bearing papyrus scrolls fuse with Victorian rag paper in the imaginative representations of the necropolitan city, at once both cemetery and library, where books and bodies decay to choking dust’.21 Similarly, T. G. Wakeling teasingly attributes the ‘strangeness’ of Egyptologists to ‘the inhalation and absorption of the desiccated and pulverised remains of the ancient Egyptians’.22 The scholar in the archives, the voracious reader in the library, the Egyptologist poring over a mummy or a papyrus, all ran the risk of physical infiltration of the dust of their toils, bringing about psychological symptoms: mania or lethargy the immaterial results of the all too material dust. This indivisibility of the material and the immaterial was, of course, among the elements of ancient Egyptian belief that Egyptology exhumed. Ancient Egyptian mortuary culture frequently provided inspiration through its own insistence upon the importance of the creation and conservation of material objects in a bid to preserve the immortal (and immaterial) spirit. Amulets were the source of magical powers, the survival of the written name was thought to ensure the survival of the soul, and tombs were filled with representations of the necessities and luxuries required in the afterlife.23 Readers were exposed to these ideas through the reading of Egyptological texts or fiction that drew upon this scholarship: the images conjured up within the mind as the text was read confirmed the continued existence of the world they depicted. H. Rider Haggard

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(1856–1925) expressed such a desire for his novel Cleopatra (1889); he hoped that ‘the long dead past [might] be made to live again before the reader’s eyes with all its accessories of faded pomp and forgotten mystery’.24 Egyptological unearthing and scholarly study was discussed in the press in very similar terms: one anonymous writer for The Manchester Guardian celebrated that through Egyptological endeavour ‘the mists are gradually clearing away from the face of what hitherto was prehistoric antiquity, and nations become alive to us which until recently were only fliting before our eyes like a deceptive mirage of the desert’.25 Perhaps it was a result of the prevalence of this imagery across conversations surrounding factual and fictional literature that, in texts referring to ancient Egypt, the invocation of pictures within the reader’s mind is mirrored by frequent allusions to a variety of forms of intoxication, with mental and bodily symptoms mirroring those that befall the reader. Opium, fittingly, with its long history of medicinal, spiritual and recreational use in ancient civilisations, is repeatedly harnessed as the tool of visualisation.26 In literature, the words of the text itself mimic the effects of opiates, summoning mental pictures, while the substances’ physicality replicates that of the book, the material shell necessary to convey the psychic effects of the words within the mind. In De Quincey’s laudanum-fuelled nightmares recounted in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), he relates a mental journey from the Far East to Egypt, encountering Hindu gods and exotic animals en route: I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.27

De Quincey’s drug-induced visions of Egyptian antiquity enjoyed a long literary afterlife. When the poet Mathilde Blind (1841–96) wrote poetry inspired by her travels through Egypt, she likened the landmarks she encountered to such hallucinations: ‘Where the sacred Isle of Philæ, twinned within the sacred stream, | Floats, like some rapt Opium-eater’s labyrinthine lotos dream’.28 George Bernard Shaw’s (1856–1950) Egyptian queen in Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) makes her first appearance onstage asleep on a bed of poppies, equating the strangeness and loveliness of the scene with opium-induced fantasy inspired by the inhalation of the ‘silver mist’:

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Dead silence. Suspense. Then the blackness and stillness break softly into silver mist and strange airs as the windswept harp of Memnon plays at the dawning of the moon. It rises full over the desert; and a vast horizon comes into relief, broken by a huge shape which soon reveals itself in the spreading radiance as a Sphinx pedestalled on the sands. The light still clears, until the upraised eyes of the image are distinguished looking straight forward and upward in infinite fearless vigil, and a mass of color between its great paws defines itself as a heap of red poppies on which a girl lies motionless, her silken vest heaving gently and regularly with the breathing of a dreamless sleeper, and her braided hair glittering in a shaft of moonlight like a bird’s wing.29

While Cleopatra’s sleep is purportedly ‘dreamless’, when Caesar encounters her thus he remarks to himself, ‘What a dream! What a magnificent dream! Only let me not wake, and I will conquer ten continents to pay for dreaming it out to the end.’30 She is the intoxicating sorceress who sleeps amid poppies – according to Caesar, an ‘impossible little dream witch’.31 Rather than merely securing these straightforward (though tantalising) thematic associations, however, De Quincey’s narrative equates processes of reading and intoxicated envisioning. Through the medium of text, De Quincey evokes images that replicate his own visions in the minds of his readers. Yet he conceived of the brain as a palimpsest, whose most ancient scripts, which far predate modern culture – a kind of universal, primordial mnemic text – might become visible under the influence of the drug.32 As Barry Milligan identifies, De Quincey ‘characterizes his version of the unconscious [. . .] in terms of ancient geological strata’, ‘layers of “Nilotic mud”’ which chimes with Carl Jung’s (1875–1961) model of the ‘memory that transcends the individual’; opium functions as ‘the modern chemical that restores the original writing on the palimpsest, the archaeological tool’.33 With this in mind, we might suppose that De Quincey, rather than reading allusions to his infamous account in subsequent literature as straightforward references, would perceive Egyptianised druginduced hallucinations as, instead, the re-emergence of collective and ancient visions. While Milligan’s study suggests that the reason for Orientalised hallucinations across the Victorian era is the result of De Quincey’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) Romantic exemplars (De Quincey’s work in particular enjoyed a renewed popularity towards the end of the century), De Quincey would perhaps have read these tropes’ extension into twentieth-century culture – in the visions of, for example, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885– 1939) in the 1920s, one of which, he recorded, featured ‘A Pharaoh’ and ‘Egyptian and Assyrian processions’ – as the activation of the

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same line of palimpsestic script within the psyche.34 Through setting these visions down on paper, however, these authors take part in the process of making their Egyptianised visions seen and indeed, according to Poulet, felt in the minds of their readers, just as psychoactive drugs had stimulated their own hallucinations.35 Incomplete archaeological fragments, examined, classified and categorised by experts, and described and reproduced in text, provided the foundations upon which drug-induced reverie and nightmare could be built. The somatosensory effects of reading are experienced by Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) eponymous antihero in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890; 1891) prior to and presaging his visits to the opium dens of London’s East End. While Dorian reads, he experiences intense and intoxicating visions elicited by the words on the page. When he encounters the section of Théophile Gautier’s (1811–72) Émaux et camées (1852) describing Venice, Wilde records that ‘[a]s one read them, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city’.36 Dorian’s experience is so profound that, for a moment, the internal vision produced by reading becomes his reality. Then, when Dorian reaches Gautier’s poems about Egyptian obelisks, the text seems to function as a springboard for aesthetic hallucinations in which he personifies the inanimate and objectifies the animate, transforming stone into a living thing and living things into precious materials. He envisions: the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl over the green steaming mud.37

In this image, the artefact – the obelisk – is made living, while the Egyptian animals are made into decadent objects – roses, gold and gemstones. The object of Egyptological interest is made indistinguishable from the natural, as Wilde celebrates a blurred version of luxurious antique materiality that defies rather than defers to scholarly conventions. The celebration of this materiality is, as one might expect, commonplace in aesthetic poetry; in Michael Field’s ‘Inevitable Death’ (1908), the deceased become beautiful objects in their ornamentation: ‘Mummied in cave and rock: their bones are rolled | To silver ore, their flesh becomes pure gold, | Their hair blue-tinctured lapis-lazuli’.38 There is, however, evidence that Wilde in particular was familiar with ancient Egyptian embalming rituals,

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suggesting the intrusion of some semblance of Egyptological fact into these reveries: the gilded claws of Wilde’s vultures echo the gilded nails of the mummified dead. Thus, Wilde’s objectification of living things mirrors processes of objectification true to ancient Egyptian convention: bodies – animal as well as human – underwent mummification processes in which precious and semi-precious materials were used to decorate the corpse, sarcophagus and funerary paraphernalia. This passage in Wilde also recalls De Quincey’s opium-fuelled nightmares, and, in doing so, foreshadows Dorian’s own experimentation with recreational drugs. Considered alongside John Whale’s suggestion that De Quincey’s account shares a sublime yet nightmarish atmosphere (as well as similar subject matter) with those of Belzoni, Belzoni’s proto-Egyptological text might be considered a narrative precursor and counterpart to the uncanny visions in De Quincey’s confessional writing and Wilde’s fiction.39 The rise of decadent and symbolist circles, within which Wilde moved, coincided with the establishment of a culture of recreational drug use towards the end of the nineteenth century.40 Opium, hashish, reputedly hallucinogenic absinthe and, to a lesser extent, cocaine were used and abused by literary and artistic circles and those who were a part of or traversed these movements, particularly the Rhymers’ Club, as well as other groups in pursuit of ancient visions, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.41 The decadent worlds of antiquity proved accessible through an equally decadent indulgence in psychoactive substances; intoxication and hallucination opened windows into the ancient past, a thrilling accompaniment to the sober details provided by the scholarly book. Of the members of these and similar groups at the fin de siècle, Wilde, with his indulgent habits, stimulated one of the richest mythologies. According to Marcel Schwob (1867–1905), Wilde was particularly fond of ‘smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes’ while he ate. His ‘visions and desires’, meanwhile, were the result of his partiality to absinthe.42 Robyn L. Schiffman observes the late nineteenth-century association between smoking and homosexuality, recording that in Robert Hichens’s (1882–1940) provocative novel The Green Carnation (1894), Esmé Amarinth – the character based on Wilde – is a smoker of gold-tipped cigarettes.43 In a letter to his brother, Wilde declares ‘gold-tipped cigarettes’ the only kind worth smoking, while he himself ordered hundreds with his name inscribed on the side in red ink, from the upmarket tobacconist Robert Lewis.44 Wilde’s cigarettes were thus luxury items created with the highest-quality Egyptian tobacco, wrapped in paper and gold foil,

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and producing gentle narcotic effects that duplicated the lethargy and effeteness of the aesthete. Emblazoned with his own name, they were also inherently textual items, and deeply entangled with Wilde’s complex self-presentation as a man of decadent and literary tastes. The slender bespoke cigarette, comprised of pale paper, gold foil and red ink, mimicked the aesthetic book – indeed, reminiscent of The Sphinx – and readied the mind for refined, dreamlike imaginings. Writers, artists and occultists inhaled Egyptian smoke and allowed it to take root in the body and the mind, and literary characters soon followed suit. The narrator in Kate Chopin’s (1850–1904) short story ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’ (1897) tries cigarettes laced with hallucinogens, fittingly rolled and packaged in yellow paper, a colour associated with decadence in transatlantic literary culture through the distinctive covers of the controversial periodical The Yellow Book, themselves inspired by the yellow paper covers that warned of salaciousness between the boards of French decadent novels. Smoking one produces unsettling visions of passion and death in the desert, and the rest of the cigarettes are discarded, unsmoked. As I have considered elsewhere, in Guy Boothby’s (1867–1905) thriller Pharos the Egyptian (1899), the eponymous antagonist produces cigarettes and perfumes that variously heighten the senses, invite visions of the past, and produce hypnotic suggestibility.45 Charlotte Bryson Taylor’s (1880–1936) In the Dwellings of the Wilderness (1904) also connects ‘a whiff of perfume’ to an ancient Egyptian supernatural potency, again with sinister connotations.46 Suggesting the presence of the deadly and seductive ancient Egyptian spirit which plagues the novel’s protagonists, the aroma – ‘the heavy, haunting scent of the jasmine flower, clinging and sensuous’ – evokes ‘nameless horror [. . .] like the horror of an evil dream [. . .] from which one cannot waken’.47 There is more than a sense of De Quincean nightmare in each of these cases, where the entering of Egyptian substances into the bloodstream almost serves as a reverse colonisation first of the body and then the mind. Simultaneously stimulating and numbing, these chemicals promise troublingly decadent encounters.

Perfume and Consumerism In fiction, inhaling incense and perfume could yield similar results to hallucinogenic smoke, stimulating regressive visions, supposedly of past lives. The eminent Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater

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(1854–1934) described a strange Egyptian perfume said to have dark magical properties in ‘The Perfume of Egypt’ (1911), a story which, like the others in the volume of the same name, are purported to be true. Although it transpires that the poisonous perfume is composed mainly of Persian incense, the modern Egyptians in Cairo associate it with ‘the awful power of the old magic of Egypt’.48 Its relatively prosaic composition belies its occult significance, however; the ‘indescribably rich and sweet’ perfume, which is ‘stimulating and exhilarating’ to the senses is said to be ‘prepared by devils, and for every phial there must be a human sacrifice’, resulting in its name, ‘virgin’s blood’.49 The perfume is rumoured to have originated during black magic rituals, but while this is neither confirmed nor disproved by the end of the tale, the substance does appear to have connections to the supernatural: each time the perfume is detected, it heralds the arrival of a ghost. The cover of the collection (Fig. 4.1) also features ancient Egyptian iconography, although the letters of the title emanating from a perfume vessel are linked in a style that evokes Arabic script rather than ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The merging of such imagery, however, unites rumours of an origin for the perfume in antiquity with its actual modern Egyptian composition. The design also suggests that the text of Leadbeater’s collection has similar powers to the perfume described within it: both are inextricably entwined, uniting ancient and modern worlds. The main part of the cover design seems to have its origins in a vignette from the Papyrus of Ani (Fig. 4.2), purchased for the British Museum by E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934) in 1888. A facsimile of this papyrus entitled The Book of the Dead (1890) is the most likely source for the image. The ancient Egyptian image becomes part of a broader picture in which it lends credence to the supernatural, its iconography of death anticipating the arrival of spirits in Leadbeater’s story. The cover of Leadbeater’s work, marrying real ancient Egyptian iconography and its hieroglyphic script with English lettering executed in an exoticised, curvaceous style, grounds the narrative within a factual archaeological frame, even if the text itself is a twisted and distorted version of supposedly true events. One-time Rhymers’ Club member and Yellow Book contributor Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947), produced a less sinister volume celebrating perfume through the ages on behalf of the Richard Hudnut Company, entitled The Romance of Perfume (1928). The French illustrator George Barbier (1882–1932) provided eight

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Figure 4.1 W. Leadbeater, The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories (Adyar: Theosophist Office, 1911). Author’s own.

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Figure 4.2 The Book of the Dead: Facsimile of the Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1890), pl. 17 (detail). Source: Internet Archive.

illustrations depicting perfume in different historical settings, including ‘Egypt’ (Fig. 4.3), a nod to the company’s creation of an Egyptian-themed fragrance ‘La Pyramide’ the year prior.50 The image invites comparisons with Gustave Moreau’s (1826–98) earlier watercolour Cléopâtre (1887) (Fig. 4.4), the perfume rising like smoke over a moonlit background of the desert and pyramids. Both feature an ancient Egyptian queen in a traditional vulture headdress, and while Barbier’s queen is unnamed, Le Gallienne refers to the Ptolemies in the accompanying text and mentions Cleopatra ‘distilling unguents to conserve her beauty’; she is the only monarch to be referred to by name. These are two Cleopatras, then, separated by forty years and in distinct artistic styles, yet each wears a jewel-encrusted robe revealing her bare breasts, holds a lotus flower in one hand, and inhales aromatic fumes associated with decadent antiquity and its ghostlike visions.51 There are further links between the images. Le Gallienne recommends to his readers ‘a curious chapter on the psychology of perfume in that strange romance, “A Rebours” by J. K. Huysmans’.52 Besides perfume, the aesthete antihero of À rebours’, Jean Des Esseintes, finds pleasure in Moreau’s paintings of Salome. Huysmans’s

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Figure 4.3 George Barbier, ‘Egypt’, in Richard Le Gallienne, The Romance of Perfume (New York; Paris: Richard Hudnut, 1928), p. 21. Source: Internet Archive.

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Figure 4.4 Gustave Moreau, Cléopâtre, assise, demi nue, de face sur un trône très élevé, c. 1887, watercolour with gouache highlights, 39.5 × 25 cm. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Tony Querrec.

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complex intertextuality writes Moreau’s real works of art into a fictional context. Salomé tatouée (1874) features ancient Egyptian symbolism such as the lotus flower, royal cobras, winged sun discs and eye of Horus motifs inscribed onto and around Salome’s body. Other studies in graphite and charcoal further suggest Egyptian origins for some of Moreau’s motifs; in one, a stylised face ornamenting Salome’s clothing evokes the columns at the temple of Hathor at Dendera, which are topped with capitals depicting the goddess.53 Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of beauty and dance, is certainly a deity with whom Salome might have aligned herself, relying on a hypnotic and erotic performance in order to secure the fulfilment of her own desires. Also present in many of the Salome paintings is an African cat, eliciting the Great Sphinx of Giza, which also features in the background of Cléopâtre.54 In À rebours, Des Esseintes fixates on the lotus flower that Salome holds, and the symbolic meanings that Moreau might have wished to suggest through ‘le sceptre d’Isis’.55 Entertaining contradictory meanings – a ‘signification phallique’, as well as both ‘virginité’ and ‘fécondité’ – Des Esseintes ends his musings upon the painting with an unsettling necrophiliac daydream concerning the ancient Egyptian embalming process.56 He imagines the removal of the brain and other internal organs and, before the teeth and nails are coated in gold and the body smothered with oils and bitumen, the (historically inaccurate) insertion of the petals of the lotus flower, sacred to the goddess Isis ‘dans les parties sexuelles, pour les purifier’.57 Observing the lotus flower in Moreau’s painting triggers Des Esseintes to undertake a mental journey into an ancient Egyptian embalming room where, as with many of the strange multisensory experiences he pursues, he conjures up imaginary aromas including flower petals, bitumen and the other fragrant essences used in embalming. When Le Gallienne refers his readers to Huysmans, he directs them to an intricate network of illusory, multisensory and decadent imagery. While Moreau’s Orientalised Cleopatra, holding her own lotus flower, is a Symbolist fantasy evoking one of his more celebrated Salomes with a suitably phallic obelisk looming behind her, Barbier’s queen is a more contemporary object of desire, the flapper-esque kiss curl escaping from her headdress suggestive of modern, fashionable hairstyles of the 1920s. Yet both appear to be summoned into existence by the very substances that they inhale. As Le Gallienne records: A mere breath of it [perfume] stealing through the brain will make pictures for us of all the glory and pathos of the world, carrying us beyond

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the confines of recorded history, into the august mornings of the early gods, and whose ruined shrines the old incense still indestructibly hovers, and recreating for us the magnificence of superhuman kings whose sarcophagi still exhale frankincense, galbanum and myrrh. Egypt and Greece and Rome come back re-created by a mere perfumed breath in our nostrils, and lands with magic names, Arabia, Persia, and far Cathay, are spread before us vividly as in a dream.58

This dream not only harks back to Des Esseintes’s fantasies about sexualised Egyptian corpses, but cloaks modern perfume in morbid, ancient glamour: Le Gallienne’s text was, fundamentally, a marketing strategy to cast something of an ancient allure onto modern fragrances in a bid to sell perfume via Cleopatra as a sexualised and, evidently, consumable object. This was a fantasy to which many subscribed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Buying into a glamourous image that they had seen on stage, read about in fiction with Egyptian themes, or in Egyptological accounts in specialist volumes or in the periodical press, consumers were able to purchase fragrances contained within bottles shaped like pyramids, obelisks or sarcophagi. These were sometimes branded with the names of ancient Egyptian deities and historical figures such as ‘Cleopatra’, ‘Isis’, ‘Bast’, ‘Khepera’, ‘Tut-An-Kham’, ‘Ptah’, ‘Cheops’, ‘Ramses II’ and ‘Ramses IV’, or even famous archaeological sites: ‘Karnak’, ‘Luxor’, ‘Amarna’ and ‘Valle de Rois’. Many more perfumes without names evoking Egypt’s pharaonic grandeur were advertised alongside bold Egyptian imagery, or decanted into vessels decorated with Egyptian motifs. ‘Le Secret du Sphinx’ and ‘Toute l’Égypte’ are among the scents marketed in bottles shaped like canopic jars, both seemingly depicting the head of the god Imseti, the guardian of the liver, as the stopper. Tobacco companies also adopted this imagery for their own exotic vapours: tobacco humidors also came in the shape of canopic jars, while ladies carried their cigarettes in cases decorated with scenes from the Book of the Dead in real gold.59 Iconography on cigarette advertising was often interchangeable with that promoting perfume, featuring genuine archaeological sites, hieroglyphs and scantily clad women inhaling twisting wreaths of smoke.60 Of the companies manoeuvring within this early twentieth-century vogue for Egypt, one perfumery in Khan el Khalili belonging to Ahmed Soliman El Mowardi (1906–56) brought a fantastical past to tourists seeking a dalliance with a romanticised version of antiquity. The focal point of the establishment featured ‘an ornate statue of the pharaoh Ramses that poured perfume from its mouth by virtue of a mechanism which had to be wound up every half hour’.61 In Europe, the French

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firm Ramsès – whose marketing, as the name suggests, relied heavily upon an association with ancient Egyptian desirability – offered the most sustained commercial engagement with Egypt within this broader trend towards the theatrical and exotic.62 The frontage of the company’s shop in Paris was adorned with five plaster busts, supposedly of the pharaoh from whom the firm had taken its name, but also evocative of Tutankhamun as represented, for instance, in the guardian statues found in his tomb. When the company first launched its products in New York, the full range of their perfumes, which, as the press recounted, ‘caught and translated’ ‘[t]he mystery, the subtlety, the fascination of the East’, were available to purchase in ‘[a]n unique handpainted case which suggests the top of a mummy case’.63 Subsequent to the Tutankhamun discovery, Ramsès was quick to incorporate this most famous of pharaohs into their publicity materials: one of the company’s full-page advertisements, featuring an image of a queen holding a flabellum and lotus flower, and reclining on a couch, claims that the fragrances had been ‘[b]lended at Cairo, Egypt, since 1683’, and aims to weave tales about the product that suggest historical accuracy: The flasques are, in themselves, fascinating objects of art. Carved in the likeness of the Sphinx or of a famous Pharaoh, or inscribed with hieroglyphics. Holding in their crystal depths blends of the veritable enchanting, penetrating scent-bases known and used since the days of Tut-ankh-Amen.

