Aspiration and Actuality: George Eliot’s Middlemarch

Middlemarch, 1872, by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Edition I read: Chatto and Windus, 1950.

Dorothea finds Casaubon dead, from a painting by W. L. Taylor.

In her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot describes a culture and era which was for her, and her original readers, recent and familiar. Although it is a work of Victorian-era artistic conscience, Middlemarch’s focus is in fact on the epoch immediately preceding Victoria’s, and details in panorama the subtle shifts of British social life. The novel is defined by a constant dialogue of dichotomous actions and reactions, and how they might manifest and conflict in forms individual and communal. “There must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,” pronounces Dr. Tertius Lydgate, one of Eliot’s protagonists, and his medical metaphor identifies Eliot’s own method of contemplating the human world, whether observable in the clash between private ambition and social role, emotional passion and restraining roles, settled custom and new possibilities, and a multitude of other oppositions. These forces work upon each other within the psychology of Eliot’s heroes, and on the field of Middlemarch society, always resolving with complex, often costly, but also necessary compromises.

Middlemarch is a curious work insofar in that it’s a work of great expanse – and length, dear reader! – and yet it retains a personal intimacy comparable to Jane Austen’s works, as it charts several specific stories engaging a select group of characters, whose fates entwine in overt and subtle fashions: the first major character, and the dominant figure in the book, is Dorothea Brooke, the niece and ward of Mr Arthur Brooke. Contrasted by her perceptibly more sensible, and yet actually, utterly uninteresting, conformist sister Celia, Dorothea, at the conclusion of her teenage years, pours both her natural adolescent fervour and frustrated intellectual yearnings firstly into a passionate religiosity, and subsequently into an ill-advised marriage with Edward Casaubon, a middle-aged cleric and scholar whose object of a life of intellectual labour is a tome that resembles something not so far from Frazier’s The Golden Bough and the works of Joseph Campbell, a key to the shared roots of all mythologies. But Casaubon, an heir who’s never struggled for a moment in his life, has grown stale in mind and emotions, his learning proves to be general pedantry, and the image of intellectual greatness that makes Dorothea smitten with him fades in the instant she marries him and therefore can’t escape her poor choice.

Dorothea soon enough finds, without quite perceiving it, a more fitting and attractive beau in the form of Will Ladislaw, a young scholar and artist who’s benefited, without much mutual respect or gratitude, from Casaubon’s patronage: Casaubon’s fortune came to him thanks to Will’s mother being disinherited for making her own way in the world as an actress, and eventually marrying a Polish immigrant. Will and Casaubon’s characters as well as social positions and ideals of vitality are highly divergent, and Will and Dorothea’s unconscious magnetic attraction hardens Casaubon’s dislike of his nephew, and as his and Dorothea’s marriage calcifies, his flashes of jealousy and pettiness concord with a quickening physical rot that overtakes him. This romantic triangle is contrasted by the swift marriage of seemingly well-matched ages and physiognomies, as Tertius Lydgate, a young reform-minded doctor who makes waves in Middlemarch with his haughty disregard for settled habits, marries Rosamond Vincy, the beautiful, spoilt daughter of the new mayor of Middlemarch, mill proprietor Mr Vincy.

Rosamond and Lydgate’s marriage proves however just as disastrous as the Casaubons’, for Lydgate and Rosamond absolutely fail to deal with each other during a fiscal crisis early in their marriage, and Lydgate, far from realising his genuine ambitions to become a pioneer of medical science, gives in to his wife’s wilful dictates. Rosamond’s brother Fred, introduced as a callow gadabout who’s flunked out of the university studies he was undertaking in order to join the gentlemanly clergy as was his father’s dream, expects a large inheritance from a perverse aged relation, Peter Featherstone. But when that expectation is dashed in a series of mordantly hilarious circumstances, he’s humiliated in the eyes of his lifelong love Mary Garth, who’s been working for Featherstone, since her manager father Caleb had fallen on lean times, an humiliation compounded by the fact Caleb has to then pay Fred’s debts. Lydgate’s patron in Middlemarch is the unctuous, much-disliked but powerful banker Nicholas Bulstrode, whose investments and charity works are always designed to further the influence of his elevated Protestant theology.

George Eliot, in a sketch by Samuel Lawrence for a lost portrait

The historic milieu that Middlemarch recounts is defined by its transience, between the Regency and Napoleonic Wars, and the ascension of Victoria, with the First Reform Bill, the coming of the railways, medical development and other signifiers of oncoming change often preoccupying the characters. None of these however arrive within the novel’s body, which is defined by the ineluctable tension between new and old, institutional and transformative. The historical nature of Eliot’s enquiry is repeatedly noted, through phases like “in those days” and “in those ante-reform times.” The landed class, depicted through figures like Tory stalwart Sir James Chettam, dithering Mr Brooke, a would-be reform candidate for Parliament who neglects his tenants, and eccentric old Peter Featherstone, who uses money to taunt and goad relatives and yet finally leaves it all to an illegitimate son, is still enshrined as the essential power base, a hegemony the Bill promises to at least partly shake, in favour of manufacturing and mercantile forces, which have already begun to take up the mantle in local governance, as embodied by Mr Vincy. Yet the elevated bourgeoisie still yearns, as illustrated by Rosamond Vincy and also in Mr Vincy’s hopes for his son Fred, to ingratiate the aristocracy and rise to positions associated with that caste, such as the clergy.

Within this social landscape, individual human dramas are defined by the constant push and pull of aspiration and actuality, and the way one can alter the other. “It is…the community that preserves…an inherited wisdom about the human condition…it is the medium in which the individual lives, and shapes his destiny,” as R. T. Jones put it in his 1970 survey of Eliot’s work, and Middlemarch is defined by a contrapuntal reflection between the acts of its heroes and the reactions of social choruses. The major protagonists are defined by compliance to a personal dominant honour and circumspection, enforced by condition and custom but also quite often welling from a deep interior conflict between desired end and inner scruple. Constantly reiterated throughout the novel is the fact that characters with new-fangled outlooks and notions are all the more conscious of behaving in a fashion correct both in the eyes of others and within themselves. Thus Will, a young man with a free-ranging artistic, political, and philosophical mind, is rigidly dismissive to the legacy offered him stemming from disreputable business dealings, and courtly in the extreme towards his forbidden object of desire, Dorothea, after she has been widowed. Dorothea, with her fulsome ambitions to work for social good and intellectual fulfilment, initially expresses her longings through a marriage that proves disastrous, and channels them into religious dogmatism, abnegation, and scholarship that is retrograde, maintains a determination to live up to her choice.

