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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Physiognomy and Vampires

Now regarded as pseudoscience, physiognomy, the art of detecting one's character through the shape of their face, was widely accepted among many writers in London in the 1890s, including Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde.

The plot of the Picture of Dorian Gray uses magic to overcome the supposed laws of physiognomy to make the protagonist appear kinder than he is, turning him into an undetectable monster.

From Stoker's novel to the history of vampires in film, the way a vampire looks deeply effects the way its victims see it. Who would you rather invite into your home, Max Schreck or Brad Pitt?

Even though we've rejected any validity physiognomy ever had, the Victorian writer's faith in this pseudoscience has shaped the gothic novel.

If we remember that Victorian Londoners feared other Victorian Londoners more than anything else, we can better understand their acceptance of a guide to reading the appearance of others in everyday urban settings, as a tool that would theoretically better enable them to navigate their landscapes more safely. The 18th- and 19th-century rise in the popularity of physiognomy can also be traced alongside the rise of the city, during industrialization, and read as a coping mechanism for people, terrified of their urban lives.

He has succeeded after all, then, in his design in getting to London, and it was he I saw. He has got younger, and how? Van Helsing is the man to unmask him and hunt him out ... Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours. - Jonathan Harker's Journal in Dracula (1897)

That the Count in Dracula can make himself look younger makes him a hidden danger, which needs to be unmasked, by someone with trustworthy eyebrows, like Van Helsing.

Physiognomy didn't just influence Victorian fiction, but was the subject of volumes of Victorian writing to the extent that a cursory internet search can produce titles from the period that are available for free online.

Encyclopædia of Human Nature and Physiognomy (1889)
Physiognomy and Expression (1890)
How to Read Character (1890)
A System of Practical and Scientific Physiognomy (1890)
Physiognomy Illustrated Or, Nature's Revelations of Character (1891)
Physiognomy (1892)
Our Noses (1893)
Faciology (1893)
New Physiognomy or Signs of Character (1894)
Wells' New Descriptive Chart for Giving a Delineation of Character (1895)
Physiognomical Register (1895)

Of course, physiognomy was also used to justify Victorian racism:

San Francisco Call, Volume 81, Number 167,
16 May 1897

A 'science,' based on judging people for how they look, is inarguably discriminatory in its very nature, though we still do it all the time. We say a person has 'kind eyes,' or that 'eyes are the window to the soul, and we live in a world that has institutionalized racial profiling.

If you are interested in pursuing this subject further, I recommend: Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (2014) by Graeme Tytler.

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Thornley Stoker: Creepy and Caring

Bram Stoker's mother told him horror stories, when he was a little boy and too sick to get out of bed. His oldest brother, Sir Thornley Stoker, 1st Baronet, became the Inspector of Vivesection for all of Ireland. Vivisection comes from the latin words: "vivus" and "sectio," which mean "alive" and "cutting," it's a term used to refer to experimental surgery on living organisms, typically animals. Human vivisection has been perpetrated as a form of torture.

Suddenly, the Stokers seem more like the Addams Family.

Now, now, now... Surely, Thornley couldn't have been as bad as all that!

Sir Thornley Stoker
1st Baronet

Bram and Thornley's stories are both a little rags to riches. Not actual rags, but their dad was an under appreciated civil servant, who only got one promotion in the course of his whole career, which he had to ask for. Any spare money the family had went to educating its boys: Thomas, Thornley, George, Richard, and Bram. Their sisters, Margaret and Matilda, got a little education too, as Abraham Stoker Sr. deeply wished his children would aspire to greater social heights than he had.

Medicine and military exploration of India were top choices on the list of careers, Papa Stoker wanted for his boys, and Thornley chose medicine, eventually becoming an eminent Irish medical writer, anatomist, and surgeon.

After a few years in medicine, Thornley became a surgeon at the Royal City of Dublin Hospital. In 1873, he transferred to the Richmond Hospital, and soon became chair of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, a position he held for many years. Thornley really liked titles and power. He governed over both Swift's Hospital (founded by Jonathan Swift), and the Richmond Hospital.

