3 Doyle Plays Sherlock

The Sherlock Holmes Way

The charms of detective fiction arguably lie in our hunger for truth, the need to know who is good and who is evil, what really happened, and not only whodunit, but also how and why he or she “dunit.” In a genre that tolerates ambiguity poorly, mysteries must be solved. In effect, however, Slavoj Žižek explains in Looking Awry that the narrative usually dupes us with a successful fiction that evades an encounter with the truth of the real:

The detective “proves by facts” what would otherwise remain a hallucinatory projection of guilt onto a scapegoat, i.e., he proves that the scapegoat is effectively guilty. The immense pleasure brought about by the detective’s solution results from this libidinal gain, from a kind of surplus profit obtained from it: our desire is realized and we do not even have to pay the price for it. (59)

Detective narratives leave the mystery of our desire and guilt draped under the cloak of rationality and facts. The solution is a ruse, a narrative contrivance that allows the reader to go scot-free while the sujet supposé savoir, whose “business is to know things,” absolves the reader by indicting the fictional suspect held responsible for the crime in question.1

Neither solution nor absolution is easily available when fact and fiction are forced into a mutual confrontation with their limits, as in Julian Barnes’s novelization of a real-life criminal case in Arthur and George. The titular Arthur of the novel is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the best-known detective in the history of the popular genre, while the relatively obscure George Edalji, an Anglo-Indian—or rather Scottish English-Parsi Indian, as we are frequently reminded in the novel—is the son of Charlotte and Shapurji Edalji, a converted Parsi from India who is appointed vicar in rural Staffordshire. After a hostile campaign of anonymous letters and pranks against the Edalji family, George becomes the chief suspect in the Great Wyrley Outrages, the name given to a series of episodes involving nighttime mutilation of farm animals near the Edaljis’ vicarage. George is subsequently arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for maiming a horse, and disqualified as a solicitor. After his release, George pleads his innocence in a letter to Doyle. Accustomed to rejecting requests for playing detective “ever since Sherlock Holmes solved his first case,” Doyle agrees at a time when he is distraught after his consumptive wife’s death, but also in love with another woman (257).2 In a curious subversion of the discrepancy between their stature in the public eye, the novel presents Arthur and George on a spurious equivalence, two “Englishmen” occupying the marquee space of the cover on a Christian first name basis. Their lives are presented in alternate chapters, interspersed with segments involving law enforcement figures.

The novelization of a real-life crime, rendered the more intriguing by Barnes’s own turn at detective fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, and Doyle’s turn as a detective in real life, ironically exposes the hoax of detective fiction as well as the unacknowledged mysteries of prejudice. Playing detective in real life, Doyle—the surrogate sujet supposé savoir—repeatedly confronts projectional fantasies and scapegoating techniques in lieu of rational investigation, devices unfortunately reminiscent of more than one Holmes story featuring grotesquely Orientalized figures in Doyle’s own literary corpus. George is turned into a scapegoat for the heinous mutilation of farm animals through a formal investigative process that bears uncanny similarity with implausible expedients in Doyle’s stories. In many ways, the novelization of the George Edalji case by Barnes puts the writer of sensational, sometimes racist, fictions to the test in his real-life reckoning with colonial prejudice. It also forces a confrontation with the idea of fair play and good form associated with Englishness and the civilizing mission. The contradictions and deceptions of the progressive, meliorative logic of the enlightenment project and civilizing mission are hardly news, but the novel goes a long way toward disclosing the reasons for their persistent appeal. In what might be described as a tragicomedy of manners, the novel draws us into turn-of-the-century England as if into a biosocial laboratory. Real-life people Arthur and George are recast in the fashioned character of unofficial Englishmen, performing creatures shaped and haunted by the sacrificial, renunciative logic of civilization and good form.

Barnes’s fictional retelling of the case shows us a world in which everyone—suspect, detective, inspector, savior, and victim of the miscarriage of justice alike—is trapped in a world seduced by questions of breeding and aesthetic form, as if in a carnivalesque house of mirrors. In a drama that foregrounds animal mutilation as the central crime bedeviling the socius, the novel offers readers an opportunity to review the results of a long experiment in biosocial engineering in which the nature/culture dichotomy relies on a complicated relationship with the animal. The management of the animal body, its urges, appetites, emissions, biological functions, and indeed, its capacity for violence, provide the basis for the civilizing process. What Horkheimer and Adorno describe as Europe’s “underground history,” which is arguably also applicable to other societies, entails “the fate of the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by civilization” in a philosophical tradition that expresses “the idea of the human being . . . in contradistinction to the animal” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 192, 203). What is called culture must be understood, they insist, as that which “defines the body as thing which can be possessed . . . as the object, the dead thing, the ‘corpus’” (193). The feats of civilization should be recognized as “the product of sublimation” and as the “transformation [of the body] into dead matter” (194). In fossilized forms of civility, we recognize its secret mandate, “nothing shall be allowed to live” (195). In Metaphysics, Adorno shares his sense that “the most important thing of all . . . what really mattered [was] the zone of the carcass and the knacker,” the latter being the person in charge of rendering farm animals no longer suitable for human consumption (117). The capacity for bodily feeling—“the true basis of morality” for Adorno—is redirected into objectification, reification, and estrangement from nature and all that lives (116). Schooled in this regimen, those who learn “to measure the other with the eye of the coffin maker” turn human beings into specimens, scan incarnate forms for signs of restraint and reform or appropriate redirection of animal urges, and condemn sensory excess or deviance from the prevailing norm (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 195). Elsewhere, Adorno refers to the production of a deadened, bourgeois subject who is allowed to survive because he has restrained and renounced the impulses that betray him as biotic being. In the introduction, I refer to this indoctrination into civility as the inculcation of a postanimal aesthetics aimed at the reform of sensory expression into rigid modes of comportment. The monuments of civilization are raised upon a charnel house as its foundation. Ritual sacrifice and modern forms of scapegoating are on a continuum with this war on life and nature, turned upon the self as upon the weak. Without belaboring the use of the particular animal metaphor of the sacrificial “scapegoat” used in the novel, the targeting of George for crimes that have never been solved—the Great Wyrley Outrages involving horrifying mutilation of horses, cows, and sheep—might be better understood if we placed it within a larger biosocial project characterized by a conflicted relationship with the animal displaced onto an exaggerated investment in the manipulation of human plasticity into rigid forms. Enchanted by symbol and its logic of substitution and displacement, modern man “seeks to save himself by throwing himself away and making himself a mouthpiece of things” (Adorno, Prisms, 207).

The Beginning and the Foregone Conclusion

“The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy’s Household,” an early story by Doyle, furnishes an intriguing backdrop for Barnes’s Arthur and George.3 Uncle Jeremy’s household includes the quixotic lord of the manor, his nephew John Thurston, who hopes to inherit his estate; an Anglo-Indian governess, “a stylish-looking brunette with Indian blood in her veins”; two children (a third having died mysteriously soon after the governess’s arrival); and the proprietor’s “imperturbable secretary,” Copperthorne, who “is somewhat gone in [the] direction” of the attractive Anglo-Indian (44, 42). The story is hardly alone in inviting charges of “improbable and illogical developments in the narrative” (Cuningham, “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Race,” 113), but is of particular archival interest as a precursor to the Holmes franchise and in featuring an Anglo-Indian racial hybrid. Published in seven episodes in Boy’s Own Paper, a popular vehicle for miscellany and stories on subjects including adventures with empire, in it Holmes and Watson “made their first bow in prototype” as Hugh Lawrence and John Thurston, several months before the publication of A Study in Scarlet, which featured the sleuth who would become a household name throughout the world (Haining, The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 34).4 It is also one of several stories in the Holmes canon in which an Oriental figure arrives in England to commit bizarre ritual murder (Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, 115). The half-Oriental governess in this story alongside a full-fledged Oriental straight out of an illustration from colonial ethnological texts are part and parcel of a discourse that views racial hybrids with suspicion because of persistent Orientalist prejudices, a problem that the composer of this story and others trafficking in this stereotype would confront in real life in Doyle’s defense of George. Although the storied governess is quite unlike the straitlaced barrister George Edalji, both have British mothers and are Anglo-Indian by virtue of racial mixture, even if they are not so by the letter of the Indian Constitution, which does not include European maternity as an admissible factor in defining the group. Both, however, are reduced to the status of specimens in the sociobiological laboratory of the British Empire.

