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Weird Fiction and Science at The: Fin de Siècle
Weird Fiction and Science at The: Fin de Siècle
Weird Fiction
and Science at the
Fin de Siècle
Emily Alder
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new
series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas
in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine.
Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave
Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its sub-
jects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The
series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new
and emerging topics as well as established ones.
Editorial Board
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages
and Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies,
Stony Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University,
USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
Weird Fiction
and Science
at the Fin de Siècle
Emily Alder
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, UK
Cover image: © Library Book Collection/Alamy Stock Photo, Arthur and Fritz Kahn
Collection 1889–1932
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Beth and George
Acknowledgements
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
of course, mine. My thanks, too, for the generous knowledge and enthu-
siasm of the scholarly and fan communities of Blackwood, Machen, and
Hodgson, especially to Sam Gafford and Grove Koger. And, lastly, to
Rod, for your irreplaceable personal, practical, and intellectual support.
Afterword 237
Index 241
CHAPTER 1
Near the end of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery (1988), Rincewind the wizard
finds himself in the Dungeon Dimensions, a dark realm of “skewed
images” and “weird curvature.” He observes a number of Things clus-
tered around a hole in the fabric of reality, including one resembling “a
dead horse that had been dug up after three months and then introduced
to a range of new experiences, at least one of which had included an
octopus.”1 Attracted to the warmth and light of the human world, these
Things are not ghosts or revenants; they are unrelated to any traditional
mythology, individual past, or family history. They are indifferent to
human concerns (or those of any other Discworld species). Motivating
concepts of good and evil, desire and revenge, or hate and compassion
don’t apply to them. Their existence, like that of the Discworld itself,
might be playfully explained by quantum physics and the possibility
of multiple simultaneous realities, but they are also irrational creations
whose shapes buckle the scientific logic of evolutionary adaptation, even
if understood on a cosmic scale.
The Things of the Dungeon Dimensions parody the mythos of the
Lovecraftian weird tale. But H. P. Lovecraft was not the first to manipu-
late the limits of reality and being in this way. In 100 Best Horror Stories,
Pratchett recounts his 1950s childhood encounters with the writing of
William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), whose The House on the Border-
land (1908) gripped him with the notion that
outside the shadow-thin walls of the world itself there were dreadful things,
looking in and biding their time. […] it made me believe that Space was
big and Time was endless and that what I thought of as normality was a
30 W lightbulb with only fivepence left in the meter and there was nothing
anyone could do about it. […] It was the Big Bang in my private universe
as sf/fantasy reader and, later, writer.2
literary styles that followed Frankenstein; science is woven into their cul-
tural history, as it is into that of more mainstream Victorian literature.
The close relationship of discourses of literature and science, their mutual
influences on each other, and their functions in nineteenth-century cul-
ture more widely, have been demonstrated in a number of contexts.6 This
book traces one route through this terrain, examining how, by the fin de
siècle, contemporary sciences and their borderlands had helped to stimu-
late a particular variety of speculative fiction, the weird tale.
That said, weird fiction is far from homogenous; a single description is
sufficiently elusive for Michael Moorcock to suggest that “[w]hat is left
after other definitions are exhausted is the weird story.”7 In fact, many of
the texts I will be discussing might also be identified as fantasy, as gothic,
as horror, as ghost stories, and as science fiction. The ways in which genre
writing became organised by writers, publishers, and critics during the
twentieth century have made such labels and their conventions familiar,
but at the fin de siècle they were either non-existent or had little cate-
gorising force. The fin-de-siècle weird tale sometimes gets lost in the gaps
between critical and generic categories, but it rewards examination in its
own right and can offer ways to look anew at texts more commonly asso-
ciated with other modes. Here, I put works like H. G. Wells’s The Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896), Machen’s The Great God Pan, and Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) alongside rich but less
well-known stories by Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, and Edith Nes-
bit for examination as weird tales through their shared interest, one way
or another, in fin-de-siècle scientific borderlands. Broadly speaking, works
by these six writers have either been identified as weird but granted little
sustained critical attention, or have attracted considerable critical attention
but rarely in the context of the weird.8 That situation is now changing
healthily, with a number of critical studies recently published, alongside
an influx of “New Weird” fictions since the 2000s.9 With this book, I
contribute an exploration of the weird tale’s development at the fin de
siècle through its relationships with contemporary science.
The fin-de-siècle weird has much to offer our current uncertain politi-
cal, economic, and environmental moment. Weird tales, though at times
reactionary, can offer radical new forms of knowledge—ecological, philo-
sophical, and spiritual, for example—and model new sets of relations
between selves and others. Timothy Morton argues that “[e]cological
awareness is weird,” “twisted,” and “looping,” a distinct response to our
current world.10 Eugene Thacker has proposed that horror (here more or
4 E. ALDER
At the heart of this book lies the premise that a close relationship with
science is essential to the weird’s existence and takes a unique form. In
many cases, I argue, fin-de-siècle science is not made weird by fiction, but
was already weird to start with. By “science,” I mean not a monolithic
discourse or single set of methods, but a tremendous diversity of stances,
knowledges, and practices, of which I can only (and shortly will) explore
a few. By “weird” I mean—what?
I have already sketched a few traits of the weird, but equally important
to it and to the argument of this book is what cannot be outlined or speci-
fied. William Hope Hodgson’s occult sleuth Thomas Carnacki, explaining
weird phenomena to his in-story listeners, wonders whether he is “making
it all clear to you”—to which writer China Miéville responds: “No. Not
clear at all. These monsters are the opposite of clear.”14 The desire of
much nineteenth-century science to observe, know, and reveal nature’s
secrets conflicts (productively and creatively, for the stories I’ll discuss)
with the weird’s irreducibility and its borderland natural-yet-unnatural
phenomena (what I will at times call the more-than-visible world).15
Roger Luckhurst has suggested that the weird “has no quintessence”
but is “always receding out of sight […] a mongrel that slithers out of
reach.”16 For Luckhurst, the weird is wayward; accordingly, “disorienta-
tion” offers a better guide than an attempt to map out a straight route. To
become disorientated to the weird is to recognise and allow its elusiveness
and inversions, to notice it on the peripheries of what can be understood
and articulated.17
One in particular of Hodgson’s books offers an extended murky disori-
entation of this sort: The Night Land (1912). In a world deprived of sun-
light, the protagonist, X, must navigate across black expanses and nego-
tiate invisible perils that don’t make sense. Hidden “Doorways In The
Night” exude “queer and improper” sounds that are simultaneously close
above his head and at tremendous distance “out of a Foreign Place.”18
X knows the sound, yet also knows he has never heard it before. “[Y]ou
shall know how it did seem,” he tells us
if you will conceive of a strange noise that does happen far away in the
Country, and the same noise to seem to come to you through an opened
door. And this is but a poor way to put it; yet how shall I make the thing
more known to you?19
6 E. ALDER
Like Carnacki, X asks his readers this kind of question frequently. How
shall we make the weird known to us? One answer is to read the noto-
riously unreadable The Night Land (which I recommend nonetheless);
another is that the weird is best left unknown, although a number of
fin-de-siècle weird tale characters fail to realise that. This is especially true
of scientist characters; in weird fiction, the capacity of conventional sci-
ence to know the world has limits, because the waywardness of weird
realities evades grasp.
In that, there may be a warning to the curious critic.20 If so, what is
an author of a book like this to do, as a creator of knowledge, with a
mode of fiction that does not want to be known? Fortunately, this book
is not the account of weird fiction and science at the fin de siècle; it is
one account—my account—written because all three elements intersect
in ways profoundly fascinating to me. It is necessarily selective; I don’t
discuss maths, or astronomy, for example; my weird authors are all British,
and they don’t include (though not for the lack of admiration) M. R.
James or M. P. Shiel. The task is, as X puts it, not to make the thing
known to you, but to make it more known.
Here is some of what I know.
extends “so far that natural and supernatural cease to be useful descrip-
tors.”29 For “supernatural” to have any meaning, there must be a “natu-
ral” against which to define it, and in weird fiction, there is no distinction.
In the next section, I explore the borderlands of science that, at the fin
de siècle, were undermining old certainties about the “natural” world and
the capacities of scientific knowledge. Here, I make a closer examination
of weird fiction’s literary history and explore some definitions of its char-
acteristic tropes and affects, all with an eye to its scientific content and its
relations with scientific ways of knowing.
The word “weird” originally is related to the control of human destiny
and can be traced to some of the oldest known examples of European
literature, including Beowulf. “A” weird is thus a fate or destiny, its form
(curse, prophecy), or one who ordains it—as do the three Fates of classical
mythology and the “wyrd sisters” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c.1606).30
This meaning persisted long enough to be used loosely in this way in
the title of M. E. Braddon’s murder mystery sensation novel Wyllard’s
Weird (1885). But “weird” also accrued associations of the fantastic and
supernatural, becoming a word suggesting “unearthly, eerie; unaccount-
ably or uncomfortably strange; queer, uncanny,” and “out of the ordinary,
strange, unusual.”31 Weird affects of this kind emerge in Romantic poetry,
texturing S. T. Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1797–1800) and “The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), while in P. B. Shelley’s Alastor (1816)
“weird” describes an atmospheric sound.32 The creep towards “weird” as
a literary descriptor is therefore visible, but, as James Machin elaborates,
its mid-nineteenth-century uses were ambiguous and it can be hard to tell
if the noun or the adjective is meant.33 Luckhurst makes the point that
the weird has no “‘lost’ tradition simply waiting to be uncovered. It is not
actually there, or only spectrally so”; that spectral tradition is constructed
through the weird’s own “pseudobiblia” (it is littered with invented his-
tories and ancient texts) and the tales’ intertextual self-referentiality.34
The weird is something which both is and isn’t really there, appro-
priately enough. Its literary history, too, is a retrospective creation,
beginning in the 1880s. In the late nineteenth century, changing tech-
nological and economic conditions of printing and publishing, espe-
cially for periodicals, encouraged the production of short speculative fic-
tions.35 In the 1880s, something else happened too. “Weird” started
to be paired with “tale” or “fiction” to describe, retrospectively, the
work of earlier writers. For example, in 1882, a number of Charlotte
Riddell’s best ghost stories were collected as Weird Stories.36 In 1885,
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 9
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones,
or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere
of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be
present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and por-
tentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the
human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed
laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos
and the daemons of unplumbed space.44
gothic guise escalate into fantastic and extreme horrors.”48 This is true of
much fin-de-siècle weird; Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, for exam-
ple, looks gothic and is presented, like Walpole’s Otranto, as an authentic
manuscript that has been rediscovered and prepared by an editor. It is
complete with an oppressive, uncanny building and an unreliable narra-
tor haunted by a past loss, but its bizarre Swine-creatures, time travel
sequences, and dreamy cosmic journeys burst that gothic frame. It is
gothic, but gothic alone is not enough to account for it. This novel is
also horror; it is also supernatural; it is also science fiction; in name and
content, it is a “borderland” tale: it is weird.
China Miéville, for one, sees such genre bleed as critically valuable,
enabling fantasy to provoke questioning of the world rather than retreat
from it.49 Miéville picks up where Botting leaves off, arguing that weird
breaks radically with gothic and is “not just post-it, but is crucially anti-
it.” He asks: “If a ghost is the enfigured monstrous of the uncanny,
an inadequately battened-down guilt-function, what is Cthulhu?”50 To
address this, Miéville counterposes the weird to the “hauntological,”
which is “the recurrence of that which we know and wish we did not”
(and what cannot account for Cthulhu, neither known nor fully know-
able).51 He proposes that the weird is not uncanny but “abcanny”; its
monsters are the “teratological expressions of that unrepresentable and
unknowable, the evasive of meaning.”52 The weird draws on the past—
Old Ones dormant for millennia in Lovecraft’s work, ancient worlds of
cults, pagan gods, and “Little People” in Machen’s—but these histories
and entities don’t depend on “the return of any repressed” or use “goth-
ic’s strategy of revenance”; instead, the weird “back-projects their radical
unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself.”53 In the
storyworlds of weird tales, things that are new, unknown, and cannot be
explained in relation to human concerns are being encountered for the
first time, but yet have always existed, abhistories in which time, space,
and the past are radically reconstructed in unfamiliar ways.
Weird encounters, then, derive from other times, places, or dimensions.
“[T]he one test of the really weird,” Lovecraft continued in “Supernatural
Horror,”
For this, Lovecraft is credited with introducing “cosmic horror” into spec-
ulative fiction, while the affect he describes is visible in many of the works
he covers in this essay. Weird entities or events are not caused by human
thought or action (although they may be found by them), and they do
not operate within moral schema. They are attempts to “think about, and
to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us,” which is, in
Thacker’s formulation, the world with the human “subtract[ed]” from it.
Calling it hostile attempts to comprehend it in human terms as a “world-
for us,” while calling it indifferent recognises the “world-in-itself,” some-
thing that obtains without reference to us. The world-without-us “lies
somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal
and horrific.”55 Yet we are drawn to it because it tells us something
about our own limits as we confront it; supernatural horror enables “the
thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a
non-philosophical language.”56
The Lovecraftian weird universe is a vast, incomprehensible, and
indifferent place, without human teleology.57 The weird is non-
anthropocentric in the sense that its horrors are not punishments or
judgements; that would be impossible in the world-without-us and
given “that in the real fabric of the cosmos we are but the slightest
insignificant thread.”58 The original meaning of the word weird has
now flipped entirely; rather than facing a ready-woven destiny, Miéville
observes, we are confronted with its unravelling: “[t]he fact of the Weird
is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten,
ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged
edges, things are looking at us.”59 Weird is not a consolatory form;
it replaces a fatalistic totality with a cosmos decidedly not organised
around the fulfilment of human narratives or fantasies. The “evils” of
weird fiction are amoral and generalised forces; the narratives are not
arranged around a binary of good and evil or according to a moral
code. The menacing entities hovering around Hodgson’s Night Land
or ushered into human bodies by Machen’s Dr. Raymond in The Great
God Pan and Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light” (1894), for exam-
ple, simply are; monsters are “innocently going about the business of
being monsters.”60 The narratives’ moral judgements may fall on the
scientists, but not on the monsters they unleashed (terrible as her acts
are, it is not Helen Vaughan’s fault that she is how she is). Science is
implicated in this amoral construction of terror and often (as in The Night
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 13
The formless disintegration of the dying Helen Vaughan in The Great God
Pan and the tentacled weed men and devil-fish of Hodgson’s The Boats
of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907) are examples of this radical monstrous.68
Later, the “gelatinous” form of Cthulhu with its “writhing feelers,” and
the transformed body of Wilbur Whateley, whose “odd” arrangement
of tentacles “seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geom-
etry unknown to earth or the solar system,” follow the earlier split
from conventional monstrosity.69 Tentacles are notoriously prominent in
depictions of weird monsters (again like Pratchett’s horse-octopus), and
“[t]here is never just one tentacle, but many,” making cephalopods, for
Thacker, into the epitome of inhuman alterity while also being anthro-
pogenic creations of biological naming and classification.70
Like science fiction, the weird often works closely with whatever are
the current dominant knowledge systems, but sits closer to their limits,
revelling in rather than avoiding the irrational or implausible. In fantasy
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 15
styles, the impossible does not have to be explained: fantasy is “not real,”
although, as James and Mendlesohn point out, some fantasy tales may
“have originated from the minds of people whose ideas about the loca-
tion of the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘fantastic’ were different.”71
One culture’s supernatural may be another culture’s natural, much as
nineteenth-century spiritualism explained the existence of a spirit world
in rationalised, naturalised terms. As Fisher expresses it, discussing Love-
craft, although “ordinary naturalism – the standard, empirical world of
common sense and Euclidean geometries – will be shredded by the end
of each tale, it is replaced by a hypernaturalism – an expanded sense of
what the material cosmos contains.”72 Weird insists on the material basis
of its world; any supernatural-seeming phenomena in weird fiction are but
natural phenomena we cannot yet explain or understand.
For instance, in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), a
staggering recreation of knowledge and reality is asserted while incom-
prehensible mystery is simultaneously maintained. The truths of the cos-
mos to which Wilmarth is exposed bring him “dangerously close to the
arcana of basic entity – never was an organic brain nearer to utter anni-
hilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.”73
Wilmarth presents what he “learned,” “guessed,” or “was told” as a set
of firm truths of which he has been totally convinced, while at the same
time these secrets from the edge of sanity remain opaque and withheld
from the reader: “I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the
great temporary stars of history had fired forth. I guessed – from hints
which made even my informant pause timidly – the secrets behind the
Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae” (216). “Behind” this screen of
language, however, is where the secrets of what, whence, and why remain.
Those secrets depend for their awesome terror both on their sugges-
tion of the cosmos as monstrous on a vast scale and on the inability
of language to represent those secrets as anything other than hints and
secrets. “No other writer,” Graham Harman argues, “is so perplexed by
the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or
between objects and the qualities they possess.”74 The unknowability of
the weird is closely tied to its unspeakability. Monstrosity can be “natural”
and yet remain terrifyingly mysterious, a real part of the way the world
is and a sign that more remains beyond our understanding. Weird mon-
sters are attempts to represent the truly unknown. Operating under laws
we can never properly know, understand, or challenge, the most terrible
of weird horrors lie beyond our ability to destroy, although they may be
16 E. ALDER
Scientific Borderlands
In a review of The Great God Pan, the Glasgow Herald declared that:
“Nothing more striking or more skilful than this book has been produced
in the way of what one may call Borderland fiction since Mr Stevenson’s
[…] Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”78 Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in
December 1894, and an obituary by Alexander Cargill appeared in a new
spiritualist and psychical research journal established the previous year by
W. T. Stead: Borderland (1893–1897).
Cargill describes Stevenson as “first among the romancers of our time
because he dwelt in Borderland.”79 The “borderland,” usually, referred
to the spirit world, and Stead expresses complete confidence in it in the
Preface to the journal’s first volume:
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 17
If future progress is as steady and rapid as that of the last year, it will
be difficult to convince anyone, when the Twentieth Century dawns, that
he or she, or any sane citizen, ever seriously doubted the existence of
Borderland and the inhabitants thereof.80
Yet Cargill’s use of the past tense suggests that Stevenson “dwelt” there as
a living writer, in “our time.” He had reasons to feel this way; Stevenson
famously attributed his creative inspiration to “brownies” who visited him
in dreams, and in the same issue as Cargill’s obituary, Stead dwells at
length on Jekyll and Hyde in an essay titled “The Man of Dreams.”81
Stevenson’s and Machen’s imaginations and literary creations evidently
resonated for their contemporaries with the idea of the “borderland”—
but neither The Great God Pan nor Jekyll and Hyde are “about” spiritu-
alism, nor, really, psychical research. The Great God Pan involves a piece
of brain surgery, and Jekyll and Hyde uses a carefully concocted chemi-
cal potion. The effects are legibly spiritual or psychical—Mary communes
with “the god Pan” to the loss of her sanity and the birth of a strange
offspring, and Jekyll becomes Hyde in body and soul—but in both cases
the method is a laboratory experiment, not a séance, and the outcome
is horrifying, not consolatory. Séances were regularly subject to the sys-
tematic investigations of psychical researchers, but that is not what Jekyll
and Dr. Raymond are doing. They both describe their fields as “tran-
scendental”; they are neither conventional scientists nor conventional psy-
chical researchers or spiritualists, though they have leanings towards all
three. Their beliefs and methods along with the outcomes of their experi-
ments posit and demonstrate weird versions of reality in which distinctions
between the material (or the natural, or scientific) and the immaterial (or
the unnatural, or spiritual) collapse.
I return to these two books in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. Weird
fiction, “the” Borderland, and borderland science align particularly pro-
ductively in Jekyll and Hyde and in its wake, but the union originates
in much earlier blendings. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The facts in the case of
M. Valdemar” (1845), for example, draws on contemporary popular inter-
est in mesmerism to offer a borderland tale hovering on intersections of
science fiction and horror.82 As the nineteenth century went on, occult
and spiritualist ideas of psychic sensitivity, phenomena of communications
from souls surviving bodily death, notions of astral planes, spheres, or
journeys, and concepts of mesmerism, vibrations, and electric currents
18 E. ALDER
increasingly made their way into weird, gothic, and fantastic tales. Mar-
garet Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Le Fanu, and others became particularly
known for their ghost stories, but almost every major Victorian writer
turned their hand to this short form, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth
Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James.83 Some tales, such as Eliot’s
“The Lifted Veil” (1859) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Playing with Fire”
(1900), were directly inspired by spiritualism, while others played with
different kinds of science. Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1872) explores how
the effect of a drug (the tea) on the brain produces a demonic halluci-
nation, investigated by Dr. Hesselius, a close ancestor of Carnacki, John
Silence, and Flaxman Low, discussed in Chapter 4.
Some full-length novels, too, such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842)
and A Strange Story, and Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds , owe as
much to old and new discourses of magic, mesmerism, and occultism as
to the ghost story and gothic traditions.84 In A Strange Story, doctor
Allan Fenwick is a positivist committed to the hard facts of science and
dismissive of anything spiritual or supernatural. Confronting the sinister
figure of Margrave, whose apparently occult or magical powers and quest
for eternal life threaten the life of Allan’s rather more spiritually sensi-
tive fiancée, Lilian, Allan is led to question his previously fiercely held
convictions. This and other novels, including Zanoni and The Coming
Race (1871), present Bulwer-Lytton’s ideas about a life force, a kind of
mesmeric fluid or energy implicated in survival and physical and social
development.85
In A Romance of Two Worlds , the sick heroine seeks healing at the
house of the mystic Heliobas and begins a process of spiritual discovery
that culminates in an astral journey through the planets of the solar system
and beyond to learn the truths about creation. One critic has described
Corelli’s novel as a “creative blend of science, paganism, the Hebrew God,
and quasitheosophical mysticism.”86 It explicitly promotes a theistic (and
gender-equal) account of the universe, reconciled with scientific material-
ism, drawing on ideas around hypnotism and electricity incorporated into
the discourses of the occult revival.
Both novels engage with contested, borderland scientific ideas in order
to question assumptions about ways of knowing the world; A Strange
Story leaves questions open, while A Romance of Two Worlds works to
affirm a new spiritual worldview over one based solely in scientific fact.
These are novels stimulated by recurring conflicts and potential reconcil-
iations in British nineteenth-century culture around the nature of matter,
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 19
the guide to all reasoning and will provide the answers to all the questions
which can reasonably be asked; behind it lay the faith that the answers
given in the sciences were independent of time and place; that they were
truths, and that a scientific method led to certitude.92
From this perspective, knowledge and truth can exist absolutely; the
world is amenable to being understood, and positivist science showed
the path.
The existence of the kinds of borderlands in which weird fiction flour-
ishes depends upon this prevailing perspective; in worldviews without
gulfs between magic and reality (or between “supernatural” and “nat-
ural”), there is no space for borderlands. Yet, Sarah C. Alexander argues,
“the story of the Victorians as steeped in scientific empiricism, committed
to materialism and devoted to literary realism ignores important strains
20 E. ALDER
of thinking that privileged the spaces between the material and immate-
rial in the physical sciences, social sciences and literature.”93 Not all sci-
ences were materialist, while spiritualism was often presented as inherently
empirical. Shane McCorristine suggests that “instead of reading spiritu-
alism and the occult as responses to things, we can take the alternative
perspective of seeing the engagement with supernatural other worlds as
discoveries which ran alongside secularization and scientific naturalism.”94
At stake was the question of the validity of different kinds of knowledge;
borderlands existed in the gaps between confidence that the scientific
method led to truth and establishment of what that truth was.
Following the work of philosopher Karl Popper, who argued in the
1930s that empirical science is demarcated by its falsifiability rather than
its verification, it has become recognised that “no scientific theory is
incontestably true” (though on a practical level, like effects of gravity,
they may be undoubtable).95 In this sense, and the argument was used
by Madame Blavatsky and others, there was enough room for doubt and
contestation within accepted science anyway to give occult knowledge a
fighting chance.96 Theosophist Annie Besant explained that “Theosophy
accepts the method of science – observation, experiment, arrangement
of ascertained facts, induction, hypothesis, deduction, verification, asser-
tion of the discovered truth – but immensely increases its arena.”97 The
extended arena, though, was where problems battled it out.
Developing schools of science were differentiated, as Thomas Kuhn
describes it, “not by failure of method—they were all ‘scientific’—but
by […] their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practic-
ing science within it.”98 The existence of a more-than-visible spirit world
or astral plane was supported by more-than-visible evidence (Besant calls
it “super-physical”). Such forms of evidence didn’t sit comfortably with
prevailing empiricist models, yet occultists sought to work with them
anyway, in hopes of making their version of truth unequivocally accept-
able in the same way as other emergent scientific claims.99 If knowledge
progressed incrementally and by accumulation, occultism and psychical
research could do it as much as botany. Occultists and spiritualists dis-
played and asserted what they knew in periodicals like Borderland, Light ,
The Spiritualist , The Theosophist, and Two Worlds.100 Blavatsky’s method
of constructing authority in The Secret Doctrine (1888), for example, is to
saturate the text with scientific language, strategically blending regular ref-
erences to well-known scientists from Newton onwards alongside occult
writings.101 The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 21
for their part, accumulated numerous reports, articles, and case studies on
phenomena from thought-transference and spirit manifestation to water
divining and haunted houses.
Henry Sidgwick, in one of his first presidential addresses to the SPR,
in 1883, emphasised the society’s “scientific spirit” and “desire to bring
within the realm of orderly and accepted knowledge what now appears
as a chaos of individual beliefs.”102 Science, indeed, had an obligation to
investigate spiritual and psychical phenomena; William Crookes saw it as
“the duty of scientific men who have learnt exact modes of working to
examine phenomena which attract the attention of the public.”103 As for
how to do it, empiricism was the obvious, if not only choice. Our view
from a twenty-first-century perspective on what valid knowledge can be
is textured by a century or more of epistemological diversification under
the influence of the social sciences.104 For most of the nineteenth century,
however, positivism dominated over other forms of knowledge, and amid
the advance of science, “[t]he loopholes for spirit were closing rapidly.”105
A scientific construction of the world either had to include God and all
the mysteries of creation, or allow something to remain beyond the cur-
rent reach of human minds and instruments, or else there was no God,
only matter. For some, solutions lay in the reconciliation of religious faith
with physical facts and principles, prompting accounts such as Guthrie
Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe (1875), into which “the
authors pitch all the normally invisible manifestations of energy – radi-
ation, electricity, and heat – and so create a modal allegorical cosmos, a
bifurcated world that equivocates at all points between physical and meta-
physical realms.”106 Science, then, did not have to do away with God,
souls, and the afterlife, but could be used to explain and prove at least
some aspects of spiritual existence and establish its material basis.
At root was a simple adjustment of what was conceived as “natural,” or
indeed “material.” The more-than-visible world was as natural as the nor-
mal one and could interact with it, communicating through a medium or
even taking on matter from the medium’s body. What was spiritual was
not necessarily immaterial: according to Besant, “all living things act in
and through a material basis, and ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are not found dis-
associated.”107 The kinds of physical propositions offered by The Unseen
Universe could be used to rationalise the spirit world, the multiple planes
that made up Theosophy’s conception of reality, and the ten Kabbalistic
worlds of the Order of the Golden Dawn.108 With all this going on, even
the SPR, populated with respected scientists, had to defend its area of
22 E. ALDER
Either way, the urge towards an alternative sense-making was not lim-
ited to science and occultism, nor even to fantastic fictions. Victorian real-
ist writers, George Levine has argued, were also engaged in an effort to
“rediscover moral order,” in a century whose scientific, philosophical, and
political tumult could provide no firm confidence in reality underpinning
literature.115 One did not have to believe in spirits or reject positivism to
recognise that the secrets exposed by science could be scary:
while one might have faith in reason and […] believe that organized
science, at least, could lay bare the structure of the universe and eventually
codify all of the “laws of nature,” what those structures or laws were
– the truths revealed by science – could be highly disturbing, even
nightmarish.116
chapters. The reason Blavatsky saw “no possible conflict between the
teachings of the occult and so-called exact science” was not because occult
science was exact but because “Official Science” (as she calls it) wasn’t
as exact as it sometimes presented itself anyway.120 The “radical empiri-
cism” of the new psychology of the 1880s, for example, “transcended
the traditional barrier between positivism and anti-positivism.”121 This is
where Jarvis sees the “topos of a collapsed occult/science binary” aris-
ing from the combination of scientific treatment of the occult alongside
turns towards occultism as an alternative to the predominant positivist
mode.122 For if spiritualism and other occult movements had endeav-
oured to become more scientific, science was also becoming more occult.