The institution of marriage, as ever a most cherished and troubling form of social bondage, is rigorously examined, as the unions in Middlemarch drive much of the plot and create various nexuses of clashing values. Dorothea’s yearnings founder upon Edward Casaubon’s empathetic impotence, Lydgate’s privilege-formed high-mindedness falls prey to the clasping middle-class egotism of his new wife Rosamond, and the romance of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy is constantly staved off by her insistence on Fred’s discovering a level of independence. Such romances and unions are at the forefront of the novel, but the supporting cast teems with odd examples of mismatched temperaments and socially iniquitous partnerships, with such loaded examples as Mr and Mrs Bulstrode, locked in a marriage defined by dishonesty and disappointment although it had seemed founded in civil security and mutual religious certainty, and one that proves to have a final integrity far greater than some others.

George Henry Lewes as a young man, by Anne Gliddon

In this way marriage, the binding of distinct personalities, considered far beyond mere expression of immediate personal desires, becomes vehicle for the attendant concerns of money, property, and propriety. Dorothea’s first husband, Casaubon, seems a personification of the unpleasant qualities Mary Garth associates with the genteel clergy, and yet he beguiles Dorothea at first with a vision of towering, unimpeded intellect and labours of great spiritual worth. His increasingly aloof, controlling intent exacerbates exactly the situation he fears, and he becomes, whilst not altogether unsympathetic, a kind of fossilised example of a waning, inarguable patriarchal authority rooted in possessor’s privilege, and religious and scholarly orthodoxy. Rosamond Vincy becomes avatar of corrosive self-interest and firm, insensitive willpower, although, ironically but logically, as a pretty and respected native of Middlemarch, none of the same level of social disapproval falls on her as it does on assailed outsiders like her husband and Ladislaw.

Lydgate, before marrying her, has pretences to achieving greatness in medical circles as a researcher, a pretence gradually ruined by debt, the wiles of his wife, and his own guardedness, so he settles for being merely a “successful man,” an amusing antithesis, but also a reduction that seems tragically unfair. And yet Lydgate conforms entirely to the expectations of family and society he imposes on himself in marrying Rosamond. The inability of individuals to escape such binds of imposition, for which marriage is both common example and neat metaphor, is something both Lydgate and Dorothea repeat. Both do their best to please their partners through support and capitulation, but both face obstacles that cannot be surmounted, stoked by Lydgate and Casaubon’s shared trait of intense, elevated pride that exacerbates rather than leavens their situations. Lydgate himself, although desiring to define himself an explorer of new medical worlds, and brusquely dismissive of entrenched interests and received thinking within his professional sphere, is unimaginative and inflexible, even innately conservative, beyond it, and is weak in the world in a way that is described long before he marries.

For her part, Dorothea’s ambitions to find herself a niche in which action and engagement, with both a factual world of people in need and with a high-minded life, and desire to become part of a great man’s life and therefore expand her own moral and intellectual horizons, is expressed through marriage, a path to self-fulfilment that sees her first subordinated to Casaubon’s increasingly sinister prerogative, for his scholarship is, in spite of the hoped-for confluence of religious prerogative and real-world benefit, entirely divorced from any useful end. She then finally fades into social inconsequence whilst Will rises to fame with the aid of her private income. Her marriage to Casaubon is considered mildly objectionable for the unseemliness of a young woman choosing an older man for his mental faculties rather than physical desirability or fiscal and social security, although the marriage does bring her the last two, at a bitter cost. Dorothea nonetheless dedicates herself to that marriage with as much fortitude as she can muster, reduced in essence to unpaid secretary and servant to Casaubon’s embittered and paranoid will, and their union proves to embody the mustiness of the lifestyle Casaubon extols. Dorothea’s ripostes and rebuttals to her husband’s often grating insinuations and statements, however, only result in guilt-wringing bouts of illness.

Dorothea’s second marriage, to Will, brings larger external consequences, with severance from fortune and family (if temporary) and from the standards with which she has lived in the Middlemarch scheme of things. Both marriages are acts of aspiration in intent, the second even revolutionary in terms of the expectation of her relations and peers. Yet each marriage, to some extent, removes from Dorothea the self-animating will and sense of mission that drives her during both her adolescence at the outset, and then in her extended period of widowhood, and “the emphasis is all on aspiration, very little on achievement,” as Robert Speaight put it. Even within herself, Dorothea is a bundle of contradictions, imbued with enormous capacity for feeling and sympathy, and yet early on, at least, expresses herself through priggish, abstaining conduct. A link between Dorothea and Rosamond is discernable, in spite of their disparate natures and deeper than their mutual attachment to Will. That similarity is found in their essential dissatisfaction with being passive agents in how their own lives are to proceed, and can both be described as “victims of their fancies.” Both embark on marriage as much in the hope it will change their world, in reaction to their home lives. In Dorothea’s case, to swap the haze and dismissiveness of Mr Brooke’s upbringing for elevation into exalted spheres of learning and achievement, in Rosamond’s for the far more worldly end of entering aristocratic circles and bathing in attendant glamour distant from Mr Vincy’s cash-conscious volatility. For both, ambitions have to be filtered through marriage and its attendant submission to a sentimental form of neutrality and sublimation, a submission Rosamond resists in relation to Lydgate, and which Casaubon tries to impose on Dorothea even after death.