The cosmetics company Palmolive also attempted to claim an Egyptological basis for their products. One advertisement (Fig. 4.5) features an Egyptian carving showing stylised human figures and hieroglyphs. This image is accompanied by an ‘Explanatory Note’ insisting that the relief tells ‘the story of palm and olive oils written in the hieroglyphics of 3000 years ago’. Furthermore, an accompanying translation of the ancient text is, remarkably, as claimed, ‘correctly shown according to the present day knowledge of the subject’.64 Evidently, Palmolive, like the authors who, as we saw in the previous chapter, consulted Egyptological experts for the creation of hieroglyphic messages, sought scholarly expertise in creating an advertisement which combines ancient Egypt’s allure with Egyptological accuracy. Additionally, the advertisement advises, ‘Read hieroglyphics down, and to the right’, implying that the reader is educated in the comprehension of ancient Egyptian text, and, with a little instruction, will be able to follow the hieroglyphs and the given translation. Not only does the Palmolive advertisement invite

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Figure 4.5 ‘Palmolive: The History Back of Modern Beauty’, Photoplay Magazine, 14.4 (1918), 124. Source: Internet Archive.

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the consumer to participate in a beauty ritual with an ancient history, then, it also flatters them by constructing them as an amateur Egyptologist, drawing upon the glamorous associations of Egyptological scholarship as well as those of Egypt’s ancient past. The prima donna turned screen siren Mary Garden (1874–1967), who had sung the title role in Jules Massenet’s (1842–1912) Thaïs (1901; 1907) and Richard Strauss’s (1864–1949) Salome (1909), and who would reprise the role of Thaïs in a silent film in 1917, is presented as Cleopatra reincarnated in an advertisement depicting ‘A Toilet Ritual of 3000 Years ago’, in a style mimicking ancient Egyptian art and accompanied by smatterings of hieroglyphs. The supplementary text asks, Did it ever occur to you that MARY GARDEN is the incarnation of CLEOPATRA, Queen of EGYPT? Like MARY GARDEN, she was famous for intelligence and beauty. MARY GARDEN PERFUME – the subtle fragrance specially created for the divine Prime Donna by RIGAUD, identifies EVERY WOMAN with a personality which renders her captivating and alluring – by accentuation of personal charm.65

As Michael Saler observes of early twentieth-century movie stars, who populated the ‘waking dreams’ of the motion picture medium, ‘[m]any fans acknowledged the deliberate blurring of the “reel” and “real” worlds even as they engaged with the fairy-tale scenarios promoted by [. . .] movie magazines’.66 Garden was just one in a series of twentieth-century ‘reincarnations’ of Cleopatra, whose seductive and dangerous allure was strongly associated with commodity culture, purchase, adornment and theatricality, her own personality melting into the roles she played: Thaïs, Salome and, here, Cleopatra. Consumers were, as Saler suggests, aware of the overstated theatricality of a statement claiming Garden to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra; this was, however, a fantasy in which they willingly indulged. ‘EVERY WOMAN’ can – by wearing the perfume – become akin to this most famed seductress. Through the inclusion of a female character who evokes Cleopatra in The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) appears to critique forms of modern consumerism that attempt to latch onto images of antiquity. The unnamed woman’s parallelism with the Egyptian queen is signalled by several allusions to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, specifically the lines delivered by Enobarbus describing ‘[t]he barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’.67 While the sails of the barge of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra are ‘perfumèd’,

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in Eliot, the perfume is displaced into a stifling interior: ‘[i]n vials of ivory and coloured glass | Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, | Unguent, powdered, or liquid’.68 Eliot recognises a trend within modern perfumery that saw natural essences give way to overpowering and unsettling synthetics, ‘the decisive factor in making perfume an affordable luxury for the masses’.69 As perfumes marketed with ancient Egyptian imagery became far more commonplace, Cleopatra’s mantle was taken up by the thousands that scented themselves with these synthetic chemicals which attempted to duplicate but ultimately fell short of the nuanced sensuality of their natural counterparts. The Waste Land’s allusions to both highbrow and lowbrow sources along with its satirical tone see images of idealised, decadent antiquity collide with a more sordid emulation of its practices in modernity, the fantasies entertained by eccentrics such as Huysmans’s Des Esseintes giving way to mass, popular culture. As John P. McCombe concedes in an essay which attempts to read similarities rather than ‘ironic distance between Cleopatra and her modern-day equivalents’ in Eliot’s writing, in Eliot’s reimagining of Shakespeare’s perfumed queen ‘the scene is presented as far more vulgar’.70 Yet even as Eliot critiqued modern appropriations of the ancient world, Paul Douglass refers to the contemporary ‘popularity of Egyptiana’ as contributing to the poem’s ‘mystique’. Here Eliot presents a woman imitating all the glamour of the most famous of Egypt’s queens within a ‘hieroglyphic’ poem that required ‘deencrypting, digging up, and decoding’; ‘[m]odern literature would emulate archaeology: the antique showing through the contemporary’.71 Ultimately Eliot’s appropriation of such imagery is problematic and paradoxical. The Waste Land simultaneously critiques consumer culture while it attempts to entangle itself and its own consumers within the allure of ancient Egypt; concurrently, however, the poem’s allusions to Egypt secure its success within a contemporary culture that values and eagerly succumbs to the bewitching allure of antiquity and the East. Eliot’s modern Cleopatra, coarse though she may be, is the seductive face of consumer culture. Eliot was evidently well aware of the combination of Egypt and glamour in a wealth of early twentieth-century advertising campaigns; his unnamed woman is perhaps a consumer subscribing to the fantasies promoted by celebrities such as Garden that ‘EVERY WOMAN’ might become ‘captivating and alluring’ – a Cleopatra – through the application of such a product. His modern Cleopatra is created through chemical applications and adornment. Indeed, such consumers attempted to mimic eroticised literary representations of

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Egyptian characters. Emerging as in an opium-fuelled dream, these characters were often depicted as the physical embodiments of Egyptian material culture. The beautiful have skin the shade of ivory relics, eyes edged with gold and teeth like pearls, while individuals of a more grotesque sort (villains rather than heroes) have papery skin the colour and texture of papyrus.72 When the characters in Wilde’s Salomé (1891; translated into English in 1894) speak of Egyptians, it is their jewel-like physicality and adornment that defines them. They have ‘long nails of jade’, are ‘clothed in fine linen and purple’ and ‘russett cloaks’, have golden shields, silver helmets and mighty bodies.73 Characters are made material relics, conjured up like spectres of the past through textual envisioning, itself mirroring hallucinations brought on by drugs, a kind of psychic archaeology digging down into the depths of the subconscious. This process was culturally wide-ranging and spanned both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) decadent erotic poem ‘The Blood-Lotus’ (1898) praises a female lover whose ‘golden lips are carven Cleopatra-wise’.74 Michael Field’s Egyptian Sonnets from Wild Honey from Various Thyme (1908), meanwhile, centre on erotic unity between physical and spiritual aspects of the self.75 ‘The Mummy Invokes His Soul’, in particular, implies a kind of sterile sensuousness that transforms both mummy and soul into sex objects. Even Ezra Pound (1885–1972) would turn to the notion of the eroticised and aestheticised body, drawing upon the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalist, decadent fantasy in ‘Dance Figure’ (1913), a poem which evokes an ‘[i]vory sandaled’ dancer with an Egyptianised name (‘Nathat-Ikanaie’).76 She wears a ‘robe, with threads of gold woven in patterns’, and her ‘place of [. . .] rest’, which suggests both the tomb and the boudoir, is adorned with ‘[g]ilt turquoise and silver’.77 Nathat-Ikanaie is, like many of the eroticised bodies before her, a ‘delicate treasure’, a woman who – poised somewhere between life and death – is a ‘woman of [. . .] dreams’ rather than of reality, ‘a concretized image of [. . .] beauty qua beauty’.78 These sensual individuals who bridged the turn of the century could not be restricted to the page. When Salome danced the dance of seven veils, she sparked a mania for striptease and exoticised dancing, not merely before the mind’s eye, but in plain sight. Dancers’ bodies were (barely) concealed beneath strings of pearls, paste gemstones and fake gold, replicating an imagined Orient and, occasionally, treasures brought to light by archaeology. Like a hypersexualised alternative to mummy unwrapping spectacles

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that had proved so popular earlier in the nineteenth century, the ancient Egyptian female body began to unwrap herself on stage: linen bandages became satin and chiffon, relics gaudy trinkets. The eventual commercialisation of this iconography resulted, particularly in the early twentieth century, in the production of items of clothing in an Egyptian style. In Virginia Woolf’s (1882–1941) Mrs Dalloway (1925), for example, the fashionable ladies of post-war London are ‘wrapped like mummies in shawls with bright flowers on them’.79 After the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, manufacturers clamoured to have access to exclusive rights to reproduce the pharaoh’s clothing, particularly his gloves. Leather gloves with Tutankhamun’s cartouche emblazoned across the wrists would be produced shortly afterwards. Dancers simulated a kind of excavation process by stripping themselves of these adornments; like the Egyptological volume within its extravagant cloth boards and gilt edges, they were dressed to tantalise and to rouse images of a glamorised ancient Orient. Characters such as Marie Corelli’s (1855–1924) ghostly dancer Ziska-Charmazel, ‘clad in glistening cloth of gold and veiled entirely in misty folds of white’, removed their clothes to the delight of their literary audiences, anticipating similar subsequent performances on stage.80 In 1904, the archaeologist Albert Gayet (1856–1916) and the amateur Egyptologist Émile Étienne Guimet (1836–1918) arranged an erotic entertainment at Guimet’s house: as Dominic Montserrat records, ‘a real Egyptian anthropoid coffin was brought into the drawing room’ and, ‘[t]o the sound of eastern pipe music, the lid of the coffin slowly opened and a figure rose up’.81 A dancer emerged, ‘performed a sinuous ballet, gradually shedding her heavy swathings until she was almost naked’, and sank back into the coffin.82 The reanimated mummy, they declared, was Thaïs, the protagonist of Anatole France’s (1844–1924) 1890 novel of the same name; this fictional character made flesh was dressed ‘in garments directly imitating those’ that Gayet had discovered on a mummy in Antinoöpolis.83 Evidently archaeologists and Egyptologists were not only involved in the eroticisation of the mummy, but willingly combined real and fictional details in order to heighten their historically informed fantasies. More famously, in 1907, the French writer Colette (1873–1954) starred in a pantomime at the Moulin Rouge entitled Rêve d’Égypte. Colette, dressed in an Egyptian-inspired costume and gold dust concealed underneath strands of ribbon, unwrapped herself before her lesbian lover, the cross-dressing Mathilde de Morny (1863–1944) who played the role of a male Egyptologist.84 After the ribbon was

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unravelled, the Egyptologist and the mummy indulged in a climactic kiss so scandalously passionate that police had to suppress the resulting riot. Ten performances had been scheduled, but the first was also the last with de Morny in this role: she was swiftly replaced by a male actor.85 The show’s title encourages a comparison between the events onstage and hallucinatory dream states, harking back to the poems of Brooke and Edwards, and the wealth of narratives that posited that the inhalation of mummy dust, perfume or Egyptian tobacco might call forth erotic visions of ancient Egypt. Elsa von Carlberg’s (1883–1970) Egyptian-inspired dances in Munich in 1909, performed under the stage name Sent M’ahesa, were less provocative and were not received with the outrage that had met Colette. Having moved to Berlin in 1907 to pursue Egyptology, her performances were shaped by her scholarly interest in Egyptian antiquity and, although ‘she did not subordinate aesthetic power to academic authenticity’, were often inspired by the distinctive angular lines of ancient Egyptian art.86 She would often dance in the guise of the goddess Isis or, in later routines, wearing a helmet inspired by pharaonic headdresses.87 The most famous performer from the period to dance as an ancient Egyptian character, however, was Ida Rubinstein (1883– 1960). Having found notoriety during a private performance of Wilde’s Salomé in 1908, in which the dance of seven veils left her nude on stage, Rubinstein joined the Ballets Russes as ancient Egypt’s most famous queen the following year. The ballet, Cléopâtre, was adapted from an earlier production, Une nuit d’Égypte, itself a revival of Anton Arensky’s (1861–1906) ballet of the same name of 1900. The narrative source for this work was Gautier’s novella Une nuit de Cléopâtre (1838–9) which, as Mary E. Davis records, was revitalised for new audiences in 1894 when the text appeared ‘in a de-luxe new edition complete with 28 erotic illustrations’.88 In the opening scene of the Ballets Russes’s production, Rubinstein, enveloped in veils, was lifted from within a sarcophagus; slowly, she was stripped of the multi-coloured drapery: ‘a red scarf embellished with silver lotuses and crocodiles gave way to a green veil embroidered with golden images recounting the history of the Pharaohs and so on’.89 Edward Forman sees echoes of the thwarted 1892 production of Wilde’s Salomé in Rubinstein’s regalia, specifically in Sarah Bernhardt’s (1844–1923) powdered blue wig that was to be reused, due to time constraints, from Victorien Sardou’s (1831–1908) 1890 staging of Cléopâtre in which Bernhardt had performed the title role.90 It has been proposed that this costume, in turn, was inspired by

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Gustave Flaubert’s (1821–80) La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874), in which the Queen of Sheba appears in a ‘robe en brocart d’or’ with her hair ‘poudrée de poudre bleue’.91 Rubinstein’s costume, then, was part of an exoticised chain of influences that had developed over the course of decades. While the appropriation of the apparel by a variety of ancient and Oriental women – the Queen of Sheba, Salome and Cleopatra – the blue-tinted hair and gold drapery is a particularly Egyptian palette; in ancient Egyptian funerary symbolism, the gilded skin and blue (lapis lazuli) hair of anthropomorphic sarcophagi denote the divine status of the deceased. When Rubinstein played Cleopatra, her skin was coloured with green paint, mimicking that of Osiris, god of the underworld, foreshadowing her own death, but also her cultural immortality.92 Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950), one of Cléopâtre’s principal dancers, went on to choreograph other ballets; his first, L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), was heavily influenced by Egyptian depictions of the body. Purportedly, when Léon Bakst (1866–1924), the designer behind the adornments of Rubinstein’s Cleopatra, arranged to convene with Nijinsky in the Greek galleries at Paris’s Musée du Louvre, Nijinsky did not keep the appointment: he was, instead, transfixed by the reliefs in the Egyptian galleries which, like the hypnotic bodies of his dancers, had the power to entrance.93 David Huckvale observes other gestures towards Egypt in this production: the première of L’Après-midi d’un faune took place in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysée. Designed by Auguste Perret (1874–1954), the theatre was constructed in a ‘scandalous modern style, which eschewed historicist eclecticism in favor of geometric lines, minimal decoration and white reinforced concrete’. ‘The starkly sophisticated impact of the façade’s three rectangular bays’, Huckvale notes, is reminiscent of ‘the similarly stark rectangularity of Queen Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir al-Bahari’.94 Egyptian iconography was appropriated for a wealth of modern architectural styles, from gaudy, glitzy movie theatres, to whitewashed modernist buildings that ‘masqueraded as an Egyptian work of art’, such as the 1933 Hoover Factory designed by Thomas Wallis (1873–1953).95 Dances infused with a heady air of Egyptological authenticity proved popular beyond the 1920s, when Irena Lexová (1908–99), whose father, František Lexa (1876–1960), was an Egyptologist, published on the history of ancient Egyptian spectacle by day, and performed dances in Prague by night.96 Dreamlike fantasy collided with aspects of Egyptological authenticity in enactments such as these. Images of figures from papyri and tomb paintings, reproduced

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in Egyptological volumes came to life, as modern dancers and choreographers plundered libraries and museums for inspiration. These ancient, erotic and eastern dances were, of course, heralded by Wilde’s Salomé, whose enigmatic dance of the seven veils was left undepicted when the play was banned shortly after rehearsals began in 1892, and which prefigured mummy-themed stripteases performed by Colette among others. Reputedly, Wilde had considered that for his play’s debut, ‘in place of an orchestra’, there would be ‘braziers of perfume’, their ‘scented clouds rising and partly veiling the stage from time to time – a new perfume for each new emotion!’97 Wilde was advised against this technique; as there was no way of clearing the theatre of each aroma before the next perfume might be released, the effect would have been stifling and excessive. We can, however, imagine the effect it would have produced: vapour would cloud the stage, and the scents of the perfumes themselves, along with the stylised, antiquated language of the play, would have contributed to the sense of inebriation, suggesting that the events before the audience were nothing more than a hallucinogenic vision, a warped version of antiquity rather than historical reality. While Wilde’s own vision of the play never came to fruition, performances in1896 and 1905 succeeded in bringing his famously mysterious striptease before an array of mesmerised theatregoers. It was during the closing decade of the nineteenth century that that the first motion picture cameras were produced, allowing later performances to be captured and exhibited multiple times in an exciting new medium. The semi-archaeological plays and dances of the fin de siècle no doubt inspired a taste for similar spectacles captured on film, with Egyptian ‘stylized gestures in art [evoking] a superb balletic contour’, ‘glamour, beauty as power and power as beauty’.98 Early films capitalised upon this sense of a strange Egyptian allure, with such subject matter acting as ‘an opiate that removes [viewers] from their own worlds and transports them to other places and times’.99 The French film critic André Bazin (1918–58) compared the cinematic preservation of the body on film to the Egyptian embalming processes – ‘a mummy complex’ – while in a statement popularised by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Abel Gance (1889–1981) defined film as hieroglyphic: ‘[h]ere, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians’.100 In creating the medium of film, culture had rediscovered ‘pictoral language’, a form of communication dependent upon vision and envisioning, one which, in ‘early analysis of cinema almost universally linked it to hallucination, dream, and illusion’.101

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According to Camille Paglia, cinema was one in a long series of genres which inherited ‘the formalistic Apollonian line’ – the ‘eye of art’ – which originated in Egypt: ‘Pharaoh, elevated and sublime, contemplated life’s panorama. His eye was the sun disk at the apex of the social pyramid. [. . .] Egypt invented the magic of image.’102 What late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cinema achieved, however, was not a panorama for one particular individual, but for the masses. Not only did films with Egyptian subject matter proliferate, some of the earliest moving picture theatres adopted a style which evoked the glamour of Egypt’s famous monuments: in Britain, the earliest example is the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly, which featured an Egyptianised frontage dating back to 1812. The ancient Egyptian aesthetic, with its bold jewel tones and extensive use of gilding was particularly popular when decorating American movie theatres from the birth of Hollywood onwards, the garish and gaudy veneers emulating something of the glitzy façades of film backdrops, sets and props, but also reproducing something of the immersive simulacrum experience of such attractions as the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Christine Finn denounces Egyptian-themed cinemas as ‘[t]he crudest conjunction’ within a broader trend which saw ‘[t]he application of decorative motifs to decorative and applied arts, such as fashion, interior design or architecture, created things which were modern in concept and function, but archaic in influence’ in the 1920s and 1930s, stating that ‘the connection was completed when the lotus-trimmed picture house in question showed a black and white horror film featuring a mummy raised from the dead’.103 Finn’s assessment is damning and suggests that the Egyptian aesthetic was nothing more than an unsophisticated fad, an opinion that did not proliferate among moviegoers at the time. Indeed, contemporary commentary on these establishments was far less critical. In Hollywood, Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre was celebrated by Art and Archaeology magazine. The décor, the article recorded, ‘is not made up of grotesque statues, sphinxes, pyramids, and meaningless signs in lieu of hieroglyphics, but is a replica of real Egyptian art and architecture.’104 In fact, surviving images of the Egyptian Theatre reveal some iconographic inaccuracies, but the intricacies and subtleties of the designs are noteworthy, as is the emphasis upon magic envisioning: the film is projected between four lotus columns like those of an ancient temple, the patterned curtain rising and giving way to visions of ancient worlds, ‘a spectral show of images flickering upon a screen’.105 Elsewhere, critics have commented on the suitability of an ancient Egyptian style for the display of media with

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such enormous cultural potential. Philip Kuberski records that the interiors of Hollywood’s first moving picture theatres were designed to stimulate the imaginations of attendees; ‘[t]his most advanced form of mechanical reproduction required the most archaic atmosphere in order to have the maximum effect’:106 The movie screen, like the painted walls on an Egyptian tomb, like the dreams inside our brains, presents a metaphysical space where time no longer operates according to its ordinary, relentless logic. All of these forms of expression actually ‘projected’ the soul, the desires, and the shadows of life into a beyond. It was universally and unaccountably intoxicating.107

Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre also benefited from Egyptological associations: Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun occurred just over two weeks after the theatre’s official opening; fittingly, the Tutankhamun excavations was the first archaeological dig to be recorded using moving picture cameras.108 Lord Carnarvon (1866– 1923) had recognised the potential for a version of the story of the discovery to be created for cinema: Pathé and Goldwyn Ltd., among others, expressed an interest in producing this film.109 For attendees throughout the theatre’s first decade, this excavation and others, their treasures periodically reproduced and marvelled over in the press, would have remained at the forefront of their minds. Ultimately, and in opposition to Finn’s view, scholarship has uncovered the full wealth of ways in which an environment that mimics ancient Egypt is particularly appropriate for cinema, from the establishment of Egyptian iconography as integral to earlier forms of nineteenth-century visual display through to the ‘uncanny parallel between archaeologists’ descriptions of their discoveries of tombs and the effects and conditions of film projection’.110 Antonia Lant, whose pivotal essay ‘The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania’ (1992) most sophisticatedly scrutinises the influence of ancient Egypt on moving pictures, goes so far as to suggest that Carter’s use of an electric torch to cast a beam of light into the darkness of Tutankhamun’s tomb functions as an embodiment of projection processes integral to cinematic display.111 Films themselves often drew upon public fascination for Egypt; numerous pictures were produced with glamorous sets and costumes which sought to emulate something of the enthrallment that Egypt’s extraordinary funerary ornaments commanded. As Chad Bennett pithily remarks of both Moreau’s and Wilde’s painted and theatrical Salomes, ‘décor bleeds into des corps’.112 Similar to this

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seamless amalgamation of subject and surroundings, through these moving pictures decorative ornament and the spectacular body become indistinguishable on the Egyptianised silver screen, as the lines between the moving picture and the cinema itself become indistinct. Egyptian-themed theatres had the particular intoxicating potential to dissolve the boundaries between the fictional and the real in the mind of the moviegoer. Egyptian artefacts and texts themselves were also described as cinematic objects: the American poet Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931), for example, heralded the Egyptian Book of the Dead as ‘the greatest motion picture I have ever attended’.113 Richard Pearson claims that ‘[a]rchaeology is about desire: and Egyptian archaeology more so than any other’; specifically, that ‘[t]he archaeology of Egypt was more often than not associated with romance and excitement, with erotic desire – and also with death’, associations which have been observed by a number of other critics including Nolwenn Corriou who notes that ‘archaeology in fiction tends to take on the shape of a love quest’.114 Yearning after undiscovered artefacts suggests a kind of romantic longing, a theme that emerges in literature which sexualises ancient bodies and in which particles and fumes enter through the nose and mouth. In particular, though, Egyptian archaeology, through its intimacy with the perfumed bodies of the dead, resulted in a host of dark and sensual re-imaginings by nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and writers. Nicholas Daly observes that the majority of late nineteenth-century mummy tales fetishise the central artefacts – relics which do not merely function as fetish-objects in the Marxist sense. The sexualisation of ancient commodities was widespread; as Daly recognises, the ‘objects [which] begin to behave as sexobjects’ in these tales mirror the glamorisation of advertising.115 Yet it was the glossy mass-culture of Egyptianised commodities which resulted in ancient Egypt’s turn away from the immaterial. The dust of the mummified body or other ancient artefacts, papyrus (which, through its fragility, always seemed to hover on the brink of disintegration), the ash left over after cigarettes and incense have burned away, all suggested a transient, ephemeral and unique experience; by the first decades of the twentieth century, this was no longer the case. These perfumes did not waft from mummy bandages or artefacts which had lain undisturbed in tombs for thousands of years, but were synthetic products of modern science, hidden behind a gilded veneer. Hallucinations once the property of the aesthete, the recreational drug-user, the Egyptologist, became, like the visions called forth by literature itself, a mass commodity. With the proliferation of products that aimed to

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evoke apparitions of antiquity that made these fantasies – once untraceable save for a film of dust – into material objects: glass bottles shaped like pyramids, gilded interiors mimicking Egyptian temples, paste gemstones and chiffon rendered on the silver screen.

