by Rod Mengham
Mrs Stapleton is nothing more nor less than the prize exhibit in a collection of dead things; she is still alive, but Holmes and company are only just in time to ensure this. She is pinned to the beam like a butterfly or moth mounted in a case, but she is also ‘swathed and muffled’ lie an Egyptian mummy, the archetypal museum specimen of preserved human tissue, the literal embodiment of humanity’s desire to avoid being ‘worm-eaten’. The towel that secures her throat and the gag that is torn from her mouth draw attention to the silencing of her voice, and place her mummified appearance in a category of objects that evoke the suspension of voice whose epitome is the tin of preserved tongue.
In one sense, Stapleton’s need to paralyse the living, making still what is quick and restless, joins with Watson’s anxiety that whatever is stirring on the moor does not belong there; or, to be more precise, it is something belonging to that place that does not belong to that time – something alive that ought to be dead: ‘If you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own’ (p.75). Watson’s vocabulary suggests that the ‘natural’ state of humanity might be one of primitive aggression: survival through competition of a kind that pre-dates the establishment of law and order. His imagination populates the hut circles alternately with examples of prehistoric man and the modern convict. He writes to Holmes that the ancient compound is most likely where the escaped convict has gone to earth: ‘Of course so far as his concealment goes there is no difficulty at all. Any one of these huts would give him a hiding-place’ (p.76). But the convict himself seems to exist in two different time-frames: as the adult murderer, and as his own childhood self, which is how his sister continues to think of him, despite the criminal career overlying and obliterating the juvenile version: ‘To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand’ (p.135). If early man is associated with the threat of violence, the early history of the self seems to hinge on vulnerability, on the need for protection. When Watson thinks he is on the convict’s trail, he is actually following a boy, the boy who brings the tinned tongue and bottled spirits to the hut circle. Except that this boy is not ‘wilful’ – he acts according to the will of Holmes.
Selden’s appearance in death only strengthens the link that Watson has made already between the convict and the prehistory of the site: his face ‘might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillside’ (p.96), while Stapleton, who conceals his Baskerville heredity, is unmasked when Holmes compares his physiognomy with that of the Baskerville family portraits: ‘it is an interesting case of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation’ (p.138). In this context, the subject matter of Mortimer’s three published papers, mentioned early on in the story – ‘Is Disease a Reversion?’, ‘Some Freaks of Atavism’ and ‘Do We Progress?’(p.8) – echoes the text’s own obsession with the collapsing of time-frames. Doyle’s own story is driven by the fascination for the reader of repeated narrative patterns; of the possibility that the sequence of actions recorded in the Baskerville family legend will recur time and time again. The legend reaches its climax with the spectacle of the giant hound standing over Sir Hugo Baskerville and ‘plucking at his throat’ (p.15); the Sherlock Holmes story leads to the same point: ‘I was in time to see the beast spring upon its victim, hurl him to the ground and worry at his throat’(p.149). Up until now, the hound has been heard but not seen, with its ‘muttered rumble’ seemingly dislocated from its source in the animal’s throat. Both in the legend and in Watson’s case history, the immediate object of the hound’s attack is the victim’s throat and the root of the tongue; which is where the voice originates; where language is housed. The case history is a species of ‘throwback’ in language, while the language of the legend proves to be premonitory.
