Paget’s illustrations — specifically those from the earlier two Adventures series — work in the visual aspects to supress sensationalistic elements within the
56 Pittard, “Cheap, Healthful Literature: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities, p, 90. “Doyle occasionally complained that Paget’s images ruined the surprise of the narrative. Yet such a technique was perfectly consistent with the Strand’s ideology of purifying experience and defusing sensation; the potential shock ending of ‘The Final Problem,’ for instance, was rendered less powerful by its opening illustration, a full page image of Reichenbach Falls with the unambiguous caption ‘The Death of Sherlock Holmes.”
57 Doyle complained to the Strand editor Greenhough Smith in his letters that, by giving away endings, the illustrations undermined his narratives. See Cameron Hollyer, “Author to Editor: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Correspondence with H. Greenhough Smith,” in: ACD: The Journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society 3, 1992, pp.11–34, p.26. Cited by Pittard, “Cheap, Healthful Literature: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities,” Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, p. 90.
stories. One distinctive trait of Paget’s works is the often blank background. Bereft of minute details, these illustrations depend on minimal props to construct the space.
This is especially evident when he depicts characters in interior settings. Just one armchair or a sofa with carpet would be sufficient to imply the interior space. The almost austere atmosphere produces a simple and neat impression, and this cleanness effectively helps to keep the tone calmly and steadily in check.
Nonetheless, the calmness perceived throughout the narrative comes not only from pictorial simplicity, but also from the obvious lack of action in these illustrations.
In spite of the title “adventure,” the images accompanying Doyle’s text appear to be less eventful and tend to acquire an air of domestic ordinariness. It is hard to overlook the recurring scenes of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (occasionally with other characters) in conversation while seated (fig. 27–30) as they keep appearing in almost every adventure. Complementing Doyle’s faith in the power of logic and rationality, such “sit and talk” motif seems to hint at the better use of the brain instead of the body and further highlight the importance of thinking during investigation.
In addition to the emphasis on the mind and thoughts, the peculiar quiescence in Paget’s illustrations could also partially result from the artist’s intention to subdue sensationalism, which is quite ostensible in his conscious avoidance from graphic depictions of violence. Among all the Holmesian illustrations done by Paget, scenes that could be perceived as violent are noticeably few in number as compared to those portraying characters in relatively static states.58 These images, ranging from fierce physical fights to milder confrontations, are virtually aimed to represent either conflict or opposition in different forms. Whether the representations could be deemed as rousing is defined by the characters’ physicality — the body language, posture as well as proximity of their physical contact, in which various degrees of dynamism are at play. Upon a closer look, the majority of these dynamic representations in the Adventures are in fact variations of the same archetypal posture (fig. 31–35). Uplifting arms, twisted torso, and a contrapposto stance, these representations differentiate from each other in their intensity. The more the limbs are
58 The approximate ration is one tenth (only the illustrations from the first two series of Adventures are counted as my statistics), and the criteria used to determine whether a presentation should be
considered violent would be: the degree of physical closeness and hostility, intensity of the confrontation or conflict between the characters, etc.
stretched and the body is contorted, the more drastic the movement will be, and hence the sentiment and dramatic impact encompassed within the image.
Interestingly, in comparison with Paget’s animated renditions of military scenes for newspapers like The Sphere and The Illustrated London News (fig. 36, 37) or his later illustrations for Doyle’s adventure story The Tragedy of the Korosko (fig. 38), most of times Paget’s Holmesian characters tend to bear a certain frozen rigidity even in those representations considered dynamic.59 Carrying an air of detachment, these characters are shown in a way as if they are posing on stage (fig. 39–41). These images do not seek to absorb the audience with sentiment as their contemporary competitors like the penny dreadful or sensational sporting papers do. Maybe it would be a bit imprecise to call them “competitors” since these publications targeted at readers who craved for sheer thrills of gruesome crimes and attracted reading communities different from the Strand. Whereas illustrations for the latter kind commit themselves to the representation of crime itself by drawing on blood, violence and gore as baits for more readers, Paget’s illustrations intentionally go toward the opposite direction.
It does not mean that Paget would wipe out every trace of crime in his works, though. Crime, as the crucial factor that drives the plots in detective fiction, is a theme impossible for the illustrator to ignore. However, the graphical representation of crime is another matter. It could be manipulated, and that is exactly what Paget had done with his restraint of sensational elements. Paget’s self-censorship manifests itself mainly in the form of concealment, but in different levels. It is not uncommon for the artist to deliberately eschew brutal scenes. In “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk” (1893), the story reaches its morbid climax when Sherlock and his entourage manage to force their way into the locked room and interrupt the swindler Pinner’s attempted suicide. Upon describing their discovery of the would-be-suicide, Doyle provides a rather extraordinary depiction full of vivid details:
A coat and waistcoat were lying on the floor, and from a hook behind the door, with his own braces round his neck, was hanging the managing director of the
59 Serialised in the Strand between May to December 1897, The Tragedy of the Korosko is a novel written by Arthur Conan Doyle about a group of European tour traveling in Egypt. Sailing on the boat named “Korosko” along the Nile, the group later encounters a band of Dervish warriors, and then the tragic starts to unfold.