Notes 1. Gabriel Moshenska, ‘Unrolling Egyptian Mummies in NineteenthCentury Britain’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 47.3 (2014), 451–77 (p. 454). 2. G. Belzoni, Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs, and excavations, in Egypt and Nubia and of a journey to the coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice, and of another to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London: J. Murray, 1820), p. 156. 3. Ibid. p. 157. 4. Louisa May Alcott, ‘Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse’, in Out of the Sand: Mummies, Pyramids, and Egyptology in Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy (Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2008), pp. 37–46 (pp. 38, 40, 41). 5. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mummia was readily available from most apothecaries; although restrictions on the export of mummies from Egypt reduced its availability in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mummia was still used in medicines. Rosalie David records that ‘the Queen of England received a gift of mumia from the King of Persia in 1809’, indicating a shift in mummia’s consumers from the masses to the elite as supplies became more limited; see Rosalie David, Discovering Ancient Egypt (London: Michael O’Mara, 1993), p. 16. Philip Schwyzer pays particular attention to the proliferation of mummia in the literary culture of the seventeenth century. He notes that Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Fragment on Mummies’ ‘is almost certainly a nineteenth-century forgery’, suggesting a particular interest in such practices (and their extended history in British culture) in the Victorian era; see Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 152. 6. Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2004), p. 244. 7. Ibid. p. 230. 8. Mike Read, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1997), p. 113. 9. Rupert Brooke, ‘Mummia’, in The Collected Poems, 4th rev. edn (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), pp. 212–13 (p. 212). 10. Nigel Jones, Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth (London: Richard Cohen, 1999), p. 145.

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11. Ibid. 12. Another individual who reported an encounter with a mummy with more than a hint of eroticism is the French novelist Pierre Loti; see Christina Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 194. For the eroticisation of mummies (which stretches back to antiquity), see Dominic Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains: Mummies and the Erotics of Biography’, in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity, ed. Dominic Montserrat (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 162–97. 13. Brooke, ‘Mummia’, p. 212. 14. Helena Michie, Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 15. 15. Brooke, ‘Mummia’, p. 212. 16. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, EDWARDS, A.A.B. MSS. GROUP 1, 312–52. Sadly, the poem is undated. 17. Amanda Adams, Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and their Search for Adventure (Vancouver: Greystone, 2010), p. 22. 18. Georges Poulet, ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, New Literary History, 1.1 (1969), 53–68 (p. 55). 19. Poulet, ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, p. 54. 20. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 22. 21. Andrew Stauffer, ‘Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 47 (2007), www. erudit.org/revue/ravon/2007/v/n47/016700ar.html [accessed 7 August 2016], 5. 22. T. G. Wakeling, Forged Egyptian Antiquities (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1912), p. 136. 23. John H. Taylor, ‘Empowering the Dead’, in Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, ed. John H. Taylor (London: British Museum Press, 2010), pp. 160–83 (p. 163). 24. H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), p. viii. 25. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, Amelia Edwards MSS. Group 1, newspaper cutting, ‘An Ancient Egyptian State Archive’, The Manchester Guardian, 28 May [no year]. 26. Opium was likely used by the ancient Egyptians; see John F. Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine (London: British Museum Press, 1996), pp. 153–6; James P. Allen, The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), p. 11. 27. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 2nd edn (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1823), pp. 171–2. 28. Mathilde Blind, ‘Prelude’, in Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895), pp. 3–8 (p. 7). These

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29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

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Writing the Sphinx lines also evoke Homer’s Odyssey and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ (1832). Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, in Three Plays for Puritans (London: Constable, 1929), pp. 89–217 (p. 108). Ibid. p. 110. Ibid. p. 111. Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in NineteenthCentury British Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 62. Ibid. pp. 62–4. On archaeological and geological metaphors as they were used in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, see George M. Johnson, ‘Excavating the Psyche as Constructed by Pre-Freudian Pioneers’, in Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900–1930, ed. Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 9–25. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, ‘Report about the Effects of Peyote on Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz’, in The Drug User: Documents, 1840– 1960, ed. John Strausbaugh and Donald Blaise (New York: Blast, 1991), pp. 231–7 (p. 235); Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981), pp. 33–4. Poulet, ‘Phenomenology of Reading’, p. 57. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–13), iii: ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts’, ed. Joseph Bristow (2005), p. 305. Ibid. Michael Field, ‘Inevitable Death’, in Wild Honey from Various Thyme (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 87. John Whale, ‘Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 218–36 (pp. 227–33). Virginia Berridge, ‘The Origins of the English Drug “Scene” 1890–1930’, Medical History, 32 (1988), 51–64 (p. 53). Ibid. pp. 53, 55, 59. For the original quotation –‘En mangeant, et c’est très peu, il ne cesse de fumer à demi des cigarettes d’Egypte trempées d’opium. Terrible buveur d’absinthe, qui lui donne les visions de ses désirs’ – see Pierre Champion, Marcel Schwob et son temps (Paris: Grosset, 1927), p. 99. This quotation (from this edition) is translated in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 327. Robyn L. Schiffman, ‘Toward a Queer History of Smoking’, in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Zhou Xun (London: Reaktion, 2004), pp. 304–8 (p. 305). While references to smoking in Wilde’s own writing and conversation proliferate, ‘gold tipped cigarettes’

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44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

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are specifically mentioned in A Woman of No Importance, in which Lord Alfred Rufford proclaims them to be ‘awfully expensive’ and that he ‘can only afford them when I’m in debt’; see Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 93–157 (p. 108). They are also given to Basil Holmwood by Dorian’s servants in The Picture of Dorian Gray; see Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, iii, p. 292. Oscar Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 343; Vivian De Sola Pinto, The City that Shone: An Autobiography (1895–1922) (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 17. Eleanor Dobson, ‘Perfume, Cigarettes and Gilded Boards: Pharos the Egyptian and Consumer Culture’, in Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt, ed. Eleanor Dobson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 162–84. Charlotte Bryson Taylor, In the Dwellings of the Wilderness (New York: Henry Holt, 1904), p. 58. Ibid. p. 60. C. W. Leadbeater, ‘The Perfume of Egypt’, in The Perfume of Egypt and Other Weird Stories (Adyar: Theosophist Office, 1911), pp. 1–50 (p. 6). Ibid. pp. 5, 6. Barbier’s most celebrated Egyptian illustrations are those produced for a 1929 edition of Théophile Gautier’s Le Roman de la momie (1858), published after the high-profile discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The illustrations for this volume are more Egyptologically informed than the image of Egypt in The Romance of Perfume. In the Barbier image, the vessel from which Cleopatra inhales perfume is an ancient Egyptian wine amphora rather than a perfume jar, suggesting that, while Barbier was aware of genuine ancient Egyptian artefacts, he was either prone to misinterpreting their original purposes or willing to overlook archaeological accuracy. Richard Le Gallienne, The Romance of Perfume (New York and Paris: Richard Hudnut, 1928), p. 37. Gustave Moreau, Study for Salomé, c. 1876, pen and brown ink, black chalk, graphite and charcoal on tracing paper, 37.5 × 22 cm, Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris. Natasha Grigorian, ‘The Writings of J.-K. Huysmans and Gustave Moreau’s Painting: Affinity or Divergence?’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 32.3/4 (2004), 282–97 (p. 287). J. K. Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: A. Ferroud – F. Ferroud, 1920), p. 56. Ibid. pp. 56–7. Ibid. p. 57. Le Gallienne, Romance of Perfume, p. 7.

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59. Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 106–7, 108. 60. Incidentally, a cigarette box decorated with Egyptian motifs is part of the collection of materials that once belonged to E. A. Wallis Budge at the British Museum; see London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan Archive, AESAr.1654. 61. Mandy Aftel, Essence & Alchemy: A Book of Perfume (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 44. 62. Ramsès produced numerous perfumes with ancient Egyptian themes, including ‘L’Étoile d’Égypte’, ‘Le Secret du Sphinx’, ‘Lotus Sacre’, ‘Ramses IV’, ‘Sphinx d’Or’, ‘Jasmine d’Égypte’, ‘Hycsos’ and ‘Ambre de Nubie’. 63. ‘The Perfumes of Egypt’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 March 1916, p. 7. 64. ‘Palmolive: The History Back of Modern Beauty’, Photoplay Magazine, 14.4 (1918), 124. Note the significance of this advertisement appearing in a magazine marketed towards fans of moving pictures. 65. ‘A Toilet Ritual of 3000 Years Ago’, Life, 68.1775 (1916), 742. 66. Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 39. 67. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Richard Madelaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ii. 2. 201. 68. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ii. 2. 203; T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Michael North (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), ii. 86–8. 69. Aftel, Essence & Alchemy, p. 6. 70. John P. McCombe, ‘Cleopatra and her Problems: T. S. Eliot and the Fetishization of Shakespeare’s Queen of the Nile’, Journal of Modern Literature, 31.2 (2008), 23–38 (p. 31). 71. Paul Douglass, ‘Reading the Wreckage: De-encrypting Eliot’s Aesthetics of Empire’, Twentieth Century Literature, 43.1 (1997), 1–26 (pp. 1, 7, 9). 72. For a discussion of female mummies as beautiful and male mummies as monstrous, see Eleanor Dobson, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Mummies and the Fairy-Tale Genre at the Fin de Siècle’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 18.3 (2017), 19–34. 73. Oscar Wilde, Salome, in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 61–91 (pp. 68, 71). The ‘fine linen and purple’ derives from a passage in Proverbs describing the clothing of virtuous noblewomen; see Proverbs 31: 22. The Egyptians are perhaps effeminate (or sexually ambiguous) in their donning of women’s clothing. 74. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Blood Lotus’, in White Stains (London: Duckworth, 1973), pp. 74–82 (p. 77). 75. For further references to Egypt in the works of Michael Field, see Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 100.

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76. Ezra Pound, ‘Dance Figure’, in Personæ: Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), pp. 99–100 (pp. 99, 100); Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 135. K. K. Ruthven suggests that the dancer’s name, ‘Nathat-Ikanaie’, is ‘a scrambled version of Ikhnaton’; see K. K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personæ (1926) (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1969), p. 56. 77. Pound, ‘Dance Figure’, p. 100. 78. Robin G. Schulze, The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 123–4; Pound, ‘Dance Figure’, p. 99. 79. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw, new edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 139. 80. Marie Corelli, Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1897), p. 234. 81. Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains’, pp. 192–3. Montserrat records another performance of mummy-themed striptease: Alan Campbell’s play The Dust of Egypt, performed in 1910 at London’s Gaiety Theatre. 82. Ibid. p. 193. 83. Ibid. pp. 192, 93. 84. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 164. 85. Michael Lucey, Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 110. 86. Karl Toepfer, Empires of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 175–6. 87. Ibid. p. 176. 88. Mary E. Davis, Ballets Russes Style: Diaghilev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion (London: Reaktion, 2010), pp. 109, 111. Davis details the Ballet Russes’ choreographer Michel Fokine’s devotion to historical accuracy. For Une nuit d’Égypte, he ‘immersed himself in the study of ancient Egypt, collecting books on its architecture, art and culture; he examine[d] relevant artworks with the goal of translating the two-dimensional effect of Egyptian bas-reliefs into three-dimensional dance’; p. 111. Gautier’s Une nuit de Cléopâtre (1838) reached broader audiences still upon the publication of Lafcadio Hearn’s 1900 translation, One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances. Hearn notes, ‘a faint perfume of unknown palm seems to hover over the open pages’, and considered Gautier’s text to have ‘an actual archæologic value, like the paintings of some scholarly artist, some Alma Tadema, who [. . .] evokes for us eidolons of ages vanished and civilizations passed away’; see Lafcadio Hearn, ‘To the Reader’, in Théophile Gautier, One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances, trans. Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Brentano’s, 1900), pp. v–xii (pp. viii, ix).

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89. Edward Forman, ‘Ida Rubinstein, Fixer Fatale’, in Women in the Arts in the Belle Epoque: Essays on Influential Artists, Writers and Performers, ed. Paul Fryer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), pp. 79–96 (p. 83); Davis, Ballets Russes Style, p. 115. 90. Forman, ‘Ida Rubinstein, Fixer Fatale’, p. 83; William Tydeman and Steven Price, Wilde: Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 22. Wilde apparently pointed out that in the text of his play it is Herodias and not Salome whose hair is powdered blue; see W. Graham Robertson, Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (London: Hamilton, 1931), pp. 126–7. 91. Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 28–9; Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de saint Antoine (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910), p. 30. 92. Davis, Ballets Russes Style, p. 118. Bakst’s design for the set features Osiride columns, likely inspired by the Ramesseum at Thebes, or the temple of Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahari. Thus, the imagery associated with the lord of the underworld permeates both Cleopatra herself and the land over which she rules. 93. Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 55. 94. David Huckvale, Ancient Egypt in the Popular Imagination: Building a Fantasy in Film, Literature, Music and Art (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), p. 200. 95. Bridget Elliott, ‘Modern, Moderne, and Modernistic: Le Corbusier, Thomas Wallis and the Problem of Art Deco’, in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 128–46 (p. 132). Modern architecture inspired by ancient Egypt has been explored in detail; see, for example, Imhotep Today: Egyptianizing Architecture, ed. Jean-Marcel Humbert and Clifford Price (London: UCL, 2003). 96. Toepfer. Empires of Ecstasy, p. 176. 97. Robertson, Time Was, p. 126. 98. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), p. 61. 99. Julie M. Schablitsky, ‘The Way of the Archaeologist’, in Box Office Archaeology: Refining Hollywood’s Portrayals of the Past, ed. Julie M. Schablitsky (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2007), pp. 9–15 (p. 11). 100. Antonia Lant, ‘The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania’, October, 59 (1992), 86–112 (p. 86); Abel Gance, L’Art cinématographique, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927), ii, pp. 100–1, quoted in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 229. See also Laura Marcus, ‘“Hieroglyphics in motion”: Representing Ancient Egypt and the Middle East in Film Theory and Criticism of

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101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115.

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the Silent Period’, in The Ancient World in Silent Cinema, ed. Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 74–90. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 223. Paglia, Sexual Personae, pp. 50, 59. Christine Finn, Past Poetic: Archaeology in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney (London: Duckworth, 2004), p. 156. Bruce Bryan, ‘Movie Realism and Archaeological Fact’, Art and Archaeology, 18.4 (1924), 131–44 (p. 144). Bryan laments that ‘[m]ovie realism is not always real, in spite of many so-called Egyptologists’ efforts, and does not, often, agree with archaeological fact. Why not secure the help of real Egyptologists for accuracy?’ Philip Kuberski, ‘Dreaming of Egypt: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema’, SubStance, 18.3 (1989), 75–94 (p. 84). Ibid. Ibid. p. 85. Bridget Elliott, ‘Art Deco Worlds in a Tomb: Reanimating Egypt in Modern(ist) Visual Culture’, South Central Review, 25.1 (2008), 114–35 (p. 121); Thomas Hoving, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story (London: H. Hamilton, 1979), p. 12. Hoving, Tutankhamun, pp. 150–1. Lant, ‘The Curse of the Pharaoh’, p. 90. Ibid. Chad Bennett, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Salome: Décor, Des Corps, Desire’, ELH, 77.2 (2010), 297–324 (p. 297). Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. xxxvi, quoted in Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, p. 227. Richard Pearson, ‘Archaeology and Gothic Desire: Vitality beyond the Grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt’, in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 218–44 (pp. 222–3); Nolwenn Corriou, ‘A woman is a woman, if she had been dead five thousand centuries!”: Mummy Fiction, Imperialism and the Politics of Gender’, Miranda, 11 (2015), http://miranda.revues.org/6899 [accessed 27 September 2015], 8; see also Lynn Meskell, ‘Consuming Bodies: Cultural Fantasies of Ancient Egypt’, Body & Society, 4.1 (1998), 63–76 (p. 63). Nicholas Daly, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 28.1 (1994), 25–51 (p. 38).

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Chapter 5

‘The sphinx will speak at last’: Visions, Communications and Esoteric Experience

If we knew the answers to these questions we should have solved the meaning of the secret of our lives. But they are hidden by the blackness that walls us in, that blackness in which the sphinx will speak at last – or stay for ever silent.1

In his history play Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) makes a point of sneering at the fashion for spiritualism that was then sweeping the nation: ‘What! Table rapping! Are such superstitions still believed in this year 707 of the Republic?’ exclaims Julius Caesar to late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury readers and audiences.2 In this moment, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra seeks to draw forth the voice (or raps) of ‘Father Nile’ from a miniature statuette of a sphinx with an offering of incense burning before it, Caesar sneering at this practice by conflating modern spiritualism with ancient Egyptian magical ritual. Shaw’s fellow Irishman and poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) read this part of the play as a reference to Shaw’s former mistress and his own close friend the actress Florence Farr (1860–1917) who, at the time of Caesar and Cleopatra’s conception, was heavily involved in the secret magical society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. After seeing two performances of the play in 1907, Yeats wrote to Farr: ‘I am quite convinced by the by that the whole play is a half of you in your Egyptian period, and that you were the Cleopatra who offered that libation of wine to the table rapping sphinx.’3 While the spectacle of the ceremony performed by Cleopatra is meant, initially, to appear convincing – ‘[t]he light begins to change to the magenta purple of the Egyptian sunset, as if the god had brought a strange colored shadow with him’ – when the sphinx is placed

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on the table, the idol does not communicate, even via percussion.4 Instead, at the climactic point, we hear ‘[t]he death cry of a man in mortal terror and agony’, made by a character whom Cleopatra has had assassinated.5 This moment of spiritual tension quickly dissolves as the gods whom Cleopatra reveres are revealed to have no power. We can clearly witness a reflection of Shaw’s disdain for the Golden Dawn in this scene: he had criticised Farr’s increasing involvement in the magical order at the expense of her acting career, writing to her that she ‘think[s] to undo the work of all these years by a phrase and a shilling’s worth of exoteric Egyptology’.6 Shaw depicts a ritual which at first seems to engender some kind of effective magical force, a combination of contemporary spiritualist practices with the reverence of ancient Egyptian religion (specifically aligning this moment with the rites undertaken by members of the Golden Dawn), before dismissing the performance of such ceremonies as meaningless. The self-conscious theatricality of this moment of the play mocks the often dramatic nature of such rites which, in the Golden Dawn, incorporated costumes, props and scenery.7 The most famous offshoot of such practices – the performance of the rites of Isis by one of the Golden Dawn’s founding members, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918), and his wife, the Order’s first initiate, Moina Mathers (1865–1928) in Paris’s Théâtre La Bodinière in 1899 – had offered once private rituals up for public consumption.8 For Farr, if not for Shaw, the rituals of the Golden Dawn and her communications with the spirits of Egypt held great magical significance and, through her devotion to Egyptological learning, were inspired by and responded to, genuine historical practices. Farr frequented the British Museum, studying under the tutelage of E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934), and working from the artefacts themselves.9 Yeats, a fellow member of the Golden Dawn, described how ‘[h]er sitting-room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces of Oriental drapery and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in the British Museum’; the iconography with which she filled her home was not only Egyptologically significant, copied from genuine artefacts, but similar to that which was used in ceremonies at the Isis-Urania Temple, the London faction of the Golden Dawn, dissolving boundaries between museum, temple and the domestic space.10 Ezra Pound (1885–1972), meanwhile, immortalised Farr and her Egyptological inclinations in his poem ‘Portrait d’une Femme’ (1912), describing ‘The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work; | Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, | These are your riches, your great