Miss Warrender is “the child of an Indian chieftain, whose wife was an Englishwoman” (“Uncle Jeremy’s Household,” 43). The chieftain “was killed in the mutiny fighting against us” (the “us” clarifies the implied community of readers), whereupon the fifteen-year-old destitute orphan is adopted by a German merchant and eventually makes her way to Dunkelthwaite in response to an advertisement for the position of governess. Thurston’s invitation to his Holmesian friend, Lawrence, throws out “the brunettish governess” as “bait to you if you retain your taste for ethnological studies” (43). Even though his nebulous suspicions involve both Copperthorne and the governess, it is “the beautiful Anglo-Indian” that the incipient Holmesian detective decides “to study . . . as an entomologist might a specimen, critically, but without bias” (55, 53). She is to him “an interesting psychological problem, nothing more” (56). He plans to study her, in other words, with what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as the measuring gaze of “the coffin maker” that has already fixed her as one might an insect (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 195). It is not the criminal but the crime that remains to be discovered in the course of the narrative. The unprompted, uninvited investigation pursued without any reported crime is designed to confirm the apprehension that the half-caste governess’s beauties of face and figure will not be matched by concomitant beauties of mind—that bad blood will tell, as it obligingly does. Lawrence, the narrator of the tale, hints “there were other things in [Thurston’s] second letter which prevent me from quoting it in full” (43). Whether these are extraneous, trivial, or of a salacious nature to sweeten the bait we shall not know, but the omissions hint at the suggestive alliance of sex and race, and heighten the mystery of “a princess for governess,” who turns out to be heir designate to the cult of Thuggee associated with ritual strangulation. Although Lawrence “solemnly aver[s] that up to the last moment I had not the smallest suspicion of the truth,” the story’s conclusion suggests that this sensational inheritance biologically predisposes the half-blood not only to poor form in artistic performance and daily habits but toward senseless, ambiguously motivated acts of homicide of innocent white children, and casual violence toward small animals (67).

More doctor than detective, in this early piece Doyle invests in physiognomic and sensational information as diagnostic data, eager to find signs “that transform the body into text” (Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both, 151).5 Gentlemanly comportment put aside at will, the would-be detective claims, “John Thurston made me peep into her private sitting-room one day when she was out,” allowing him to observe her questionable aesthetic choices in producing an effect “ludicrously tawdry and glaring” in the decorations (“Uncle Jeremy’s Household,” 54–55). Lawrence notes that her “Oriental love for bright colours had exhibited itself in an amusing fashion” (55). Using stock colonial verbiage and animal imagery, Doyle tells us that despite Lawrence’s Holmesian immunity from feminine lure, he “could not help admiring the beautiful litheness of her figure . . . [and her] feline grace,” thus explaining her appeal to the dour secretary, Copperthorne (48). She appears to him as a “pythoness” (59). Claiming to have gained “a deeper insight into her character” over time, Thurston offers a series of observations on the “great dash of savage in her nature” underneath “the veneer of culture” (54). Readers are asked to believe that despite being “fairly well read,” acquainted “with several languages,” and having “a great natural taste for music,” “in the course of her conversation she would every now and again drop some remark which would almost startle me by its primitive reasoning, and by its disregard for the conventionalities of civilization” (54). Miss Warrender’s compromised aesthetics are symptomatic both of “savage” blood and insufficient cultivation. In due course of time, evidence of deficient aesthetic form is followed by that of poor moral form. During one of their walks, “her wild original habits suddenly asserted themselves,” as she stops to strike and maim a rabbit in “an outbreak of the old predatory instinct of the savage, though with a somewhat incongruous effect in the case of a fashionably dressed young lady on an English high road” (54). That Lawrence and his friend, despite their obligations to their studies, hope to “have time for a crack at the rabbits for all that” goes unremarked (44).

With Thurston’s disclosure that the governess’s youngest charge, Ethel, was found dead in the shrubbery within a week or two of her arrival, the reader’s suspicions are aroused (47). Intrigued by Copperthorne’s power over the governess, Lawrence provokes an outburst during which the governess claims that if she had a lover, she would ask him to “Kill Copperthorne” (59). Observing his disapproval, she sheepishly confesses, “it is the Indian training breaking out again” (59). Happening upon her strangulation of Ethel, Copperthorne, we learn later, has been blackmailing her into killing Uncle Jeremy, who has witlessly made a will in his secretary’s favor. In the inconsistent logic of the story, only the governess’s behavior and oddities need explanation in racial terms, whereas the superstitions of the local staff, the odd, clownish appearance of the proprietor and his risible attempts at versification, and Copperthorne’s clear motive and criminality need no explanation as to their sources in deficient aesthetics, inferior civilization, or primitive religion. We learn of Copperthorne’s dubious antecedents, and his being sent down from university “under a cloud,” but we get no sense that the coincidence of bad blood, poor form, and irrational criminality are to be allied in any figure but that of “the beautiful Anglo-Indian” (55–58).

Miss Warrender, rediscovered as Princess Achmet Genghis Khan, is not only part Indian, but born of a father who represents an amalgam of the empire’s worst nightmares: he is simultaneously mutinous, devoted to savage rituals, married to but unreformed by a gentle, Christian representative of the empire, and leader of a band of professional thieves and assassins who perform ritual sacrifice to propitiate an alien, wild, über-female goddess. To arrive at the conclusion that she is the “daughter of a fierce fanatical warrior rather than of her gentle mother,” Lawrence performs a sociocultural version of nineteenth-century racial science’s calculation of genetic ratios (66). In this calculation, the aesthetics of comportment furnishes part of the required but usually concealed qualitative data set. Corroboration and embedding within the larger text of Orientalism confirms that the savage spirit manifests in savage beliefs, and primitive cultural forms.6 Although he has perished in the worst excesses of the mutiny, the fanatical warrior’s spirit apparently lives not only in his daughter but also in an incongruous, intertextual apparition who duly materializes on the bleak Yorkshire landscape and prostrates himself at the feet of the combination governess-princess-high priestess.

Doyle mentions several ethnological texts and sources in the story in a bid to establish historical heft for introducing elements of an alien deus ex machina into a narrative in search of a crime after it has already committed to unmasking a criminal with bad blood. The last-minute introduction into the desolate dales of Yorkshire of an obliging acolyte of Miss Warrender’s father serves to dispatch Copperthorne in a ritual strangulation using the customary “roomal,” a long kerchief, as weapon, a crime Lawrence is privileged enough to witness in person. Providentially, he has also overheard a conversation between the governess and the secretary in which we learn of not only the murder of Ethel but also that of her adoptive father’s daughter in Germany. Miss Warrender has murdered (or sacrificed) two young children, presumably because she can’t help it, not because she is seriously disturbed but because she is half (textbook) Oriental and therefore inclined to meaningless murder.7 Motivated neither by money nor social prestige, love, or revenge, unless the murder of innocent children can be seen to avenge the violence of massacres against the 1857 mutineers and her father, the princess admits that she has “grieved much over” Ethel’s death, “for what had the poor child done that she should be sacrificed!” (68). Should the reader balk at this uncharacteristic duality, the narrator explains that as a descendant of thugs—an occupation rather than an identity, but that need not detain us—she has succumbed to “the terrible power the homicidal craze has over every other mental or moral faculty” (71). Since she was “already a woman when she had left them,” the narrator explains, “it was no wonder that the varnish of civilization had not eradicated all her early impressions or prevented the breaking out of occasional fits of fanaticism” (71). Heedless of the poor logic of the next assertion, Lawrence continues thus: “In one of these apparently she had put an end to poor Ethel, having carefully prepared an alibi to conceal her crime” (71; emphasis added). Lawrence will have it both ways; the crime is uncontrollable as well as premeditated. Mindful, perhaps, of the injustice of casting her as a criminal without any hope of profit or gain, the narrator not only describes her as an “unfortunate woman,” but permits her to escape the gallows and the narrative unscathed, although her guilt and the fearful figure of foreignness have been firmly stamped on the avid reader of these fictions. Lawrence decides that Copperthorne, who is willing to use an “unfortunate woman’s horrible conceptions of religion to remove Uncle Jeremy in a way that no suspicion could possibly fall upon the real culprit,” also “should not escape the punishment due his crimes” (72). Instead of the due process of legal indictment, however, Copperthorne is eliminated by the Oriental wanderer in a bizarre outsourcing of the murder, the motive, and justice.

