SOURCE: Thomas, Ronald R. “Minding the Body Politic: the Romance of Science and the Revision of History in Victorian Detective Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991): 233-54.

[In the following essay, Thomas suggests that Victorian society's desperate need to distance itself from the world of crime reflects a feeling of collective guilt caused by Britain's imperialist policies.]

Once we happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. I had thought that Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had read this author attentively.

(The Wolf-Man, My Recollections of Sigmund Freud)

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

(Sherlock Holmes, “The Five Orange Pips”)

Having been through the remarkable analysis of his own dream with Freud, the Wolf-Man should not have been surprised to discover that Freud was so attentive a reader of detective literature in general and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. The analogy between the methods of Freudian dream theory and those of the master detectives of Victorian detective fiction has subsequently been noted not only by Freud's most famous patient, but by literary critics and psychoanalytic scholars as well.¹ As the detective story “reconstructs” a crime and provides the missing explanatory links between apparently unrelated events, psychoanalysis reconstructs the web of dream-thoughts that lead up to a dream, identifying the hidden logic, or motive, or repressed desire that connects those thoughts. In both cases there are obstacles to the act of reconstruction, obstacles Freud would refer to as the agencies of resistance, repression, and censorship. Those terms are drawn from the world of law and politics rather than the science of medicine, and they indicate how much Freud's therapeutic model is also a model of social enforcement, just as Holmes's model of law enforcement also serves a therapeutic function for his clients and his readers alike.

But there is a further, rather more disturbing analogy between the science of detection as it was practiced by Holmes and the science of psychoanalysis as it was developed by Freud. This correspondence is perhaps most clearly manifested in the opening pages of the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, where the great detective introduces his science of detection and joins forces with his well-known partner, the physician, Dr. Watson. In their very first collaboration, the two are faced with a rather sensational clue as they investigate a crime: scrawled in blood on the wall where a gruesome murder was committed are five red letters—RACHE. Lestrade, the well-meaning but consistently errant inspector from Scotland Yard, immediately concludes that the letters indicate that the unknown writer intended to inscribe the name RACHEL on the wall, and that somehow a woman by that name would figure in the crime's solution. Holmes cautions him, however, that RACHE is also the German word for revenge, and it is frequently used as a signature by radical socialist groups to take credit for their political executions and to warn their enemies of impending retribution.

Later, Holmes will turn his analysis of this writing—and of the case—around. As he ponders the motive for the murder, he expresses a characteristic tendency to provide private explanations for political acts: “And now the great question as to the reason why. Was it politics, then, or a woman? That was the question which confronted me. I was inclined from the first to the latter supposition. It must have been a private wrong, and not a political one, which called for such methodical revenge” (Doyle 1:84). Holmes's methodical science of criminal investigation consistently “inclines” him in this direction: to replace the historical event with the romantic intrigue. He invokes the political motive only to dismiss it as a false clue in understanding the truth of the matter, which, more than likely, can always be traced to a “private” wrong. Moreover, he justifies this substitution by appealing to the authority of science—the science of criminal detection which he invented.

When the master detective reads the writing on the wall, that is, the discourse of a positivistic science intervenes to replace the historical explanation with a more personal and psychological one. It is a commonplace, of course, to accuse psychoanalysis of the same crime of suppression. Carl Schorske's famous essay on “Politics and Patricide in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams”; argues persuasively that the science of psychoanalysis was an elaborate act of political repression on Freud's part, in which he systematically reduced his own troubled political past and present to an epiphenomenal status in relation to the more primal conflict between father and son. As is the case in A Study in Scarlet, a scientific inquiry enables a universal “family romance” to replace a political conflict with more specific historical determinants.

This essay concerns the intersection not of psychoanalysis and detective fiction, but of a set of broader discursive phenomena at the end of the nineteenth century, a convergence that is implied and exemplified by the analogy I have just drawn. The circumstances I will consider together here are, first, the rise of the literary phenomenon of detective fiction to popular prominence in late Victorian England; second, the simultaneous development of the “scientific” discipline of criminal anthropology which sought to explain the origin of criminal behavior physiologically, inscribing it within the body of what was classified as the “criminal type”; and third, an emerging political crisis in the public conscience in England over the rationale for continuing the established policies of imperial conquest. More specifically, I will focus upon an analysis of the “criminal mind” and the “criminal body” as it is portrayed in two important texts in Victorian detective fiction, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four. The criminal psychology and the imperial politics implied in these texts collaborate with the emerging scientific theories of criminal physiology as they were articulated by the founders of criminal anthropology in the 1880s and 90s to contain and sublimate contemporary political events for which there seemed to be no evident justification. Together, scientific fact and fictional narrative generated a system of knowledge and created a body of literature that not only provided psychological reassurance about the security of life and property at home, but also manifested and controlled cultural doubts in Victorian England about the policies of the empire abroad.²

Arthur Conan Doyle first introduced the figure of Sherlock Holmes to the English reading public in 1887, the same year in which Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk in the office of the Paris prefect of police, was gaining notoriety for introducing a method for identifying criminals based upon the careful measuring and quantifying of certain bodily parts of the criminal. In the same period in which Bertillon was developing this science of “anthropometry,” locating the distinct identity of a criminal in the criminal's anatomy, researchers from other disciplines were exploring additional ways to detect the criminal in the body, through such means as fingerprinting, serology, toxicology, and forensic medicine.³ Simultaneously, in the pages of the Strand magazine, Sherlock Holmes was inventing a parallel branch of criminology which would become integral to actual police work throughout Europe. By availing himself of all the chemical, biological, physical, and technological methods springing up at the turn of the century, Holmes became “the harbinger of a kind of criminological investigation which did not fit into any of these special disciplines, and which ultimately far surpassed them in range” (Thorwald 234). The Sherlock Holmes stories not only provided good entertainment for their common readers, they also inspired future advances in criminological practice as well.⁴ Indeed, Bertillon and Edmond Locard, another pioneer in forensic medicine and criminology in France, have attributed some of their own innovations to reading the Sherlock Holmes stories. In developing what he called “a new police science” which focused on the examination of microscopic particles on the criminal body, Locard would even instruct his colleagues and students “to read over such stories as ‘A Study in Scarlet’” and ‘The Sign of the Four’” in order to understand the basis of the practices he was recommending (qtd. in Thowald 281).