But it is the setting of both legend and case history that ensures the collapsing of time-frames: a setting in which the nature of the landscape provides a crucial element in the detective-story plot, while slowing down the rate of change so much that repeated actions seem almost to co-exist in a region of temporal stasis. It is the peat bog setting that preserves physical matter even while it swallows up moorland ponies and specimens of humanity. The peat holds objects from the past destined to become future exhibits, or the stuff of future memories. Watson refers at one point to ‘touching bottom’ as a guarantee or criterion of certainty: ‘It is something to have touched bottom anywhere in this bog in which we are floundering’. (p.88) But touching bottom in a peat bog is a guarantee only of extinction. Stapleton alone had ‘learned to penetrate the Grimpen Mire’ (p.158) but despite his being able to navigate his way through the quagmire, Stapleton is sucked down into it and penetrated by its mixture of water and organic materials. The text itself anticipates the slow decomposition of Baskerville bodies at the very moment of Sir Henry’s arrival on the scene: ‘The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation – sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.’ (p.56)
In one way or another, the figures who populate the story and its setting are imagined as the forerunners of their own afterlives. When Mortimer, the cranial enthusiast, first encounters Holmes, he sees him primarily as a skullcarrier – as a future exhibit in an anthropological museum – while he himself is described in terms that render him a candidate for inclusion in Stapleton’s entomological collection: ‘He had long, quivering fingers as agile and restless as the antennae of an insect’(p.10). Mortimer is most alive when handling the relics of the dead: ‘He has been excavating a barrow at Long Down, and has got a prehistoric skull which fills him with great joy’ (p.78). He enters the story in order to disclose the document that provides its essential narrative kernel, the Baskerville legend, and reads it aloud in a ‘high, crackling voice’ that resembles the sound of a primitive recording mechanism. Two years before writing the Hound, Conan Doyle had published ‘The Story of the Japanned Box’, which centres on the ‘strange, crisp, metallic clicking’ of a phonograph that preserves the last words of a dying woman, whose entreaty to her husband is projected into the future. The manuscript of the Baskerville legend draws attention to its own afterlife in the hands of its readers: ‘Learn then from this story not to fear the fruits of the past, but rather to be circumspect in the future’ (p.13). Stapleton, under his assumed name of Vandeleur, is credited with the discovery of a particular moth species, so that his own change of identity is attached to the life cycle of a creature undergoing metamorphosis. His collection of lepidoptera is assembled in the same building where he runs his school, for young humans at a larval stage of development whose minds he intends to mould, ‘impressing them with one’s own character and ideals’ (p.72), so that they too become part of a collection whose primary aim is to reflect the ambition of the collector.
Conan Doyle arranges the narrative so that Holmes and Watson gravitate towards Stapleton as chief suspect, and they are described as doing so like a pair of lepidopterists closing in on a ‘settled butterfly’. Once he has assembled most of the evidence he needs, Homes produces the vocabulary of the collector: ‘My nets are closing upon him, even as his are upon Sir Henry’ (p.126). There might seem to be a natural justice in this lexical symmetry, although the avidity with which the detective looks forward to closing the file on Stapleton is somewhat disconcerting: ‘We have him, Watson, we have him, and I dare swear that before tomorrow night he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of his own butterflies. A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!’(p.138) Whether Holmes derives more relish from the capture of his prey, or from its extinction, is difficult to say. But the ‘Ba
ker Street collection’ is not, of course, a chamber of horrors, but a series of casebooks, and the primary objective of the investigative procedure in any given case is not to establish the legal or moral case for nailing the villain, but to complete the narrative pattern.
The case-history is a summa of deductions, providing a reconstruction of the acts and circumstances that lie behind a specific crime, but the investigations of Holmes and Watson sponsor a discursive investigation into the prehistory of the place where that crime is committed, and the prehistory of its agents and patients. Holmes sounds the keynote on the very first page of the text, asking Watson to deduce the prehistory of the stick that Mortimer has left in their Baker Street flat: ‘this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it’ (p.5). Watson provides an outline that Holmes corrects and extends. Like a pair of archaeologists, they reconstruct the culture to which the object belongs, showing how the artefact itself possesses a kind of memory; how its reflection of the milieu from which it has sprung is inevitable. As the souvenir of a specific history, it is anything but accidental.