"Middlemarch", by Stephen Alcorn

Whilst Chettam’s embodiment of the proper, felicitous, pompous noble comes to weigh on Dorothea, Chettam proves something a straw dummy, much as the class he represents is starting to be supplanted. Fred Vincy, as initially indolent and destructive as his sister, is alchemised into a thriving and sturdy young man, partly from the positive influence of Mary, whose secure and assured sense of character, enforced by her own experience which cannot indulge the romantic notions of Dorothea and Rosamond, and by her father Caleb, a figure who embodies the transition, and the link between, classic yeoman England to a newer, more industrial and business-like one. Fred’s early expectation is to inherit Featherstone’s Stone Grange and become a landed gentleman, anticipating that he would “know that he needed to do nothing.” But he fails to possess the property through playing a game which Featherstone has rigged for his own amusement, in which reward and achievement has nothing to do with deserving or responsibility but arbitrary prerogative and minatory guilt. Featherstone then stands in for courtly world, where success and favour are based on such whims and sources of power. Fred comes to own Stone Grange having instead proven himself in middle-class arts of management, book-keeping, and rational application, which even Caleb Garth, with his still partly plebeian dedication to business without an entirely competent understanding of finance, has not yet mastered. In the story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, a new era is nascent, in which something resembling a meritocracy is discernible if hardly fully, inarguably formed. Such is, Eliot suggests, the desirable and inevitable way of progress, as an incremental process realised only through trial. Middlemarch, for all its dampening agents, is being altered all the while.

Middlemarch is also a vicinity of ironies and hypocrisies. Mr Brooke, genial, pro-reform independent political candidate, is a tightwad about maintaining his property and tenants. Bulstrode, apostle and arbiter, made his fortune out of pawnbroking and dubious deals and can contemplate manslaughter to protect his reputation. The Casaubon fortune too, with its idyllic estates and great house replete with the signifiers of careless luxury and scholastic wealth, a summit of genteel aspiration, is based in the same, dirt-smeared processes of exploitation and pretence. The scandal of Bulstrode and Lydgate “gathered a zest which could not be won from the question whether the Lords would throw out the Reform Bill,” a deliberate phrase that links the failures of both men’s differing crusading spirits in the face of enthused reactionary attitude and the high political manifestation of a similar sentiment. A constant quid pro quo in social, moral, and personal values is detailed, as positions of power and reliance are altered and often reversed. Twinning opposites are continually described, through characters like Will, the “gypsy” rebel, and Bulstrode, dean of Middlemarch capitalism and tireless labourer for God’s glory – if strictly in terms of his denominational preference – are found to be intricately linked, and likewise with Casaubon, pillar of learned clergy and landed gentry, and both elders hide deplorable characteristics, where Will’s intelligence, honour, and careful progressive ideals count for little in the face of xenophobia and expedient prejudice.

Poor marriages and unfortunate alliances are easily made; more fitting ones constantly impeded by decorum and economics, and also sometimes through good sense. Through Will and Dorothea, and other characters, adherence to customary social forms of etiquette and behaviour is confirmed as a necessary codicil to any novel outlook, partly to justify and paint in the best light those outlooks, for even the whiff of wrongdoing gives conservatives a weapon, and because of a logical link in the author’s mind that a dedication to progress is a hallmark of a highly conscientious character. Even Casuabon’s and Bulstrode’s actions spring from an overwhelming, almost morbid sensitivity, and whilst he cannot be called a reformer so much as a zealot, Bulstrode’s cash and dedication is vital to Lydgate’s efforts as medical progressive. And yet, often, acting in pure accord to both custom and conscience finally provides as many problems as it checks, as, for instance, Lydgate’s affectations conspire to cut off all but his last, most odious recourse.

The punishment for even minor violations or evasions of strict responsibilities can be severe, as proves all too accurate in the case of Lydgate, and for Bulstrode, whose own agenda is gleefully sabotaged by the enemies he has made, after the return and then suspicious death of the sleazy reprobate Raffles, his foil in the novel’s second half. Whilst to a certain extent imbuing the likes of Will and Dorothea with such exacting private standards, as opposed to the likes of Rosamond and Bulstrode, serves the familiar need of a dramatic author to render the figures intended as exemplary and those who are not in their necessary, exclusive light, it also offers the firm assurance that fibre, and the capacity to withstand and absorb abuse and compromise, is a necessary characteristic of the first-rate human. Lydgate, for instance, is entirely defeated precisely because he is too rigid to conciliate: his capitulation, to Rosamond, to monetary imperative, to Middlemarch’s rejection, is total rather than arbitrated.

Eliot’s ambition then to create a narrative that describes what is a lucidly probable and prognosticative account, albeit with positive results and instructive lessons attached (as opposed to one in which various ideals are illustrated and fulfilled, or pointedly unfulfilled), can be described as quintessentially “realist”, and the manner in which she thoroughly describes a precise sense of the relationship between individual and society, essayed through an “interpreting intelligence” as a hallmark of that style, as C. P. Snow summed that genre up. The gift that Eliot’s authorial voice offers the reader is one lacking for the characters, the capacity to leap from one viewpoint to another, conceive discursive perspectives and how they collude to create painful situations, of the “inevitable incompleteness of every human judgement” on any action, except, in glimmerings, for Dorothea. All deeds and consequences are considered in both their personal and public light, “compelled by many conflicting currents in their daily flow” (Speaight) and Middlemarch presents that populace as a fully functioning organism, with a heart and its own systole and diastole motions.

In terms of pure craft, Middlemarch, in spite of its length, is a dream of a book, Dickensian in its humour and evocation of human peculiarity, but not half as overgrown in prose, Austen-esque in its intricate sense of the interpersonal, but far wider in the scope of its awareness and depth of its portraiture. Many commentators over the years have found Will an insufficient character, a censure which characters intended as good generally draw. He’s not the kind of bitingly convincing figure who can drive the reader insane with their sorry aspects, like Rosamond or Raffles, or the kind to move you with efforts to find their better nature, like Fred. But Will’s keenly described psychological reflexes, in trying to avoid facing his own terminal attraction to his “aunt,” and his hot, suggestively resentful sense of his own outsider status when he lets loose in outrage at Bulstrode and Rosamond, and natural his bohemianism – he likes to lie on the carpet of people he visits – nonetheless make him a far more convincing and substantial character in such traits than most other idealised characters in Victorian fiction: none of the ghostly goodness of Oliver Twist or Elizabeth Bennet here. But Dorothea, whose quality is always a given but never pushed into the realm of unlikely saintliness, is by far the superior character. She moves through a series of educational tragedies and often fails in tact and form, and whilst her innate integrity doesn’t change, the way it expresses itself, and the ideals she pours it into, are convincingly remoulded and fortified by life.