Many of these developments in police practice, both real and literary, may also be traced to the founder of criminal anthropology in Europe, Cesare Lombroso, and to his popularizer and explicator in England, Havelock Ellis, both of whom concentrated their research upon the body of the criminal in explaining the reasons for criminal behavior. The increasingly authoritative claims of evolutionary biology as they were being elaborated during this period suggested that human beings be regarded more and more as animals subject to the laws of nature like all other animals. Social scientists and even legal reformers, therefore, looked with increasing frequency for the causes and remedies of crime in the biology of the offender rather than in the circumstances of the crime. As I will show in this investigation of a set of foundational texts in detective fiction and criminal anthropology, these assumptions had implications not only for the detection and disciplining of domestic crime in England, but for the prosecution of foreign policy as well.

In the climactic scene of The Moonstone, the mysterious theft of the diamond—which serves as a symbol of the imperial conquest of India in the novel—is revealed to have taken place when the sleeping body of the unwitting thief was operating under the influence of opium. Here, the criminal is seen as a victim of his own bodily processes and the plotting of a physician who wanted to demonstrate the power which the body wields over the mind. To solve the mystery and recover the gem, the thief agrees to the plot of another physician, restaging the theft by subjecting his body to the same quantity of opium once again and redreaming the scene of the crime. In Doyle's The Sign of Four, Sherlock Holmes administers himself an injection of cocaine and drifts into a lethargic, dreamy state both before and after he solves a mystery that exposes a deeper plot of imperial plunder and betrayal which also originated in the Indian colonies. Here, the body of the thief convicts him in another way, when Holmes's scientific expertise enables him to identify the traces left at the scene of the crime as belonging to an aboriginal figure of imperial conquest. In this case, that criminal body, like the object he steals, is transformed into a commodity from the empire: before he is killed, he is exploited in England as a curiosity at exhibitions and fairs because of the “misshapen” and “distorted features” of his exotic physiognomy (Doyle 1:128).

The repeated association of dream, drugs, and empire with the body of the criminal in these novels suggests a repressed intention within and between them.⁵ That intention may be revealed in another element the two texts share. Each refers either directly or indirectly to the military and political violence of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. “The Sepoy War,” as the Victorians often called it, or “the Devil's Wind,”’ as the British retaliation was named by the Indians themselves, shook popular confidence in British foreign policy at home. On one hand, the impact of the event served to dramatize to some Britons the need to enforce law and order in the unruly colonies; on the other, it exposed the increasing hypocrisy of the empire's economic motivations and the need to reinforce a sense of Britain's proper role in history as a beacon of order and civilization in a world of darkness and barbarism. In fact, India was one of the main sources for the production of the very drugs which, in all these texts, represent the subversive and vengeful forces from the colonies that threatened to penetrate the mind of the mother country and its body politic as well. The invasive, disorienting influence of the drug on the body of the criminal and the detective alike becomes equated in these texts with the infectious influence of the colonies on the state of the English commonwealth. Both influences require investigation and treatment. Both call for an enforcement of the law and a re-enforcement of contested political and historical assumptions.

Before they wrote their detective novels, Collins and his friend Charles Dickens had already addressed the subject of the mutiny in articles and stories in the magazine Household Words.⁶ But their detective fiction represents the fullest expression of the vexed responses they had to the conflict. Along with Doyle, who frequently spoke out as an apologist for Britain's imperial policies, the authors of The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood reveal in their detective stories both an uncomfortable sense of guilt about the British imperial project and an effort to justify that project as well. According to Patrick Brantlinger's analysis of the literature of the empire, no episode in British imperial history raised public excitement to a higher pitch than this insurrection by the Bengal Army against the increasingly brutal suppression of their own culture by the British forces. In 1897, Hilda Gregg remarked in Blackwood's magazine that “of all the great events of this century, as they are reflected in fiction, the Indian Mutiny has taken the firmest hold on the popular imagination” (qtd. in Brantlinger 199). The event gave rise to a deluge of outraged eyewitness accounts, journal articles, histories, poems, and plays on the subject—virtually all of which were aimed at condemning the barbarity of the Indian savages. But these detective stories treat the event only indirectly, using the colonial troubles as a background for stories of domestic crime. In the anthropological discourse on the criminal body which was developed concurrently by figures like Lombroso and his English counterpart Havelock Ellis, a more sophisticated reaction to the colonial unrest is evidenced and a more formidable defense against it is erected. The combined literary and scientific policing that operates in both of these materials may be read as a response to this moment when the British public was confronted in dramatic terms with the bloody handwriting on the walls of its own empire—they saw themselves acting less and less like the moral policemen of the Orient and more and more like its lawless economic exploiters: they were brought face to face with the spectre of their own criminal guilt and an impending colonial revenge.

Common to these two novels is the occurrence of a domestic crime which takes the form of a violent counter-invasion from the colonies, threatening the safety and tranquility of the homeland. The forces of scientific detection are then marshalled first to expose that threat and then to explain it away as the underlying and isolated crime of passion that it really is, a passion linked to a medical or a physiological condition. Like the crime in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the theft of the moonstone takes place in an opium-induced dream against a background of Eastern orientalism. The mystery is finally solved in a dramatic reenactment of that dream in which Franklin Blake, the protagonist and chief detective figure of the novel, discovers that he had stolen the diamond from his own fiancée and that the theft was the result of a quantity of opium slipped into his drink by a physician intent on demonstrating in his body the power of medical science. But this sensational domestic crime covers over the more vicious originary political crime recounted in the prologue to the novel: there we learn that the gem was taken first as a piece of imperial plunder by a platoon of British soldiers during their murderous siege of a small Indian village. It was subsequently bequeathed upon Blake's fiancée by her uncle, Colonel Herncastle, bringing with it, many feared, the legendary curse that condemned any illegitimate possessor of the stone. When the moonstone is then mysteriously stolen from the niece's bedroom in the middle of the night, the community becomes preoccupied with this event, eclipsing any concerns it may have had about a vengeful curse from the colonies upon the mother country. It even obscures the memory of the brutal political crime by which the gem was attained in the first place. Under the cover of the dream episode, the political plot is transformed into the exotic atmosphere for a romantic intrigue.

