A STRIKING NUMBER OF CHARACTERS in Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories who return to England after a sojourn in the colonies have an outlandish aspect. One, a contorted and bilious ex-soldier, owns a pet Indian mongoose. Another has lost a leg to a crocodile in the Ganges and has a poison-toting Andaman Islander in tow. A third keeps a fiendish hound and passes his South American wife off as his sister. A fourth returns from South Africa with a “blanched” face and a furtive manner. Many of these returned colonials are portrayed as menacing, and their presence in England precipitates a crisis, either a crime or a mysterious tragedy. In actual fact, return from the colonies to the metropole was a routine phenomenon, and returned colonials were familiar figures on the metropolitan landscape. Why does Doyle depict the phenomenon of return from Empire as so problematic if it was in fact quite commonplace?

Doyle's unusually consistent way of representing the returned colonial reveals certain recurrent anxieties about imperialism.¹

While here I limit myself to the corpus of Doyle's imperial detective fiction, the anxieties detectable in these stories are themselves symptomatic of a sense of malaise that tinged the triumphalist New Imperialism of the late Victorian period.² Pierre Macherey's notion of symptomatic reading– by which he means a critical attention to textual gaps, silences, and tensions that reveal the presence of ideological matter that has been transformed through the labor of literary production–is useful in clarifying the cultural significance of the trope of return in Doyle's detective stories. A symptomatic reading of these stories brings to light considerable cultural unease about the contradictions of colonial capitalism, especially, I will argue, about the emergence of an itinerant, transnational underclass of poor Europeans–the flotsam and jetsam of Empire.

Doyle's enthusiastic support for the supposed civilizing mission of the British Empire is clear in his memoir, Memories and Adventures, where he describes the “rebuilding” of Egypt as the single most significant period in its history. “Clear-headed Anglo-Saxons” are credited with improving the physical geography, the law, the agriculture, the taxation system, and the health of the people (128–29).³

He viewed Empire as a vast, heterogeneous, global unity that inspired broad loyalties, and that could have a salutary effect on British manhood, countering the perceived degeneracy of turn-of-the-century English culture. Doyle was able to propound these views from the position of public visibility that his literary fame had given him. His friendships with Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, and Robert Baden Powell also reveal something of his commitment to Empire, as does his membership in imperial societies such as the Legion of Frontiersmen.

Though Doyle spent very little time in the colonies, his brief sojourns in Egypt and South Africa brought him close to conflicts that were significant in Britain's imperial career. He traveled to Cairo in late 1895 for his wife's health, and quite by chance found himself near the spot when Kitchener began his campaign to retake Khartoum. Doyle rushed to the frontlines in the capacity of honorary journalist. Although he had to return to Cairo before fighting began, he alludes in his memoir to a brief meeting with Kitchener: “He asked me to dine in his tent that night, when he discussed the upcoming campaign with great frankness” (Memories 142). His involvement in the Boer War was more direct, though once again he was a non-combatant. In December 1899, two months after Britain entered into war with the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, Doyle decided to volunteer for service in South Africa. When he was turned down, he went anyway–as a medical officer, in charge of a field hospital that had hastily been established in Bloemfontein by a philanthropist. While he was there, an epidemic of typhoid broke out and he worked round the clock with his meager staff to treat the sick and wounded. Doyle was knighted for his service in South Africa.

On his return to England after three months, Doyle wrote The Great Boer War. Contrary to his expectations, the war continued, and he found himself defending the British faction against the charge of atrocities by journalists such as W. T. Stead. In little more than a week, he compiled a book-length “pamphlet” in which he “made a more effective case by marshalling the statements of eye-witnesses, many of them Boers, on the various questions of farm-burnings, outrages, concentration camps, and other contentious subjects” (Memories 192). By adopting the empiricism that Sherlock Holmes is so famous for, and making a dispassionate review of the facts of the case, Doyle revived enthusiasm for the war within England.

Doyle's unwavering support for the Boer War is, however, belied by his fictional account of a soldier's combat, “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier.” Written more than two decades later, this story registers misgivings that are glossed over in The Great Boer War. Sherlock Holmes is approached by James Dodd, whom the detective quickly identifies as a veteran of the Boer War, to Dodd's amazement. Dodd is puzzled by the disappearance of his comrade in arms, Godfrey Emsworth. According to his family, Godfrey has embarked on a voyage to recover his health after being shot near Pretoria. Not satisfied with this explanation of Godfrey's silence, Dodd travels to the Emsworth estate, wangles an invitation to stay overnight, and in the course of his visit actually catches a glimpse of Godfrey, whom he describes to Holmes as strangely altered: “There was something shocking about the man, Mr. Holmes. It wasn't merely that ghastly face glimmering as white as cheese in the darkness. It was more subtle than that–something slinking, something furtive, something guilty–something very unlike the frank, manly lad that I had known. It left a feeling of horror in my mind” (Complete Sherlock Holmes 2: 492). Godfrey's Emsworth's appearance is at once abject and unintelligible: something so horrible has happened to him that his butler believes him better off dead.