The text begins with a model example of the technique and theme of reconstruction. Holmes provides the example, which the narrator, Watson, relates. The latter states that his chief objective is to ‘give publicity’ (p.6) to Holmes’s methods, which adds another layer of reconstruction to the process. And what he proceeds to recount are precisely his memories of looking forward to Holmes’s own reconstructions of past events: ‘I feel that it is best that I should let you have all the facts and leave you to select for yourself those which will be of most service to you in helping you to your conclusions’ (p.98).
Both Holmes and Watson note the decisive role of balancing ‘alternative theories’ (p.27) and balancing ‘probabilities’ (p.35) in pursuit of a conclusion, and the decisive factor in reaching a conclusion is the achievement of form, the allure of coherence: ‘The thing takes shape, Watson. It becomes coherent’ (p.30). The allure of the detective story plot is the harmony it gives to seemingly discordant elements; the underlying pattern that Watson gives voice to. The language of reconstruction is what loosens the story’s tongue. But reconstruction gives only one version; and is the result of choosing between alternatives. In some respects, it is a kind of translation, from one language to another, and its relation to its own prehistory is like that of a living organ to a tin of preserved tongue. The morphology is the same; the experience radically different.
The text of The Hound of the Baskervilles includes an emblem of its own status as a container for things that have been re-composed in the message left for Sir Henry Baskerville at the Northumberland Hotel. The message consists of printed letters cut out of a copy of The Times and pasted onto a foolscap sheet. Holmes ascertains that the letters have been excised from an article on Free Trade – an economic principle that encourages the free movement of goods between different societies and cultures. The letters have been combined into a message that warns against movement between locations: ‘As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor’(p.32). Movement towards the moor entails movement towards Sir Henry’s ancestral home and heredity, as well as towards the prehistory of the crucial location: the site of Grimspound. It entails movement in time as well as space.
When Watson first makes the move to Baskerville Hall, he notes the ruins of the old Lodge and the incomplete condition of its replacement ‘a new building, half constructed’ (p.58) representing the abandonment of those ‘schemes of reconstruction and improvement’(p.16) interrupted by the death of Sir Charles. When his heir, Sir Henry, arrives on the scene, it is evident that ‘our friend has large ideas, and means to spare no pains or expense to restore the grandeur of his family. When the house is renovated and refurnished, all that he will need will be a wife to make it complete’ (pp.83–4). This compulsion to renovate and reconstruct arises from an obscure need to restore what has been lost; which, in both cases, is a sense of connection with the place. But it might also reflect Conan Doyle’s fascination with the reconstructive mania of Sabine BaringGould, the Victorian excavator of Grimspound.
1 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (London: Penguin Books, 2001), pp.118–19. All subsequent references are to this edition.
2 November 1905, Associated Sunday Magazines, quoted in Christopher Frayling’s Introduction to the Penguin edition.
3
GRIMSPOUND WAS DUG over a period of two and a half weeks in 1894, by a team of local workmen supervised by a team of local worthies: the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, Mr Robert Burnard, Mr R.N. Worth, Mr R. Hansford Worth, the Reverend W.A.G. Gray and one Dr Prowse. All but Prowse signed the excavation report drafted by Baring-Gould and published in July in the Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association, Vol.XXVI. There is no doubt that Baring-Gould and Burnard were the two heavyweights in this enterprise; and their views on archaeological method did not quite join up. Burnard was the founding Secretary of the Dartmoor Preservation Association whose mission was the ‘protection and preservation’ of the status quo on Dartmoor; Baring-Gould was a best-selling historical novelist whose experiments in archaeology, architecture and musicology were driven by a desire to re-fashion whatever survived of the past in line with his own predilections. And he was accustomed to getting his own way. In 1849, aged fifteen, he had discovered a Roman villa at Pau in the south of France. With no formal training in archaeology, he directed a team of French workmen and uncovered a mosaic pavement, reputedly two hundred feet long. Apparently, he took careful notes and made watercolour drawings of his findings, but the pavement itself was left to disintegrate.