Suspicion for the theft is, for a brief time, cast upon a mysterious group of devout Indian nationals who come to England expressly to rescue the gem from the hands of their infidel colonial oppressors; but these strange figures are soon trivialized and dismissed from serious consideration as the theft begins more and more to resemble a symbolic seduction of the victim by her suitors. Blake has, it begins to become clear, unconsciously broken into his fiancée's bedroom, gained access to her secret hiding place, and stolen her most precious possession. But when it is discovered that Blake, in turn, has had the gem stolen from him while he was still in his opiated dream, he is exonerated. The thief finally turns out to be Blake's rival for Rachel's affections, Godfrey Ablewhite, a renowned and respected philanthropist by day, a petty philanderer and embezzler by night. He steals the gem simply to help finance his sexual exploits and, for the purposes of the plot's displacements, to confirm the sexual allegory of the crime. If there are any doubts about the conclusiveness of that allegory, they are put to rest when the crucial clue to the mystery is unearthed—the stained nightgown of the would-be lover that has in turn been stolen away by a rival for his affections.⁷ The replacement of a political explanation for the crime with a romantic explanation is already complete fairly early in the text, a substitution which will then be confirmed and demonstrated scientifically later on: suspicion is first transferred from the colonial plunderers to the Indian visitors and then to the romantic protagonist. Through the agencies of physiological science, even Blake's guilt will in turn finally be lifted from him and directed at the conventional target of Victorian repression—the figure of sexual promiscuity.

Ablewhite is also the image of English hypocrisy, publicly a man of charitable and benevolent intentions, privately a cheat and a thief. Except for the obvious metaphorical parallel with an increasingly hypocritical and double-minded British imperial ideology, however, Ablewhite has no connections with politics or the colonies. When his guilt is assured, then, the crime of the novel is displaced at a third remove from the originary scene of imperial conquest and murder upon the body of a promiscuous womanizer. This mystery, which begins as a violent military invasion, gradually degenerates into nothing more than the unmasking of a spurned lover and an incorrigible chaser after women. In fact, Ablewhite is murdered by the Indian nationals before he can redeem the gem for cash. And to make the point absolutely clear that any political motives in this novel are to be understood as a disguise for something else, the culprit's corpse is discovered in the disguise of a dark-skinned East Indian sailor, only to be unmasked by the police for the philanderer he is. As in A Study in Scarlet, the political explanation for the crime turns out to be a mere decoy for uncovering a crime of passion and greed. An emerging Victorian science collaborates with an established Victorian morality to enable even Godfrey Ablewhite to be read as a victim of his own irrepressible bodily drives.

But the novel is not nearly as concerned with the disguised body of Godfrey Ablewhite as it is with the drugged body of Franklin Blake—with first indicting him as the apparent thief and then exonerating him as the victim of his physiological reaction to the foreign body of the opium. The main action of the novel is directed toward mounting an elaborate scientific demonstration, what the doctor calls “a bold experiment,” which places the spectacle of Blake's body at its center (438). The young physician Ezra Jennings theorizes that Blake had in fact unconsciously engaged in the theft for purely physiological reasons: he was acting under the influence of a precise mixture of alcohol and opium combined with a nervous condition brought on by his deprivation of sleep and tobacco, all of which conspired to produce his body's mysterious behavior against his own will. The physician recommends, therefore, an exact replication of these precise physiological conditions in the body of Blake in order to discover the fate of the stolen object and, by implication, to regain control over his own body. This procedure will, theoretically, cause the patient to replicate his actions of the night in question and thereby solve the mystery of the moonstone's disappearance. Moreover, this dramatic restaging of Blake's sleep-walking dream, the doctor stipulates, must be performed before “witnesses whose testimony is beyond dispute” (439). Blake's body must, that is, become a public spectacle, an object of suspicion to himself, and a field of scientific investigation for the entire community. The assembly and construction of the complicated machinery and personnel to complete this bold experiment form the main action of the novel, completely replacing the primal political crime of colonial conquest with which it had begun and enabling its transformation into a story of bodily passion denied.

David Miller has shown persuasively how The Moonstone and other Victorian novels demonstrate the dispersal of the regulatory function of the police into the everyday activities of ordinary life. But here, in this moment of scientific public theatre when Blake's body is submitted to the surveillance and regulation of the entire community, the reduction of the patient to a docile body subject to the conditions of his own physiology and the dictates of the medical profession has its most dramatic demonstration in an event that is anything but ordinary. Through the staging of this moment which forms the dramatic center of the novel, Blake is made to believe that he virtually reunites his mind with his body by submitting them to the authority of the physician and the testimony of his society, all of whom, joined together, are empowered to condemn or acquit him. The remarkable achievement of this novel is to convince Blake (and us) to approve of this bold experiment as an acceptable practice and to allow the physician's procedures to declare the protagonist guilty or innocent. In urging Blake to comply with his bizarre plan, Jennings quotes from the work of several actual pioneers in Victorian forensic medicine and then offers the incontestable rationale for the proceeding: “Science sanctions my proposal” (440). That “proposal” amounts to conducting a kind of scientific romance where the scientist not only enables the reunion of body and mind leading to the solution of the mystery, but he enables the reunion of the estranged lovers in marriage as well, an event which effectively cancels out the political intrigue at the root of all these problems in the first place.