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store’, again emphasising the ancient and mysterious objects with which Farr surrounded herself.11 Farr’s mystical beliefs were certainly influenced by scholarly Egyptology, an interest which is demonstrated, in part, by her textual output: in 1897, under increasing financial pressure she ‘prepared a booklet about Egypt, intending to sell it for sixpence per copy profit, which she sent for review to the Egyptologist Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie’ (1853–1942).12 Farr’s abandonment of this venture has previously been attributed by scholars to Petrie’s written response which, it is often claimed, dismisses Farr, implying her mystical interests as the reason for Petrie’s disdain.13 In fact, when one reads Petrie’s letter in the original, he provides Farr with a number of useful suggestions concerning concepts she should discuss in more detail, as well as the pronunciation of hieroglyphs. While he does express concern as to the likelihood of the pamphlet’s success, this is as a result of the density of its Egyptological scholarship, rather than Farr’s mystical leanings. Before he signs the letter, he states, ‘If you can get the Brit. Public to swallow doses of the Book of the Dead’ (a cultural artefact on which, he reveals, he too soon shall be working), ‘so be it, + good luck. I should be rather shy of giving a dose with so many technicalities in it.’14 According to the Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray (1863–1963), herself rumoured – by some – to have practised magic,15 Petrie had no sympathy for ‘believers in curses and spells’ and if approached by such an individual ‘would hurriedly remember an urgent appointment and flee’.16 He certainly did not treat Farr as such, however, offering advice in a demonstration of collegiality. Identifying Egyptological scholars with occult interests is tricky; as this chapter demonstrates, the relationship between Egyptology and esotericism across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can only be described as in a constant state of flux: sometimes mutually appreciative, and sometimes at odds. As we shall see, expert practitioners varied in their beliefs, which somewhat inevitably shifted over the course of their lives and careers; similarly, their involvement and collaboration with individuals engaged in esoteric practices underwent comparable fluctuations. This is true, also, of the writers upon whom this thesis has focused thus far. We have already witnessed Marie Corelli’s (1855–1924) attribution of supernatural power to her Egyptian necklace, as well as the magical themes adopted by those involved in nineteenth- and twentieth-century occultism, including Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) and C. W. Leadbeater (1854–1934). We have also seen Howard Carter (1874–1939) dismiss supernatural

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rumours while contributing to them in the same publications by lacing his text with Gothic tropes. That we have already encountered so many individuals participating in esoteric activities, or at least dabbling on the edges of supernatural rumour, suggests the indivisibility of the otherworldly from Egyptological culture in this period. In this section, I further chart the participation of individuals in the broader cultures of esotericism, determining how contemporary Egyptology was seen not only to intersect with the spiritual and the magical, but actively encourage participation in these subcultures. Accordingly, this chapter examines the individuals whose supernaturally charged encounters with Egypt were not merely explained away as connected to forms of intoxication and fantasy, as we have previously seen. It takes as its focus those who entertained (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘performed’) a genuine belief in the magical, spiritual or supernatural significance of ancient Egypt, using Egyptology as a means of investigating and supporting these views.17 While it is necessary to underline that it is incredibly difficult to ascertain people’s true beliefs – particularly when dealing with theatrical individuals whose talent for self-fashioning is well known – communications with Egyptological scholars and the use of genuine artefacts and contemporary scholarship by such individuals suggests a desire to anchor their experiences, visions and religious rituals in fact. Correspondingly, several Egyptologists were embroiled in activities that might be defined as esoteric (ranging from Theosophy and spiritualism to magical rituals). There are several interconnected networks in which these overlaps were established, uniting well-known Egyptologists including E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934), Howard Carter, Margaret Murray and Battiscombe Gunn (1883–1950) with high-profile writers such as W. B. Yeats, H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) and Sax Rohmer (1883–1959), as well as those famed for their involvement in esoteric movements, most notably, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). These connections and a mutual culture of collaboration is, once again, key.

Egyptological Reading and Rituals Erik Hornung has famously divided studies of Egypt into scholarly Egyptology and mystical ‘Egyptosophy’.18 Others have described the relationship between Egyptology and esotericism as more closely

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linked than this binary suggests: Steve Vinson and Janet Gunn, for example, state that ‘the various scholarly disciplines that had emerged to study the past, and the systematic pursuit of occult knowledge, were flip-sides of one coin’.19 I myself am inclined to favour Vinson and Gunn’s assessment, which demonstrates sensitivity towards the importance of academic scholarship to the esoteric activities with which this chapter is concerned, as well as the inseparability of occultism and Egyptology not only in the popular imagination but in the lived experiences of Egyptologists themselves. Certainly, of the disciplines that sought to further understanding of the civilisations of the past, Egyptological practitioners can be seen to have engaged with esotericism with a far greater frequency than other scholars who studied the ancient world; similarly, scholarly Egyptology, in particular, was pursued, adopted and twisted for esoteric ends. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several occultists turned to Egyptological artefacts, institutions and experts in order to conduct research, or to support the veracity of their experiences. This was a time in which ancient Egyptian objects, in particular, were held to have continuing supernatural agency, and even Egyptologists were not averse to highlighting their perceived magical power: they were frequently involved in processes of ‘counter-narrative’, ‘exploiting the uncanny atmospheres that hovered around these artefacts’.20 Speaking of a statue of the goddess Sekhmet, depicted with the head of a lioness, situated ‘in the small temple of Ptah, at Karnak’, Arthur Weigall (1880–1934) relates how many visitors to the site – both tourists and the Egyptian people themselves – attribute supernatural potency to this relic. ‘Tourists usually make a point of entering the sanctuary in which it stands by moonlight or starlight’, Weigall records, ‘for then the semi-darkness adds in an extraordinary manner to the dignity and mystery of the figure, and one feels disposed to believe the goddess not yet bereft of all power.’21 Appropriately, the qualities with which these individuals imbue this statue are Egyptologically accurate: as ‘the agent employed by the Sun-God, Ra, in the destruction of mankind’, Sekhmet had ‘a sinister reputation’. Weigall observes that: when the statue was discovered a few years ago, a fall of earth just in front of her terminated the lives of two of the small boys [. . .] which, not surprisingly has been quoted as an indication of the malevolence of the spirit which resides in this impressive figure of stone. One hears it now quite commonly said that those who offend the goddess when visiting her are pursued by ill-fortune for weeks afterwards.22

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At first, referring to the statue as ‘it’, and then, subsequent to relating this tale, referring to it as ‘her’ (imbuing the statue with the spirit of the goddess), Weigall hints that there may be an element of mystical truth behind this story. In antiquity, statues were believed to have been vessels that the spirits of the deities represented might inhabit (members of the Golden Dawn entertained a similar belief, using ancient Egyptian statuary to channel the gods in their rituals). As the goddess of war, attributing violent acts to this statue of Sekhmet is apt, then, and informed by Egyptological fact. This statue of Sekhmet was well known to tourists seeking to explore Karnak. In Palimpsest (1926), H.D. (1886–1961) refers to this sculpture numerous times, often describing the goddess’s sentient smile. On one occasion, the protagonist of Palimpsest’s final section, Helen Fairwood, feels as if ‘[f]ire-flies [. . .] should have darted up, hung between her and the smudged-out smile of the oblong, seated cat Sekmet, a veil, glimmering of dancing frenzied stars.’23 In this moment, Fairwood yearns for a kind of sublime, supernatural encounter with the goddess. In her sessions with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), H.D. spoke of this statue after Freud showed her one of his own relics representing the goddess: ‘I told the Professor of the cat-headed image in the little temple off the great temple of Karnak. He was amused to hear that an iron grille they had had to place at the temple entrance, because of the hysterical moonlight visitors.’24 This section of Palimpsest is semi-autobiographical, and the informed reader is left to ponder how much of H.D.’s depiction of Fairwood’s longing for an experience of Egypt’s magic as she encounters the statue of Sekhmet, just one of many ‘psycho-hysterical visionary sensations’, was based on her own experience.25 Other relics considered potent include, most notably, the British Museum’s ‘unlucky mummy’, whose associated tales of death, misfortune and haunting have been explored by Roger Luckhurst in his study The Mummy’s Curse (2012). Another of the British Museum’s mummies, with the name of Katebet, was held, in contrast, to be a benign force, diverging from more usual tales of cursed artefacts. In an article in the Daily Mail in 1906, the anonymous journalist notes that Katebet was particularly popular with a female demographic (evoking Corelli’s assertion of her spiritually based feminine Egyptology as opposed to Budge’s masculine scholarship): They approach the case with reverence, and lay a hand upon it. Looking earnestly in the golden face of the priestess, they put a question that permits a plain affirmative or negative reply. Then they wait patiently.

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If the priestess moves the answer is ‘Yes’; if she makes no sign it is ‘No.’ They assert she does nod sometimes, and the advice she gives is good.26

Any movement on the mummy’s part is attributed by the author to vibrations or changes in temperature. Evidently, however, this is not what Katebet’s visitors believed. Margaret Murray records that a similar benevolent mummy resided ‘in an Edinburgh museum. [. . .] I was told that if you placed your hand on the glass above the mummy’s head or heart, and in silence made a wish that wish would be fulfilled.’27 Museums were, as a result of their collections, often sought out by those wishing to tether their occult activities to genuine artefacts if a journey to Egypt itself was out of the question. The journalist W. T. Stead (1849–1912) and the amateur archaeologist Thomas Douglas Murray (1841–1911), both advocates of spiritualism, entreated Budge to permit them to conduct a night-time séance in the British Museum’s First Egyptian Room to contact ancient Egyptian spirits. Budge refused.28 It was while studying objects at the British Museum in December 1895, sourcing material for her book Egyptian Magic (1896), that Farr experienced communication with the spirit of ‘an Egyptian Adept’.29 The name of this individual and the artefact which it inhabited are disputed, but Caroline Tully demonstrates that the two identities proposed for the ‘Egyptian Adept’ (Nemkheftka and Mut-em-menu) are both connected to British Museum artefacts, further tethering Farr’s esoteric experiences to the scholarly Egyptological world.30 Significantly, the communications that Farr received from the Adept resulted in the formation of a ‘Sphere Group’ within the Golden Dawn, a faction that delved into Egyptology in order to attempt to achieve greater mystical enlightenment. While the women who visited the mummy of Katebet are depicted as eccentric (and gullible) by the Daily Mail, Farr’s communications with ancient Egyptian spirits not only occurred during periods of scholarly research, but inspired further Egyptological study, among her and her associates. Aleister Crowley, another Golden Dawn initiate, famously bound his esotericism to Egyptology, anchoring his and his wife’s visions and communications to real artefacts. As Tully states, ‘we may view Crowley’s record of the reception of The Book of the Law’, the central sacred text in Thelema, a religion developed by Crowley and which incorporated ancient Egyptian deities, ‘as a narrative that expresses the tensions between two different constructions of Egypt: the Hermetic and the Egyptological’.31 Crowley claimed that the text of The Book of the Law was channelled through him by a higher power, presaged by his wife slipping into a trance state while in the Great Pyramid of

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Giza, and pointing out an image of her communicant (the god Horus via a messenger, Aiwass), on a stele (the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu) at the Bulaq Museum.32 Declaring that he had dined with the Bulaq Museum’s curator, the Egyptologist Émile Brugsch (1842–1930), in order to discuss this artefact, Crowley subsequently received translations of the stele from the assistant curator, and later by Battiscombe Gunn and Alan Gardiner (1879–1963).33 Crowley’s literary writings, meanwhile, also reveal a sustained interest in Egyptological artefacts. His volume of poetry The Winged Beetle (1910) is, as the title suggests, heavily influenced by Egyptological reading. Crowley refers to a variety of deities from the ancient Egyptian pantheon throughout this collection: Set, Horus, Osiris, Seb, Nut, Hathor, Isis and Sekhmet, and one poem, entitled ‘The Twins’, was directly inspired by a stele at the British Museum inscribed with a solar hymn.34 Others seeking supernatural Egyptological experiences turned to written scholarship; ‘Wallis Budge’s translations and commentaries’, as Luckhurst records, ‘were constantly cited by occultists like Florence Farr, and thus fed supernatural interpretations of museum objects.’35 The citing of Egyptological scholarship in support of occultist claims was widespread across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the writer and spiritualist Violet Tweedale (1862–1936), for example, referred her readers to Budge and Peter le Page Renouf (1822–97), quoting passages from Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead to reinforce her claims that the magical power attributed to certain Egyptian mummies in antiquity continued in the modern world.36 Sax Rohmer was given a ‘beautifully-bound, rare edition of The Book of the Dead’, amassed as part of ‘a large library on Egyptology and the occult’,37 and on one occasion, after the death of his friend the escapologist Harry Houdini (1874–1926), purportedly attempted to contact Houdini’s spirit using incantations from this volume (an activity of which the anti-spiritualist Houdini would have certainly disapproved).38 The Book of the Dead was revered, as well, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), the matriarch of the Theosophical Society. Her literary output harnessed other Egyptological texts and translations of papyri, including the Papyrus Ebers.39 Indeed, the Theosophical Society’s early interest in ancient Egypt (combining the scholarly and the mystical) was such that ‘The Egyptological Society’ was one of the names originally proposed for the organisation.40 Other individuals who sought to combine occultism with the scholarly study of the ancient past include the poet Gerald Massey (1828–1907), who pursued interests in both spiritualism and

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Egyptology, and studied at the British Museum with Samuel Birch (1813–85), the Keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities (later the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities).41 One scholar, F. W. Read (1863–?), wrote about Egyptological matters in the spiritualist periodical Light, and also contributed articles to the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology.42 William Oxley (1823–1905), the author of Egypt: And the Wonders of the Land of the Pharaohs (1884), requested to be present at a number of séances conducted by the spiritualist medium Elizabeth d’Espérance (1855–1919) in the 1890s, at which ancient Egyptian spirits and artefacts purportedly materialised.43 Numerous Egyptian objects that emerged from the ether in darkened séance rooms – scarabs, coins and faience figures – were taken to the British Museum where they were assessed by experts.44 Hieroglyphic symbols which mysteriously appeared inscribed on paper or were produced via automatic writing were sent, by the inquisitive or the sceptical, to Egyptologists for their assessment.45 Even as late as 1935, when Theosophy and spiritualism were both well past their peaks in popularity, the mystic Paul Brunton’s (1898–1981) A Search in Secret Egypt – an account detailing his spiritual experiences of sites of archaeological importance including inside the Great Pyramid of Giza (also key to Crowley’s otherworldly communications) – proved remarkably successful. In the same year, Dorothy Eady (1904–81, also known as Omm Sety) became secretary and draughtswoman to Selim Hassan (1886–1961) of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, who was soon to be appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cairo. Eady had been encouraged in the study of Egyptian hieroglyphs by Budge in her childhood; her intellectual pursuits were inspired by a long-standing belief that she had been an ancient Egyptian priestess in a past life (a narrative that she would come to transcribe from otherworldly dictation in cursive hieroglyphs), and – from the age of fifteen – believed that she was visited by the pharaoh Seti I, her lover with whom she conceived a child in this previous incarnation.46 Her involvement in professional Egyptological circles was cemented after she moved to Egypt in 1931; she would go on to become keeper of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, respected for her Egyptological knowledge and her remarkable predictions as to where particular archaeological traces would be found. The range of these diverse practices makes up just part of the relationship between esotericism and both professional and amateur Egyptology across the decades in question.

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Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism was also heavily influenced by popular fiction, which often benefitted from the generic fluidity that flourished at the chiasma of literary and Egyptological culture. Blavatsky owed a considerable debt to the author and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73), and, like Freud, admired the depiction of Ayesha in Haggard’s She (1887): evidently occult interests and a singular respect for supernatural fiction (particularly that demonstrating a degree of antiquarian knowledge) went hand in hand.47 As David Glover notes, occultists (including Blavatsky and Crowley) ‘were never shy of appropriating popular texts for their own purposes’; a key figure in the Golden Dawn’s AmenRa Temple in Edinburgh, J. W. Brodie-Innes (1848–1923), held that Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903; 1912) shone light upon some of the mystical concepts with which Golden Dawn members had been grappling.48 The range of popular texts upon which esotericists drew thus not only encompasses Egyptological volumes themselves, becoming increasingly available for non-specialist audiences, and, as this book has demonstrated, readily borrowing from numerous literary genres in a bid to broaden their appeal, but also fiction influenced by contemporary Egyptology. Farr, as we have seen, was very much involved in this culture, conflating different types of literary and Egyptological sources. She too ‘made her occult agenda venerable by drawing on the Harris papyrus, Hatshepsut’s funerary obelisk and the Book of the Dead’, demonstrating a desire to legitimise her occult undertakings through Egyptological scholarship.49 Concurrently, like Blavatsky, Farr demonstrated an appetite for literature, referring to Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842) (a text integral to the foundation of the Golden Dawn) in Egyptian Magic, and ending this study with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792–1822) ‘Ozymandias’ (1818), quoted in full.50 As an actress, performing works of fiction, and as an occultist, performing what she held to be authentic rites, Farr was caught between worlds of supposed reality and fantasy.51 The evidence of Farr’s Egyptological study but also her literary inclinations might be seen to come together most creatively in two plays that she wrote with Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938): The Beloved of Hathor (1901) and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk (1902), both set in ancient Egypt and dealing with Egyptian culture and religion. One cannot help but consider Farr’s depiction of ritual magic onstage in relation to Shaw’s damning representation of Cleopatra’s powerless rites; avoiding references to contemporary spiritualism, Farr distances

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her own ceremonies from modernity (and Shaw’s empty rituals) by instead emphasising genuine ancient iconography. Farr and Shakespear note in the printed volume reproducing the scripts of both plays that ‘the Authors wish the plays to be represented, not scenically but decoratively’, suggesting the use of ‘a simple white background or pale sienna hangings, so arranged that the figures of the actors, moving across the stage, may reproduce the effect of the ancient frescoes or illuminated papyri’.52 Similarly, for The Beloved of Hathor, Farr and Shakespear advise that ‘[t]he play is to be acted against a plain white backcloth with pale brown hangings on either side, striped to resemble the decoration of a papyrus roll’. Setting the play to look like embellished papyri draws comparisons between the act of watching a play and reading an ancient Egyptian text. Through the use of such paper-coloured drapery, the stage set becomes an artefact, the actors illustrations, and the audience the interpreter, or Egyptologist. The costumes are more specific, calling for details such as ‘a vulturecrown’, ‘a cone and lily’ and a ‘beaded collar’, and for one character in The Shrine of the Golden Hawk – the Ka – the playwrights provide Egyptological information to support their recommendations: ‘The Ka is frequently represented on ancient frescoes as a smaller figure walking behind the king or queen. It represents the subtle body, and supports and strengthens the more material body’. Resultantly, ‘[t]he Ka has the same kind of dress’ as the character Nectoris, ‘her double or other self’. The Beloved of Hathor was first performed on 16 November 1901 at the inaugural meeting of the Egyptian Society, and again shortly after its début, on 20 January 1902. The Shrine of the Golden Hawk was first performed the next day, 21 January 1902. To Yeats, these plays seemed ‘less plays than fragments of a ritual’, invoking archaeological imagery in keeping with Farr and Shakespear’s vision of the plays as Egyptian wall paintings or illustrated papyri.53 While his review of the performances was mixed, Yeats lauded the contributions of Farr and Dorothy Paget (1888–1957), who ‘spoke their sentences in adoration of Heru, or Hathor, copied or imitated from old Egyptian poems, as one thinks the Egyptian priestesses must have spoken them’.54 Yeats’s comment that ‘[t]hey spoke with so much religious fervour, with so high an ecstasy, that one could not but doubt at times their Christian orthodoxy’ is, of course, tongue-in-cheek: Farr’s Egyptological study (both on a personal level and within her ‘Sphere Group’) complements her mystical beliefs, and results in a performance that blends fantasy with genuine faith, drawing heavily upon actual ancient Egyptian ritual and iconography.55

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The Egyptian Society, for whose entertainment these plays were performed on all three occasions, was a group presided over by M. W. Blackden (1864–1934), not only a member of the Golden Dawn but also of Farr’s ‘Sphere Group’.56 As a trained artist, Blackden aided the Egypt Exploration Fund, coming into close contact with a number of Egyptologists including the young Howard Carter – at this time, also enlisted for his artistic skills – and Percy Newberry (1869– 1949), though this relationship deteriorated rapidly.57 Blackden combined his Egyptological interests with his occult pursuits, providing the Theosophical Review with a series of articles on the Book of the Dead with his own notes and translations over the course of the first decade of the twentieth century. The Egyptian Society, whose aim was, as Yeats recorded, ‘to illustrate the life and thought of Ancient Egypt by plays and lectures’, was evidently attached to Farr’s ‘Sphere Group’, but provided a more public outlet for members’ Egyptological interests, combining creative works with lectures which sought to bring genuine Egyptological knowledge into conversation with more mystical subjects.58 Certainly, the involvement of those who navigated any boundaries between Egyptian esotericism and Egyptological research (such as Blackden) is an intriguing counterpoint to Shaw’s embittered barbs. While Shaw was evidently aware (to some degree) of the overlaps between mysticism and Egyptological scholarship, his branding of Farr’s Egyptology as ‘exoteric’ does not do justice to her learning and that of her associates, some of whom successfully participated in both of these worlds. One of the most intriguing connections between these plays and Egyptological scholarship is the involvement of Battiscombe Gunn in a 1905 production of The Shrine of the Golden Hawk directed by Farr.59 Gunn’s life and work speak to many of the aspects of Egyptological culture that this book has addressed: some time before the advent of his Egyptological career but only a year before his first published translation, Gunn played the ‘Priest of the Floods and Storms’ in Farr’s play, negotiating the hazy line between scholarly and esoteric (rather than exoteric) Egyptology; he trained under Margaret Murray and, as a result of his philological skill, assisted in making translations from inscribed artefacts found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.60 He was also, for a time, friendly with Aleister Crowley. Farr’s plays were by no means alone in their depiction of Egyptian rites. With Maud Hoffman (1869–?), an actress and fellow Theosophist, Mabel Collins (1851–1927) adapted The Idyll of the White Lotus (1890) – her work suspended somewhere between occult novel and clairvoyant vision – into a play entitled Sensa: A Mystery Play in

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Three Acts (1914). The Idyll of the White Lotus was inspired, Collins initially believed, by the psychic atmosphere surrounding Cleopatra’s Needle. She elaborates upon the conception of this narrative in The Story of Sensa (1913): In 1878 I was deeply engrossed in literary work which kept me constantly at my writing table, and from the window of the room I worked in I saw Cleopatra’s Needle brought up the river and set up upon the Embankment. A procession of superb Egyptian priests began from that time to come into my room – coming up the staircase and entering the door – and stood around my table. I thought at first it was the appearance of astral forms connected with the Needle. But as these mysterious visits continued and culminated in a great effort, it is evident that if they were astral forms they were animated and directed by the egos to which they belonged, and were indeed the Kas of certain priests of ancient Egypt.61

While Collins claims that The Idyll of the White Lotus was communicated to her ‘in the mystical and universal language’ and that she was merely its translator (anticipating Crowley’s later receipt of The Book of the Law), this novel was evidently informed by both contemporary Egyptology and occult thought. Collins refers to Theosophists who approved of the lore to which she gestures; meanwhile, she reveals her familiarity with recent Egyptological scholarship, quoting the works of the German Egyptologist Alfred Wiedermann (1856–1936), and Budge’s Egyptian Magic (appropriately footnoted, though misremembering ‘Wallis’ as ‘Walter’ on one page).62 Indeed, she uses this scholarship to support the notion that the vision of the past which she received in a trance state was no mere fantasy but historically accurate. Egyptology, she claimed, had confirmed what she had already witnessed in her visions. There are four recorded performances of Sensa, ‘one in 1914 at the Court Theatre, Sloane Square and three in 1919 at the Etlinger Hall, Paddington’.63 In the 1919 production, the musicologist and archaeologist Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953) and the composer and anthropologist Elsie Hamilton (1880–1965) – two individuals who had met at events orchestrated by the Theosophical Society – contributed a degree of scholarly accuracy in the play’s ‘incidental music’; Schlesinger had accepted a Fellowship at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Archaeology, and published a number of articles in the Institute’s journals.64 Evidently, the participation of scholars in esoteric performance was by no means unusual. Indeed, in each of the plays and rituals considered here, the involvement of

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experts only serves to contribute to the mysticism of events as they are performed on stage, blending the real with the acted, and aligning a depiction of the past with factual details that lend an air of authenticity.

Past Lives and Eerie Tales Of all of the individuals with twin interests in esotericism and Egyptology, however, it is H. Rider Haggard who was particularly open about what he believed to have been supernatural encounters, combining aspects of these anecdotes with his Egyptological reading (and conversations), and recording these across his factual and fictional output. Believing that he might have experienced past lives in Egypt, Haggard acquired hallucinogenic substances to attempt to access visions of the past. As is so often the case with Haggard, this practice makes its way into his fiction: the inhalation of the smoke from a narcotic drug evokes visions from a previous incarnation as an ancient Egyptian in his novel The Ancient Allan (1920).65 Smoking ‘a certain herb, not unlike tobacco in appearance’ in this text ‘cause[s] the person who inhales its fumes to become clairvoyant, or to dream dreams, whichever the truth may be’.66 Haggard’s famous protagonist, Allan Quatermain, smokes ‘the unholy drug’ with Lady Ragnall, formerly Luna Holmes, the character with the hieroglyphic birthmark of the crescent moon whom Haggard’s devotees would have known from his earlier novel The Ivory Child (1916).67 Lady Ragnall believes that, upon smoking the substance, they would ‘see wonderful pictures of some past or future existence’, ‘to open a great gate and to see’ – anticipating Howard Carter – ‘wonderful things, glorious things that will thrill us for the rest of our lives’, and certainly the events described in the novel are almost entirely hallucinations of what appears to be shared past lives in ancient Egypt.68 These visions arise while the pair sit in a museum-like room, home to ‘various Egyptian antiquities including a couple of mummies’ and some papyri; the box containing the drug sits atop ‘a case full of scarabs’.69 Lady Ragnall dresses as the goddess Isis for the occasion, ‘like a bride of ancient days adorned for her husband’, recalling her role as a priestess in The Ivory Child (as well as the crescent moon on her breast), and tethering Haggard’s fictionalised depiction of Egyptianate ritual to, for instance, the rites of Isis as performed – also in costume – by the Matherses.70 Quatermain qualifies the events, stating that his ‘experience [. . .] may after all have been no more than a long and connected dream’.71 He adds, however: ‘Yet

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how was I to dream of lands, events and people whereof I have only the vaguest knowledge, or none at all.’72 The implication is that the visions resulting from the inhalation of the drug are accurate; one can only assume, given Haggard’s inquisitiveness when it came to notions of past lives and clairvoyant dreams, that his search for similar substances was to achieve similar ends. Haggard’s spiritual beliefs are complex, and while at the end of his autobiography, The Days of My Life (1926), he indicates a religious allegiance to the Church of England, elsewhere he devotes an entire chapter to ‘Psychical’ matters, a section in which, rather disappointingly, he neglects to mention an ambiguous ‘experience with the mummy’ to which he briefly alludes in his private diaries.73 This section instead recounts his second visit to Egypt including an excursion to ‘the tomb of Queen Nefer-tari’ accompanied by Carter who was ‘then the local custodian of antiquities at Luxor’, a strange occurrence in which he dreamed of his dog a few hours after the animal had died (an event then unknown to him), as well as a variety of ‘dream-pictures’ to which Haggard was tempted to attach otherworldly significance.74 ‘[I]t would be easy to make a story out of each of these mind-pictures,’ he relates; certainly, the scenarios that he describes are evocative of the range of the impressive historical and geographical span of his literary fiction.75 One is a vision of himself as an ancient Egyptian, in a scene which might have been plucked directly from one of his Egyptian novels. He sees: A great palace built in the Egyptian style. Myself, a man of about thirty, in quaint and beautiful robes wound rather tightly round the body, walking at night up and down some half-enclosed and splendid chamber through which the air flows freely. A beautiful young woman with violet eyes creeps into the place like one who is afraid of being seen, creeps up to me, who start [sic] at seeing her and appear [sic] to indicate that she should go. Thereon the woman draws herself up and, instead of going, throws herself straight into the man’s arms.76

Haggard describes these images as ‘imaginings which developed themselves in my mind’, and notes that he has several ‘alternative explanations’.77 Naturally leaning towards ‘[s]ubconscious imagination and invention’ for the origin of these ‘dream-pictures’ (‘the one which most people would accept’), Haggard also observes the possibility that they might otherwise be ‘[m]emories of some central incident that occurred in a previous incarnation’ or [r]acial memories of events that happened to forefathers’, an explanation with a

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distinctly psychoanalytic flavour.78 Relating that he mentioned his visions to the renowned physicist, psychical researcher and spiritualist Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), Haggard evidently sought the opinions of learned authorities in a bid to come to a conclusion as to the true nature of the dreams. Haggard’s ties to those with occult interests extend far beyond Lodge to numerous friends, acquaintances and collaborators. The illustrations for one of his more unusual works – The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story (1911) – were in part provided by W. T. Horton (1864–1919), an initiate into the Golden Dawn upon Yeats’s recommendation. Horton experienced visions with Egyptian subject matter, writing to Yeats that while: reading your Poems last Tuesday [. . .] there came over me a feeling of majestic, mighty power, strength, justice, wisdom & calmness which I tried to depict by a face. I seemed to get into an Egyptian sphere & as I worked in my inward ear came the word Men-Ka-ra several times. After finishing the drawing I looked thro’ a list of Egyptian kings & found Men-Kau-Ra 4th dynasty (B.C. 3633–3600) renowned for his virtues & justice. Most likely I had read this name before, but at the time I was decidedly not thinking about him.79

Here, Horton tries to corroborate his esoteric experiences through the application of Egyptological knowledge, searching through a list of pharaohs to find a match for his auditory hallucination, though demonstrating a degree of confusion as to how the ancient name he hears is pronounced: ‘I find that he is sometimes called “Man-Kau-ra” at others & more often “Man-Ka-ra”.’80 Horton appears not to have been aware that these similar names actually correspond to two distinct pharaohs in Egypt’s history. He records making other drawings of Egyptian forms including the god Ptah and the goddess Isis, relating that while sketching Isis he ‘felt a pleasurable inclination to burn incense while & after drawing her’. ‘Rameses II’, he discloses, was ‘one of my Spirits in the old days of Spiritism’, suggesting a long-standing personal association between occultism and Egypt informed by Egyptian history.81 Horton was also connected to Farr’s ‘Sphere Group’, and Haggard, at least, certainly seems to have regarded Horton as something of a mystical authority, writing to him seeking spiritual information, some of which informed his literary work.82 The Mahatma and the Hare, Haggard’s only work illustrated by Horton, is a story purportedly inspired by a dream; after Haggard

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(or, rather, his narrator) has read a news story, ‘just as he went to sleep, or on the following morning just as he awoke, he cannot tell which, there came to him the title and the outlines of this fantasy’.83 The ‘particular clearness’ with which he sees the dream, and the ‘so odd a fashion’ in which the vision occurs, suggest that this is no ordinary event.84 These details together contribute to a mystical frame narrative, evocative of those which Haggard had used in his earliest texts with Egyptian elements, She (1887) and Cleopatra (1889). Shawn Malley states that, in She, the inscribed potsherd contributes to the ‘stratified narrative [structure that] reflects the archaeological content’; we might see Haggard’s nested narrative in The Mahatma and the Hare as being similarly archaeological in nature, but with a supernatural and psychological twist.85 The text’s illustrative material emphasises the break between Haggard’s narrator’s spiritual dream experience and hare’s story, exposing the narrative’s archaeological layers. Horton produced stylised images for the esoteric part of the narrative, while H. M. Brock (1875–1960) contributed more traditional, detailed illustrations for the part of the tale told by the hare. Haggard’s tendency of deliberately blurring the real and the fictional in his work emerges in the commissioning of a member of the Golden Dawn to produce the images to accompany the parts of the text presented as a supernatural vision, lending them a degree of esoteric authenticity. The tale’s narrator first relates his friendship with an individual with occult powers (mirroring Haggard’s real relationship with Horton), who informs him that ‘the first time that we had anything to do with each other, so far as I can learn, that is, was over eight thousand years ago, in Egypt before the beginning of recorded history’.86 Subsequently, the narrator comes to experience ‘knowledge [. . .] about certain epochs in the past in which I lived in other shapes’ charting ‘back [. . .] to the days of primeval, prehistoric man’.87 ‘[O]nce’, he recalls, ‘this spirit of mine [. . .] dwelt in that of a Pharaoh of Egypt’; while he does not provide the name of the monarch, he does reveal that ‘of this forgotten Royalty [. . .] little is known save what a few inscriptions have to tell’ and that ‘there remains a portrait statue in the British Museum’.88 This artefact is presumably the one illustrated by Horton in an image depicting a monumental figure facing pyramids on the horizon (a picture which also featured on the front cover of the book) (Fig. 5.1). The uraeus on the crown (which appears to be a pschent, or double crown) indicates that this figure is a pharaoh. There are, of course, echoes, here, of Haggard’s own ponderings as to whether his dreams might

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Figure 5.1 W. T. Horton, ‘I, who myself was worshipped as a god’, in H. Rider Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), p. 20. Source: Internet Archive.

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indicate that he had experienced a past life in ancient Egypt. In the narrator’s case, however, he identifies (though refuses to disclose) his previous incarnation. There are certainly parallels to be drawn between the events in The Mahatma and the Hare and a passage in Haggard’s autobiography in which he relates that: A friend of mine who is a mystic of the first water amused me very much not long ago by forwarding to me a list of my previous incarnations, or rather of three of them, which had been revealed to him in some mysterious way. Two of these were Egyptian, one as a noble in the time of Pepi II who lived somewhere about 4000 B.C., and the second as one of the minor Pharaohs.89

Given that The Mahatma and the Hare was published in 1911, and Haggard’s autobiography written in 1912 (though not published until 1926), it is likely that Horton is the friend with mystical powers to whom Haggard refers. The slippage between Haggard’s life and the events he depicts in his fiction is notoriously difficult to navigate, and these visions of past lives, whether Haggard’s or Horton’s, become – as a result of Haggard’s complex spiritual beliefs and particular reverence for ancient Egyptian civilisation – inextricably entangled with his literary output. We might also read an indication of Haggard’s belief that he had indeed experienced past lives in ancient Egypt in The Mahatma and the Hare, in the narrator’s demonstration of a continued spiritual affinity with this former self, tied to the Egyptological artefact depicting the pharaoh within the British Museum, an institution aligned with Egyptological truth but also, by this stage, with spirits and supernaturalism. On one occasion, while he ‘stood and gazed and dreamt’ before the statue of the pharaoh, a policeman tells the narrator that the museum is closing. Incensed at the interruption, the narrator: laid my hand on the foot of the statue, for it had just come back to me that it was a ‘Ka’ image, a sacred thing, any Egyptologist will know what I mean, which for ages had sat in a chamber of my tomb. Then the Ka that clings to it eternally awoke at my touch and knew me, or so I suppose. At least I felt myself change. A new strength came into me; my shape [. . .] put on something of its ancient dignity; my eyes grew royal.90

Horton’s image of the silhouetted statue is not of the artefact in its modern setting of the British Museum but in its original location in

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Egypt, denoted as such by the two pyramids on the horizon. Through this illustration, the reader, too, is brought back to the time of the narrator’s previous existence, seeing the statue of the pharaoh as a ‘shadow’, an almost ghostly presence, particularly interesting when we consider that Horton had plentiful experience producing sketches of ancient Egyptian deities and pharaohs in occult contexts. Significantly, there is also something of Haggard’s features – sans beard – in the statue’s profile, further supporting the hypothesis that Horton is Haggard’s mystical friend who provided him with a list of his past identities. Witnessing the transformation in the narrator’s countenance in this blending of past and present selves as the narrator touches the statue, the policeman ‘trembled’ and states that ‘I have been told that things come out of these old statues in the night’; the narrator speculates that ‘he thought I was some imperial ghost that the shadows of evening had caused him to mistake for man’.91 Describing the moment of Haggard’s death, Haggard’s relatives would echo this image of an ancient king’s spirit inhabiting the modern body: ‘Rider rose up in bed. [. . .] the red glow [of a distant fire] upon his dying face. “My God!” said Cheyne [Haggard’s son-in-law] to himself, “an old Pharaoh”.’92 Haggard’s daughter, too, would open her biography of her father with a sonnet by the first British Nobel laureate, the doctor Ronald Ross (1857–1932), which Ross had composed ‘after reading The World’s Desire’, a novel set in ancient Egypt which Haggard had co-authored with his friend, the Scottish writer and anthropologist Andrew Lang (1844–1912). In this tribute, Ross celebrates Haggard’s ‘soaring wit’, declaring that Haggard is ‘incarnate from some olden time, | And nobler’.93 Perhaps Haggard’s spiritual beliefs coloured the ways in which these individuals saw him, aligning him with alternative spiritualities, and distinctly Theosophical ideas. Haggard certainly contributed to the sense of his own mystical past in his relation of strange coincidences in The Days of My Life, in which the reader is led to believe that he was gifted with prophetic abilities. He was apparently contacted by Egyptologists – including his friend, Gaston Maspero (1846–1916) – who wished to know where he had sourced certain details for his fiction; scholars claimed that these details were based in truth and wondered where Haggard had encountered them. Haggard insisted that they had sprung from his imagination.94 He sometimes attributes (or at least connects) similar prophetic or clairvoyant talents to his Egyptologist friends. Specifically, he records several stories related to him by Budge, ‘both the most industrious and the most learned man of my acquaintance’, whom

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Haggard describes as ‘a great believer in the Old Egyptians’.95 While Haggard’s exact meaning is unclear, he states that ‘Budge seems to be of opinion that the ancient thinkers among this people discovered all that we can learn of the mysteries which relate to the life of the soul, the resurrection’ and so forth.96 Budge apparently related to Haggard that ‘[i]n times that passed away before history began [. . .] they found out much that we think now’; while Budge believed that ‘the medicineman and the paid priest arose and overlaid the truth with all the fantasies and formulas and ridiculous details of symbolical worship that it was their advantage to imagine and maintain’, he nevertheless recognises a kernel of truth in the ancient Egyptian religion that – although marred by ‘the dross of ritual and controversy’ – has survived even into the present day.97 It is possible that Budge’s avowals of Egyptian religion’s spiritual significance to Haggard were repeated to Farr, cementing their association through their shared respect for ancient spirituality. Notably, Dorothy Eady also asserted her belief that Budge followed the ancient Egyptian religion.98 While Budge was, like many Egyptologists, reluctant to publicly encourage a presentation of himself as a man of superstitious beliefs, he nevertheless gave the editor of Haggard’s autobiography, C. J. Longman (1852–1934), his consent to reproduce the tales that appear in this memoir: ‘I have Sir E. W. Budge’s permission to say that he has seen and consents to the publication of the above stories. – Ed.’99 The very inclusion of this footnote implies that special permission is not only required, but that Budge’s compliance should be rendered in text: at a time when Egyptology and the British Museum were becoming ever more associated with unlucky artefacts and lingering magic, Budge’s opinion on such matters would have, no doubt, been increasingly interesting to those who entertained such beliefs themselves. While Budge asserted that the ‘unlucky mummy’, an artefact with several supernatural happenings attributed to it, ‘had given them no trouble’, he nonetheless implies to Haggard that he had no definitive answers when it came to rumours of the existence and continued potency of dark magic: ‘I asked Budge if he believed in the efficacy of curses. He hesitated to answer’.100 Combined with Budge’s tales of prophetic abilities (his own, supposedly inherited from his mother, and those of a fortune teller in Egypt whose predictions proved tragically accurate), his insistence to Haggard that he had heard ancient Egyptian ‘souls arriving through a certain gap in the hills’, as well as his attendance of a meeting of the Ghost Club in 1904, his position when it comes to esotericism becomes ever hazier.101 Perhaps Budge was merely aware that ‘[s]upernatural fictions achieve their best shivery effects when they rely on a penumbra of

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uncertainty between fact and fiction, Gothic fantasy and archaeological knowledge’.102 Regardless as to Budge’s true beliefs, we must temper Haggard’s representation of Budge, and Budge’s amicable dealings with Golden Dawn members Florence Farr and Edith Nesbit, with his outward-facing rationality when it came to supernatural matters: his criticism of Marie Corelli’s theory of a mummy’s curse as ‘bunkum’ in 1923 certainly gives the impression of a sceptical and level-headed scholar dismissive of rumour and hyperbole.103 We might compare this duality to Haggard’s insistence in the press following Lord Carnarvon’s (1866–1923) death that there were no malign forces at work in the tomb, a pragmatic and prosaic stance seemingly at odds with his participation in esoteric activities, his collaborations and friendships with mystics, records of supposedly supernatural events, and visions of what he proposed to be previous incarnations in ancient Egypt. Similarly, Carter’s insistent denial of the rumours of a mummy’s curse subsequent to the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun might be interpreted as at odds with his publication of accounts such as the supernaturally charged ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, and, most remarkably of all, evidence that, before the discovery, he had attended séances at the home of his patron, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon. While often overlooked, the memoirs of the 6th Earl of Carnarvon (1898–1987) devote a substantial amount of time to the superstitions of his father, an individual ‘who had always been interested in spiritualism and the study of the occult’.104 One passage recounts a séance held at Highclere Castle during the First World War which had put a temporary end to the archaeological digs, attended by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, his son, his daughter, Howard Carter, Lady CunliffeOwen (d. 1934) and Louis Steele.105 An incantation was spoken, and Cunliffe-Owen became entranced: ‘[o]ne moment [Cunliffe-Owen] had been her normal self, the next her features had become strained and white. Suddenly she started talking in an unknown tongue, which, to everyone’s astonishment, Howard Carter had pronounced as being Coptic’.106 According to Carnarvon’s son, ‘[a]fter a few minutes, she opened her eyes and resumed the conversation in which she had been engaged before going into a trance.’107 While Carnarvon’s spiritualist fancies were not highly publicised, after his death in Egypt sparked rumours of a pharaoh’s curse, the secretary of the London Spiritualist Alliance, G. E. Wright, spoke out, declaring that ‘Carnarvon was a member of this alliance for many years’, nevertheless asserting his certainty that his death was not the work of vengeful spirits.108 The 6th Earl of Carnarvon also documents communications from clairvoyants and spiritualists both before and after his father’s death.