Correctly surmising the reason for Godfrey's confinement, Sherlock Holmes forces the family's hand. He and Dodd are finally able to obtain an account of his misadventure outside Pretoria from Godfrey himself, who describes how, wounded and faint, he stumbles into a house and collapses on an unmade bed, only to wake up to what appears to be a nightmare.

The passage describes a world turned upside down–Godfrey's borrowed bed is more dangerous than the battlefield; conscious experience is more disturbingly unreal than a nightmare. The hospital is starkly precise, illuminated by a relentless African sun. Yet, though the room is flooded with light, Godfrey can make no sense of the grotesque figures that meet his eyes. He is unable to clarify matters because the people in the ward are unintelligible–they speak Dutch. The overtones of paranoia in his description grow stronger as he focuses on the people surrounding him, described here as “strange monstrosities” whose laughter inspires dread. Finally, an element of aggression enters the scene; the man with the sponge-like hands utters wild-beast cries and attacks Godfrey, drawing fresh blood from his wound. Emsworth learns that he is in a Boer Leper Hospital that had been temporarily evacuated in the face of the British advance. The field of imperial battle, far from being one of glory, turns into a scene of horror.⁴

This description of a ward of leprosy patients may be read literally to identify fears of physical degeneration and disease in the colony, but the representation of Boers as diseased can also be understood metaphorically, in the light of political relations between the Boers and the English. The English missionaries of the mid-century construed the Boers as “no more than half-savages: they led degenerate, unrefined lives, lacked a true European ‘spirit of improvement,’ and showed their ‘monstrous’ character by treating blacks as prey to be hunted.”⁵

The English viewed the Boers as the lumpenproletariat of Empire who hindered their civilizing course, to be realized through the spread of Christianity and commerce. Doyle echoed this colonial distinction in The Great Boer War, where he described the Boers as “brave, honest farmers, but standing unconsciously for medievalism and corruption, even as our rough-tongued Tommies stood for civilization, progress, and equal rights for all men” (185). He saw the Boers as hapless victims, but as degenerate nonetheless.

At the same time, the description of the “extraordinary nightmare” that Emsworth wakes up to perhaps recapitulates some of the horror of Doyle's own experience in Langman's hospital treating the casualties of war and disease. The fact that in this story an Englishman returns from the Boer War with a “guilty” and “slinking” demeanor can be interpreted as an implicit admission on Doyle's part that the conduct of the British was not altogether “manly,” to use a favorite word of his. The “nightmare” of the concentration camps in which Boer women and children were rounded up after the burning of Boers' farms by the British was, perhaps, not entirely dispelled by Doyle's efforts at rationalization. In “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” Emsworth has imagined a case of pseudo-leprosy into being, and a famous dermatologist solves his case. Doyle returned from the Boer War to fame and a knighthood, rather than to the travails that Doyle ascribes to his fictional returned colonials. A symptomatic reading of “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” suggests that his own return was not as free of trauma as it appeared, however.

Doyle's preoccupation with the fate of the returned colonial in his detective stories stemmed not only from a traumatic personal experience, but also from broader cultural anxieties about Empire. Doyle's early story, “The Case of the ‘Gloria Scott,’” about the return of characters from Australia, exhibits a number of the elements that resurface in other Sherlock Holmes stories. At the same time, it is important to note that the history and nature of British imperialism varied, and that narratives of return have different cultural contexts. The idea of return from Australia, to take the case in point, is particularly fraught because of its penal history. In this story, Holmes visits his college friend Victor Trevor at the country house of Trevor's father, Justice Trevor. One afternoon, Holmes exercises his as yet uncelebrated detective talents idly upon the person of Justice Trevor. Justice Trevor is a highly respected country gentleman whose character appears to be unassailable, yet Holmes's revelations cause the justice to keel over with shock and fear. Trevor is evidently hiding something, for he begins to regard Holmes with unease after this incident. The sudden arrival of Hudson, an itinerant sailor, who makes claims upon the Justice's hospitality, confirms Holmes's suspicion that there is more to Trevor's affairs than meets the eye. In this instance, however, Holmes has not been called upon as a detective, and as an overly perspicacious visitor his presence becomes unwelcome, so he returns to London. But, Victor Trevor summons him a few weeks later and recounts how Hudson has shattered his father's peace of mind, eventually causing the old man to have a fatal stroke. In a deathbed letter to his son, Justice Trevor reveals the details of his past, the traces of which Holmes has inadvertently detected. Holmes learns that the venerable country judge had in his youth been a transported convict and imperial gold hunter, and has been traced and blackmailed by a witness of his past misadventures.