Increasing specialisation and professionalisation of sciences themselves
made them less accessible and more “occult” to lay audiences, while the
enigmatic workings of modern technology could seem as obscure as those
of the séance.123 Historian of science Richard Noakes has pointed out
that telegraphy could look not so different from spiritualism, given that
both presented invisible communication at distance.124 The late nine-
teenth century’s “new” physics of atoms, X-rays, and more-than-visible
forces was not only marvellous and so far little understood, but could be
hard to tell apart from theories proposed by psychical researchers—not
least because concepts like the luminiferous ether were used by both.
“Like atoms, like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are systems of forces
which vibrate continually to each other’s attractive power,” wrote F. W.
H. Myers in 1903, conflating energy, atomic physics, astronomy, and
magnetism in a single account of disembodied communication.125 These
ideas all describe or populate the more-than-visible world, the “something
beyond that which is visible” that Tait and Stewart called the Unseen Uni-
verse.126 In theory, if unseen worlds of microbes, atoms, and energy could
be real and true without being empirically verifiable or totally understood,
governed by laws as yet undiscovered, why not unseen worlds of spirits?
That said, it was not entirely settled whether energy and atoms were
“real.” Blavatsky, needling at physicists and chemists in The Secret Doc-
trine, wrote that “Science has first to learn what are in reality Matter,
Atom, Ether, Forces. Now, the truth is that it knows nothing of any of
these, and admits it.”127 Such mysteries conveniently left plenty of room
for Theosophy to be correct, but were, too, contested in mainstream sci-
ence. From the empirical perspective, atoms and forces were problematic
because they could not be observed. For some, these abstract concepts
were “the means by which observational facts may be better described,”
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 25
for others they were the ends, representing “the true reality behind the
phenomenon.”128 Physicist Ernst Mach, for example, held that the atom
was a “mental artifice […] a product especially devised for the purpose in
view. Atoms cannot be perceived by the senses; like all substances, they
are things of thought.”129
Other physicists, however, understood this more-than-visible world to
be the objectively “real” world, in contrast to the everyday one experi-
enced by people through their normal senses.130 For “despite its reputa-
tion, ‘materialistic’ is precisely what 19th-century physics was not. Instead
of taking matter to be the fundamental stuff that the world is made of,
physicists were driven by an attempt to find out what matter itself really
was.”131 Nevertheless, the invisibility of the subjects of theoretical physics
made it more reliant on analogy and metaphor compared to predomi-
nately empirical, observational sciences such as botany. The imagination of
physicists gave us Maxwell’s demon, Schrödinger’s cat, and now-familiar
diagrammatic representations of atoms like suns circled by spinning elec-
trons like planets. Approached the other way, the imaginative qualities of
fiction mean that narratives have the capacity to theorise physical ideas, as
the following chapters will elaborate.132
My final weird scientific borderland lies in biology. The impact of
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) on nineteenth-century
literature and culture is well documented.133 By presenting species
(including humans) as existing in a constant state of adaptation to envi-
ronmental conditions instead of as static, divinely created forms, evolution
by natural selection made imaginable an almost limitless variety of ani-
mal shapes—of which late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writ-
ers often made use to justify bizarre monstrous forms as “natural.”134
Remote and mysterious environments like oceans, jungles, polar regions,
and even the upper atmosphere and the moon made favourite locations
for new monstrous animals, often modelled on insects, aquatic inverte-
brates, and, of course, cephalopods. Even real, known species such as
amphibians, carnivorous plants, and fungi existed in biological border-
lands because they transgressed conventional distinctions between land-
dwelling and water-dwelling, or the animal and plant kingdoms.
In weird, sf, and gothic tales, as in Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen
Carrig’ , Wells’s “The Sea Raiders” (1896), Conan Doyle’s “The Hor-
ror of the Heights” (1913), or Frank Aubrey’s “The Devil-Tree of El
Dorado” (1896), the encounter between humans and unexpected species
is usually antagonistic.135 George Levine, however, stresses the wonder in
26 E. ALDER
nature that Darwin showed in Origin of Species and other works; Darwin-
ism itself represents a form of secular re-enchantment, showing a world
“not mechanical and drained of meaning, but thrillingly fluid and trans-
formative, unpredictable – and thus at least always slightly mysterious,
and yes, poetic.”136 A Darwinian world was not only a creative, imagi-
native space, but was already weird. The strange animals encountered in
fin-de-siècle weird fiction inspire awe at their bodily strangeness as well as
disgust, fear, and hostility and show that the terrestrial, visible world too,
was far less known and stable than it supposedly should be.
As well as possibilities for physical shape, attitudes to animal intelli-
gence underwent a shift in the late nineteenth century as a consequence of
developments in psychology. Animal intelligence in the Victorian period,
historian Rick Rylance explains, was understood as “absolutely different
in kind from human intelligence. But the acknowledgement that animals
may have any kind of intelligence at all admits a leakage from the new
conceptual world [of psychology].”137 This small but radical recognition
alters relations between humans and animals on psychological as well as
biological levels. It opens the way to imagining weird entities who could
possess an intelligence of an utterly different kind from humans, but per-
haps equal to it in degree, or even exceeding it.
Weird tales revel in the awesome terrors, physical and cerebral, that
might dwell in the borderlands of science. Predicated on the presence of
forces or entities outwith the limits of the normally knowable world, weird
fiction questions assumptions that accessing the other world is necessarily
desirable and that what is found there is necessarily benign. The “Border-
land” of Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, for example, is no simple
home of patient human souls, but a suitably weird dimension allowing
access to the monstrous extents of time and space (see Chapter 6). Fin-
de-siècle weird fiction is fascinated by science, but can also critique its
limitations. It allows room for or even welcomes the unknown and unex-
pected, and for uncertainty and unanswered questions, however frighten-
ing or awesome these might be, or perhaps especially when they are.
boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions
flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. As the following chap-
ters will elaborate, some tales attack positivist or materialist science, and
some explore alternative, enweirded epistemological terrains that validate
abcanny realities. Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in material-
ist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary
theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermo-
dynamics and the “new” physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up
on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird.
My case is that weird fiction emerged because of, and could not have
emerged without, the particular state of late nineteenth-century biology,
physics, psychology, and the scientific discourses constructed around the
occult revival—and this is an argument that could be extended into other
disciplines (into maths and geometry, for example). Rachel Crossland has
pointed out the problems with identifying primacy in either literature or
science: whether literature is seen to anticipate or reflect scientific discov-
ery, one or the other must be put first.138 Rather, she suggests, as inter-
woven parts of the same culture, both science and narrative can be seen
as different (though related) ways of thinking about similar topics and
problems. This is particularly evident in the way, for example, Wells wrote
about xenotransplantation in both The Island of Doctor Moreau and “The
Limits of Individual Plasticity” (1895), or in the enthusiasm of psychical
researcher Frederic W. H. Myers for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. But it is
also visible in the way some of Blackwood’s short stories exhibit qualities
that, with hindsight, resonate with the then very young field of quantum
mechanics: both quantum theory and weird fiction responded to some
well-established questions in the nineteenth century about physical phe-
nomena.139 Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread
cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge and
between competing versions of what valid knowledge is. Weird tales not
only take part in that conversation but contribute their own versions of
knowledge.
In the chapters that follow, we visit places where the walls of normal-
ity are thinnest. The structure of the book isn’t strictly chronological, but
starts with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Chapter 2. Stevenson
(1850–1894), also known for adventure romances like Treasure Island
(1881), and Kidnapped (1886), wrote a number of strange or gothic
tales around this time, including “Markheim” and “Olalla” (both 1885).
Jekyll and Hyde, however, was particularly influential. It has a crucial place
28 E. ALDER
in the emergence of the weird tale, especially when the weird tale’s emer-
gence is viewed through its entanglement with contemporary scientific
practices and philosophies. The novella demonstrates, not least, what was
already weird about late nineteenth-century science (in this case, psychol-
ogy and psychical research) through its representation of Hyde as a char-
acter and in the construction of the narrative itself as unstable, eluding
secure closure or certainty.
The influence of Jekyll and Hyde on the weird tale can be seen in the
work of later writers including Arthur Machen (1863–1947) and Edith
Nesbit (1858–1924).140 Machen’s weird tales, mystic and supernatural
fantasies, and autobiographical writings have attracted increasing critical
attention in recent years. Machen now is “widely accepted as a founda-
tional figure […] in the development of modern horror fiction […] a high
priest retroactively canonized by later practitioners of his weird art” such
as Lovecraft.141 Machen’s ambivalent attitude to science and occultism
and his deep commitment to his own mystic worldview inevitably inflect
his fiction. Chapter 2 examines some of the weird qualities of Machen’s
fiction, particularly The Great God Pan. Dr. Raymond’s experiment
demonstrates the dangers of meddling in scientific borderlands with only
conventional methods and assumptions as tools. His dreadful success
causes the weird to irrupt into normal reality, particularly through the
figure of Helen Vaughan, who presents, like Hyde, as a weird monster.
Chapters 2 and 3 both focus on the figures of doctors and other sci-
entists, and the means by which they attempt to access, understand, or
control the borderland and what occupies it. Chapter 3 examines the cen-
tral role of the senses and the relations between researcher and subject in
scientific positivism and in spiritualism, and how tensions between these
systems are negotiated in weird tales. The methods and the results of
weird experiments defy the nineteenth century’s dominant epistemology,
and the narratives construct alternative ways of knowing better suited to
a weird ontology. These include Machen’s “The Inmost Light” and Nes-
bit’s short stories, “The Three Drugs” (1908) and “The Five Senses”
(1910). Nesbit is best known for her children’s stories, including The
Railway Children (1906) and Five Children and It (1905).142 A pro-
lific writer for nearly thirty years, she also authored a number of weird
and gothic tales, collected as Grim Tales (1893) and Fear (1910). Some
of these, including “Man-Size in Marble” (1887) and “The Five Senses,”
have attracted attention from critics for their feminist qualities and their
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 29
interest in science.143 “The Three Drugs” and “The Five Senses” merit
particular attention in the context of the weird tale because of the char-
acteristics they share with their predecessors by Stevenson and Machen,
and because of their emphasis on expanded sensory experience as a way
of knowing radical weird realities.
In questioning what science can explain, weird fictions challenge what
science stands for, including its authority as an institution and its impli-
cation in projects of domination. Chapter 4, however, looks at stories in
which an occult investigator—a weirdfinder—contains or at least explains
a weird irruption. Occult investigation is technologised and profession-
alised in weird tales that attempt to contain the horrors breaking through
from the outside. In these detective stories, the mystery is weird or at
least believed to be so at first. The sleuth’s expertise manifests variously
as esoteric knowledge, occult equipment, or mental powers, as hybrids of
the ghost-finding practices and technologies of the Society for Psychical
Research and the rituals or experiments of occultism are translated into
fiction. Championing the credentials of borderland science, Flaxman Low,
John Silence, and Thomas Carnacki are expert figures used to reassert
human control over the unknown, and who, like Sherlock Holmes, wield
the power of knowledge to explain, categorise, and contain the psychic or
occult wonders and terrors experienced by their clients.
The Flaxman Low stories were written in collaboration between Kate
and Hesketh Prichard, mother and son, and first published under the
pseudonyms of E. and H. Heron. The character of Flaxman Low belongs
to a healthy swathe of such figures in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, following Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, and is an important predeces-
sor of Blackwood’s John Silence and Hodgson’s Carnacki.144 Blackwood
(1869–1951), whose work I also visit in Chapter 6, had a long career and
wrote in a great variety of forms, including journalism, radio plays, and
children’s stories.145 He travelled widely and lived in Canada and Switzer-
land as well as in New York and England. Urban and wild locations both
colour his fiction. He was an “omnivorous occultist” who belonged to
a number of groups at different times and in different places.146 Like
Machen, Blackwood believed there was more to spiritual existence than
conventional Christian teachings defined, and both were involved with
occult movements including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.147
For Blackwood, as his biographer Mike Ashley summarises,
30 E. ALDER
and another become legible in the context of heat engines and energy
exchange as weird terrors increase in power at the expense of humans.
Blackwood’s short stories also reflect a new uncertainty about reality par-
tially spurred by the way the new physics opened up the invisible inner
world of atoms as well as invoking invisible forces, ultimately paving the
way for quantum mechanics and its accompanying instabilities.
The weird, in Miéville’s words, grew out of a “burgeoning sense that
there is no stable status quo but a horror underlying the everyday.”154
Open to the unknown, the wondrous, and the terrifying, the weird
favours unstable, usually alarming versions of reality that run counter to
the prevailing nineteenth-century positivist account of the world as some-
thing amenable to human understanding and about whose phenomena
rational intellectual processes and empirical methods will reveal sure truths
and natural physical explanations. Nineteenth-century sciences were ask-
ing questions about how the world could be understood, and finding or
at least seeking answers. Weird tales asked such questions too, using the
imaginative freedom of fiction to present answers from the extremes of
wonder and terror in storyworlds that could treat them as if they were
real.
The weird fictions discussed in this book prise open spaces in the
borderlands of fin-de-siècle sciences and explore their narrative potential.
They are at root tales of terror, variants of ghost stories and akin to
gothic, and they glory in the fresh possibilities for fearful atmosphere,
novel monstrosity, and awesome wonder offered to speculative fiction
by science. Weird fiction deserves recognition on its own terms. Clus-
tering the texts of this book together as weird offers fresh insights to
how these kinds of story could respond to science and intervene in the
cultural and philosophical questions and debates it raised at the fin de
siècle. Weird tales flourish at intersections between literary modes, where
they imagine the world differently. They react to changing ways of under-
standing generated by scientific exploration, considering how their impli-
cations might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into
the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews. The borderlands
of fin-de-siècle science were pivotal for the emergence of the weird and
shaped its contribution to the development of speculative fictions there-
after.
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 33
Notes
1. Terry Pratchett, Sourcery (London: Gollancz, 1988), 250.
2. William Hope Hodgson, “The House on the Borderland,” in The House
on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002); Terry
Pratchett, “William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Borderland,” in
Horror: 100 Best Books, ed. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman (London:
Carroll and Graf, 1988), 72–73.
3. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and the
Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 12; Robert Louis Stevenson,
“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” in The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall
(London: Penguin, 2003), 56.
4. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story (London: Sampson Low, 1862),
148; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in
Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
537.
5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1996),
34; see Maurice Hindle, “‘Vital Matters’: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and Romantic Science,” Critical Survey 2, no. 1 (1990).
6. For the development of literature and science as a field, see, for exam-
ple, Daniel Cordle, Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two
Cultures Debate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Charlotte Sleigh, Literature
and Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
7. Michael Moorcock, “Foreweird,” in The Weird: A Compendium of
Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London:
Corvus, 2011).
8. Gothic is often preferred; see, for example, gothic analysis of Stevenson
and Wells by Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles:
Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and
of Hodgson and Machen by Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality,
Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996).
9. On fin-de-siècle weird fiction, see, for example, James Machin, Weird
Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018);
on the New Weird, see Alice Davies, “New Weird 101,” SFRA Review
291 (2010).
10. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6.
11. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books,
2011), 2.
12. See, for example, Mark Fisher, “Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall’s
Pulp Modernism,” k-punk (2006); Sherryl Vint, “Introduction: Special
Issue on China Miéville,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009).
34 E. ALDER
13. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon
Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1990), 1.
14. China Miéville, “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Can-
nies,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (2012), 380.
15. The ecological phrase “more-than-human world” derives from David
Abram. See Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language
in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997).
16. Roger Luckhurst, “Where the Weird Is: At the End of the Passage” (pre-
sentation, The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres, Birkbeck, Univer-
sity of London, November 7–8, 2013).
17. To undertake a disorientation to the weird, see Roger Luckhurst, “The
Weird: A Dis/orientation,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
18. William Hope Hodgson, “The Night Land,” in The House on the Bor-
derland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 397.
19. Hodgson, “Night Land,” 398.
20. I am not the first to wonder this; see Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain,
13.
21. Philip A. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1977), 3.
22. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London: Faber, 1977), 55. Briggs’s interpretation of “ghost story” is
inclusive: she addresses Le Fanu, Machen, Hodgson’s Carnacki stories,
and Blackwood’s John Silence stories, among others, but doesn’t identify
them as part of a weird tradition.
23. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1041. See also China
Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fic-
tion, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll
Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Mark Fisher, The Weird and the
Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016); Nick Freeman, “Weird Realism,” Tex-
tual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017); and Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain.
24. Aaron Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror
Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), x.
25. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (Springer, 2014);
Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of
the Fin de siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012).
26. Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition,” in Speculations on Specula-
tion: Theories of Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn and Mathew Candelaria
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1979).
27. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping His-
tory’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiv.
28. Timothy Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-
Itself: Fidelity to the ‘Lovecraft Event’ in the Work of Caitlín R. Kiernan
and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 35
29. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists Theories of Vision
in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 187, italics original.
30. “Weird,” n., Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2, 6th edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For discussion of the word’s
etymology, see also Morton, Dark Ecology; Fisher, The Weird and the
Eerie, 12; and Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1049.
31. “Weird,” adj., def. 2 and 3, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2.
32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (London: Faber
and Faber, 1972); Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Soli-
tude,” in The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), l.30.
33. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 36.
34. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1045, 1047.
35. See Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–
1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
36. Charlotte Riddell, Weird Stories (London: Home and Van Thal, 1946).
37. J. T. Bealby, “Biographical Notice,” in Weird Tales by E. T. A. Hoffman
(London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), lxxii.
38. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (London:
Downey, 1894); Edgar Allan Poe, Weird Tales (Philadelphia: H. Alte-
mus, 1895).
39. Stuart Cumberland, A Fatal Affinity: A Weird Story (London: Spencer
Blackett, 1889).
40. On this process of genre establishment, see Will Tattersdill, Science, Fic-
tion, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2016).
41. For discussions of Weird Tales, see Peter Haining, Weird Tales
(London: Sphere, 1976); Terence E. Hanley, “Weird Tales from
the Romantic Era,” Tellers of Weird Tales, accessed 13 July
2015, http://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/weird-tales-
from-romantic-era.html.
42. Weird Tales was itself “strip-mined” later by anthologised reprints. Can-
dace R. Benefiel, “Shadow of a Dark Muse: Reprint History of Original
Fiction from Weird Tales 1928–1939,” Extrapolation 49, no. 3 (2008),
463.
43. Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press, 12.
44. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (New York: Dover,
1973), 6–7.
45. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 2–3; on Lovecraft’s pivotal role in the
development of the weird tale, see also Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie,
especially pp. 16–25.
46. Fred Botting, Gothic, 2nd edn., (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.
36 E. ALDER
47. Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,”
1140.
48. Botting, Gothic, 167.
49. Tony Venezia, “Weird Fiction: Dandelion Meets China Miéville,” Dan-
delion 1, no. 1 (2010), para. 17; see Joan Gordon and China Miéville,
“Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction
Studies (2003).
50. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 379.
51. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 380.
52. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 381. Miéville stresses that his use of “ab”
derives from “abnormal” and the “abhuman” creations of William Hope
Hodgson, rather than from Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.
53. Miéville, “Quantum Vampire,” Collapse IV (2008), 113.
54. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 7.
55. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 5–6.
56. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 2.
57. Jason V. Brock, Disorders of Magnitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2014), 14; Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, 158.
58. Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, 158.
59. China Miéville, “Afterweird: The Efficacy of a Worm-Eaten Dictionary,”
in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories, ed. Ann and
Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus, 2011), 1115.
60. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion, 23.
61. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 61.
62. H. P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” The H. P. Lovecraft
Archive, accessed 15 February 2019, www.hplovecraft.com.
63. Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” in Pan’s Gar-
den (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), 91.
64. Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” 98.
65. Christine Ferguson, “From Anxiety to Ecstasy: Arthur Machen, A. E.
Waite, and the Mysticist Redemption of Victorian Popular Fiction,”
(2014); Mighall, Victorian Gothic.
66. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1054.
67. Miéville, “Quantum Vampire,” 105.
68. William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, in The House on
the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002).
69. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3:
The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 95, 97; H. P.
Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The
Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 123.
70. Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester: Zero Books,
2015), 150.
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 37
71. Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (Far-
ingdon: Libri, 2012), 3.
72. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 18.
73. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” in H. P. Lovecraft
Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000),
216.
74. Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero
Books, 2012), 3.
75. Venezia, “Weird Fiction,” para. 9.
76. William F. Touponce, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury:
Spectral Journeys (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), x.
77. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 64.
78. Quoted in Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan:
Seren, 1995), 27.
79. Alexander Cargill, “Our Gallery of Borderlanders: Robert Louis Steven-
son,” Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 12.
80. W. T. Stead, “Preface,” Borderland, Vol. 1 (1894).
81. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams (1888),” in The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Martin A Danahay (Peterborough,
ON: Broadview, 2005), 103–5; W. T. Stead, “The Man of Dreams,”
Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 17–24.
82. On Poe’s tales and the terrifying limits of the knowable, see Robert Tally,
“The Nightmare of the Unknowable, or, Poe’s Inscrutability,” Studies in
Gothic Fiction 1, no. 1 (2010). Weird Tales editor Clark Henneberger
aspired to produce “a periodical of modern literature in the Poe tradi-
tion” pointing to Poe’s influence on the development of the horror story
field broadly conceived (Haining, Weird Tales, 16).
83. On supernatural fiction in this period, see Andrew Smith, The Ghost
Story: A Cultural History, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2010).
84. On Bulwer-Lytton’s contributions to the development of the ghost story
tradition, particularly as endeavours to “strengthen the status of the mar-
vellous,” see Mark Knight, “‘The Haunted and the Haunters’: Bulwer
Lytton’s Philosophical Ghost Story,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28,
no. 3 (2006), 253.
85. See Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of
New Regions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976).
86. Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian
Literary Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia,
2000), 131.
87. For excellent discussions of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism,
psychical research, science, technology, and literature, see, for exam-
ple, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical
38 E. ALDER
108. Besant, Theosophy; Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism
in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and
Dion Fortune (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press [SUNY],
2015), 8.
109. F. C. S. Schiller, “On Some Philosophic Assumptions,” Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research 15, 1900–1901 (1901), 64.
110. Elana Gomel, “‘Spirits in the Material World’: Spiritualism and Identity
in the Fin-de-Siècle,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 191.
111. Oppenheim, Other World, 196, 159–60.
112. Oppenheim, Other World, 2, 4; see also De Cicco, “More Than Human,”
6.
113. Owen, Darkened Room, 27; see also Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His
Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the Magical Exploration of Edwardian
Subjectivity,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 1 (1997).
114. Owen draws on Max Weber’s discussion of the way intellectual rational-
isation “disenchanted” the world by stripping it of wonder and mystery.
115. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (London: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 20. See also Freeman, “Weird Realism” on rela-
tion between the weird and other modes including literary realism.
116. Patrick Brantlinger, “Introduction: Zadig’s Method Revisited,” in Energy
and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick
Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xviii.
117. Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the
Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
118. For full discussions of thermodynamics, see Ted Underwood, The Work
of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Economy, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Brantlinger, “Introduction: Zadig’s Method
Revisited”; and Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature
and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
119. Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment,” PMLA 117,
no. 3 (2002).
120. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Phi-
losophy, Vol. 1, 487; Egil Asprem, “Theosophical Attitudes Towards Sci-
ence: Past and Present,” Handbook of the Theosophical Current 7 (2013).
121. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1980), 79.
122. Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,”
1138.
123. Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and
the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 2006).
124. Richard Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Var-
ley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” History of Sci-
ence 32, no. 4 (1999), 422.
1 WEIRD TALES AND SCIENTIFIC BORDERLANDS AT THE FIN DE SIÈCLE 41
reality while still allowing rational (rather than superstitious) scope for the
unknown and unknowable lying beyond.
The radical, new, weird reality that the text demands to have accepted
has roots in nineteenth-century psychology and especially in the profound
changes the discipline was undergoing in the 1880s—changes that chal-
lenged not only assumptions about the nature of human consciousness
and selfhood, but also those about the stability and comprehensibility of
reality itself. Jekyll and Hyde, I suggest, picks up on the weirdness of this
rapidly evolving area of fin-de-siècle science, while also pushing the limits
of its implications even further.
By the 1880s, the “unshapely, accommodating, contested, ener-
getic discipline” of psychology showed a clear drift towards the firmer
rules of experimentalism.8 Such tightening reflected a shift away from
understanding the mind predominantly on an intellectual, metaphysi-
cal level and towards biological models basing mental health in the
body. Modern empirical approaches driving nineteenth-century pos-
itivism understood the brain as an organ, its functions (and dys-
functions) observable in physical effects. Nonetheless, Rick Rylance
emphasises, Victorian psychology maintained a “discursive turbulence,”
remaining a “mosaic always in process of completion.”9 Physiological
explanations were not universally accepted. Theosophist Annie Besant,
for example, looked back at the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury from the vantage point of 1912 and complained of the way
that ‘‘physiology had captured psychology” to render mental life bio-
logically determinable (from which, of course, Theosophy offered res-
cue).10 In principle, from different perspectives, many shared Besan-
t’s complaint. The psychologists of the Society for Psychical Research
were among those who disputed the limiting of investigation of men-
tal capacities to the methods and epistemologies of the physical sciences.
F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney both recognised multiple levels of
consciousness; the ego as a concept was in circulation well before Freud
and provided a way to describe consciousness that released it from reduc-
tive, psychophysiological models.11
Without necessarily discounting the value of physiological understand-
ings of the brain, many were convinced they were insufficient on their
own. For Henri Bergson, physical determinism offered a tempting logic,
but was inadequate and could never be experimentally proved. Critiquing
mechanistic, unitary models of the mind, Bergson understood conscious-
ness as, rather, made up of heterogenous states. As he put it in Time
and Free Will (1886), we “grasp our inner states as living things, con-
stantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate each
48 E. ALDER
psychic intensity, the emotional nuance that is present in all our mental
states, and ebbs and flows in a way that can be neither quantified nor
verbalised. Once the preconceptions stemming from outward experience
are removed, inner experience reveals itself as a continuous, heterogenous
flow of mental states, melting into one another in a way that could not be
analysed.13
not only hellish, but inorganic. This was the shocking thing: that the slime
of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust ges-
ticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, would usurp
the offices of life. (69)
An inward orientation of the weird like this also marks Jekyll and Hyde
as a weird tale. Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde dissolves all internal
boundaries that might have been thought to exist around Jekyll’s physical
and intellectual identity. Originating within Jekyll, Hyde feels “natural”
to the doctor, even to the extent of being more of a self than the origi-
nal. “In my eyes,” Jekyll reports, the new form “bore a livelier image of
the spirit, it seemed more express and single” than he did (58). At first,
in Jekyll’s unreliable testimony, at least, Hyde appears as something pro-
gressive, a purer (which is not to say gooder) self in comparison with the
contaminated doctor.
Yet Jekyll did initially hope to produce a better version of the self,
which finds a corollary in spiritualist speculations on the possibilities for
spiritual development. W. T. Stead, in “The Man of Dreams” (1895),
offers the remarkably optimistic spin that while people may be brewing a
Hyde, “under the outward semblance and mask of an unregenerate repro-
bate, the suppressed other self may be building up, little by little, the
higher and purer nature, which will only be seen in its reality when the
mortal scaffolding of the flesh falls into the tomb.”40 Myers, in “Multiplex
Personality,” also argued that identity is “capable of being reconstituted
after an improved pattern” and that “spontaneous readjustments of man’s
being are not all of them pathological or retrogressive.”41 Although these
aspirations are undermined rather than fulfilled by the actual results of his
experiment, what Jekyll has produced may look horrifyingly forward to
future unthinkable possibilities for the human self as much as back to its
perceived savage, primitive biological past. Jekyll’s discovery reveals pre-
viously unthought of possibilities and hints at unknown wonders beyond
the limits of the physical world as currently understood. These revelations,
too, must be acknowledged as components of the narrative if Hyde’s ori-
gin, actions and extant corpse are accepted as such.
