The Downfall of Professor Challenger: Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiritualism

For nearly one hundred years, Professor Challenger, the gruff but loveable hero of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, has thrilled successive generations of readers with his crackpot zoological adventures. But less famous are the ends to which his creator used him in later works- works that explore the darkest crevices, not of the world’s forgotten places, but of Doyle’s own psyche.

The Lost World has long been considered a classic by those who enjoy old-time adventure novels. It features Doyle's not-quite-as-famous-as-Sherlock-Holmes character as he sets off on an expedition to discover living dinosaurs in the Amazon rainforests of South America. Challenger is a big, burly bear of a man with a booming voice and an arrogant, ignorant manner. He’s a scientific colossus whose genius does not extend to include such overrated virtues as modesty or politeness. Just as legend has it that Sherlock Holmes was inspired by one of Doyle’s professors at Edinburgh, it is also said that the description of Challenger chimes with that of one Professor Rutherford, who also taught there during Doyle’s studentship.

In short, The Lost World is an absolute classic, and beats anything by Doyle’s nearest rival, H. R. Haggard, into the ground. It's genuinely thrilling, funny, has great characters, and plenty of that fin-de-siecle adventurous spirit that characterizes British fantastic fiction of the period.

Challenger disappears into the wilds with scant regard for personal safety like a true son of the British Empire, taking with him only a small group of those he trusts the most. The camaraderie between the characters is a big part of what makes the novel great. It touts without irony the old-fashioned idea that when you've got your trusted friends on board, you can take on the world (as long as there are no troublesome women around, of course!). The boys-own feel is laid out clearly in the brief and whimsical verse that opens the narrative-

I have brought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.

Fortunately for those generations of man-boys who grew up regarding Challenger’s Lost World exploits as the epitome of naïve entertainment, his other adventures have rarely seen print. But there’s a shock in store, in the form of a 'classics' edition, adorned with a nauseating blue cover, called The Lost World and Other Stories, placed innocently on the shelf, like a landmine of bilge hiding amidst the snow-white flowers of the beautiful Yugoslavian landscape.

Most of the stories are, on the whole, brief and unremarkable. When the World Screamed and The Poison Belt are serviceable, but they both find the Professor leaping to ridiculous conclusions without evidence. He is, of course, constantly proven correct simply because the writer makes it so.

No matter, the reader will reassure himself. There is one final story left in the collection, and it’s a whopper- The Land of Mist; the only story in the book of comparable length to The Lost World. Ah yes, the reader thinks. Doyle has been holding out on us, but here’s where the real meat is. This is where he’s been hiding his aces. Everything’s going to be okay.

Sigh.

See, between writing The Lost World and The Land of Mist, Doyle became pretty heavily involved with spiritualism. This interest had begun to bleed, more than a little, into his writing. He turned his considerable talents of propaganda-writing towards promoting his new religion, giving lectures to packed halls on sell-out tours all over the Empire. This happy thought is never more than the length of a silver-cord from the mind of the reader who peruses the pages of The Land of Mist.

Now, one of the chief pleasures of reading turn-of-the-century fantastic fiction is the wealth of bizarre ideas which were still taken for granted at this time- ether, spirit-writing, mesmerism, the hollow Earth, social Darwinism and the like. Science was in its adolescence, and was confidently expected to finally prove things that everybody already knew- that God was in his Heaven, white men were fit to rule the world, and that the lower classes were happy with their lot. Souls could be weighed and fairies and spirits could be photographed (because the camera never lies, right?) It's a unique period, and in a way, Arthur Conan Doyle served as an apt representation of it as a whole.

As a young man, Doyle turned his back on his Catholic faith. Nobody in his day and age could believe such nonsense, could they? As far as he was concerned, science (and Darwin in particular) had banished the age of superstition. The future creator of Sherlock Homes declared that he would never again believe anything that could not be proven. But fast-forward to the end of the Great War, and the picture is very different. With Europe in ruins; with every last Victorian ideal of decency and honour lying strangled and mashed in the muck of the Somme, and with his beloved son dead from Spanish flu, Doyle discovered (as much of the world did) that the gap left by religion has to be filled by something else. But not just anything- for once you embrace rationalism, there’s no going back. Traditional Christianity would clearly not do. Some new idea that could return meaning to life, but which was amiable to the new mechanistic nuts-and-bolts universe that science was revealing, was in order.