Although he was heir of the Lewtrenchard estate on Dartmoor, he did not take up his inheritance until 1881, at the age of forty-seven. And before that date his life was profoundly unsettled. His eccentric father opted for an itinerant life, travelling round Europe by coach with his entire family in tow. As a result, the young Sabine spent less than three years in England, between the ages of three and sixteen, although when he returned to England for good, he possessed an eclectic knowledge of several European cultures and spoke five languages. He studied at Cambridge, where he was known for his piety, defied his father’s plan that he should teach at Marlborough and went instead to Pimlico to teach slum children. Two other teaching posts followed before he took up orders; then he went to a curacy in Yorkshire, which he loved, and a rectorship in East Mersea, which he loathed – all the time keeping up a manic rate of literary production.
When he installed himself at Lewtrenchard as squarson (= squire + parson) his condition was that of the Return of the Native. His family history meant he belonged to Devon, but his formative experiences lay elsewhere. He saw the west of England in relation to long and broad historical perspectives; and regarded Dartmoor as the site of encounters between natives and incomers – as a crucible for intermixing different racial stocks. Baring-Gould’s Presidential Address to the July 1896 meeting of the Devonshire Association embodies the outlook of a man for whom a sustained exposure to different national characters had produced a mindset of profound atavism. In this lengthy policy document, he identifies the invasion of Aryan ‘swarms’ into Europe during the Neolithic period with the arrival of a new, brachycephalic, type of skull. The resulting fusion of dolichocephalic and brachycephalic skull-types did not coincide with the cultural domination of the former by the latter, but rather the opposite:
But if the Goidel invaders subjugated the Ivernians, they were in their turn conquered by them, though in a different manner. The strongly-marked religious ideas of the long-headed men, and their deeply-rooted habit of worship of ancestors, impressed and captured the imagination of their masters, and as the races became fused, the mixed race continued to build dolmens and erect other megalithic monuments once characteristic of the long-heads, often on a larger scale than before.3
Exactly like Dr Mortimer in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Baring-Gould is obsessed with c
raniology, not simply as a means of reconstructing the prehistory of Dartmoor from the evidence of human remains, but as a basis for determining the survival of archaic traits within the present day population:
We are hindered in making great way by the absence of skulls and skeletons of prehistoric man in our barrows on the granite and the clay. Nor can we expect to find them. But the present inhabitants of the county are with us, and perhaps not altogether indisposed to be observed and commented upon. They are lineal descendants of the men who set up the rude stone monuments, and tomahawked each other, first with stone axes, and then with bronze celts…
In conclusion, I would urge on the Devon Association the importance of collecting statistics relative to the shape of heads, the colour of eyes and hair, and complexion of the children in our schools.4
The urgency of this call to action is heightened by the influence of the railways in ‘distributing our population and breaking up the little clusters of families that have remained in one district for centuries’.5 It is precisely by means of the railway system that Sherlock Holmes distributes himself; or rather, the efficiency of the railway creates the illusion of his being in two different places at once: in London, at the heart of modernity; and on the moor, in pursuit of the human ‘throwback’. The railway is the enemy of ethnography, but it modernises the system of criminal investigation.
Mortimer notes that Sir Henry Baskerville has the ‘rounded head’ of a Celt – he is both the heir of the estate and an arriviste, having spent his career in Canada. His condition recalls that of the second wave of invaders, outwardly in control, but inwardly succumbing to the traditions of the place they come to own. His uncle fits the same pattern, having made his fortune in South Africa. Both men seek to renew the building projects of their forerunners, unconsciously echoing the practices of Baring-Gould’s ‘short-headed’ invaders who extended the tradition of dolmen-building established by the ‘long-headed Ivernians.’ But the Baskerville improvers also echo the practices of Sabine Baring-Gould himself, who personally relocated the Lewtrenchard ‘menhir’, or standing stone, which had been used time out of mind as a bridge over the millstream. Baring-Gould had it dragged to the front of the mill and re-erected.