Eliot was also often perceived as a woman who insisted on a high moral tone in her books, perhaps to compensate for own her mildly scandalous relationship with George Henry Lewes, whom Will is partly based on. It’s certainly true of Middlemarch that she emphasises that behaviour has inescapable consequences, and adherence to propitious norms is necessary for happiness in life. And yet the quiet crackle of the erotic is almost always tangible in, say, Will's conversations with Dorothea, so that it’s not too hard to see why Casaubon goes rigid at the merest sight of them together. Such a crackle is also preset in Lydgate and Rosamond’s flirtations, and interestingly absent from Fred and Mary’s relationship, which began and has remained largely pre-adolescent in its purity. Eliot’s slow-burn narrative pays off with several scenes that are sheer beauties in climactic effect, and yet which are nothing, in terms of any external drama: Dorothea’s appeal to Rosamond to be a better partner to her husband, a moment which sees the two women joined in momentary fellowship, and, then, Dorothea’s explosive spurning of all she possesses for the inevitable clinch with Will, in Casaubon’s deserted, cavernous, shadowy house as a thunderstorm erupts outside. It’s the kind of romantic melodrama that Hollywood is always yearning to reproduce, but it doesn’t violate the novel’s realistic tenor.

As Middlemarch’s narrative draws to a close, of her major protagonists, some find fulfilment, others prosperity, but the two are not necessarily mutual. The immediate story concludes with the rejection of the Reform Bill, whilst Lydgate and Rosamond, Mr and Mrs Bulstrode, and Will and Dorothea all must leave Middlemarch, the median nature of which is suggested by its very name: it is the centre, the core, the given, the banal and the essential. Lydgate does well for himself, but considers himself a failure. Will is elected to parliament and becomes a man of note, at the expense of Dorothea’s shrinkage to mere social appendage. All of these are ambiguous, imperfect ends that seem symptomatic of their era and human relations within them. But Eliot reminds us that she is writing of the past, and that such was the nature of things, she suggests, whilst the future has already happened and will go on happening. In Dorothea, most clearly, awareness of humanity as a shared state, sensing “the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance…that involuntary, palpitating life”, rather than as a net of limitations, a new reality awakens, and all these were skirmishes in an ongoing struggle for society and the self.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bullett, George 1947, George Eliot: Her Life and Books, Collins, London.

Jones, R. T. 1970, George Eliot, Cambridge University Press, London.

Snow, C.P. 1978, The Realists, MacMillan, London.

Speaight, Robert, 1954, George Eliot, Arthur Barker, London.

Conan Doyle’s Tales of Unease: The Haze at the Dawn of Modernity

Tales of Unease, collected short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, written between 1883 and 1921. Pictured, 2000 Wordsworth edition, with introduction by David Stuart Davies.

Arthur Conan Doyle is of course most famous for creating one great pop culture icon, Sherlock Holmes, and to a much lesser extent a second, Professor Challenger. The man himself had always wanted however to expand his literary horizons, and he was most proud of his historical novels, with some good reason: The White Company, for instance, is snappy and animated where its models, the works of Walter Scott, lumber today. Why no-one’s made a film of it I can’t imagine. Tales of Unease, however, is a collection of some of his ephemera, ghoulish and ghastly stories that suggest the breadth of his imagination and his generic reflexes. Conan Doyle had a particular fondness for adventure, for tales of revenge, and for the motif of penetrating the unknown, for exploring and explaining the inexplicable. This last fascination, and the desire to hold the irrational at bay, is at the root of the electric brilliance of the character of Sherlock Holmes, sitting with the authority of a judge at the crossroads of chance and fate. Conan Doyle became increasingly frustrated with writing detective stories, and his hero, precisely because they stood in the way of his indulging his interests more deeply: where Holmes became beloved because he delivered readers from the anxiety of the fantastic, it was the anxiety of the fantastic that intrigued Conan Doyle. As he became more and more of a mystic, the idea that all perceived truth had deeper levels changed its nature for him.

In this light, a curious aspect of the Holmes stories – and this is why the Holmes novels are all rather inferior to the short works – is that they are in essence passive: although both Holmes and Watson, on the page if not always in their screen incernations, are robust men capable of taking care of themselves, and there’s often some last-minute piece of gallivanting to try and catch some criminal before they escape, yet they are almost always too late upon the scene. The action is always happening to someone else, in some other place, and even if it is soon explicated, it rarely has immediacy. Considering that Conan Doyle took real delight in derring-do, ripping yarns, and physical action, which he had a real gift for writing, this constriction, as well as his more intellectual preoccupations, were at odds with the detective genre as he had helped to codify it. Where later writers in the mode would skew the genre closer to mental parlour games where action is inconsequential and the processing of clues up front. In Conan Doyle, the pleasure is instead in listening to Holmes explicate how those clues have given him understanding of often utterly bizarre mysteries.

In any event, Conan Doyle was a natural yarn-spinner, and some of the stories collected in Tales of Unease resemble the kinds of crime Holmes would come across after the fact, particularly the morbid vengeance romance of the 'The Lord of Château Noir' and 'The Brazilian Cat': the latter tale, especially, possesses one of those faux-avuncular villainous relations with nasty intentions that Holmes battled so often. In the 'The Case of Lady Sannox', a Turkish ambassador desperately appeals to the surgeon Douglas Stone, a flashy man about town who is currently the lover of society diva Lady Sannox, to come and save the life of a veiled Eastern woman by slicing away her lower lip, which has been inoculated with a poison that will soon spread and kill her.

“He grabbed the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he tore out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, he knew that face.”

Yes, the woman is Lady Sannox, and the Turk is her husband Lord Sannox in disguise, having artfully contrived a vicious and unmistakeable punishment for both guilty parties:

“It was really very necessary for Marion, this operation,” said he, “not physically, but morally, you know, morally.”