Over the course of the 20th century, many people would come to fill this hole with UFO’s, automatic writing, electronic voice phenomenon, new age-ism, star people, Scientology, creation ‘science’, intelligent design, and dancing statues at Ballinspittle. But Doyle filled it with Spiritualism.

From its humble beginnings in rural upstate New York in 1848, spiritualism had grown to become, in the eyes of many, a legitimate counter to science’s gloomy claim that life was material and nothing more. After all, spiritualism was a religion that didn’t ask its followers to believe anything beyond that which they could experience themselves firsthand. Any doubting Thomas who wished to be convinced could take part in a séance, during which a medium would contact spirits from the other side, and those spirits would manifest themselves, in various ways, in the physical realm. There would be knocks and raps. Furniture (and sometimes people) would levitate.

But these were mere parlour tricks- the real meat of the thing was the communication with the spirit-folk. They spoke through the mediums, who gave messages to those present from loved ones who had passed on. Readers adept at detecting connections between cultural trends will probably notice that this shameful manipulation of grieving patrons has not entirely ceased today.

In The Land of Mist, Professor Challenger examines this strange phenomenon. Of course, he begins as a skeptic. He applies the correct amount of caution. He is a scientist, after all, and he knows that spiritualism is a minefield rife with cads and charlatans. After attending several séances and witnessing the manifestation of his dead wife, he decides that the phenomenon is genuine. Doyle then gets up on his soap-box, and allows Challenger to make the case clear- death is not the end, spiritualists and mediums are really in contact with the dead, and a new and better world is around the corner for those of us who accept that this is really happening. Challenger (and thus Doyle) believes that this is the most important breakthrough in history.

As you are reading this, remind yourself of one thing- this writer was knighted for his ability to create propaganda (which he did during the Boer War and the Great War). And were it not propaganda, The Land of Mist would be a great book. Nobody wrote supernatural fiction as well as Doyle, and in this book he really excels himself. In one standout chapter, Malone and Roxton spend a night in a haunted house, and encounter a ‘degraded spirit’. In any other context, it would be a sterling example of a spine-chilling ghost story. But when Doyle uses such incidents as examples of his own worldview rather than as a fictitious device, the result is a depressing yet fascinating example of a flawed masterpiece. It’s literally heart-breaking to see beloved characters reduced to mouthpieces for such hokum.

By the 1920’s, Doyle’s ‘simple plan’ for his novels had become anything but. The very opening of The Land of Mist announces that, while Challenger and his friends are real in the world of the book, their previous adventures (i.e., the events of The Lost World and the other Challenger stories) are to be considered nothing more that the exaggerations of certain zealous pressmen. This incredible piece of ret-con serves to indicate that The Land of Mist is somehow more important and ‘real’ than the other stories, as it ostensibly takes place in the ‘real’ world and not the world of fantastic fiction, being that it is dealing with the important ‘realities’ of spiritualism. It seems that Doyle wished to use the character of Challenger to lure the reader into his lecture, while jettisoning the ‘baggage’ of his previous unlikely adventures.

I can think of no surer way to alienate fans of The Lost World.

I enjoy Spiritualism as one of the bizarre ideas that gives the Victorian literary period its flavour, but this book is just sad.

It’s sad that Doyle really believed that a bunch of fakers shaking tables in dark rooms were going to change the world.

It’s sad that the creator of the most famously logical character in history also created this misguided polemic.

And it’s especially sad that he hijacked a bunch of my favourite characters to do it.

A recent book by one Dr Andrew Norman makes the case that Doyle was slightly schizophrenic. Such torturous explanations are unnecessary. Quite apart from the fact that, as one wit put it, ‘psychology should not be a long-distance sport’, even the briefest glance at the world around us should be enough to convince that people will always need strange things to believe in. Doyle truly believed that he had met and conversed with apparitions. He saw, smelt and touched them. In his own head, he was completely convinced. We know now, of course, that spiritualism was no more than a bunch of cads and charlatans; we also have a deeper understanding of how the human mind can be fooled when it really wants to believe. It seems that even a fictional character, created by the brain behind Sherlock Holmes, is not immune from this yearning.

Tales of Unease- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

As a child, I knew that when a bunch of well-educated men in old-fashioned dress got together in their 'club' (whatever that was) and started to tell tall tales around a great warm hearth, there were only two ways in which things could pan out- they would inevitable end up (a) somewhere exotic, such as jungle or a desert, or (b) in a haunted house. In either case, an adventure would ensue. Of course, no women would be present during it, for they are troublesome, meddling creatures. Such is what comes of consuming the Right Sort of Literature.

Eventually, I discovered that the particular time and place during which these adventures usually seemed to occur was Britain, about one hundred years ago, and that the reason these educated, civilized men so often wound up in wild countries was that they, in fact, owned them. Ah. And so, as night follows day, as the training-montage-scene must follow the inspirational-speech-scene, my interest in tales of adventure and the supernatural led to an interest in the age of imperialism. But what has all this got to do with the creator of Sherlock Holmes?

Tales of Unease is a collection of Doyle's non-Baker St related stories, and wouldn't you know it, it turns out to be a veritable taproot of the archetypes I mentioned above. These stories are set in a world where upper-class twits (sorry, Brits) discover ghostly goings-on in every drawing-room and college dormitory (Oxford, naturally). I've aired my grievances over Doyle's use of spiritualism in fiction before, but in this collection he gets the balance just right. His characters, though mostly Mary-Sue type author inserts, are not fools and require about as much convincing as you or I would that something supernatural is truly afoot. This adds to the mood Doyle is attempting to create with these stories- the feeling that the world is a much stranger place that we had ever dreamed, and that we are on the brink of some great, if uncomfortable, realization. Of course, most of this will take the form of tables banging in dark rooms during seances, but you can't have everything, right?





















One thing you can have though, is mummies. Plenty of 'em. In classic tales such as The Ring of Thoth and Lot 249, Doyle appears to have contributed to the then-growing idea of Egyptian curses and mysticism. These stories in particular appear to have been among the first to introduce the elements of immortality, reincarnation and lost love to the mummy cycle. Lot 249 in particular is one of the most enjoyably creepy shorts in this collection. There's little doubt that these stories influenced most of the ideas regarding Egyptian mysticism that followed, climaxing with the 'real-life' curse of Tutankhamun in 1922, as well as the 1932 Karloff movie.

Special mention must go to The Captain of the Polestar, in which the crew of a whaling ship in the frozen north begin to see strange things out on the ice. Here, Doyle is drawing on his own experiences of being ships' doctor on a whaler, and the resulting images of the endless white desert are indeed haunting. It's a great example of 'less is more'- knowing that whatever is in the readers' imagination is surely more wondrous than whatever he can provide in the narrative, the author plays it subtle with this one.

Special mentions also to The Horror of the Heights, for being the best (and only) damn story ever written about the possibility of giant sky-jellyfish living in our upper atmosphere. 'Aeroplaning' had only been around for less than twenty years when the story was written (1913). Doyle makes it seem almost reasonable-

'A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle, he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers that inhabit them..."

It's the kind of open-ended 'anything's possible' logic that Charles Fort would be proud of, but it does allow for a thrilling adventure. (This story in particular has always stuck with me, and I used the idea in my comic Laissez-Faire. Click here to read it!)

As for the rest, well they're a mixed bag, including some downright failures (there's something about a prehistoric cave-dwelling bear-creature wandering around South Kensington that just isn't scary). But there are plenty of Victorian-age novelties scattered throughout to tide the jaded reader over. Egyptians are mysterious, Turks are inscrutable and at every turn doughty and fearless (but modest)Englishmen swallow their fear in order to confront the strange mysteries that lie just beyond the veil. Even in the most horrific of circumstances-

'-there lies deep in every man a rooted self-respect which makes it hard for him to turn back from what he has once undertaken.'

In every man? I sure hope so!

Actually, though this kind of bluff claptrap is common among Victorian fictional heroes, Doyle might just actually have meant it. The man did attempt to enlist as a private in the British army during the Boer War (when he was 40) and again during the Great War (when he was 54!). He does seem like a chap who practiced what he preached.

As is well known by fans of genre fiction, Doyle rather hoped that he'd be remembered for stories that did not involve cocaine and violin-playing. Though not famous for it today, he was as good at constructing a genuinely creepy 19th-century ghost story as any more famous names you may care to mention. And of course, there's nary the rustle of a petticoat in the whole thing, as H. R. Haggard might say. At least, not the petticoat of a living woman. Muster up some of that late-Victorian can-do attitude and track down Tales of Unease.