Significantly, the person primarily responsible for solving the mystery is not only a scientist, he is also an exile from India, a strange “metaphysician of the mind” about whom no one knows very much except that he suffers under the oppression of an unnamed accusation and an unspecified disease. Ezra Jennings manages to get the information that eludes even the master-detective Cuff, and he is able to do so for one reason: as a scientist and medical man, he understands the effect of foreign substances on the body, especially as they influence the unconscious world of dreams. He is an addict himself, administering and even “abusing” opium (as he confesses) for the pain and anxiety connected with his unspecified physical ailment. At the same time, Jennings is at the vanguard of his profession, reading one controversial text on Human Physiology and authoring another on the “delicate subject of the brain and the nervous system” (423). This advocate of a theory of crime as a form of pathology with purely physiological determinants, then, designs the dream's reenactment and orchestrates this, the novel's central scene, in which the community becomes the spectator and police of Franklin Blake's delinquent body and of his subconscious mind as well.

Jennings is the forerunner not only of the modern criminal anthropologist, but of the practice of medical science as a form of surveillance and discipline, of police work as a form of therapy. These two professions will be explicitly joined again in the detective form's most popular double incarnation—the team of Doctor Watson and Consulting Detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes. But here, in the first English detective novel, detection and therapy are combined to reveal that a social crime is the playing out of a psychological conflict expressed in a dream—a conclusion strikingly prophetic of the “repressing agency” of Freudian dream theory as Paul Ricoeur would describe it: the “psychological expression of a prior social fact” (178). The conclusions of this text also anticipate more immediately, however, the tactics and assumptions of the emerging discipline of criminal anthropology, attending to what Jennings himself calls the “physiological principle” which is the basis of all human action (440). In him, and in the scientific disciplines he represents, the underlying motives for the crimes of empire are reduced to questions of bodily fluids, nervous reactions, and intoxicating drugs. The “stimulating influence” of the opium, Jennings tells Blake in summarizing his theory of the crime, along with “your morbidly sensitive nervous condition” became “intensified in your brain” and managed to “subordinate to themselves your judgment and your will” (442).

But there is another reason why Jennings should prove to supply the vital information for the case, beyond the fact that he represents the “sanctions” of the contemporary positivistic “science” of human physiology. Jennings also embodies the repression of the prior social fact with which the novel is most deeply concerned—the declining moral authority of the British Empire. He is first of all a secretive man who staunchly refuses to divulge the details of his mysterious past. “My story,” he affirms, “will die with me” (427). But Jennings does offer some evidence about the nature of that secret story that finally does cost him his life. At one moment Jennings lets down his guard and allows part of his secret past to escape when he tells Blake, “I was born, and partly brought up, in one of our colonies. My father was an Englishman; but my mother—We are straying away from our subject, Mr. Blake; and it is my fault” (420). Jennings is, it would seem, the bastard child of the British Empire. But to speak of that empire and his relationship to it is to “stray away from the subject.” That subject is the novel's secret “fault,” its repressed crime. Jennings conspires in maintaining this secret that is at the heart of the novel's crime—the violence and cruelty of British imperialism which obscures its motives and accuses its victims. Ironically, his ambitious scientific project and the revelations it achieves obscure the unspeakable and painful crime which is inscribed in his own body and which finally takes his life.

The Moonstone suggests that the criminal intentions lurking beneath the official ideals that originally justified the British Empire will bring their own revenge in the form of a guilt and anxiety that are imprinted upon the mind and body of even its most innocent citizens. The society experiences that guilt at least in part as fear: fear that the “Indian Plot” would reclaim and revenge the profits of empire. But it also offers a cure for this fear and guilt, reducing them, finally, to secondary illusions and replacing them with the collective composition of a kind of scientific romance in which the mind, estranged from its own body, is reunited through an act of scientific intervention and social surveillance. Appropriately, the marriage between Blake and Rachel which is interrupted by the crime is wonderfully enabled by the scientific romance performed within the body of the unwitting criminal, purging him of the effects of the foreign agents, even as it accounts for the disappearance of the signs of imperial plunder—the diamond itself—and returns the society to its newly normalized practices.

The complex configuration of crime, empire, and political repression finds an even more elaborate expression in what would seem a less complex text, Doyle's The Sign of Four. The missing property is once again a treasure from India—the Agra Treasure—which has been stolen from the sons of a retired British officer who had served in the colonies and brought the treasure back home to England with him. During the theft, one of the sons who has inherited the treasure is killed in his chemical laboratory by a poison dart, and the other retreats into a mad state of opium addiction, guilt, and anxiety. As Holmes eventually discovers, the thief responsible for this crime is also an ex-British soldier who had actually defended British interests from the onslaught of a horde of “black fiends” during the Sepoy War (1:156). Gradually, this soldier, named Jonathan Small, was drawn into a life of crime—virtually coerced—by a pair of Indian mutineers. While the identification of criminality with imperial conquest seems to be more clearly acknowledged here than in Edwin Drood or The Moonstone, the effort to distort and repress that equation finds a more elaborate form. And while this text deals more explicitly with the events surrounding the Indian mutiny, it is also more forgiving about Britain's role in those events. In fact, the ex-soldier Jonathan Small is finally presented as only a reluctant and petty criminal, swept into a life of crime more by loyalty to his friends and coercion of the Indian nationals than by greed for himself. Although Small is identified as the thief of the tale, its murderer is identified as an Indian national, Small's savage aborigine companion, Tonga, whom the soldier had once nursed back to health in India and subsequently brought back with him to England. The “savage instinct” of the man Small refers to as a “little bloodthirsty imp” is the only motive that is offered for his murderous crime, a crime that is performed, fittingly, at a scene of scientific experimentation with the poisonous dart the tribesman had made from what Holmes instantly recognizes as what is clearly not “an English thorn” (1: 113, 156).