He signs off with commands to forward his mail to Venice and to exhibit the results his amateur gardening. The contrived destruction of Lady Sannox’s intoxicating, ego-fulfilling beauty, the noted sleaziness of Stone’s dedication to his streak of sensualism that has rendered his professional income, the “third highest in all of London”, still insufficient to match his consumption, the Lord’s cool abstraction and ruthless detachment, are details that lend the story vivid piquancy, although it lacks the emotional strength that some other stories in the collection retain, and the tension of others, because it’s not too hard to guess where it’s all going: indeed Conan Doyle signals the aftermath at the outset, but even there lies the morbidly amusing twist to the initial information that Lady Sannox had "taken the veil". Still, it’s a story that contains the seeds of the kind of vicious physical mortification for moralistic ends and cunning mastermind villainy that underpins much of the modern horror film. Just as obvious and in some way even more nasty is 'The New Catacomb', in which poor young German archaeologist Julius Berger introduces his rich, self-satisfied English friend Kennedy to the undiscovered catacomb he’s located under the Roman countryside, only to leave him lost within the depths of that labyrinth. This act is Berger's acute revenge on Kennedy for his having casually seduced and abandoned to social disgrace the girl who had been, unbeknownst to Kennedy, Berger’s fiancé.

“There was a rustle somewhere, the vague sound of a foot striking a stone, and then there fell silence upon that old Christian church – stagnant, heavy silence which closed around Kennedy and shut him in like water round a drowning man.”

Like many of Conan Doyle’s similes, that last one is both a touch overwrought, and also utterly relishable: the clever dovetailing of the image of silence, in Kennedy’s isolation in the dark, with water that will drown him, both having the same import of inevitable death, and the image of drowning itself presaging expiration in a similar welter of helpless panic. The brief epilogue, a supposed new report of Berger’s subsequent fame and fortune as the discoverer of the catacomb with the grim corollary of the tragic finding of Kennedy’s decomposing corpse, “his sad fate” written off as the “natural result of his own temerity”, sees Conan Doyle’s pithy technique utilising the mistaken tone of the report, and the way drama can be abstracted to meaninglessness through reportage, to give a blackly ironic cap to the story.

The medieval moralism in these two stories, and in 'The Lord of Château Noir', is both the source of such tales’ appalling pungency and vicarious entertainment value: the refusal to countenance moral rather than merely legal violations, and their direct, physically totemistic punishment, is of course a long tradition in macabre fiction, but one that’s actually taken a relatively long time to soak into the cinema with “torture-porn” films that explicitly mangle the bodies of pretty young things in vengeance for their wanton, rapacious way. Conan Doyle’s take isn’t as orgiastic (or uncomfortably sexualised) as such generic mutations, although his prose lends it a rather lusher force than many, and the erotic undertone to the violence in 'Lady Sannox' in particular is hard to miss. Conan Doyle’s influence on other writers and then filmmakers was however detectable in a much older subgenre of the horror film, a specifically interesting aspect of two other, elaborate tales in the collection, 'The Ring of Thoth' and 'Lot 249', which anticipate various mummy-on-the-loose movies.

A sadistic kind of moral expiation is thoroughly condemned, and yet a fascination with an eroticised variety of it still fully on display, in a story that evokes the theme indirectly: 'The Leather Funnel' sees an unnamed narrator visiting his strange, rich, occultist Parisian friend Lionel Dacre. Dacre, with his fascination for psychic and paranormal phenomenon, convinces him to sleep for the night next to an odd antique, the titular funnel, rigid with age and scored with strange grooves. The narrator has a dream that proves to have been exactly the same as that Dacre had when he slept near the funnel, and he explains the object’s history: it was the funnel used for giving the ‘extraordinary question’ – filling a person’s stomach with water until their torso ruptured – by inquisitorial authorities to a “small young woman with blonde hair and singular, light-blue eyes – the eyes of a child.” The horror of the narrator in having witnessed part of the woman’s fate is barely leavened by learning what Dacre has discovered about the mystery: she was an infamous aristocratic murderess, despised for her utterly amoral, psychopathic crimes including killing her father and brothers, and yet one who gained respect for the bravery of death. The marks on the funnel were from her teeth biting on it in her agonies.

‘The Lord of Château Noir’ is likewise set in France, and invokes relatively recent history (in 1894 when the story was composed) in being set during the Franco-Prussian War. This story extends Conan Doyle’s innate interest in poetic justice into that recent conflict, suggesting the way violence, even modern warfare, contains eternally primal essentials. Here his deft descriptive prose is on exhibit:

“It was a cold December night when Captain Baumgarten marched out of Les Andelys with his twenty Poseners, and took the main road to the north-west…A thin, cold rain was falling, swishing among the tall poplar trees and rustling in the fields on either side….Behind them the twenty infantryman plodded along through the darkness, with their faces sunk to the rain and their boots squeaking in the soft, wet clay.”

And the Château itself:

“At half-past eleven their guide stopped at a place where two high pillars, crowned with some heraldic stonework, flanked a huge iron gate. The wall in which had been the opening had crumbled away, but the great gate still towered above the brambles and weeds which had overgrown its base…The black château lay in front of them. The moon shone out between two rain-clouds and threw the old house into silver and shadow…Above was a dark roof breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it. A single light gleamed in one of the lower windows.”

A better lesson for creating a fetid, menacing atmosphere in the space of a few paragraphs is hard to find, the prose charged with cinematic vividness. The picture of Captain Baumgarten himself, bald, “heavy-jawed, blue eyed, with a curving yellow moustache”, not brilliant but stolid and reliable, is a fittingly, cool, crisp representative of the Prussian forces, who leads his men out one night, acting on intelligence bought from a captured farmer, identifying Count Eustace of the Château Noir as the leader of the murderous band of guerrillas killing Prussian soldiers. The German soldiers, desiring revenge on the man who’s been assassinating their comrades, instead find themselves entrapped by their quarry. Baumgarten settles to wait for the absent Count’s return, with his men bivouacked in the château, by a fire in the house’s great hall, only for Eustace to appear from the shadows of his own great hall, like one of his own family portraits has come to life, or an unforgiving ghost, to confront the Prussian warrior. Eustace’s motive for unremitting punishment of the Prussians is slowly, memorably revealed as he inflicts upon the Captain the same hideous disfigurements and humiliations that were imposed on the Count’s own son, who had fought with the French army, before showing a final, dubious pity, as did the Prussian general who released his son as a blind, agonised ruin:

“And so it was that Captain Baumgarten, disfigured, blinded and bleeding, staggered out into the wind and the rain of that wild December dawn.”

