ABSTRACT
Doyle’s history of The British Campaign in France and Flanders con cludes with a grim picture of a post-war Europe:
This is the background to Doyle’s Spiritualist campaign and his at tempt, through it, to find a new interpretive centre for masculine intelligence. No longer located in the capital city of a vast empire or in the intellectual control of the brain, Doyle’s writing in the last phase of his life travels towards a region of consciousness more ‘in rapport’ with the signs of the body and the flow of the emotions. When Sherlock Holmes, in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ from His Last Bow (1917), gives his customary display of privileged intelligence, these are the signs that constitute his ‘small essay in thought reading’. He tells Watson:
In making public his conversion to Spiritualism in 1916, Doyle ap peared to have surrendered his ‘masculine’ reason and fundamentally revoked the identity he had scripted for himself as a war historian and the creator of Sherlock Holmes. As Freud observed, European civiliza tion seemed to have contradicted ‘the basis of its own existence’3 through the barbarism of the warfare on which it embarked in 1914, and Doyle in this new statement of belief appeared to have done the same. As he became the increasingly indiscriminate champion of seance mediums, fairies and spirit photographers, he moved in a direction that many of his readers found inexplicable. Initially, however, Doyle’s Spiritualism was more a continuation of his war-writing by other means than a repudiation of it. Closely connected to his interest in codes, ciphers and
secret intelligence, his Spiritualism was, in its early stages, a strategic attempt to realign the British Empire with a revised and modernized version of Christianity.