Hyde’s depravity, crimes, and the horror of Jekyll’s gradual disintegra-
tion may ultimately dominate in most readings of the novella, but Jekyll’s
54 E. ALDER
I should need no scientific basis […] In these days the supernatural per
se is entirely incredible; to believe, we must link our wonders to some
scientific or pseudo-scientific fact, or basis, or method. Thus we do not
believe in “ghosts” but in telepathy, not in “witchcraft” but in hypnotism.
If Mr Stevenson had written his great masterpiece about 1590-1650, Dr
Jekyll would have made a compact with the devil. In 1886 Dr Jekyll sends
to the Bond Street chemists for some rare drugs.51
and spirit. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Machen’s novel constructs a weird nar-
rative reality that is only partially knowable and resists fixing to a single
state or meaning.
In The London Adventure (1924), Machen recommended a different
method of knowing: “I try to reverence the signs, omens, messages that
are delivered in queer ways and queer place, not in the least according to
the plans laid down either by the theologians or the men of science.”55
As the narrator of the short story “A Fragment of Life” (1904) puts it
The path of science, then, is a path of folly, of meddling with false wisdom
at the expense of true understanding. Through the use of inverted com-
mas, even the pairing of “books” and “science” appears to be distaste-
ful. Even more seriously, accepting a modern, materialist standpoint on
knowledge is dangerous—it could make the difference between achieving
an ecstatic spiritual experience or a dreadful one.
Critics have noted ways in which practices of reading and writing were
central to Machen’s search for the ecstatic experience through a “fusion
of research, belief, and creative art.”57 Reading popular fiction, assisted by
its democratic level of shared accessibility, could be a route towards “the
possibility of sheer spiritual bliss and occult citizenship”58 ; in Hieroglyph-
ics, Machen identifies “Ecstasy” as the defining quality of “fine literature”:
into horror. Machen’s weird tales “show the numinous to run a troubled
path” between ecstasy and evil.61
“The White People” walks that line, functioning as “an exploration of
knowledge as grace, and of knowledge corrupted.”62 It is the story, told
through her own diary, of a sixteen-year-old girl introduced to pagan
magic by her nurse, and who learns the rituals enabling her to encounter
the “white people” at a secret place in the woods, ultimately leading to
her self-destruction. Ambrose, the scholarly recluse into whose possession
the diary has passed, argues that the girl’s story is emblematic of true sin,
which has nothing to do with the intentions or innocence but rather with
transgression against the known order. Kimberley Jackson argues that
“The White People” constructs “the world of true sin” as “a world of
transgression and transcendence always present beneath the known and
the civilized”63 ; in this sense, the numinous, perhaps, does not so much
tread a line between two states as encompass a broader sublime experi-
ence. Sin, as Ambrose claims, is “simply the attempt to penetrate into
another and a higher sphere in a forbidden manner […] sin is an effort to
gain the ecstasy.”64 Since both ecstasy and sin arise out of the same nat-
ural urge towards mystic experience, the distinction between them is fine
or almost non-existent; as Machen later remarked in Far Off Things , man
“is by his nature designed to look upwards […] to discern the eternal in
things temporal.”65
“A Fragment of Life” (1904) explores the same impulse more posi-
tively, in an effort “to imbue London life with a condition of visionary
strangeness that would inspire rather than alienate.”66 It is one of several
tales in which London’s urban spaces become uncertain and unreal (as
happens at moments in “The Red Hand” and Impostors , for example).67
“Fragment” tracks the escape of a young couple, Edward and Mary
Darnell, from their mundane mid-income domesticity through the teach-
ings of the ancient Celtic church. Mr. Darnell realises that “the whole
world is but a great ceremony or sacrament, which teaches under visible
forms a hidden and transcendent doctrine. […] he found in the ritual of
the church a perfect image of the world; an image purged, exalted, and
illuminate.”68 Darnell and his wife gradually acquire the kind of knowl-
edge required to gain this transcendental borderland, discarding the “fol-
lies” of scientific knowledge.69 Even so, there are “darker perils” in these
exalted teachings too—“suggestions of an awful region into which the
soul might enter […] of evocations which could summon the utmost
forces of evil from their dark places,” while childhood memories carry
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 59
The ab-historical past that Machen invokes is that which cannot be claimed
by the present or by history because it remains always past, a past with no
future, or a past with no present. It is in this past where true savagery
resides; and because it lies, unclaimed, alongside human history, it is capa-
ble of intruding into the human world, the world in which man has come
to define himself as the most imposing figure. In Machen’s tales, what has
never been human cannot claim man’s shape, and yet it is precisely from
out of a human face that it peers. Contained within the human form itself
is the very real existence of the possibility of never-having-been, or the
possibility of another rationality and another physique.82
In this account, abhistories, like the weird, hover between true reality
and unthinkable alternative, hinting of possibilities neither fully present
nor entirely erasable. Jackson identifies Machen’s tales as “supernatural”
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 61
rather than weird, and doesn’t connect abhistory with either Miéville’s
abcanny or Kelly Hurley’s and William Hope Hodgson’s abhuman.83
Nonetheless, making the link (particularly since Jackson cites Hurley’s
The Gothic Body) is irresistible: the “ab-historical past” described here
is evidently a weird past. As Miéville puts it, the weird is “suffused
with abness,” producing an “invented cultural memory” and “back-
project[ing]” a “radical unremembered alterity into history.”84 Machen’s
abhistory is a numinous history, lying alongside the dominant modern
British construction of the past and occasionally brushing wondrously,
horribly against it.
The history of science, too, becomes abhistorical in Machen’s hands.
Worth deftly distinguishes Pan from science fiction by suggesting that the
story is premised on an “‘antiquum’, a recovered piece of older, occult
knowledge” as a counterpoint to the “novum” posited by Darko Suvin
as the marker of sf.85 Tales like Pan and “The Inmost Light,” Worth
argues, imply “that such modern disciplines [as neuroscience] are only
catching up with the ‘sciences’ of a bygone age.”86 The knowledge likely
to be mishandled by modern science is not new, but has always been
there, lying behind the mainstream history of science and out of view
to most people. The existence of Machen’s Little People and the secret
knowledge they represent expose the delusions of anthropocentricity: its
definitions of the world and its history, the limits of its knowledge and
ways of knowing. The normal reality that has been constructed by histo-
ries and language, scientific rationality, and visible material forms (such as
bodies and objects) is undermined.
The dangers of unwise picking and prodding at the relationships
between these is one of the subjects of The Great God Pan, discussed
next. As far as his early weird tales go, at least, Machen’s worldview con-
sists in a sometimes-known but only partly knowable true reality, which
must be approached with caution. The weird borderland in Machen’s fic-
tion is a numinous more-than-visible world of evil and terror, or awe and
ecstasy, or all of these, always there but mostly out of reach of human
knowing. An understanding that the world is not limited to materiality is
essential for a meaningful existence—if it is the right sort of understand-
ing. In Machen’s weird tales, scientists and experimental techniques often
unleash the most destructive and unknowable terrors, in fictional attacks
on materialist ontology as well as on the practices and epistemology of
nineteenth-century positivist science.
62 E. ALDER
an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of
amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. […] Such forces cannot be
named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a
symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to
some a foolish tale. (92–3)
Again like Jekyll and Hyde, The Great God Pan uses a scientific experi-
ment on a human subject to demonstrate radical theories that, if correct,
would entail accepting a revised version of the nature of reality—one that
consists in much more than what is visible. Dr. Raymond explains that “I
devoted myself to transcendental medicine” (2)—a new inter-discipline to
complement Jekyll’s “mystic” and “transcendental” chemistry. He posi-
tions himself as an explorer, the discoverer of a world of knowledge:
“[…] the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines
of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and
great oceans” (5). A combination of research and insight leads him to new
truths about reality and to understand, he thinks, the nature of the border
separating one world from another. As he explains to Clarke, the friend he
has invited to witness his experiment, the “real” world is not ours but the
other one, the one that exists “beyond this glamour and this vision […]
beyond them all as beyond a veil” (3). To access this world, Dr. Raymond
will demonstrate the physiological manipulation of spiritual consciousness
by means of “a slight lesion in the grey matter […]; a trifling rearrange-
ment of certain cells” (4). He proposes a physical, neurological basis for
the activities of the mind and spirit, resembling the suggestions put for-
ward by the SPR of receptive nerves accounting for telepathy.89
Raymond applies, in short, materialist, positivist approaches to an
occult experiment in “transcendental medicine”; the incompatibility of
the two is partly what causes the terrible events that follow. Jack Poller
argues that Machen drew primarily on alchemical rather than modern
occult ideas, given his ambivalence to materialist science and scepticism
of the SPR’s adoption of positivist methods.90 For Machen, materialist
science, including in an occult pseudo-scientific form, could never prove
a successful route to ecstatic experience, and indeed, might lead to far
worse. As Ambrose remarks in “The White People,” “we are so drenched
with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognise real wicked-
ness if we encountered it.”91
Dr. Raymond is therefore set up for failure despite (or because of) his
sincere conviction of achieving success. Over those “certain cells,” Dr.
Raymond claims complete knowledge and precise control: “I am perfectly
instructed,” he informs Clarke, “as to the possible functions of those
nerve centres in the scheme of things. With a touch I can bring them
into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current” (7). The “nerve
centres” in question belong to the girl Mary, who is about to undergo a
drugged but not anaesthetised brain operation. In the public imagination,
64 E. ALDER
look on such a sight with impunity” (108). Raymond, then, makes sev-
eral erroneous assumptions due to his positivist cast: that the knowledge
set to be gained will be gained by himself, and will be beneficial to him;
that he, the scientist, is in control of the situation; that the condition of
the body determines the state of spirit or consciousness; and that Mary
herself is no more than an operational instrument. The ultimate result of
the experiment, though, is Helen Vaughan, the spirit of Pan made flesh
from Mary’s body. Helen can be seen as both an invoked demon and a
distortion of the spirit forms channelled by mediums and clothed with
their bodily matter; as a weird being she is both of these and more. With
Mary unable to communicate her experience, Helen is the only worldly
evidence for what “seeing the God Pan” is all about—and she, like Hyde,
is at root an unknowable being who defies ultimate comprehension.
Reports of the childhood of Mary’s daughter filter into the narrative
through the memoirs of Clarke, telling of her corruption of two play-
mates (a young boy who loses his reason and a girl who later dies). As
an adult, she comes to the attention of Villiers after a series of London
gentlemen are found dead. The beautiful Helen, it seems, seduces her
victims and reveals to them certain horrific unnameable evils that drive
them to suicide. Helen has been read as a degenerate and transgressive
figure, linked to fin-de-siècle decadence, social anxiety over women’s sex-
uality, and inherited madness.96 The insanity of Mary signals her intellec-
tual inferiority (the power of her will cannot maintain her psychological
unity in the face of her experiences), and she passes on her degenerate
traits to Helen.
But Helen does not have to be understood as degenerate. Machin, for
one, disputes aspects of reading “Machen as a deeply engaged cogitator
and interpreter of contemporary scientific discourse and accompanying
neuroses surrounding evolution and degeneration” and calls for a greater
range of responses to his weird fiction.97 Like Hyde, Helen is legible in
more ways than only as a degenerate horror. If Raymond represents, as he
claims, a peculiarly advanced state of human scientific understanding, then
Helen is a being well beyond that understanding. As a union of human
with one of “the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of
all things” (93), she is also a progressive creature: something new. She
may derive from an abhistorical past and ancient knowledge, but those
are revived through the modern scientific methods were used to create
her, and, unlike the “little people” encountered on rural fringes in “The
Shining Pyramid” and The Three Impostors ’ “Novel of the Black Seal,”
66 E. ALDER
As was befitting, I did all that my knowledge suggested to make sure that
I was suffering under no delusion. At first astounded, I could hardly think,
but in a minute’s time I was sure that my pulse was steady and regular,
and that I was in my real and true senses. I then fixed my eyes quietly on
what was before me. (99)
Dr. Matheson appeals to the reliability of his senses and the supremacy
of his mind; though briefly thrown in astonishment, he soon gets his
body under control and calmly observes what is happening. His report
is thus to be received as an empirical account conveyed by his “real and
true senses” and is rationally presented. The scientific gaze is needed to
confront the weird—at the same time as its power is shattered by that
confrontation.
What Dr. Matheson witnesses is far from rational and instead violates
many assumptions about the stability of the world. He watches Helen’s
body undergo a series of changes, in a much-quoted passage describing
how
the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchange-
able, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve. […] I saw
the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again
reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended,
and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the
abyss of all being. (99–100)
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 67
Critics often focus here on Helen’s horrible bodily instability and how it
reflects anxieties over sexual transgression or evolutionary degeneration.
Certainly, her transformations, like Jekyll’s efforts to describe his experi-
ence of Hyde, plausibly reflect “a flickering backward-run down the evo-
lutionary tree towards protoplasm.”98 They flout several supposedly safe
distinctions: female and male, human and beast, body and world, and
Darryl Jones points out that “these interstices […] in their violation of
seemingly clear category distinctions, are the sites of revulsion and there-
fore of horror.”99 These interstices are also sites of weird, whose affect is
not horror alone but comprises awe and wonder too.
The above quoted passage needs to be understood in the context
of the whole scene. The scene’s weirdness shows more fully when the
entirety of Dr. Matheson’s report is taken into account, especially the
contrast between its confident beginning and its troubled, fragmentary
end. Watching Helen’s bodily changes, Dr. Matheson acknowledges that
“horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corrup-
tion choked my breath,” but assures his implied reader that he “remained
firm” (99). Such scientific resolution in the face of revulsion is necessary
to bring him to the brink of the weird and enable him to observe the
world around him turning distinctly Lovecraftian:
The light within the room had turned to blackness, not the darkness of
night, in which objects are seen dimly, for I could see clearly and without
difficulty. But it was the negation of light; objects were presented to my
eyes, if I may say so, without any medium, in such a manner that if there
had been a prism in the room I should have seen no colours represented
in it. (100)
and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth”; these he saw as impos-
sible “in a story of material incidents” but perhaps possible in “an interior
tale of the soul and its emotions.”104 Both Mary and the boy Trevor met
by Helen as a child are profoundly psychologically affected and have no
means of attempting to impart their knowledge, which is instead retained
and silenced by men. Helen’s childhood playmate Rachel has her “wild
story” cut off unsaid by Clarke closing the book of his memoirs (26),
while in her adult life, Herbert “would not dare whisper” what Helen
told him (34), and a written account of her “entertainment” is so terri-
ble Austin cannot read it (92). Natasha Rebry understands these stallings
as an inability to cognitively process the shock, and thus as further evi-
dence for the story’s relationship with contemporary debates over the
physiological basis of the mind and for Machen’s opposition to biologi-
cal reductionism.105 However, part of these ineffable encounters between
humans and the god Pan is a corrupted form of ecstasy.
In this sense, Pan and Helen stand not for the transcendental mystery
of A Fragment of Life, but rather for the transgressive knowledge of The
White People. Dr. Matheson’s account presents his witnessing of Helen’s
death as enweirded and twisted, made terrible and horrifying. Although
his account is partial and his experience is indirect, it is the fullest articu-
lation the narrative contains of the distorted, corrupted mystic experience
that “seeing the god Pan” might offer. Machen himself seems later to
have considered the effects of The Great God Pan as something of a mis-
take, reflecting on “my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness,
into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay.”106 Hence,
perhaps, the ambiguous affect of this weird tale, hovering between won-
der and horror.
A different understanding of the nature of reality and a different
understanding of knowledge—of the relationship between body, mind,
and spirit—is demanded by The Great God Pan, in an illustration of
Machen’s own opposition to a materialist, mechanistic ontology in favour
of the wonder and horror of a more enchanted world. An eerie, abhis-
torical figure, Helen exists outwith conventional moral, philosophical,
and semiotic frameworks that might otherwise explain her. Hers is an
advanced state beyond human comprehension that can barely be wit-
nessed, let alone narrated, understood, or controlled by conventional sci-
entific eyes. She violates the stable boundaries that are supposed to struc-
ture the world and its history for us, and, like Hyde, eludes the empirical
knowing represented by direct description.
70 E. ALDER
Conclusion
Jekyll and Hyde helped to pioneer the weird tale by exploiting certain
fractures and debates in contemporary science; it found the weird already
present within the innovations of 1880s efforts to rethink psychology, and
thus already part of the fin-de-siècle world in which the novella is rooted.
The multiplicity and indeterminacy of reality and consciousness and their
implications for relationship between body and mind are all explored
in Stevenson’s novella, as is the almost blasphemous alarm, horror, and
perturbation experienced during the encounter with the unknown and
unknowable (Hyde) which characterises the weird tale.
In Machen’s weird tales, too, pure materialism is challenged as the
defining relation of body to spirit becomes fluid and uncertain. Hyde
and Helen Vaughan figure as amorphous monstrous shapeless things,
unknown weird beings of shapes and textures that don’t belong in the
known natural order of physical existence. Ideas of the multiplicity of
human consciousness or soul in Machen’s work take the form of connec-
tions with lost, ancient, pagan worlds, abhistories that trouble the dom-
inant narratives about modern civilisation. Machen’s weird tales refuse a
single, knowable construction of the world, but insist on other realms,
too mysterious and sometimes too evil for human beings to cope with.
When a scientific framework of knowledge or investigation is applied to
the world beyond the veil, particular trouble ensues—for the characters
but also for dominant positivist assumptions about the nature of reality.
Machen’s anti-science takes the form of a call for a new, truer kind of
knowledge. He objects to science in its particular materialist, positivist
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 71
Notes
1. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping
History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Linda
Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and
Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Donald Lawler, “Re-
framing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of
Gothic Science Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred
Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988); and Anne Stiles, “Jekyll and Hyde as Science Fic-
tion,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed.
Caroline McCracken-Flesher (New York: The Modern Language Associ-
ation of America, 2013).
2. James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 14.
3. Ronald R. Thomas, “The Strange Voices in the Strange Case: Dr. Jekyll,
Mr. Hyde, and the Voices of Modern Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 76.
4. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 31.
5. Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde
and Late-Victorian Psychology,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 2
(2006), 2011.
72 E. ALDER
6. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Cul-
ture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); Robert Mighall,
“Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment
and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (London: Penguin, 2003); Andrew
Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the
Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Nancy
K. Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” Interna-
tional Journal of Scottish Literature 2, no. Spring/Summer (2007); Anne
Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Cen-
tury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Martin Danahay,
“Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35, no. 1
(2013); and Mario Ortiz-Robles, “Liminanimal: The Monster in Late
Victorian Fiction,” European Journal of English Studies 19, no. 1 (2015).
7. Davis, “Incongruous Compounds.”
8. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.
9. Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 21.
10. Annie Besant, Theosophy (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1912), 14.
11. See Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical
Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 247; Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritu-
alists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 183–85, for discussions of Myers’
ideas about consciousness.
12. Henri Bergson and F. L. Pogson, trans., Time and Free Will: An Essay
on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: Swan Sonnenschein &
Co., 1910), 231, italics original.
13. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), 87.
14. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 203.
15. Peter K. Garrett, “Cries and Voices: Reading Jekyll and Hyde,” in Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and
Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 61.
16. Paul Maixner, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage
(London: Routledge, 1995); Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science,
and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
17. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Death, Vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 34.
18. Myers, Human Personality, Vol. 1, 15.
19. Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, 6; Reid also
notes that Stevenson’s letters and notes reveal his long-term interest in
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 73
78. Arthur Machen, “The Shining Pyramid,” in The Great God Pan and
Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 236.
79. Aaron Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” Vic-
torian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012), 220.
80. Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” 223.
81. Machen, Far Off Things, 95, 97.
82. Jackson, “Non-evolutionary Degeneration in Arthur Machen’s Supernat-
ural Tales,” 130.
83. Hurley, Gothic Body. Hurley links Hodgson’s “abhumans” from The
Night Land to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject.”
84. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 381; China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The
Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M.
Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009),
113.
85. Worth, “Introduction,” xiv.
86. Worth, “Introduction,” xiv.
87. Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 7. All subsequent quotations are from
this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
88. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen,” 283.
89. See, e.g., William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism
(London: J. Burns, 1874).
90. Jake Poller, “The Transmutations of Arthur Machen: Alchemy in ‘The
Great God Pan’ and The Three Impostors,” Literature & Theology 29,
no. 1 (2013).
91. Machen, “The White People,” 115; Machen’s biographers and critics
point to his dislike not only of scientific materialism, but also of many
forms of occultism and Christianity; see, e.g., Freeman, “Arthur Machen:
Ecstasy and Epiphany,” 252; Luckhurst, Telepathy, 203.
92. Anne Stiles, “Introduction,” in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920,
ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3; see also
Rylance, Victorian Psychology, and Oppenheim, Other World, 266, on fin-
de-siècle psychology’s “stark choice between determinism and free will”
in explanations of how the brain works.
93. Natasha Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’: The Gothic
Brain,” Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (2016), 13.
94. Jeffrey Michael Renye, “Panic on the British Borderlands: The Great
God Pan, Victorian Sexuality, and Sacred Space in the Works of Arthur
Machen” (diss., Temple University Libraries, 2013), 15.
95. Stiles, “Introduction,” 13.
96. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen”; Mark De
Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin
de Siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012); and
Machen’s reputed sexual anxiety is critically discussed in Machin, Weird
Fiction in Britain, 149.
2 WEIRD SELVES, WEIRD WORLDS: PSYCHOLOGY, ONTOLOGY … 77
These gateways – which we otherwise name the Organs of the Senses, and
call in our mother speech, the Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, and the
Skin – are instruments by which we see, and hear, and smell, and taste,
and touch; at once loopholes through which the spirit gazes out upon the
world, and the world gazes in upon the spirit.12
The evidence of sight, in this case, apparently could not reliably yield
a single truth. Neither could touch: those who seized Home’s, or the
spirits’, hands “could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.”28 For Lang, the mystery of Home “is solved by no theory or com-
bination of theories, neither by the hypothesis of conjuring, nor of col-
lective hallucination, nor of a blend of both.”29 Lang uses the language
of science: of problem-solving, theory, and hypothesis. He acknowledges
its inadequacy to address the problem, but it remains the only discourse
available to him for evaluating and determining “facts.”
To an extent, the séance itself invited scientific readings. It was laid out
rather like an experiment, replicating certain conditions (such as darkness,
hand-holding, the presence of a medium) to produce certain results (such
as knocking, spirit forms, writing). So the séance looked like it ought to be
amenable to scientific investigatory methods and to facilitate experimental
tests, mediums submitted to being tied up, encaged, or attached to mea-
suring equipment; it became “perfectly acceptable for a medium to be
first searched, then tied around the neck, wrists, or body with tape, cot-
ton, or silk thread.”30 This very cooperation, however, partly subverted
the terms on which the knowledge generated by the séance claimed to
be based. Tie the medium up too tightly and communication with the
spirits is impeded; tie her (for it was very often her) too loosely, and there
is too much scope for fraud. Imposing experimental conditions, rather
86 E. ALDER
than eliminating doubt, potentially interfered with the sitting and created
more doubt.
In addition, for a successful séance, active involvement was required
from the sitters. Not only were their testimonies crucial, but each indi-
vidual, body and mind, had to be invested in the séance for it to be suc-
cessful, which was at odds with the position of the distanced positivist
researcher. By holding hands, sitters formed a “community of sensation”
promoting the right harmonious atmosphere for communicating with
spirits.31 The presence of a sceptic could be detrimental. In 1885, the
spiritualist weekly Light recounted the failure of slate-writing observations
by SPR members with medium Mr. Eglinton: “[t]he sensitive and his
controls, feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile prejudging audi-
ence, were thus paralysed.”32 Spiritualists asked only that sceptics kept
an open mind; self-respecting scientifically minded people could hardly
refuse, when spiritualists themselves allowed that “[h]onest scepticism is
no barrier to the enquiry, but prejudice and superstition are undesirable
everywhere.”33 Yet such a requirement meant that the sceptic could be
accused of possessing a “spirit of opposition” if they did not engage hon-
estly with the séance, and if they did, that made them complicit as a par-
ticipant rather than objective as an observer.34 Arguably, many spiritualists
did not fully understand the scientific methods they were trying to use.35
Either way, rather than providing empirical evidence which would lead
to acceptance of the results, by relying on pre-existing faith among its
participants a séance could effectively turn the scientific requirement for
rigorous and replicable experimental conditions against the healthy posi-
tivist scepticism that was supposed to accompany it.
In this way, theory, methods, and evidence combined to construct
the séance as something amenable to positivist science, but in practice it
enacted something quite fundamentally oppositional. As Richard Noakes
points out, “[b]y maintaining that the causes of spiritualistic phenom-
ena involved both disembodied and embodied intelligences, [spiritualists]
were also denying that physiologists and others holding materialist views
of the mind had the sole right to reliable knowledge in spiritualism.”36
Value placed on personal, spiritual forms of knowledge as well as depen-
dence on theories and methods that mainstream science did not accept
made spiritualism a challenging practice on several levels.
Witness testimony was an important part of evidence for phenomena,
though of course, “[t]he situation sketched out in the anti-spiritualist
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 87
a not particularly well integrated bundle of parts; strata and streams of con-
sciousness did not form one seamless web, but remained distinct entities.
[…] Whatever its constitution, it [personality] was liable to abandon its
own home, leaving that vulnerable to invasion and possession by another
personality.47
In this first moment, Jekyll acquires his knowledge of being Hyde through
his senses united with his mind; he is “conscious” of the “heady” rush
of sweetness and sensual experiences. This knowledge is vivid, but also
strange, new, and indescribable; although his experience is real and intense
to him, it still remains slightly out of reach.
The weird experimental method is superior to the ordinary kind, and
so is the quality of the knowledge gained. Jekyll gains it immediately, com-
pared to the slow self-recognition of the old doctor who took so long to
“reach years of reflection, and [begin] to look around me and take stock
of my progress and position in the world” (55), and gains it incontestably:
“I knew myself,” he declares, “at the first breath of this new life, to be
more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil” (57).
Jekyll is instantly and absolutely sure of what he knows, to the extent
of putting a numerical multiplier on its severity, which paradoxically ties,
albeit more figuratively than literally, the relative concept of “wickedness”
to the eternal truths of mathematics.
In keeping with the earlier declared immateriality and transience of
the body, Jekyll’s self-knowledge of his physical appearance comes only
second: “I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sen-
sations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature”
(57). The mirror reveals Hyde’s younger, slighter body with its “imprint
of deformity and decay” (57), his inner wickedness marked on his phys-
ical form. The state of the spirit stamps the shape of the new body. Yet
proof of the new knowledge has a bodily manifestation as well as a spir-
itual one; neither has supremacy, and the line, if there is one, between
spirit and matter is blurred. Any balanced dualistic relationships set up
earlier in the narrative are now irretrievably upset or undermined.
Despite Hyde’s elusiveness and resistance to pinning down, as dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, a revised, weird epistemology does offer possible
ways of knowing the weird—at least, for those, like Jekyll, who are pre-
pared to get sincerely and directly involved. Jekyll’s commitment to his
own experiment might be the most honest thing he ever does. Between
them, Jekyll’s experiment and the narrative’s representation of Hyde
establish some ontological and epistemological foundations that become
important for weird fiction, drawing from an 1880s scientific climate in
which a number of options for knowing the world coexisted. There are
92 E. ALDER
many commonalities between Jekyll and Hyde and the three tales I exam-
ine next.