Conan Doyle’s sense of the world as islets of composed civility and calm surrounded by intimidating chaos, unruly passion, uncharted menaces and ethereal possibilities, to be approached with scientific curiosity but understood with instinctual fervour, is apparent in all the stories in the collection, and are quintessentially Victorian in many ways: the fear of the new, waiting to be stumbled upon, or the fear of explosions of things thought repressed and forgotten, is constantly described. Something of his Holmesian methodological approach is apparent in ‘The Brown Hand’ applied to a supernatural subject, a story which also, like The Sign of Four and its model The Moonstone evokes the blowback effect of disrespect to foreign cultures and Imperial plundering infiltrating the bourgeois English landscape. Sir Dominick Holden, a brilliant and well-rewarded surgeon who had lived and worked for many years in India, is now an exhausted and melancholy wretch even though he’s retired with his equally suffering wife to a house bordering Salisbury Plain. The reason, as described by a distant relative who tells the story, is because Holden had amputated the hand of an Indian man, and had kept the severed hand as an object of his medical research having promised the man he would see the hand was buried with him when he died. But the hand had been destroyed in a fire and now Holden is relentlessly persecuted by the Indian’s shade, appearing every night to search his house for the jar containing his lost limb.

The narrator’s cunning ploy, once he’s experienced the shade’s forlornly angry appearances, is to offer the ghost a substitute, fetching the amputated hand from a dead Indian man from a London hospital, and contriving that the spirit will come across the hand and claim it as his own. Conan Doyle cunningly tweaks the conclusion by having this ruse seem to fail, only for the narrator to realise this was because he used the wrong hand. The other hand, once procured, satisfies the ghost, Holden is freed of his visitations, and the narrator becomes Holden's heir. The interesting proximity to the cauldron of British mysticism, out on Salisbury Plain, accords well with the intrusion of a manifestation of an alien creed, the baleful counterbalance to the White Man’s Burden. Meanwhile the suggestion that even the most irrational force can be kept in check with reason and reasonableness is reassuring, so that whilst the descriptions of the brown man’s manifestations are as ineluctably creepy as something that might have sprung out a J-Horror film, it’s a spirit that can be laid to rest.

‘The Brown Hand’ and ‘The Brazilian Cat’ have similar starting points, tales of penniless young men visiting wealthy relatives recently returned from overseas with dire secrets, and they each pay off with the hero becoming rich after an adventure with those relatives, but through very different methods: ‘The Brazilian Cat’ is perhaps the story in the collection that most entirely resembles a Holmes tale, lacking only the detective himself to discern the grim intent of the villain. Young Marshall King, who had been raised to expect being the heir of a Lord but has fallen, through indolent ways, into grave fiscal peril, eagerly accepts an invitation from his cousin Everard King, a former Brazilian planter, to stay with him for a while, hoping to beg for some money to escape a debtor’s disgrace. But King has other, deeply sinister plans, which to be fulfilled require him to lock Marshall in with the jaguar he keeps as a pet. What follows is a riveting survival tale as Marshall discerns ways to elude the cat within the small, apparently fatal pen in which it’s kept, finally attempting to secure himself within the innermost cage that is usually the creature’s home, having taken refuge at first on top of it:

“Pulling off my dress-coat, I threw it down over the head of the beast. At the same moment I dropped over the edge, seized the end of the front grating, and pulled it frantically out of the wall. It came more easily than I could have expected. I rushed across the room, bearing it with me; but, as I rushed, the accident of my position put me on the outer side. Had it been the other way, I might have come off scathless. As it was, there was a moment’s pause as I stopped it and tried to pass in through the opening I had left. That moment was enough to give time to the creature to toss off the coat with which I had blinded him and to spring upon me. I hurled myself through the gap and pulled the rails to behind me, but he seized my leg before I could entirely withdraw it. One stroke of that huge paw tore off my calf as a shaving of wood curls before a plane. The next moment, bleeding and fainting, I was lying among the foul straw with a line of friendly bars between me and the creature which ramped so frantically against them.”

The big cat, having tasted human blood for the first time, is now insatiable for it, and, of course, the moment Everard enters in the morning, he instead becomes the animal’s brunch. Again, the gross physical violence that Marshall suffers is necessary for his moral character – he’s not the same dissolute gadabout at the end – and he finishes up the beneficiary of the Lord’s inheritance finally thanks to Everard’s other conniving. Everard’s menagerie of collected animals and association with exotic climes of course resembles Dr Roylott in ‘The Speckled Band’, the idea of arranging a financially fortuitous animal’s mauling obviously similar to The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Everard’s falsely genial, Pickwick-esque air of equanimity disguising bottomless depravity similar to Jephro Rucastle’s bogus bonhomie in ‘The Copper Beeches’ (and also his end at the jaws of his own deadly mastiff). The first-person account of the experience is however great storytelling both technically and in effect, the reassurance inherent in the device barely compensating for the you-are-there intensity of the night in the cat’s cell. Again, like ‘The Brown Hand’ and several other stories here and elsewhere in Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, the importation of the exotic sets off almost unnoticeable yet finally destabilising vibrations, akin to the psychic emanations of the object of ‘The Leather Funnel’ and the thought-manifestations in the short mystical story ‘Playing With Fire’. Everard’s beasties indicates not the mere fancy of an eccentric but his embodied wish to have his relative eaten and the violence that might otherwise have been suppressed and made latent in him by the bland English weather instead stoked to psychotic ends by unfulfilling foreign adventures, is an interesting, and largely unconscious, metaphor for the colonial project’s effect on the masterminding nation.

