Make Yourself at Holmes: Victorian Culture, Sherlock Holmes and the Vicissitudes of Identity Agnieszka Jasnowska Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies March 2015 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Agnieszka Jasnowska The right of Agnieszka Jasnowska to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisors, Dr Barbara Engh and Dr Eric Prenowitz, without whose unswerving intellectual and emotional support, kindness and patience this project would never come to fruition. Their careful reading, encouragement and guidance sustain and illuminate the thesis. I am indebted to them in ways too numerous to list. Many thanks to Dr Ashley Thompson and Dr Eric Prenowitz for providing me with my own desk space 'far from the madding crowd', where it was possible to think, read and write. (Not necessarily in that order). I would also like to thank my fellow postgraduate students in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies for intellectual stimulation and friendship, especially the parallax team (X) – Fiona Allen, Simon Constantine, James Lavender and Swen Steinhäuser – who understand the joys of academic proofreading more than anyone else. I am eternally grateful to my family and friends for always believing, despite signs to the contrary, that the project will one day be completed; and to Miłosz, for everything. Finally, thank you to Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse and Edmund Crispin for unparalleled beauty of language. My research was funded by a scholarship from The Arts and Humanities Research Council. Abstract This thesis joins a lively field of Victorian cultural studies to examine the construction and re-presentation of personal and national identity in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, concentrating on three tales: ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ and The Sign of Four. Employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia, it argues against the view of detective fiction as literature which merely confirms and reflects the normative middle-class values, positing instead that the effects of excessive textuality at work in the Holmes stories exceed the task of simple hegemonic reinforcement. It proposes a new method for reading Doyle’s narratives, termed ‘syndromatic’, which understands the stories in a reciprocal and dynamic intertextual relationship with the historical, socio-cultural and literary milieu of their emergence. This approach supposes an irreducible density of 'textual' weave on either side of the traditional text/context divide, and allows us to trace the conflictual and polyvocal interplay across it. Rooted in and inspired by a particular genre and an inimitable, if much imitated, author, the thesis none the less makes an oblique argument for a renewed urgency of literary-cultural analysis in general. Working with the formalistic as well as content requirements of detective fiction and actively engaging The Great Game of Sherlockian scholarship alongside a theoretical study, this research negotiates the intellectual and the emotional involvement with its object to explore, as participant-observer, the addictive joys of reading detective fiction. Table of Contents Introduction – Traces of Textuality: Syndromatic Reading of Detective Fiction, Victorian Culture and Sherlock Holmes .................................................... 1 Chapter 1 – Spaces of Duplicity: Professional Identity, Labour and Confession in 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' ....................................................... 45 Socio-Cultural History: Opium ................................................................................ 49 Literary Influences: De Quincey ............................................................................. 71 "If You Are Found Again, Then All Must Come Out": 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' ............................................................................... 78 Chapter 2 – Deviations of Familiarity: Corporeal Identity, Degeneration and Writing in 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man' .................................................... 129 Socio-Cultural History: Human/Animal ................................................................... 132 Literary Influences: Gothic Fiction .......................................................................... 147 "When One Tries to Rise Above Nature One Is Liable to Fall Below It": 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man' .......................................... 161 Chapter 3 – Empire of Signs: Masculine Identity, National Mythology and the Quest for Knowledge in The Sign of Four ............................................................. 200 Socio-Cultural History: The Indian Mutiny of 1857 ................................................. 207 Literary Influences: Adventure Romance ............................................................... 230 “When You Have Eliminated the Impossible, Whatever Remains, However Improbable, Must Be the Truth”: The Sign of Four .................................. 239 Conclusion – ‘Nothing Clears Up a Case so Much as Stating it to Another Person: Reading Sherlock Holmes ....................................................................... 287 Appendix: List of Title Abbreviations for the Sherlock Holmes Stories ................ 292 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 293 List of illustrations Fig.1.1. Sidney Paget, The Unmasking of Neville St. Clair from ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, illustration from The Strand Magazine, December 1891. ................................................................................................... 45 Fig.1.2. Gustave Doré, Opium Smoking – the Lascar’s Room in “Edwin Drood”, engraving, 1872, Wellcome Library London. ................................ 69 Fig.1.3. Opium den, The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, Frogwares, game screenshot, 2012, author's own. ................................................................. 69 Fig.1.4. ‘Map Shewing Degrees of Poverty in London’ (1889-1890), Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People, Wellcome Library, London. ................................................................................................................. 114 Fig.2.1. Sidney Paget, Professor Presbury from ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’, illustration from The Strand Magazine, March 1923. ..................................................................................................................... 129 Fig.2.2. Before and after picture of a rejuvenated man. Paul Kammerer, Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Human Efficiency (London: Methuen & Co., 1924). Wellcome Library, London. ............................... 134 Fig.2.3. Movie poster for The Beast of Borneo, dir. by Harry Garson (1934), IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025075/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.................... 137 Fig.2.4. An advertisement for Hudson’s soap, The Graphic, 1 December 1888. ................................................................................................... 155 Fig.2.5. Brooke’s Monkey Brand Soap advertisement, 1901, http://screever.org/2012/07/31/monkey-brand-soap-1899-1901/ .......................... 158 Fig.3.1. Richard Gutschmidt, Holmes and Watson from The Sign of Four, illustration from Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, February 1890. ................. 200 Fig.3.2. 'The Massacre at Delhi', from Sir Colin Campbell, Narrative of the Indian Revolt from Its Outbreak to the Capture of Lucknow (London: George Vickers, 1858). .......................................................................... 213 Fig.3.3. 'Massacre at Cawnpore' from Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny vol.1 (London: London Printing and Publishing Company, 1858-1859). ......................................................................................... 214 1 Introduction Traces of Textuality: Detective Fiction, Victorian Culture and Sherlock Holmes How do you know? I saw their traces. 1 To give your life, or any significant part of it, to the study of Sherlock Holmes is to defy reason.2 I want to start, in contravention of all genre rules, by making a confession: I am addicted to detective fiction. W.H. Auden's eloquent explication on the nature of this habit efficiently summarises both the intensity of the craving – 'if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it' – and the specificity of its location – 'the story must conform to certain formulas (I find it very difficult, for example, to read one that is not set in rural England).'3 To suffer from a case of what Wilkie Collins' Gabriel Betteredge identifies in The Moonstone as 'detective fever' seems a common malady, as universal as it is selective.4 (I could repeat after Auden that my addiction is truly fuelled by stories located in a quintessentially British setting and