But before he even sees the aborigine, Sherlock Holmes is able to posit his existence and assert his guilt with confidence. The master detective describes the as-yet-unseen criminal perfectly to Watson by identifying the distinctive footprint left behind at the scene of the crime by Small's brutal companion as, like the thorn, a very unEnglish phenomenon. In this, the crucial act of detection in the novel, Holmes makes his identification by resorting once more to the authority of science: by consulting a “gazetteer which is now being published” (1:128). This volume contains, among other innumerable facts, a description of the aborigines of the Andaman Islands, a description which coincidentally, under the guise of objective anthropological data, amounts to a “scientific” justification for British interventionism. In the physical features of the race, it would seem, the signs of criminal behavior can be detected:

They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they, that all the efforts of the British officials have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to ship-wrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast.

(1: 28)

As was true of The Moonstone, the crucial piece of evidence in The Sign of Four focuses the investigation on the body of the suspect and, in this case, on the “naturally” criminal and very unEnglish physiology he possesses. The real violence in The Sign of Four remains a definitively unEnglish phenomenon, residing in this savage foreign body from outside the mother country. The “naturally hideous” features of this “intractable and fierce” body find their rightful burial beneath the waves of the Thames at the end of the tale, along with the evidence of English plunder and brutality, the Agra treasure itself. This “savage imp” from off the Indian coast replaces the opium imported from India in The Moonstone as the sign of the uncontrollable forces threatening the body politic of England from the outside (1:127). Even the English suspect, the good soldier gone bad, seems to bear in his body a symbolic sign of the foreign infection, since he lost one of his legs to a crocodile in the Ganges river. His missing footprint tells another criminal tale of bestiality that complements that of the visible if distorted footprint left by his murderous companion.⁸

The gazetteer to which Holmes refers in identifying the culprit appears, at first, a rather harmless volume containing an eclectic array of facts on a wide range of subjects. But this seemingly neutral assembly of data resembles in form another set of texts that were appearing in England at about the same time: Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man (first English edition, 1879) and Havelock Ellis's The Criminal (1890). Both of these contained elaborate collections of scientific data on criminal anatomy, and together they established the basis of the discipline of criminal anthropology. In fact, their collections of data claimed to demonstrate with increasing force the biological and physiological basis of crime, causing them to argue that “the criminal mind” was clearly detectable in—and even determined by—the features of the criminal body. Both texts were filled with elaborate charts and graphs recording criminals' cranial capacity and body shape to support the theory of a distinct criminal physiognomy. Diagrams of the criminal ear, teeth, hands, and eyes were presented as evidence for the claim that “crime is often really a fatal consequence of certain constitutions,” (Lombroso 245). “In general,” Lombroso concluded, “born criminals have projecting ears, thick hair, a thin beard, projecting front eminences, enormous jaws, a square and projecting chin, large cheek-bones, and frequent gesticulation. It is, in short, a type resembling the Mongolian, or sometimes, the Negroid” (qtd. in Ellis 84). I will comment further on the startlingly explicit degree of racial prejudice manifested in these assertions later. For the moment, it is important to note how deeply these statements link criminality to specific body types. “If we examine a number of criminals,” Lombroso's daughter would claim in summarizing her father's theory, “we shall find that they exhibit numerous anomalies in the face, skeleton, and various psychic and sensitive functions, so that they strongly resemble primitive races” (Ferrero, 5). In “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Holmes has apparently benefitted from this line of thinking when he identifies a murderer by reading the “anatomical peculiarities” of the suspect's ear. The great detective himself even claims to have published articles on the subject in the Anthropological Journal, articles which seem closely related to the findings of Lombroso and Ellis in their focus upon the criminal body (2: 896).

It is as if the assertions of Lombroso and Ellis are more generalized, systematic theorizations of Holmes's identifications of the savage criminal footprint in The Sign of Four, the criminal ear in “The Cardboard Box,” and the data from the journals and the gazetteer he employs to secure these identifications. To be sure, all of the criminals Holmes brings to justice in the many cases he investigates are not Andaman aborigines, or even foreigners. Lombroso himself would eventually revise his theory to qualify its racist underpinnings by conceding that only about one-third of all criminals were born criminals bearing the “criminaloid” physiology, the rest having been driven to criminal acts for circumstantial reasons. But for Lombroso and Doyle alike, the predilection to associate the unredeemable criminal with the foreign is virtually irresistible. The celebrated collaboration of Holmes and Dr. Watson may itself be read as a strategy of defense against and a prescription for recovery from the deadly foreign influence, since Watson meets the detective when he returns from the Afghan campaign to nurse an injury he received in battle while serving in the British army there. It is as if the adventures Watson proceeds to write facilitate his recovery from that wound. Tales like “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Speckled Band,” “The Naval Treaty,” and “The Adventure of the Empty House,” among others, consistently dramatize how the poisonous, criminal effects of the empire can infect those who participated in it. Even more to the point, however, is the fact that the often-explicit political features of these tales fade into the background of unquestioned assumptions behind the cases, as their significance is supplanted by the more “scientific” concerns of the investigative procedure itself. Those concerns commonly focus upon the detective's coming to recognize the naturally criminal body of the suspect. When, for example, Colonel Sebastian Moran of Her Majesty's Indian Army is arrested in “The Empty House,” the culprit's guilt is assured in Holmes's eyes because “one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature's plainest danger-signals” (2: 492). To reinforce the significance of these natural endowments in determining the criminal's behavior, Holmes will invoke a version of Lombrosian atavism in explaining the case to Watson as an example of a general phenomenon, implying that Moran's criminality represents a return into the present of a criminal ancestor from the past: “I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree” (2: 494). When he first meets Holmes, Watson makes a telling observation of his own when he notes that the great detective seems to know a great deal about anatomy, chemistry, geology, British law, and even sensational literature, but almost nothing about politics (1: 21-22).⁹

