“I never risk hallucinations,” Doyle explained, “my experiments have had six, eight, or ten witnesses.”51 We can read in these words a reference not only to evidence, but also to a kind of jury—the eyes of men and women who can testify to what they see. It’s by these means he “proves” spiritualism, and yet, as Sherlock Holmes remarks in “Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” evidence may be “a two-edged thing, and may possibly cut in a very different direction to that which [we] imagine.” Doyle visited mediums on several continents, and like Crookes, he attempted to use scientific methods to judge them. He refused to heed the criticisms of those who “had no experience” of psychic phenomena: “There’s an enormous difference, believe me, between believing a thing and knowing a thing, and talking about things that I’ve handled, that I’ve seen, that I’ve heard with my own ears.”52 The results “justified” him; he could “fill a room of [his] house” with the letters of thanks from those who received consolation from psychic connection to lost loved ones—who “heard the sound of a vanished voice and felt the touch of the vanished hand.”53 Was this so different from the piles of mail he received for Sherlock Holmes from those who misjudged him to be flesh and blood? Weren’t they writing letters to a ghost?
We might wonder how a medical man trained by Joseph Bell in observation of minutiae could believe such stories. Not all physicians were so credulous. Silas Weir Mitchell attacked it as both fraudulent and “very stupid”54 (and later wrote a satire in which a man returning from war attends a séance of his legs and walks on invisible air, reunited). Tesla would ultimately turn his back on spiritualism, too, by discovering the external mechanism of his visions. The angelic faces, he wrote, were but the work of his eidetic memory, recalling a painting he had seen and admired; the music came from a nearby church choir at early mass; the likeness of his mother appeared only because she was so much concerned in his thoughts. These notes explained “everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts,” and he added, “I have ever has the faintest reason to change my views on psychical and spiritual phenomena, for which there is absolutely no foundation.”55 Regardless, séances boasted witnesses “of unquestionable intellect and social status,” men like Crookes, but also Napoleon III and Tsar Alexander II (who were both patrons of the famed medium Daniel Dunglas Home).56 Granted, neither Napoleon or Alexander received insight into the destruction of their separate empires, but even so, the spiritual had not risen as an affront to science so much as an aspect of it. Decades earlier no one would have believed electricity could light homes hundreds of miles from the source of energy—and for Doyle, his Sherlock and his spiritualism did not exist as if in separate spheres. In 1928, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle agreed to be interviewed on film. The grainy black and white can still be viewed today: Doyle, looking very much the part of Dr. Watson, sits on his front stoop with his dog, Dolly, and speaks about Sherlock and the realm of spirits. “There are a few things that people always want to ask me,” he begins. “One of them is: how I ever came to write the Sherlock Holmes stories? And the other is about: How I came to have psychic experiences and to take so much interest in that question?”57 He begins with neither. Instead, he described his scientific training in medical school—and his frustration with detective stories wherein lucky chance or “fluke” led to unexplainable results. “I began to think of turning to scientific methods,” he explained; if Dr. Bell, his old professor, had instead worked as a detective, “he’d get the thing by building it up, scientifically.” Doyle planted the seed of an entirely new kind of detective, and one so popular that he literally took on life of his own. It is “curious,” Doyle tells his interviewer, William Fox, “how many people around the world are perfectly convinced that he is a living human being. I get letters addressed to him [. . .] I’ve even had ladies writing to say they’d be very glad to be his housekeeper.”58 Sherlock, he claimed, was a “monstrous growth” that even a skilled surgeon couldn’t quite cut away—though Doyle had tried, principally by burying him at Reichenbach Falls. Ten years passed before Sherlock returned, years of angry letters from pleading fans, and even several attempts at copying the style and carrying the stories on without Doyle’s help. He claimed that his more “serious” interest in spiritualism and the paranormal began at the same time as his work on detective fiction, about 1886. But by 1903, the fields would merge: he would bring his own hero back from the grave.
The Immortal Detective
“It was in the spring of 1894,” Watson begins, and London had been rocked by the death of Ronald Adair, “under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances.”59 But, he continues, “The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing to me compared to the inconceivable sequel, which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life.” Watson goes on to reveal his own continued interest in crimes of a curious nature, and as he mulled over the Adair case, he accidentally runs against an elderly and deformed man. A sneer is all he gets for his pains to help him gather the scattered books—but hours later, in his Kensington rooms, he finds the same white-haired creature at his door. In conversation, he points Watson’s attention to the bookcase; a quarter of a moment later, and Sherlock Holmes stands before him instead. “A grey mist swirled before my eyes,” Watson writes; he stood, he stared, he fainted dead away. When he comes to, his first response is to grasp Holmes by the arm to test that flesh and blood made up the man; we find Sherlock is no spirit at all, but rather a hunted man. The description that follows doesn’t scintillate so much as disappoint; Watson accepts the whole, ready for another adventure (he is rather conveniently a widower at this point). But the reader feels strangely cheated. That’s it? Yes, the tale ends with the famous capture of the last of Moriarty’s men, the sharpshooter Colonel Sebastian Moran. Yes, we see Watson and Sherlock reinstalled at 221B. But if Doyle speaks truly that his hand was “forced” into pulling this particular spirit from the pit, then the somewhat unenthusiastic return may be evidence not of a grand séance but a continued haunting. All scientific method aside, the “Empty House” is haunted, after all. Sherlock outlives his creator. The Sherlock effect never lost momentum, even in his absence, and after all, The Hound of the Baskervilles appears in the interim between Sherlock’s death and life.
“There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the color-less skein of life,” Sherlock explains at the end of A Study in Scarlet. It is “our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.” From his first case to his last, Sherlock offers concrete method, the “science” that Doyle felt was so lacking from detective fictions. From Edmond Locard in France, to Spilsbury in Britain, to John George Spenzer in Cleveland, Ohio, the leading forensic detective of the age offered advice from 221B Baker street. Tucked into Spenzer’s archive is a typed sheet of paper, a copy of “Why the Modern Sherlock Holmes Would Be Scientifically Trained.” The “new school” of scientific detective technique, it states, “May find Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a powerful ally.” Every murderer of the modern age is confronted with a scientific problem—how to dispose of bodies. Many (like the acid bath murderer) had found in chemistry a solution, and woe betide to the detective who doesn’t do likewise. “Good detective service is the product of an entirely different line of development [. . .] which involves a thorough knowledge of all the practical sciences.”‡ The article cites the head of inspection at Scotland Yard, Charles Ainsworth Mitchell. Mitchell, advocate of handwriting analysis, fingerprinting, and new techniques, explains that Sherlock is but the starting point of a broad new field which, even by 1911, still had not been fully grasped. It’s a case of innovation in need of a salesman. “Of all modern agencies,” Mitchell explained in Science and the Criminal, “electricity is one of the most effective [. . .] for capturing the criminal.”60
What, we might ask, does the manufacture of power have to do with detective work? Speaking like a latter-day Joseph Bell (and in agreement with Tesla), Mitchell explained: “The man
in the street is not quick at grasping the possibilities of novel invention. At first, it is popularly regarded as a new toy, a matter of amazement and of amusement, but of no moment in the practical affairs of men.”61 He goes on to speak of all the inventions we’ve covered thus far in our journey, the telephone, the telegraph, electricity, and x-ray; every one of them was thought of no use, but “must prove itself and so live.” And what proof mattered to men like Mitchell? “Not until the telegraph had shown its utility in capturing criminals did it acquire any reputation”; wireless transmission and even photography would have been but passing fads (in his estimation) if not for the light they brought to the darkest of matters: murder. The well-lit street discourages the criminal; the telegraph aids in transferring information so that he may be caught at railways by well-informed policemen; the photograph leaves no doubt that he is the man—and the microscope pins him to the crime scene in silent but effective witness. The future would see the rise of forensics not only in courtroom drama in Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler’s§ New York, but also in schools and police units across the globe. “If we presented Michael Faraday [. . .] with the scientific evidence our courts now take for granted,” writes Val McDermid, “it would seem like magic.”62
And perhaps there is magic in it. Sherlock Holmes, with his angular features pressed over fingertips, head haloed in pipe smoke, suggests that justice is possible, that truth may be found, that proof exists for those who know how to find it. The forensic detectives cannot bring the dead back to life, but they can make them speak, and through the dust and ash that surrounds us, offer a kind of order in the chaos . . . and at least the illusion of control. And of course, we can rest assured that Sherlock, who lived long before us, will be operating long after us, immortal as ever, the last “inventor” in an age of manufactured power (and one that George Shattuck Morison himself failed to predict). We long for the unemotional control of the Great Detective because he, alone among all the inventors, controls his technology. It can have no dread for him; he employs it, masters it as the Vryl-ya master the life force. But let us not forget: he—and the control he represents—is still always and ever a fiction. It’s little wonder we prefer the fiction of an immortal Sherlock Holmes, steampunk hero debonair extraordinaire, to the mad science of our own dread tech, as much or more threatening now than ever it has been.
*Though, in fact, there is such a title—Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell by Howard Engel.
†“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.”
‡From the Spenzer archive, Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum.
§The principal characters of Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, and famous for turning forensics into a systematic practice.
FINISHING THOUGHTS
Mad Science Reprise
What does it mean to stand at the edge of a New Epoch, surveying from that vantage the sweep of history long gone, and the vast blue dawn of a not-yet-imagined future? The end of Elting Morison’s Men, Machines, and Modern Times offers proposals, but no answers. “Maybe in time,” he writes, “there will be found some grand design to satisfy all the data in the disturbing new world, settled doctrine from which all men can take their bearings. But that time is hardly now.”1 In fact, as he explains it, the time is specifically not “now.” The whole purpose for experiment in fact and in fiction persists in finding the potential and limit of machinery before it jumps the rails. We invent technology ahead of our capacity to contain or respond to new conditions; as a result, it will take “poets and philosophers and scholars,” he says, to remind us of the strange bundle of contradictions we call human. Since we can’t see far enough beyond the horizon of time, Elting asks that we “take the measure, a little more closely than heretofore, of what man is in the new environment he has created.”2 His great uncle never made any such promise, and now—some half-century later—we have more of George Morison’s dash and daring than of Elting’s caution.
At a dinner of steampunk authors, Diana Vick made the point that “authors can’t write about the future because it’s happening too quickly [. . . and] with steampunk we can go back and talk about things that didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, and there’s so much more potential in that.”3 Then again, we can only imagine this potential backward. Like Sherlock, the story always happens in reverse. It’s the speed of change that causes our dislocation—it’s the train crash invented before the train. The New Epoch did come. It did bring many of the happy success Morison predicted. The trouble—the dread—has little to do with engineering prophecy. It has almost as little to do with the future.
There are those who would call the steampunk aesthetic escapist, a way out of the dingy cobbles and into the bright dazzle of something better, other. Whitechapel Gods may be escaping from the modern, but S. M. Peters’s novel clanks along with machines of grit and destruction every bit as toothsome as modern-day weapons of destruction. Nemo might captain amazing vessels, but he’s caught up in a very real political history of colonialism and imperialism we’ve inherited right to our present moment. In fact, the present never leaves us alone. William Gibson (of The Difference Engine) wrote Pattern Recognition in 2001, a year that splits history starkly between before and after the terror attacks of 9/11. The destruction wrought by four planes, aviation technologies that no one before considered as tantamount to missiles, returns us to Virilio’s warning about the invention of accident. No hot-air balloon? No pitching into earth from above. No boiler? No explosion—no airplane, and New York’s skyline might still have Twin Towers overlooking the harbor. “The attacks of September 11, 2001,” write Rachel Bowser and Brian Croxall in Like Clockwork: Steampunk Pasts, Presents, Futures, “changed everything.”4 We’ve proven it a familiar story—World War II and the atom bomb, World War I and the catastrophic effects of gas and guns, Armstrong’s “Big Will” or Tesla’s radio waves, even the locomotive itself, which allowed borders to be crossed so readily and at such speed: you cannot reverse upon technology. We must live in the after with all the aftermath. But it’s the way the past interrupts the present that Freud called “trauma.” Theorist Cathy Caruth adds that “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event,” but that it comes back in unknown and unknowable ways to haunt us.5 Steampunk is ever the present and past interrupting each other’s narrative, and our dread doesn’t rise from seeing some future danger, but living in a troubled present.
“Nobody really writes about the future” at all, said Gibson when asked about the book. “All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing.”6 This helps explain steampunk’s “moment”—its rise to national and international prominence. If speed of technological change dislocates us, steampunk beats it to the punch. Lacking the Red Queen’s memory in fact, we invent it in fiction, recreating a reality where planes (or rather airplanes) do crash before we’ve invented them, but at least it no longer surprises us. Meanwhile, we go on inventing the means of destruction for a future generation to assimilate.
“Our generation,” wrote George Shattuck Morison, “has the privilege of doing its full share in bringing forth the great changes which are ushering in the new epoch.” The truth of our steampunk science lies just there: clockwork futures aren’t about the future at all. They exist here, and now, the present moment with its darkness and daylight, its struggles and sorrows. The strange little book got a good bit of the present right. Smallpox eradicated, epidemics at such a low ebb in developed countries that people debate whether rather than when they will vaccinate. Earth movers and building techniques lift cities skyward with better ventilation and safer construction—and half of it accomplished by nonhuman enterprise. Children no longer labor in mines; prosthetic shops don’t line our boulevards for the unlucky factory worker. We’ve seen better and cleaner means of living since the 1970s, used new materials to protect what’s left of the environment, and proven that yes, both Armstrong and Tesla were right, we can harness the sun, and th
e wind, and the water for power. It’s also meant pollution and war and damage and death. It always does. If steampunk science has taught us anything it’s that we live precariously with our inventions and their intersections: golden gears and dreadful weapons, medicine that heals and poison that destroys, past and present, fact and fiction. It’s best, perhaps, if we leave the haunting and—like the sleuth—take up trace hunting. We have paths to choose, here at the edge of our own epoch, the future ancestors of an inherited past.
If the science be mad, then let us be heroes.
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIG. 1: Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (“The Ambassadors”) © The National Gallery, London.
FIG. 2: Athanasius Kircher published a similarly cosmic work, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. Dittrick Museum of Medical History.
Clockwork Futures Page 29