It is important to note that there are two instances of return from Empire in this story. While one Englishman returns with a colonial fortune and makes a home for himself as a country gentleman, a second comes back to England an indigent and itinerant ne'er-do-well. This asymmetrical twinning of the figure of the returned colonial can be found in a number of the Sherlock Holmes stories: The Sign of Four, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” “The Crooked Man,” “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” and The Hound of the Baskervilles. In these stories, Doyle depicts the return of colonials in an ambivalent way, portraying some colonials as marginal, physically ravaged characters who threaten the peace, while characterizing others as their respectable counterparts who attain social status by virtue of their colonial wealth. In his posthumous confession, Trevor reveals the roundabout route by which he is transformed from a clerk at a London bank, to a transported convict, to a respectable gentleman in rural England. Having left England in the most inauspicious of circumstances, that is, as a criminal sentenced to transportation for embezzling money, Trevor benefits from a shipboard mutiny which permits him to escape the “Gloria Scott,” the transport ship on which he is imprisoned. The survivors of the “Gloria Scott” are able to fabricate entirely new identities, successfully passing themselves off as survivors of a wrecked passenger ship and making their way to Australia as free men. For the hopefuls who have gathered together for the single-minded pursuit of gold, familial antecedents and social position are unimportant–the anonymity of the crowd and the wealth of the land offer Trevor the chance to recreate himself and to return to England a wealthy man. The story imaginatively weaves together the two events that determined Australia's colonization and settlement: the penal transportation that played a key role in the initial occupation of Australia, and the gold rush that spurred large-scale immigration in such a way as to reproduce the mythology of the colony as Arcady.⁶

A sojourn in the colonies could, in fact, be a means of acquiring fame and wealth. Neophytes may have been looked down upon somewhat, but they were also embraced by English society. As Disraeli put it, “A colonist finds a nugget, or he fleeces a thousand flocks. He makes a fortune, he returns to England, he buys an estate, he becomes a magistrate, he represents Majesty, he becomes High Sheriff; he has a magnificent house near Hyde Park; he goes to Court, to levies, to drawing-rooms” (qtd. in Lansbury 54–55). Trevor is just the type of worthy English colonist Disraeli idealizes. With his newly acquired wealth, Trevor is able not only to return to England, but also to recuperate a version of the pastoral ideal in England itself. The story presents a backward-looking model of social mobility, in which pre-capitalist wealth wrested from Empire is able to sustain an older social order. Doyle writes about Sherlock Holmes's visit to his friend's home in what Raymond Williams calls the “elegiac, neo-pastoral mode,” and describes in a stylized manner a gracious way of country life associated with a mythic Old England. Trevor's acquisition of a country estate and the lifestyle that it supports is a sign of his complete assimilation into a traditional order. The story at the same time suggests that social position can be bought, even by a former City clerk and transported convict, with the help of money from Empire. In fact, the old order is no longer an “entailed inheritance,” to borrow Edmund Burke's famous phrase–it is sustained from without. Returns from Empire, both financial and individual, become crucial to developments in the nation.⁷

Doyle presents a revival of the milieu of the rural gentry by the “natural man” as part of the logic of return. Holmes says of Trevor, “He was a man of little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude strength, both physically and mentally. He knew hardly any books, but he had traveled far, had seen much of the world, and had remembered all that he had learned” (Complete Sherlock Holmes 1: 511–12). In this idealized image of the imperialist, the colonial has his learning not from books, but from immediate experience, and he is able to bring a “rude” and rejuvenating wisdom to England. In sum, Trevor exemplifies the virtues of the respectable colonial. He returns to England with the wealth he has acquired abroad and invests it in land; he lives by and reproduces the traditional lifestyle of the English gentry; and his “rude strength” and his experiences abroad enable him to reinvigorate the milieu to which he returns. Doyle sketches similarly favorable portraits of respectable colonials in other detective stories. In “The Crooked Man,” Sherlock Holmes is called on to investigate the apparent murder of Colonel Barclay, who has had a distinguished military career, made in different parts of the British Empire, and has returned to England a much venerated and liked soldier. In “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” James Dodd has returned successfully from combat in the Boer War to civilian life in England. Holmes's famous companion, Dr. John Watson, is himself a wounded veteran of the Afghan War and has returned to England after a medical tour of duty. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, heirs to the Baskerville estate return from abroad to restore the languishing family seat with a colonial fortune, and extend their beneficence to the surrounding countryside. These characters are desirable because they exercise their wealth, experience, and character not in a revolutionary way, but to resuscitate a traditional order dominated by landed gentry. What haunts this imaginary social landscape is the shadow of an unregenerate aristocracy that has failed to live up to the responsibilities of hegemony. In stories such as “The Case of the ‘Gloria Scott’” and The Hound of the Baskervilles, genteel colonials are implicitly defined in contradistinction to degenerate aristocrats. The respectable colonial is, in Doyle's scheme, an intermediary character. He is a bearer of traditional values and an agent of an inherited order, like the aristocracy, but he is not portrayed as profligate in the way the aristocracy frequently is in English writing of the nineteenth century. He is, in a sense, the efficacious double of the degenerate aristocrat.