Explicitly set in those spaces of incontrovertible scientific authority,
laboratories, all four are stories of experiments whose subjects take on
the role of medium, becoming instruments for accessing an other world
under experimental conditions. Sensory experience for most of these sub-
jects extends beyond the usual five senses; the knowledge of the spirit or
soul is admitted as valid, and leaves physical traces in or as a body as dis-
tinctions between matter and spirit or mind crumple. Constructions of
the human body as mechanism or instrument, of scientists as objectively
detached, and of will or consciousness as biologically determined are both
offered and undermined. Assumptions that stable truths about the world
can be attained are resisted; instead, the stories posit inherent unknowabil-
ity, instability, and multiplicity. Existing discourses are shown to be inade-
quate, so that weird knowledge remains out of reach. Language struggles
to represent it. Brains (human ones anyway) cannot hold it and must
either lose it or go mad. The narratives do not present straightforward
anti-scientific attacks; rather, they critique assumptions of certain kinds of
science and their limitations. In its place, they imagine a reconstruction
of methods and knowledge that complements the weird reality of their
storyworlds.
and are treated as neutral research subjects by the male scientists. I will
first briefly revisit Dr. Raymond’s experiment in The Great God Pan by
way of a bridge between Jekyll’s experiment just discussed and that of
“The Inmost Light.”
Dr. Raymond sees Mary as little more than a passive conduit for the
“current” of the spirit.50 Passivity is necessary in as much as “[t]he true
mystical experience is one not sought, but given,” and so Mary’s sub-
missiveness is consistent with the well-planned conditions of the experi-
ment.51 Yet her reduction to a piece of experimental apparatus also speaks
to Raymond’s positivist stance: he plays the objective, distanced scientist
(quite in contrast to the self-experimenting Jekyll who understands his
own self to be at the epistemological centre of his experiment) conducting
research upon a mechanical body and always remaining “perfectly cool”
(14). The knife is a “necessary” part of the operation on her brain tis-
sue that means “a spirit will gaze on a spirit world” (7). The spirit, too,
becomes instrumental here, a device of empirical observation, which will,
he wrongly thinks, “gaze on” but not interact with the spirit world.
In his conception of the submissive Mary as an instrument whose body
and spirit are under his control, Raymond fails to consider the personal
involvement inherent in mystic experience and the impact of that involve-
ment on the experiment’s outcomes. As Raymond administers to his sub-
ject a drug from a green phial, Clarke “watche[s] changes fleeting over
[Mary’s] face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float
across the sun” (14). Mary’s physical and mental self is evidently already
involved in this experience. Following the operation on her brain, as, pre-
sumably, her spirit views or enters the world beyond, the results register
visibly on her body. Her eyes, suddenly opened, “shone with an awful
light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her
hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible” (15). Mary responds
both physically and emotionally to what she sees and strives (and perhaps
succeeds) to know by touch what is invisible to the two onlookers.
Body and spirit are both profoundly involved in Mary’s experience of
the phenomenon, similar to Jekyll’s “racking pangs” and “horror of the
spirit” the first time he takes his potion. Natasha Rebry draws the connec-
tion between body and soul here: “the alteration in Mary’s brain is simul-
taneously an alteration in her spirit.”52 Knowledge, as Huxley expressed
it in the essay discussed earlier, is a simultaneity of experiencing and com-
prehending; in Machen’s story, the spirit or soul is part of that knowing.
Body and mind also both participate, and the results of the experiment are
94 E. ALDER
inscribed on all three. Afterwards, Mary loses her reason and cannot intel-
lectually communicate what she knows. Her body, however, records the
results: her impregnation, bodily and soulfully, by “Pan.” In this sense, as
with Hyde, spirit determines body, not the other way round; the meet-
ing of spirits facilitated by Raymond’s scalpel has observable physiological
effects.
Mary’s full participation in the experiment is key. Her ecstasy is evi-
dent on her face, where too it is soon succeeded by “the most awful
terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from
head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house
of flesh” (15). Raymond proves his point that the human brain could
allow the spirit access to the world beyond the veil, but nothing cer-
tain comes of it; whatever ecstatic, terrible truths Mary learns to remain
mysterious and hers alone. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, in her exploration of
Machen’s artistic search for ecstatic experience, argues that “Machen’s
concept of art follows Coleridge’s description of symbol (as opposed to
fancy) as something participatory” and therefore leads to greater access
to truth, whether divine or mystic; for Machen, “Cartesian assertion of
human ‘truth’ repositions creative power and thus removes mystery.”53
Mary’s participatory experience reinstates it.
A similar point is proved by Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light.” Dr. Black
seeks esoteric knowledge, wishing to “gratify my desire of knowledge of a
peculiar kind, knowledge of which the very existence is a profound secret
to most men,” and, sort of, finds it (163). There is a delicious irony in
the way this “secret” knowledge ends up picked over by other scientists
and publicly displayed across newspapers and a courtroom, yet is rendered
meaningless because nobody knows what to do with it. In this way, “The
Inmost Light” is arguably an even more cutting attack by Machen on
modern positivist scientific culture than is The Great God Pan. No won-
der they were published together. Adrian Eckersley has argued that Dr.
Black’s ambitions align him with Dr. Raymond and that the story is a
“parallel with the task of science itself: it is the materialist scientist who
has ripped the decent theological clothing from humanity and shown us a
demon.”54 And yet dualisms of matter and spirit or demon and decent are
insufficient, underplaying Machen’s complex take on science, occultism,
and religion as well as obscuring how the text resists the stabilising effects
of binary structures and absolute knowledge.
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 95
Dr. Black is not a materialist scientist—or, not only. Like Raymond and
Jekyll, he is both a materialist surgeon and an occult scientist who recog-
nises that “[w]hen men say there are strange things in the world, they lit-
tle know the awe and terror that dwell always with them and about them”
(149). Dr. Black recognises the limits to knowing the world through con-
ventional methods: “in the work I had to do there must be elements
which no laboratory could furnish, which no scales could ever measure”
(165). Conventional empiricism can only produce partial knowledge and
understanding about the world. He has fewer illusions than Raymond
about the nature of the knowledge he seeks and its rewards; his “paths,”
he knows, lead to “regions so terrible, that the mind of man shrinks
appalled at the very thought” (163). Dr. Black expresses, in effect, his
sense of a weird numinous behind the everyday, not beyond a veil, but
interlocked with the world we know.
Further, where Dr. Raymond treats the spirit as a tool for gaining
knowledge, Dr. Black better understands the significance of individuals’
essential being: to complete his experiment, he realises that “from some
human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul”
(165). There is no question of self-experimentation; his wife eventually
consents to be the subject, with tears of shame, and in a barred and shut-
tered laboratory he “did what had to be done, and led out what was no
longer a woman” (167). Mrs. Black’s soul is transferred to the “opal with
its flaming inmost light” (167) and what remains is the thing whose face
at the window horrifies Dyson so profoundly.
Dr. Black suffers personally and morally from what he has done and
his death follows, but it is only in a private letter to Clarke that Dr. Ray-
mond acknowledges any regrets or responsibility, admitting that “[i]t was
an ill work I did that night when you were present” (108). Clarke himself
takes no steps to expose him, refusing Villiers the vital information that
would help to halt Helen’s career. The Great God Pan presents us with a
cold, arrogant scientist and a moral coward, and a narrative littered with
fatal consequences of their action and inaction, but no public or narra-
tive retribution visits either of them. The story’s target is not so much
Raymond’s inhumane attitude towards the women as people (including
Helen, for whom he disavows responsibility and ejects from his home at
an early age), but rather his stance as a scientist.55
Dr. Black, too, escapes public exposure. He falls under suspicion of
his wife’s murder, but, as Dyson learns from the newspaper report of the
inquest, the doctors who conducted the autopsy of Mrs. Black’s body
96 E. ALDER
“could not discover the faintest trace of any kind of foul play; their most
exquisite tests and reagents failed to detect the presence of poison in the
most infinitesimal quantity” (124). Subtle and sensitive as these forensic
tests are, the real nature of Dr. Black’s “foul play” remains hidden; he is
not blamed for the “somewhat obscure and scientifically interesting form
of brain disease” that is identified as the cause of death (124). Only a
physiological cause can be officially acceptable in the prevailing medical
culture, and no poison or pathogen can be found in the body. However,
the autopsy does find that “[t]he tissue of the brain and the molecules of
the grey matter had undergone a most extraordinary series of changes”
(124). The action of the spirit has left its traces on the body, which are
taken for marks of a physical disease; again, body and spirit (or soul or
consciousness) are inseparable, but the epistemological significance of that
passes unnoticed. On the basis of this evidence, the inquest concludes that
death was of “natural” causes, and Dr. Black is acquitted.
The real, unofficial conclusion of the (unnamed) doctor who examined
the brain is rather different. The newspaper quotes his “curious” claim
that the brain’s appearance “indicated a nervous organization of a wholly
different character from that either of man or the lower animals” (125).
But this claim fails to alter the course of the court hearing. It eludes
pinning down to a meaning that would secure it as evidence: exactly what
is a nervous system neither human nor animal, and in any case, what
would that prove? No one knows. The empirical, observable evidence
can be pointed to, but is essentially useless.
Nevertheless, the doctor’s conversation with Dyson reveals him to be
more open than most to the significance of this weird evidence. He is
convinced that “in spite of all the theories, what lay before me was not
the brain of a dead woman – was not the brain of a human being at
all” (142); crucially, he reaches this conclusion “in spite” of neurological
theory, not because of it. But this evidence cannot be assimilated to an
officially accepted scientific framework, and consequently nothing can be
done with it in an inquest which can only make decisions based on facts
sanctioned by that framework. “[T]he verdict was given in accordance
with the evidence,” the doctor later tells Dyson; “the jury acted very sen-
sibly; in fact, I don’t see what else they could have done” (141). Scientific
investigation of evidence and the judicial system built upon it both have
limits as ways of knowing and ordering the world, or the weird.
The best the doctor can come up with is that Dr. Black was “justified”
in killing his wife because she had “[t]he brain of a devil. […] Whatever
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 97
Mrs Black was, she was not fit to stay in this world” (143). The notion
of a devil’s brain suggests a reassuring moral motivation for Dr. Black’s
final action (though the necessity for it was his fault in the first place).
However, attributing physical anatomy to a superstitious construct sug-
gests that it is both material and immaterial—in other words, impossible,
but there is no better descriptive language. The doctor’s discourse echoes
the binary language of good and evil to which Jekyll resorts and is like-
wise insufficient. Other efforts to articulate what Mrs. Black has become
operate through negation or absence. She, or her body, at least, becomes
“what is no longer a woman”; what Dyson glimpses at the window is
“the face of a woman, and yet it was not human” (121). There is no
language to describe what is, only what isn’t. A similar moment occurs
in The Three Impostors : “Miss Leicester” “cannot say I saw a face or any
human likeness” when she sees something with burning eyes staring from
her brother’s window.56 Like Hyde, and Helen, these weird entities are
unknowable, emerging through the gaps and occlusions of what is known
and how that is signified in language.
Weird monsters are unspeakable, but weird tales endeavour to find
ways to speak them. Weird fiction and science both meet the limits of
language at encounters with new phenomena. Ernst Mach explained this
point in The Science of Mechanics: “[i]n the reproduction of facts,” he
wrote, “we begin with the more durable and familiar compounds, and
supplement these later with the unusual by way of corrections. Thus, we
speak of a perforated cylinder, of a cube with bevelled edges, expressions
involving contradictions, unless we accept the view here taken.”57 The
doctor’s choice of phrase—“the brain of a devil”—is the familiar supple-
mented by the unusual to become a description of reality that looks like a
contradiction, but isn’t. Empiricism itself becomes weird when it operates
at the limits of knowing. Weird tales don’t need to make science weird—it
already is.
The over-determined observability of “Mrs Black” and her devil’s brain
provides the kind of longed-for unequivocal evidence for extra-human
existence that eluded occultists: evidence that could be presented and ver-
ified at an inquest. Not only does this evidence fail to persuade because of
failure to see it for what it is, but we are thankful for that. At the end of
the story Dyson, in his horror, crushes the opal, and the “inmost light” is
extinguished. In exploiting empiricism and rationalism at the same time
as undermining it, Machen’s story both “proves” the existence of weird
98 E. ALDER
linked one to all knowledge past and present. He felt that he controlled
all wisdom, as a driver controls his four-in-hand. Knowledge, he perceived,
belonged to him, as the air belonged to the eagle. He swam in it, as a
great fish in a limitless ocean. (55)
Roger not only has (temporarily) ownership and control over time,
knowledge, and even the elements, he knows emotionally and intellec-
tually that he has it (feeling it, perceiving it) at the same time as he physi-
cally experiences it (driving, flying, swimming), in a perfect union of mys-
tical, empirical, and rational knowing. However, this limitless wisdom is
transient, since it cannot be held by the mind in its normal everyday state.
Roger gains only one piece of lasting knowledge, a piece of personal infor-
mation of use only to him. At the story’s start, we learn that he has an
unspecified “trouble”: “There was a woman in it, of course, and money,
and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments” all woven into a “puzzle-
problem” he can’t resolve (45). All he retains from his few moments of
limitless knowledge is a solution, in words of “very simple wisdom”: “To
end the trouble, I must do so-and-so and say such-and-such” (58). This
knowledge would be meaningless to anyone else, to the extent that there
is apparently nothing for a reader to gain by even knowing the details of
the “trouble,” let alone of its solution.
Roger’s personal mental as well as physical condition is a significant fac-
tor in the result of the experiment. Entry to this state of knowledge and
insight depends on the subject being consciously ready to submit: “the
whole life of the subject, risen to an ecstasy, falls prone in an almost vol-
untary submission to the coming super life,” the doctor tells Roger; “Sub-
mission – submission!” (54). Submission, indeed, was seen as essential to
the mystic state.63 The “more pliable” a medium, for example, could be
“beneath the will of others, the greater are his powers as a medium.”64
James identifies “Passivity” as another psychological marker of the mystic
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 101
state: “when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the
mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as
if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”65 “I submit,” Roger
confirms, and when his own turn comes, so does the doctor: “I submit
– I submit” (54, 58).
This time, submission will lead to disaster. There are hints that the
doctor’s past actions (which include numerous animal vivisections as well
as previous experiments on people) may be affecting his own experience
of the drugs. He suffers more profoundly than Roger from the first drug;
to Roger “it seemed that, either this man was less able to bear pain than
he, or that the pain was much more violent than had been his own” (57).
The second drug gives Roger a sort of psychic second-sight, enabling
him to look through a locked door at the doctor’s previous victims, now
“quiet people lying along the floor in their death clothes” (53) which
further hints at the doctor’s remorseless callousness.
But with the third drug withheld (since the bound Roger cannot
administer it), for the doctor the second drug leads to a moment of fatal
exposure to an overwhelming horror not unlike Mary’s in The Great God
Pan: “I see what I will,” he claims, but he is wrong:
“I close my eyes, and I see – no – not that – ah! – not that! […] Not
that,” he moaned. “Not that,” and writhed in a gasping anguish that bore
no more words. […] presently he writhed from the chair to the floor,
tearing feebly at it with his fingers, moaned, shuddered, and lay very still.
(59)
Like Mary, the doctor sees something beyond what is apparently visi-
ble and is swamped by the horror of it. Denial is futile; the will gives
way under the impact of overwhelming experience. That experience is
also beyond words—“not that” identifies, in negation, some nameless
unknown, the realm of the weird, lying out of sight.
Like Dr. Raymond, Nesbit’s doctor is ambitious and arrogant. He
seeks to gain God-like wisdom, and he is entirely sure of himself and his
achievement. The proofs Roger gives of the experiment’s success demon-
strate to the doctor that “[i]t was not a dream, this, the dream of my life.
It is true. It is a fact accomplished” (56). From this positivist stance, that
absolute truths about the world are obtainable, the doctor has no doubts
that the experiment will work equally well on himself: “I shall begin to be
a new man. It will work quickly. My body like yours, is sane and healthy”
102 E. ALDER
(56). Based on his mechanical assessment of the health of body and brain,
the doctor assumes that the experiment is replicable, but his emotions and
his over-confidence betray him. The temporarily wise Roger perceives that
he must be unbound to help with the third drug, but the doctor refuses
out of fear: “no, and no, and no many times. I am afraid of you. You
know all things, and even in your body you are stronger than I” (57).
Instead, the doctor apparently supposes he can self-administer the third
drug, but the first two drugs overpower him more than he expects. The
second drug induces an almost paralytic submission, and the doctor can-
not reach the third despite its being by his elbow. The doctor has also
forgotten the accelerated action of the three drugs on Roger’s perfect
body and mind; Roger’s state of knowledge and strength has passed, and
he is now too weak to break his bonds.
The story plays with ideas of will, submission and receptivity, turning
submission itself into a form of agency. The doctor’s specific researches—
he is a physiologist and a vivisector, experimenting first on animals and
then on people who stray into the trap of his house—position him at
a clinical distance from the experience of his research subjects. Retain-
ing control of the administration of each drug, and assuming he would
remain in control of the final self-experiment, he has failed to notice the
crucial catch, that the third drug cannot be self-administered because the
subject must be passive. The ethical success of the experiment depends
on cooperation between researcher and researched; the inaction of either
leads to disaster.
In this way, the tale’s weird mode exposes flaws in scientific myths of
control. The capacities of the human body for knowing can be extended
beyond the usual range of senses and consciousness, and the knowledge
to be gained is real, but a distanced positivist stance is not sufficient. The
results sought by the doctor can only be obtained by surrendering one’s
whole self, body and mind, to a greater power; only then can an expanded
reality, a weird, more-than-visible reality, be experienced. For the human
mind, what lies there on the edges of the known is overwhelming; contact
may be fleeting and it cannot be fully mastered or apprehended—Roger
retains a minute fraction of what he knew—and the ecstasy of weird expe-
rience may manifest as horror as easily as wonder.
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 103
He knew that this drug with others, diversely compounded and applied,
produced in animals an abnormal intensification of the senses; that it
increased – nay, as it were magnified a thousand fold, the hearing, the
sight, the touch – and he was almost sure, the senses of taste and smell.
But of the extent of the increase he could form no exact estimate. (154)
It is only through his own experience, through the embodied results mea-
sured and reported by his senses, systematically tested in turn, that he can
gain a full knowledge of the experiment’s outcomes.
In doing so, he glimpses the weirdness behind the quotidian world.
The intensification of each sense is so remarkable that it reveals, in effect,
the unobservable worlds that lie out of reach of normal experience, as
each altered sense exposes hidden subtleties. His enhanced hearing, for
example, makes audible a fly’s footsteps and the movements of glass bot-
tle stoppers, while under intensified sight he sees vague shapes he later
concludes “were the microbes and bacilli that cover and fill all things, in
this world that looks so clean and bright” (156). Through the efficacy of
the “wild, magic” ingredient, Boyd Thomson acquires empirical knowl-
edge of phenomena to a level unavailable to normal senses or instruments.
His enhanced senses push back the boundary between the realm of reality
and the realm of appearance; he can see and hear tiny things that normally
are not humanly observable. Knowledge, here, is constructed as neither
stable nor absolute, either empirically or intellectually, but as subjective
and relative. He might have expected increased certainty about the world
at a more detailed level than ever before, but what he gets is a shifting
multiplicity, shaped in part subjectively, according to how the scientist
mobilises his will, in a way more suggestive of quantum than traditional
mechanics.
Boyd Thomson finds that sensory knowledge offers more than one
simultaneous truth. His enhanced touch, for example, reveals two coex-
isting versions of reality as he holds a syringe: “When he looked down
at his fingers, he saw that what they grasped was the smooth, slender
tube of clear glass. What he felt that they held was a tremendous cylinder,
rough to the touch” (154). Realities multiply as the professor’s exper-
iment accentuates the way in which the two senses supply conflicting
rather than corresponding information. Neither sensation gives any more
“true” a knowledge of the syringe than the other, though much depends
on where the mind directs its attention:
106 E. ALDER
He examined the new phenomenon with cold care. It seemed that only
that was enlarged on which his attention, his mind, was fixed. He kept
his hand on the glass syringe and thought of his ring, got his mind away
from the tube, back again in time to feel it small between his fingers, grow,
increase, and become big once more. (154–5)
One effect of the “unaccredited, wild, magic” drug is to alter the relation-
ship between mind and senses in the process of observation. The drug
not only intensifies sensory observation but increases the mind’s capac-
ity to know at will the aspect of the world currently being observed. As
a consequence, Boyd Thomson’s stance as a scientist in relation to this
knowledge also has to move beyond the positivist position of objective
distance and mastery. As long as he applies the drug to only one sense
at a time, Boyd Thomson maintains his “cold” detachment and proceeds
systematically. However, his detachment gradually decays as each sense
brings startling experiences. Sight, which he saves for last, offers the most
profound transformation of his observed world: “the whole of the stable
earth seemed to be suddenly set in movement, even the air grew thick
with vast overlapping shapeless shapes” (156). What was once constant
and empty is put into motion and populated. The experience overturns
Boyd Thomson’s remaining faith in definitive knowledge, as through the
intensification of his sight, the “stable” reality he thought he knew is most
profoundly revealed as an illusion.
This imagined experiment demonstrates arguments put forward by
physicists such as William Crookes against extreme empirical reasoning
like that of Mach’s. Richard Noakes explains that
procured, would even more precisely observe the true reality is beyond
everyday experience, but that always there, out of reach.
Although Boyd Thomson can later offer an explanation of what he
saw (microbes and bacilli), the experience at the time is profound and
overpowering enough to make him think twice about what he is doing;
the weird world he experiences is somewhat beyond what he can handle.
He is particularly affected by “the little things that were no longer little,
the invisible things that were invisible no longer” (156). There is indeed,
it seems, a populated reality beyond the veil of everyday experience, yet
one which contains the potential for horror that even a scientist is not
quite ready to deal with; the professor feels “grateful for the first time in
his life, for the limits set by Nature to the power of the human body”
and “could not but feel that success, taking the bit between its teeth, had
gone just a little bit too far” (156).
Nevertheless, he has not learned yet. He concludes that the logical next
step is to take all five versions of the drug at once, reasoning that with all
five senses intensified he will acquire the “supreme” power of a “demi-
god” (156). He is right about the effects, but wrong about his ability to
use them; he has not quite acquired the mastery over the physical world
he thought he had. Though alive, though “hearing, taste, touch, scent
and sights were intensified a thousandfold,” he becomes “as powerless
as a cat under kurali” (159). Thus, the professor experiences for himself
the helplessness of his own former animal experimental subjects, and his
magnified senses produce horrors: intolerable charnel scents, a distended
sense of time, earwigs and beetles appearing as giant monsters. Totally
paralysed, the professor is taken for dead. Anticipating unforeseen side-
effects, however, he has taken the precaution of leaving instructions to
his servant Parker to visit him in the family mausoleum every day for
a fortnight. Now Boyd Thomson suffers the consequence of his long-
standing failure to recognise that human emotions and their irrationality
and unpredictability matter. Parker is too spooked to enter the vault and
the Professor is left alone until saved by Lucilla, brave and loving enough
to enter the tomb and approach close enough to notice he is conscious.
As a result, with “an awakened heart” (163) and a new respect for the
value of emotional feeling, he naturally renounces his researches in favour
of marriage and farming.
However, the narrative ends with rumours that he is resuming science,
albeit confined to “extending paths already well trodden” (162). The con-
clusion is thus rather ambivalent. Well-trodden paths, after all, need not
108 E. ALDER
Conclusion
In these stories, weird realities are not amenable to conventional ways
of knowing. Once questions about how we know reality are raised, the
possibility of reality being other than what we thought can follow, and
other forms of knowledge than disinterested, objective and observable
facts about nature can and must be taken into account or revealed. Jekyll’s
indeterminate self, Machen’s often-demonic “world beyond the veil,” and
the expanded sensory reality and ocean of wisdom of Nesbit’s stories all
conceive new ontological dimensions. Knowing these extended worlds
requires the observation of the senses added to the feeling of the spirit
and undergoing some form of intellectual processing.
The nature of the self as discovered by Jekyll wouldn’t yield to a model
that separated mind or spirit from body, or distanced the researcher from
experiment, or constructed the world in neat binaries. The hidden worlds
and others with which Raymond, Black, and Nesbit’s doctor connect their
subjects can only be known by body, mind, and spirit. Success relies on
the discovery of a physiological basis to spiritual knowing, but that alone
3 WEIRD KNOWLEDGE: EXPERIMENTS, SENSES, AND EPISTEMOLOGY … 109
Notes
1. Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in
The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences,
ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 214.
2. See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the His-
tory of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Ted Benton
and Ian Craib, Philosophy of Social Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2011). On the scientific method, see Peter Kosso, A Summary of
Scientific Method (London: Springer Science & Business Media, 2011).
3. Thomas H. Huxley, “On Sensation and the Unity of Structure of Sensif-
erous Organs,” in Science and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1881), 249.
4. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 263.
5. Charles Landesman, Introduction to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell,
1997), 22.
6. John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 147.
7. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (Lon-
don: Watts & Co., 1893), 483.
8. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 259.
9. Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Soci-
ological Analysis (London: Athlone, 1996).
10. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 269.
110 E. ALDER
4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012).
23. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion,
and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company,
1888), 477.
24. William Fletcher Barrett, “Seeing Without Eyes,” in Spiritualism, Mes-
merism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psy-
chical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto,
2012), 307.
25. Richard Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” in Bod-
ies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 155.
26. On the séance and questions of evidence, see, e.g. McCorristine, “In-
troduction”; Richard Noakes, “Natural Causes? Spiritualism, Science, and
the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in The Victorian Supernatu-
ral, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Noakes, “Instruments to
Lay Hold of Spirits.”
27. Quoted in Andrew Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of
Daniel Dunglas Home,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–
1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane McCorristine (Lon-
don: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 269. On William Benjamin Carpenter,
see Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, 287–305.
28. Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas
Home,” 263.
29. Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas
Home,” 271.
30. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late
Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 68.
31. McCorristine, “Introduction,” vii.
32. Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” 8; Alex Owen, The Place of
Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 69; A [Anon.], “The Telepathy
Theory,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4,
Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 141.
33. J. J. Morse, “The Study of Psychic Phenomena. How to Investigate,”
Borderland 1, no. 2 (1894).
34. M. A. [Stainton Moses] Oxon, “How to Hold Séances,” Borderland 1,
no. 1 (1894), 53.
35. Oppenheim, Other World, 200–1.
36. Richard Noakes, “The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain,” in The
Ashgate Research Companion to Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana
Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 34.
112 E. ALDER
55. See Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’,” for discussion of the
gender and ethical issues involved in the choice of women as experimental
subjects in these two stories.
56. Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors (London: Everyman, 1995), 119.
57. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 483.
58. Edith Nesbit, “The Three Drugs,” in In the Dark (Wellingborough:
Equation, 1988), 54. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and
page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
59. A comparable situation appears in one of Blackwood’s short stories, “Max
Hensig,” in which Williams through alcohol achieves a state close to clair-
voyance that gives him, briefly, unusual perception, concentration and
motor control; Algernon Blackwood, “Max Hensig,” in The Listener and
Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907).
60. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), 302.
61. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 302.
62. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 303.
63. Nick Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” Literature and
Theology 24, no. 3 (2010), 248.
64. [Anon.], “Mediumship,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 14 (1873), 210.
65. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 303.
66. Edith Nesbit, “The Five Senses,” in In the Dark (Wellingborough: Equa-
tion, 1988), 162. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and
page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
67. Victoria Margree, “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic
Short Fiction,” Women’s Writing 21, no. 4 (2014), 437.
68. Margree, “Feminist Orientation,” 437–38.
69. Richard Noakes, “The ‘World of the Infinitely Little’: Connecting Physical
and Psychical Realities Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science Part A 39, no. 3 (2008), 324.
CHAPTER 4
researchers pursuing borderland science for their own ends, but work-
ing experts who, like Sherlock Holmes, are called upon by their clients
for help to deal with strange and dangerous phenomena. In the process,
they create a new profession based on the realising of occult and psychical
theories and practices: weirdfinding.