The introduction of an exotic princess-priestess with unfathomable motivations and an equally outlandish dispenser of rough justice seem oddly excessive to the story of a nefarious plot hatched by a malevolent secretary who seeks to dispossess Thurston of his legitimate inheritance. Thurston’s unexamined stakes in the narrative surely involve the protection of his inheritance, which may just as plausibly be threatened by an attractive governess as they might by an unscrupulous secretary who has gained his employer’s trust. In other words, we have here the makings of a plausible crime with recognizable, rational, mercenary motives and a real villain with a suspicious history and poor antecedents, who is ready to achieve his ends by any means at his disposal. Copperthorne’s motives—money and profit—are plausible in a rational world, even if they are not seemly. The profiling of irrational motives belongs to later technologies of investigation and detection in the genre of shows such as CSI, Criminal Minds, Dexter, and so forth. In these narratives, the detective attempts to explain motive through the discourse of psychology (rejection by a lover or higher authority, slight at work, stalled career, inferiority or a lack of being taken seriously, abuse as a child, trauma, etc.), aiming to domesticate if not to rationalize that which seems irrational: the evil of taking another (usually innocent) life. Denied this satisfaction, we are given in the governess’s crime, guilt, and unaccountably chivalrous evacuation from the scene of retribution and justice a foregone conclusion about race and racial mixture as the prima facie crime awaiting punishment.

Displacing the weight of crime, guilt, and ungovernable urges on the “governess” and that of the dispensation of justice on a mysterious emissary Oriental other who then disappears permit the story to end without confronting the evil that may lurk in homeland, Christian breasts. The story concludes with a letter from “Dr. B. C. Haller, a man of encyclopedic knowledge,” who corroborates Lawrence’s understanding of Thuggee, and ends with a justification for proselytization: “Truly ‘the dark places of the earth are full of cruelty,’ and nothing but the Gospel will ever effectually dispel the darkness” (79). The Christian farewell, drawing from Psalms 74:20, invokes and then outsources evil to “the mysteries of Thuggee” and unspecified but legion others awaiting enlightenment (78).

The English Way

Barnes’s Arthur and George exhumes two themes that have appeared in “The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy’s Household”: (1) the displacement of original sin onto Empire’s other, or significantly half-other and (2) the peculiar situation of those others who have seen the light, in the divine as well as the secular sense, and attempt to follow the English way. The problems of residual evil and an incorrigible primitive core continue to beset the latter, despite their religious as well as cultural conversion. Both themes are animated, moreover, by the idea of the “extimate,” which Adorno describes as “the non-I, l’autrui,” and Miller as the alterity within the subject (Negative Dialectics, 23). With enlightenment, Christianity entered into a complex engagement with its premodern core, conceptualizing tragic sacrifice within a narrative of redemption. Motifs of ritual sacrifice and the redemption of humankind through one scapegoat exist in the continuity between the “pagan” figure of the Corn King and in the person of Christ the redeemer. In Doyle’s short story, the relocation of collective guilt for the bloodlust that accompanies the scapegoating of the melded figures of the Corn King growing into the redeemer onto a bizarre, irrationally motivated crime and an insufficiently converted foreign body emerges as a symptom of the lack of rapprochement with a primitive core that resists management. It is also possible that Doyle’s interest in spiritism and the supernatural world—which cost him credibility and stature later in life—make an early appearance in these exaggerated and displaced forms. Finally, in the casual alliance of savagery and lack of good form in the novel and the story, we see intimations of a civilizational project that evaluates its success by the extent to which it has been able to disguise and displace biological and animal being into rigid forms of comportment and control. Instinctively aware that he is a suspect “for some reason [he] does not understand,” George is the selected sacrificial figure who must pay for the sins of a world driven by the need to exercise technical mastery over nature and bare life. Barnes’s novel presents a modern-day scapegoat who is chosen to carry the collective sins of a repressive, violent civilization, while disclosing the secret trump card of aesthetic form as the alternative bio-logic informing its repressive classificatory impulses. The novel discloses both texts simultaneously, allowing us to understand the continued incentive to mimic recognizable codes of civility despite the lack of immunity granted by this conversion to the English way.

By the conflicted rubric of the civilizing mission, George Edalji is an exemplary specimen. A Christian education cautioning against “the sins of the flesh” and unquestioned subscription to the aesthetic forms of English civility make George a designer convert to the epic intentions of the civilizing and the Christian mission (Arthur and George, 82).8 Lacking in imagination, George is prone to “following the inventions of others,” including the biblical injunction heard “many times on his father’s lips”: “I am the way, the truth and the life,” from John 14:6 (4–5). Another familiar homily in the Edalji household presents England through a biological allegory as “the beating heart of the Empire,” with “The Church of England” as the blood that reaches “even its farthest shore” (21). Growing up, George’s world is the church, the churchyard, and the Great Wyrley Vicarage inherited by his father from his Uncle Compson (7). Of a nervous disposition, George prefers this world to that beyond the vicarage wall. At the local school, where “other boys are not so neat,” George wears a bow tie, waistcoat, and jacket, and responds politely when told, “you’re not the right sort,” with a rote and civil greeting: “How d’you do, my name’s George” (11). By the time he is sixteen, George “knows our Saviour’s birth to be a solemn truth,” begins to study law, and imagines himself “with a desk, a set of bound law books and a suit with a fob chain slung between his waistcoat pockets like golden rope. He imagines himself respected. He imagines himself with a hat” (30). These, in sum, are articles of faith for the postulant Englishman. England’s version of the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) was founded in part in a mandate to “[administer] . . . an impartial justice, based on a belief in a fundamental English decency,” as Robert Young argues in The Idea of English Ethnicity. Simon Gikandi, too, points to this conjunction: “Within the symbolic economy of English identity, the idea of the law bestows the authority of nature and totality to the nation and its imperial ideology” (Maps, 66). Indeed, in the Hegelian schematic, it is in the law that the spirit of a people finds its ideal manifestation. In his own estimation, founded in this amalgam of beliefs about Englishness, George is a “full Englishman . . . by birth, by citizenship, by education, by religion, by profession” (Arthur and George, 268).

Very soon, however, it is precisely through an encounter with the law that good form and genteel upbringing count in George’s disfavor because they come to be read as smug and arrogant, inappropriate to someone who remains alien despite “birth . . . citizenship . . . education . . . religion . . . profession” (268). Sergeant Upton describes him as an “uppish little fellow” despite or perhaps because of his pretensions to these attributes, reminding us that Miss Warrender was also disliked by Uncle Jeremy’s retainer for “her ‘uppish ways’” (“Uncle Jeremy’s Household,” 31, 74). Inspector Campbell’s report to Anson, “The odd thing was, listening to his voice—it was an educated voice, a lawyer’s voice—I found myself thinking at one point, if you shut your eyes, you’d think him an Englishman” (Arthur and George, 112), is met with a direct reference to what is unassimilable, as Anson responds, “Whereas if you left them open, you wouldn’t exactly mistake him for a member of the Brigade of Guards?” [historical elite of the British army] (112). Anson goes on to elaborate: “It sounds as if—eyes open or eyes shut—your impression was of someone who feels himself superior. How might I put it? Someone who thinks he belongs to a higher caste?” (112).

The impossibility of being sufficiently English is coded in a history that George cannot shed, announced both in his person and his last name as vital code for these disjunctive elements of identity. At sixteen, George is accosted by a policeman who interrogates him after he has found on the vicarage doorstep a key that turns out to be stolen:

“Name?”

“You know my name.”

“Name, I said.” . . .

“George.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Ernest.”

“Go on.”

“Thompson.”

“Go on.”

“You know my surname. It’s the same as my father’s. And my mother’s.”

“Go on, I say, you uppish little fellow.”

“Edalji.”

“Ah yes,” says the Sergeant. “Now I think you’d better spell that out for me.” (32)

Much of the narrative that follows on this sneak preview of the workings of racial prejudice is an attempt to spell out the significance of the last name, unshaken residue of a history that cannot be erased by conversion or sufficiently outweighed by the three Christian names that precede it. Doyle’s attempts to bring Anson to reason flounder on the problem of this foreign history. Conceding that it was unwise to introduce “a coloured clergyman into such a rude and unrefined parish” in what he believes is a mistaken bid “to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican Church,” Doyle attempts to establish common ground with the truculent officer. Anson follows this agreeable trail in a conversation that unfolds to reveal the insurmountable double bind in narratives of conversion:

“And then to introduce three half-caste children into the neighbourhood.”