The respectable colonial has another undesirable double: the imperial lumpenproletarian. While Empire provides opportunities for enrichment, and colonial wealth enables repatriates, even convicts and outlaws, to represent themselves as English country gentlemen, Empire produces its own lumpenproletariat, who might return to plague the metropole. In Doyle's stories of return, the past ineluctably catches up with reformed colonials when their less successful fellows return to torment them in their homes. Hudson in “The Case of the ‘Gloria Scott’” is precisely such a character. In Doyle's Australian stories, these figures, demonized as they are, implicitly confirm that the Empire that was touted as the poor man's Arcady has its own down and out. Hudson represents a class of colonial that causes particular anxiety to the imperial government–the “poor whites” who have been excluded from the spoils of Empire, and have come back for their share of the loot. The itinerant sailor tries to capitalize on his damning knowledge of how rich colonials have made their money to get some part of it. As the sole surviving crewmember of the “Gloria Scott,” Hudson is in a position to blackmail Trevor. In Doyle's account, the imperial lumpenproletarian is not satisfied simply with extortion–he covets the place of the successful colonial. Doyle codes Hudson's course of blackmail as a series of transgressions of the social and domestic order. Hudson torments Trevor by requiring the judge to give him a “position”–first as a gardener, and then as a butler–and then refusing to “know his place.” As he climbs up the stairs of domestic service, and establishes his domain over more and more of the house, he becomes increasingly insolent. His crowning act of insubordination is to commandeer the judge's boat and best gun and go on shooting trips, challenging the symbolic core of the English country gentleman's privilege. Hudson finally causes Trevor to have a stroke by threatening to expose him. The imperial vagabond is the nemesis of the successful repatriated colonial, destroying his life in England.

In Doyle's detective stories of Empire, such characters are often cast as perpetrators of crimes or suspects in investigations within England.⁸

These characters covet the riches that have been denied them. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” a relatively poor witness to a bushranger's lawless career in Australia exploits his knowledge to live off the now wealthy colonial, following him to Britain. In “The Crooked Man,” a former soldier who has been betrayed by his rival in love into the hands of the Indian mutineers of 1857 returns eventually to England as his rival's nemesis. In The Sign of Four, a displaced and impoverished imperial soldier returns from India in pursuit of the Englishman who has defrauded him of his loot. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a poor and illegitimate relative of the heir to the Baskerville fortune returns from South America and looks for a chance to do away with his wealthy kin. In all of these instances, while one colonial prospers, another experiences a decline in his fortunes. This impoverished colonial returns to England and threatens the security of a well-to-do counterpart.

The fictional representation of such poor, discontented characters must be understood against the historical backdrop of colonial social and economic formations. As Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have argued, “Colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent. Against the power which they projected across the globe and against their claim to racial, cultural, or technological dominance, closer investigation reveals competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture” (609). Colonial regimes, by invoking the discourses of racism (and with slightly different inflections, patriotism and nationalism), held out to Europeans the promise of a society of two classes, the colonizers and the colonized, and differences within these classes were construed as far less significant than differences between them. Yet the ideology of colonialism was belied by the actual organization of colonial society, characterized by differential access to wealth and power. The class differences within the colony were no less extreme than those of bourgeois European society; along with its English “nabobs,” colonial European society produced its contingent of paupers, vagrants, orphans, prostitutes, the insane, and criminals.⁹

Had a social investigator conducted a survey of this population similar to Henry Mayhew's study London Labour and The London Poor, the findings would have been analogous. These so-called “poor whites” struggled to subsist by whatever means they had, sometimes falling into poverty when they were discharged from jobs in the army, the railways, on ships, and the like. Like Mayhew's “nomads” who traversed London, they often wandered from country to country. This class was an imperial lumpenproletariat, an underclass found throughout the colonial world, including Australia, India, and Africa.¹⁰ Historians of colonial societies have studied these marginal groups, pointing out that they bore witness to a stratification by social class in colonial societies that was at odds with imperial ideology.¹¹ Existing on the borders, such colonials threatened the integrity of the colonial category of superior European.