For Lovecraft and S. T. Joshi, the detective casebook formula is a major
flaw. For Lovecraft (who felt similarly about the Carnacki stories), the
John Silence tales are “[m]arred only by traces of the popular and conven-
tional detective-story atmosphere,” while Joshi calls Blackwood’s whole
concept of the psychic detective “grotesque”: “Blackwood, in having the
know-it-all Silence obtrude, usually at the end, with a prosy explanation
of the phenomena, introduces a fatal element of rationalism into some-
thing that should not be rationalized.”5 There is a case to be made for this
view that rationalisation spoils what would otherwise be a perfectly good
weird tale. Roger Luckhurst suggests that the problem lies in “the fusion
of opposed genres of discourse: the rule-bound, denotive statements of
science with the playfulness of literature.”6 In Carnacki the Ghost-Finder,
as we will see, Hodgson exploits the mismatch between Carnacki’s expert
truth claims and his wildly far-fetched experiences to ludic, almost paro-
dic effect. In Blackwood’s case, the Silence stories are not better at being
weird tales than, for example, “The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” and “The
Man Whom the Trees Loved.” But they can be understood as a different
kind of weird tale.
The Low, Silence, and Carnacki stories, I argue, become weird because
of the presence of the weirdfinder and his ability to identify and explain—
if not always to solve or eradicate—the haunting in question. Discussing
the popularity of story series about these figures in her Night Visitors, Julia
Briggs notes that “a character of this sort conferred a certain continuity
on diverse material while himself gaining in authority and interest.”7 His
explanation “need not detract from the terrors of the tale, since it does
not explain them away, but merely reveals some sort of logic of cause and
effect behind them.”8 The success of such a story is due to its method
of linking the weird mystery to a scary but recognisable phenomenon,
making it terrifying because, rather than despite, its having natural causes.
Thus, the horribleness of a Flaxman Low story where dreadful events turn
out to be caused by the spores of an unusual efflorescent fungus (“The
Story of Konnor Old House”) works as effectively as the one about a
zombie that can be felt and tasted but not seen (“The Story of Yand
Manor House”).
118 E. ALDER
Weirdfinders are a new kind of scientific figure, dealing with new kinds
of haunting. Literary predecessors to this figure include Sheridan Le
Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius from “Green Tea” and other stories collected in In
a Glass Darkly (1872), while Dr. Lloyd from Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange
Story is credited by Julia Briggs as “the first mesmeric doctor in English
literature, though […] he had several notable forebears in life.”9 Mike
Ashley cites Samuel Warren’s 1833 Passages from the Diary of a Late Physi-
cian as the earliest forerunner of John Silence, but notes that the premise
was “given great impetus by the creation of the SPR.”10 Like psychi-
cal research, fin-de-siècle weirdfinders arose in part from the nineteenth-
century popularity of mesmerism, but were also doing something new.
Tracing this development, Michael Cook points to the interventions made
by the Flaxman Low tales: “If the Hesselius tales were essentially ghost
fiction with a dash of pseudo-scientific thought, then the arrival of the
Flaxman Low stories saw a genuine fusion between the detective story
and supernatural fiction.”11 In the late Victorian and early Edwardian
cultural context of weirdfinding, science, gender, and ghosts were figured
differently than they had been earlier in the century. “[G]hosts, phan-
tasms, and spirits” may belong to old traditions, Peter Keating observes,
but they
also seemed new. As one commentator noted in 1900: “The old spectre of
our childhood with his clanking chains has faded into nothingness in this
age of inquiry. If he appears again it is in a new character and he must at
least be civil to the Society for Psychical Research.”12
indeed human relatives surviving in the spirit world, all was well, but
occult practices risked channelling evil personalities too, or might “urg[e]
us towards evil if our spirits are open for evil.”16 Magnetism, etheric
vibrations, forces and energies, electric instruments—such language popu-
lates discourses of physics, occultism, psychical research, and weirdfinding
alike, not only inflecting weirdfinding tales with scientific reasoning but
profoundly reshaping the nature of the hauntings weirdfinders investigate.
The weirdfinder almost invariably identifies an unconventional combi-
nation of causes producing a weird phenomenon entirely unlike ordinary
revenants. To remind of some of China Miéville’s arguments outlined in
Chapter 1, the weird enacts a rationalising of the irrational that is never-
theless unable to reduce it; it is
In this period, as British science emerged from the grip of gentleman ama-
teurs to achieve a professional status both in academe and industry, trained
scientists were likely to feel uneasy about a group like the SPR. In part,
too, the scientific profession feared that spiritualism and psychical research
threatened to reintroduce into modern science those links with magic and
the occult from which it had only recently broken free.23
The rise of spiritualism, the discovery of atomic particles, and the theories
of forces unavailable to the human eye all cast a more supernatural light on
the contemporary sciences. The scientist added to this increased paranor-
mality; professionalization was creating a scientific culture that was more
and more unintelligible for a lay audience, and with a lack of understanding
comes a sense of mystery and occult.26
rightly or wrongly, that they have a weird haunting to deal with and need
expert help. In this way, weirdfinders evade the “mad scientist” trope also
prominent at this time, a trope that, Anne Stiles describes, “traces its roots
to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in
the mid-nineteenth century” and “coincided with the growth of scien-
tific professions.”30 To an extent, Low, Silence, and Carnacki could easily
follow in the “mad scientist” vein—they are educated, intelligent, and,
like Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau (and most of the fictional scientists
I have discussed so far), “unmarried [and] single-mindedly devoted to
research.”31 Joachim Schummer’s take on the modern “mad scientist” of
the nineteenth century was that he “did harm primarily to other people
through his obsession with playing God.”32 Weirdfinders, however, set
out to help, and generally succeed. Silence, for example, takes no pay-
ment but possesses “[t]he native nobility of a soul whose first desire was
to help those who could not help themselves” (1).
It is obviously important for weirdfinding stories that their clever
experts cannot be dismissed as either mad or, as I will come to, feminine.
The clients, whether men or women, usually have unreliable or incom-
plete impressions, or incorrect theories of their own, while the weirdfind-
ers’ trained minds means what they observe and assert is accepted as fact.
Their intelligence and extensive knowledge are presented not as genius
but as a rational mind put to the discipline of solid hard work and spe-
cialist education. In Marilena Parlati’s words, they are
The men who gather at the haunted house […] resemble a hunting party,
scientific expedition, or group of military officers planning a coup against
an elusive enemy, and the house itself is constructed as a battleground, a
laboratory, or a supernatural dark continent.41
In such spaces, women and their activities are marginalised. The gen-
dered difference of women’s lived experience extends to epistemol-
ogy. Fictional women detectives, for example, as Joanna Wargen shows,
were marginalised as knowers or discoveries by androcentric nineteenth-
century scientific institutions and systems of knowledge.42
The male weirdfinders, however, are able to operate in both spheres
of masculine and feminine knowing and spirituality or, perhaps, collapse
and reconfigure them into one new sphere of operation. Andrew Smith
describes an internal crisis in hegemonic masculinity at the fin de siècle as
the dominant masculine scripts became pathologised.43 Male weirdfind-
ers use their occult and psychical expertise to combat that sense of crisis
through a construction of an alternative masculine and professional iden-
tity. Sage Lesley-McCarthy argues that “[t]he uncontested masculinity of
Flaxman Low and the other professional psychic detectives is […] intrin-
sically connected to their status as trained occultists, rather than ‘dab-
blers’ in the mystical.”44 Weirdfinders accordingly develop their mental
faculties through occult training along the lines of the Golden Dawn.
“All of the occult work within the Golden Dawn,” Susan Johnston Graf
explains, “was trained on elevation and control of consciousness,” includ-
ing “evocation” of subconscious energies and “invocation” of divine ener-
gies; “[t]he imagination and the will were the key elements of the human
psyche with which the Golden Dawn ritual magician worked.”45
Through occultism, men could regain some of the authority lost to
women with their feminine spiritual apparatus, because the occult offered
a way to be manly as well as psychical or magical. Alex Owen argues that
as “masculinity was assuming a variety of different faces” in the 1890s,
“the occult offered men the possibility of a direct spiritualized experience
of the other world that avoided the feminized connotations of spiritual-
ist mediumship.”46 Pitfalls included avoiding the passivity of the ecstatic
state, for example, through the exercise of willpower. Willpower, Owen
notes,
guarantor of manly health and efficacy. […] Within occult circles, however,
the will was to be tutored and honed as the essential attribute of the
magician regardless of distinction of sex.47
With a view to meeting the widespread interest in these matters, the fol-
lowing series of ghost stories is laid before the public. They have been
126 E. ALDER
and Low saves the third. Low’s explanation of the haunting could have
come straight out of “Multiplex Personality”:
As we will see, Low takes his psychological investigations deep into the
spiritual and the occult. Psychology, he tells us
Road,” the haunter is an “Elemental Earth Spirit,” which are things that
“absorb the vitality of any ailing person until it is exhausted” and are
“animated solely by a blind malignity to the human race.”54 Such ele-
mental spirits sit closer to the weird notion of outer monstrosities, and
similar explanations are offered in some of Blackwood’s tales, such as
the Silence story “The Nemesis of Fire.” Low distances himself from the
occultist account of these spirits, however. He refers to his “own research-
es” into the relationship between “atmospheric influences,” gases, and
spiritual phenomena “generated when certain of the primary formations
are newly exposed to the common air,” adding atmospheric chemistry to
his repertoire of scientific knowledge (“Moor Road,” 256). In this way,
Low “defines the supernatural in his reality.”55 Weird phenomena exist,
as a natural part of this world.
Low’s own personality helps make a weird construction of reality seem
rational and acceptable. He is presented as a calm, unflappable presence,
reassuring to his clients and called upon because he is “the sort of man
one could rely on in almost any emergency” (“Spaniards,” 61). When Mr.
Swaffam tries to goad him that “‘you don’t look sufficiently high-strung
for one of your profession’[,] Mr Low merely bowed” (“Baelbrow,” 369).
As Schaper puts it, he is a “seasoned ghostbuster whose confrontations
with household haunts affirm his masculinity rather than feminizing him”
and the stories demonstrate that “only a man in full command of him-
self can safely confront the supernatural.”56 Low is unafraid to confront
weird phenomena, however horrible some of them certainly are. That is
not to say he is never scared, but he has the willpower to keep control
of himself. As the opening narration to “The Story of Saddler’s Croft”
explains, “[e]xtremely few persons are sufficiently masters of themselves
to permit of their calling in the vast unknown forces outside ordinary
human knowledge for mere purposes of amusement” (176). Low’s work
is no casual hobby, and he is no passive instrument; he is trained to deal
masterfully with the unthinkable.
As a professional, Low is distinguished to a significant degree from his
often-hapless client. In “Saddler’s Croft,” an American woman with an
interest in spiritualism, Mrs. Corcoran, is lured in her sleep to a temple
in the garden haunted by the powerful spirit of a Greek man, Agapoulos,
which takes physical form by possessing the body of a local gentleman,
Sinclair. Flaxman Low is able to explain and disrupt these circumstances,
persuading the Corcorans to move house and undertaking to close “what
may be called the doors of life” in Sinclair’s spirit or psyche that had,
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 129
when open, made him vulnerable (185). In the events of the story, Mrs.
Corcoran and Sinclair take on the passive role of medium. Mrs. Corcoran
enters trances in which she sings and sleepwalks, while Sinclair (as Low
later explains):
It was only by an immense effort of will that he was able to throw off
the trance that was stealing over him, holding him prisoner – how nearly a
willing prisoner he shudders to remember. But habits of self-control have
been Low’s only shield in many a dangerous hour. (183)
Low pushed out his hands with a mad longing to touch a table, a chair,
anything but this clammy, swelling softness that thrust itself upon him from
every side, baffling him and filling his grasp.
His feet were slipping in his wild efforts to feel the floor – the dank flesh
was creeping upon his neck, his cheek – his breath came short and labour-
ing as the pressure swung him gently to and fro, helpless, nauseated!59
The skeleton is now in the museum of one of our city hospitals. It bears
a scientific ticket, and is the only evidence extant of the correctness of
Mr. Flaxman Low’s methods and the possible truth of his extraordinary
theories. (69)
132 E. ALDER
Cook, drawing on Sarah Crofton, points out a gap in the logic here:
that attributing the murderous ghost to this skeleton is inference, not
the proof expected from a trail of clues readable by the detective, and
still needing a leap of faith to believe in the weird.61 Cook argues, how-
ever, that the reliance on inference, the stories’ “partial compliance” with
detective fiction conventions, and the “broken chain of clues” are signifi-
cant:
The gap between an intuitive leap and logical deduction makes a space
for the weird, wherein exists another construction of the world, one only
partially comprehensible or amenable to scientific truth claims—and that
is the way it should be, leaving us on the limits of the known.
The real-world evidence and “casebook” presentation of Low’s stories
are narrative devices to bolster their authenticity, and through that the
authenticity of his particular brand of psychical science. The stories work
satisfyingly partly because the solution to the puzzle is not obvious—
the haunting is never a traditional ghost but always an unexpected com-
bination. Although Low can explain everything, the phenomenon first
presents itself as an inexplicable weird encounter that seems to defy nat-
ural law but yet leaves empirical evidence. Low’s explanations arguably
contain and neutralise weirdness, but in doing so, they also acknowledge
that reality is not what we thought it was. The “standard of reality,” as
an Algernon Blackwood character would later put it, has changed.63 The
weird is real; a male scientist, occultist, professional detective says so, with
unquestionable authority.
to be the real ghost (she had been lied to about the nature of the haunt-
ing). The encounter is at first terrifying, and she declares “I was an utter
fool to go in for psychical research when I had not the necessary nerve.”65
What she does have, however, is the necessary sympathy to provide what
the ghost wants to release him from his liminal state: love. Since he is
“well dressed, youngish and good looking, but with a face of great sad-
ness,” responding to the request isn’t all that difficult. Feelings of pity and
love released by his demand sway her to kiss him in “a momentary ecstasy
of flaming sweetness and wonder” (348), and the house is left empty.
Here, the narrator’s feminine capacities of feeling are what enable her
to identify and then exorcise the ghost, not her intellectual control. It
is a “woman’s” ghost story in more ways than one—she tells her own
story and solves her own case successfully within the domestic space of an
ordinary house. It is a case particularly suited to her femininity, requir-
ing emotion and sympathy rather than strong will and reasoning. In the
end, she decides not to bother her uncle with the true story and thus
avoids subjecting the situation to rational mansplaining. All in all, her
method of dealing with the haunting is an almost exact inverse of that of
Flaxman Low’s. The contrast fulfils Susan Schaper’s argument that when
“female characters subdue household ghosts with their feminine compas-
sion, they demonstrate the power of the domestic woman,” while “the
ultimate source of cultural authority lay not in essential middle-class fem-
ininity but in essential masculine ‘animal instincts’ governed by rational
self-discipline.”66
Blackwood’s own psychic doctor character, John Silence, however, has
it all: the nerve and the sympathy, the intellect and the intuition. He is not
quite such a man of action as Low, but combines sympathy and willpower
to diagnose and assist his clients and, where necessary, to subdue weird
phenomena.
John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) was Blackwood’s first big
success as a writer, enabling him the financial independence to move to
Switzerland. The book published the first five stories. “A Psychical Inva-
sion,” “The Nemesis of Fire,” and “The Camp of the Dog” all centre on
a case investigated by Silence himself, while “Ancient Sorceries” and “Se-
cret Worship,” according to Blackwood’s biographer Mike Ashley, were
probably written earlier with Silence “grafted on to the story in a final
revision.”67 A sixth story, “A Victim of Higher Space,” was added to the
134 E. ALDER
collection later.68 I focus mainly here on the first story, “A Psychical Inva-
sion,” which outlines Silence’s background and the methods he uses in
the six cases that unfold.
Blackwood’s conception of the more-than-visible world was a realm
not of (human) ghosts or souls but of far greater powers or energies.
In “The Genesis of Ideas” (1937), Blackwood recalled that as a child he
“longed to see a ghost” and later “to understand what faculty enabled one
to see a ghost, or, rather, be aware of any ‘other-worldly’ manifestation at
all.”69 He held that awareness of the expanded world was based in con-
sciousness: “My interest lay then in the extension of human faculty, and in
the possibility that the mind has powers which only manifest themselves
occasionally. And this interest is even stronger in me today than ever.”70
Developing the mind’s faculties gives the practitioner capacity for agency
in relation to the more-than-visible world, in contrast to the latent talents
and passive, controllable sensitivity that might typically attend a spiritual-
ist medium. Belief in these possibilities had scientific support, Blackwood
explained:
concepts influence several of his novels; John Silence is one possible work-
ing out for Blackwood, through fiction, of what neither occult teachings
nor science alone could provide.76
The weird is as real in Silence’s world as it is in Flaxman Low’s. He
doesn’t deny the existence of strange phenomena, but he rejects both nor-
mal scientific and normal superstitious explanations; Cook remarks that,
“in Blackwood’s stories, the question of the existence of the supernatural
world is not in doubt.”77 However, the terminology is misleading. For
Blackwood, Ashley makes clear,
Silence, in the same vein as Low, explains exactly this point in “Nemesis
of Fire”: “I have yet to come across a problem that is not natural and
has not a natural explanation. It’s merely a question of how much one
knows – and admits.”79 Like other Blackwood characters such as Bittacy
in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and O’Malley in The Centaur
(1911), Silence has learned how to step beyond the everyday world and
see the whole—and, unlike these others, how to do so safely and return
unaltered. As he explains to his client in “A Psychical Invasion,” he has
been “inoculated” (34) (unlike Bittacy, O’Malley, and Defago in “The
Wendigo,” who are transformed).
Silence is a unique model. His advanced skills and knowledges—
including medicine, mathematics, anthropology, psychical research, and
occultism—are moulded into a role suited to dealing with the weird
more-than-visible world and legible in specifically Edwardian cultural con-
texts of masculinity, imperialism, and professional expertise. Mark De
Cicco, in a discussion of Silence’s techniques, has argued that “Silence,
while taking similar risks to our other occult scientists, manages to make
use of occult science to harness queer, supernatural forces and to ulti-
mately bring balance to a world that threatens to fall out of sync.”80 De
Cicco’s elaboration of the “queer” to describe what is strange and dif-
ferent in the world compared to consensus normality works well as an
expression of the weird, although he never calls it that. His term for fig-
ures like Silence is “occult explorer,” into which he co-opts, if not the
136 E. ALDER
most obvious choices for comparison, our old friends Dr. Jekyll and Dr.
Raymond. The risks Silence takes may be similar in some ways to Jekyl-
l’s, but they are not to Raymond’s: Raymond puts other people fatally at
risk, never himself. While De Cicco is right about Silence’s role in making
the world a better place by smoothing over weird irruptions (and leaving
aside the point already made that queer or weird forces in Blackwood are
not “supernatural”), Silence is more than an occult scientist.
“A Psychical Invasion” emphasises Silence’s dislike of uncritical con-
ceptions of science and of being associated with either mainstream
medicine or with occultism. For example, he has “a clear knowledge of
the difference between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychi-
cal affliction that claimed his special powers” (4). Such an affliction is
both medical and in need of the help of something “special” and mys-
terious. The horrors encountered by Silence’s clients go beyond every-
day maladies, yet are to be taken seriously, and so his abilities must
go beyond familiar skills and knowledge. When his visitor in the open-
ing scene attempts to praise his “sympathetic heart and knowledge of
occultism” and he interrupts her with “please – that dreadful word!” she
amends her phrasing to “your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained
psychic knowledge” (1, italics original). A man of latent talents combined
with training is how she sees him in more precise terms than the slippery
catch-all “occultism.” Silence’s learning has taken him far beyond any of
his contemporaries, beyond the Golden Dawn and beyond the Society for
Psychical Research. He calls the SPR’s classificatory work “uninspired,”
yet pities them because he’s too kind to show contempt: “For the modern
psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the ‘man who knows’”
(“A Psychical Invasion,” 4).
What is it, then, that Silence “knows”? His clients call him “the psychic
doctor,” and the texts regularly identify him as “the doctor,” emphasising
his role as a medical practitioner. In the framework of the story, psychi-
cal knowledge is evidently advanced enough that methods can be taught
and doctors trained, just like any other science. No one, we are told,
“ever dreamed of applying to him the easily acquired epithet of quack”
(3–4). Silence has evidently succeeded in creating a convincing new med-
ical field. Yet he has undergone rigorous training in the weird, too: “In
order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted him-
self to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual”
(3). His training has taken place at exactly the point where distinctions
between these three ways of knowing collapse into one. At the same time,
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 137
it remains beyond public ken: “What precisely this training had been or
where undergone, no one seemed to know […] it had involved a total dis-
appearance from the world for five years” (3). The hermetic secrecy sug-
gests an occult training like that offered by the Golden Dawn, and Graf
describes Silence as “an exemplar of adepthood.”81 Members believed,
Graf explains, “that the knowledge and experience gained by attaining
the higher grades actually meant that the candidate was evolving spiritu-
ally and psychically.”82
If so, Silence has taken that evolution to a unique extreme; as far as we
can tell, his training was not a shared activity, since he seems to be the only
one of his kind. He is “the one man in all the world who can understand,
and sympathize,” exclaims Mr. Mudge, the “Victim of Higher Space”
(and a man who should know, since he travels multiple dimensions and
has potentially been everywhere at once).83 Silence, certainly, has devel-
oped beyond the need for systematic, ritual practices; as he explains,
the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that
thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.
“Learn how to think,” he would have expressed it, “and you have learned
to tap power at its source.” (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)
The simplicity of his skill separates Silence from both ritual occult prac-
tice and conventional scientific practice. For Silence, summarises Smajìc,
“[i]mpressions received through the inner senses are more reliable than
corporeal sensations, and one must be careful not to distort the former
with deductive reasoning.”84 Silence’s superior abilities may be down to
his training, but he also values intuition, and surrounds himself with ser-
vants and staff who possess it (including Hubbard in “The Nemesis of
138 E. ALDER
Fire” and “The Camp of the Dog,” and Barker in “A Victim of Higher
Space”).
Silence’s first visitor in “A Psychical Invasion” stresses the value of his
“sympathetic heart” alongside his knowledge, and physical descriptions
of Silence draw out his sympathy as well as his intellectual control. Two
descriptions are worth quoting fairly fully. His eyes are “speaking” and in
them
shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence, while at the same time
they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen most often in the
eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the mouth without disguising the
grim determination of lips and jaw, and the face somehow conveyed an
impression of transparency, almost of light, so delicately were the features
refined away. […] from his manner, – so gentle, quiet, sympathetic, – few
could have guessed the strength of purpose that burned within like a great
flame. (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)
The absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression
of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth,
but also, as I well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the mask-like face
of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at
any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. (192–3)
Both descriptions combine the knowledge and control of the expert, the
feminised delicacy and sympathy of the sensitive medium, and a masculine
strength and determination. His personality is the epitome of Schaper’s
“essential masculine ‘animal instincts’ governed by rational self-discipline”
quoted earlier.
The development of mental control and the power of the will is cen-
tral to Silence’s successes, but so too is his capacity to sympathise with his
clients’ suffering (which helps lead him to a better understanding of their
case) and his ability to turn his own mind and body into a sensitive medi-
umistic instrument, as he does in “A Psychical Invasion.” In this case,
Silence investigates why his client, a man named Pender, is being haunted
by ancient evil forces emanating from his house and channelled through
his body. Pender has no control over this; it is happening unluckily while
he is under the influence of drugs. Silence describes Pender’s state as “a
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 139
absorb into himself the forces opposed to him and to turn them to his own
account. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into
him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus
enormously increased his own. (64)
The convoluting shadows about the ring were taking shape […] the brute
was coming through – pouring into the material world, as gas might pour
out from the mouth of a pipe. […] I saw that it was the Hand, vast and
nearly perfect in form. (53)
The presence of the ring inside the Pentacle turns the protective circle
into a place of danger. Carnacki’s own action has enabled the monster
to subvert the weirdfinder’s most powerful defence, in a “distortion of
that occult staple, the magic circle, such that it becomes both techno-
logical and a portal, enabling the irruption of the weird,” undermining
any sense of firm borders between self and other, this world and that.96
Accordingly, the positions of Carnacki and the Hand are inverted. The
weirdfinder escapes by leaping out over the Electric Pentacle, leaving the
monster “chained, as surely as any beast would be” (53). He has con-
tained the menace, but not exactly defeated it. Only in the safety of the
morning can he end its existence as well by destroying the ring itself.
Appropriately for their ambiguous nature and disregard for ontological
borders, Carnacki’s monsters must be tackled on both a material and psy-
chical level and require the weirdfinder to draw on a blend of different
sets of knowledge.
The giant lips and the ghostly hand may partly function as spiritual-
ist manifestations, but they are also occult forces; Luckhurst argues that
“Carnacki’s protective pentacle, his conjuring of malicious forces, and his
references to the authority of medieval manuscripts owe more to the rites
associated with the Order of the Golden Dawn than psychical research.”97
The Golden Dawn, based on knowledge derived from supposed transla-
tions of ancient manuscripts and ciphers, required initiates to learn eso-
teric texts and ritual practice in detail, often with the goal of incarnat-
ing spiritual powers. “Golden Dawn magic,” Graf describes, “worked
through the embodiment of cosmic energy in talismans and symbols,”
and R. A. Gilbert gives the examples of the “Rituals of the Pentagram
and Hexagram, for the invocation and banishment of assorted spirits.”98
In Theosophy, too, symbols such as circles, crosses, and the five-pointed
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 145
star used in ceremonial magic each had their own significance.99 In the
early twentieth century, Egil Asprem details, Aleister Crowley worked par-
ticularly hard at framing the occult scientifically, publishing scientific test
methods for magic in The Equinox between 1909 and 1917, and devising
a dedicated system for the naturalistic proof of visions, spirit communica-
tions, and other occult phenomena.100 Carnacki’s Pentacle and associated
rituals reflect these practices.
Carnacki, following in the footsteps of his weirdfinder, doctor, and
detective predecessors, is presented as a professional too much respected
to function as a Crowley figure exactly. Nevertheless, he is a modern
occult scientist, who both admits his faith in the “old magic figure” of
the pentacle and cites repeated tests and observations as his evidence. “I
ask questions, and keep my eyes open,” he says, seeing himself as the
“twentieth century man” of scientific approach who will not dismiss the
evidence of his own experience (45).
Yet it is questionable how seriously we are meant to take Carnacki,
whose name alludes to an ancient Egyptian temple, Karnak, suggesting
a level of artifice in even the diegetic construction of his identity.101 In
“The Thing Invisible,” Carnacki explains that
most people never quite know how much or how little they believe of mat-
ters ab-human or ab-normal, and generally they never have an opportunity
to learn […] I am as big a sceptic concerning the truth of ghost tales
as you are likely to meet; only I am what I might term an unprejudiced
sceptic.102
a horrible sense that something was moving in the place […] I had a kind
of intuitive knowledge that something had stirred in the darkness” (22).
Later still, he describes himself as “listening with body and soul” (25)
and feeling the “sheer, actual physical pain attendant upon, and resulting
from, the intense nerve strain that ghostly fright sets up in the human
system” (26).
In this way, Carnacki dresses up his tale in a scientised discourse draw-
ing its authority from spiritualist experience, ghost story traditions, occult
forces, and empirical sensory knowing, deliberately leading us to expect
and accept the phenomenon as a “true manifestation.” “[N]inety-nine
cases in a hundred,” Carnacki tells his unquestioning friends, “turn out
to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth! Well, if it were not for
the hundredth, I should have few stories to tell” (16). And yet the case
he’s about to recount to them, it turns out, is one of the ninety-nine:
the dagger in the chapel is propelled by a hidden mechanism. The ninety-
nine cases evidently can offer stories just as good as the hundredth, as
well as shedding doubt on it. “The Thing Invisible” raises questions over
what is meant be taken as real in Carnacki’s stories; his personal bodily
and mental experience in the chapel clearly can have nothing to do with
mysterious outside forces, but is almost identical to what he undergoes in
the Grey Room in “Gateway of the Monster” which is really haunted. Or
perhaps what is “real” is all in the telling.