The Lost World & Other Stories- Part 2

Having read part one, you will have been left in no doubt that Professor Challenger and his scientifically-questionable methods had a large influence upon my youthful self. So I simply couldn’t wait to crack into this new book which promised more Challenger adventures. I was rather disappointed then, to find them, on the whole, brief and unremarkable. Perhaps the story When the World Screamed comes the closest to recapturing some of that Challenger magic. The Poison Belt, however, feels like a second-rate take on a H. G. Wells scenario.

Other factors rankle also. Challenger had held unconventional and unpopular views before in The Lost World, but then he had had solid proof that his crazy ideas were true. His continual ranting about having the correct scientific attitude held up, because he had good reason to know that he was right. In these new stories, Challenger continually leaps to incredible conclusions, and he’s proven correct just because the author makes it so. If Challenger claims that the world is a giant echinoderm (a sea urchin, to the zoologically-challenged) based on no evidence at all, then he’s right. Just because. I know it’s anal to berate fantastic fiction for lack of scientific rigour, but Doyle had got that mix just right before (he was a trained doctor with an above-average understanding of science), and in this volume I feel he does the good Professor an injustice by slighting it. Challenger is supposed to be a genius who’s unafraid to go against the status quo, but in The Lost World he would never propose these kinds of ideas without evidence. And in fact, this idea turns out to be more relevant to this article than I had first supposed…

No matter, I thought. There was one final story left in the collection, and it was a whopper. The Land of Mist. The only story in the book of comparable length to The Lost World. Ah yes, I thought. Doyle has been holding out on us, but here’s where the real meat is. This is where he’s been hiding his aces. Everything’s going to be okay.

So Lord Chelmsford may well have thought before the battle of Isandlwana.

See, between writing The Lost World and The Land of Mist, Doyle became pretty heavily involved with Spiritualism. This interest had begun to bleed, more than a little, into his writing. He turned his considerable talents of propaganda-writing towards promoting his new religion, giving lectures to packed halls on sell-out tours all over the Empire. This happy thought is never more than the length of a silver-cord from your mind as you peruse the pages of The Land of Mist.

Now, one of the chief pleasures of reading turn-of-the-century fantastic fiction is the wealth of bizarre ideas which were still taken for granted at this time- ether, spirit-writing, mesmerism, the hollow Earth, social Darwinism and the like. Science was in its adolescence, and was confidently expected to finally prove things that everybody already knew- that God was in his Heaven, white men were fit to rule the world, and that the lower classes were happy with their lot. Souls could be weighed and fairies and spirits could be photographed (because the camera never lies, right?) Of course, it didn’t quite turn out like that. It's a fascinating period, and in a way, I find Arthur Conan Doyle to be an apt representation of it as a whole.

As a young man, Doyle turned his back on his Catholic faith. No-one in this day and age could believe such nonsense, right? Science (and Darwin in particular) had banished the age of superstition, right? The future creator of Sherlock Homes declared that he would never again believe anything that could not be proven. But fast forward to the end of the Great War, and the picture is very different. With Europe in ruins, with every last Victorian ideal of decency and honour lying strangled and mashed in the muck of the Somme, and with his beloved son dead from Spanish flu, Doyle discovered (as much of the world did) that the gap left by religion has to be filled by something else. But not just anything- for once you embrace rationalism, there’s no going back. Traditional Christianity would clearly not do. Some new idea that could return meaning to life, but which was amiable to the new mechanistic nuts-and-bolts universe that science was revealing was in order.

Over the course of the 20th century, many people would come to fill this hole with UFO’s, automatic writing, electronic voice phenomenon, new age-ism, star people, Scientology, creation ‘science’, intelligent design, and dancing statues at Ballinspittle. But Doyle filled it with Spiritualism.






















In The Land of Mist, Professor Challenger examines this strange new phenomenon. Of course, he begins as a sceptic. He applies the correct amount of caution. He is a scientist, after all, and he knows that Spiritualism is a mine-field rife with cads and charlatans. After attending several séances and witnessing the manifestation of his dead wife, he decides that the phenomenon is genuine. Doyle then gets up on his soap-box, and allows Challenger to make the case clear- death is not the end, spiritualists and mediums are really in contact with the dead, and a new and better world is around the corner for those of us who accept that this is really happening. Challenger (and thus Doyle) believes that this is the most important breakthrough in history. As you are reading this, remind yourself- this guy was knighted for his ability to create propaganda (which he did during the Boer War and the Great War).