So, what about vivisection? Thornley succeeded his brother-in-law, Richard Thomson, as Inspector of Vivisection for Ireland in 1879. But they weren't just family, they were colleagues. They cofounded the school of nursing at Richmond Hospital, and oversaw the construction of surgical facilities there in 1899. All the while, Thornley was writing volumes about his work, and the work of other doctors in Ireland.

Taxidermy Shop

Victorians don't have the best reputation for being kind to animals, and most certainly were experimenting on live animals. The French physiologist, François Magendie (1783-1855), and the Scottish anatomist, Charles Bell (1744-1842), founded the field of neuroscience through their experiments on live rabbits, and puppies. Magendie got further than Bell did because he was more ruthless with the puppies. Bell wrote:

I was deterred from repeating the experiment by the protracted cruelty of the dissection. I therefore struck a rabbit behind the ear, so as to deprive it of sensitivity by the concussion, and then exposed the spinal marrow.

And this essay argues that Bell would have been more successful had he not worried about the rabbit's suffering.

Thornley was most interested in the work of Magendie and Bell, in the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, he frequently expresses his special interest in surgery of the spino-cerebral cavity. However, the position of Inspector of Vivisection was in accordance with Ireland's 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. Thornley's fascination with the medical breakthroughs being made with vivisection were tempered by his awareness of the ethically murky waters that surrounded such experiments, and kept Bell from forging ahead.

Meddling in morally murky waters does not a monster make. Sometimes, the creepiest people are the most actively caring because they are able to look straight on at the horrors of this world, then take action to end those horrors. Thornley campaigned against the use of vivisection in the training of surgeons, as well as many other cruelties of vivisection during his tenure as Inspector. He recorded the number of animals experimented on in Ireland every year, ensuring that nothing was done without the proper licenses and permits.

Today, we attach a lot of meaning to the way that people treat animals; we believe that people, who are cruel to animals, will likely be cruel to people in need, whereas we believe that people, who are kind to animals, are just lovely human beings. I think, we believe this, in part, because of people, like Thornley, who worked to protect animals from medical experimentation, and campaigned against the Workhouse System. He also blended a love of art with his love of science, becoming Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Thornley resigned from many of his medical duties in 1910, due to fatigue. The following year he was created a baronet, of Hatch Street in the City of Dublin. That part still confuses me a bit because I imagine being made a baroness of say... the street where I grew up, but when I imagine it that way, all of the children I grew up with would make fun of me for having an essentially meaningless title. Maybe Thornley was too close to the end of his life to care what other people might say, and just appreciated the gesture. After all, he did collect many titles throughout his lifetime. Thornley only outlived Bram by a few months, and died in June 1912, aged 67, when the baronetcy became extinct.

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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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Dracula and the Dow Industrial Index

When I think of Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, I think of Victorian science, technology, and gothic warnings about vice. This year, I was surprised to see that on the anniversary of the publication of Dracula, Daily Finance's Investor Center compared Dracula and the Dow Industrial Index:

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published for the first time on May 26, 1897. Arriving exactly a year after the first publication of Charles Dow's industrial index, the tale of a charming vampire from Transylvania had a similar effect on pop culture as Dow's index had on stock market culture. While it wasn't an immediate best-seller, the novel's influence on early filmmaking led to an explosion of interest in vampire stories that continues to this day, to the chagrin of many husbands and boyfriends. Stoker's creation, and the worldwide pop-culture craze it spawned, has added an estimated $10 billion to the economy, according to one "very conservative" estimate by 24/7 Wall Street's Jon C. Ogg.

I hadn't made the link between the two before. Of course, the anniversary dates are a coincidence in timing, but the fact that the Dow Industrial Index was still a babe reflects on the climate Bram Stoker was writing in and why Dracula is also seen as an early example of techno fiction.

Technology is a major theme in the novel, which is written in an epistolary style, during the throws of the industrial revolution when crackpots everywhere were clamouring to have their work recognized as science. The elevated place of science must have danced with Stoker's love of all things mystical, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, producing the kind of environment where a specialist could very reasonably be called in to research supernatural phenomenons.

If one can make a science out of economics, why couldn't they make a science of chasing vampires?

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