Compounding the uncertainty is the way Carnacki builds up his knowl-
edge from (invented) occult sources—the study of esoteric rituals, ancient
manuscripts, like the “Sigsand MS,” and obscure, implicitly recent works
such as “Professor Garder’s “Experiments with a Medium” (“Gateway
of the Monster,” 45) or “Harzan’s Monograph, and my Addenda to
it, on Astral and Astral Co-ordination and Interference.”103 Sometimes
his audience cite these back to him: Arkwright asks “have you any idea
what governs the use of the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Rit-
ual? I know, of course, that it was used by the Ab-human Priests in the
Incantation of Raaaee” (“Whistling Room”, 86). Are these details well-
known facts in Arkwright’s wider world, are they secret, esoteric knowl-
edge shared by this little circle of initiates and perhaps others—or does he
but parrot it after spending so many evenings sitting in Carnacki’s dining
room? Carnacki’s four friends (Arkwright, Dodgson, Jessop, and Taylor—
they never vary) are entirely credulous. “What talks they were!” enthuses
Dodgson; “Stories of all kinds and true in every word, yet full of weird
and extraordinary incidents that held one silent and awed until he had
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 147
Conclusion
Whether detected by an instrument or experienced by a body, weird phe-
nomena in these tales are demonstrably real. The mysteries often look
familiar at first, but under the weirdfinders’ explanations, hauntings are
revealed to operate in unconventional combinations (of mind, body, and
spirit, or mummy and vampire). Their investigation is required to make
the haunting reveal itself as a weird phenomenon. Weirdfinders are “men
who know”; they understand the possibilities of other realms of exis-
tence and their combined physical and psychical knowledge proves there
is no divide between the spiritual and material worlds. Carnacki may
use technological devices as well, but all three weirdfinders involve their
own persons in their investigations: they go to experience the phenom-
ena for themselves in order to know it. In their persons, they are both
active agents and sensitive systems. Rather than being passive instruments
requiring expert control, they retain their own agencies, calibrating their
bodies and maintaining their power of will.
150 E. ALDER
Between them, these weirdfinding stories stage both the success and
the failure of positivist science to explain and contain the phenomena
of the universe, and attempt to align borderland science with the main-
stream, turning what they do into a respectable and successful profes-
sion. All the same, the weirdfinders are often severely menaced by weird
phenomena and may escape rather than defeat them. In some ways,
weirdfinding brings these characters closer to the limits of human know-
ing than any other practice—and allows them to return to tell the tale.
Notes
1. Others include E. W. Hornung’s Dr. John Dollar in The Crime Doctor
(1914) and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (1914) by Alice and Claude Askew;
see Sage Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective: Progress,
Professionalisation and the Occult in Psychic Detective Fiction from the
1880s to the 1920s” (diss., Griffith University, 2007).
2. E. and H. Heron, Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist, Collected Stories
(Project Gutenberg of Australia, 2006).
3. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision
in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010); Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult
Explorer of the Fin de Siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23,
no. 1 (2012); Marilena Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues: Tales
of Detection in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction,” European Journal of
English Studies 15, no. 3 (2011).
4. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (New York: Dover,
1973), 75.
5. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 75; S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur
Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose
Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990),
115.
6. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 187.
7. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London: Faber, 1977), 59.
8. Briggs, Night Visitors, 59–60.
9. Briggs, Night Visitors, 59. For discussion of Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange
Story and “The Haunters and the Haunted” as tales of scientific inves-
tigation of the marvellous, see Mark Knight, “‘The Haunted and the
Haunters’: Bulwer Lytton’s Philosophical Ghost Story,” Nineteenth-
Century Contexts 28, no. 3 (2006).
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 151
10. Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Black-
wood (London: Constable, 2001), 135.
11. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2014), 16.
12. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel
1875–1914 (London: Fontana, 1991), 362, 360.
13. William Barrett, “Appendix to Report on Thought Reading,” Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882), 62.
14. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Death, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 4, italics orig-
inal.
15. Luckhurst, Telepathy, 189–90.
16. J. M. Gully, “Some Experiences and Conclusions Regarding Spiritualism,
No. V,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 14 (1873), 211; see Janet Oppenheim,
The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 165.
17. Joan Gordon and China Miéville, “Revelling in Genre: An Interview
with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies (2003), 368.
18. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists; Cook, Detective Fiction
and the Ghost Story, 2.
19. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 14.
20. Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny,
and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 39.
21. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 187.
22. The word “scientist” is credited to William Whewell. On the creation
of new professional labels, see David Cahan, “Looking at Nineteenth-
Century Science: An Introduction,” in From Natural Philosophy to the
Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David
Cahan (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); on pro-
fessionalisation of scientists, see Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and
Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth
Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006).
23. Oppenheim, Other World, 202.
24. See Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and
the Magical Exploration of Edwardian Subjectivity,” Journal of British
Studies 36, no. 1 (1997); Egil Asprem, “Magic Naturalized? Negotiating
Science and Occult Experience in Aleister Crowley’s Scientific Illuminism
La Magie ‘Naturalisée’? De La Négociation Entre Science Et Expérience
Occulte Dans L’Illuminisme Scientifique D’Aleister Crowley,” Aries 8,
no. 2 (2008).
25. Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion,” in John Silence: Physician
Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 1. All subsequent quo-
tations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in
the text.
152 E. ALDER
46. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture
of the Modern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 88.
47. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 88. Annie Besant succeeded Blavatsky as
Theosophy president, for example, and Florence Farr rose through the
Golden Dawn’s senior ranks to become Praemonstrator after William
Wescott; see R. A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn: The Rise
and Fall of a Magical Order (Slough: Quantum, 1997), 140–48.
48. W. T. Stead, Real Ghost Stories: A Record of Authentic Apparitions (Lon-
don, 1891); For an overview of the Flaxman Low stories, see Neil Wil-
son, Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction, 1820–
1950 (British Library, 2000).
49. E. and H. Heron, “No. I—The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,”
Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898), 60. All subsequent quotations are from
this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
50. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. II—The Story of Saddler’s
Croft,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 176. All subsequent quotations
are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
51. E. and H. Heron, “No. IV—The Story of Baelbrow,” Pearson’s Maga-
zine 5 (1898), 366. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and
page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
52. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. I—The Story of Sevens Hall,”
Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 37. All subsequent quotations are from
this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
53. Robert Perret, “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist,” in Victorian Detec-
tives in Contemporary Culture (Springer, 2017), 78.
54. E. and H. Heron, “No. III—The Story of the Moor Road,” Pearson’s
Magazine 5 (1898), 255–56. All subsequent quotations are from this
edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
55. Robert Perret, “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist,” 83.
56. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 10–11.
57. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 16.
58. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. VI—The Story of Mr. Flaxman
Low,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 585. All subsequent quotations are
from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
59. E. and H. Heron, “No. VI—The Story of Yand Manor House,” Pear-
son’s Magazine 5 (1898), 587. All subsequent quotations are from this
edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.
60. Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective,” 169.
61. See Sarah Crofton, “Csψ: Occult Detectives of the Fin de Siècle and
the Interpretation of Evidence,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 30, no. 2
(2012), 36.
62. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 20.
154 E. ALDER
63. Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 153.
64. Joshi, indeed, describes Blackwood as “quite frankly the most wholesome
and cheerful horror writer I know of” (Weird Tale, 89).
65. Algernon Blackwood, “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” in The Listener and
Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 341. All subsequent quo-
tations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in
the text.
66. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 12.
67. For discussion of the production and impact of the book, see Ashley,
Starlight Man, 131.
68. Algernon Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space” (1914), no
pages, accessed 29 August 2018, http://www.luminist.org/archives/
blackwood_victim.htm.
69. Algernon Blackwood, “The Genesis of Ideas” (1937), reprinted in Stud-
ies in Weird Fiction 27 (2005), 35.
70. Blackwood, “Genesis of Ideas,” 3.
71. Blackwood, “Genesis of Ideas,” 3.
72. For discussion of this possibility see Ashley, Starlight Man; Graf, Talking
to the Gods, 83.
73. For a detailed study of Machen, Blackwood, and the Golden Dawn, see
Graf, Talking to the Gods.
74. Joshi, Weird Tale, 116.
75. Ashley, Starlight Man, 135.
76. See Graf, Talking to the Gods, 85–98 for discussion of The Human Chord,
The Promise of Air, Bright Messenger, Julius Le Vallon, and The Centaur
in the context of the Golden Dawn. See also this book, Chapter 6.
77. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 21.
78. Ashley, Starlight Man, 53.
79. Algernon Blackwood, “The Nemesis of Fire,” in John Silence: Physi-
cian Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 173. All subsequent
quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets
in the text.
80. De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 18.
81. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 14.
82. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 9.
83. Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space.”
84. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 191.
85. De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 21.
86. Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues,” 212.
87. Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponder-
able (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 16.
88. Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues,” 214.
4 WEIRDFINDERS: REALITY, MASTERY, AND THE OCCULT … 155
of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to
indicate their location in reality.”4 Moreau’s island, for example, is legi-
ble in these terms. It is simultaneously a place and outside of all places,
overturning the structures and assumptions of the culture from which he
is exiled.
The novel’s preface, written by Prendick’s nephew, frames the narra-
tive with careful ambiguity, making the island into “a liminal space at
the border between fiction and reality,” existing simultaneously within
and beyond the confines of current marine cartography.5 The date and
coordinates of Prendick’s rescue are precisely reported, a possible island
(Noble’s Isle) is suggested as the location of Moreau’s laboratory, and
the existence of the Ipecacuanha and its cargo is confirmed. Payal Taneja
makes the valuable point that although Moreau “isolates himself culturally
and intellectually from the scientists in London, he maintains an economic
connection” with the British Empire and its trade network which supplies
his animals.6 Neither island nor story are entirely divorced from social
and geographic realities, but exist on their fringes. Despite these circum-
stances, however, empirical evidence is missing; no creatures resembling
Beast People are found on the island to support Prendick’s story. The bot-
tom line is, as Prendick’s nephew puts it, simply that “my uncle passed
out of human knowledge […] and reappeared in the same part of the
ocean after a space of eleven months” (2). Prendick’s story is received as
“demented” (1), and, afterwards, he claims memory loss, undermining
the sense of veracity the Preface at first appears to construct.
Hodgson’s sea stories use islands and ships in similar ways. For Fou-
cault, a ship is a “heterotopia par excellence […] a floating piece of space,
a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at
the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.”7 Ships at sea exist
between known places, and Hodgson’s and Wells’s ships and dinghies
convey their protagonists into liminal spaces. In “The Derelict,” a storm
drives the ship whose crew discovers the metamorphosed hulk into an
unknown area of the ocean; the story takes place off the known charts
and the discovery could never, except by another chance encounter, be
verified. In “The Voice in the Night,” an unidentified island is the space
in which two castaways encounter a tempting monstrous fungus. Fog con-
ceals the fungus-man castaway and his rowing boat from the shipboard
narrator and his companions, sustaining the story’s suspense and ambigu-
ity. Hodgson’s choice of fungus as his material for monster manufacture,
as we will see, has its own particular liminality.
162 E. ALDER
If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren
in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine – our slaves in the most labo-
rious works, our companions in our amusements – they may partake [of?]
our origin in one common ancestor – we may be all melted together.8
His weird tales posit a fundamental similarity between all forms of life and
elevate humble cryptogams to the complexity of mammals.
Darwin’s work, as previous scholars have established, infused
nineteenth-century culture, “feeding an extraordinary range of disciplines
beyond its own original biological field,” including literature.15 The
image of animal shapes melted together suggests a collapse of the limits
of not only human but all species identity. Creatures’ bodies possessed an
“essential mutability”; evolution by natural selection suggested that “any
morphic transmutation was possible, given time, chance, and species vari-
ability.”16 Species’ instability and the theoretical potential for any shape of
living creature to evolve opened new conceptual spaces which speculative
writers like Wells and Hodgson could populate with monsters and other
strange life forms.
The project of exploring shared physicality between species belonged
to more areas of biology than evolutionary theory alone. Wells’s own
anatomical Textbook of Biology (1892) demonstrates observable similari-
ties of groups of animals such as mammals through dissection of a rabbit.
Other fields, including Louis Pasteur’s work in microbiology and Anton
de Bary’s studies in mycology, along with cell biology, physiology, and
anatomy, suggested the same situation. In his 1905 biography of Haeckel,
Wilhelm Bölsche recalls how the cell-state theory of German biologist
Rudolf Virchow transformed understanding of the organisation of living
organisms in the 1870s. If the life of the human body was “merely the
sum of the vital processes and functions of [its] millions of individual
cells,” Bölsche reflects, there was “nothing to prevent us from thinking
that in the combination of these various cells into communities each of
them brought with it its little psychic individuality”; in short, “is not what
we call ‘the soul’ really the product of the millions upon millions of sep-
arate souls of these cells?”17 If human souls existed and had a biological
basis, it must be in cells and therefore be shared with any cellular organ-
ism. If not, what’s left is an eerie failure of presence: no soul, and the
barren prospect of a wholly material existence.
To recognise biological closeness between, rather than only within,
the Linnean kingdoms of life was to question the security of human
superiority within the animal kingdom, as well as the primacy of ani-
mals more generally amongst species. The baffling interstitial existence
of slime moulds, fungi, and lichen—cryptogams—cast doubts on the rest
of the implied hierarchy of the tree of life, too. The radically destabilising
potential of biology in the nineteenth century ran wide and deep. But so
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 165
Moreau draws the disapprobation not only of the public but also of the
scientific community, which “turns its back on Moreau for tarnishing the
reputation of scientific investigation.”28 Willis sees The Island of Doctor
Moreau neither as anti-vivisectionist nor as unequivocally supporting the
state of institutionalised science in the 1890s, but as a critical narrative
that promotes publicly accountable advancement of scientific knowledge.
The novel shows Moreau
By marginalising Moreau and pushing his activities out of sight, the public
and scientific communities are implicated in their terrible results. More-
au’s experiments are displaced from their original urban context and freed
from the public reactions that impede scientific investigation, but also reg-
ulate them. In the counter-site of his island heterotopia, everything about
his experiments intensifies—their horror as well as their success, the pos-
sibilities of vivisection as well as its drawbacks, the decrease in Moreau’s
accountability and the rise of his power.
For Moreau, the possibilities of his experiments are tremendously sig-
nificant and exciting. As early reviews of Doctor Moreau showed, as critical
studies locating the novel within the gothic tradition have explored, and
as Prendick often experiences, the Beast People generate a sense of mon-
strous terror through their violations and blendings of normative human
and animal forms and behaviours.30 However, the Beast People are not,
as Prendick first thinks, degenerated humans, but artificially developed
animals with the potential to be something more than either. A sense of
Moreau’s excitement surfaces in Wells’s speculative essay “The Limits of
Individual Plasticity” (1895). This essay shares both words and underlying
ideas with his 1896 novel. In it, Wells sets out the physiological princi-
ples that Moreau fictionally puts into action: “a living being may,” Wells
wrote, “be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that
may be shaped and altered […] and the organism as a whole developed
far beyond its apparent possibilities.”31 There are no essential differences
between the “raw materials” of living forms, only in the organisation of
that matter. As T. H. Huxley, too, suggested in “On the Physical Basis
168 E. ALDER
of Life,” a basic “protoplasm […] is the clay of the potter; which, bake
it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by
nature, from the commonest brick.”32
For Wells, likewise, the direction of material plasticity need not be left
to the blind chance of natural selection, for, “[i]f we concede the justi-
fications of vivisection, we may imagine as possible in the future, oper-
ators, armed with an antiseptic surgery and a growing perfection in the
knowledge of the laws of growth, taking living creatures and moulding
them into the most amazing forms.”33 Like Moreau, Wells emphasises
the potential of vivisection as a path towards “perfection” of organisms
that are not terrible but “amazing.” David Hughes and Robert Philmus
see Wells’s essay as an expression of his commitment to the capacity of
human science to take ethical control of evolution, while Doctor Moreau
“satirically balance(s) the ‘plastic’ possibilities of the organism against the
limitations inherent by nature in it.”34 The novel does function as a gothic
evolutionary satire through Moreau’s ultimate failure and the regressions
of the Beast People and the human characters. But it also does more.
Moreau’s ambitions look towards progression and advancement, align-
ing him with the other scientists of weird fiction and the weird’s progen-
erate impulses. He too is set apart from ordinary scientists not only by
his techniques but also by the scope of his vision and ambition. Before
his exile, Moreau was a “prominent and masterful physiologist […] well
known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination” (42). Pain,
as Moreau later explains to Prendick, is a vital component of his creative
project. The “bath of burning pain” that is vivisection will “burn out all
the animal,” creating not just a human but a perfected human: a “rational
creature” (106). As Martin Danahay argues, Moreau’s project is essen-
tially eugenic; he aims not to humanise animals but “to erase ‘animal’
altogether through the instruments of pain and death […] the ‘coming
man’ evolves beyond the body and the animal.”35 Moreau’s experiments
are no ordinary explorations in vivisection; their controversial qualities
consist in their challenge to humanity’s relationship to its fleshly existence
rather than in animal suffering. The “rational creature” Moreau hopes to
produce would have none of the animal traits borne by human beings,
and yet this being of pure reason would be made entirely of animal flesh,
and therefore be contaminated by no traces of soul or grace either.
Occult discourse sought to collapse the distinction between spirit and
matter by constructing the more-than-visible world as a super-physical
extension of the known world. Doctor Moreau seeks the same end, but in
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 169
them briefly as he flees what he believes to be the prospect of his own vivi-
section at Moreau’s hands. They reappear a few chapters later, as Prendick
recounts:
Unlike the Beast People, these creatures do not inspire horror, revulsion,
or uncanny feelings of recognition in Prendick. Instead, Prendick exam-
ines “rather a pretty little creature; and, as Montgomery stated that it
never destroyed the turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits,
I should imagine it might provide a convenient substitute for the com-
mon rabbit in gentlemen’s parks” (118). These creatures are twice man-
ufactured. They are “made of the offspring of the Beast People,” but are
presented without a trace of horror. Instead, Prendick compares them to
cats and rabbits and wishes to appropriate them as commodities within
his culture’s domestic social and economic order.
These creatures cannot be readily assimilated into a gothic framework.
Although their bodies, like those of the Beast People, are monstrous in
that they violate normative animal shapes by resembling both rabbits and
cats, they pose no apparent threat to human identity. They appropriate
neither human body shape nor language and social behaviour in the way
that the Beast People in their outcast community do. However, in one
sense, Prendick should be worried, because more than any other of his
creations these animals prove Moreau right, in principle. They prove that
in this fictional heterotopia there is “some sanction for the belief that […]
the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental
superstructure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding
the result as a new variety of being.”41 Moreau’s desire to recreate a per-
fected human mentality may have failed, but he has succeeded in shaping
“a new variety of being” around a persisting “thread of life.” So, although
The Island of Doctor Moreau tempers the arguments of Wells’s essay by
suggesting there are limits to plasticity, it leaves open a small rip, just big
enough to glimpse another weird biological borderland.
The counter-site of Moreau’s island creates a space in which an alterna-
tive version of evolutionary inheritance can exist, to which the “creatures
172 E. ALDER
made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had invented,” are
key. The existence of Moreau’s pink rabbits signals Lamarckian theories
of evolution that Wells had largely rejected, if rather unwillingly. Philmus
and Hughes see The Island of Doctor Moreau as a fictional effort by Wells
to “harmoniz[e] his need to believe in some kind of Lamarckian inher-
itance with the scientific disproof of Lamarck by Weismann.”42 If they
are indeed “grafted hybrids” biologically, the Beast People should not be
able to breed.43 But they can breed and produce offspring apparently
resembling neither the Beast People nor their original animal forms (evi-
dently, the offspring are only suitable to be turned into small rabbit-like
creatures, rather than take their turn at being reshaped into people). This
next generation suggests that, on some level at least, some modifications
acquired during the organism’s lifetime are inheritable: a Lamarckian, not
Darwinian, process.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteris-
tics, set out in Philosophie Zoologique (1809), proposed that changes in
animal forms came about through changes in habits, thus causing the use
or disuse of organs, in response to their environment. These changes were
preserved and, if common to both reproducing individuals, inherited by
the next generation.44 Lamarck’s ideas were popular and influenced Dar-
win’s thinking in Origin of Species, but were overturned by later evolu-
tionists including German biologist August Weismann.45 Nevertheless, if
Lamarck’s theory was inadequate, a better one remained elusive. Dar-
win was not able to explain how variations within species appeared, nor
the mechanisms by which they were transmitted to future generations.46
Until the “rediscovery” in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work
in genetics, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (1866), these questions
remained unsatisfactorily answered.47
That said, both Darwin and Weismann did propose theories to explain
inheritance that revolved around information-carrying material passed on
from parent to offspring. Darwin’s “provisional hypothesis,” outlined in
The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), was
called “pangenesis”48 ; here “gemmules” in the blood carried informa-
tion about bodily adaptations to the reproductive cells. Weismann, who
favoured Lamarck’s theory at first, explicitly refuted it in 1883 and pro-
posed that continuity of a “germ plasm” was the means of inheritance.
Only changes here would transmit variations to future generations—
which turned out broadly correct in principle, if not in details.49 Weis-
mann explained new characteristics by identifying sexual reproduction as
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 173
offspring of the Beast People, which vary from their parents, undermine a
solidly Weismannian reading of Doctor Moreau; they take a new, if undis-
closed, form that is neither a copy of one of the parent Beast People nor a
copy of one of the original animals. Doctor Moreau both uses and under-
mines existing available evolutionary theories in order to explore a system
of its own that hovers somewhere between Lamarckism and Weismann’s
neo-Darwinism. Somehow, Moreau has succeeded in inventing a brand
new species, which even, as Montgomery explains, can itself breed.57
Since they can breed, the pink hopping creatures are arguably the
most successful of Moreau’s inventions. They are an “invented” species
of generic, unnamed animals, in contrast to the specialised recombinants
identified as Leopard-Man or Hyena-Swine. Yet even they may not be
successful enough; their “rabbit-like habit of devouring their young” dis-
appoints Montgomery’s hopes for a sustainable source of meat on the
island. The ultimate fate of the evolutionary experiments of Moreau’s
island is rather bleak, suggesting the failure of ethical human direction
of evolution in favour of the survival of only the lowliest, most generic,
and most adaptable species. In the novel’s Prologue, Prendick’s nephew
lists “certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some
rather peculiar rats” as the animals found on Noble’s Isle by the crew of
H. M. S. Scorpion. If the allusions to creatures with “curious” or “pe-
culiar” traits may be taken as an indication that these sailors did indeed
land on Moreau’s island, then the surviving remnants of the Beast People
and their descendants have completed their evolution into some simpler
animal types better fitted to survive: insects and rodents. In this way, the
pink hopping creatures prove that Moreau’s experiments at inducing per-
manent and heritable variations in animal form have a limited success, but
also reveal his inevitable failure, because the processes of natural selec-
tion are ultimately more powerful than artificial modification by human
hand. At the same time, to maintain the unknowability of the heterotopic
counter-site, the empirical evidence of the weird slides out of reach and
is left suggestive rather than definite.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the weird mode creates a narrative
space in which marginal regions of evolutionary science and physiology
can be explored. Here, strange new bodily forms can exist, and the prin-
ciple of a shared physicality between humans and other animals can be
pursued to its logical extremes. By doing so, Wells can fictionally stage
the anatomical speculations theorised in his essays, especially “Individual
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 175
recorded that general opinion was “not determined on where the animal
ends and where the vegetable begins,” remained unresolved.60
Alternatively, perhaps, nineteenth-century biology had only increased
the questions rather than the answers by elaborating the puzzles of
cryptogams, for example, or carnivorous plants. In Insectivorous Plants
(1875), Darwin draws parallels between the carnivorous plant Drosera
(sundew) and animals, including the composition of digestive fluids and
responses to stimuli. Drosera, he observes, “may be said to feed like an
animal,” while in an experiment:
Nothing could be more striking than the appearance of the above four
leaves, each with their tentacles pointing truly to the two little masses of
the phosphate on their discs. We might imagine that we were looking at a
lowly organised animal seizing prey with its arms.61
Plants like Drosera showed that distinctions between the two kingdoms
of animals and plants were not always adequate, and that intriguingly lim-
inal organisms could exist, albeit at the more “lowly” end of the evolu-
tionary scale. Darwin’s work on Drosera also, for one modern biologist,
reveals a tendency in the history of biology to privilege animal existence
over plants, fungi, and other cryptogams.62 This description of Drosera
relegates the “organisation” of the plant to a “lowly” status, rather recog-
nising the sophistication of a plant with a surprising combination of char-
acteristics.
This representation sits close to how popular fiction of the time reg-
istered carnivorous plants. Hodgson’s 1907 novel The Boats of the “Glen
Carrig” features anthropophagous trees as well as invented recombined
animal forms populating remote and isolated islands. As I have examined
elsewhere, Boats creates remote marine spaces in which new forms of ani-
mal life can exist, according to alternative evolutionary paths, in environ-
ments in which they, rather than human beings, have a right to exist as
successful species.63 Boats also follows a tradition of carnivorous tree sto-
ries including Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The American’s Tale” (1879), Phil
Robinson’s “The Man-Eating Tree” (1881), and Frank Aubrey’s “The
Devil Tree of Eldorado” (1897).64
Hodgson’s novel, however, adds a fungal twist to the anthropophagous
tree premise. The stranded sailors venture among what look like trees on
the banks of a strange island creek, only to discover human faces within
the branches. Narrator Winterstraw observes that a “brown, human face
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 177
peering at us from between the wrapped branches […] was of a part with
the trunk of the tree; for I could not tell where it ended and the tree
began.”65 Boundaries between the original human and the apparent plant
that absorbed it have dissolved. This monster bleeds when stabbed, like
a “live creature,” and its “cabbage-like” appendages move like “an evil
serpent.”66 Tree and human and reptile are melted together, not only
combining animal classes but also blending the animal and vegetable king-
doms. Yet the tree-monsters of Boats are not simply overgrown carnivo-
rous plants; Hodgson’s innovation is something even more transgressive.
Winterstraw touches the tree-monster to find that “its trunk was as soft
as pulp under my fingers, much after the fashion of a mushroom.”67 The
fungal analogy indicates morphic potential as well as positioning it as an
organism neither animal nor plant: more like a cryptogam.
In a number of ways, cryptogams have an obvious appeal to a writer of
weird tales. Their malleability means they can easily be imagined to look
like a human, or a tree, or a ship, emphasising monsters’ transgressive
plasticity and their resistance of classification. The creatures created out
of substances like fungus, mould, or lichen in Hodgson’s stories are not
hybrids of animals and plants, but something else altogether. They cannot
be mapped onto the rules for either kingdom: too mobile for plants, for
example, yet too resilient under tearing and cutting to be animals. The
monster, says Jeffrey Weinstock, “undoes our understanding of the way
things are and violates our sense of how they are supposed to be. […]
The ‘unnaturalness’ of the monster inheres in its violation of established
conceptual categories.”68 Cryptogams do precisely that. Upsetting estab-
lished categories of animals and plants, they caused fractures in which
weird inventions of life could flourish, “doubtful beings” could become
certain, and notions of natural and unnatural, alive and not alive, or ani-
mate and inanimate, may be redefined.
Fungi had long been deeply implicated in questions of distinctions
between Linnean kingdoms, with Linnaeus reporting having observed,
he thought, a relationship between “seeds” of fungi and animalcula infu-
soria in 1767, while entomogenous fungi, which grow on insects, were
at first taken by some biologists for a kind of “vegetable fly.”69 A con-
ception of fungi as interstitial organisms, that potentially could change
between being plants and being animals, persisted in biology until around
the 1860s.70 Like animals and plants, fungi are eukaryotes, so classified
for their level of complex cellular organisation. All three diverged from the
same “primitive, almost proto-fungal stem” and thus share “the eukaryote
178 E. ALDER
last common ancestor.”71 This is how fungi are known to modern biol-
ogy. Haeckel speculated similarly in The Wonders of Life (1905), but until
the middle of the twentieth century the consensus was to classify fungi
with plants, albeit as a distinct group.72 The classification was problem-
atic because in some ways, cryptogams also resembled animals. Haeckel
found fungi to “inhale oxygen and give out carbonic acid like animals,”73
and Anton de Bary observed that some Myxomycete (slime mould) spores
moved with “a hopping and an amoeboid creeping movement.”74
For these kinds of reasons, in 1866 Haeckel proposed an “intermedi-
ate” kingdom of life, called “Protista”: “a ‘boundary kingdom interme-
diate between the animal and vegetable kingdoms’ containing organisms
‘neither animals nor plants’.”75 Protista were understood to be something
else; biologist C. Clifford Dobell pinpointed their “great importance” as
“a group of living beings which are organised upon quite a different prin-
ciple from that of other organisms.”76 The evident insufficiency of plant
and animal categories for explaining the natural world had led to the
important step of recognising that life might exist based on alternative
principles, perhaps not yet fully understood.