The tendency to suppress political facts with scientific theory in the Holmes canon recapitulates a recurring narrative pattern in Victorian detective fiction, a pattern I referred to in my analysis of The Moonstone as “scientific romance.” Like A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four serves as another case in which this narrative pattern is played out in bold terms. Once again, a direct outcome of the solving of the crime is the enabling of a marriage between the forces of detection (in this case, Dr. Watson) and the victim of the crime (Miss Morstan). “It is a romance,” Miss Morstan's servant asserts midway through the tale. “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl” (1: 129). But the obstacle in this romance is one of the most telling features within it, the Agra treasure itself—which, since Miss Morstan is its “rightful” heir, Watson perceives as a “golden barrier” between them, a mark of her economic superiority over him (1: 143). However, once the treasure, along with the dark, aboriginal murderer, is consigned to “the dark ooze at the bottom of the Thames” (1: 139), the romance is unencumbered and the lovers can unite: “Whoever had lost the treasure,” Watson proclaims, “I knew that night I had gained one” (1: 143). In addition to a wife, however, Watson and his readers also gained something else through the good offices of Holmes and his gazetteer—an obfuscation of the signs of imperial guilt and a return to a state of national confidence through the erasure of the implications of the Sepoy Rebellion. As Jonathan Small admitted in his confession, “It was an evil day for me when first I clapped eyes upon the merchant Achmet and had to do with the Agra treasure, which never brought anything but a curse yet upon the man who owned it. To him it brought murder, to Major Sholto it brought fear and guilt, to me it has meant slavery for life” (1:140). In the place of this curse on the British colonialists, however, The Sign of Four leaves us with a dramatic demonstration of the methods of the “scientific detective” focused upon the body of the “black cannibal” criminal and the telling footprint he left behind, a demonstration which not only frees Watson to marry, it suppresses by reconfiguring for the public an embarrassing political episode (1:91). “Some facts should be suppressed,” Holmes cautioned Watson at the outset of this tale in describing detection as “an exact science”; “or at least a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them” (1:90).

But science is not necessarily an ahistorical discipline, and Holmes's deployment of it, like Lombroso's and Ellis's, may be more accurately regarded as historical revisionism rather than romantic escapism. Commentators have related Holmes's methods for investigating crime to other scientific strains in Victorian culture in addition to criminal anthropology, most notably to the interpretive methods of Darwin in biology and Lyell in geology, both of whom conceived of their disciplines as being radically historical in nature.¹⁰ The theories put forward by these scientists were not denials of history, but ambitious efforts at understanding human history in a new way, consistent with ongoing scientific discoveries. Lombroso's theories spring from this tradition and may be understood as direct applications of the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of social behavior. Indeed, it was in 1859, the year of the publication of The Origin of Species, that Lombroso first conceived of his investigations as yielding the theory of criminal man as a distinct “human variety” (qtd. in Ellis 38). In his analysis of Lombroso, Ellis would acknowledge that Darwin provided the theoretical justification and the method by which Lombroso could pursue that task, enabling him to identify the physical characteristics of the criminal with earlier incarnations of the human species. When Lombroso describes in chilling detail the moment in which this theory first took hold of his imagination as he gazed into the skull of a dead criminal upon whom he had performed an autopsy, he seems to invoke the prehistoric, fossil-strewn landscapes of Darwin and Lyell to provide the background and authority for his own “revelation” that anatomically related the criminal to savages and apes:

This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes.

(Ferrero xiv-xv)

The historicizing perspective of this “new science” of criminal anthropology was so central to it, in fact, that the discipline was defined specifically by Ferrero, Lombroso's daughter and commentator, as “the Natural History of the Criminal” (Ferrero 5).

Combining the discourse of evolutionary theory, morphology, psychology, and physiology, Lombroso and Ellis would consistently associate the criminal type with what they called the “lower human races” and the “primitive savage,” sometimes even equating them with “the lower mammals.”¹¹ The ultimate justification for the explicit racism of these hypotheses was, then, founded upon the underlying historiography of the theory, which considered non-white racial groups as predecessors in the evolutionary chain, very present links between the modern “civilized” races and “the lower mammals.” These anachronistic “lower races” not only violated the laws of civilization, they violated the logic of the human story. The criminal who resembles the primitive savage, Lombroso would argue, is a kind of evolutionary flashback which has somehow escaped out of the past into the present. The congenital criminal, he says, “reproduces in civilised times characteristics, not only of primitive savages, but of still lower types as far back as the carnivora” (Ferrero 6-7). He would even claim that the criminal crania is characterized by the presence of “a median occipital fossa … as among the lower apes, in the human foetus between the third and fourth months, and in some lower races” (Reported in Ellis 51). Ellis would concur, asserting that “the lower races” which the criminal type resembles “present a far higher proportion of anatomical abnormalities”; they therefore “belong to earlier times” and may be regarded as “reversions to far more ancient days” (Ellis 208-9).

The phenomenon of violent criminal behavior, it may be deduced from these theories, contradicted a theory of human history which was progressive and developmental, sentiments vaguely echoed by Holmes himself in the theory of criminal behavior he expressed in “The Empty House” when he claimed that the suspect represented in his development “the whole procession of his ancestors” (2: 494). The works of Lombroso and Ellis, like those of Holmes, sought to explain that contradiction anatomically, by identifying the criminal type as a kind of physiological anachronism, a deformed animallike body, a reversion which had been thrown into the civilized present from the uncivilized past. By so doing, the scientific discipline of criminal anthropology aimed beyond simply expanding our knowledge of human behavior or even revising the criminal justice code. It sought to reinforce an embattled theory of progressive human history, much as I have argued these detective stories sought to do by reinforcing in more specific terms the role of Great Britain in that history. Moreover, criminal anthropology also offered what was regarded as indisputable data based on scientific authority to verify the superiority of the white races by identifying criminality with the physical characteristics of the dark races, thus implicitly sanctioning the right of a dominant white culture like Britain to bring the primitive savages of India into the light of modern civilization by force, if necessary, at the very moment when this ideology was under its strongest attack. A scientific theory of natural history, that is, came to the aid of an endangered theory of political history. Criminal anthropology rendered the body a kind of legible text, much as Holmes was doing with his remarkable powers of observation and interpretation, a text that explained the mystery of human violence independent of political circumstances. So confident was Lombroso in the sanctions of the science he helped invent, that when one individual he examined showed no evidence of criminal activity but bore all the characteristics of the criminaloid, Lombroso was bold enough to conclude, “he may not be a criminal legally, but anthropologically, he is” (qtd. in Ellis 80).