“George, Horace and Maud.”

“Three half-caste children,” repeated Anson.

“George, Horace and Maud,” repeated Doyle.

“George, Horace and Maud Ee-dal-jee.” (328)

Anson closes this thread of the conversation by drawing attention to what follows those Christian names, and will forever follow, the whiff of foreignness, which sits poorly on the English tongue.

Edalji is a name that spells out the incarnate sound of difference, pronouncing its incommensurability with Englishness. Moreover, as George explains to a sympathetic Doyle, “It’s Aydlji, actually, if you don’t mind. . . . I am used to it. But since it is my name . . . all Parsee names are stressed on the first syllable” (260). Aware of its potential impact on the English ear, George’s lawyer resists his client’s tutelage in the correct Parsi pronunciation. Tone deaf to the implications, George suggests that the lawyer make “an announcement at the beginning of the case as to how to pronounce my name.” Mr. Meek, the lawyer, reassures him, “Of course it’s your name, and of course Mr. Vachell and I shall endeavour to pronounce it correctly. When we are here with you.” “But in court . . . ,” he continues, “I think the argument would be: when in Rome” (148). In a maneuver assimilated immigrants will recognize readily, Mr. Meek explains, “What you call mispronouncing, I would call . . . making you more English. . . . Less Oriental” (148). The domestication of its foreign sonics in court notwithstanding, George Edalji’s is a name unlikely to overcome its threatening and unsympathetic aspect in spelling and sound. The Parsi last name remains a persistent reminder of George’s half-ness, and that of religious conversion as unconvincing in the colonial theater. Understandably then, in due course, George’s brother Horace changes his last name in a final bid to leave its freighted history behind. Reviewing his life in later years, George writes that Horace “was now lost to the family: he had married, moved to Ireland and changed his name” (418).9

The inadequacy of three Christian names against the last word of the last name is matched by suspicions about the quality of conversion by the others of empire. Gauri Viswanathan observes: “Even when Hindus or Muslims were converting to Christianity, the decisions made by the [colonial] civil courts denied that such conscious change occurred, and the Christian convert was treated as essentially someone who had not converted. . . . Their religious identity was subsequently recast in the form of the religion they had renounced” (Outside the Fold, 14). Anson’s assessment of George’s uppishness is associated metonymically with “higher caste” supremacism, even though the latter is a convert to Christianity, and even though Zoroastrianism, his father’s religion before conversion, contains nothing analogous to caste. Father, son, and family all find their religious status under question. Relying on available records, Barnes tells us that Reverend Edalji’s parish endured significant “ill feeling when the Vicar was first given the living. People saying they didn’t want a black man in the pulpit telling them what sinner they were, that sort of thing” (Arthur and George, 101). Moreover, suspicious of the conversion, the parish also exchanged rumors about “new moon, pagan rites and such like” (101). In the short story discussed earlier, one of Lawrence’s first questions about the governess broaches the issue head-on: “What view of religion does she take? Does she side with her father or mother?” (“Uncle Jeremy’s Household,” 47). Thurston’s confused response, “We never press the question. . . . Between ourselves don’t think she’s very orthodox,” is intended as a clue to horrifying disclosures planned for a dramatically propitious narrative moment, emanating supposedly from the insufficiently converted Christian half-caste’s “horrible conceptions of religion” (47). Anson is baldly vocal in his doubts about the conversion as credible. In response to Doyle’s assertion that he “cannot picture a priest of the Church of England placing his hand on the Bible and knowingly committing perjury,” Anson parries with, “Try to imagine this instead. Imagine a Parsee father putting loyalty to his Parsee family above loyalty to a land not his own” (Arthur and George, 330). Despite George’s detailed account of Shapurji’s conversion by Scottish missionaries in his conversations with the famous author, Doyle himself would write in his memoirs, “‘How the Vicar came to be a Parsee, or how a Parsee came to be the Vicar, I have no idea’” (quoted in Barnes, Arthur and George, 414).10

Barnes’s novel uncovers the anatomy of racial thinking in a creative reconstruction of the case indicting George against all odds, and indeed, contrary to obvious evidence. Inquiring into irrepressible and untrustworthy instinctual impulses, Freud chooses the Mischling as his master analogy for the traffic between the unconscious and the preconscious: “Their mixed and split origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with individuals of mixed race [Mischlingen Menschlischer Rassen] who taken all round resemble white men but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges” (“The Unconscious,” 191). Freud’s interest in exposing the inconvenient irrepressibility of instinctual impulses, akin to the “striking feature” that betrays a body, even the bodies of those “who taken all round resemble white men,” braids sex, race, instinct, repression, and civilization into an inextricable weave. George, the convicted criminal, is “a goggling half-caste,” “a poor, bookish, solitary boy with bulging eyes,” afflicted both by myopia and exophthalmos (Arthur and George, 341). While George’s myopia offers Doyle, a trained ophthalmologist as well as writer of detective fiction, confirmation of innocence because the alleged criminal is too nearsighted to have committed the nocturnal mutilations, exophthalmos suggests “an unhealthy degree of sexual desire” and atavistic barbarism to Anson, the chief constable in charge at the time of the investigation (341). Doyle believes that the moral certainty of George Edalji’s innocence lay in “that singular optical defect,” but he also understands that “therein lay . . . the reason why he should have become a scapegoat” (289). Anson is able to spin a fantastic narrative of biological peculiarity, racial mixture, and inadequately channeled urges into a motive for violence against animals in blatant disregard of facts.

George’s conversion to Englishness and subscription to Christian principles not only do not bring him the redemption promised by both, but his singular optical defect overturns all the other signs of normative subjectivity: “Self-control presents itself as secretiveness, intelligence as cunning. And so a respectable lawyer, bat-blind and of slight physique, becomes a degenerate who flits across fields at dead of night, evading the watch of twenty special constables, in order to wade through the blood of mutilated animals” (Arthurand George, 289). In an aesthetic order that defines the human by upright stature, the hierarchy of the senses typically places smell, touch, and taste far below the privilege of sight, “the noblest, since, among all the senses, it is farthest removed from the sense of touch, which is the most limited condition of perception” (Kant, Anthropology, 43). German naturalist, botanist, biologist, and ornithologist Lorenz Oken identified the European as “eye-man” in a racial hierarchy of the senses (quoted in Classen, Color of Angels, 67). In light of an arbitrary hierarchy of the senses founded in distance from the ground and from the more animal senses reliant on touch and smell, George’s optical deficiency is not just a “striking feature” betraying his “coloured descent,” but a symptom of his inadequacy within an elaborate postanimalist aesthetic system in which sight and vision have been uniquely privileged: “Therein lay . . . the reason why he should have become a scapegoat” (Arthur and George, 289).11

In blatant disregard of the exculpatory fact of George’s myopia, Anson considers racial mixture reason enough for a predisposition to crime in its unfortunate by-product, selectively adducing a facial feature that allegedly explains the redirection of frustrated sexual desire into the instinct to torture animals. Anson repeatedly betrays his unthinking prejudice in statements often drawn directly from Barnes’s extensive research into the case, while remaining clueless about the extent to which he is a product of a regime of false reason that has distorted his sensorium and his ability to use the evidence of the senses. In Doyle’s assessment of the inception of a process culminating in the miscarriage of justice, Anson has made George “a target from the beginning” (329). Anson’s inheritance presumably includes a fund of stories similar to “Uncle Jeremy’s Household,” creative fictions he unwittingly draws on in establishing George’s guilt, even as he smugly brags about having taught Doyle “a thing or two about the real world” during their conversations (345). The consensual projectional fantasies that serve as the “solution” to “The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy’s Household” would not have seemed aberrant or illogical to the implied reader. In a definitive history of Boy’s Own Paper, Jack Cox notes that the story “was a great success with house parties” (Story of the Boy’s Own Paper, 56). The farce of detection and deduction, first enacted in Doyle’s creative fiction, is replicated by Anson in real life, resulting in a tragedy that will destroy an insufficiently English lawyer’s life. The structural similarity between the irrelevance of logical motive in “The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy’s Household” and in Anson’s construction of the Edalji case emerge forcefully in an intertextual reading of the novel. In his confrontation with the official responsible for investigating the mutilations, Doyle repeats the most urgent demand a mystery makes after it has identified the person responsible for the crime: “I ask you simply, Why?” (Arthur and George, 336). In an earlier conversation with Inspector Campbell, Anson has already admitted to Campbell, “the why interests me less than the how and the when and the what” (112). Questioned by Campbell with regard to motive, Anson attempts to supply a series of possible motives: “There might be some deep hatred of animals. . . . Or . . . there is some pattern in the timing of the attacks . . . there might be some sacrificial principle involved. Perhaps the mysterious instrument we are seeking is a ritual knife of Indian origin. A kukri or something. Edalji’s father is a Parsee, I understand. Do they not worship fire?” (112). Even his fellow officer Campbell notes the “loose speculation” (113). The fetish object as instrument of crime, like the roomal used by thugs in Doyle’s short story, unites a perception of religious practices in dark places with dire potential for violence. The illogical and delusional nature of these projections about racial others, and of miscegenation as original sin and manifest guilt, become starkly visible in the mirror the investigating officer Captain Anson holds up to Doyle in Arthur and George.

