The Ghost Club

Founded in London in 1862, the Ghost Club is the oldest paranormal investigation and research organization in the world. The organization is still active today and its members have included: Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats, and Siegfried Sassoon.

The Ghost Club was seven years in the making, having started as a conversation about ghosts between Cambridge fellows at Trinity college in 1855. Naturally, it attracted some banter in the Times, but with Charles Dickens and some Cambridge men among their ranks, the Ghost Club soldiered on.

The Davenport Brothers and their spirit cabinet (1870).

Like real-life Victorian Ghostbusters -- though maybe they were more like Myth Busters, the Ghost Club investigated spiritual phenomena, like the Davenport Brother's spirit cabinet. The Davenport Brothers were travelling American magicians and the spirit box was their most famous illusion. In the spirit box illusion, the brothers were tied inside the box with some musical instruments. When the box was closed, the instruments played, but when it was opened, the brothers remained tied in their original positions. The Ghost Club never published the result of their investigation.

Members of the Ghost Club (1882).

Following Dickens' death, the Ghost Club became inactive during the 1870s, but was revived on All Saints Day 1882. It remained a select and private organization of earnest ghost hunters, who really believed that ghosts existed. They met monthly and women were not admitted.

Investigations into the spirit world were referred to as 'physical research,' and the growing popularity of Spiritualism at this time attracted people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud to its meetings. Many members treated Ghost Club as a kind of refuge, where they were able to conduct the kind of research and have the kind of conversations that they were unable to have elsewhere.

At each meeting of the Ghost Club a list of all the members, dead or alive, was read. Deceased members were said to sometimes make their presence felt during this activity.

Sir Arthur Grey of Jesus College, Cambridge, immortalized the Ghost Club as "The Everlasting Club" in 1919 - a ghost story that, around Cambridge, some still believe to be true.

Humans of London (in the 1890s)

Who isn't occasionally inspired by Humans of New York? Since I've taken a little break from writing recently and been playing with Photoshop, I thought I would share what I've come up with.

These are writers in London in the 1890s (if they had Facebook and someone got inspired by Humans of New York).

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Humans of London: Arthur Conan Doyle

I've seen some parodies of Humans of New York recently and thought I could try putting my own spin on it.

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Sherlock Holmes and Batman as Aspirational Superheroes

Some people reject the notion of Sherlock Holmes as a superhero because Arthur Conan Doyle's books weren't science fiction, or fantasy. The original character possessed qualities that were within the realm of human possibility, thus making him an aspirational figure. Then again, some people hate superheroes. Those people immediately have something in common with super villains, but that's another story. I love superheroes and argue that Sherlock Holmes most certainly was and always has been a great one.

Wikipedia defines a superhero as:

...a type of heroic character possessing extraordinary talents, supernatural phenomena, or superhuman powers and dedicated to protecting the public.

Sherlock Holmes was/is dedicated to protecting the public. He even has an archenemy. His powers now seem completely within the realm of human possibility, but so do Batman's.

In the 1890s, Sherlock Holmes' powers were most certainly science fiction. His, fortunately, was a case of life imitating art.

When Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes in 1887, police relied on rudimentary evidence and witness testimony to solve criminal cases. There's no way Jack the Ripper would still be a mystery today if police still relied on those techniques and the public was beginning to chalk the lack of science up to police incompetence, but they didn't know it was the science that police were missing.

In many ways, modern science was still being invented and could be viewed as an 1890s gentleman's pursuit, one that Conan Doyle's detective was adept at in ways that no one had ever imagined. In addition to his incredible powers of observation, Sherlock Holmes used chemistry to solve crimes. His methods were aspirational and inspired the first generation of forensic scientists.

Catching a murderer through a blood stain was as unfathomable in 1887 as Batman's collapsable jet-skates were in 1967. Unfortunately, the crime solving applications of Batman's jet-skates are still unfathomable, but when we get there, some people may try to argue that Batman's not a superhero either.

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Jack the Ripper in Popular Culture

Jack the Ripper is the most legendary terror of late-Victorian London. I've written about him before, and it's the legacy that the ripper case left upon the imagination that fascinates me the most.

If the Ripper Case didn't actually invent crime journalism and detective fiction, it certainly changed the shape of them. Jack the Ripper was the first serial killer to attract worldwide media attention, which was, in part, due total reforms that enabled the wider circulation of inexpensive magazines and newspapers, including the Illustrated Police News.

The Illustrated Police News, 15 September 1888.