The status and comportment of this colonial underclass was particularly troubling to colonial regimes, which saw the racial superiority of Europeans as a key justification for and instrument of imperial rule. In India, the East India Company, during the period of its monopoly, severely limited access to the colony, keeping the numbers of those not in its own employment or that of the British Army small. One reason for this may have been a desire to maintain its own commercial and political grip, but another certainly was the fear that an influx of poor whites would decrease racial prestige and authority.¹²

After the replacement of Company rule by that of the Crown, this policy was no longer adhered to, and especially with the growth of markets for European labor in the railways, construction, communication, and textile industries, more and more “poor whites” came to India, numbering by the end of the century as much as half the European population. These Europeans would sometimes slide into extreme poverty. One British official in India complained in 1867, “The sight of Europeans in the lowest depths of degradation brought on by drinking and profligacy must tend to degrade our race in the eyes of all who see them, and must go far to weaken our prestige amongst a nation avowedly ruled by the respect and fear in which they hold their conquerors” (qtd. in Ballhatchet 124–25). This observer locates colonial power in the field of vision: it is the spectacle that these Europeans present to natives which proves to undo the homogenous category of superior European. Not only did the spectacle of these degraded and degrading colonials threaten to discredit the mythology of European racial supremacy but their ambiguous appearance also confused the boundary between European and native identity. The “poor white” was an abject subject, threatening to disrupt the distinctions that organized colonial identity and colonial rule. One European described a “European loafer” to the Madras Vagrancy Committee in 1867: “He was dressed more like a Native than a European, he had a red fez cap on his head, and native slippers on his feet” (Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants” 120). Such cross-dressed figures were perceived as scandalous because in “going native,” they revealed European identity to be a fragile construction.

As the number of destitute Europeans increased, so did the repressive measures taken by the government: these outcasts of Empire were repatriated, institutionalized in orphanages and workhouses, and incarcerated. Significantly, poor Europeans in India were singled out as subjects of the Vagrancy Acts of 1869, 1871 and 1874; no such legislation applied to destitute Indians. Poor Anglo-Indians, that is, people of mixed English and Indian ancestry, were also socially and politically stigmatized, especially when they became vagrants. It was not the fact of vagrancy itself but that of European vagrancy and the consequent loss of imperial face that was seen as a challenge to imperial rule. Located on the boundaries and margins of Empire, such colonials threatened “the illusion of a homogeneous white race, affluent, powerful, impeccable, aloof” (Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants” 124). By institutionalizing and repatriating European vagrants, orphans, insane, and criminals, the imperial regime attempted to maintain the facade of a homogenous ruling race.

While the presence of poor whites caused embarrassment to the imperial regime, it was also regarded as a desirable buffer against native insurrection, especially after the Indian Mutiny. The poor whites could fill out the numbers of Europeans in the colony; they could also do the “dirty work” of Empire, acting as immediate supervisors of the natives, and intermediaries between them and the colonial elite. It was from such useful positions that they slid into destitution and vagrancy. Destitute Englishmen appear in other fiction of Empire– Kipling's stories are replete with these figures, from Daniel Dravott and Peachey Carnahan in “The Man Who Would Be King” to Kim O'Hara's father in Kim. One finds in the writing of Doyle, and certainly in Kipling's stories, considerable sympathy for such down-and-out Europeans. Even in the accounts of British administrators, one can occasionally detect an awareness that poor whites were not simply backsliding or inherently degenerate, but were, rather, casualties of the vagaries of colonial capitalism and colonial administration. One British official observed in a memorandum that poor whites were like the effluvium emitted from factory chimneys (Reports on European Vagrancy). At the same time, although they threatened to weaken the construct of “superior European,” they also enjoyed a certain license by virtue of their position on the borders of colonial society, as members of a ruling race but of a degenerate class. Kipling accordingly celebrates Kim's marginal mobility, a mobility that enables him to engage in intelligence gathering.

Yet the allegiances of this group to the colonial elite were questionable. Of all the classes in the colony, it was the least wedded to the status quo of colonial capitalism.¹³

Racial ideology militated against alliances between the colonized and poorer Europeans in the colonies; yet economic divisions possibly introduced an element of precariousness to the hegemony of the imperial regime over poor whites. Stoler points out that the nexus of The representational terrain of popular fiction becomes a place in which to articulate and imaginatively control this perceived problem. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, the poor white “idlers and loungers of Empire” have become a social menace and must be appropriately dealt with.