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‘Upon the news of the discovery of the tomb’, he recounts, ‘Count Hamon [1866–1936] who was extremely well known in society circles as the clairvoyant, Cheiro [. . .] had written to my father warning him not to become involved.’109 Carter’s and Carnarvon’s views as to the veracity of what they witnessed in this séance are impossible to determine, and the fact that neither appears to have been particularly keen to discuss these events in public suggests a variety of reasons for their silence: respect for each other’s privacy, fear of ridicule, disbelief in the authenticity of what they had experienced, or, indeed, anxiety arising from what they may have perceived to be a genuine supernatural occurrence. Certainly, Carter was dismissive of members of the public contacting him regarding supernatural matters. During a period of terrible weather in Egypt, Carter received a telegram from Dublin dated 13 January 1923, reading: ‘If trouble continues reseal tomb pour milk oil wine at threshold.’110 This was followed by two letters from the author of the telegram, one Ella Young. In the first of these epistles, dated 8 April 1923, she iterates the message of the telegram, suggesting that ‘an offering of wine, oil & milk’ presented in a ‘ceremony performed by one skilled in such matters’ should not be considered ‘arrant nonsense’.111 In the second of these communications, dated 13 April 1923, she refers to an illness that Carter had purportedly contracted, and advises him not to employ the services of an ‘ordinary medium’, but someone ‘who is able to communicate with a Ka’, preferably ‘a native of Egypt’.112 Carter and Mace address the first two messages in The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, noting, somewhat facetiously, that ‘we had neither wine nor honey with us, so were unable to carry out the directions. In spite of our negligence, however, we escaped the further trouble.’113 Their derision can also be read in that A. C. Mace (1874–1928) kept a number of these items of correspondence in ‘an envelope labelled “letters from cranks”’, though that they were deemed worthy of keeping suggests their receipt was not met with utter scorn.114 Mace enjoyed telling ghost stories – Margaret Murray records a story of a dismembered mummy arm grabbing him by the throat in the night – but he, like Murray, always seemed to have provided a rational explanation (the mummy arm had, he stated, merely fallen off the shelf where it had been placed). That Egyptologists not only revelled in telling these tales (Murray observed in her autobiography that ‘I find that all good archaeologists are expected to have had at least one occult experience either personal or of somebody that he knows’) but that they seem to have particularly delighted in telling them to other Egyptologists, might

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be yet another way in which the Egyptological and the esoteric were ‘performed’.115 The most eccentric item of correspondence that Carter received is likely a letter from an individual claiming to be the reincarnation of Tutankhamun, stating, rather loftily, that he had ‘dormi pendant des siècles innombrelles’.116 Theosophical ideas, such as reincarnation, were – as we saw with Marie Corelli’s necklace, and in Haggard’s personal beliefs – so frequently associated with ancient Egypt. There was even joking speculation (before his death) that Carnarvon himself was the reincarnation of Tutankhamun: And his transmigrating soul – where is it now? Can it be that it’s surviving And in Lord Carnarvon striving To get back into the Game, no matter how?117

In these lines, the poet, Frances Wilson, gestures towards an everincreasing body of fiction which posited that those involved in Egyptology owed their knowledge not to study, but to a previous incarnation in ancient Egypt. This had been amassing since the nineteenth century, peaking with high-profile Egyptological discoveries: as Dominic Montserrat records, of the literature inspired by Flinders Petrie’s excavations at Amarna in the late nineteenth century and the discovery of a mummy (likely that of Akhenaten) in 1907, ‘[s]everal of the authors believe they can commune with Amarna mystically or have lived there in previous incarnations’.118 The phenomenon of Tutankhamun’s curse was exploited by numerous individuals eager to assert their own supernatural (or rational) authority, and the press only served to exaggerate these claims. The theory that dark supernatural forces were guarding the tomb was supported by ‘Professor Mardrus’, who resurfaces as an authority in several newspaper articles. In The New York Times, for example, it is reported that ‘Professor Mardrus, one of the most distinguished Egyptologists in France’, ‘says that [. . .] it is quite possible that the remarkable science of the ancient Egyptians may have provided a secret enabling them in some way to protect the sacred things’.119 Joseph Charles Mardrus (1868–1949) was not, in fact, an Egyptologist, but a physician and translator, most famous for his translation of the One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French (1894–1904). This version of the tales is noteworthy for Mardrus’s embellishments: he evidently had a taste for invention, and was, appropriately, well connected in literary circles, counting

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the American poet and novelist Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) among his close friends.120 He was, on a number of occasions, mistakenly introduced as an Egyptological authority; it was suggested, for example, that as ‘a well known [. . .] Egyptologist’ that he might contribute to T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) journal, The Criterion.121 Eliot sought the opinion of the anatomist and Egyptologist Grafton Elliot Smith (1871–1937) – incidentally another Egyptologist interested in spiritualism, being, for a short time in 1934, the first President of the International Society for Psychical Research – wishing to know ‘whether you know of him and whether you consider him to be a scholar of standing’. While Smith’s response is unknown, Mardrus never contributed to The Criterion. It is likely that Smith informed Eliot that Mardrus was not an Egyptological scholar; it is not inconceivable that Smith may have even related Mardrus’s involvement in fuelling the fires of mummies’ curses under expert guise. Of those who capitalised upon the widespread cultural fascination with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the Egyptologist-turned-journalist Arthur Weigall is certainly one of the few Egyptological scholars who explicitly embellished and promoted tales of the supernatural. In 1923, he published Tutankhamen and Other Essays, a volume which discusses the events of the dig as well as the rumours of a mummy’s curse that circulated after the death of Carnarvon. It is in this work that Weigall related his famous ‘curious prophetic’ statement relating to Carnarvon’s impending doom. Weigall records that upon the opening of the tomb’s inner doorway ‘Lord Carnarvon [. . .] made the jesting remark that they were going to give a concern down in the sepulchre. His words’, Weigall states, ‘distressed me, for I was absorbed [. . .] in my own thoughts, which were anything but jocular; and I turned to the man next to me, and said: “If he goes down in that spirit, I give him six weeks to live.”’122 Six weeks later, Carnarvon was near death. Weigall dismisses this as coincidence, downplaying his uncanny predictive abilities for effect. Accompanying this tiptoeing around the possible supernatural explanations for events surrounding the Tutankhamun excavations are other narratives (collected, somewhat misleadingly, under the term ‘essays’ along with more scholarly pieces) which take advantage of the public’s appetite for paranormal Egyptological stories. That Weigall offers mundane explanations for most of these phenomena corresponds with the sceptical persona he adopts in this volume and in his work more broadly, but the persistence with which such stories with supernatural implications appear and reappear in his work at the very least suggests that Weigall was aware of

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how popular these types of narrative were, and was willing to take advantage of this to bolster his sales figures. One of Weigall’s most intriguing stories in this collection brings together Egyptology, the supernatural and explicit notions of performance, something which is key to many of these esoteric engagements with Egyptology, its institutions, scholars and artefacts. Weigall recounts an incident in Egypt in the winter of 1908–9, involving himself, his wife Hortense (1880–1943), the American painter Joseph Lindon Smith (1863–1950), and Smith’s wife Corinna (1876–1965). Relating that the group ‘[s]ometimes [. . .] used to camp the night amongst the tombs’, a landscape in which ‘one could not well avoid the thought that the spirits of Egypt’s dead were at that hour roaming [. . .] amongst these illusory scenes’, Weigall records that Smith suggested that they act out ‘a ghostly drama [. . .] amongst the desert rocks’.123 They agreed that the play should be ‘based on the historical fact that the spirit of [. . .] Akhnaton was [. . .] denied the usual prayers for the dead, being thus condemned to wander without home or resting-place throughout the years.124 Weigall describes the roles (Akhenaten, his wife Queen Tiye and ‘the messenger of the gods, sent from the underworld to meet the royal ghost’), noting that he intended to assume responsibility for ‘the lights, prompting the actors, and doing the odd jobs’, and that ‘Mr. F. F. Ogilvie’ (1871–1930), ‘that painter of Anglo-Egyptian fame’, was to provide ‘some weird music at certain moments’ on his guitar.125 Costumes were made and Weigall wrote the script. His description of the first rehearsal sets the scene for supernatural happenings: ‘beneath the starlit heavens, the quiet, earnest diction of the two ladies, and the strange, hawk-like tones of our celebrated amateur [Smith], caused them to sound very mysterious and full of meaning’.126 A few days before the play was due to be performed in front of an audience of their friends, the group rehearsed: alas! hardly had Mrs. Smith finished her introductory lines, when she was struck down by agonising pains in her eyes, and in less than two hours she had passed into a raving delirium. The story of how at midnight she was taken across the deserted fields and over the river to our house at Luxor, would read like the narration of a nightmare. Upon the next day it was decided that she must be sent down immediately to Cairo, for [. . .] there were grave fears that she might lose her sight. On this same day my wife was smitten down with violent illness [. . .]. On the next morning, Mr. Smith developed a low fever, and shortly afterwards, I myself, was laid low with influenza. Mr. Ogilvie, returning

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to his headquarters by train, came in for a nasty accident in which his mother’s leg was badly injured. And thus not one of us could have taken part in the production of the play on the date announced.127

By this stage, the reader is primed to receive an otherworldly explanation for these events. ‘Many of our friends’, Weigall relates, ‘were inclined to see in our misfortunes the punishing hand of the gods and spirits of ancient Egypt.’128 That the play revolved around the ‘heretic’ Akhenaten may have suggested the wrath of the Egyptian pantheon; that it not only depicted historical figures but their spirits might also have been seen as a reason for supernatural entities to intervene. That this play was written and designed speaks to the creativity that so many individuals involved in Egyptology sought to express. Over the course of this chapter we have observed similar performances: Florence Farr and Olivia Shakespear’s plays, Mabel Collins’s Sensa based on her visions of the processions of ghosts of Egyptian priests, and Shaw’s damning critique of those with occult inclinations. In a parallel to the telling of these narratives, a wealth of stories, often orbiting particular artefacts, emerge not only from the mouths of occultists, but Egyptologists themselves. While it is difficult to establish genuine belief in some cases (Budge’s in particular), we might consider these two poles – the attempt to promote, or else suppress, tales of supernatural agency – as another kind of performance. Budge was evidently willing to share his stories of clairvoyance and ghostly encounters with Haggard (a friend with similar interests), but not with the press (when his professional reputation was at stake). In both cases he might be seen to adapt his performance for his audience, exaggerating the supernatural for effect behind closed doors, while maintaining a lofty and disapproving persona in public. This might suggest a reason behind Carter’s and Carnarvon’s silence when it came to their spiritualist activities. Ultimately, the participation of so many Egyptologists, occultists, writers and artists in these activities – if not in occult practices, then in the furthering of supernaturally inflected rumour – demonstrates more than the mere integration of Egyptological and esoteric cultures on a hitherto unrecognised scale. It also reveals the diversity and creativity of these narratives, collaborations and performances, as they took place in all manner of settings: in private conversations, between the covers of books, in the theatre, in the museum, and even amidst the ruin of Egypt’s ancient sites. Yet, as much as this dialogue was fruitful, it was also fraught, existing on one of several fault lines between professional and amateur Egyptological interest. At stake – depending on any one individual’s stance at any given point in their lives – was

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personal authenticity, professional success, influence and reputation. Such activities also colour how we remember these individuals, the stories they told, and the stories that were told about them, to this day.

Notes 1. H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life, ed. C. J. Longman, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), i, pp. 22–3. 2. Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, in Three Plays for Puritans (London: Constable, 1929), pp. 89–217 (p. 188). Caesar and Cleopatra was written in 1898 and first published in Three Plays for Puritans in 1901. 3. Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats, Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats: Letters, ed. Clifford Bax (London: Home & Van Thal, 1946), p. 60. 4. Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra, p. 187. 5. Ibid. p. 188. 6. Farr, Shaw and Yeats, Florence Farr, Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats: Letters, p. 10. This letter is dated 12 October 1896. 7. Most famously, the Golden Dawn used striped nemes headdresses, and black-and-white pillars painted with genuine Egyptian iconography copied from the Book of the Dead. 8. See Dennis Denisoff, ‘Performing the Spirit: Theatre, the Occult, and the Ceremony of Isis’, Cahiers victoriens et édourdiens, 80 (2014), https://journals.openedition.org/cve/1552 [accessed 2 January 2019]; Caroline Tully, ‘Celtic Egyptians: Isis Priests of the Lineage of Scota’, in Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination: Art, Literature and Culture, ed. Eleanor Dobson and Nichola Tonks (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 145–60. 9. Lynn Parramore, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in NineteenthCentury Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 112. 10. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 14 vols (New York: Scribner, 1996–2013), iii: ‘Autobiographies’, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (1999), p. 119; Josephine Johnson, Florence Farr: Bernard Shaw’s ‘New Woman’ (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1975), p. 80. 11. Ezra Pound, ‘Portrait d’une Femme’, in Personæ: Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), pp. 73–4 (p. 73); A. Walton Litz, ‘Florence Farr: A “Transitional” Woman’, in High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939, ed. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 8–90 (p. 86); Johnson, Florence Farr, p. 22.

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12. Mary K. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1995), p. 192. 13. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 192; Johnson, Florence Farr, p. 82. 14. London, University of London, Senate House, Florence Farr correspondence, AL203/5, Flinders Petrie to Florence Farr, 5 August 1897. 15. See Kathleen L. Sheppard, The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology (Plymouth: Lexington, 2013), pp. 174–5. 16. Margaret Murray, My First Hundred Years (London: William Kimber, 1963), p. 93. Petrie’s reluctance to engage with practices on the peripheries of scholarly Egyptology as witnessed by his colleagues is particularly interesting given his own initiation into Egyptian research: as David Gange notes, ‘Petrie was famously drawn to Egypt through the intertwining of the approach to biblical prophecy encouraged by the Plymouth Brethren, the sect in which he was raised, with the Pyramidology movement that sought divine meaning in the dimensions of the Great Pyramid’; see David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 49. 17. Sax Rohmer, Brood of the Witch-Queen (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1936), p. 42. 18. Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, trans. David Lorton (London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 1. 19. Steve Vinson and Janet Gunn, ‘Studies in Esoteric Syntax: The Enigmatic Friendship of Aleister Crowley and Battiscombe Gunn’, in Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, ed. William Carruthers (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 96–112 (p. 109). 20. Roger Luckhurst, ‘Science versus Rumour: Artefaction and CounterNarrative in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum’, History and Anthropology, 23.2 (2012), 257–69 (pp. 263, 264). 21. Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamen and Other Essays (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), p. 121. 22. Ibid. pp. 121–2. 23. H.D., Palimpsest (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926), p. 275. 24. H.D., Tribute to Freud, rev. edn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), p. 172. 25. H.D., Palimpsest, p. 266. 26. ‘Mummy Worship in London’, Daily Mail, 17 August 1906, p. 7; Shabti / pectoral / mummy-wrapping / mummy-mask / finger-ring / coffin / cartonnage / bracelet / human mummy, 1330–1250 bce (coffin), wood, sycamore fig wood, stone, plaster, linen, human tissue, human hair and gold, 165 cm (mummy), EA 6665, British Museum, London. 27. Murray, My First Hundred Years, p. 178. 28. Luckhurst, ‘Science versus Rumour’, p. 260. Others attempted séances at alternative locations suited to the contact of Egyptian spirits: James Burns (1835–94), the founder of the Progressive Library and Spiritualist

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29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

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Institution, and who merged the spiritualist periodicals The Medium and Daybreak, tried to conduct a séance in the Egyptian Court of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, but was unsuccessful due to the unwelcome attentions of other members of the public. The group speculated as to the possibility of holding séances inside the chambers of the Egyptian pyramids. See Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 204. Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn, p. 163. Caroline Tully, ‘Florence and the Mummy’, in Women’s Voices in Magic, ed. Brandy Williams (Stafford: Megalithica Books, 2009), pp. 15–23 (pp. 15–16). Tully argues convincingly that both objects were in fact involved in Farr’s contact with Egyptian spirits at different times. Nemkheftka’s identity is connected to a limestone statue, and Mut-em-menu’s, a mummy (then contained within a mismatched coffin). See Statue, c. 2450 bce, limestone, 134 cm, EA 1239, British Museum, London; and Mummy wrapping / human mummy, Roman period, linen, human tissue and gold, 41.5 × 170.2 × 26.5 cm, EA 6704, British Museum, London. Caroline Tully, ‘Walk Like an Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley’s Reception of The Book of the Law’, The Pomegranate, 12.1 (2010), 20–47 (p. 22). Tully, ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’, p. 21; Vinson and Gunn, ‘Studies in Esoteric Syntax’, p. 103. See Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, c. 680–70 bce, wood and gesso, 51.5 × 31 cm, A 9422, Egyptian Museum of Cairo, Cairo. Vinson and Gunn, ‘Studies in Esoteric Syntax’, pp. 103–4. While Gunn and Crowley were friendly at this time, it is unclear as to whether Gardiner knew for what purpose the translation was made. Aleister Crowley, ‘The Twins’, in The Winged Beetle (n.p., 1910), pp. 98–101. See Stela, 18th Dynasty, granodiorite, 146 × 90 × 29 cm, EA 826, British Museum, London. Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 232. Violet Tweedale, Phantoms of the Dawn (London: John Long, 1924), pp. 130–1. While Tweedale turns to Budge’s Egyptological publication to corroborate her beliefs, she nevertheless laments that while ‘[t]he man who desires to concentrate upon Egypt gathers round him the books written by the great Egyptologists, and he accepts their conclusions as expert’, this ‘does not go far enough. We have been given a wealth of hard, scientific facts, but the work of blending those facts with their occult significance has yet to be done’; p. 128. Christopher Frayling, ‘Sax Rohmer, Dr Fu Manchu and the Music Hall’, in Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer, ed. Phil Baker and Antony Clayton (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2015), pp. 83–122 (p. 94); Gary Lachman, ‘The Romancer of Sorcery:

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38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

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Writing the Sphinx Sax Rohmer and the Occult’, in Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer, ed. Phil Baker and Antony Clayton (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2015), pp. 203–18 (p. 208). Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), pp. 184–5. Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt, pp. 142, 183. Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky: The Woman and the Myth (New York: Putnam’s, 1980), p. 151. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 223. Gange notes that Birch even proofread Massey’s writings. Massey produced several texts focusing on ancient Egypt, including The Book of the Beginnings (1881), The Natural Genesis (1883) and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907). See, for example, A. C. Bryant and F. W. Read, ‘An Inscription of Khuenaten’, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, 15 (1893), 206–15. See Elizabeth d’Espérance, Shadow Land; Or, Light from the Other Side (London: George Redway, 1897); Eleanor Dobson, ‘The Sphinx at the Séance: Literature, Spiritualism and Psycho-Archaeology’, in Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Stratification in Literature, 1900–1930, ed. Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83–102. Estelle Roberts, Fifty Years a Medium (London: Corgi, 1969), p. 113; Nandor Fodor, Encyclopædia of Psychic Science (London: Arthurs Press, 1934), p. 27. See, in particular, the hieroglyphic symbols produced in the séances of the famed Scottish spiritualist medium David Duguid, reproduced in Hafed Prince of Persia: His Experiences in Earth-Life and Spirit-Life, Being Spirit Communications Received through Mr. David Duguid, the Glasgow Trance-Painting Medium, 2nd edn (London: James Burns, 1876), p. 72. A Danish translator wrote to Borderland, stating that he had ‘procured a photographic reproduction of the [hieroglyphic] inscription’, which he sent ‘to Mr. Valdemar Schmidt, Professor in Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen’. The professor, he relates, informed him that the writing was ‘false and nonsensical’ and that, while there had been an attempt to use Egyptological sources, ‘[t]he whole is very negligently done’; see ‘Mr. David Duguid’s Central, “Hafed.”’, Borderland, 3.3 (1896), 345. Walter A. Fairservis, ‘Introduction’, in Omm Sety, Omm Sety’s Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times, ed. Nicole B. Hansen (Chicago: Glyphdoctors, 2008), p. xv; Hanny el Zeini and Catherine Dees, Omm Sety’s Egypt: A Story of Ancient Mysteries, Secret Lives, and the Lost History of the Pharaohs (Pittsburgh: St. Lynn’s Press, 2007), p. 22; Jonathan Cott, The Search for Omm Sety: A Story of Eternal Love (London: Rider, 1987), p. 42. Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt, pp. 142, 183.

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48. David Glover, ‘Introduction’, in Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, ed. David Glover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. ix–xxii (p. xvii). 49. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 263. 50. For the significance of Zanoni to the Golden Dawn, see Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order, 1887–1923 (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972), pp. 31–3, 159. 51. Dorothy Eady, incidentally, also performed Egyptian rituals as part of her religious observances, as well as assuming the role of the Egyptian goddess Isis on stage. 52. Florence Farr and O. Shakespear, The Beloved of Hathor and The Shrine of the Golden Hawk (London: Croydon, 1926), unnumbered. 53. William Butler Yeats, ‘Egyptian Plays’, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 14 vols (New York: Scribner, 1996–2013), x: ‘Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written after 1900’ (2000), ed. Colton Johnson, pp. 62–3 (p. 62). 54. Ibid. p. 63 55. Ibid. 56. Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 54. 57. T. G. H. James, Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (London: Kegan Paul International, 1992), pp. 15–16, 30–3; Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 266. 58. Yeats, ‘Egyptian Plays’, p. 62. 59. Vinson and Gunn, ‘Studies in Esoteric Syntax’, p. 99. 60. Ibid. p. 108. 61. Mabel Collins, The Story of Sensa: An Interpretation of the Idyll of the White Lotus (New York: John W. Lovell, 1913), pp. 2–3. 62. Ibid. p. 7. 63. See Catherine E. Hindson, ‘Beautiful Pagans: When a Best-Selling Author and a West End Actress made a Spiritualist Performance’, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Josephine Guy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 301–20. 64. Kate Bowan, ‘Living between Worlds Ancient and Modern: The Musical Collaboration of Kathleen Schlesinger and Elsie Hamilton’, Journal of the Royal Music Association, 137.2 (2012), 197–242 (pp. 197, 225). Bowan records that in 1922 Schlesinger asked Howard Carter to send her the dimensions of flutes found in Tutankhamun’s tomb; see p. 230. 65. Gange, Dialogues with the Dead, p. 217. Haggard’s and Quatermain’s esoteric experiences frequently overlap: in She and Allan (1921), Quatermain relates how he visited a spiritualist medium, stating that ‘over the results [of that visit], or rather the lack of them, I draw a veil’; see H. Rider Haggard, She and Allan (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), p. 3. Haggard’s experiences of

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66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85.