I enjoy Spiritualism as one of the bizarre ideas that gives the Victorian period its flavour, but this book is just sad.

It’s sad that Doyle really believed that a bunch of fakers shaking tables in dark rooms were going to change the world.

It’s sad that the creator of the most famously-logical character in history also created this misguided polemic.

And it’s especially sad that he hijacked a bunch of my favourite characters to do it!!

Doyle truly believed that he had met and conversed with the apparitions of his dead son and others. He saw, smelt and touched them. In his own head, he was completely convinced. A recent book by Andrew Norman tries to prove that Doyle was slightly schizophrenic. I don’t believe such explanations are necessary. People seem to be hard-wired to believe weird things, and that’s the end of it. We know now, of course, that spiritualism was no more than a bunch of cads and charlatans. Challenger was right. I think it’s best to leave the old fellow have the last word.

The Lost World & Other Stories- Part 1

More Professor Challenger? More stories featuring the gruff but loveable hero of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World? I couldn't believe it. But there it was- a horrible blue-covered 'classics' edition called 'The Lost World and Other Stories', placed innocently on the shelf, like a landmine of shit hiding amidst the snow-white flowers of the beautiful Bosnian landscape. I couldn't say no. How could this go wrong?

Sigh.

First, a little background. The Lost World (written in 1912) has always been one of my favourite old-time adventure novels, ever since I first stole a copy of it from a friend's house when I was in school. It features Doyle's not-quite-as-famous-as-Sherlock-Holmes character, the crackpot zoologist Professor Challenger, and his expedition to discover living dinosaurs in the Amazon rainforests of South America. He's a big, burly bear of a man with a booming voice and an arrogant, ignorant manner. His condescension towards the non-scientific world is legendary. Truly, he's a character who should only ever have been played in film by the legendary Brian Blessed, who's probably too old now. What a missed opportunity (no disrespect to Wallace Beery or Bob Hoskins).

Challenger disappears into the wilds with scant regard for personal safety like a true son of the British Empire, taking with him only a small group of those he trusts the most. Memorable characters include the brave adventurer John Roxton, and Irish journalist Ed Malone.

Roxton, interestingly, is reckoned to have been based on the British consul Roger Casement. As a thumping great Imperialist, Doyle probably had a lot of admiration for Casement's doings in the Congo, especially when he was exposing the cruelty of Leopold's Belgian Congo state. 'Bravo, Casement!', Doyle must have thought, 'show the world that those dastardly unsporting Belgians have no right to harass native citizens of foreign lands!' I wonder if Doyle saw any similarity when Casement was stripped of all honours and executed for conspiring against the British just before the 1916 Rising in Dublin. Hmm.

Malone is interesting chiefly because his involvement in the expedition is an attempt to impress his girl, Gladys. By the time he returns, she has become engaged to someone else. But that's okay, because by that time, Malone has learned that there's no bond like the bond between a bunch of lads that like to go out into the jungle together, shooting newly-discovered animals. Women in these boys-own adventures are strictly a nuisance, especially when they come between lads who just want to go out into the jungle etc...

There's plenty for the Imperialist to enjoy, too. Challenger and co run merrily amok, encountering (and shooting) incredible creatures, naming things after Queen Victoria (well, they would have if it had been ten years earlier...), and carrying out a little social hygiene on species they find to be literally 'sub-human'.

So basically, The Lost World is an absolute classic. It's genuinely thrilling, funny, has great characters, and plenty of that fin-de-siecle adventurous spirit that characterizes British fantastic fiction of the period. The comradery (a special bond within a group that is in no way erotic or homoerotic- thank you, Urban Dictionary!) between the characters is a big part of what makes the novel great. It's the old-fashioned idea that when you've got your buddies around, you can take on the world (as long as there are no troublesome women around!).

Challenger himself is absolutely hilarious, and is really one of the forgotten greats of fiction. Really, for a literary character not to be as famous as Sherlock Holmes is a bit like being a scientist who's not as smart as Einstein. So, hard cheese, old chum, but it's all in good sport, what?

(more to come about Challenger in part 2)