Doyle's “idlers and loungers of Empire” frequently bear the marks of their outcast status on their bodies. In imperial fiction, European bodies are often represented in a double way. On the one hand, the body of the male adventurer can be indomitable. It triumphs over hunger, thirst, disease, injury, and exhaustion. Yet imperial fiction is also replete with bodies that are unstable and fragile–bodies that change color, shrink, bleed, bend, and break. In several stories by Doyle, the bodies of Europeans in Empire undergo undesirable morphological changes. Contradictory representations of the European body as consummately powerful and tremulously frail can be understood in terms of the contrary nature of corporeal experience in the colony. On the one hand, the coloring, physique, physiognomy, and vestments of the European body all bespoke the puissance of a ruling race, as it was celebrated in public rituals of social power, whether on parade or on a hunt. But at the same time Europeans were continually aware of the weakness and vulnerability of their bodies. Influenced by the theories of degeneration that were popular in the late Victorian period, English people believed that imperial location had harmful effects upon European bodies, passions, and intellects.¹⁴

In the colonies, strange and debilitating diseases were an everyday fact of life (Bewell 11). Writers of colonial fiction would have us believe that dangerous beasts–scorpions, snakes, tigers, and rogue elephants–also menaced Europeans. Though on the one hand writers celebrate the power and strength of the imperial body in narratives of extension, traversal, and endurance; on the other hand descriptions of evisceration, emaciation, exhaustion, and disease suggest the vulnerability of the imperial body.

Yet this debility cannot be understood entirely as a condition of imperial experience–it has a class dimension. It is especially the down-and-out colonials to whom I have referred that have bodies that are disfigured or disturbing in some way. Jonathan Small has a wooden leg; Henry Wood has a contorted frame; Stapleton's visage bears an uncanny resemblance to that of a notoriously venal ancestor, Hugo Baskerville. Such “irregular” imperial bodies are not unique to Doyle's fiction: in Kipling's imperial stories, one finds bodies that are burnt, decapitated, amputated, and bloated and discolored with disease. Of course, one cannot generalize about all imperial fiction of the period–Conrad's Marlowe returns to England seemingly untouched. All the same, why are certain returned colonials marked in a bodily way? And what do these deformities signify?

While the psychoanalytic concepts of the “uncanny” and the “abject” may too strongly connote fear and horror properly to characterize Doyle's doubling of well-to-do and down-at-heel returned colonials, these concepts nevertheless suggest why these characters seem anomalous and disturbing, and enable us to probe the political unconscious of his stories. Freud discusses the phenomenon of the uncanny in a number of ways, offering several accounts of its nature and basis. He points out that the etymology of “unheimlich” or “unhomely”–translated as “uncanny”–reveals that it is associated with two sets of ideas: what is agreeable and familiar; and what is kept out of sight and hidden. From this, he concludes that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression (Freud 234). Freud also links the uncanny to the “double”:

According to Freud, the double is originally a safeguard against the destruction of the ego, but takes on an uncanny quality subsequent to a person's passage beyond the stage of primary narcissism. When this stage has been surmounted, the “double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” The patterns of doubling and return that I have pointed to in Doyle's detective stories of Empire suggest that the Englishman who has returned from the colonies is represented as “unhomely” not only in an individual sense but in relation to the nation. Though still a part of the nation, he has become alienated from the culture of the mother country. His return to England is disturbing because it forces an engagement with a self that has become estranged from its native matrix.

Not only is the returned colonial “unhomely,” he is frequently abject in his destitution and disfigurement. Julia Kristeva argues in Powers of Horror that there are certain experiences that undo the very modalities of subjective experience. She calls these experiences instances of abjection, citing among them food loathing; the revulsion produced by a corpse; the horror of an open, pus-filled wound; and disgust of feces. The abject–“what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4)–tends to draw the self “to the place where meaning collapses” (2). In this, the abject is unlike the object, which stabilizes the subject in a reciprocal relationship of otherness. At times Kristeva suggests that the abject has a social character, saying that it exposes the fragility of the law, but for the most part her analysis is situated on the terrain of the individual psyche, invoking ostensibly timeless, universal experiences of the body to elaborate the notion of abjection. Moreover, she appears to assume a bodily experience that is anterior to, indeed antithetical to, a symbolic order. While she eloquently conveys the psychic quality of abjection, she pays little attention to the social matrices in which abjection occurs. Mary Douglas, by contrast, focuses on the social marking of certain entities as disturbingly anomalous and ambiguous.¹⁵

The ravaged bodies of returned colonials are reminders to the national body that it is not whole and robust, but is divided and damaged. They disturb the psychic and social orderliness of late Empire and trouble the consciousness of the nation. Of course, the nation is not a self but a cultural and political formation–a continually reasserted fiction of autochthonous community. The presence of abject characters that, upon returning from Empire, are at once part of and estranged from the nation disturbs this fiction.