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Writing the Sphinx séances are detailed (rather cryptically) in his autobiography: ‘spirits, as we understand the term’ were not responsible for the séance phenomena, he claimed; see Haggard, The Days of My Life, i, p. 39. H. Rider Haggard, The Ancient Allan (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), p. 2. Ibid. p. 30. Ibid. p. 5, 46. Though unlikely, it is possible that Carter (or else Percy White) derived his famous phrase from Haggard’s precedent. Ibid. pp. 35–6, 51. Ibid. p. 51. Ibid. p. 3. Ibid. H. Rider Haggard, The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard, 1914–1925, ed. D. S. Higgins (London: Cassell, 1980), p. 102 Haggard, The Days of My Life, ii, pp. 157, 167. Ibid. p. 167. Ibid. p. 169. Haggard wrote down the ‘imaginings’ ‘at the time’ and reproduced his notes in his autobiography ‘without alteration, as I think it best not to interfere with the original words’, hence the grammatical errors; p. 167. Ibid. p. 167. Ibid. p. 168. George Mills Harper, W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton: The Record of an Occult Friendship (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 93. Ibid. Ibid. As George Mills Harper records, Horton’s ‘letters to Henry Rider Haggard, in the collection at the University of Reading, suggest that he assisted Haggard with the research for The Moon of Israel: A Tale of the Exodus (1918)’; see Harper, W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton, p. 77, n. 22. H. Rider Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare: A Dream Story (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), p. 2. Ibid. The unusual nature of events is also emphasised by the short period of time in which this vision is supposed to have taken place. As the narrator notes, ‘I remember noticing afterwards that I could not have been long asleep. When I began to dream I had only just blown out the candle, and when I awoke again there was still a smouldering spark upon its wick’; p. 165. This detail contradicts the narrator’s previous claim that he may have had the dream just before he awoke in the morning. In The Ancient Allan, too, the hallucinations occur over a matter of seconds; see Haggard, The Ancient Allan, p. 293. Shawn Malley, ‘“Time hath no power against identity”: Historical Continuity and Archaeological Adventure in H. Rider Haggard’s She, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 40.3 (1997), 275–97 (p. 280).

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93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

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

111.

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Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare, p. 12. Ibid. pp. 16–17. Ibid. pp. 18–21. Haggard, The Days of My Life, i, p. 255. Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare, p. 22. Ibid. pp. 22–3. Godfrey Haggard, ‘Forward’, in Lilias Haggard, The Cloak that I Left (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951), pp. 15–21 (p. 21). Haggard’s biography written by his daughter was published in blue cloth with an ancient Egyptian motif stamped on the front in gilt. Ronald Ross, ‘To Rider Haggard from Ronald Ross (after reading The World’s Desire)’, in Lilias Haggard, The Cloak that I Left (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951), p. 7. Haggard, The Cloak that I Left, p. 186. Haggard, The Days of My Life, ii, p. 30. Ibid. pp. 30–1. Ibid. p. 31. El Zeini and Dees, Omm Sety’s Egypt, p. 15. Haggard, The Days of My Life, ii, p. 38, n. 1. Ibid. pp. 32, 33. Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, pp. 39, 47, 140; Haggard, The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard, p. 164. Budge told Haggard this story in 1919, after Haggard had written The Days of My Life, hence its omission in Haggard’s autobiography. Budge apparently defended the veracity of his claims: ‘[c]ross-examination quite failed to shake his belief upon this point, the statement of which he prefaced with the remark, “I am not mad.” Very curious!’ Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse, p. 206. London, British Museum, Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan Archive, AESAr.603 E.21, newspaper clipping, ‘British Museum Official’s Reply to Miss Marie Corelli’ [n.d.]. Henry Herbert, No Regrets: Memoirs of the Earl of Carnarvon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), p. 120. Henry Herbert, Ermine Tales: More Memoirs of the Earl of Carnarvon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 16. Herbert, No Regrets, p. 129. Herbert, Ermine Tales, p. 16. ‘Carnarvon’s Death Spreads Theories about Vengeance’, The New York Times, 6 April 1923, pp. 1, 3 (p. 3). Herbert, No Regrets, p. 120. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA ii.3.25. This communication was related in The Times; see ‘Tutankhamen’s Tomb’, The Times, 19 January 1923, p. 10. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA ii.3.23.

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112. Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA ii.3.24. 113. Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter, 3 vols (London: Cassell and Co., 1923–33), i (1923), p. 133. 114. Christopher C. Lee, The Grand Piano Came by Camel: Arthur C. Mace, the Neglected Egyptologist (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992), p. 101. 115. Murray, My First Hundred Years, p. 41. 116. ‘Slept for innumerable centuries’ (my translation). Oxford, University of Oxford, Sackler Library, Griffith Institute Archive, TAA ii.3.15. 117. Frances Wilson, ‘Tut-Ankh-Amen’, in Anthology of Newspaper Verse for 1923, ed. Franklyn Pierre Davis (Enid, OK: Frank P. Davis, 1924), pp. 46–7 (p. 47). 118. Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 140. 119. ‘Carnarvon’s Death Spreads Theories about Vengeance’, p. 3. 120. See Natalie Clifford Barney, Adventures of the Mind, trans. John Spalding Gatton (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Mardrus’s wife, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, had an affair with Barney. 121. T. S. Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, 5 vols (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2011–15), ii (2011), p. 539. 122. Weigall, Tutankhamen and Other Essays, p. 53. 123. Ibid. pp. 123, 124. 124. Ibid. p. 124. 125. Ibid. p. 125. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. pp. 125–6. 128. Ibid. p. 126.

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The symptoms of ‘Egyptomania’ subsided with the Great Depression and the tailing off of art deco style. A world war had stalled Egyptological excavations, and in the 1930s another global conflict approached. As I suggested in the introduction, it was the deaths of the giants of Egyptology, not new discoveries and breakthroughs, that dominated Egyptological reports in the newspapers across this decade. Flinders Petrie, who survived the 1930s, was to die on film in 1940, demonstrating the extent to which Egyptology was enmeshed in sensationalist fictions, even beyond the zenith of collaborative activity which has been the focus of this book. A museum archaeologist with Petrie’s name is the first victim of the reanimated mummy in the 1940 film The Mummy’s Hand; Petrie actually died in 1942 at the age of eighty-nine, less than two years after the death of his namesake was depicted on screen. This is a fittingly symbolic representation: the Egyptology and the creative cultures that it had encouraged, participated in and, at times, derided, spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was gone. The final chapters of the lives of these scholars were foregrounded and accompanied by those of many of the writers, artists and thinkers on whom this study has focused: Marie Corelli and E. Nesbit died in 1924, H. Rider Haggard in 1925, Mabel Collins in 1927. Although some survived them and would continue to weave Egypt’s charm into their works – for example, Ezra Pound who would return to Egyptian hieroglyphs in his ‘Rock-Drill’ cantos (1955), and H.D. in works including Helen in Egypt (1961) – this was not only the moment that marked the twilight of what has been termed the ‘golden age of Egyptology’,1 but also that of the greater literary and cultural web of intertextuality, collaboration and inspiration that had produced such a varied body of work across disciplines and artistic movements.2 The gilt that once flashed on the cloth covers of all manner of literature touching

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upon ancient Egypt was increasingly replaced by designs printed on paper dustjackets, as the popular fascination roused by this fabled civilisation itself began to fade. I opened this study with the embellished account of the moment in which Howard Carter peered through the darkness into the tomb of Tutankhamun, and, to a degree, this discovery – ‘the first truly modern media event’, as Michael North puts it – unprecedented in terms of the lavish treasures it brought to light, might be seen as the final upwelling of public fascination with Egypt before its decline in the thirties.3 Using the index to The Times, Donald M. Reid has demonstrated that from the discovery of the tomb (November 1922) until a few months after the death of Lord Carnarvon (April 1923), press coverage of the excavations was extensive.4 After this six-month burst, however, mentions of the dig began to wane. Another peak in interest occurred when excavation resumed in the winter of 1923; the following year, when the attentions of the Egyptologists were largely turned to conservation work of artefacts already removed from the tomb, there was little press interest; the winter of 1925 saw another peak with the unwrapping of Tutankhamun’s mummy, but even this renewed excitement quickly dissipated. ‘Carter’s six remaining seasons in the tomb’, Reid notes, ‘were only minimally reported’, and ‘[a]fter Carter completed his fieldwork in 1932 and published the third volume of his popular account in 1933, Tutankhamun nearly vanished from the news for almost thirty years.’5 [T]he rage for Tut’, North states, ‘was so intense’ that ‘it [. . .] burned itself out’.6 Mariana Jung notes of another famous milestone in Egyptian archaeology, the discovery of the Nefertiti bust by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt (1863–1939) in 1912, that this object has undergone a sea change: from model to archaeological object to modern-day cult image. The popularity of the Nefertiti bust has continued uninterrupted since the moment of her first exhibition; she has been elevated to an icon of Western culture and has since become deeply anchored in our cultural memory.7

While I would contest Jung’s implication of a consistent and continual cultural enthusiasm for ancient Egyptian objects, in line with Reid’s findings concerning the Tutankhamun excavations, her observation of the Nefertiti bust’s journey from its origins in the ancient world, its discovery in the modern world and subsequent afterlife as a ‘cult image’ rings true. This is also correct, I might add, of the

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funerary mask of Tutankhamun. The rediscovery of beautiful ancient things certainly leads to widespread appreciation of these objects and the ancient civilisation that produced them, but with this celebration comes mass production of images: saturation of the marketplace with iconography reproduced ad nauseam. In other words, it was the sheer mania whipped up by the awe-inspiring relics of ancient Egypt that caused this fervour to collapse under its own weight. H.D. wrote of the feeling of desensitisation brought on by overexposure to Egyptian imagery in Palimpsest (1926), observing that in Egypt ‘everything seems painted [. . .] cardboard’. The reason for this comparison is that anyone experiencing Egypt for themselves ‘seem[s] to have seen all this before [. . .] on everything, cigarette boxes, posters in the underground [. . .], magazine ads’.8 New photographs taken ‘this very morning’ reproducing ‘the very-present’, H.D. relates, are ‘already familiar to every reader of the Daily Mail in misty London. The very photograph, it seemed, that she had already boringly a hundred times turned from on the backs of other people’s newspapers on buses, or in the Metro’: ‘these symbols ran now through everything’.9 While it is true that the numbness H.D. expresses with regards to the widespread appropriation and reproduction of ancient Egyptian iconography and snapshots of archaeological sites did not result in a permanent or even particularly long-lived turn away from Egypt in her own work, her presence in Egypt in 1923, which evidently strongly influenced the events she depicts in Palimpsest, specifically binds this feeling of fatigue to the Tutankhamun excavations. While aspects of the literary and cultural climate across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have since proven impossible to shake, including tropes such as the mummy’s curse, with its origins in nineteenth-century fiction, and even narratives of reincarnation which underwent a similar literary vogue, in the 1930s the complex, multifarious and collaborative culture that these decades had nurtured could no longer thrive. Archaeological digs in Egypt were subject to ever-tightening restrictions.10 Cinema managers no longer had the funds to decorate their establishments in the extravagant Egyptian style that had proved so popular since the birth of moving pictures in the final years of the nineteenth century. The Victorian magical revival was waning: out of the ashes of the Golden Dawn came a number of successor organisations, most of the temples of which had closed or merely existed in state of dormancy by the end of the 1930s, and, after a peak in interest in spiritualism coinciding with the First World War, subsequent high-profile prosecution

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of fraudulent mediums and inaccurate predictions about the coming global conflict resulted in mass movement away from such beliefs.11 To a degree, the various conditions that led cultural engagement with ancient Egypt to flourish across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might be seen to have aligned in a fortuitous syzygy. This was a time in which museums attracted visitors from an ever-growing range of social backgrounds. Meanwhile, the nineteenthcentury’s ‘move towards a society’s “Being in Print”’ saw a revolutionary surge in the production and propagation of text, industrial advances that made books widely available for the mass consumer, and indeed, most crucially of all, ‘[t]he emergence of genuinely mass readerships’.12 Fiction grew ever more affordable as the Victorian triple-decker novel gave way to standalone volumes, and individuals who once relied upon libraries in order to access books on a temporary basis found themselves in a position to establish and cultivate their own permanent collections of literature. Even Egypt itself was no longer off-limits: a journey that had once been an expensive venture was transformed by companies such as Thomas Cook & Son, which made Egyptian tourism an inexpensive reality for thousands. Thus, the cultural conditions across these decades were such that a widespread and diverse interest in ancient Egypt could emerge and thrive. It took interested individuals, however, to participate in and propagate this culture, from the Egyptologists who drew upon literary genres to instil their work with a certain ‘marketability’, to those who drew upon Egypt’s (and Egyptology’s) contemporary glamour to augment the timeliness (and scholarly authority) of their own. These key players derive, as we have seen, from eclectic backgrounds, and their experiences and writings considered together are greater than the sum of their parts. Intricate webs of reading come to light: Egyptologists turned to fictional forms as authors turned to Egyptology. The culture of collaboration and mutual influence between writers and Egyptologists that emerges across the decades in question is undeniably rich, and even those with occult interests were not dismissed as quickly by the likes of Flinders Petrie and Wallis Budge as has often been reported. Indeed, at times there seems to have been an air of collegiality to such conversations, and even a degree of collaboration. There was still room for open disdain between Egyptologists and authors, however: their conversations, especially ones to which the press was privy, had the potential to be particularly sour, and some individuals (Marie Corelli at the forefront) were keen to present themselves as more spiritually in tune with ancient Egypt than the museum professionals with whom they locked horns. These

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animosities aside, the degree to which Egyptological information was popularised across this period (in Egyptological publications, but also in myriad creative cultural forms) meant that the imagery and mythology of ancient Egypt was readily accessible to those who sought it. Barbed statements appearing in the press from either side may even have encouraged the attentions of readers drawn to clashes between literary and Egyptological titans. Over the course of this study we have witnessed the packaging of Egyptological volumes as glitzy items drawing upon the textual and physical markers of a variety of literary (often fictional) genres, and the invention of fanciful stories around Egyptological artefacts themselves, blurring boundaries (in both cases) between fantasy and reality. We have observed the invasion of Victorian and early twentieth-century homes by hieroglyphs, including those within printed books, from Egyptological tomes through to children’s literature, historical fiction, mystery and romance novels. Subsumed into commodity culture more broadly, ancient Egyptian iconography became entwined with notions of dreaming and hallucination in the works of the literary and artistic elite as much as it became emblematic of sensual consumerist fantasy. Egyptology’s glamour was not merely a superficial device mobilised in order to sell cigarettes, perfume and cinema tickets (although it was undoubtedly incited in order to market these products among others), however, but made a deep and meaningful impact upon systems of individual and collective spirituality and belief in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inspiring acolytes to undertake research in museum settings, enlist experts in hieroglyphic translations, and to contribute to a vibrant literary and artistic culture that embraced Egyptology in its myriad forms. Despite subsequent revivals of ancient Egyptian style – notably in the 1960s – and the piquing of public interest in Tutankhamun coinciding with international tours of these exhibits in the 1970s, 2000s and 2010s, it was the decades bookending 1900 that not only saw a discipline of Egyptology develop and flourish, but which also nurtured a unique and unprecedented profusion of creative engagements with the field, leaving literary and artistic traces ready to be unearthed. It has thus been my intention in Writing the Sphinx to illuminate these cross-cultural connections, expose collaborations and conflicts, and provide a fuller picture of both the creativity of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptology and the Egyptological engagement of writers and artists. It is at these cultural synapses that, I believe, we might discover the most ‘wonderful things’.

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Notes 1. Rosalind Williams defines ‘the golden age of archaeology’ as ‘the period that saw Sir Arthur Evans’s work at Knossos, the discovery of Minoan Crete, Leonard Woolley’s discovery of the royal graves at Ur, and Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen’, a period which benefited from ‘the precision and thoroughness’ of ‘humanistic archaeological excavation’ during ‘the late 1870s and the 1880s’; Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 41–2. 2. The ‘Rock-Drill’ cantos contain several Egyptian hieroglyphs; see Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), pp. 632, 643, 646, 647, 651. With the ‘Rock-Drill’ cantos, Pound returned to Egypt with an increased interest in Egyptological accuracy: as Angus Fletcher notes, ‘the later Egypt is valued for its hieroglyphic language and for actual philosopher-kings like Kati’, demonstrating ‘the influence of his son-in-law, the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz’; see Angus Fletcher, ‘Ezra Pound’s Egypt and the Origin of the Cantos’, Twentieth Century Literature, 48.1 (2002), 1–21 (p. 15). De Rachewiltz writes of Pound’s use of hieroglyphs in Boris de Rachewiltz, ‘Pagan and Magic Elements in Ezra Pound’s Works’, in New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas, ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 174–97. 3. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 19. 4. Donald M. Reid, ‘Remembering and Forgetting Tutankhamun: Imperial and National Rhythms of Archaeology, 1922–1972’, in Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures, ed. William Carruthers (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 157–73 (pp. 159–60). 5. Ibid. pp. 165, 166. 6. North, Reading 1922, p. 23. Ancient Egypt proved passé in a number of contexts in the 1930s. Sémiramis, the work of Arthur Honegger and Paul Valéry, choreographed by Michel Fokine and featuring Ida Rubenstein in the title role, suffered as a result of its ancient Egyptian aesthetic: ‘the Egyptian style, so fashionable in 1910, was desperately outdated by 1934’; Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 160. 7. Mariana Jung, ‘100 years of the Discovery of Nefertiti’, in In the Light of Amarna: 100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery, ed. Friederike Seyfried (Berlin: Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2012), pp. 421–6 (p. 426). 8. H.D., Palimpsest (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926), p. 268. 9. Ibid. p. 271. 10. Alice Stevenson, ‘The Object of Study: Egyptology, Archaeology, and Anthropology at Oxford, 1860–1960’, in Histories of Egyptology:

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Interdisciplinary Measures, ed. William Carruthers (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 19–33 (p. 27). 11. For an account of the Golden Dawn’s decline, see Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order, 1887–1923 (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972). 12. Andrew King and John Plunkett, ‘Introduction’, in Victorian Print Culture: A Reader, ed. Andrew King and John Plunkett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1–8 (p. 1); Gerard Curtis, Visual Words: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 216, 227; Andrew McCann, Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 30.

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Appendix: ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’

I transcribe the ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’ written in a hand I believe to be Marie Corelli’s, held at Kresen Kernow, CF/2/768, and dated to c. 1910. It is part of a collection of documents pertaining to families in the St Austell area, once belonging to the solicitors Coode and French. I have, thus far, been unable to find a connection between Corelli and this firm. [Envelope] Eclipses (Classic) Barrie (Meredith) Story of an Egyptian Necklace A Forgotten Legend [p. 1] The Story of the Egyptian Necklace The following is the story of an Egyptian necklace, 4000 years old belonging to Miss Marie Corelli as told by herself. “When I published my first book,” said Miss Corelli, “the Romance of Two Worlds,” I was quite young, only about 17 or so. Soon after the book appeared & achieved the enormous success which it did, I received a long closely-written letter from a woman who I had never seen. I had heard of her vaguely – she was the wife of Père Hyacinth [sic] the priest who created such an excitement in Paris & throughout the whole of France in the middle of the last century & was expelled from the Church for marrying this lady. She was an American & I believe, very ugly, so heaven knows why he wanted to marry her! Well, anyway he did so, & it was this lady who wrote to me on the occasion of the publication of my book. She began her letter by stating that she had never seen me & knew nothing whatever about me except that I had written the Romance of Two Worlds. She was able, so she said, to tell the Past of people – not merely

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[p. 2] the Future, as many can, but the Past, the previous existence of the soul of a person in a different body. Though she had never seen me, or even thought of me, she had, she wrote, dreamt of me, had a vision concerning me. In a previous existence, she told me, I had been an Egyptian Princess – a very great & mighty princess of royal blood, & that when I died I had been preserved as a mummy. And this mummy was still in existence, buried under the sand somewhere in Egypt. On the breast of this mummy, according to her dream, was a necklace of great value, with a brass plaque on which was an engraving of my head. She wrote that some day, she was convinced, that necklace would again belong to its rightful owner. But, she warned me, in my previous existence as the Princess, there had been a man who had done me great harm – in fact, it was he who had killed me, though, at the same time he loved me with an extraordinary passion. This man, she informed me, was now existing again as I was & I should probably come across him in the course of my present life. if [sic] I did, I must on no account become friendly with him, & must keep a careful watch on his behaviour, or [p. 3] our meeting might again be fatal to me. With this warning, the letter ended, though, besides what I have told you there was a great deal more, that I cannot now remember. Well, I was more amused than anything else when I received this letter. I was very young, & did not believe in the previous existence of the soul as I do now, so put the letter away, & thought no more of it. Many years later, when my books & self had become well known throughout the world, I was staying up in London. Every year had brought forth its book, for, with no exaggeration, I wrote on the average a book a year, & I had many friends and admirers of my works. On this occasion I went out a great deal with Sir Charles [?Eastlake] a very great friend of mine, who was always very fond of taking me to theatres & suppers at restaurants etc. About this time there had been great excitement over the excavations at Philae, where several relics of great interest had been discovered, among others a female mummy. The mummy which belonged to Sir John Aird, had been kept at the museum in Cairo, but a necklace & a gold plaque found on the mummy’s breast

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Sir John had brought home. The plaque he gave to the British Museum, but the necklace he kept. [p. 4] Well my friend Sir Charles took me one day to the British Museum, to see this, & various things wh. had been brought home. At the museum, we encountered Sir John Aird, to whom Sir Charles introduced me. Sir John was, as a rule, a very shy, reserved man. But he took the most extraordinary fancy to me & walked me up & down all the afternoon. He told me about the necklace, & that his wife refused to wear it, because it had been on a mummy. I was very interested in it & I thanked him for the pleasant afternoon he had given me. But, you can imagine my astonishment, when, as I was about to leave Sir John, the latter said he would give me the necklace, which was worth thousands of pounds. Of course I said I could not possibly think of accepting it, at which he seemed very much upset & practically besought me to take it, repeating several times that I ought to have it. I at last managed to convince him that I should not dream of taking it. While I was up in London, I met Sir John again several times, & on each occasion he offered me the necklace, & entreated me to accept it. Each time assuring me that by right it belonged to me. I was immensely interested at the time, but after a while I left London, & in my busy life, I forgot all about it for some time. [p. 5] Some months later, I was staying down at Brighton & walking one afternoon along the sea front I met Sir Charles [?Eastlake]. He came up to me at once, & seemed very pleased to see me. “Oh Miss Corelli” he said at once, “you are the very person I was most wishing to see.” He then went on to say that Sir John Aird was ill – very ill – dying in fact & that he had asked Sir Charles to implore me to take the Egyptian necklace. The necklace, so Sir John said, had belonged to an Egyptian princess who had been killed four thousand years ago, & been dug up during the excavations at Philae. The necklace was attached to a gold plaque, with an engraving of a woman’s head on it, & Sir John was firmly convinced that the necklace should belong to me. In fact, – so Sir Charles gave me to understand the reason of Sir John’s illness, was my refusal to have the necklace & it would probably help him to recover it I took it, or it might very likely, cause his death if I refused. Sir John, Sir Charles said, wished the necklace to be presented to me on bended knee, as was due to my

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rank! Sir Charles implored me to accept the necklace, & almost seemed to think himself, like poor Sir John, that it ought to [p. 6] belong to me. I did not hesitate long, but said at once that I would have it. Sir Charles was overjoyed, went up to London by the next train & brought the necklace back with him. It was presented to me with due ceremony & I have had it ever since. I think it had brought me luck & regard it as a mascot but I would not wear it for anything. Sir John Aird recoved [sic] after I had accepted the necklace. That is the end of the real story of the Egyptian necklace, but there is a little incident in connection with it, which is interesting. A little while ago, I had Beerbohm Tree & Constance Collier staying with me, & I showed them the necklace. They were both immensely interested & Miss Collier exclaimed “What would I give to wear it the first night of Antony & Cleopatra!” I offered to let her wear it & promised to bring it up to London for her. So it was arranged. A few nights before the Play, i[sic] had a dream, in which a shadowy figure appeared to me warning me on no account to move the necklace from its present position. This happened three nights running. I wrote & told Miss Collier who said she w.d on no account wear the necklace, so it stayed in my room at Mason Croft, where it has remained ever since. [p. 7 – a small scrap of paper rather than a full sheet] Miss Corelli went to the first night of Antony & Cleopatra, & in once scene where Cleopatra was very passionate, Miss Collier put her hands to her neck, & tore the necklace she had on, to bits, & all the jewels real or unreal, rolled about the floor!