"Whatever information may be in the possession of the police they deem it necessary to keep secret ... It is believed their attention is particularly directed to ... a notorious character known as 'Leather Apron'." - Manchester Guardian, 6 September 1888.

'Leather Apron,' 'Jack the Ripper'... adopting a nickname for a murder suspect became standard media practice with these words, and would soon be followed by 'the Axeman' of New Orleans, 'the Boston Strangler,' 'the Düsseldorf Ripper,' and many others.

Public frustration with the inability of the police to solve the case opened the public's hearts to freelance detectives, like Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake. The public obsession with this horrifying unsolvable mystery directly captured the imagination of writers as well.

Fiction that was directly inspired by the case began to appear as soon as October 1888. John Francis Brewer wrote a short gothic novel that featured the murder of Catherine Eddowes, The Curse Upon Mitre Square (1888). These stories immediately had an international appeal because the whole world was watching London for clues at the time.

The Spanish-language 'Jack El Destripador' was published soon after the murders, and sent a comedic version of Sherlock Holmes after a similar killer.

Indirectly, Jack the Ripper influenced the popularity of other works, like Dracula, which definitely gained popularity through the public's obsession. But in terms of those that dealt most directly with Jack the Ripper, Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' (1913) was the most influential work. In this novel, Mr. and Mrs. Bunting suspect their lodger is a wanted serial killer, called "the Avenger." Alfred Hitchcock adapted the story to film, and the theme became as popular as Holmes versus the Ripper.

Today there are hundreds of books that try to solve the mystery, and works of fiction that still feed a public interest in the story. Lowndes' novel has been made into five films.

The movie Time After Time (1979) lets Jack the Ripper escape from 1890s London to 1970s San Fransisco, followed in hot pursuit by H.G. Wells.

And Jack the Ripper made it into comic books.

And of course, Ripper Street, the TV series.

In 2011, Madame Vastra from Doctor Who claimed to have eaten Jack the Ripper. As you can see (in the picture below), the construction of Madame Vastra's character is partially built on a framework, pre-established by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the halloween-themed stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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1890s Witches

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle protested the harassment of mediums by comparing it to the antiquated persecution of witches. In 1897, Sigmund Freud said he understood "the stern therapy of the witches’ judges," as he learned more about cults, particularly sex cults.

Sex cults were an offshoot of a Victorian obsession with magic. The Victorian obsession with ancient magic and spiritualism was far more mainstream than most people imagine, and included a long list of writers and celebrities, who participated in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, including Bram Stoker, and Constance Wilde.

Unlike one writer, I think it's safe to say that, although he believed in ghosts and fairies, Conan Doyle didn't believe in, condone, or support witches. However, Joe Revill does identify an interesting current of 1890s writing on the subject of witches.

Karl Pearson

Woman as Witch: Evidences of Mother-Right in the Customs of Mediaeval Witchcraft. A lecture given to the Somerville Club by Karl Pearson, 1891 outlines Pearsons belief that witchcraft was actual magic, and that "the confessions wrung from poor old women in the torture chambers of the Middle Ages have a real scientific value for the historian of a much earlier social life." Pearson was a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University College London, and would carry on theorizing, lecturing, and writing about witches throughout the 1890s.

In Woman as Witch, Pearson makes the connection between the history of witchcraft's relevance to contemporary interests in the status of women. Don't start calling him a suffragette just yet. His view of men and women throughout history was very specific, and served to reinforce Victorian ideas about gender.

The woman as depositary of family custom and tribal lore, the wise-woman, the sibyl, the witch, would hand down to her daughters the knowledge of the religious observances, of the power of herbs, the mother-lore in the mother tongue, possibly also in some form of symbol or rune such as a priestly caste love to enshroud their mysteries in. The symbols of these goddesses would be the symbols of woman’s work and woman’s civilisation, the distaff, the pitchfork, and the broom, not the spear, the axe, and the hammer. Since agriculture in its elements is essentially due to women, hunting and the chase characteristic of men, the emblems of early agriculture would also be closely associated with the primitive goddess. - Karl Pearson

Pearson definitely believed that Joan of Arc was a witch. However, he did not condone the use of witchcraft, or goddess worship, among his contemporaries, considering it primitive and savage. He painted this image of the witch:

We have accordingly to look upon the witch as essentially the degraded form of the old priestess, cunning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, jealous of the rights of the goddess she serves, and preserving in spells and incantations such wisdom as early civilisation possessed.