The doubling and return of colonials–some abject, some not–is, then, a trope that expresses a number of underlying cultural anxieties. It suggests that the colonials who return to England have become estranged from their native country. It suggests also that an episode or experience that has been repressed has come back to trouble the present. The return of disfigured and violent colonials points to a historical trauma that has been repressed–it signifies a return of the violence that is suppressed in celebratory accounts of the civilizing mission.¹⁶

One might take the return of the repressed in these stories to be symptomatic of a troubled political unconscious upon which the original and repeated violence of colonization has left its traces. This violence is symbolically displaced onto the bodies of poor whites. In “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia are erased from the imperial scene. Native Africans are similarly elided in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier.” Such repeated elisions suggest that Doyle allows no space for the native inhabitants in his imaginary representations of settlement colonies and little more in those of other colonies. Yet in the maimed and sometimes racially degenerate European characters who inhabit his stories, Doyle presents hybrid figures of the poor whites and the natives who have been agents and subjects of colonial violence. The insistent presence of these abject bodies suggests that though the imperial subject has become a pariah, he haunts metropolitan society, like Conrad's “secret sharer.”

The physical irregularity of the returned colonials in Doyle's stories points to the alienating effects of colonial service. In several instances, the bodies of characters from the colonies bear the marks of battle or some other form of violence. Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes's friend and assistant, is the first returned colonial with a wounded body to appear in the Sherlock Holmes stories. A number of other characters–Jonathan Small in The Sign of Four, Henry Wood in “The Crooked Man,” Godfrey Emsworth in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”–are soldiers, suggesting that the male warriors of Empire are especially vulnerable to misadventures. At the very beginning of A Study in Scarlett, Watson recounts his service in the Second Afghan War at Maiwand, where he is struck in the shoulder by a bullet. During his recovery, Watson contracts enteric fever.

In this brief passage, Doyle provides a thumbnail sketch of an unfortunate colonial. Watson is wounded, unemployed, and footloose.¹⁷ Further, Doyle makes a metaphorical link between the human waste of Empire–the imperial lumpenproletariat–and the social pool into which it drains, the imperial city. In describing London as a “cesspool,” Doyle imputes an abject condition to the heart of Empire. This is a strikingly different image of London from the one we find in, for example, The Heart of Darkness, where Marlowe regards with awe the majestic expanse of the great city, upon returning from the “heart of darkness”–although he too finds darkness in a European city. In Doyle's view, if the colony is unsalubrious, as the wounding and infection of Englishmen would suggest, so is the imperial metropolis, and it is in part made so by the presence of imperial lumpenproletarians. The health and wholeness of Empire are implicitly staked upon Watson's successful rehabilitation.

That health and bodily integrity are a preoccupation in the stories is suggested not only by the prevalence of wounded imperial bodies but also by the nature of Watson's profession. As a doctor, Watson can restore wounded bodies. Also, his own wound heals, an indication that he can reintegrate into English society. Watson is a median figure, a potential lumpenproletarian who becomes a respectable former colonial–he regains his health, and takes on a curative role in the society he rejoins. At risk of becoming one of the legion of “loungers and idlers of Empire,” he is in fact rehabilitated and reabsorbed into the bourgeoisie after his return to England. In comparison with other “loungers and idlers of Empire” in the stories, Watson has been normalized. But in fact, the text betrays a certain anxiety even about Watson's improvement. His wound gives him lingering pains, suggesting that his recovery has not been complete, and that traces of his ordeal in India remain. More curiously, Watson's wound wanders. In The Sign of Four, it is his shoulder that is wounded; in another story, he has a leg wound. This slippage leads one to conjecture that Watson's body has an incongruous status. The textual unfixity of his bodily injury insinuates its lingeringly irregular character, even though his body has ostensibly healed. His residual pains are a reminder that some imperial adventures can adversely and indelibly mark the bodies of Englishmen, and that return to English society in the full sense is an uncertain and difficult matter.