To Doyle’s question regarding motive, Anson returns a response uncannily reminiscent of Lawrence’s explanations of the unpredictable consequences of mixed blood: “When the blood is mixed, that is where the trouble starts. . . . Why does human society everywhere abhor the half-caste? Because his soul is torn between the impulse to civilization and the pull of barbarism” (339). The Irish-Scottish Doyle’s piqued response, “is it the Scottish or the Parsee blood you hold responsible for barbarism?” is met with a trenchant rejoinder: “You yourself believe in blood. You believe in race. You told me over dinner how your mother had proudly traced her ancestry back five centuries” (339). Apart from boasting of his second wife’s family ancestry, Doyle had once responded very coolly to his sister Connie’s interest in Ernest Hornung, a suitor whom he describes as “Half Mongol, half Slav” by the sound of his name, asking his sibling, “Could you not find someone wholly British?” (Arthur and George, 74). “There’s something odd about him,” he allegedly said, proceeding to employ sensorial justification, “I can sniff it” (75). Attention to the body is part of the influence of Doyle’s teacher Joseph Bell on Holmes’s diagnostic organon:

It was Bell’s dictum that a doctor had to be not only learned but also immensely interpretive of all relevant features of a patient. Diagnosis, he taught, was not made just by visual observation but also by the employment of all the senses: do not just look at a patient, he advised, but feel him, probe him, listen to him, smell him. Only then could a diagnosis be attempted. (Quoted in Booth, The Doctor and the Detective, 50)

Like Miss Warrender for Doyle’s Lawrence and Hornung for Doyle, George is a suspicious character ab ovo for Anson and the Yorkshire constabulary.

Doyle’s belief in blood and race manifest in conflicted ways. Like Anson, Doyle locates George within his Parsi ancestry regardless of his father’s conversion, with the difference that it is not to him a sign of deficient morality. In fact, he refers repeatedly to the superiority of the Parsis, their penchant for charity, and their distinction as “the most highly educated and commercially successful of Indian sects,” in a response analogous to that of George’s Uncle Stoneham, who has previously testified in a letter in defense of George, “Our friends at that time too felt as we did that Parsees are a very old and cultivated race, and have many good qualities” (Arthur and George, 338, 191; underlining in original). The hierarchical evaluation of different “Indian sects” couples with Anson’s troubling response to Doyle’s commendation of the race: “They are not called the Jews of Bombay for nothing” (338). Moreover, Anson’s blatant prejudice, which extends beyond Indians, Jews, and Parsis to the Irish, is made clear at several points in the novel. Also emphasized, however, is Doyle’s preoccupation not only with race, blood, and ancestry, but also with class and evidence of cultivation and good form. He extols the virtues of the Parsis for the same reasons that he enjoys his race pride. In his description of Parsis to his second wife, Jean, Doyle speaks of their “historical origin . . . characteristic appearance, their headgear, their liberal attitude to women,” but “he passes over the ceremony of purification, since this involves ablution with cow urine” (318). Doyle wisely suppresses information about the Parsi belief in the healing and spiritual power of the bodily discard of an animal because he is acutely aware of how such a detail might be perceived in a culture founded in unease with animals and the animal body.

Inspector Campbell tells Captain Anson that the man who performed the mutilations would be someone who was “accustomed to handling animals” (84); this assumption would clearly rule out George. Yet George is pursued as the single suspect. On the night a horse is mutilated, Anson already has his force on guard, focusing on George because the chief constable is convinced that “he will do something” (113). George’s earlier suggestion, that the next time there is an incident they employ bloodhounds, for “they have . . . an excellent sense of smell,” is met with a rejoinder indicting Doyle’s sensational, racist fictions: “It sounds like something out of a shilling shocker. ‘Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’” (106–7). The logical uses of the sense of smell are disregarded in the mockery, although the inspector duly reports the suggestion to Anson, who in turn responds with the following: “You’re sure he didn’t say native trackers?” (111). Creative license and the demands of the ludic drive notwithstanding, Doyle’s imaginative extensions stand revealed as part of that nexus between culture and imperialism that permitted race to acquire its power not only through pseudoscience but through the equally persuasive medium of a good story. As a creative fiction accountable to no particular standard of logic or verifiability, the storied other thus made available to a populace hungry for information and entertainment, and struggling tacitly or otherwise with its own psychoses, becomes a suspicious character in advance of an actual crime, and readily available for scapegoating when evildoing occurs. In Barnes’s narrative, Doyle is forced to confront the sensory triggers of prejudice and understands why George might seem a misfit among the “unenlightened”:

[Arthur] tried to imagine George Edalji in the village of Great Wyrley, walking the lanes, going to the bootmaker, doing business with Brookes. The young solicitor—well spoken and well-dressed though he was—would cut a queer figure even in Hindhead, and no doubt a queerer one in the wilds of Staffordshire. He was evidently an admirable fellow, with a lucid brain and resilient character. But if you merely looked at him—looked at him, moreover, with the eye of an ill-educated farmhand, a dimwit village policeman, a narrow-minded juror, or a suspicious chairman of Quarter Sessions—you might not get beyond a brown skin and an ocular peculiarity. He would seem queer. And then, if some queer things started happening, what passed for logic in an unenlightened village would glibly ascribe the events to the person. (288)

The trope of always already inadequate conversion is familiar to us from accounts of “flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English,” as Bhabha explains (The Location of Culture, 87). In fact, the postcolonial mimic was often targeted especially for mockery. The partial infusion of English blood in racial hybrids similarly exaggerates their difference from the English, even though it is understood that the structure of English ethnicity betrays its own contradictions and conflicted inheritance. So far, so unremarkable. One other mystery, however, abides to command our attention. Positioned as detective and champion of truth and justice in real life, Doyle asks the chief investigating officer—in what we would like to think of as the rationalist Sherlock Holmesian way—why Horace, George’s brother and equally “mongrel” half-caste, is not under suspicion. Why does Horace pass muster and George fail? Who is chosen as scapegoat, and who escapes unharmed? Who invites projectional fantasies, mockery, and disdain, and why? Who, moreover, does not? By juxtaposing two hybrids within one family as potential scapegoats, Doyle’s question and the selection of firstborn George imply that racial prejudice is not always a foregone conclusion. In asking and exploring “why not Horace?” the novel exposes the final mystery of racial and cultural prejudice: its unpredictable plot, inconsistent logic, creative fictions, and hysterical obsession with good form (Arthur and George, 340). It betrays, moreover, the exceptionalist logic that continues to fuel the engines of colonial mimicry and hybridity in new forms in a globalized world.

Strait Is the Gate

In a narrative that repeatedly refers to Doyle’s belief that “life was a chivalric quest,” Barnes suggests that it is a recollection of this missionary belief that stimulates the author into action in defense of George at a time when he is confused after his first wife’s death (Arthur and George, 69). Doyle gives this account in his memoir: “What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave, blue-eyed, gray-haired mother, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors” (quoted in Barnes, Arthur and George, 414–15). Wlad Godzich proposes the following structure for the Arthurian code, one that Arthur, named after the legendary knight, has learned at his mother’s knee:

The paradigmatic conception here is that of the quest in romances of chivalry, in which the adventurous knight leaves Arthur’s court—the realm of the known—to encounter some form of otherness, a domain in which the courtly values of the Arthurian world do not prevail. The quest is brought to an end when this alien world is brought within the hegemonic sway of the Arthurian world: the other has been reduced to (more of) the same. The quest has shown that the other is amenable to being reduced to the status of the same. (The Culture of Literacy, 263)

The judicial system’s unfair treatment of George, the vulnerability of his helpless mother, and Doyle’s lifelong quest to right the wrongs done to his “Mam” by his alcoholic, indigent father, collude to set the celebrated creator of detective fictions on his romantic rescue mission. Doyle conjugates George’s attributes in terms that Godzich describes above, recognizing in the half-caste lawyer a “professional Englishman,” whereas Anson, who believes that “police work is not just punitive but also prophylactic,” targets them as signs of incorrigible and inferior difference, forms of contagion identified for containment (Arthur and George, 330, 329). Described in the novel as “a Staffordshire man through and through” (95), Anson might be of the camp that finds it “ideologically inconceivable that there should exist an otherness of the same ontological status as the same, without there being immediately mounted an effort at its appropriation” (Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 264). Anson responds with prejudice rather than chivalry.