Sir Laurence Gomme

Laurence Gomme's Ethnology in Folklore (1892) others witchcraft, the way that Dracula does vampirism, by painting it as a pre-enlightened set of beliefs still held foreign (and 'backwards') cultures. A tantalizing concept for a work of fiction that seeks to frighten its readers, but an isolating approach to cultural studies. Gomme, didn't believe England was safe from witches, any more than Van Helsing thought they were safe from vampires.

The demonism of savagery is parallel to the witchcraft of civilisation in the power which votaries of the two cults profess, and are allowed by their believers to possess, over the elements, over wild beasts, and in changing their own human form into some animal form, and it will be well to give some examples of these powers from the folklore of the British Isles. - Laurence Gomme

Ethnology in Folklore is a terrible read, though it provides an interesting study in the history of race, and frequently sites Jacob Grimm (of the Brothers Grimm) for his work on teutonic mythology. Most notably, Gomme's witches have the power to turn into animals, though their power has been diminishing over the centuries, and by the 1890s they could only turn into small (mostly harmless) animals.

Gomme's writing, however, makes it easier to see why some might think Conan Doyle believed in witches, as it links them directly to fairy magic (with the help of Grimm, of course).

Matilda Joslyn Gage

Although she was writing in the States, Matilda Joslyn Gage must be included among the writers, who wrote about witchcraft in the 1890s. In Women, Church and State (1893), she became one of the first writers to identify Christianity's impediments to women's equality. Gage demonstrated how religious doctrine is (even still) used to justify depriving women of civil, human, economic and political rights, even denying women the right to worship alongside men.

In Women, Church, and State, the historical persecution of witchcraft is identified as one of Christianity's tools for oppressing women for having any kind of knowledge, power, or autonomy. Gage also identifies ways in which her contemporaries recoiled from anything associated with witchcraft.

So firmly did the diabolical nature of the black cat impress itself upon the people, that its effects are felt in business to this day, the skin of black cats being less prized and of less value in the fur market than those of other colors. A curious exemplification of this inherited belief is found in Great Britain. An English taxidermist who exports thousands of mounted kittens each year to the United States and other countries, finds the prejudice against black cats still so great that he will not purchase kittens of this obnoxious color. In the minds of many people, black seems ineradicably connected with sorcery. - Matilda Joslyn Gage

Interestingly, the way that Gage understood witch lore in the 1890s, witches were supposed to be able to fly on animals or bits of wood, whereas in contemporary witch lore, we only image witches flying about on brooms. What is the significance of those brooms in relation to gender? Does it indicate that women are oppressed now in ways we weren't back then?

Aradia, title page.

In 1899, Charles G Leland published a book about witchcraft, as a kind of gospel text, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. In Aradia, Leland claims to convey the traditions of Italian witchcraft as conveyed him by his witch informant, Maddalena. The accuracy of the book is debatable, but it has been influential.

Because Wicca is a real religion today, I would trust the testimony of Wiccans as to whether Aradia is an accurate representation of the craft. The number of self-identified Wiccans in the USA has risen from 8,000 in 1990 to 342,000 in 2008 (interestingly, 75% of these are women). It shouldn't be as hard for us to find someone to ask as it was for Leland.

Leland provided a photograph of his witch informant, as a young fortune teller, making me feel that he wasn't protecting her identity very carefully, or else... he had someone else pose for the photo.

Maddalena, as a young fortune teller.

In the 1890s, as today, witchcraft is generally lumped in with superstition and the occult. While people wrote about witchcraft in the 1890s, witchcraft was still practiced, even in the distorted sense of women providing 'magic' or 'homeopathic' remedies. Oscar Wilde's mother had a woman living with her called 'Mrs Faithful,' who could make a powder that would 'cure' pregnancy.

In Women, Church, and State, Gage sites an American 1867 case of persecuting witchcraft, in which a woman used a few drops of cat's blood to help an ailing child. Compare that unproven remedy to what her contemporaries were buying from Victorian Druggists (cocaine, heroine, antimony, strychnine, etc.), and it becomes harder to argue that "witch" wasn't a word that was just being thrown around to hurt women for having any sort of knowledge, or independence (however weird, I mean... cat's blood? Really...).

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the halloween-themed stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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If you have enjoyed the work that I do, please consider supporting my Victorian Dictionary Project!

Where did your favourite 1890s writer go to school?

What did it take to be a successful writer in 1890s London? Did Education have anything to do with it? While managing the Lyceum, Bram Stoker used to receive manuscripts from aspiring playwrights of all walks of life. Though Stoker seemed skeptical about some of the aspiring writers he came across, a study into the educational backgrounds of some of 1890s London's most successful writers demonstrates that they did indeed come from all walks of life.

Of course, access to education was influenced by gender and social class. Women's education was topical in the 1890s, and formed the basis of some of these writers' works.

J.M. Barrie was educated in his native Scotland before moving to London, and becoming a writer. Barrie started school at the Glasgow Academy at age 8. At 10, he continued at the Forfar Academy, before moving on to the Dumfries Academy at age 14. He had a lifelong love of reading, and devoured Penny Dreadfuls as a kid. Barrie knew he wanted to be a writer, even though his family wanted him to go into the church. Determined to study literature, he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually earned his M.A. in Literature in 1882.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, like most Victorian women, was privately educated. It helped that she married a publisher.

Hall Caine grew up in the Isle of Man, but attended the Hope Street British Schools until age 14.  After school, he articled with John Murray, as an architect and surveyor. During this time, he still loved reading, and spent a lot of time at Liverpool's Free Library, leading him to insist that he was mainly self-taught.

Marie Corelli was the love child of the Scottish poet and songwriter Dr. Charles Mackay, and his servant Elizabeth Mills. Consequently, she was educated by a series of governesses, who, according to biographer Annette Fredrico, "fled from her intellectual exhibitionism and her intimidating sense of her own brilliance." Without a governess to look after her, Corelli was sent to a convent, most likely in Paris, where, according to Fredrico, "she concocted private theatricals about love and murder." Corelli left the convent at age 15. She published her first novel 16 years later, after a career as a musician.

Arthur Conan Doyle came from a broken home. His family actually had to split up because of his father's alcoholism, and lived in squalid tenement flats. With the financial support of his uncles, Doyle went to a Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school at age 9, then Stonyhurst College, until he was 16. Next, he spent a year at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria (also a Jesuit school). He left that place agnostic, and went to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where writing became a hobby for him. He finished school at 28 with an advanced medical degree, and tried to be a doctor, until he got really good at his hobby, and the world became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes.

Richard Bernard Heldmann a.k.a. Richard Marsh used his pseudonym to practically assume a new identity, which included a claim to having graduated from Eton and Oxford. These claims have recently been proven false. Marsh adopted the new name, and life, to recover from the scandal of serving eighteen months’ hard labour, during April 1884, for forging cheques in Britain and France in 1883. He started using the name "Marsh" upon release from jail. Stories by ‘Richard Marsh’ begin to appear in literary journals in 1888, followed by two novels in 1893. Marsh wrote prolifically during the 1890s, and the early years of the 20th century. However, we're still not sure where he really went to school.

Ellen Buckingham Mathews a.k.a. Helen Mathers attended a boarding school in Chantry, near Frome in Somerset, which made it into her first novel,"Comin' thro' the Rye." In that book, she explores her experiences at school. "Mr Russell" in the novel was Rev Fussell in real life, who was the Lord of the manor and founder of the school. In the novel she calls the village Charteris.

W. Somerset Maugham studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital in Lambeth, London. He was still studying there in the 1890s (I mostly include him in this site because he is one of my husband's favourites). During this time, Maugham felt he got the education he needed for writing from the streets, by hanging out with the "low" sorts of people that he didn't otherwise get a chance to be around. He saw them on the streets, and in the hospital: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief ..." As a medical student, he wrote at night, and published Liza of Lambeth in 1897, which was a big success.

Sometimes, more is made of Bram Stoker's education before he went to school than during. An unknown illness kept him in bed, listening to his mom's horror stories, until he inexplicably recovered and went school at age 7. Of being a sickly kid, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years." His private school was run by Rev. William Woods. Stoker's early illness left him with no further major health issues; he even excelled as an athlete at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with honours as a B.A. in Mathematics. Stoker actively participated in the College Historical Society, 'the Hist', and became president of the University Philosophical Society, writing his first paper on "Sensationalism in Fiction and Society".

One might say education was a habit in the home of Mary Augusta Ward a.k.a. Mrs. Humphry Ward.  She was born into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists in Tasmania, Australia. Ward was the daughter of a literature professor, the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and she was Aldous Huxley's aunt. She attended boarding schools, including Shifnal in Shropshire from ages 11-15. Her schooldays inspired one of her novels, Marcella (1894). When she wasn't at school, she was at home with her family at Oxford University. She eventually married a writer and Oxford educator, and continued to live at Oxford, at 17 Bradmore Road, where she is commemorated by a blue plaque.