Franco-Midland Hardware Company. His knees were drawn up, his head hung at a dreadful angle to his body, and the clatter of his heels against the door made the noise which had broken in upon our conversation.60
These concrete visual clues, despite their pictorial potential, were forgone by Paget, while the previous scene where the detective forced his way through the locked door was preferred (fig. 42) — a choice that could be interpreted as a calculated concealment.61
That Paget hardly depicts the moment of killing is probably the artist’s most obvious act of veiling violence. In the twenty-four Adventures published before The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), only three stories contain actual depictions of malicious attacks: the scene from “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” (1892) capturing Mr. Victor Hatherley, a young consultant hydraulic engineer trying to escape from the just-discovered counterfeiter Colonel Stark, clinging onto the sill for dear life, with the uplifting axe in the villain’s hands which foresees the impending horror of thumb-cutting )62; the concluding piece of “The Cardboard Box” (1893) which re-enacts the climax of the murderer Jim Browner’s confession — infidelity, an eloping couple on boat, and an angry estranged husband betrayed, these eventually leads to a crime of passion, and with a couple ferocious strokes taking the lives of the adulterers (fig. 35)63; representation of Sherlock Holmes pinned on the floor and strangled by the Cunninghams after the duo realises the sleuth is close to expose their crime in “The Adventure of the Reigate Squires” (1893), which is particularly rare as Holme’s is seldom depicted as the weak throughout the canon (fig. 44)64.
60 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk,” in: The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p.
232.
61 Pittard, “Cheap, Healthful Literature: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities,” Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, p. 97.
62 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 133.
“He dashed her to one side, and, rushing to the window, cut at me with his heavy weapon. I had to let myself go, and was hanging by the hands to the sill, when his blow fell. I was conscious of a dull pain, my grip loosened, and I fell into the garden below.”
63 Doyle, “The Cardboard Box,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 212. “The haze was like curtain all round us, and there were we three in the middle of it. My God, shall I ever forget their faces when they saw who was in the boat that was closing in upon them? She screamed out. He swore like a madman, and jabbed at me with an oar, for he must have seen death in my eyes. I got past it and got one in with my stick, that crushed his head like an egg. I would have spared her, perhaps, for all my madness, but she threw her arms round him, crying out to him, and calling him ‘Alec.’ I struck again, and she lay stretched beside him.”
64 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 266.
“His words were cut short by a sudden scream of ‘Help! Help! Murder!’ With a thrill I recognised the voice as that of my friend. I rushed madly from the room on to the landing. The cries, which had sunk
Nevertheless, the brutality displayed in these scenes pales in comparison with those graphic terrors that feast upon the reader’s thirst for blood and excitement, but such contrast is actually satisfying if one takes into account that Paget’s illustrations also participate in the censorship of the Strand, only that the artist did it through a visual filter. Take the imminent throat-cutting scene in The String of Pearls (1846-47) for example (fig. 45), set in London, the classic Victorian penny dreadful serial showcases the infamous barber Sweeney Todd going on a killing spree with his straight razor as the victims sit on his barber chair. Unlike Paget, who manages to withhold the feeling of suspense in his reserved presentation, illustrators for The String of Pearls aims to amplify drama by drawing on the reader’s dread and anxiety with bloodcurdling elements. Grabbing the poor man’s head, the vicious barber forced his victim to bare his throat. As the razor’s sharp blade edges in a terribly close distance, the helpless victim is shown hands opening wide, frontally facing the spectator in his most vulnerable moment.
Of course there are still times when gory scenes cannot be simply avoided. Yet, out of two hundred and one illustrations from the first two Adventures series, there are only nine graphical representations of corpses, which is an extremely small percentage considering the genre the Sherlock Holmes stories belong to.65 In these rare cases, concealment, to a lesser extent, still exists when one pays attention to how Paget handles the corpse and blood. In the case of “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”
(1891), in which Charles McCarthy, an old expatriate from Australia, was killed by a fatal blow to the head with an unknown weapon after a heated quarrel with his son James in the woods, Paget provides two illustrations including the old McCarthy’s body. The first one depicts the scenario after the son ran to call for the lodge-keeper’s help. As they followed the young McCarthy back to the site, they found the old man flat on the ground, dead (fig. 46).66 While the text states that the victim’s wound
down into a hoarse, inarticulate shouting, came from the room which we had first visited. I dashed in, and on into the dressing-room beyond. The two Cunninghams were bending over the prostrate figure of Sherlock Holmes, the younger clutching his throat with both hands, while the elder seemed to be twisting one of his wrists.”
65 Strictly speaking there are only eight illustrations contains actual depiction of corpses or human body parts, but I’d like to include one more illustration from “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” since the victim in this case is only one breath away from death. The image in question will be discussed in the following analysis.