These returned colonials have another curious aspect: they are racially coded as “other.” The “crooked man” Henry Wood is quite brown from exposure to the tropical sun and he speaks an unintelligible language. Jonathan Small of the wooden leg has an inseparable companion, Tonga, who is described as a homicidal savage. Godfrey Emsworth, the “Blanched Soldier,” possesses skin of an unnatural “cheese-like whiteness.” These descriptions betray a preoccupation with skin color, arguably the most salient of racial markers in the late nineteenth century. The “poor whites” in Doyle's stories are themselves of questionable whiteness; Doyle symbolically affiliates imperial lumpenproletarians with non-Europeans. Doyle suggests that social and economic stratification, coded in racial terms, traverses imperial formations and cannot be mapped neatly along the divide between Europeans and “natives.”

Doyle's stories can in fact be read against the grain to offer an indictment of colonial economy. While Empire produces wealthy colonials, it simultaneously and conjointly produces large numbers of impecunious, displaced “poor whites.” His characters have not merely become estranged from the culture and the consciousness of the nation–often, the bodily damage they have suffered in Empire has made them unfit for conventional work upon their return. The bodies of all of these returned colonials have become undisciplined both with respect to the norms of legality and to the imperatives of labor. Contrary to the ideology of imperialism, which holds that everyone gets rich in Empire, these indigent and rootless colonials who return to England are social and economic outcasts.

Detective fiction concludes by imposing hermeneutic and juridical order upon an unquiet and dangerous world. Puzzles and unsolved identities are resolved, blame is assigned, and peace is reestablished. In some of his stories of return, Doyle makes the coupling of good and bad returns from Empire palatable by superimposing a juridical and ethical narrative of crime and detection upon a social and economic narrative of unequal fortunes. Moreover, the outcast colonial generally deserves his ill fortune because he is a reprobate. This is the logic of stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. When he is discovered and the story of his crime is told, the cosmos in which he is placed is rid of uncertainty and the community cleansed of guilt. Auden, in an essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” argues that the criminal expiates the sins of all. “In the [detective story] it is certain that a crime has been committed and, temporarily, uncertain to whom the guilt should be attached; as soon as this is known, the innocence of everyone else is certain” (24). The assigning of guilt purifies the community as a whole. To take this argument in a secular direction, in fiction of imperial intrigue, this individuation of criminal culpability is also a way of displacing social and political problems–the “sins of all.” “As Holmes' critical observations apply only to individuals, so his vocation, the solution of individual crimes, merely restores the social balance that each crime has upset. It never brings that balance into question, for the causes of disorder, where they involve more than individual motives, are not his concern” (Clausen 65). This bracketing of causes in favor of effects is, according to Jon Thompson, the fundamental logic of empiricism that drove imperialism.¹⁸

However, in many instances, Doyle does not offer an ideologically tidy resolution. While Doyle distinguishes between the respectable and unprepossessing colonial, and marks the latter as abject, he does not impose any neat moral schema upon this pattern of depicting colonials. In “The Crooked Man,” for example, Henry Wood is in no way culpable for his misfortunes. Although Colonel Barclay is ultimately exposed, and justly suffers a stroke, Wood is not rehabilitated. Often, the seemingly successful and respectable colonials are corrupt–as in The Sign of Four and The Crooked Man. In “The Case of the ‘Gloria Scott’” and “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” it is the law-abiding colonial and not the former outlaw who is characterized as a villainous tormentor and blackmailer. Nor is there always a conclusive ending to the stories. In “The ‘Gloria Scott,’” Hudson disappears at the end of the story. Sherlock Holmes speculates that Beddoes, a putative victim of Hudson's course of blackmail, has done away with Hudson, but we do not know this for certain. Thus, Doyle's detective stories are more ambiguous than would first appear to be the case. Criminality and guilt are the substance of detective cosmology, yet these are often shown to be insufficiently clear-cut.

Doyle was far from being a critic of Empire, and he emphatically does not indict colonial capitalism and administration. When he acknowledges their existence at all, he characterizes the native inhabitants of the colonies as corrupt and savage. In his view, the influence of English culture is unquestionably civilizing. When English characters experience a moral and physical decline in the colonies, they become more and more like the ostensibly unregenerate natives. However, the shadowy figures of English colonials who have fallen through the cracks of the imperial economy and society haunt his stories. Their return to England and embroilment in misadventure or crime suggests that something is rotten in the state of Empire. While imperial rhetoric celebrates the ideal of a prosperous and superior ruling race, imperial economies produce impoverished and ailing colonials, abject characters who can be neither assimilated nor entirely separated from the metropole. One might go as far as to argue that in failing to effect complete closure, assign blame unequivocally, and purge the entire community of guilt, Doyle, wittingly or not, expresses the antinomies of late Victorian imperialism.