Oscar Wilde was educated at home until age 9, focussing on languages with a French bonne and a German governess. Then he was off to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He developed a prominent role for himself in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. By the time he was finished school, Wilde was basically the poster boy for aestheticism.

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Sherlock Holmes and Retired Copyright

Thanks to a legal battle between author, Leslie Klinger, and the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the tales of Sherlock Holmes are now in the public domain. What does that mean?

Works are moved from their protective copyright status to the public domain to balance the public’s interest in open access with the property interest of copyright holders. Overwhelmingly, works in the public domain are so old that their intellectual property rights are no longer applicable. Most of the works discussed in this blog are part of the public domain because enough time has passed since they were first published. Likewise, most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were already in the public domain before Klinger took the estate to court.

Sherlock Holmes became a literary sensation in the 1890s, the thirst for which didn’t dry up when the decade ended. To feed public demand, Conan Doyle continued writing and publishing Sherlock Holmes mysteries until 1927. While most of the Sherlock Holmes canon was moved into the public domain, appearing on public domain web sites, like Project Gutenberg, stories published between 1923 and 1927 were still protected under US copyright law.

The legal status of these last ten Sherlock Holmes stories complicated the legal status of the rest of the Sherlock Holmes stories because characters in fiction are part of a work’s intellectual property. When Klinger published his previous books, inspired by Conan Doyle, she had to pay a fee to his estate. Upon the publication of her second book, she decided to challenge the copyright status and won, thereby moving the complete set of Sherlock Holmes stories into the public domain.

These controls over intellectual property influence the portrayal of characters, who have become classic tropes throughout literature and film. For instance, the Bram Stoker estate tried, but failed to maintain the kind of control over portrayals of Dracula that Conan Doyle’s estate maintained over Sherlock Holmes. As a result, we see rich and varied interpretations of Dracula’s character in literature and film dating back to the 1920s. Conan Doyle’s heirs previously controlled and restricted the ways in which Sherlock Holmes could be interpreted. It will be fascinating to see what happens next!

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Sherlock vs Creationism

While procrastinating on actually writing my book, I've been watching documentaries that trace the origins of forensic science to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Joseph Bell. I also watched the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, which lead me to the conclusion that creationists must be opposed to forensic science.

I have to come at this from two directions, so I will begin with the one most closely related to the subject of my blog.

The documentaries: Sherlock Holmes: the True Story demonstrates the ways in which Dr. Bell (the man who inspired Sherlock's character) was, in real life, the first forensic scientist - and actually used his skills to help police solve crimes! And Sherlock: the First CSI shows us that forensic scientists, since Dr. Bell, have been inspired by the books! If you know who Sherlock Holmes is or what forensic science is, you probably have some idea about how science can help us prove a person is guilty of a crime - even when they swear they are innocent!

During the debate, Ham uses the term 'witness' an awful lot and treats the Bible as a witness's statement. "We weren't there to see what happened, so we could be wrong," says Ham repeatedly. He also repeatedly uses the term 'historical science' to describe Nye's approach. He further differentiates between historical science and observational science.

The term 'historical science' doesn't refer to a documented record of epic moments in science history, though that would be cool. It refers to science that attempts to make claims about the past, like geology and evolutionary biology. These are sciences that try to reconstruct the past. When talking about historical and observational science, Michael Weisberg puts it best:

The main difference is simply that historical sciences like geology and evolutionary biology try to reconstruct the past, while other sciences like chemistry aren't especially concerned with any particular time period.

Modern sciences that concern themselves with a particular time period are integral to our legal system and called forensics. The fictional Sherlock Holmes used chemistry to test blood stains, even when he had witnesses, who claimed to have seen what happened, but were actually guilty of committing the crime. By Ham's logic, the witness provides a more reliable testament to what transpired on a crime scene than the blood on the floor. The creationist case against historical science means they can't accept the results of a DNA test any more than they can the existence of fossils because it is historical science that investigates what happened within a particular time period. Creationists, therefore, must hate Sherlock!

To Tania Lombrozo, who blogged Weisberg's excellent explanation above, the crux of the debate was about the basis of belief, "including the role of evidence versus revelation." Essentially, creationists are suffering from a very Victorian fear, one that Charles Darwin struggled with himself, that God might disappear in a puff of logic.