Some stories in this collection are throwaway fillips, and two of the least essential are basically jokes, albeit each possessing an irony over transforming expectations: ‘The Nightmare Room’ and 'The Los Amigos Fiasco' are attempts at outright humour that prove Conan Doyle’s dry wit was better served stitched into the fabric of far darker pieces. Both are set in the United States, a country which for Conan Doyle, as for Jules Verne, represented excitable pioneering not always tethered to reasoned application, and ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ offers another B-Movie plot that would be pinched for the The Invisible Ray and Man-Made Monster: a rampaging bandit named Duncan Warner is to be executed via the new invention the electric chair, but using a far stronger power source than has been used before, for the small Californian town of Los Amigos has a brand new and very powerful generator. But Peter Stulpnagel, a canny but little respected local researcher chosen as one of a panel to arrange their experiment in electrified homicide, predicts that a stronger electrical charge will, instead of killing a man, imbue him with amazing properties of power and longevity, and this proves to be the case: Warner and Stulpnagel hoot amicably as the Los Amigos lawmen try first to kill the criminal with great charges, and then to hang him the good old-fashioned way, which proves laughably unsuccessful. In ‘The Nightmare Room’, a hoary melodrama in which two men, a French dancer’s husband and her lover, play a game of death to see who’ll be her final mate, proves to merely be a lousy movie that the producer wants to shoot over again.

No more substantial is ‘How It Happened’, although it has a different focus, being a story that is plainly the offspring of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist bunkum. It's a supposedly verbatim account of a female medium’s channelling of the spirit of a man who died in a car crash and how he came to experience his own death and lingering in the afterlife, meeting a friend who had died before in perplexity before the penny dropped. ‘Playing With Fire’ likewise is built around spiritualism, with a circle of bourgeois London dilettantes introducing a new member, an inquisitive, slightly reckless French psychic into their company, and he begins pressing them to penetrate new possibilities in generating physical manifestations of their thoughts, finally resulting in the appearance of an invisible unicorn that makes havoc in the house, unicorns having been the obsessive subject of an artist in the circle. It’s a stry mostly interesting for how Conan Doyle treats plainly his great thematic refrain: the manifestation of the subconscious impulse, and the literalisation of terrifying forces.

‘The Horror of the Heights’, like ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’, is based around a dated piece of theorising about new technology, but with a far more clever gimmick, and a real air of menace, in offering the supposed account of one Joyce-Armstrong, an aviator who had developed a theory around certain inexplicable accidents that had killed several aeronaut fellows who had ventured to great heights in the new, more powerful varieties of aircraft (the story was written in 1913, a year before the age of aerial warfare commenced in earnest). Check out how this story offers grisly suggestions that help build a tense mood, so well employed the hairs did actually stand up on my neck:

“His habit of carrying a shotgun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of (his eccentricity). Another was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong, according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: ‘And where, pray tell, is Myrtle’s head?’”

Joyce-Armstrong soon proves, by taking a new aeroplane up to the edge of the stratosphere, that the great heights are inhabited by colossal jellyfish-like animals that are so lightweight that they spend their entire lives drifting upon the air currents, and decay away to nothing before ever falling to earth when they die. Some of these animals are harmless but others are great beaked things held up by gas bubbles within their bodies, capable of tearing men and machines to pieces, and finally Joyce-Armstrong becomes the victim of them when he ascends once too often. It’s both an inspired piece of cryptozoological fancy, and a kind of steampunk horror-adventure from the days when the earth’s limits weren’t so well defined. It’s enough to make you wish that flying the friendly skies occasionally required passengers manning machine guns to fight off swarms of gossamer beasts.

More familiar in plot if just as tense is ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’, which likewise it told by an account within another narrative, left behind by a recently deceased doctor, John Hardcastle, who, upon taking a restful visit some years earlier to rural Derbyshire, encountered a terrifying phenomenon. The familiar if sparse atmosphere of the region is well laid out and a feeling of the humdrum encoded in such details as the fact Hardcastle is living with a pair of old spinsters, a world as far from menace and the inexplicable as it seems you can get, and yet the landscape is eerie and teems with hidden caves and pits, including the Blue John shaft, dug by Romans extracting precious ore, which is now the centre of local legends about a mysterious beast that roars within and steals out at night to consume livestock. A young divinity student, Armitage, tells Hardcastle about these stories, willing to say he’s heard the roars himself. The doctor dismisses him, but soon hears the menacing howl from deep within the earth himself, and, taken over by curiosity, ventures into the shaft, only to fall and extinguish his light, soon realising he’s trapped within with a huge, unseen thing, and the written description of this encounter possesses a Spielbergian relish:

“It was a tread – yes, surely it was the tread of some living creature. But what a tread it was! It gave one the impression of enormous weight carried upon sponge-like feet, which gave forth a muffled but ear-filling sound. The darkness was as complete as ever, but the tread was regular and decisive. And it was coming beyond all question in my direction.”

Hardcastle keeps his wits together and the creature doesn’t detect him, and he flees the shaft, but on hearing that Armitage has vanished, probably snatched by the beast in walking the moor, he decides to arm himself and ambush the monster. Conan Doyle cleverly exploits a folk-myth atmosphere here – many a rural locale has its unexplained marauder that consumes sundry sheep to this day – and generates a sense of unease in the English landscape, and a good old-fashioned monster hunt with the clever potential explanation that the animal belonged to a species of underground-dwelling bears look though extinct but perhaps having instead lived deep and this had through luck found a portal to the surface that gave it an easier supply of food. Whilst Hardcastle takes on the beast and emerges victorious, he, like several of Conan Doyle’s protagonists here, is consumed swiftly once he has looked deeply into the potential for chaos to linger in the orderly world.

If ‘The Horror of the Heights’, ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’, and to a certain extent ‘Playing With Fire’ are all kinds of monster yarns, so too is ‘Lot 249’, one which also links to ‘The Ring of Thoth’ in sharing a motif of ancient Egyptians alive in the modern world, but they are actually quite diverse stories. If ‘The Ring of Thoth’, with an unknowably old but still perceptibly human ancient stalking the deserted corridors of a museum searching for the mummy of his long-lost lover, obviously prefigures the 1932 Karl Freund film The Mummy, ‘Lot 249’ anticipates other more familiar varieties of mummy movie where a bandaged, desiccated working corpse possessing great power and mindless menace stalks unfamiliarly everyday locations. ‘Lot 249’ was actually filmed, very loosely, as an episode of 1990’s Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, but the story's atmosphere is less William Gaines and far more M.R. James, with the fusty academic locale of Oxford vital to the ironic disparity of the drama, although it never suggests James’ gift for almost abstractly suggested menace and subliminal manifestation. Conan Doyle was finally, usually much more literally minded than James, and less authentically antiquarian in his references.

In ‘Lot 249’, an industrious young medical student, Abercrombie Smith (you’ll have noticed that several of Conan Doyle’s protagonists here are, like him, doctors or in training as such), living in a tower on campus with two other young men, Edward Bellingham and William Monkhouse Lee, is told by another friend, Jephro Hastie, of the nastiness Bellingham has exhibited, and the strange grip he has on Lee, having gotten himself somehow, in spite of his rotundity and obnoxiousness, engaged to Lee’s beautiful sister. Soon, it becomes apparent that Bellingham’s gifts for obscure languages has given him rare knowledge for using Egyptian black magic for influence, and he’s taken it step further by obtaining and reviving a mummy to use to assault enemies and people who defy him, as attacks about campus proliferate and Smith begins to understand the dreadful nature of the sounds he’s been hearing from the room beneath his.

“…he glanced back at the road along which he had come. Something was coming swiftly down it. It moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue.”

Such classic macabre imagery marks out the story, the longest in the collection, although Smith’s final dealing with Bellingham and elimination of the menace is a bit plain, and the story is essentially an elaborate “boo!” Conan Doyle smartly leaves off on a faint note of lingering mystery as Bellingham disappears to continue his research. ‘The Ring of Thoth’, on the other hand, lingers in the memory with some of the same sepulchral emotion as the Freund film inspired by it, particularly withered but undying antihero Sosra’s air of ageless sorrow. He has survived ages of mankind unable to end the immortality he was able to imbue on himself through what he assures was entirely scientific means, being now 3,500 years old. Sosra turns up in the museum where a scholar, John Vansittart Smith, is working through the midnight, and tells him his story: he’s searching his timeless love Atma, who was also loved by a friend of his, Parmes, to whom he had extended the gift of immortality. Parmes, rather than live without her, and furious at his friend for failing to save her in time, develops a way to die, and then hid the secret from him contained in a ring emblazoned with the image of Thoth, so that he’d be forced to wonder the earth alone. But Sosra had recognised the ring upon the finger of a mummy Vansittart Smith himself had disinterred. He is finally found dead, embracing Atma’s mummy.

The note of crepuscular romanticism and lingering, consuming emotional loss in this story is even more defined in the collection’s best story, ‘The Captain of the Polestar’. Here several of Conan Doyle’s characteristics come together with completeness: penetrating a veil of existence at the limits of the rational world, the lingering of the spirit, the mystery to be discerned, the excellently sketched physical environment, the morbid sexuality, and the enigmatic dominant man whose motives are barely perceivable to the common fellows about him. Here, that dominant man is the eponymous captain, Nicholas Craigie, an almost suicidally valiant captain of a whaling ship threatened with becoming icebound within the Arctic Circle, his increasingly anxious crew reporting visions of spirits around the ship and wailings from the hazy semi-perpetual twilight. Craigie himself, described by the narrator, the ship’s young medical officer John McAllister Ray, is a brusquely intelligent but strangely changeable, capricious man, who has enjoyed putting himself the in the way of danger in the past. In spite of the eerie manifestations and physical danger the ship is in, he’s determined to hold on, and Ray himself, archly rational, gives way to the atmosphere:

“The night was very dark – so dark that, standing under the quarter-boat, I was unable to see the officer on the bridge. I think I have already mentioned the extraordinary silence which prevails in these frozen seas. In other parts of the world, be they ever so barren, there is some slight vibration of the air – some faint hum, be it from the distant haunts of men, or from the leaves of trees, or the wings of the birds, or even the faint rustle of the grass that covers the ground…It is only here in these Arctic seas that stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you all in its gruesome reality. You find your tympanum straining to catch some little murmur, and dwelling eagerly on every accidental sound within the vessel. In this state, I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul.”

Conan Doyle was actually writing here partly from experience, for he had served for a voyage on a whaler in the north, the Hope, in 1880, and his story, written three years later, was actually one of his first stabs at fiction. That it displays a care in creating mood and a depth of feeling that’s missing from the most recent stories in the collection perhaps says something about how being tethered to the Holmes stories eroded his more expansive authorial gifts. But they never abandoned him entirely. The storytelling in ‘Captain’ is indeed nearly as minimalist and suggestive as M.R. James, as a tantalising sketch of a beautiful woman in the Captain’s cabin accords with the feminine appearance of the ghost stalking the ship, the Captain maintaining a murmuring vigil making promises to the wind, and then finally leaping from the ship and vanishing across the ice floes chasing this wraith, to be found later, frozen to death, his apparent death wish finally fulfilled. The explanation? It comes in a brief epilogue supposedly written by the young doctor’s father, accounting the story of a friend who had known Craigie:

“According to his account, he had been engaged to a young lady of singular beauty residing upon the Cornish coast. During his absence at sea his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror.”

The suggestiveness here, the simultaneous offering of solution to the mystery and suddenly even more ambiguous reasons, is genuinely poignant, and the story itself captures something of the same mood of seaborne desolation found in the end of Frankenstein and in Coleridge. It’s not unworthy of either, and it’s the only time in the story that Conan Doyle wields the aura of the truly grand kind of fantastic story, and not merely exciting or sly. But they're all marked out by how lingering past and looming future always seem to offer the same immensity of threat. Finally, Conan Doyle’s bifocal sense of reality and truth at least served him well in creating tales of unease.