In these investigations into the body of the criminal, literally a peering into the criminal brain, the anthropologist presents himself very much like a Private Eye. And when, as Lombroso and Ellis both do, the observations they make provide a kind of narrative reordering of the body, by identifying certain morphological types as “belonging” to earlier moments in human history, the anthropologists resemble even more profoundly the Victorian detective, whose task it was to take a disordered, incoherent narrative situation (the crime)—with its gaps, its inconsistencies, its missing pieces, its unexplained events—and to provide a coherent narrative explanation (or solution) in its place. By explaining the criminal as a character who rightfully belongs to an earlier moment in the narrative of human history, the criminal anthropologist performs the same act. Holmes himself would draw the analogy between detective and biologist in the passage which serves as an epigraph for this essay. There, as Dupin did before him, Holmes compared his own work in “The Five Orange Pips” to that of the renowned anatomist, Cuvier: “As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after” (1: 225). In both cases, I am suggesting here, the observer's rearticulation of the body may serve a political intention as well as a narrative one. As we have seen, the reassurance about the safety of life and property at home provided by a fantasy figure like Sherlock Holmes not only displaced a fear about the justification of British foreign policy, it also offered a justification for the increasing force with which that policy could be pursued.

The appropriation by the police of the principles of criminal anthropology and detective fiction alike is evident in the rapidly developing field of criminology at the turn of the century throughout Europe and America. Lombroso himself endorsed the widespread deployment of bertillonage by police forces as the best application of his theories for the identification of criminals and the monitoring of convicts (252-53). By 1901, however, a more subtle and sophisticated derivative of criminal physiology would supplement Bertillon's anthropometry and his “portrait parlé”: the registry of criminals' photographs accompanied by minute verbal descriptions of their physical characteristics.¹² In that year, Scotland Yard would establish the first fingerprint file in Europe, and from that time onward Bertillon would fight a losing battle for the continuance of his system. Of course, the British had first employed fingerprinting as a method of identifying criminals some forty-three years earlier in India. In 1858, the year after the initiation of the Sepoy Rebellion, Sir William Herschel used fingerprinting to register Indian natives, a system that was eventually instituted as a means of registration in Indian prisons as well as a means of identification in criminal investigations. Herschel published a description of his method in 1880, about the time when the suggestion was made to register all the Chinese in California, underscoring again how consistently the literature and science of criminology has been implicated with racial politics. Seven years later, in the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the great detective would boast to Watson that “the history of the man” could be distinguished by the proper reading of “the callosities of his forefinger and thumb,” another subject upon which he had written (1: 23).

Ironically, a form of fingerprinting had been in place long before as a matter of everyday practice in the Bengali culture. A print of the thumb was commonly used to seal letters and documents with the mark of the sender as a sign of authenticity. This personal expression of good faith was then forcefully taken over by the imperial administrators as a form of biological monitoring and control.¹³ The scientific theory that posited the uniqueness of the patterns of skin lines in each individual had been proposed in the west some fifty years earlier by one of the founders of modern histology, Jan E. Purkyne. But its usefulness had been largely ignored until the administrators of British imperialism combined this scientific knowledge with local custom to formulate a means of identification and coercion over the colonies, a practice which was then redeployed in the prisons and police precincts back home. Appropriately, Sir Francis Galton, who published a book on the subject in 1892, did further research into the procedure for criminological applications and tried inconclusively to trace distinguishing racial characteristics in fingerprints, expecting to find among Indian tribes “a more monkey-like pattern” of print (Galton 1728). Just as theories of evolution were appropriated by criminologists to further certain political intentions, then, native custom and scientific theory alike were ruthlessly appropriated by law enforcement agencies to mark individuals biologically and to forcefully confer an identity upon them.

The detective fiction of the turn of the century continued to appropriate the assumptions of the science of criminology and to popularize it in the magazines and dime novels in which that fiction was published and read in vast numbers. So deeply were the implications of this science deployed for political purposes in this fiction that in The Secret Agent, Conrad's ironic imitation of the detective form, the author stages a debate between two suspected criminals on the merits of Lombroso's theories. One of the two, an anarchist and ex-medical student aptly nicknamed the Doctor,¹⁴ identifies the innocent but simple-minded Stevie Verloc as a perfect example of the criminal type. The other suspect, Karl Yundt, rejects Lombroso's politically naive theories and reproves his “scientifically” minded companion:

Did you ever see such an idiot? For him the criminal is the prisoner. Simple, is it not? What about those who shut him up there—forced him in there? Exactly. Forced him in there. And what is crime? Does he know that, this imbecile who had made his way in this world of gorged fools by looking at the ears and teeth of a lot of poor, luckless devils? Teeth and ears mark the criminal? Do they? And what about the law that marks him still better—the pretty branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry? Red hot applications on their vile skins—hey? Can't you smell and hear from here the thick hide of the people burn and sizzle? That's how criminals are made for your Lombrosos to write their silly stuff about.