Here's where I wish that historical science was more about the history of science and less about trying to convince children that science is a bunch of hookum. Last month, I wrote a series of posts on the spirituality of writers in the 1890s. What was so striking about that period in science was how Victorians tried to use science to prove or disprove spiritual claims. Research has been done into the science of having a religious experience and that research has provided an array of explanations for an array of different religious experiences, but, at the time, I found the investigation in to psychics more entertaining (I kinda still do).

The Society for Physical Research was founded in London in 1882, "to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated." W.B. Yeats and Arthur Conan Doyle were both members. The Society disproved one fraud after another.

The Society's track record in the 1890s alone should be enough to strike fear into the heart of anyone promoting spiritual beliefs as science, which might be why creationists recoil from conventional science and are building their own institutions. I'm sorry. I don't mean to suggest that creationist museums will be infiltrated by the Society any time soon. The Society does still exist, but I hadn't heard of them until I started investigating spiritualist frauds and the writers who loved them. Like most Christians of their era, they were searching for ways to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with science.

Really, I'm tired of people talking about science's threat to Christianity. Like Nye, I'm more concerned about the creationist threat to curiousity. Members of the Society believed in all kinds of things (Conan Doyle even believed in fairies), but scientists in the 1890s had curious enough minds to put their beliefs to the test, rather than hiding them so close to their heart that no one could touch them. But, I'm not being fair to creationists, when I glorify the attitudes of my favourite Victorians in the 1890s.

The Fundamentalist Movement was founded in the United States in 1878 and succeeded in getting the teaching of evolution banned from US public schools by the 1920s. Their campaign rode on the shoulders of the anti-German sentiment of the First World War: "The same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible."

Books, like Headquarters Nights (1917) and Science of Power (1918), strove to link Darwinism with Germany. To me these books should be part of the history of conspiracy culture. I like that Conan Doyle wanted Sherlock to take on the Germans too and published His Last Bow in the Strand in September 1917.

Written during the third year of WWI, His Last Bow is set in August 1914 and is crafted as a bit of war propaganda. In it, Sherlock is able to provide German intelligence to the English government before retiring from detective work to keep bees. Ironically, when Dr. Bell retired he also became an etymologist specializing in Bees, but that is another story. His Last Bow finishes with a bit of poetic patriotism.

"There's an east wind coming, Watson." 

"I think not, Holmes. It is very warm." 

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

That sentiment of growing stronger through adversity is what is missing from creationism. To me, a curious and intelligent mind is one that is not afraid to have its opinions and beliefs changed. Sherlock wouldn't have got very far if he began every case with a preconceived notion of who the killer was or just took the witness's word for what had happened. Stories written, like that, wouldn't have captured anyone's interest or inspired chemists to improve blood tests for toxic substances.

The appeal of Sherlock Holmes is that he's kind of like a superhero, but he doesn't have any magical powers, which means that we don't have to be from another planet of bitten by a toxic spider to get as powerful as he is! If we read enough, if we learn enough, if we are observant and conduct a lot of experiments, we might get as smart and powerful as Sherlock!

The danger of not nurturing curious minds is that we won't have as many new advances in forensic science or medicine. Heck, we might even be raising future law enforcement that thinks a witness's statement is more reliable than the smoking gun in her hand.

I'm going to go back to my writing now and will try not to watch so much TV.

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We're All Friends Here!

The more I read about the lives of writers in London in the 1890s, the more interconnected they seem. I feel compelled to sit down one of these days and make a tree of who was friends with who.

I knew that Bram Stoker was friends with Oscar Wilde and that they were both friends with Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), but I didn't know that Doyle was friends with J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan).

Barrie even asked Doyle to do some editing on one of his plays (if you are a writer today, that probably sounds familiar).

Barrie was pen pals with Robert Louis Stevenson. When he opened the mail box in front of his house, he might have bumped into George Bernard Shaw because they were neighbors.

As his marriage crumbled in the 1900s, Barrie got support and advice from his good friend, H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds). They both knew Thomas Hardy, but not very well.

If anyone knows of a family-tree style map of the friendships between writers in London in the 1890s, let me know? Otherwise, I might have to make one myself!

Note: The date on this post was changed when I made a minor edit to add in the closing line that I now try to leave on all my posts. It was a reminder that I still haven't got around to mapping out the friendships between writers, which is largely because they were too many. Writers in the 1890s were so well connected that they knew each other even if they lived in different cities or countries, like Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. This sense of community, though it reminds me of the online communities we create today, was, for the most part, due to a stronger inclination toward letter writing and attendance at literary events. However, I still think that a community of writers is a community worth celebrating!

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