By Indiana M. A. Humniski
Trigger Warning: mentions of human remains.
Illustration: Van Maële, Martin. Société d'Édition et de Publications, 1906.
Image Description: A sketch of a mummy’s emaciated body, emerging from a stone coffin, decorated with lightly-detailed drawings of Egyptian gods & goddesses in front of a blackened backdrop.
Welcome back to Behind the Bookshelf! This is the final edition in a trio of blog posts that will focus on different spaces in Dalnavert and link these locations to works of Victorian literature!
In this edition, I invite you to consider museums and the cultural work they do. While museums are spaces of conservation and education, they can also be spaces of appropriation and theft. Let's examine the case of a Victorian-era fictional character with a taste for collecting Egyptian artifacts! Victorians are known for their intense curiosity regarding other cultures. When reading Victorian literature in the modern era, readers can link themes to the concept of Orientalism: a term popularized by Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said’s book of the same name. If you’re curious about the meaning of Orientalism and about the ways this mindset shaped Victorian culture, then I’d place my bets that Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 short story “Lot No. 249” will be of interest to you!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
Illustration of "Lot No. 249" by Antoine-Marie Raynolt (1898).
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a Scottish author and physician. Best known for authoring fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories as well as four novels about the famous detective, Doyle was a very spiritual man. Indeed, he visited Winnipeg in 1923 in an attempt to convince the city’s inhabitants of the validity of spiritualist beliefs. To read more about this local link, click here.
While many people will associate Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, detective stories were not the only noteworthy stories he wrote. In his less-studied short story “Lot No. 249,” Doyle recounts a heart-racing tale of Oxford students entangled in a narrative that includes the intrigues of Egyptology, a frightening reanimation of a long-dead person, and, for good measure, several impressive high-speed chases.
“Lot No. 249” (1892)
The plot follows Abercrombie Smith, a medical student living at Oxford and his endeavours to quell the “evil” acts of Edward Bellingham. Bellingham, a history student specializing in foreign languages, purchases a mummy and reanimates it to act as a vehicle for his own nefarious revenges. With themes such as murder and mayhem – it is easy to imagine this tale as exceedingly popular, especially with its target audience: young men of the period.
Illustration: Antoine-Marie Raynolt in La Lecture (1898).
As the story was published in 1892, it is possible that this tale made its rounds through the halls of Dalnavert. Perhaps the young son of the Macdonald family, Jack, could have found some excitement and adventure in these pages (particularly with the descriptions of the Oxford rowing team in action, since Jack took part in this sport!).
However – beyond these boyish themes of hypermasculine adventure – there is a distinct undercurrent of Orientalism that flows throughout Doyle’s narrative.
A Brief Introduction to Orientalism
Edward Said defines Orientalism as a primarily British and French perspective on how the region that has been broadly labelled as “the Orient” has served as “an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” Imagining the region as both a place and a monolithic culture, Europeans have sought “to capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it.” Keeping this definition at the forefront of our minds, contemporary readers of “Lot No. 249” will notice the intense reverberations of this mindset, whose influence extends far beyond this story and continues to be felt in our own day.
Nineteenth-Century Visual, Social, and Medical Culture of Mummies
“Gaston Maspero working on a mummy in Cairo”, 1886.
Victorians exploited the bodies of mummies through visual, social, and physical modes of consumption.
IN VISUAL CULTURE
Mummies were exhibited in museums for curious onlookers. Additionally, Western artists benefited from these practices. A popular shade of pigment, chillingly named “mummy brown,” was created from mummified human remains.
IN SOCIAL CULTURe
Mummy unwrapping parties were on the rise. To read another short story where Doyle explores magic, Egyptology, public museums, and the unwrapping of a mummy, click here. Wealthy party hosts could purchase a mummy from distant shores, have this human body shipped to their homes, and unwrap it in front of their guests.
IN MEDICAL CULTURE…
Philippoteaux, Paul Dominique. “Une prêtresse d'Ammon (Examination of a Mummy - The Priestess of Ammon)” c.1895-1910.
The powdered remains of mummies were consumed to cure ailments ranging from headaches to epilepsy. This practice has been deemed medical cannibalism. The effective and expensive substance called “mumia,” found in the Persian mountains. In reality, “mumia” came from black-rock asphalt; however, Victorians were guided by this mistranslation of the local word for wax which was “mum.” Due to the word’s similarity to the term “mummy,” a critical assumption led to the misunderstanding. While Victorians used the concept of cannibalism to deride other cultures such as Indigenous cultures, the practice was, it seems, acceptable in the case of mummified remains and British medical culture. This is another example of the materiality of “The Orient” that European harvesters exploited for what they believed would be medical gains.
(In)Human Words v. Human Remains
When I read “Lot No. 249” for the first time, there was one feature that stood out more than others: the dehumanizing language that was repeatedly used to describe human remains. It was a choice that felt significant and was hard to ignore. Regarding these remains, it is important to note that Bellingham houses his collection of artifacts in his dorm room. At an early point in the story, before Abercrombie Smith discovers Bellingham’s nefarious misuse of the mummy, Smith seems to be distinctively unnerved by the mummy’s physical appearance. Certainly, the narrating voice of “Lot no. 249” shows a revulsion towards the mummy. As this quotation shows, there is a distinct difference in the narrator’s descriptions of the mummy’s physical appearance as a dehumanized object versus Bellingham’s desire to know about the mummy’s life:
Two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. [ … ] Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. [ … ] ‘I don't know his name,’ said Bellingham, passing his hand over the shrivelled head. ‘You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now.’ (531)
From the narrator’s descriptions of the mummy’s “nut-like eyes” and rat-like “thin teeth,” it is obvious that the narrator is not seeking to understand or even perceive the mummy on a human level. Instead, these descriptions grotesquely serve to “other” the mummy. In contrast, Bellingham acknowledges the human life that came before, made evident by his emphasis on not knowing the mummy’s name. However, as discussed above, there is a fine line between acknowledgement and fetishization when it comes to Victorians’ treatment of mummified remains…
IN DOYLE’S STORY…
Egyptomania ran rampant on Victorian college campuses such as Oxford, where Doyle sets his tale. The aforementioned mummy unwrapping events did not just occur in private homes. These exploitative events occurred in university lecture halls as well. While Doyle makes no mention of Smith attending a mummy unwrapping, he does make it clear that Smith has studied human remains. Smith, like his fellow students, engages in anatomical studies of human bones. Visiting with a fellow medical student, Jephro Hastie, Smith shares his “anatomical plunder” of human bones; however, he ironically perceives Bellingham’s anatomical study of his purchased mummy as something worthy of judgement and derision. This is another Orientalist example of the double standards of British attitudes toward non-British cultures.
The Morality of Museum Spaces
Bellingham’s room is described by the story’s narrator as a “museum rather than a study” (530). His room contains a collection of oddities whose provenance is unknown to the reader. The morality of Bellingham, a British collector, possessing objects and artifacts from another culture and distant locations is questionable. What is more, there are numerous arguments to be made against the display of human remains of any kind in private or public museum spaces, regardless of the intention or identity of the collection’s curator. For example, the National Museum of Scotland has recently removed photographs of unwrapped human remains from their online database.
When considering the collection and display of human remains, respect should be paramount. However, consistent with the attitudes of many Victorians, the mummy’s presence in Bellingham’s private home museum serves a purpose besides fulfilling any academic research purposes: to facilitate exploitation. As Said explains, “The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” This “material” aspect expands into the everyday lives of Victorians who were exploiting imported artifacts, human or otherwise, as objects of curiosity when they were, in fact, records of civilizations. Though Bellingham speaks about the remains with an empathetic tone, he contradicts himself later. Bellingham uses the reanimated mummy to commit acts such as pushing a fellow student, Monkhouse Lee, into a river in an attempt to kill him. In short, Bellingham’s vengeful use of the body of a long-dead person contradicts any reverence that he shows to the purchased remains.
Western Masculinity v. Eastern Mysticism
Illustration: Antoine-Marie Raynolt in La Lecture (1898).
Overall, this tale shows two distinct male identities. Abercrombie Smith represents the athletic and adventurous British male. He and his fellow medical classmate are described as “open-air men—men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust” (526). He is the kind of man who could (and would) destroy a less-masculine man such as Bellingham specifically. Contrarily, the emasculated character of Bellingham is depicted as less of a man due to his academic interests in foreign cultures and his appearance, particularly his larger body size and prioritization of academic interests over athletic pursuits.
Smith is positioned by Doyle as the tale’s main avenger against impure, mystical forces that are threatening the lives of others in his homeland. When Smith discovers that Bellingham has been using both his knowledge of Ancient Egyptian culture and a reanimated mummy to commit crimes by proxy, Smith declares to Bellingham that his “filthy Egyptian tricks won't answer in England”. Thus, a British reader would be inclined to root for Smith’s heroism. However, this same character does not share the same empathy that Bellingham emits regarding the humanity of the mummy. Instead, Smith is stunned into silence and revulsion. Evidently, Smith is only a homegrown hero when it comes to empathizing with members of humanity that look like him.