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Index

Acton, Harold, 77 advertising, 14, 15, 111, 148, 166, 177, 223 aestheticism, 14, 131, 148, 156, 158 Aird, John, 66, 79–80, 81, 82, 83 Akhenaten, 6, 209, 211, 212 Albert, Prince Consort, 101 Alcott, Louisa May, 149, 150, 151, 153 Allen, Grant, 30, 71 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 19n22, 114, 123, 183n88 ankh, 13, 118, 126, 135, 141n69 Ankhesenamun, 40, 111 Antinous, 77 Anubis, 126 Arensky, Anton, 172 Atlantis, 111 Auldjo, John, 65 aura, 8, 9 Austin, Jane, 82 Bakst, Léon, 173 Ball, Alec, 9 Ballets Russes, 172 Barbier, George, 161, 164 Barney, Natalie Clifford, 210 Bast, 124, 165 Bazin, André, 174 Bell, Archie, 39

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Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 3, 50, 51, 136, 148, 149, 157 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 174 Benson, E. F., 113–14, 137n7 Bernhardt, Sarah, 172 Bes, 142n84 Bible, 7, 59, 87n2, 134 Birch, Samuel, 101, 107, 128, 194 Blackden, M. W., 197 Blackwood, Algernon, 34, 62, 84 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 193, 195 Blind, Mathilde, 6, 154 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 2, 97, 104, 135, 136 Bonomi, Joseph, 101, 103, 104, 106 Book of the Dead, 36, 68, 69, 108, 126, 131, 159, 165, 177, 193, 195, 197 Boothby, Guy, 71, 143n99, 158 Borchardt, Ludwig, 222 Bradbury, Kate, 135 Bradley, Katharine see Field, Michael Breasted, James Henry, 48, 50 British Museum, 12, 61, 63, 64, 68, 83, 96n110, 108, 112–13, 128, 136, 137n2, 150, 159, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 202, 204, 206

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Brock, H. M., 202 Brodie-Innes, J. W., 195 Brodrick, May, 43 Brooke, Rupert, 135–6, 150–1, 153, 172 Browning, Robert, 3 Brugsch, Émile, 193 Brunton, Paul, 194 Budge, E. A. Wallis, 3, 6, 12, 15, 18n18, 41, 48, 68, 69–70, 95n93, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 122, 124, 132, 141n68, 159, 182n60, 187, 189, 193, 194, 198, 205–7, 212, 224 Bulaq Museum, 193 Bull, Ludlow, 6, 130 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 195 Burghclere, Winifred, 25 Burns, James, 214n28 Burton, Harry, 28, 30 Caesar, 155 Cairo Museum, 83, 128 Callendar, Arthur, 21 cannibalism, 149–50 Capart, Jean, 142n76 Carey, Henry, A., 6, 130 Carnarvon, Lord see Herbert, George Carter, Howard, 1, 3, 5, 11, 15, 21, 22, 23–4, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 33–5, 36–7, 39–40, 48, 50, 51, 59, 87n3, 119, 132, 135, 139n40, 146n125, 147, 148, 176, 188, 189, 197, 199, 200, 207, 208, 209, 212, 217n64, 222 ‘The Tomb of the Bird’, 33, 34–5, 36–7, 207 The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, 21–22, 23, 24, 25–6, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 40, 208

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cartouches, 103, 114–15, 119, 124, 125, 126, 134, 139n40, 140n48, 171 Champollion, Jean-François, 98, 99, 100, 101, 106, 114, 115, 135, 136, 142n76 Cheiro, 208 Cheops, 133, 165 children’s literature, 1, 6, 25, 50, 108, 110–13, 225 Chopin, Kate, 158 Christianity, 59, 196, 200 Christie, Agatha, 6, 36, 52n10 cigarettes, 14, 147, 148, 157–8, 165, 177, 224 cinemas, 14, 175–7, 224 Cleopatra VII, 80, 114, 115, 118, 154–5, 161, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 186–7, 195 Cleopatra’s Needle, 198 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 135 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 155 Colette, 171–2, 174 Collier, Constance, 80–1, 82 Collins, Mabel, 197–8, 212, 221 Cook, Thomas, 2, 41, 43, 66, 95n93, 224 Cooper, Edith see Field, Michael Corelli, Marie, 12, 60, 62, 65, 66–70, 71, 72, 73–4, 75, 76, 78–86, 87, 188, 191, 207, 209, 221, 224 Ardath, 69 Free Opinions, Freely Expressed, 69 The Life Everlasting, 69 A Romance of Two Worlds, 70 The Sorrows of Satan, 12, 68, 72–3, 74, 83

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Index

The Soul of Lilith, 69 Ziska, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73–4, 85, 171 Crowley, Aleister, 15, 170, 189, 192–3, 194, 195, 197, 198 Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 101, 104, 106, 175, 215n28 Cunliffe-Owen, Helen, 207 curse, 33, 37, 61, 82, 84, 85, 88n11, 188, 206, 207, 209, 210, 223 dance, 14, 73, 148, 149, 164, 170–2, 173–4 Davies, Nina de Garis, 107 Davies, Norman de Garis, 107 de Morny, Mathilde, 171–2 De Quincey, 148, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158 De Rachewiltz, Boris, 226n2 decadence, 12, 76, 101, 148, 156, 157, 158, 161, 164, 169, 170 d’Espérance, Elizabeth, 194 detective fiction, 3, 6, 25, 52n10, 63, 117–18, 130–1 Dickens, Charles, 153 Doolittle, Hilda see H.D. Douglas, Theo, 95n95 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 5, 34, 36, 84, 85 dreams, 11, 12, 14, 71, 72, 81, 152, 158, 165, 170, 174, 199, 200–1, 202, 224; see also hallucination; visions drugs, 14, 149, 156, 157, 177, 199, 200; see also opium Du Camp, Maxime, 77, 146n126 Duguid, David, 216n45 dust, 14, 99, 148–9, 150, 151, 153, 171, 172, 177, 178

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259

Eady, Dorothy, 3, 194, 206 Ebers, Georg, 6, 19n22, 45, 48, 50, 62, 139n39 Edwards, Amelia, 3, 6, 14, 41, 91n44, 135, 151–2, 172 Egypt Exploration Society, 3, 6, 41, 59, 197 Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, 175 El Mowardi, Ahmed Soliman, 165 Elcock, Howard K., 36 Eliot, George, 1 Eliot, T. S., 38, 168, 210 esotericism, 13, 15, 134, 188, 189–90, 192, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212 Farr, Florence, 15, 186, 187–8, 192, 193, 195–6, 197, 201, 206, 207, 212 Field, Michael, 131, 156, 170 film, 14, 148, 174–5, 177, 221, 223 First World War, 221, 223 Flaubert, Gustave, 77, 99, 135, 173 Fokine, Michel, 183n88 fonts see typefaces Fouquet, Daniel Marie, 145n109 France, Anatole, 171 Freeman, R. Austin, 36, 63–4, 117–18, 130 Freud, Sigmund, 191, 195 Gance, Abel, 174 Garden, Mary, 168, 169 Gardiner, Alan, 5, 40, 107, 132, 193 Gautier, Théophile, 77, 156, 172, 181n50, 183n88 Gayet, Albert, 171

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George IV, 104 gender, 67, 69, 171 genre, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11–12, 22, 25, 27–8, 33, 37, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 130, 136, 224, 225 Glanville, Stephen, 6, 25–6, 40 gold, 11, 14, 21, 22–3, 30, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 72, 79, 81, 82, 83, 117, 127, 156, 157–8, 164, 165, 170, 171, 173 Gothic, 1, 25, 30, 33, 34, 37, 50, 51, 148, 189, 207 Goyne, Richard, 39 Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, 176 Great Pyramid of Giza, 133, 149, 192–3, 194, 214n16 Great Sphinx of Giza, 66, 126, 164, 166 Greiffenhagen, Maurice, 116, 140n59 Grenfell, Bernard, 99 Griffith, Francis Llewellyn, 124 Griffith, George, 17n15, 71, 133 Guimet, Émile Étienne, 171 Gunn, Battiscombe, 15, 189, 193, 197 H.D., 5, 18n18, 191, 221, 223 Hadrian, 77 Haggard, H. Rider, 1, 5, 6, 27, 36, 62, 64, 68, 83, 84, 85–6, 87, 111, 114–15, 118–21, 126, 128, 135, 153, 189, 199, 200–1, 202, 204, 205–6, 207, 209, 212, 221 The Ancient Allan, 199–200 Ayesha: The Return of She, 140n59, 141n69

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Cleopatra, 64, 114, 115–16, 118, 119–20, 140n59, 154, 164, 202 The Days of My Life, 200, 204, 205 The Ivory Child, 118, 199 King Solomon’s Mines, 62, 120 The Mahatma and the Hare, 201–2, 204 Moon of Israel, 17n15 Morning Star, 118 Mr. Meeson’s Will, 141n67 The Queen of the Dawn, 115 She, 64, 71, 119, 120, 121, 122, 140n59, 141n71, 195, 202 She and Allan, 140n59 ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’, 9 The World’s Desire, 111, 140n59, 206 Hall, Henry Reginald, 69 Hall, Lindsley, 145n113 hallucinations, 11, 13, 14, 147, 148, 149, 153, 156, 157, 174, 177, 199, 201, 224; see also dreams; visions Hamilton, Elsie, 198 Hassan, Selim, 194 Hathor, 164, 193, 196 Hatshepsut, 40, 173 Hearne, Lafcadio, 183n88 Herbert, Evelyn, 21 Herbert, George, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, 21, 22, 23, 50, 69, 70, 84, 85, 119, 176, 207, 208, 209, 212 Herbert, Henry, 6th Earl of Carnarvon, 207–8 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 15, 111, 157, 186, 187, 191, 192, 195, 197, 201, 202, 207, 223

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Index

Herodotus, 7, 133 Hetzel, Pierre-Jules, 41 Hichens, Robert Smythe, 6, 58n93, 157 hieroglyphs, 13, 82, 98–101, 103, 105–7, 108, 110–12, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120–2, 124, 125–6, 128, 129–30, 131, 132–3, 136, 148, 159, 166, 168, 174, 224 Hoffman, Maud, 197 Holland, Clive, 85 Home, Daniel Dunglas, 36 horror, 16, 33, 158, 175 Horton, W. T., 201, 202, 204–5 Horus, 117, 118, 121, 164, 193 Houdini, Harry, 134, 193 Hunt, Arthur, 99 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 161, 164, 169

261

Keats, John, 63 Kipling, Rudyard, 5, 119 Kircher, Athanasius, 20n38, 138n17

illustration, 8, 9, 11, 27, 30, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 50, 51, 65, 101, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 126, 140n59, 161, 201, 202, 205 imperialism, 2, 27, 30, 36 Imseti, 165 Isis, 63, 65, 72, 88n13, 108, 118, 121, 154, 164, 165, 172, 193, 199, 201, 217n51

Lalique, René, 76 Lang, Andrew, 111, 114, 121, 122, 205 Lansing, Ambrose, 6, 130 Le Gallienne, Richard, 159, 161, 164–5 Leadbeater, C. W., 159, 188 Lee, Emma Redington, 48 Lepsius, Karl Richard, 43, 107 Lexa, František, 173 Lexová, Irena, 173 Lindsay, Vachel, 177 lithography, 50, 51, 101 Lodge, Oliver, 201 Loftie, William John, 120, 121–2, 126, 128 Longman, C. J., 206 Lorimer, George Horace, 144n106 Lorimer, Norma, 6, 18n18, 137n7 Loti, Pierre, 179n12 Lovecraft, H. P., 134 Loyson, Emilie, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 81 Loyson, Hyacinthe, 70–1 Lythgoe, Albert, 130 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 65

jewellery, 3, 12, 14, 64, 66, 71, 72, 73–83, 85, 93n79, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 135 Jones, Edward Burne, 123 Jones, Owen, 101, 104 Jung, Carl, 155

Mace, A. C., 5, 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 32, 37, 40, 51, 132, 208 The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, 21–2, 23, 24, 25–6, 32, 36–7, 40, 208 Mackay, Eric, 93n77

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magic, 3, 13, 14, 15, 16, 61, 62, 65, 83, 86, 88n11, 108, 110, 113, 118, 121, 123, 127, 134, 153, 156, 175, 189, 191, 193, 206, 223 Manning, Samuel, 41, 50 Mardrus, Joseph Charles, 209–10 Mariette, Auguste, 6 Marsh, Richard, 143n99, 149–50 Martineau, Harriet, 59 Maspero, Gaston, 18n18, 44, 70, 124, 127, 131, 132, 205 Massenet, Jules, 168 Massey, Gerald, 193–4 Mathers, Moina, 187, 199 Mathers, Samuel Liddell MacGregor, 187, 199 Meisenbach, Karl, 116 Mélida, Arturo, 45 Mélida, Jose Ramón, 45 Metropolitan Museum, 6, 28, 130–1, 133 modernism, 7, 14, 48, 173 Moore, Marianne, 63 Moreau, Gustave, 161, 164, 165, 176 movie theatres see cinemas moving pictures see film mummia, 149, 150 mummies, 4, 8, 12, 30, 33, 59, 61, 63, 64, 71, 72–3, 74, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 94n81, 96n110, 117, 119, 122–3, 128, 136, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 156, 157, 170–2, 174, 175, 177, 191–2, 193, 199, 209, 221, 222 mummy’s curse see curse Murray, Alexander Stuart, 68 Murray, Margaret, 3, 5, 188, 189, 192, 197, 208

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Murray, Thomas Douglas, 192 Musée du Louvre, 126, 173 museums, 2, 61, 174, 192, 224 mystery, 34, 36, 37, 130, 225 Naville, Édouard, 126, 131 Nefertiti, 121, 222 Nesbit, Edith, 1, 6, 18n18, 108, 110–11, 113, 188, 207, 221 Neues Museum, Berlin, 103–4 Newberry, Percy, 197 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 173 Nitocris, 133 Norwich Castle Museum, 96n110 Nut, 193 obelisks, 13, 27, 44, 45, 115, 134–5, 156, 165, 195 occultism, 3, 66, 67, 70, 159, 188, 192, 193, 195, 197, 198, 201, 202, 205, 207, 212 opium, 14, 147, 148, 154, 155, 156, 157 Orientalism, 4, 25, 45, 65, 97, 106, 155, 164, 170, 171, 173 Osiris, 94n85, 118, 154, 173, 193 Oxley, William, 194 Paget, Dorothy, 196 Parker, Gilbert, 58n93 perfume, 147, 148, 158, 159, 161, 164–5, 168–9, 174, 177, 224 Perret, Auguste, 173 Petrie, Flinders, 3, 14, 43, 94n88, 124, 131, 132, 135, 139n39, 152, 188, 209, 221, 224 Phillips Brothers, 79–80 photographs, 8, 11, 25, 28–9, 32, 36, 40, 51, 223

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Index

Poe, Edgar Allan, 77, 99–100, 111, 115 Pollock, Walter Herries, 122 Popham, Arthur Ewart ‘Hugh’, 150 Pound, Ezra, 7, 128, 170, 187, 221 Poynter, Edward, 19n22 psychical research, 91n46, 201, 210 Ptah, 201 pyramids, 13, 27, 45, 49, 70, 84, 122, 134, 135, 136, 154, 161, 165, 175, 178, 202, 205, 215n28; see also Great Pyramid of Giza Ra, 127 Rameses II, 165, 201 Rameses IV, 165 Rawlinson, George, 124 Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond, 115 reincarnation, 3, 15, 71, 72, 73, 76, 81, 82, 83, 86, 168, 194, 199, 200–1, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 223 Reisner, George, 145n113 religion, 3, 36, 45, 60, 65, 114, 187, 189, 192, 195, 200, 206 Renouf, Peter le Page, 101, 126, 131, 193 Rhymers’ Club, 157, 159 Rohmer, Sax, 6, 15, 124, 125, 126, 127–8, 189, 193 romance (genre), 1, 25, 27, 34, 37, 129, 130, 161, 177 Rosetta Stone, 13, 97, 98, 117, 133 Ross, Robbie, 77 Ross, Ronald, 205 Rubinstein, Ida, 172, 173 Sackville-West, Vita, 38

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263

Salome, 161, 164, 168, 170, 173, 176 Sardou, Victorien, 172 Sayce, Archibald Henry, 87n3 Schlesinger, Kathleen, 198 Schliemann, Heinrich, 44, 139n39 Schofield, Lily, 111–13 Schwob, Marcel, 157 Seb, 193 Sekhmet, 190–1, 193 Set, 124, 125, 126, 128, 193 Sety, Omm see Eady, Dorothy sexuality, 12, 16, 61, 76, 77, 149–51, 152, 164, 165, 171, 177 Seymour, G. L., 30 Shakespear, Olivia, 195, 212 Shakespeare, William, 80, 168, 169 Shaw, George Bernard, 7, 154, 186, 187, 195–6, 197, 212 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 63, 195 Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, 175 Sladen, Douglas, 6 Smith, Grafton Elliot, 18n18, 37–9, 210 Smith, Joseph Lindon, 211 South Kensington Museum see Victoria and Albert Museum sphinxes, 38, 106, 122, 155, 156, 165, 175, 186–7; see also Great Sphinx of Giza spiritualism, 15, 36, 65, 66, 67, 186, 187, 192, 193, 194, 195, 201, 207, 210, 212, 223–4 Stead, W. T., 66, 192 Stoker, Bram, 1, 5, 7, 40, 71, 74–6, 94n81 The Jewel of Seven Stars, 74–6, 94n81, 195

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264

Writing the Sphinx

Strauss, Richard, 168 Stuart, Bertha, 58n93 Suez Canal, 2 symbolism (movement), 14, 101, 148, 157 Symons, A. J. A., 93n79 tattoos, 14, 117, 118, 164 Taylor, Charlotte Bryson, 30, 58n93, 158 Thaïs, 168, 171 Theosophy, 65, 66, 67, 159, 189, 193, 197, 198, 206 Thoth, 121 Tiye, 119, 121, 211 tourism, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 36, 43, 48, 60, 66, 135, 136, 165, 190, 191, 224 Turner, Reggie, 77 Tutankhamun, 1, 5, 11, 21, 33, 34, 37, 38–9, 40, 48, 59, 65, 69, 70, 84, 85, 111, 119, 120, 131, 132, 133, 139n40, 145n113, 146n125, 166, 171, 176, 181n50, 197, 207, 217n64, 207, 209, 210, 222, 223 Twain, Mark, 137n12 Tweedale, Violet, 193 typefaces, 45, 48, 49, 98, 101, 107, 132 unlucky mummy, 33, 61, 112–13, 149, 191, 206 Van Dine, S. S., 6, 130–1 Verdi, Giuseppe, 6 Verne, Jules, 41 Victoria, 101 Victoria and Albert Museum, 79, 80

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visions, 15, 147, 149, 153, 157, 197, 200, 201; see also dreams; hallucinations von Carlberg, Elsa, 172 Vyver, Bertha, 74, 80–1, 83 Wakeling, T. G., 86–7 Wallis, Thomas, 173 Walpole, Hugh, 93n79 Warner, Charles Dudley, 99 Warner, William Henry, 18n18 Waugh, Evelyn, 25 Wedgewood, 105–6, 123 Weigall, Arthur, 1, 5, 6, 34, 37, 52n11, 99, 190–1, 210–12 Wells, H. G., 5 White, Percy, 5, 24, 25, 33, 36, 53n14 Whymper, Edward, 115–16 Wiedermann, Alfred, 198 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 5, 12, 76–9, 83, 156–8, 174 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 77, 78, 156, 157, 180n43 ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, 77 Salomé, 170, 172, 174, 176 The Sphinx, 77, 158 A Woman of No Importance, 180n43 ‘The Young King’, 78 Wilde, William, 77 Wilhelm II, 43 Wilkinson, John Gardner, 124 Williams, Tennessee, 133 Williamson, A. M., 128–9 Williamson, C. N., 128–9 Wilson, J. Arbuthnot see Allen, Grant Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy, 155 Woodville, R. Caton, 116 Woolf, Virginia, 7, 38, 171

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Index

Wordsworth, William, 63 World Museum, Liverpool, 96n110 Wright, Willard Huntington see Van Dine, S. S.

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265

Yeats, W. B., 7, 186, 187, 189, 196, 197, 201 Yellow Book, The, 158 Young, Thomas, 99, 114, 140n48 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 18n15

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