The fingerprint of the foreigner: colonizing the criminal body in 1890s detective fiction and criminal anthropology.

In December of 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing The Memoirs of Sherloc Holmes, the second in his great series of detective stories that took the reading public of England by storm during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Among the first of The Memoirs to appear in The Strand Magazine were "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" and "The Adventure of the Yellow Face." True to form, both cases required Holmes to identify someone: in the first, a presumed murder victim and in the second a presumed blackmailer. "The Cardboard Box" presents Holmes with a singular piece of evidence: a package received by his client containing only two human ears. In one of the most remarkable demonstrations of his interpretive powers, Holmes accurately reads in those ear the identity of two murder victims and the man who murdered them. "The Yellow Face" tells rather a different story. It is one of the rare cases in which the usually infallible Holmes "erred," Watson tells us, in his effort to determine the identity of the person in question. In what would seem a less daunting interpretive challenge than the previous one, the detective fails to properly identify the strange figure with the uncanny yellow face, the mysterious someon who appears at the window of a house visited in secret by the wife of Holmes's anxious client. And yet, despite the detective's failure, Watson assures us, "the truth was still discovered" as a result of Holmes's intervention.(1) Together, these two cases chart the impressive reach of Holmes's powers to read the criminal body and map his limits as well. But they also do much more. Like the flood of scientific writing on criminology that appeared in England during the 1890s, these fictions of criminality link questions of personal identity an physiology with questions of national identity and security in ways that redefine the relation of an individual's body with the body politic.

This essay asks the question of how a designated figure of social authority--th literary detective--gains the power to discover "the truth" by acquiring the right to tell someone else's story against his or her will, and how the emergence of the immensely popular genre of detective fiction may be related to specific national needs and interests. Indeed, for all their differences, both "The Cardboard Box" and "The Yellow Face" begin as tales of domestic intrigue but end with lengthy, coerced confessions that raise larger national issues. It might be argued that the elevation of detective fiction to the pitch of sensational popularity it enjoyed in 1890s England signals the emergence of a narrative of authoritarian containment to compete with and discipline the dominant nineteenth-century narrative of self-determination represented best by the period's fascination with autobiography. The work the literary detective performs is an act of narrative usurpation in which he converts stories told by subjects about themselves into alibis proffered by suspects. The force of this narrative of social intervention as a monitoring and disciplining agency is demonstrated in the confessions Holmes extorts from the suspects in these cases confessions that make clear that the most private domestic scandals also often bear the imprint of the most public national policies. The disembodied ears at the end of "The Cardboard Box" and the discarded yellow face at the end of "The Yellow Face" silently remind us that Holmes establishes himself as the source o truth about the body and the identity of culprit and victim alike in these tales. As he unravels the mystery and makes his accusation, he speaks for them as he speaks for the nation.

Whatever else Sherlock Holmes may have claimed to be, he should be understood a the literary personification of an elaborate cultural apparatus by which person were given their true and legitimate identities by someone else. Holmes is referred to by Watson in the very first of The Adventures as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen"; and his methods are presented to us as unassailable because they are machine-like in their scientific objectivity, uncontaminated by the detective's emotional involvement or cultural bias.(2) Watson's first encounter with Holmes takes place in the master detective's chemical laboratory, a place he often frequents during his investigations, lending an air of scientific precision and exactness to his work. Watson, having just returned to England to nurse a wound he suffered in the colonial campaign in Afghanistan, may be read as representing the British imperial policy in need of rehabilitation by Holmes's self-proclaimed science o detection. In that first encounter, Holmes not only surmises the fact that Watson is a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, he also correctly recognizes that a perfect stranger they see on the street is a retired Marine sergeant, further demonstrating to Watson his remarkable powers of identification. The detective then informs the doctor that with his specialized knowledge, he can accurately infer the whole history of a man by observing such things as his fingernails, his facial expression, and the callosities of his forefinger and thumb. In the tales that Watson proceeds to pen about the master detective, Holmes will indeed read the history of individuals as representatives of the nation and will then rewrite their relationship to it. In fact, Holmes's emergence as an authoritative cultural hero in the 1880s and 1890s corresponds to a transformation of Britain's national identity during the same period. Notably, during the first few years of the 1890s, Britain's identity as a nation--in its own eyes and the world's--was being radically redefined with respect to its vast global empire. Once an embattled and suspect pursuit, a "Ne Imperialism" became equated once again with morality and patriotism in England, rising to the status of a national cult also referred to as the "Pax Britannica."

After the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 had been transformed in the popular imagination into a glorious martyrdom, the gradual silencing of the Liberal critique of imperialism was virtually secured in England. The policies of empire seemed to have weathered the storm of mid-century popular indifference, colonial uprisings, and left-wing criticism. By the time of the elections of 1895, a Conservative-Unionist coalition swept to a decisive victory, bringing with it the triumph of this New Imperialism and the silencing of the conscience of the old imperialism which had been personified in Gladstone, who would die in the year following Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Importantly, the advent of the New Imperialism did not really represent a new imperial policy, so much as it did a new popular attitude toward that policy. Granted, the new competition for international power from rising states like Germany caused some stiffening of economic and military aggression in British imperial pursuits during the 1890s, especially in the "scramble for Africa" tha followed the Berlin Conference convened by Bismarck in 1884 to partition the dark continent. As a consequence, however, by the time of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the historian James Morris claims, "The idea of Empire had reached a climax," and the celebration of sixty years of Victoria's reign was a much an international celebration of the idea of the New Imperialism as it was tribute to the venerable queen.(3)

My focus is on the domestic rather than the international acceptance of this phenomenon, a development that I will link directly to the powers and popularit of literary figures like Sherlock Holmes and to the prestige of scientific authorities like Havelock Ellis and Francis Galton. I will argue that together their work helped to transform reluctant approval, indifference, and direct criticism for imperial policies into general reverence, enthusiasm, and even hysteria in the British popular imagination. Certainly there were other factors contributing to this development, and one may look (among other places) on almost any page of magazines like The Strand for popular explanations. The widely-enjoyed profits of empire back home and the general economic and militar success that attended British expansionism abroad during this period are eviden in virtually every article about military conquest and every adventure story dealing with exploration that appeared in The Strand during these critical years. One such series that ran concurrently with The Memoirs of Sherlock Holme was called Shafts from an Eastern Quiver, tales of British adventurers who took part in strategic military and scientific projects and narrowly escaped from th clutches of devious and dangerous oriental tribesmen. Still another series provided first-person accounts by British military men from around the Empire, relating the tales of bravery that earned them the coveted Victoria's Cross. Appropriately enough, the installment from this series that appeared in the first volume of The Strand tells the harrowing story of the very battle in Afghanistan in which Dr. Watson was purportedly wounded, forcing his return to England and his meeting up with Sherlock Holmes.