Both de Bary and Haeckel distinguished Myxomycetes from fungi.
Haeckel included Myxomycetes in kingdom Protista, but, despite some
pondering, decided to leave fungi “among plants, though many natural-
ists have separated them altogether from the vegetable kingdom.”77 In
later work, though, he retreated from the idea of a third kingdom, divid-
ing plants and animals into two kingdoms stemming from simpler single
and multi-cellular organisms. For some biologists, fungi were failed plants.
Henri Bergson suggested that fungi, despite their global profusion, “have
not been able to evolve” and “might be called the abortive children of
the vegetable world.”78 Fungi suggest decay and decline. Critic Anthony
Camara suggests that “the dysmorphic fungal body” threatens “human
devolution and a degrading return to a less organised primordial state
of being,” but he also notes its contradictory, ambivalent biological sta-
tus was something “unreal” and “undead.”79 Feeding on dead matter, a
fungus transforms old material into new living shapes; it is also a greedy,
excessive form of life.
In earlier natural history, fungi were implicated in theories of spon-
taneous generation of life, because they appeared to grow unexpectedly
on dead matter apparently without parents.80 Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani
proved the existence of spores in 1776, however, and Louis Pasteur’s
mid-nineteenth century observations of ferments and air-borne germs
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 179
Possessing a new kind of “quiet” life, this skilful organism adopts human
shapes (converting, we understand, the bodies of previous castaways) and
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 181
a strange existential interface between the human and some other state
of materiality (114). The castaway describes himself and his compan-
ion as “outcast souls,” beyond the reach of God or the natural order
of the world associated with divine ordinance; sure enough, at the end
the nodding mould-man vanishes into a “ghostly and mournful” other-
worldly mist (121). The castaway’s struggle to identify suitable nouns and
verbs—“man,” “lady,” “lives”—is not only a struggle to name terrestrial
strangeness or the emergence of a new type, but also marks an encounter
with something as far beyond language as it is beyond intelligibility and
tolerance.
“The Derelict,” too, presents a strange new species. With a scientifically
rationalised and theorised premise, in its expression of enigmatic horror
it also invokes the weird’s sense of vast cosmic awe. The narrating doc-
tor’s speculations on the material conditions producing this new organism
include his Carnacki-like understanding of the “Life-Force” as one of “the
Outer Forces – Monsters of the Void”92 : the adventure with the mould-
ship is not only an encounter with an alien life but also a glimpse into the
awesome secrets of the universe and finding them terrible. Originally pub-
lished in the Red Magazine in 1912, “The Derelict” encapsulates Hodg-
son’s efforts to imagine new and alien forms of life through the weird
environment of the sea. A group of sailors, investigating what appears to
be a derelict hulk, find themselves aboard a living ship formed out of a
voracious grey-white mould and barely escape with their lives. Where the
fungus of “The Voice in the Night” combines with living human forms
to create a new type of life, here the dead wood of the ship has provided
material and structure.
The story explicitly debates the conditions that might originate life.
The tale of the living Derelict is recounted by the ship’s doctor, now an
old man, to a younger framing narrator. Hodgson’s story therefore starts
and finishes with their conversations about the cause of the phenomenon:
What has transformed a wooden hulk into a living monster? Discussions
of spores or air-borne germs are absent, however, and instead the doctor
ruminates on the “Life-Force,” arguing that life is possible in any sort of
matter:
wood; for I tell you, gentlemen, the Life-Force is both as fiercely urgent
and as indiscriminate as Fire – the Destructor; yet which some are now
growing to consider the very essence of Life rampant. (33)
The Derelict itself both occupies and exceeds the boundary kingdom.
As a mould-like being, it may be aligned with Myxomycetes; Hurley,
indeed, identifies it as a “slime-mold entity.”100 Slime moulds are colonies
of prokaryote organisms, capable of collective movement. The text con-
tains only one reference to “slimy,” however, and forty-seven uses of the
word “mould” (without specifying what kind—words like “dough,” for
example, are also used and suggest yeast). The Derelict is neither clearly
fungus nor slime mould, but either way, its sophisticated structure posi-
tions it with the “higher” animals: “a ‘lower’ organism, mold, has attained
the morphic organization of a properly higher one,” including mobility
and a beating heart.101 The Derelict no longer has a deck and hull but a
“skin,” and, surrounded by a “curious scum” and with “great clump-
ings of strange-looking sea-fungi under the bows,” this new life-form
may, perhaps, be starting to reproduce (37). By collapsing distinctions
between so-called “higher” and “lower” organisms, the Derelict suggests
their basic similarities.
Signs of the Derelict’s biologically transgressive life accumulate exu-
berantly as the sailors approach and board it. Up close, the vessel’s side is
covered in thick, spongy mould with “a reg’lar skin to it,” suggesting the
surface of a living form (40). A hole made by the captain’s foot gives a
blood-like “gush of a purplish fluid” (43). Finally, the ship needs to feed.
The “stuff” is soon, like a slime mould, “in active movement,” and before
the sailors can escape to the boat, one man is consumed:
His feet had sunk out of sight. The stuff appeared to be lapping at his legs;
and abruptly his bare flesh showed. The hideous stuff had rent his trouser-
legs away, as if they were paper. He gave out a simply sickening scream,
and, with a vast effort, wrenched one leg free. It was partly destroyed. The
next instant he pitched face downward, and the stuff heaped itself upon
him, as if it were actually alive, with a dreadful savage life. (46)
Meanwhile, they hear a thudding like a giant heartbeat from within the
ship, and the hull develops “ugly purple veinings […] like you will see
the veins stand out on the body of a powerful full-blooded horse” (48).
Finally, the captain yells out the truth: “She’s alive!” (51). The semblance
of “dreadful savage life” is finally recognised as the reality. The production
of this life from all three kingdoms is registered: through the Derelict’s
mould and slime, its “spongy” texture, its animalian blood, heart, and
skin, and its original vegetable material.
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 187
Conclusion
The Island of Doctor Moreau, “The Voice in the Night” and “The
Derelict” all exploit the heterotopic qualities of remote islands and
uncharted ocean spaces to explore a weird worldview informed by border-
lands of nineteenth-century biology. These liminal spaces form counter-
sites in relation to the conventional known world; in them, discredited
scientific ideas can be revived and marginalised theories or practices can
occupy a central position.
The principle that living forms are mutable underpins Hodgson’s
repeated fictional imaginings of strange or monstrous creatures emerging
in remote or unknown places and times, as well as Moreau’s belief that
there is no reason why a human being should not be surgically created out
of animals, nor why consciousness should not be produced through a pro-
cess of physical transformation. Closer examination of their fiction, how-
ever, reveals that these imaginary products of scientific conjecture owe
188 E. ALDER
Notes
1. Robert M. Philmus, “The Satiric Ambivalence of ‘The Island of Doc-
tor Moreau’ (l’Ambivalence Satirique Dans ‘l’Ile Du Docteur Moreau’),”
Science Fiction Studies 8, no. 1 (1981). Philmus discusses the significance
of Jekyll and Hyde for Moreau, particularly in Wells’s 1895 draft, which
shares “method and meaning” as “an exercise in detecting the bestial
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 189
nature of man” with Stevenson’s novel (3). See also Anne Stiles, “Lit-
erature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009).
2. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration
at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37.
3. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: Gollancz, 2010),
41. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers
are given in brackets in the text.
4. Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Archi-
tecture/Mouvement/Continuite (1984), 3–4; see also Sarah C. Alexander,
Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Pick-
ering and Chatto, 2015), 132–33, for relevant discussion of heterotopia.
5. Nick Redfern, “Abjection and Evolution in the Island of Doctor
Moreau,” The Wellsian 27 (2004), 39.
6. Payal Taneja, “The Tropical Empire: Exotic Animals and Beastly Men in
the Island of Doctor Moreau,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 39, no.
2 (2013), 141.
7. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 9.
8. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an
Autobiographical Chapter, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1888), 6. In
Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 229. Barrett et al. transcribe as “netted” the word
Life and Letters interprets as “melted”; however, I have chosen “melted”
since it seems more consistent with the sense of the whole quotation.
9. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic Period
Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 183; see Deborah Denenholz
Morse and Martin A. Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Rep-
resentations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007).
10. Joseph M. Scamardella, “Not Plants or Animals: A Brief History of the
Origin of Kingdoms Protozoa, Protista and Protoctista,” International
Microbiology 2, no. 4 (1999).
11. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 2nd edition, trans. E. Ray
Lankester (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 45.
12. Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fic-
tion 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
13. Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the
Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
14. Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors, 4.
15. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Ark Paperbacks, 1985),
13.
190 E. ALDER
52. H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 184; see also John Glendening, “‘Green
Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H. G. Wells’s The Island of
Dr Moreau,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002).
53. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 36–37.
54. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 38.
55. H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 107.
56. Ben Woodard, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 23.
57. For discussion of the significance to Wells’s fiction of T. H. Huxley’s
arguments for “ethical evolution,” see, e.g., Glendening, “‘Green Con-
fusion’”; Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of
Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
58. See, for example [Anon.], “A Tunnel of Mushrooms,” Pearson’s Maga-
zine 5 (1865).
59. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 2nd edition, trans. E. Ray
Lankester (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 48.
60. John Hunter, Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy,
Physiology, Psychology, and Geology (London: J. Van Voorst, 1969), 16.
61. Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants (Wigtown: Langford, 2002), 18,
246.
62. David Moore, Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
63. Emily Alder, “(Re)encountering Monsters: Animals in Early-Twentieth-
Century Weird Fiction,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).
64. Cheryl Blake Price, “Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin-de-
Siècle Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 2 (2013).
65. William Hope Hodgson, “The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’,” in The House
on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 19.
66. Hodgson, “Boats,” 19.
67. Hodgson, “Boats,” 19.
68. Jeffrey Weinstock, “Introduction: Monsters Are the Most Interesting
People,” in Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 2.
69. G. C. Ainsworth, Introduction to the History of Mycology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 24, 25.
70. Ainsworth, History of Mycology.
71. Moore, Fungal Biology, 6, 189.
72. Ainsworth, History of Mycology; Anton De Bary, Comparative Morphology
and Biology of the Fungi, Mycetozoa and Bacteria, trans. Henry E. F.
Garnsey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1887).
73. Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London:
Henry S. King, 1876), 115.
74. De Bary, Comparative Morphology, 423.
5 MEAT AND MOULD: THE WEIRD CREATURES … 193
93. See, for example, Maurice Hindle, “‘Vital Matters’: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Romantic Science,” Critical Survey 2, no. 1 (1990);
Laura E. Crouch, “Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lec-
tures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientific Source of Frankenstein,” Keats-
Shelley Journal 27 (1978); C. U. M. Smith, “A Strand of Vermicelli:
Dr Darwin’s Part in the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster,” Interdis-
ciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (2007); and Frankenstein’s Science:
Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830 (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2008).
94. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 253.
95. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 254.
96. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 254.
97. Hermiona De Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 101.
98. Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work. F. W. H. Myers argued similarly
in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Long-
mans, Green and Co., 1903), 34–38.
99. H. G. Wells, “Another Basis for Life,” in H. G. Wells: Early Writings;
J.-H. Rosny aîné, “The Death of the Earth. Trans. George Slusser,” in
The Xipehuz and the Death of the Earth (New York: Arno Press, 1978).
100. Hurley, Gothic Body, 36.
101. Hurley, Gothic Body, 36.
102. Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” 513.
103. Leigh Blackmore, “Things Invisible: Human and Ab-Human in Two
of Hodgson’s Carnacki Stories,” Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope
Hodgson Studies 1, no. 1 (2013), 184.
104. Woodard, Slime Dynamics, 27.
CHAPTER 6
and now it is Silence’s energy that disperses: “a mist lay over his mind
and memory; he felt dazed and his forces scattered” (62). The monster’s
effects are characterised by increasing entropy and as the psychic battle
wears on, the invader reveals itself in chaotic, “discarnate” form as “the
wreck of a vast dark Countenance,” “ruined” and with “broken features”
(63). It embodies disorder like a destroyed mechanism.
Silence, on the other hand, is that impossible ideal, an engine not only
of perfect efficiency through whom nothing is wasted, but able to make
dissipated energy produce work. The energy itself is not evil—its qualities
are dictated by the engine, or soul, using it, and thus Silence, “the soul
with the good, unselfish motive, held his own against the dark discarnate
woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul was on the side of
the Dark Powers” (64). Order is associated with moral goodness, disorder
with evil. Silence is so pure and efficient that he is “immune” (34) to evil
intentions, which cannot harm him. Further, the invader’s energies are
available for Silence to “turn them to his own account. […] he used the
very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his
own” (64). The invader belongs to a state of heat-death, associated with
a “glacial atmosphere” and “[s]omething from the region of utter cold”
(63). This energy should be unusable, yet Silence can “absorb these evil
radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good
purposes” (64). Silence, while establishing the credibility of an expanded
understanding of the world where matter and spirit are not divided, also
shows its practical usefulness; his defeat of the invader restores order and
harmony by reversing the entropic process.
The source of the conserved energy accessed by Silence can be con-
sidered as the more-than-visible world. This was the reasoning behind
Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe.11 Never mind,
they argued, that the “visible universe must, certainly in transformable
energy and probably in matter, come to an end,” because given “the prin-
ciple of Continuity upon which all such arguments are based still demand-
ing a continuance of the universe, we are forced to believe that there is
something beyond that which is visible.”12 Energy passed from the visi-
ble universe to the more-than-visible, but was not lost; rather, the Unseen
Universe “recovers at another, metaphysical level all that was squandered
in the ‘seen’ or material world.”13 Religion and science could thus be
reconciled; considered theologically, if energy derived from the Creator,
then its dissipation and conservation have purpose and nature remains
under divine control.14 The idea of the Unseen Universe was received
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 199
and Susan Strehle have shown how works of writers from Woolf to Pyn-
chon engage with these early to mid-twentieth-century transformations
of physical science and philosophy, while Christina Scholz traces direct
affinities between the notion of “quantum fiction” arising in the 1990s
and weird fiction itself.29 My objects of discussion here, however, are early
twentieth-century stories. While they post-date Röntgen rays and Planck’s
theory of quanta, they significantly pre-date the wider acceptance and the-
orisations of quantum theory of the 1920s. But all arise out of nineteenth-
century physics.30 Egil Asprem makes the point that “attempts to under-
stand matter in terms of ether or even electromagnetism resulted from
physical models based on mathematical formalisations, theory-building,
and the challenge of puzzling experimental data” for decades preceding
the establishment of quantum theory,31 and Gold argues that Victorian
texts anticipate twentieth-century physics through their “creative use of
entropy” (as, too, does, “A Psychical Invasion”).32
Weird tales work with ideas that had undergone widespread special-
ist and popular discussion through the century as well as new discoveries
and propositions which, like X-rays, quickly gripped the imagination. As a
result, what weird tales sometimes end up describing is something resem-
bling a quantum world as much as it does a thermodynamic one. The
very fact they cannot (as physicists and Theosophists and others gener-
ally could not) reconcile the potentials of the new ideas with established
classical conventions encapsulates the historical moment of transition and
overlap between one way of understanding the nature of the universe and
another: the classical, Newtonian, quotidian, empirical experience of the
world, and the new, quantum, weird, hidden theoretical reality of it. The
juxtaposition is not easy or comfortable in either the science or the fiction
of the period; the two states don’t intuitively sit together and yet they are
mixed.
Weird fictions like “The Willows” and The Night Land don’t sort their
science either, but instead present storyworlds that are weird because they
are woven tapestries of science, metaphysics, occultism, imagination, and
genre tropes. I explore how Blackwood and Hodgson present their sto-
ries’ strange, monstrous encounters and phenomena thermodynamically,
like energy movements, intersecting with metaphysical and occult extrap-
olations of thermodynamics to explain unseen dimensions and weird enti-
ties. Since the ideas of these forces and currents are modern—depending
on nineteenth-century discourses of electricity and energy and atoms and
202 E. ALDER
a compendium of occult and spiritualist themes and ideas, from the two-
worlds hypothesis and astral journeys of the spiritualists, to the Theosoph-
ical “Esoteric Buddhism” of Madame Blavatsky and Alfred Percy Sinnet,
to the Occult Celtism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.34
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 203
A similar claim can be made for The Night Land, in which telepathy and
reincarnation play a large part in the story’s central romance. To this com-
pendium I add energy physics.
The interplay between physics and occultism allows construction of
weird ontological visions of remarkable scope across time, space, and
other dimensions. Both novels, especially The Night Land, are notori-
ous for what critics often call “flaws” of writing style, sentimentality, and
genre collision. As Gary Wolfe explains, some see the astral journey in The
House on the Borderland as “an almost fatal flaw in an excellent horror
novel, while others have viewed it as a passage of visionary genius weak-
ened by the tawdry Gothic tale that surrounds it.”35 Hodgson, however,
“conceived of his novel as a unity” and “sought to provide […] a cosmo-
logical superstructure for the obsessive horror” of his work.36 Reading the
novels as weird offers a way, perhaps the only way, to understand them as
unities.
any more than five or six million years of sunlight for time to come.”39
Time might be infinite but the sun, at least in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, was demonstrably not. Nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltz-
mann observed that the “general struggle for existence of animate beings”
was really a struggle for energy’s useable transformations: “a struggle for
entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from
the hot sun to the cold earth.”40 When that process ceases, so does the
world’s hospitability to animate beings (though not necessarily to weird
ones).
In the night-time following solar heat-death, there is no prospect of
a saving sunrise as there is in “The Willows.” The difference between x
millions of years and the infinity of time dictates that the coming night
not only lasts for ever, but also is all there is and ever has been (since
infinity minus x million is still arithmetically infinite). In “The Garden of
Proserpine” (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne imagined the entropic
world as dark and motionless:
words, the horror of energy unusable to humans in a time and space they
cannot belong to, which form ideal conditions for the weird.
The darkness following solar heat-death—if there was really nothing
else to hope for—had troubling epistemological implications: How is a
motionless, energy-less world to be known or understood? This was not
a question anyone needed to worry about pragmatically, but it ties the
imagined eternal night of the future to the epistemological concerns of
the present. George Levine, discussing responses to the changing episte-
mological bases of nineteenth-century science, notes that “like their most
obvious antagonists, Huxley and the naturalists shared the terror of ‘dark-
ness,’ ‘madness,’ and ‘moral chaos’ that would come if no foundation
for knowledge were found.”43 The fear of the heat-dead universe is a
moral fear and one that the weird taps, generating worlds that cannot be
explained on any known foundation, and in which weird things on the
unknowable dark edges of human reality draw closer.
Weird tales, however, don’t succumb to gloom entirely, but also look
for new possibilities or formulations of energy, from the sun, or at least
a sun, or from the more-than-visible world, again taking their cue from
physics and its occult versions. William Thomson, unwilling to condemn
the universe to eternal night, left open the loophole of whether “sources
now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation,”
and, as we have seen, The Unseen Universe offered another way to account
for where the energy “goes” that might leave hope.44 Bruce Clarke traces
a line of ideas through James Clerk Maxwell and The Unseen Universe to
Isis Unveiled (1877), in which Madame Blavatsky “appropriated the recu-
perative side of Tait and Stewart’s arguments at the point that the invis-
ible world recovers the spilt energy of the material world and so stocks
its celestial coffers with eternal potency.”45 Blavatsky brought alternative
myths of the sun into dialogue with Western science to offer new forms
of energetic salvation. The “Occultists of the East,” Blavatsky explained,
posited a “Central Sun” as “the centre of Universal life-Electricity […] the
one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, life Centre.”46 In this formula-
tion, the Central Sun is a sort of perpetual motion machine, an eternal
source of the energy of life.
Weird and sf tales of this period embrace solar perpetuity as much as its
heat-death. In The House on the Borderland and in Frank Lillie Pollock’s
“Finis” (1906), the mythical “Central Sun” of the universe is shown to
exist. In Pollock’s story, that sun is “so inconceivably remote that perhaps
hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would elapse before its light should
206 E. ALDER
burst upon the solar system.”47 When it does, life on earth is consumed
by the immense heat. In The House on the Borderland, the Recluse’s
lengthy passage through time takes him well beyond the death of our
sun and onwards towards the Central Sun, a journey that produces new
revelations, both consoling and terrifying. In this way, the novel nego-
tiates weird cosmological alternatives to the philosophically unacceptable
prospect of eternal night.
The novel purports to be a manuscript discovered by two young men
on holiday in rural Ireland, whose own story is further framed by an
“editor”: Hodgson. The main story is that of a long-dead man known
only as the Recluse. The framing, as well as clues within the text to how
the events might seem different to the Recluse’s sister and housekeeper
Mary, encourages doubts about the story’s authenticity and the Recluse’s
sanity.48 All the same, the manuscript, found near the site of the epony-
mous house which has long since collapsed into a ravine, tells the story of
events befalling its resident: the house apparently sat on the borderland
between this world and some other, horrifying dimension. The Recluse
writes of his battles with green pig-like monsters attempting to invade
his home, while between these struggles, he experiences dream-like astral
journeys that take him firstly to an analogue of his house in a vast arena
surrounded by monstrous pantheistic gods, including Set and Kali, and
secondly through aeons of time and space to the end of the universe and
the Central Sun.
Before the Recluse can enter this weird abfuture, the known present
must fall away. Time speeds up, as he sits reading in his study; the hands
on his clock buzz and the sun and moon whip around the world ever
faster into streams of day and night. The sequence bears more than a
passing resemblance to what Wells’s Time Traveller views from his time
machine, but the Recluse travels much further.49 His sleeping dog crum-
bles to dust, and he himself ages before awakening to discover his own
“ages-dead” corpse under a shroud of “grave-powder” (170). Dust, sug-
gests Oliver Tearle, “is a far-reaching thing,” used in The House on the
Borderland to signal “the passing of time, and the death that will come to
all living beings.”50 The Recluse is conveniently left as “a bodyless thing,”
an etheric body or immortal spirit watching as “time winged on through
eternity” (170–1) and the sun wanes to “a vast dead disk, rimmed with a
thin circle of bronze-red light” (175) before finally going out.
Yet this is not the end of time. Through the technique of the dream-
vision, the Recluse is in a position to witness what “no living man can
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 207
ever have known” (175): the eternal night after the death of the sun,
tantamount to entering a weird outer dimension. He feels all the exis-
tential distress that would cause, realising, “despairingly, that the world
might wander forever, through that enormous night. For awhile, the
unwholesome idea filled me, with a sensation of overbearing desolation”
(176). Light never wholly vanishes from the sky, though, and, gradually,
a flaming green star emerges and consumes the dead sun. From here, the
Recluse’s experience grows less astronomical and more mystical, shifting
from an account of entropic decay into a search for ultimate meaning.
His soul passes over a “boundless river of softly shimmering globes,” and
he grows “conscious of a new mystery about me, telling me that I had,
indeed, penetrated within the borderland of some unthought of region –
some subtle, intangible place, or form, of existence” (183). The Recluse
is reunited with the soul of his dead love in the “silent, spacious void”
and the “quiet waters of the Sea of Sleep” (184). Here (as also in The
Night Land, in which the “Country of Silence” is the lowest level of the
pyramid and where the civilisation’s dead are disposed), silence and sleep
resonate closely with death, trances, and the possibility of access to bor-
derland realms. The spirit of the mesmerised subject, Blavatsky claims,
“quits its paralyzed earthly casket,” and
the gates of the portal which marks the entrance to the “silent land” are
now but partially ajar; they will fly wide open before the soul of the
entranced somnambulist only on that day when, united with its higher
immortal essence, it will have quitted forever its mortal frame.51
The clairvoyant’s spirit can obtain a glimpse of the “silent land,” but only
the souls of the dead may enter. The Recluse meets his lost beloved, but
the reunion is transient; he is not a dead soul but a “bodyless thing,”
temporarily existing on the cusp of life and death.
Like Machen’s Mary and Nesbit’s Roger, the Recluse glimpses secrets
of the cosmos beyond the limitations of conventional conceptions of time
and existence. They are mainly along Theosophic lines: “Intra-Cosmic
motion is eternal and ceaseless,” Blavatsky declared, “cosmic motion (the
visible, or that which is subject to perception) is finite and periodical.”52
The Recluse has watched normal cosmic motion cease, and now what
the eternal cosmos is really like is revealed. He notices a “countless pro-
fusion” of “moving sparks” he thinks are “messengers from the Central
Sun” (186). The Central Sun indeed emits energy, like a stream of atomic
208 E. ALDER
Huge, vague thoughts had birth within me. I felt, suddenly, terribly naked.
And an awful Nearness, shook me.
And Heaven! … Was that an illusion?
My thoughts came and went, erratically. (186)
The secrets of time and the universe are partially unlocked for the Recluse,
but at crucial moments he cannot make sense of or process what he is
experiencing, nor even describe it. The failure of text and language to
represent the other reality keeps it veiled in shadows, refracted through
gaps and silences.
The Recluse enters a weird dimension of wondrous answers to spiritual
and physical mysteries, but they are only partially comprehensible and his
experiences remain tied to the real, contemporary world and the horror of
the invading Swine-creatures. His return to his own time takes him once
more past the House in the Arena, revealing that his own house is key to
everything he has (or thinks he has) experienced. Darryl Jones identifies
the House, or rather the Pit over which it is built, as an omphalos, the
“divine navel” or “geomantic centre point, locus of the convergence of
occult forces, a singularity of spiritual creation or force” (the ancient forts
and Celtic temples of Arthur Machen represent others).53 The ompha-
los is a variety of rip in the world-weave, through which things peer—in
this case, the Swine-creatures, always “searching for an ingress into the
House” (123).
At the omphalos of the House distinctions between realities collapse,
the Recluse battles the Swine-creatures around the real house, or at least
that much of it that is still (mostly) in his world. He also sees them from
the other side during his journey past the House in the Arena, analogue
for his own: “over its walls crawled a legion of unholy things, almost cov-
ering the old building […] they were the Swine-creatures” (180). These
views of the Swine-creatures from the other side of the boundary iden-
tify the Pit and the House as the links between dimensions. He realises
that the two houses are “en rapport,” and that when he fought off the
pigs from the terrestrial house, he had also protected the other house
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 209
(189). Actions in the terrestrial here and now, it seems, have correspond-
ing effects in the abfuture time and place and therefore may not be not
futile after all.54
The Recluse’s visionary sequences bring him close to barely gras-
pable truths about the nature of the universe. Between these revelations,
reunion with his love, and the horror of the Swine-creatures, the cosmos
of The House on the Borderland is a weird ontological expression of won-
der and terror. The astral journeys and the invasions from the Pit together
constitute a search for the meaning that lies beyond the physical world,
which take the ambivalent weird form of both inexplicable horror and
spiritual consolation. Energy is not lost in Hodgson’s vision; the energy
of the universe is far greater than what is visible in the solar system and
contains, in the Central Sun, a perpetual source.
an Evil Force had made action upon the Peoples within the Lesser
Redoubt; so that some being utter weak by reason of the failing of the
Earth-Current, had opened the Great Door, and gone forth into the night.