This story and its representation of both British men and a mummified Ancient Egyptian demonizes the “Orient,” Egypt included. Simultaneously, the story sparks the Western appetite for exploring (and exploiting) the unknown. While Bellingham treats the mummy with more respect than Smith, his extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts remains a complex, problematic example of Western greed towards foreign cultures.
In a distinctly Scooby-Doo-esque twist, the monster of Doyle’s narrative is not the rampant mummy on the loose; indeed, the truly terror-striking twosome of this tale is the combination of the appropriative pride of Edward Bellingham and the prejudice of Abercrombie Smith.
Dashing Back to Dalnavert
A key topic to remember when considering the ethics of displaying artifacts in museum spaces is the manner in which those artifacts were acquired. Of course, in a Canadian context, this logic can be extended to numerous cases currently under discussion of the appropriation and display of Indigenous, Inuit, and Métis artifacts and artworks.
Tracey-Mae Chambers installs #hopeandhealingcanada at Dalnavert in 2022.
It is important for Canadian museums to keep Indigenous voices, perspectives, and contemporary creations in mind as we consider the present-day practices of museums, especially in museums, such as Dalnavert, that have inherent links to Canada’s colonial history. You can read more about a work of anti-colonial art installed at the museum in Fall 2022 by Métis artist Tracey-Mae Chambers on the Dalnavert Blog.
Closing the Chapter…
With my mind on museums, I’d like to close off this blog with a message that encapsulates the three posted articles that I’ve shared thus far: there is value in using the literature of the past to inform conversations in the modern day. From colonialism to feminism to Orientalism, I have found that contemporary conversations are only made richer when we peek backwards (especially within the pages of our past!). It is interesting to imagine what the Macdonald family might have been reading while they lived in the home. In fact, that query is how the title for this series came to be! I’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading any or all of my Behind the Bookshelf blog posts. I hope that they have opened your eyes to some literary gems of the past while simultaneously engaging your thoughts about our current world. Above all, I have deeply enjoyed writing them and I hope that you, dear readers, have enjoyed taking a step “behind the bookshelf” with me!
About Indiana M. A. Humniski
Indiana Humniski is a fourth-year Honours English student at the University of Manitoba. She is spending her summer as a Research Assistant focusing on the Victorian period. From studying ghost stories to experimenting with Victorian-era crafting practices, Indiana appreciates the treasures of our literary past and finds great joy in transposing them into her academic future.
Acknowledgements & Sources
Lakshmisree Shaji: for introducing me to the important words and teachings of Edward Said.
Source Citations
“Arthur Conan Doyle.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2024, www.britannica.com/biography/Arthur-Conan-Doyle.
Blakemore, Erin. “The Gory History of Europe’s Mummy-Eating Fad.” History, May 2023, www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eating-medical-cannibalism-gory-history.
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. “Lot No. 249”. Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Sept. 1892. pp. 525-44. https://archive.org/details/1892lotno249doyleharpersmagsept
“Human Remains in Our Collections.” National Museums Scotland, 2024, www.nms.ac.uk/collections-research/research/human-remains-in-our-collections/.
“John ‘Jack’.” Dalnavert Museum, 2014, www.friendsofdalnavert.ca/john-jack.
Ro, Christine. “Is It Ever Ethical for Museums to Display Human Remains?” BBC, 19 Jan. 2024, www.bbc.com/future/article/20240118-is-it-ever-ethical-for-museums-to-display-human-remains.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1979. Reprint. Vintage, 1994.
“The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine.” Smithsonian Magazine, 6 May 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/.
“Tracey-Mae Chambers' #hopeandhealingcanada.” Dalnavert Museum, 22 Sept. 2022, www.friendsofdalnavert.ca/blog/2022/9/22/tracy-mae-chambers-hopeandhealingcanada.
Image Citations
“Gaston Maspero working on a mummy in Cairo”, 1886. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaston_Maspero_demaillotage.jpeg
Philippoteaux, Paul Dominique. “Une prêtresse d'Ammon (Examination of a Mummy - The Priestess of Ammon)” c.1895-1910. https://www.leicestergalleries.com/browse-artwork-detail/MTkxMDg=.
Raynolt, Antoine-Marie. La Lecture, 1898. https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Lot_No._249.
Van Maële, Martin. Société d'Édition et de Publications, 1906.https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Lot_No._249.