(Conrad 77-78)

Despite increased suspicion of this kind about the biological determinism of Lombroso's thought, suspicions which gained force later in the twentieth century, the physiological principles of criminal anthropology would continue to be practiced in detective fiction and police precincts alike. These principles are perhaps most dramatically manifested in the hard-boiled school of detective stories which came to prominence in the 1930s and 40s. The assumptions of criminal anthropology would not only be incorporated into the routines of police procedure but into the aesthetic of literary naturalism as well. There, the indictments of Conrad's radical critic of Lombroso are realized in the body of the detective himself who exists in a kind of drunken no-man's land between law and lawlessness. The movement of literary naturalism, which focused its attention on the details of hard, material facts, scientific objectivity, and brutal natural laws to represent the human subject as an essentialized body, may owe as much for creating the audience for the naturalistic aesthetic to Doyle and Collins and to Ellis and Lombroso as they owe to Zola or Dreiser or Hardy. The blatant sexism expressed in many of these texts, which characteristically identified the criminal type with the seductive body of the femme fatale or the perversions of the exotic homosexual male, may be read as a transposition of the overt racism expressed by Lombroso and Ellis. In both cases, the criminal is recognizable as a distinct physiological type.

Detective fiction has always been a disputed literary genre. Its mass appeal, its rapid production, its uneven quality, and its suspect appearance in pulp magazines and dime novels have sometimes denied the form serious critical attention. But as Raymond Chandler argued in “The Simple Art of Murder” (and as he demonstrated in his own novels), detective stories can be important writing. Chandler conceded that while even the best detective fiction is an elaborate, formulaic art of escape, “all men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page. … it is part of the process of life among thinking beings” (Chandler 12). In the case of detective fiction, it can be argued, what lies behind the page has a peculiarly complex relation with what lies upon it. Michel Foucault makes a claim analogous to Chandler's when he describes the new “literature of criminality” that develops during the latter half of the nineteenth century and permanently alters the “process” by which “thinking beings” order their lives:

… throughout the whole second half of the century there developed a “literature of criminality,” and I use the word in its largest sense, including miscellaneous news items (and even more, popular newspapers) as well as detective novels and all the romanticized writings which developed around crime—the transformation of the criminal into a hero, perhaps, but equally, the affirmation that ever-present criminality is a constant menace to the social body as a whole. The collective fear of crime, the obsession with this danger which seems to be an inseparable part of the society itself, are thus perpetually inscribed in each individual consciousness.

(Foucault 12)

The literature which inscribes the collective fear of crime on the individual consciousness includes scientific and political writing as well as the fictional and journalistic. As I have suggested here, in fact, detective stories make use of science and politics to effect this process of inscription. While Holmes insists, in A Study in Scarlet, that the motive for the crime must be personal and not political, his cases demonstrate over and over again that the personal and the political cannot be considered as alternative explanatory fields but as intimately related expressions of one another. Since the invention of the detective novel corresponds to the development of the science of criminal anthropology and to the institution of the modern police force as well, the genre offers an unusually rich opportunity to examine this essential relationship between the dangers, revelations, and disappointments that manifest themselves in the literature we invent and consume to enforce order upon our minds and our bodies and to reinforce an endangered sense of history as well. In its participation in this process, Victorian detective fiction may even be regarded as the principal alternative to the other great novelistic genre of the nineteenth century, the autobiography. With the authority and proof of positivistic science, the detective story reassigns the property rights over one's own story to society, a story with accusations which cannot be appealed because they are found to be already indelibly inscribed in the body of the criminal.

Notes

1. See, for example, Brooks, Cawelti, and Spence.

2. In a very useful article, John R. Reed has pointed out that The Moonstone is a novel of serious social criticism and that English imperialism is the “unacknowledged crime” of the novel. My intention here is to show that Victorian detective fiction commonly acknowledged such political “crimes” only to then obscure and excuse them with a scientific investigation that focused attention on the criminal body.

3. For a fuller description and analysis of Bertillon's system of anthropometry and related developments in nineteenth-century criminological practice, see Thowald, Mitchell, Harris, and Hurwitz and Christiansen.

4. A representative of the Marseilles Scientific Police Laboratories would report to The Illustrated London News in 1932 that “many of the methods invented by Conan Doyle are today in use in scientific laboratories.” See Ashton-Wolfe.

5. I have written on the significance of dreams in nineteenth-century detective fiction in general and in The Moonstone in particular in Dreams of Authority. In this essay, however, my interest turns from the psychological features of these texts to the physiological analysis of the criminals in them.

6. In his Life of Wilkie Collins, Nuel Pharr Davis recounts Dickens's and Collins's responses to this event and the conflict it generated between them. Dickens felt that Collins was not severe enough in his condemnation of the Indians in the reproving article (“A Sermon for Sepoys”) he wrote for Household Words at Dickens's behest (207-8).

7. For psychoanalytic readings of the novel that elaborate the sexual allegory, see Lawson, Rycroft and Hutter.

8. See Derek Longhurst for an analysis of how the Holmes stories mediate political and economic conflicts into “a moral discourse with co-ordinates of class, gender and white supremacy, subject either to individual reform or to the ministrations of the English gentleman” (66).

9. A fuller examination of Holmes's debt to science in general and the medical model in particular is developed in Accardo.

10. Lawrence Frank argues that the Holmes stories only seemed to endorse the historicizing perspective of nineteenth-century science, actually subverting it by suggesting the fictive nature of the accounts the scientist and the detective offer.

11. For more on the relation between the “biological positivism” of Lombroso's criminal anthropology and Darwinian evolution, see Gottfredson and Hirschi.

12. For a fuller consideration of Bertillon's “talking photograph” and its replacement by fingerprinting, see Mitchell (50-66).

13. Carlo Ginzburg describes this process of appropriation in his analysis of the emergence of an epistemological model in the late nineteenth century he calls “low intuition,” a model which forms a tight link between the human animal and other animal species.

14. To extend the irony, Conrad gives “the Doctor” (Comrade Ossipon) the traits of Lombroso's criminal type himself: “A bush of crinkly yellow hair topped his red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the Negro type. His almond-shaped eyes leered languidly over the high cheekbones” (75). Martin Seymour-Smith notes in the editor's introduction to this edition that “most policemen, by 1906, believed in Lombroso's theories” (20). Perhaps the best evidence we have for this assumption is the widespread adoption of such practices as anthropometry, bertillonage, and fingerprinting by European police stations to monitor known criminals.

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