Doyle’s chivalrous defense of the Parsis clearly did not extend to all of empire’s others. Writing about his voyage to West Africa in “On the Slave Coast with a Camera,” Doyle states, “I had a great desire to ‘astonish the natives’ by representations of their own hideous faces” (16). Ruminating further, he observes: “A great deal has been said about the regeneration of our black brothers and the latent virtues of the swarthy races. My own experience is that you abhor them on first meeting them, and gradually learn to dislike them a very great deal more as you become better acquainted with them” (19). On the same voyage, the young Doyle had a “momentous encounter,” as his biographer described it (Edwards, Biographical Study, 255). Doyle recalls it in these words:

The most intelligent and well-read man whom I met on the Coast was a negro, the American Consul at Monrovia. . . . This negro gentleman did me good, for a man’s brain is an organ for the formation of his own thoughts and also for the digestion of other people’s, and it needs fresh fodder. (Memories and Adventures, 55–56)

The “negro” in question was a famous black abolitionist and former slave, Henry Highland Garnet. Doyle confessed himself open to the intelligent, well-read gentleman’s views, acknowledging the black man’s superior form in contrast to others of his racial group. In the adjacence of two conflicted responses to “our black brothers” lies the classic ambivalence of colonial discourse. At the same time, however, in Doyle’s negative response to the faces identified with a generalized black social body and in his positive one to the particular encounter with an intelligent, educated, well-formed “negro gentleman,” we might see beyond ambivalence a more erratic, case-by-case situation that reveals another portion of the catechism additional to what George learned so well at his father’s knee (“I am the way, the truth and the life”). This portion reveals, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth to life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:14).

Freudian theories of ambivalence in the interaction between the races have been productive in revealing the mechanics of colonial interaction: the importance of fetishized stereotypes of the other, the piecemeal nature of Englishness, and the fissures inherent in colonial commands to mimicry. What remains insufficiently understood is the working of structures of exceptionalism in invitations to mimicry of privileged forms. Those who pass muster racially or culturally do so through their ability to approximate most closely forms that are riven by inconsistency but are nonetheless privileged within the particular social laboratory in which mimicry and conversion take place. Without a built-in reward structure, no cultural system can sustain its hold as a desirable ideal, particularly in light of its inconsistency. I have suggested that attention to the aesthetic dimensions of mimicry can help us understand how and why some cultural forms exert their power and invite modes of passing, not as white, but as recognizably reformed or different from those who do not or cannot attempt this mimicry. It is also worth considering that those who “fit” within a privileged norm of Englishness do not thereby necessarily fit in every “English” situation.12 Doyle’s anxieties about his own identity are expressed in a curious self-description: “You and I, George, you and I, we are . . . unofficial Englishmen” (268). George, understandably,

is taken aback by this remark. He regards Sir Arthur as a very official Englishman indeed: his name, his manner, his fame, his air of being absolutely at ease in this grand London hotel, even down to the time he kept George waiting. If Sir Arthur had not appeared to be part of official England, George would probably not have written to him in the first place. But it seems impolite to question a man’s categorization of himself. (268)

A fuller exploration of Doyle’s simultaneous and rivalrous positioning within the national and imperial text is beyond the scope of this chapter, although it is important to note the odd junction between his chivalric code, attachment to justice, and advocacy of empire in verse and prose.13 Anson’s sly references to Doyle’s ancestry suggest that the extension of English identity to the Celt was still under way, a process Young describes as part of a larger global development, that of “Englishness . . . defined as a transportable set of values” (The Idea of English Ethnicity, 232). Instead of a stable set of attributes, Englishness seems to function as a social yardstick that adapts to various situations, but most commonly in alliance with hierarchical thinking. Doyle’s formal evaluation of George includes setting him apart from his social inferiors as he reminds Anson that they “are talking . . . not of some butcher’s boy, but of a professional Englishman, a solicitor in his late twenties, already known as the author of a book on railway law” (Arthur and George, 330). In this estimation, while the lower classes may enjoy the wages of whiteness, George enjoys the wages of education and superior class in those circles where these attributes are valuable. Arguably, Doyle is not indicting racial prejudice as much as the withdrawal of protection to a near exemplary subscriber to the English way in its upper-class, professional mode, one that he himself valued highly.

Instead of a generalized notion of the border, then, the process of passing or mimicry might be better understood through that of a turnstile or gate that only permits passage to one person at a time. The passer confronts the baffle gate repeatedly and cannot be assured of passage at every turnstile. Those who have just the ticket, acquired through a rigorous aesthetic and liberal education, might pass some gates and not others, preserving the promise of a reward structure with just enough exceptionalism to inspire a long line of empire’s others at the baffle gate.

Attempting to inspire George to similar feats, the vicar holds out the example of successful Parsis who have breached the color line. “Dr. Dadabhoy Naoroji,” he recounts, “was elected to Parliament for the Finsbury Central district of London” in 1892 . . . even though the PM, Lord Salisbury “said that black men should not and would not be elected to Parliament” (51). Ignoring George’s protest, “But I am not a Parsee, Father. That is what you and Mother have taught me,” the vicar insists that the boy “remember the date,” which is to say remember the exception, and to remember it especially when “unfair things happen, even if wicked things happen” (52). In the face of growing harassment, Barnes confides, the vicar has “chosen to respond to the crisis in what seems to George a peculiar fashion: by giving him short lectures on how the Parsees have always been much favoured by the British.” Through his father’s hagiographic history, George learns that the first traveler to Britain, the first student to study Christian theology in a British university, the first student at Oxford, the first woman student, and the first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service were all Parsi. “As a second Parsee, Muncherji Bhownagree is elected to [the British] parliament,” the vicar’s bedroom catechism expands to include not only the tenets of religious scripture but the text of English values and the advocacy of cultural mimicry of certain privileged forms of Englishness on the grounds of demonstrable success (55). The vicar also seems to understand the price and cost of admission. When he finds “twenty pennies and halfpennies laid at intervals across the lawn,” “the Vicar decides to regard them as a donation to the church” even though there are “also dead birds, mostly strangled; and once excrement has been laid where it will be most visible” (44). The vicar’s belief in exceptionalism rather than justice, perhaps based no less in his own experience in being selected as a vicar of color in a rural parish, suggest that he may have a more realistic grasp of the English way.

In hopes of a similar reward for adherence to this path, the vicar trains his older son to assimilate to beliefs and lifeways that optimize the possibility of success.14 Like his father, George is apt to minimize the role of race in the behavior of others. Despite harassment by coworkers who question his Englishness, George persists in thinking that he is not the subject of racial prejudice. Doyle, on the other hand, recognizes a pattern he has himself used creatively in his fictions. George does not look right despite sporting the correct accessories and facial hair growth. Although Inspector Campbell admits, “if you shut your eyes, you’d think him an Englishman” with “an educated voice, a lawyer’s voice” (112), in visual descriptions by the Staffordshire constabulary and the press, George is depicted as a “little fellow. A bit odd-looking” (101), as someone with “little of the typical solicitor in his swarthy face, with its full, dark eyes, prominent mouth, and small round chin” (140). The vicar, on the other hand, is described by Inspector Campbell as a “short, powerful, light-skinned fellow with none of the oddities of his son. White-haired, but good-looking in a Hindoo sort of a way” (118). George himself “is aware that some consider him odd-looking” (116), and Doyle describes him as a man “small and slight, of Oriental origin, with hair parted on the left and cropped close” (259–60). It is nonetheless possible to construe what seems to be George’s willful blindness to racial prejudice as a form of alternative insight. Indeed, between father and son, there are glimpses of a more complicated understanding of prejudice than in its glib reduction to racism or skin color. While the Edalji family undergoes various forms of harassment, another family, the Brookes, is also receiving letters, a fact that the vicar takes as proof “it is not merely race prejudice.” George astutely asks, “Is that a good thing, Father? To be hated for more than one reason?” (51). George points to the multiple sources of prejudice, while the vicar’s own experience and that of other successful Parsis confirm his faith in the possibility of selective redemption. Their subscriptions also imply that racial prejudice exists among other forms of discriminatory thinking; indeed, the vicar and his son both display their own brand of prejudice against those they consider ill formed and undereducated. When George registers his concern about early experiences of prejudice, he is urged to “pity and cherish the feeble of mind” because “the centre of England is still a little primitive” (39, 52).

The language of evolutionary development is used both by a prejudiced police force and those who are subject to this prejudice. The antagonisms of racial difference emanate from the same belief systems that find their roots more pervasively in the disdain of nature and ways of living that are close to nature and animal life. George expresses his distaste for boys who come from farms; he “thinks they smell of cows,” resists his father’s fair-minded explanation of the association between smell, poverty, and farm life, and is glad to escape a school with “stupid farm boys and odd-talking miners’ sons” (11, 16, 23). When George is seven years old, George’s great-aunt asks him who his friends are. George names Harry Charlesworth and explains, “the rest of them are just smelly farm boys” (15). When the vicar asks him why he calls them smelly, George responds, “Because they are, father,” and when asked, “Why are they?” he answers, “Because they do not wash” (16). The vicar explains, “if they are smelly, it is because they are poor. We are fortunate enough to be able to afford soap, and fresh linen, and to have a bathroom, and not to live in close proximity with beasts,” adding that it is the humble who will inherit the earth, but George does not believe him (16).15 On his daily walks, George “ignores the landscape, which does not interest him; nor do the bulky, bellowing animals it contains” (83).

Although he is myopic in more than one sense, George seems to recognize the aesthetic logistics of class delineations, mirroring in his own prejudices those that lie at the heart of a civilizational process devoted to a suppression of overt reminders of animal nature and bodily being. The violence of this dominative relationship to the self targets the animal within and without in a civilizational context that justifies hunting and routine carnivory alongside the need to care for animals as a particularly human value. To Inspector Campbell’s eye, Captain Anson’s study offers an unremarkable mis-en-scène of the colonial British drawing room: “two high leather chairs on either side of the fireplace, and above it the looming head of a dead elk, or moose. Something antlered anyway” (95). Early in his career, Doyle had sailed to “the Arctic ice field, off after seal and anything else they could chase and kill . . . like any healthy Briton, he enjoyed a good hunt,” feeling “little but male competitiveness when they were out on the endless ice battering seals to death” (32). Displaying his familiarity with railway law, George regales his siblings with the story of “a hunting man” in Belgium, “who took his retriever on a train and sued when it was ejected from the seat beside him in favour of a human being.” The court finds for the plaintiff because “in Belgium a dog may have the status of a passenger so long as it has a ticket,” presumably because it shares his master’s propensity for hunting and supplements this desire with its enhanced nasal competence (66).

In light of the glorification of hunting, it is more than a little ironic that the indictment and incarceration of George on unsubstantiated grounds of animal mutilation marks him as a racial and moral degenerate who betrays “excessive urges” channeled into violence toward defenseless animals (343). Along with hunting, the routine violence of the consumption of “prison beef and mutton” (195), the place of the butcher in everyday life, or the delivery of a “baron of beef” and “dead birds, mostly strangled” to George’s father’s vicarage as part of a harassment campaign against the interracial household elicit no outrage or comment. Casual, habitual violence toward animals in daily life points to the inherent contradictions of a project that defines civil behavior mostly by what kind of barbarism or violence it will tolerate and toward whom (44–45). In Barnes’s narrative, Doyle experiences a challenge to his “way of thinking,” however, when he sees a whale’s eyes “slowly dim over in death,” leading him to muse on “the mystery of the victim” (33). As “he continued to shoot ducks from the snowy sky, and felt pride in his marksmanship,” an uncontainable feeling assails him: “Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored” (33). It is interesting to note that gizzard stones are technological aids to mastication and digestion for the birds who use them as teeth, a sign of intelligence disregarded by the hunter who takes pride in his status as homo faber, the exclusive maker, user, and manipulator of tools and technology. Later, when he examines the corpse of a young man, Doyle notes its “post-mortem muscular relaxation . . . as if the strain and tension of living had given way to a greater peacefulness” (33). “The human dead,” he concludes, “also bore in their gizzard pebbles from a land the maps ignored” (34). Doyle’s apprehension of “the mystery of the victim” enfolding the world of the animal and that of “the rough developing animal” human present an alternative vision of the shared sanctity of breathing, sensate life (90). At the same time, his observations point to the violence done to life not only to the nonhuman animal but also to the human on whose dead face he has observed a release from “the strain and tensions of living” in a mapped, chartered world given to the cultivation of sclerosed forms of comportment.

Rigor mortis does not await death but begins in sclerosed life. The redirection of the idea of civility into rigid forms of comportment, dress codes, accents, and bodily dilations constitute acts of enormous creativity on the one hand and self-delusion and constraint on the other. George’s mimicry of Englishness—ostensibly the making of a living subject whose notions of the good life, the right life, is lived in the English and Christian way—involves an attachment to dead forms displaced onto commodities, extensions, and dilations: “He has a respectable mustache, a briefcase, a modest fob chain, and his bowler has been augmented by a straw hat for summer use. He also has an umbrella. He is rather proud of this last possession, often taking it with him in defiance of the barometer” (92). He has fashioned himself as the “mouthpiece of things” (Adorno, Prisms, 270). These bodily dilations earn him the acknowledgment and salute of ticket collectors and stationmasters as the better sort of gentleman. But what does this elaborate disguise disguise? Not merely a half-English body, but also everything that must be refused to the animal. As Derrida observes:

In principle, with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to dress itself. Clothing would be proper to man, one of the “properties” of man. Dressing oneself would be inseparable from all the other forms of what is proper to man, even if one talks about it less than speech or reason. (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 5)

Derrida reminds us that “the most powerful philosophical tradition in which we live has refused the animal” a range of the properties of man: “culture, institutions, technics, clothing, lying, pretense of pretense” (135).16 In the listing of cold commodities, we see the sources of George’s confidence and oblivion about his subscription to an elaborate confidence game. The prejudice directed toward other races and cultures is on a continuum with the violence inherent in the making of the human through a series of repressions, disguises, and a violent regulation of the state of nature in the dominator and in all that is subject to domination, including the animal within.

Captain Anson himself draws attention to “urges and appetites” and their necessary redirection in a conversation with Doyle because, as he says, “We are men, Doyle, who understand this side of things” (Arthur and George, 342). Anson’s comments on sexual urges unwittingly illuminate the reason for his animus against miscegenation. If, as Horkheimer and Adorno remind us, “sex represents the body in its pure state,” miscegenation is a reminder of animal urges insufficiently restrained, leading to the transgression of the lines that must be maintained between the races (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 235). The segregation of colonial quarters from native ones in colonial urban planning marks the possession of the idea of superior civilization in the coded language of “Civil Lines,” a reference to white neighborhoods with housing allotted to members of the English civil service. If these lines represented a moral cordon sanitaire from the lesser races, they also implied the governance and regulation of the lesser self prone to surrender to animal urges. Such urges may be natural, Anson concedes, but they must find appropriate channels of expression. George, he notes, is unmarried and has no friends, “neither male comrades nor, for that matter, friends of the fairer sex. He has never been seen with a girl on his arm. Not even a parlourmaid” (Arthur and George, 341).17 Worse yet, “He does not engage in sporting activities either. . . . The great manly English games—cricket, football, golf, tennis, boxing—are all quite foreign to him,” as are “Archery [and] Gymnastics,” which are less conventional but acceptable options (341). As he explains to Doyle, “the choice often lies between carnal self-indulgence which leads to moral and physical enfeeblement, even to criminal behavior, and a healthy diversion from base urges into manly sporting activities” (343). Prevented by his circumstances of isolation and a peculiar appearance from indulging his sexual urges, George should have but “chose not to divert himself with the latter,” according to Anson (343). Herbert Sussman describes the Victorian preoccupation with “the management of energy, and partly of sexual desire” (Victorian Masculinities, 3). Bourgeois masculinity in Victorian colonial discourse is associated with the confinement of “affectionate and sexual life within marriage” on the one hand, and on the other with self-discipline expressed as “the ability to control male energy,” whose power is to be deployed “not for sexual but for productive purposes” (11).