And immediately there had come into the Lesser Pyramid, great and horrid
monsters, and had made a great and brutish chase. (466)
the world’s decay, and some are naturally evolved to suit the new envi-
ronmental conditions.69 Both sets of creatures contrast to the humans
who know their days are numbered and spend their time in “quiet watch-
ing for the day when the Earth-Current shall become exhausted.” The
Night Land is also populated by even stranger things, “fresh and greater
monsters” that are “attracted” like “Infernal sharks” to the pyramid, yet
repelled by its light (329). There are many such terrors in the Night
Land—the House of Silence that lures unwary humans inside to their
destruction and shines with its own malevolent light, the mountain-sized
Watchers encircling the pyramid. A few equally inexplicable Powers
of Goodness occasionally intercede to protect human wanderers, but
most entities are hostile. Andy Robertson dubs these monsters “pneu-
mavores”—soul-eaters—emphasising that even if they have come from
another dimension or cosmos, they are natural entities, not demonic or
supernatural, in other words, the epitome of a weird monster.70
Some pneumavores have their origin in scientific meddling, which has
exposed a weird, multidimensional reality. “Olden sciences,” the narrator,
X, tells us,
ruptures detectable only by the spirit, weird energies increase while X’s
weakens.
Watched by outside forces, the people of the Great Redoubt are, in
their turn, fascinated by the “black monstrosity” of the Night Land and
watch it continually: “on none did it ever come with weariness to look
out upon all the hideous mysteries” (324). They face Eugene Thacker’s
“world-without-us,” a “zone that is at once impersonal and horrific” and
confronts us with our own limits.71 The weird things look in, people look
back, horrified, yet compelled. The natural barrier is thin, and relative
safety lies only behind the double fortress of Great Pyramid and Electric
Circle. Those who cross the limits and venture into the Night Land risk
their souls as well as their physical lives. In The Night Land, soul or spirit
itself becomes an energy source to compete for. Spiritual eternity is central
to The Night Land’s story, as it is to The House on the Borderland. In both,
eternal love is as possible as eternal night. Hodgson’s abfutures suggest
that human agency is cosmologically small but not futile, even while it
must recognise its limits and ultimately yield the lost energetic world to
weird others.
“The Willows”
In “The Willows,” based on a trip Blackwood took with a friend in sum-
mer 1900, the narrator and his Swedish companion journey the Danube
in a Canadian canoe.76 Stuck for two nights in their camp on a shrink-
ing island between the willows and a flooding river, they are terrorised
overnight by inhuman forces, and only narrowly escape.
“The Willows” exemplifies Blackwood’s philosophy of expanded
awareness of the world writ weird. The normal elements of water, sun,
and wind grow powerful and threatening, and, if that wasn’t bad enough,
the pair have strayed into a place
where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a
spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence
they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil
between had worn a little thin.77
If the Swede’s speculations here are right, weird entities veiled by the
willows look in from somewhere outside the system. They bring with
216 E. ALDER
them, and seem to relish, chaos and disorder, and disrupt normal energy
transformations. In the text, the energetic hostility of the environment is
linked to that of the “willows,” as is the final hour escape from both.
The Danube is presented as excessively energised, a living entity, and
resistant to human domination. The river is a “huge fluid being” that “im-
pressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness ” (131). It resembles
“some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires
as it became conscious of its deep soul” (131). It possesses agency of its
own as it “slips beyond the control of stern banks” and “wanders about at
will among the intricate network of channels” (128). Officially, this living
landscape is designated “a deserted area” (127), a blank blue area on the
map “growing fainter in colour as it leaves the banks,” labelled “in large
straggling letters [with] the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes” (127). The
entropy and lassitude of the riverland’s anthropocentric construction as
a “desolation” and a “desert” (and the narrator later calls it a “waste”),
however, contrasts with its evident energy. Symbolic cartographic gover-
nance “straggles” and “grows faint” in the effort to fix and define the
changeable waterscape.
Nothing stays still in this swampy region; the willows are “so continu-
ally shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain
is moving and alive” (127, italics original). On this stretch, the waters
“spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel” (127). The effect
of this dissipation, however, is to increase rather than diminish the work
produced; the river waters
The delta-like river plain spills over with proliferating energy that contin-
ually creates and destroys. The two travellers move at the whim of the
water; their canoe is “twisted like a cork,” “leap[s] like a spirited horse,”
and “plunges on yellow foam” (129) until they are all but thrown up on
the banks of the willow-grown island where they will spend two terrible
nights. The narrator quickly feels a sense of unease and distress that he
connects with both the “unrestrained power of the elements” (specifically
the water, the “shouting hurricane” of the wind, and the sun’s heat) and
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 217
remaining paddle is “beautifully scraped […] so thin that the first vigor-
ous stroke must have snapped it off” (166). The narrator attempts rational
explanation:
“One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing,” I said feebly, “or – or
it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it
by the wind.” (166)
Neither of them believes it, although the narrator is not ready to admit
it. He clings “feebly” to what he knows are untenable theories “with that
diminishing portion of my intelligence which I called my ‘reason’” (168).
Later, these “explanations made in the sunshine […] came to haunt
me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature” (179). Reason
and rationality, associated with the sun and therefore productive energy,
are themselves subject to entropy as the narrator’s fear and confusion
translates, after dark, into chaotic, unproductive, “diminished” thinking.
“There are things about us,” remarks the Swede, “that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction” (48).
The “willows” (as I will continue to call these “things,” though they
are not, of course, the willow plants ) are increasingly evidently weird
entities capable of using energies that lie out of human reach. They are
inherently entropic and promote the same conditions in their human vic-
tims. The “exhaustion” of the narrator’s first disrupted night, for example,
“only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the
obsessive spell of the haunting” (173–4). Vulnerability is associated with
disorder and diminishing useable energy; the more frightened the narra-
tor gets, the more erratic become his thoughts and behaviour. Even when
he admits his fears, talking about them “set me shaking a little all over. I
found it impossible to control my movements” (187). The Swede’s view
is that the willows seek a sacrificial victim and “[o]ur only chance is to
keep perfectly still […] We must keep them out of our minds at all costs”
(185, 188). But the narrator finds it difficult to control his mental state,
becoming prone to nervous outbursts that put them in danger. On the
second night, when the narrator madly decides to laugh away their fears,
the Swede “turn[s] ashen white” and speaks in a “helpless, frantic way”
(191).
The dissolution of the barrier between the safe, real world and the
weird, more-than-visible one is now close, and the narrator’s last rally to
take “control of our forces” by making “one more blaze” is not enough.
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 219
I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation. And the moment
I was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming […] that same
familiar humming – gone mad! […] The sound seemed to thicken the
very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty. (198)
The details described here, mundane on one level, have become strange
and less real to the narrator. What was present is now absent, “robbed”—
while “something” else, something indefinable and marked by an empty
dash, is now present. Time, too, is distorted. It compresses to moments
and stretches to aeons. The narrator experiences the island as a “primeval
region” and the willows as “sponge-like growths” or “antediluvian crea-
tures,” only to later feel “utterly alone on an empty planet” like a future
last man, and to fear the death of the sun: “I never longed for the sun
as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night”
(188). The otter glimpsed in the water returns in story’s final line as the
peasant’s body washes away, “turning over and over on the waves like an
otter” (203). The peasant’s body may be the boatman’s, the otter may
have been the body, the boatman (argues the Swede) may not have been
a man: the object may have been each and all of these. The narrative never
fixes this point; instead, the possibilities remain mixed in a kind of quan-
tum state of superposition: as far as we can tell, the object was everything
it was observed to be.
In the context of “The Willows,” this is not a comfortable situation but
a dangerous one. According to one account of quantum theory, from a
condition of superposition, once detected the particle collapses into one
of the possible states: “the act of measuring or observing an object often
profoundly alters its state” and “the possible properties of the object may
depend on what is actually being measured.”95 When Blackwood’s narra-
tor looks at “swaying,” “interlaced,” “melting” shapes and wants to see
elemental forces, that is what they become for him, inspiring wonder and
worship rather than the chaotic terror of the second night (152). Later
the first night, a second glimpse terrifies him, and in the morning, he
resists admitting his fears: “Provided my experiences were not corrob-
orated, I could find strength somehow to deny them” (161) and later
he “postpone[s] […] plain talk” for “[a]s long as possible” (179). As
we have seen, the more they describe and articulate their experiences,
the more real and deadly they become: “Above all,” cautions the Swede,
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 225
“don’t think, for what you think happens!” (190). Where in a thermody-
namic reading of “The Willows,” the role of human thought and will is
to guide and direct energy and action, in a quantum reading such efforts
risk stabilising the version of reality that will lead to their destruction.
“The Willows” is not the only one of Blackwood’s stories to exhibit
quantum fictional traits. Some of Poland’s words about Blackwood’s
Pan’s Garden, for example, suggest a mixed, indeterminate state underly-
ing these stories, too: “to walk in Pan’s garden is to experience a collusion
of boundaries, human and nonhuman, inner and outer, and balance and
chaos, that falls poignantly in an alternative state between celebration and
suffering.”96 In “May Day Eve,” from the same earlier collection as “The
Willows,” the narrator experiences a sort of quantum awakening when he
makes the mistake of crossing a certain moor alone on the eponymous
night. The wind and fog are full of shifting shadows and forms:
the world about me had somehow stirred into life; oddly, I say, because
Nature to me had always been merely a more or less definite arrangement
of measurement, weight, and colour, and this new presentation of it was
utterly foreign to my temperament. […] I recall my singular fancy that
veils were lifting off the surface of the hills and fields […] such a thing
had never been possible to my practical intelligence.97
Like the world revealed on May Day Eve, the quantum world is not a
definite, intuitive, practical world either, and does require a completely
new way of understanding physical reality.
Even more than in “The Willows,” the narrator of “May Day Eve”
becomes immersed in a quantum condition as his rational sense of self
abandons him: “I called in vain. No answer came. Anxiously, hurriedly,
confusedly too, I searched for my normal self, but could not find it”
(284). In this process of communion with an expanded world, again stan-
dards of reality, moral and physical, alter: “New values rushed upon me
from all sides. […] a fundamental attitude of mind in me had changed”
(292). He realises that anything that now happens to him “must seem not
abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course utterly true” yet
“my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the night
puzzled and distressed me” (293). The new normality or reality is no less
true for being hard to grasp intellectually.
The climax of the story is an encounter and a merging with projec-
tions of the narrator’s lower and higher selves, or material and etheric
226 E. ALDER
bodies, in the forms of a gross caged man and an angelic female figure
(306).98 Memory of the details (the “glamour” cast by the “elementals”
he encountered) fades, but he remains changed: “The new world I had
awakened to seemed still a-quiver about me” (311). Not only is the new
reality an uncertain, “quivering” one, but both expanded consciousness
and quantum theory, it seems, require and produce a fundamentally new
and altered set of conceptual relations with reality, a threshold moment
that can never be un-learned.
In weird tales, where ontological distinctions collapse and the irrational
or unreal can be treated as real, fictional literalisations speak back to and
elaborate explanatory metaphors, often playfully. Egil Asprem identifies a
“tendency among esoteric writers to start from the scientists’ metaphori-
cal descriptions of, for instance, the energy, momentum and movement
of atoms, and then to wander off into speculative realms where these
descriptions are taken to literally imply vitality, teleology or even con-
sciousness.”99 A ludic quality like this is evident in the way Blackwood’s
“The Woman’s Ghost Story,” introduced in Chapter 4, presents physical
concepts in the form of a spectre. The ghost haunting the house explains
to the female narrator that
I’m in different space, for one thing, and you’ll find me in any room
you went into; for according to your way of measuring, I’m all over the
house. Space is a bodily condition, but I am out of the body, and am not
affected by space. It’s my condition that keeps me here. I want something
to change my condition for me, for then I could get away.100
Like Mr. Mudge in “A Victim of Higher Space” who moves in and out
of a fourth dimension and at times experiences being in several places at
once, the ghost belongs to a “different space” that can’t be measured in
the normal way. While Mr. Mudge travels physically through the fourth
dimension (emerging, at the story’s end, in Bombay), this ghost is “out of
the body,” transcending matter and also behaving like an electron. Spread
“all over the house,” he is everywhere and nowhere, undetermined in
time and space until a “change of condition” (which, it turns out, is his
emotional recognition by the narrator as a loveable being) enables him to
escape his current state.
Her observation is key. Just before this speech, she tried to escape him
by fleeing one room, only to run into another on the floor above and see a
vague figure “between me and the windows, where the street lamps gave
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 227
just enough light to outline his shape against the glass” (342). The shock
of finding him here too overwhelms her: “I lay in a collapsed heap upon
the floor. So there were two men in the house with me, I reflected. Per-
haps other rooms were occupied too! What could it all mean?” (343).
What it means, the story’s ending reveals, is that the uncle who sent
her lied about the haunting so that she wouldn’t simply find what she
expected to find. Accordingly, the ghost’s state remains unfixed until she
asks herself the right questions about who and what he is:
Conclusion
In Blackwood’s and Hodgson’s tales, weird entities are energetic entities,
whose interactions with the humanly knowable works are represented in
terms of energy flows and transformations. Fin-de-siècle energy discourses
provide for the weird tale a way of expressing weird otherness, fear, and
even forms of communication, not previously possible. Where the sec-
ond law of thermodynamics connoted the prospect of the decline of pro-
ductive energy into universal heat-death, the first law raised possibilities
for the consequences of energy conservation elsewhere in the system and
the excesses of its build-up. Weird terrors, as natural entities operating
on entirely different physical systems from those of normal terrestrial life
and in abfuture times, are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and never fully
knowable. They bestow the same traits on energy transformations.
228 E. ALDER
The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, and “The Willows”
emphasise the “outsideness” of the entities faced by the protagonists, dis-
tinctly weird because they are not human, not revenant, not of this time,
and not of this world. In “The Wendigo,” too, for example, Simpson
feels “the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror.”101 Alien otherness
is salient and depictions of its touch express concerns about what might
lie outside the closed system as well as within it. The notion of causes
outside the system is an aesthetic violation that conflicts with the natural
human or social Victorian desire for unity.102 Confronting a physical real-
ity redefined by radioactivity, relativity, and quantum mechanics is also an
aesthetic violation conflicting with the traditional desire for unity. Weird
tales negotiates this uncertain borderland between classical and “new”
physics.
The discourse of quanta had not yet become widely available in the
way that the language of thermodynamics had by the fin de siècle. While
I don’t mean to argue that Blackwood was aware of Planck’s quanta or
Einstein’s work, nor that weird tales are anticipating quantum theory of
the 1920s, I do suggest that weird tales offered one way of exploring,
often playfully, the kinds of questions about the nature of reality (or the
reality of nature) that physics also investigated. In other words, similar
nineteenth-century cultural conditions (in science, in spirituality, in phi-
losophy, in literature) that in physics led to quantum theory also led to
weird tales.
Notes
1. Charles Coulton Gillespie, quoted in Greg Myers, “Nineteenth-
Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social
Prophecy,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian
Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), 310.
2. Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion,” in John Silence: Physician
Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 34, italics original. All
subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are
given in brackets in the text.
3. See, e.g., R[udolf] Clausius, The Mechanical Theory of Heat with Its
Applications to the Steam-Engine and to the Physical Properties of Bod-
ies (London: John Van Voorst, 1867), 357; Myers, “Popularizations of
Thermodynamics.”
6 WEIRD ENERGIES: PHYSICS, FUTURES, AND THE SECRETS … 229
97. Algernon Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 283–84. All subsequent quotations are
taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the
text.
98. On gross and etheric bodies in Theosophy, see Asprem, “Pondering
Imponderables,” 157.
99. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables,” 133.
100. Algernon Blackwood, “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” in The Listener and
Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 343. All subsequent quo-
tations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brack-
ets in the text.
101. Blackwood, “The Wendigo,” 167.
102. Choi, “Forms of Closure,” 315.
Afterword
This book has explored the place of British weird fiction in contexts of fin-
de-siècle sciences. I have tried to show that the weird tale became what it is
as a direct result of the conditions of Western scientific culture in the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Weird fictions are stimulated not
just by new and startling scientific discoveries—although these are clearly
significant inspirations—but also by a new awareness of the limitations of
scientific knowing, particularly of any single form of scientific knowing.
That awareness is inseparable from genre. Nominally, science and popular
fiction are considered different genres. But as I have been exploring, in
the mode of weird, the overlap is considerable; the ideas and discourses
of many of the scientific fields I chose to investigate were already weird to
start with. That weirdness is only really visible with hindsight, after more
than a hundred and thirty years of the weird tale, and so the history of the
weird tale itself becomes a kind of Möbius strip, abhistorical, pseudobib-
liac, a failure of absence, leaving a visible trail that nevertheless at many
points has been elided in criticism, if not among readers. Something sim-
ilar is revealed about the world’s natural physical phenomena; the world
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science thought it knew turned out
to be something else, something much less stable and knowable. Like nat-
ural selection, abhistories, and outer monstrosities, the more-than-visible
quantum world has been there all along, we just didn’t know it. The
occult revival in this fin-de-siècle context is as logical as the emergence of
the weird tale.
Notes
1. Algernon Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” in The Listener and Other Stories
(London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 292.
2. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” in The Weird: A Compendium of
Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus,
2011), xvii.
3. Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” 293.
Index
A hierarchy, 163
Abcanny, 11, 27, 59, 61 non-anthropocentric, 12
Abfuture, 196, 202, 203, 206, 209, ontology, 195
214, 227 worldview, 163
Abhistory, 11, 16, 60, 61, 65, 69, Astral journey, 18
142, 162, 237 Atom, 24, 84, 195, 199–201
Abhumans, 36, 61, 76, 156, 180 Authority, 16, 20, 29, 92, 116, 124,
Agency, 13, 16, 31, 59, 90, 102, 134, 132, 144, 146, 163, 222
139, 143, 159, 181, 195–197,
211, 214, 216, 217, 238
Alchemy, 63, 68 B
Alterity, 11, 14 Beast People, 31, 161, 167, 168,
Anatomy, 97, 164, 174, 175 170–174
Animal, 14, 19, 25, 26, 31, 96, 101– Bergson, Henri, 47–49, 178, 184
103, 107, 160–179, 185–188, Besant, Annie, 20, 21, 47, 87, 153
222 Binary(ies), 7, 12, 24, 49–52, 94, 97,
bodies, 166 108, 238
consciousness, 169 Biological borderland, 31, 160, 162,
evolutions of, 160 171
kingdom, 164, 176, 177 Biology, 14, 23, 25–27, 31, 47, 69,
monster, 31 82, 92, 159, 160, 162–164, 169,
Anthropocentricity, 61, 170, 182 170, 172, 175–178, 185, 187,
construction, 216 188
expression, 170 history of, 176
Conan Doyle, Arthur, 18, 25, 120, Doctor, 18, 28, 66, 88, 92, 95–102,
175, 176 116, 123, 136, 139, 145,
“The American’s Tale,” 176 183–185
“The Horror of the Heights,” 25 Dracula, 16
Sherlock Holmes, 29, 115, 117, Dr Hesselius, 18, 29
119–121 Drug, 18, 88, 90, 93, 98–104, 106,
Consciousness, 31, 46–49, 54, 63, 107, 138
65, 70, 92, 96, 98, 99, 102, 134, Dualism/dualities, 50, 52, 94
159, 166, 169, 185, 187, 204,
226
E
Corelli, Marie, 9 Ecology, 13
A Romance of Two Worlds , 9, 18 Ecstasy, 30, 57–59, 61, 69, 70, 94,
Cosmos, 12, 15, 21, 23, 195, 207, 102
209, 213 Eerie, 13, 59, 62, 69, 164
Creatures, 14, 31, 160, 162, 164, Einstein, Albert, 200, 228
171–174, 177, 179 élan vital , 184, 221
Crookes, William, 21, 106, 121, 148, Electrical fluid. See Mesmerism
199 Electricity, 2, 17, 18, 118, 123, 148,
Cryptogams, 31, 162, 164, 175–179, 185, 201, 211, 214
188 Electric Pentacle, 142–144, 148, 149
Cumberland, Stuart, 9 Emotion, 52, 71, 91, 93, 102–104,
107, 133, 138, 226
Empire, 140. See also Colonial;
Imperialism
D
Empiricism, 15, 20–22, 24, 25, 32,
Darwin, Charles, 25, 162–164, 172, 47, 52, 68, 79–81, 83–87, 89,
176, 185, 193, 209 90, 93, 95–97, 100, 103–105,
On the Origin of Species , 25, 26 108, 131, 132, 140, 146, 147,
Darwinism, 26, 163, 172, 174, 161, 165, 174, 195
181, 182, 210. See also Natural Energy, 23, 24, 31, 84, 184, 195–
Selection 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211,
Detective, 115–117, 119, 120, 212, 214–219, 221, 225, 227
123–125, 132, 145 conservation, 197–199, 227
stories, 29, 115 physics, 30, 195, 196, 203
Determinism, 19, 47 Entropy, 31, 196, 198, 211, 216–219
Dimensions, 4, 11, 26, 31, 45, 54, 80, Epistemology, 4, 22, 28, 47, 54, 61,
84, 98, 137, 202–203, 206–209, 71, 79–83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 96,
238 103, 121, 123, 124, 205
fourth dimension, 140–141, Eschatology, 31
222–223, 231 Ether, 24, 130, 199, 200, 212
Disorder, 196, 198, 212, 215, 216, Evil, 12, 51, 58–59, 61, 65, 69, 70,
218 97, 138–139, 196–198
244 INDEX
Evolution, 1, 25, 31, 46, 67, 162– Ghost story, 3, 6–10, 18, 34, 120,
165, 168, 170–176, 179, 182, 125, 132, 133, 146, 152
187, 188, 209–211, 223 Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of,
control of, 168 21, 29, 42, 55, 87, 124, 134,
Evolutionary theory, 23, 27, 209 136, 137, 144, 153
Experiment(s), 17, 28, 29, 52–54, 62, Gothic, 3, 10, 11, 30, 32, 127
65, 71, 79–86, 88–95, 98–108, Gothic fiction, 2, 4, 10, 14, 18, 25
166–170, 174
experimental science, 22
Expert, 29, 30, 116, 117, 120, H
122–124, 126, 138, 140, 141, Haeckel, Ernst, 163, 164, 175, 178
149 Haunted house, 232
Haunting, 115, 117–119, 122, 123,
127, 131–133, 143, 145, 149,
F
227
Faith, 19, 21, 86–87
Heat-death, 31, 196–198, 202, 204,
Fantasy, 2, 11, 14, 45, 209
205, 211, 215, 227. See also
Feminine/femininity, 116, 122, 124,
Energy
133
Heron, E., and H., 7, 29, 117, 122,
Fin-de-siècle, 3, 4, 6–8, 14, 16, 22,
127
23, 26, 32, 46–49, 52, 65, 70,
Flaxman Low, 18, 29, 115, 116,
87, 103, 118, 124, 141, 160,
120, 124, 125, 127, 129
162, 175, 179, 195, 199, 210,
220, 227, 228, 237, 238 “The Story of Baelbrow,” 126–128,
occult, 22 131
science, 4, 5, 23, 237 “The Story of Crowsedge,” 129
Flammarion, Camille, 203, 204 “The Story of Flaxman Low,”
Force(s), 10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 31, 32, 129–130
84, 118, 119, 127, 136, 138, “The Story of Konnor Old House,”
139, 143, 144, 146, 185, 195, 117
197, 199, 201, 202, 214, 215, “The Story of Moor Road,” 128
222, 224 “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,”
Fungi/fungus, 25, 31, 117, 161, 164, 126, 128
175–183, 186, 188 “The Story of the Grey House,”
130
“The Story of ‘The Spaniards’,
G Hammersmith,” 124, 126,
Gender, 14, 18, 113, 118, 123, 124 128, 131
Genre, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 16 “The Story of Yand Manor House,”
Geometry, 27, 223 117, 130, 131
Ghost, 1, 6, 118, 127, 134, 143–145, Heterotopia, 31, 160, 162, 165, 166,
226, 227, 232 171, 174, 175, 179, 181, 187
haunting, 226 History, 11, 175
INDEX 245
N P
Nasmyth, James, 220–222 Passivity, 93, 100, 102, 116, 123,
Natural history, 162, 178 124, 128, 129, 134, 139
Natural selection, 25, 163, 164, 168, Philosophy, 4, 19, 23, 32, 51, 69, 89,
173, 174, 179, 187, 237 200, 201, 206, 214, 215, 228
Nature, 13, 15, 23, 25, 107–109, Physicists, 24–25, 106, 201
128, 182, 198–199, 214, 221 Physics, 23–25, 27, 119, 121, 165,
Nerves, 63, 98, 99, 123 199–201, 203, 205, 211, 228
Nervous system, 96 new physics, 27, 32, 199, 228
Nesbit, Edith, 3, 28, 54, 79, 98, 108, Physiology, 31, 47, 63, 69, 94, 96,
207 108, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174,
“The Five Senses,” 28, 29, 79, 82, 175, 185, 188
89, 103–109 borderlands of, 169
“The Three Drugs,” 28, 29, 79–80, Planck, Max, 200, 201, 228
89, 98–102 Plant(s), 25, 130, 175–179, 188
Neurology, 62, 92, 96 evolution of, 160
New Weird, 3, 33 kingdom of, 176
Numinous, 57, 58, 61, 62, 70, 95 Plasticity, 159, 162, 171, 177, 188
Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 9, 17, 37
Pollock, Frank Lillie, 205
O Positivism, 21, 23, 47, 49, 80, 110
Occult, 7, 9, 17, 18, 24, 27, 29, 55, Positivist, 18, 24, 27, 32, 56, 63, 65,
64, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129, 70, 80, 83, 86, 87, 93, 94, 101,
140, 142, 145, 202, 205, 237 102, 104, 106, 109, 116
detectives, 116. See also Weirdfinder science, 7, 19, 61, 80, 86, 87, 150
forces, 146 worldview, 45
248 INDEX
Technology, 29, 30, 115, 123, 142, weird forms, 31, 175
148, 149 weird realities, 6, 29, 71, 80, 82,
Theosophical Society, 134 92, 104, 108, 109, 116, 141,
Theosophists, 20, 22, 47, 83, 84, 201 142
Theosophy, 20–22, 24, 38, 47, 83, weird science, 4, 6, 27, 97, 187,
84, 87, 144, 201 227
Thermodynamics, 23, 27, 31, Weirdfinder/weirdfinding, 29, 115–
195–197, 201, 209, 227, 228 122, 124–126, 141, 142, 144,
Thing(s), 1, 12, 60, 70, 95, 180–182, 145, 149, 150
205, 208, 210, 212–214 Weird Tales , 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 26, 28,
Thomson, William, 197, 203, 205, 29, 32, 37, 49, 196, 200, 201,
209, 210 205, 226
Time, 107, 195, 202–204, 206, 238 Weismann, August, 172–174, 188
and space, 26, 205, 206, 226 Wells, H. G., 3, 9, 14, 27, 31, 46,
Tree, 13, 176, 177, 212 159–168, 171–175, 185, 188,
206
“Another Basis for Life,” 185
U
Uncanny, 171 “The Biological Problem of Today,”
The Unseen Universe. See Stewart, 173
Balfour The Island of Doctor Moreau, 3,
Urban spaces, 58 27, 31, 104, 122, 159–163,
165–175, 180, 185, 187–188
“The Limits of Individual Plasticity,”
V 27, 167, 173–175
Vibration, 17, 81, 118, 148 “The Sea Raiders,” 25
Vivisection, 64, 101–104, 108, 160, The Time Machine, 31, 197, 203,
162, 165–169, 171, 188 206, 210
Willow bushes, 221, 222
Willpower, 124, 129
W
Women, 95, 122–124
Ways of knowing, 4, 8, 18, 28, 29,
Worldview, 4, 13, 19, 22, 28, 32, 54,
49, 54, 61, 71, 80, 91, 96, 98,
55, 61, 103, 143, 163, 165, 179,
99, 108, 109, 136
187
Weird, 5, 8–10, 12, 14, 25, 28, 32,
scientific, 45, 108
51, 102, 103, 116, 119, 135,
136, 145, 174, 183, 187, 200, spiritual, 18
203, 205, 213, 214, 220 weird, 181, 189
weird entities, 12, 26, 130, 215,
218
weird fiction, 3, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, X
23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 97 X-rays, 24, 147, 199, 201