Abstract
In his accounts of the investigations conducted by Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson has become Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictionalized “man in the street,” responding to “the strong sweeping current of … thought” of the “chief philosophers of the age.”1 Through such accounts Watson offers a brief for a worldview that, nevertheless, points to the problematic and contradictory nature of a Darwinian perspective that was not then, as it is not now, a single, coherent one. Rather, a variety of materialist perspectives existed in late-Victorian Britain, vying for the status of a prevailing common sense. In a novel like The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02) there is to be found evidence for Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that “each large and creative verbal whole is a very complex and multifaceted system of relations”: in the novel “there are no voiceless words that belong to no one. Each word contains voices that are sometimes infinitely distant, unnamed, almost impersonal …, almost undetectable, and voices resounding nearby and simultaneously.”2
By the scientific use of the imagination we may penetrate this mystery also.
John Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870)
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Notes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), p. 26. All further references appear in the text.
M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, no. 8 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 124, emphasis added.
In the chapter I shall consider John Tyndall as a Romantic materialist. In his recent biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, Adrian Desmond refers to Tyndall’s “poetic materialism”;: see Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 366: his “poetic materialism was enough to drive …[St. George] Mivart to damn Tyndall’s ‘creed.’ … But there was a magnificent determinism to it.”;
For discussions of the various issues raised by those promoting biological determinism, see Stephen Jay Gould,The Mismeasure of Man, rev. edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); and for an authoritative survey of nineteenth-century anthropology, see George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,The Hound of the Baskervilles, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, 2 vols (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930), II, 671. All further references to Holmes stories or novels are to this edition and appear in the text.
For recent discussions of such issues in relation to the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, see Rosemary Jann, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order, Twayne’s Masterwork Series, no. 152 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995); and Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, no. 26 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
For discussions of Havelock Ellis’s life and career and of his importance as a popularizer of nineteenth-century science, including discussions of the criminal and sexuality, see Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); and Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Havelock Ellis,The Criminal (1890; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. 102, 106. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
For an account of nineteenth-century British classical evolutionism and anthropology, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; and Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
Cesare Lombroso,Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, trans. Henry P. Horton, Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems, no. 14 (1911; reprint, Montclair, NJ.: Patterson Smith, 1968), pp. 368–69, 373.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols in 1 (1871; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), II, 405. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 112. For a discussion of Huxley, see James G. Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978). For a recent life of Huxley, see Desmond, Huxley.
See John Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” in his Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Addresses and Reviews, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), pp. 423–58. All further references to Tyndall’s essays are to this edition and appear in the text.
For a biography of Tyndall, see A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945). For a discussion of the X Club, see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York: Warner Books, 1991), pp. 525–28. Also, see Desmond, Huxley, pp. 327–30.
Robert Chambers, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 30. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text. For further discussions of Vestiges, see Secord’s introduction; also, see Secord, “Behind the Veil: Robert Chambers and Vestiges,” in History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene, ed. James R. Moore (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 165–94. Secord’s Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) has superseded all previous discussions of Vestiges.
See Simon Schaffer, “The Nebular Hypothesis and the Science of Progress,” in History, Humanity and Evolution, pp. 154–55. For an earlier discussion of Vestiges, see Milton Millhauser, Just Before Darwin: Robert Chambers and “Vestiges” (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959).
RohnJ PlringleJ Nichol, Views of the Architecture of theHeavens.In a Series ofLetters to aLady, 3rd edn (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1839), p. 187. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
For a recent discussion or Milton and materialism, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). For earlier discussions see Walter Clyde Curry, Milton’s Ontology, Cosmogony and Physics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957); and Denis Saurat, Milton: Man and Thinker (New York: Dial Press, 1925).
John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), pp. 351–52; Book VII, 11. 220; 225–27; 232–37.
“Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem, The Excursion,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt in Twenty-One Volumes: Centenary Edition, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), XIX, 10, emphasis added.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 532, 11. 1–6.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Helen Derbishire, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 481, Book XIV, 11. 40–42.
[Thomas Carlyle], “Characteristics” (review of An Essay on the Origin and Prospects of Man, by Thomas Hope, and Philosophische Vorlesungen, by Friedrich von Schlegel), Edinburgh Review, 54 (1831): 358, 353.
Quoted in Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 63.
Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to “‘I’he Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols (London: A. and C. Black, 1896–97), XIII, 346, 348.
John Playfair, Illustrations of the HuttonianTheory of theEarth (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1802), p. 8.
For a discussion of detective fiction and Victorian preoccupations with memory and mind, see Gillian Beer, “Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983–84 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 63–87. At this point in my reading of The Hound of the Baskervilles, I offer an interpretation different from Ronald R. Thomas’s claim in Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science that nineteenth-century detective fiction rejected Romantic versions of human consciousness.
For discussions ot opium and Romanticism, see Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Centuiy England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); and Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
See Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). In a letter dated 15 May 1865 Charles Lyell wrote to William Pengelly, whose excavations of a cave near Brixham Hill, Devon, helped to establish the antiquity of man: “How old do you imagine the Cornish language to have been? Professor Nilsson... believes that the Phoenicians had a tin trade with the Cassiterides … twelve hundred years B.C. and that their trade lasted a thousand years.” See A Memoir of William Pengelly, of Torquay, F.R.S. Geologist, With a Selection from His Correspondence, ed. Hester Pengelly (London: John Murray, 1897), p. 165.
The issue of ethnocentrism, racism, and nineteenth-century science, espedaily evolutionary anthropology, is discussed in various places; see Russett, Sexual Science; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; and Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Dr. Leon Sterndale may well be based on Winwood Reade and his Savage Africa (1863).
Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 7th edn, 2 vols in 1 (New York: Brentano’s, 1924), I, 18. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
For recent critiques of the concept of culture that Tylor promoted, see Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Alan Liu, “Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail,” Representations, no. 32 (fall 1990): 75–113.
Edward B. Tylor, “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions, Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 18 (1888): 269; quoted in Stocking, After Tylor, p. 8.
For discussions of the intellectual traditions informing The Golden Bough, see Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists, Theorists of Myth, no. 2 (New York: Garland, 1991); Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, & Campbell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, pp. 144–237; and Stocking, After Tylor.
James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: The Roots of Folklore and Religion, 2 vols in 1 (1890; reprint, New York: Avenel Books, 1981), I, 3. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.
J[ames] G. Frazer, “The Scope of Social Anthropology,” in Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions, 2nd edn (1913; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1968), p. 170. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text. I am indebted to George W. Stocking, Jr., for directing me to this lecture in his After Tylor.
Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural Htstory of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N. from 1832 to 1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), p. 369. The story of Darwin’s pocket edition of Paradise Lost has become legendary. In Darwin, Desmond and Moore state that on the voyage of the Beagle Darwin “carried a pocket edition [of Paradise Lost] everywhere, inspired by its vision of a prehistoric world torn by titanic struggle” (p. 124).
I am here responding to Donald P. Spence, The Freudian Metaphor: Toward Paradigm Change in Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987). For the larger significance of metaphor for our understanding of ourselves and our universe, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and George Lakoff and Mark l’urner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). This vision of metaphor as the basis of human understanding is more fully connected to Western philosophy by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
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© 2003 Lawrence Frank
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Frank, L. (2003). The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind. In: Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919328_8
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