Anson admits that although “boxing would not have been his forte,” George could have pursued “gymnastics, and physical culture, and the new American science of bodybuilding” (Arthur and George, 343). Doyle is horrified at the suggestion that “on the night of the outrage there was . . . some sexual purpose or manifestation.” Anson concedes the lack of a direct connection but insists that sexual deprivation can “turn a man’s mind” (343–44). On a visit to Inspector Campbell, an officer of the law he had hoped to enlist in his aid, George himself recites the reasons he stands out in his father’s parish: “I do not play in the Great Wyrley cricket team,” “nor for that matter do I patronize public houses,” “nor for that matter do I smoke tobacco” (106). George’s odd looks aside, he is also insufficiently English in ways that might have compensated for the deviance in his features from the acceptable visual norm. He does not do with his body what English men are ostensibly supposed to do: imbibe intoxicating drink, inhale smoke, display muscular force, or have sex with girls, “not even a parlourmaid,” whose subservient position might have permitted her to overlook his odd appearance or upon whom a more muscular man would have imposed himself in order to release animal urges (341; emphasis added). At a time when Victorian technologies of the self required manly sport and imperial ambitions, both of which “tall, broad-shouldered” Doyle excelled at (67), George is myopic, bookish, friendless, and ill at ease with women. George is measured both by a racist scale that preconceives relative worth and by a new set of criteria that gauges the subject’s attempts to overcome the initial deficit of race by adhering to aesthetic norms and bodily technics that have evolved in the process of civilization, including accepted forms of discharging animal urges, even if they are not only arbitrary but also sexist, or even violent.

At age fifty-four, George ponders that “he has never done most of the things that afford his compatriots pleasure: drinking beer, dancing, playing football and cricket; not to mention things that might have come if marriage had come” (426). His brother Horace has done all of these. At a comparable age, Horace was a “sturdy and straightforward sixteen-year-old” (61). Never quite the scholar, he nonetheless fulfills some of the vicar’s belief in Parsi exceptionalism later when he acquires a position in the civil service, albeit at the “clerical level” and “with help from a cousin of mother’s” (82). Later, George notes enviously, he is “a happy-go-lucky penpusher with the Income Tax in Manchester.” We are told that Horace seems “to glide through life unscathed; he goes from day to day, his ambition amounting to no more than a slow climb of the ladder, his contentment deriving from female companionship, about which he drops unsubtle hints” (115). Horace, too, is exercising a brand of Englishness, with less exertion and greater success, and if not reward, then exemption from punishment and scapegoating. He will make a passable unofficial Englishman—or at least a less other Irishman—when he sheds his family history and changes his last name, disappearing into Ireland through marriage. In George’s view, “quite in which order he had done these three things George was not sure, but they were all clearly linked, and the undesirability of each action bled into the others” (418). Horace’s selective assemblage and disassembly of partial bits of identity, unsavory to George, serves as sufficient expedient in his escape from Wyrley and survival in the world beyond.

Horace’s passage is a less glorious analog, of course, to that of Doyle’s: “Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth, instructed in the faith of Rome by Dutch Jesuits, Arthur became English. English history inspired him; English freedoms made him proud; English cricket made him patriotic” (28). Unofficial or otherwise, both Horace and Doyle conform more closely to masculine models of cultural Englishness, unlike the unfortunate George. With his myopia, exophthalmos, and Oriental features, coupled with inadequate sexual and athletic exercise, George can never hope to reduce sufficiently the sensory load of difference from accepted modes of masculinity in English society, however riven it might be by reasons of class, occupation, speech patterns, vocabulary, or otherwise, and however diversified by location in the countryside as opposed to the city. Indeed, firstborn but the runt of the litter, George, the “little fellow,” enjoys the great writer’s favor largely because he is weak and Doyle’s preferred version of Englishness locates its “root” in the “invented world of chivalry,” which requires that “the strong aided the weak” as “chivalry was the prerogative of the powerful” (101, 28). By this logic, Doyle’s advocacy of George as a “professional Englishman” makes the writer powerful, and so more English, while diminishing the Englishness of his protégé. Doyle’s chivalric code finds its expression and its sources in a world in which the strong have learned to prey on the weak, and the logic of dominative rationality has justified necessary sacrifices in the name of progress and civility. Moreover, Doyle’s chivalrous mission, coupled with his lifelong preoccupation with “money, breeding, taste, history, power” betrays its sources in the very logic that creates the structural possibilities for its exercise (322).

As Barnes’s narrative draws to a close, the mystery of the Great Wyrley Outrages remains, while Horace, the other other, has stepped out of the book and broken out of history, with its spatial hold on identity and its temporal narrative of becoming, leaving the mysteries of race and hybridity unsolved while reiterating their exceptionalist logic. The scandalous kernel of developmental modernity is revealed in its random dispensation of reward and punishment, disguised by the authoritative quality of a discourse that had promised redemption. This version of biological warfare redirects its own repressions and suffering into the domination of others, choosing survivors and scapegoats. Horace’s move to Ireland is not without some irony given Doyle’s anxious evolution as an unofficial Englishman, but he has managed to glide through the narrative without harm. Having passed through the baffle gate, Horace, whom Anson describes as “the epitome of an English country gentleman but with a clever incisive brain,” vanishes from a history that will not remember his passing (Oldfield, Outrage, 130). George, on the other hand, has failed to measure up to the standards of passable Englishness. George’s failure is tantamount to a modern-day sin against the articles of faith that allow individuals to survive in the new jungles of civility. Here, civilization has introduced the velvet-gloved menace of those who find and prey on the weak with a measuring gaze that should be reserved for corpses rather than living beings.

Doyle’s campaign on his behalf makes George “the only man to be granted a free pardon for a crime he never committed,” at once both “guilty and innocent” (Arthur and George, 382). George considers his situation:

Innocent yet guilty. Innocent, yet wrong-headed and malicious. Innocent yet indulging in impish mischief. Innocent yet deliberately seeking to interfere with the proper investigations of the police. Innocent yet bringing his troubles upon himself. Innocent yet undeserving of compensation. Innocent yet undeserving of an apology. Innocent yet fully deserving of three years’ penal servitude. (388–89)

George, we may recall, has been raised by a father who, despite glimpses of realistic understanding of the way of the world, is also a past master at utopian illusions that include the belief that “the world’s future depended upon the harmonious commingling of the races,” a prospect that has failed to materialize more than a century later (414). In a demonstration of his unshaken faith in the systems that have failed his son, the vicar attempts to ascribe a grand purpose to George’s suffering, encouraging him to occupy the space of martyr: “George’s father had hinted to him on various occasions that his sufferings had a higher purpose to them” (389). But George, we are told, “had never wanted to be a martyr, and still saw no Christian explanation of his travails” (389). At the conclusion of Barnes’s narrative, George has lost faith in the Christian way, although he knows “that he would doubtless go on living as he had done, observing like the rest of the country—and mainly because of Maud—the general rituals of the Church of England, observing them in a kind of half-hearted, imprecise hopeful way until such time as he died, when he would discover what the truth of the matter was, or, more likely, not discover anything at all” (420–21). The other redemptive narrative, the tenets and rationale of the civilizing mission, however, seem to survive this loss of faith. Locked into the logic of enlightenment modernity, George believes that he may be “a kind of martyr after all, if of a simpler, more practical kind—a legal martyr whose sufferings brought about progress in the administration of justice” (389). His unassuming accession to a sentence he serves for three years without complaint and subsequent meditation on martyrdom take shape within a prosaic, modern sensibility that leave his belief in English law as a redemptive narrative unaltered. “Might it not be some consolation,” he asks himself, “if this terrible fracture in his life led to some ultimate good for his profession?” (390). As it turns out, the George Edalji case would become a factor in the 1907 creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal for England (426). George’s assumption of an overarching purpose and justification for necessary suffering within the arc of imperial enlightenment obscures the stochastic and violent character of the enlightenment project from its victim’s sight. George’s internalization of the instrumental logic that turns the scapegoat into necessary sacrifice is the unannounced tragedy of the triumph of false reason, that the sacrificial animal who suffers justifies its own suffering.