66 Doyle, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 54. “On following him they found the dead body stretched out upon the grass beside the Pool. The head had been beaten in by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon. The injuries were such as might
appears to be “beaten in by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon,” there is nothing ferocious in Paget’s representation, only a faint patch of blood on the forehead. The same also goes with the other illustration, which re-enacts the suspect-son’s recollection of how he found his father lying on the grass with expiring breaths (fig. 47).67
Similar kind of obscured injury on the victim’s corpse could be observed in other Adventures. “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” (1892) involves a disappearing race horse and a dead horse trainer John Straker with a severely-fractured skull. As Holmes accepts the case and brings Doctor Watson with him on their way to the crime scene, the detective outlines the whole incident and recounts how the victim’s body was found:
About a quarter of a mile from the stables, John Straker’s overcoat was flapping from a furze bush. Immediately beyond there was a bowl-shaped depression in the moor, and at the bottom of this was found the dead body of the unfortunate trainer. His head had been shattered by a savage blow from some heavy weapon, and he was wounded in the thigh, where there was a long, clean cut, inflicted evidently by some very sharp instrument.68
In the corresponding illustration, Paget handles Doyle’s description of the corpse in a quite unexciting manner. What should be a shattered, hideous head wound caused by brutal force turns into a faint indent on the forehead so inconspicuous that one could barely notice (fig. 48), and the wound on Straker’s thigh is nowhere to be seen as the artist purposefully arranged the victim’s body in a way that the viewer’s sight would be blocked by the other bent leg. The blocking of reader’s sight on the corpse would later appear again in “The Adventure of the ‘Gloria Scott’” (1893) when the exiled criminals on the barque “Gloria Scott” killed the captain and took over the ship (fig.
49).69 Taken from an angle reverse to the narrator’s, the sight of the dead captain in Paget’s illustration is largely blocked by the shooter.
very well have been inflicted by the butt-end of his son’s gun, which was found lying on the grass within a few paces of the body.”
67 Ibid., p. 56. “I found my father expiring upon the ground, with his head terribly injured.”
68 Doyle, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 188–189.
69 Doyle, “The Adventure of the ‘Gloria Scott’,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 245.
“Then we rushed on into the captain’s cabin, but as we pushed open the door there was an explosion from within, and there he lay with his head on the chart of Atlantic, which was pinned upon the table, while the chaplain stood, with a smoking pistol in his hand, at his elbow.”
In some other cases the corpse is partially blurred by the artist’s subtle use of shadow and light, such as the nearly indiscernible lower half of the first drowned victim’s body in “The Five Orange Pips” (1891) (fig. 50), an ambivalent view almost blending with the dim background.70 Another instance would be the ending scene from “The Speckled Band” (1892), which depicts the moment when Holmes and Watson found the murderer Dr. Roylott died of a snakebite from his own “speckled band” — a swamp adder (fig. 51).71 Partially hidden and partially illuminated by the lamplight, Dr. Roylott’s corpse sits stiffly in the darkness, but strangely the viper which should coil viciously around his neck is nowhere to be seen.
The last corpse veiled in shadow can be seen in “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (1893). Recounting one of the sleuth’s earlier case entrusted by his college mate Reginald Musgrave, the story unfolds from an old family ritual and a butler’s mysterious disappearance. When Holmes and Musgrave finally found the missing butler Brunton in the secret basement, the man in question is already dead for days.72 Though described with a “distorted, liver-coloured countenance,” Paget does not portray any signs of livor mortis on Bruton’s face. Instead, facing downward in a posture resembling kneeling bow, the butler’s face in the illustration is basically shown in a profile hidden in the dark (fig. 25).
Besides hidden wounds and veiled bodies, it is also worth noting that blood is almost invisible in these Sherlock Holmes stories. Of all the Adventures illustrations, only four of them show the presence of blood. Three of them, as already discussed, are related to corpse representation (fig. 46, 47, 49). The only exception is when the
70 Doyle, “The Five Orange Pips,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 72. “We found him, when we went to search for him, face downwards in a little green-scummed pool which lay at the foot of the garden.”
71 Doyle, “The Speckled Band,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 121–122. “It was a singular sight which met our eyes. On the table stood a dark lantern with the shutter half open, throwing a brilliant beam of light upon the iron safe, the door of which was ajar. Beside this table, on the wooden chair, sat Dr. Grimesby Roylott, clad in a long grey dressing-gown, his bare ankles protruding beneath, and his feet thrust into red heelless Turkish slippers. Across his lap lay the short stock with the long lash which we had noticed during the day. His chin was cocked upwards, and his eyes were fixed in a dreadful rigid stare at the corner of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly round his head. As we enter he made neither sound nor motion.”
72 Doyle, “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual,” The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, p. 256.
“It was the figure of a man, clad in a suit of black, who squatted down upon his hams with his forehead sunk upon the edge of the box and his two arms thrown out on each side of it. The attitude had drawn all the stagnant blood to the face, and no man could have recognised that distorted, liver-coloured countenance.”
client reveals his still bleeding hand in front of Doctor Watson in the opening scene of
“The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” (1892):
He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers
He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers