Friends, in Gothic Fiction, do not tend to fare well. We might think of Clerval in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – a devoted companion to Victor who ends up murdered because Victor will not create a devoted companion for his creation. Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, literally ‘burns’ in a fever to her death. Most of the protagonists in M. R. James’ Edwardian ghost stories appear to be completely friendless – typically, solitary men whose social interactions merely serve to send them further down the road to perdition. If the Jamesian ghost story warns us to be wary about what we look for (because we might just find it), it also suggests that absenting ourselves from the social world risks drawing ourselves into a another, decidedly less salubrious one.
Part of the enduring appeal of the Gothic lies in its moral ambiguity. If Gothic texts present us with the tangible presence of evil in the world, they also blur the boundaries of good and evil, sometimes highlighting the key anxieties of the age. Friendship, or more broadly, human relations and what motivates them, plays a core role in this moral universe – not least because a one of the defining aspects of friendship is the idea of shared values. Indeed, in classical philosophy, the idea of a shared appreciation of the ‘good’, embodied the highest form of friendship. Plato and Aristotle distinguished this from friendships based on pleasure and friendships based on utility (i.e. the usefulness of a relationship in terms of material advancement.) Friendship can also be understood morally in terms of trust, respect and empathy: we expect a degree of intimacy in friendship which entails the disclosure of private thoughts and feelings we would not ordinarily share, and that a friend will validate these thoughts and feelings and respect them. In the Gothic universe, secrecy burdens relationships – both in the sense that characters that should trust each other, do not disclose their inner secrets and in the sense that a shared intimacy carries obligations of care with it, that can place characters at odds with the world around them. We can find a further thread in the role that status and power play in relationships – friendship implies a degree of parity – but people are rarely entirely ‘equal’ – and certainly not in the world of Gothic fiction.
The question of what friendship is, or perhaps more pertinently, who you should be friends with, plays a pivotal role in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, Lot No. 249, adapted for television in 2023 by Mark Gatiss as part of the enduring Ghost Stories for Christmas. The story is celebrated as an example of modern Mummy Horror that predates Bram Stoker’s more famous, ‘Jewel of the Seven Stars’, though it seems to me that the mummy’s nefarious attacks are almost incidental to the narrative, which is heavily driven by the interactions between the male characters. Gatiss modified the story in several ways in his adaptation, not least in inserting an episode in which a Sherlock Holmes figure makes overtures of friendship towards the story’s protagonist, a medical student called ‘Abercrombie Smith’ – and even if the first Sherlock Holmes story predates Lot No. 249 by several years, the connection seems apposite – Holmes and Doctor Watson embody an idealized vision of male companionship that finds its flawed echo in the fits, starts, and finally, confrontations that occur between Smith, Monkhouse Lee and Bellingham.
Smith is introduced to us in interaction with an ‘old school friend’ called ‘Jephro Hastie’ – much of this is used as an opportunity to characterize Abercrombie Smith and set up a binary opposition with Edward Bellingham. Both Hastie and Smith are presented as ‘robust’, ‘open-air’ men who are accomplished sportsmen (it’s hard not to read Conan Doyle into Smith – as he too was a medic and an accomplished sportsman). As friends, they echo each other’s manners and interests – down to the flannel trousers they are wearing. Doyle throws in some boxing gloves and ‘single-sticks’ (wooden swords – it was once an Olympic Sport apparently) to emphasize their manly ruggedness, but also their mutual dependence. Boxing is something that Smith can expect to do “with Hastie’s help’. Smith courteously offers whisky, which Hastie refuses, and then Smith refuses himself – demonstrating their shared dedication to responsible behaviour.
To a modern reader, the theatricality of all of this manliness has an air of unintentional camp – and this is perhaps compounded by the odd revelation that despite this being May (which you would presume is near the end of the University year), Smith knows neither of the other occupants of the college tower he lives in. Or perhaps this could simply be understood in terms of utility – Smith’s alpha male status means that he has no need to approach either of them – he has Hastie, after all, with whom he can live out a bachelorhood of boxing, stick fighting, rowing, and reading medical textbooks.
Smith is not, however, unfailingly devoted to Hastie. When Hastie describes Bellingham as ‘reptilian’, Smith divines that this is jealousy at Bellingham’s engagement to his childhood sweetheart, and light-heartedly censors Hastie as a ‘prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-thinking old man’.
As suggested above, when Bellingham is introduced, Conan Doyle effectively slaps a fluorescent ‘antagonist’ label on his forehead. Where Smith is an outdoorsman, Bellingham’s room is ‘close’ and stuffy – saturated with the odour of ‘balsamic resin’. If the décor in Smith’s room denotes healthy vigour and rational study, Bellingham’s is a temple of macabre Egyptian exoticism. In a delightful turn of phrase, Conan Doyle includes an ‘uncouth frieze’ – which does a fair job of suggesting lewdness without actually saying so. Bellingham is obese, and both physically and mentally unhealthy. Smith remarks that ‘his heart is going like a pair of castanets’ before we are treated to a breakdown of the manifold signs of moral decay writ large (literally) on Bellingham’s body.
It’s worth noting, however, that this isn’t a simple picture of antipathy. Smith, after all, is rushing to Bellingham’s aid in response to his “uncontrollable shriek of horror” and Monkhouse Lee’s call for help. Earlier, Conan Doyle refers to a ‘silent bond’ between Smith and Bellingham, a ‘community’ fostered by a proximity – or the companionship of two men studying late at night, aware that both are awake. In fact, Smith is at pains to emphasize that Hastie is wrong to judge people by their appearances.
Aside from the description of Lot No. 249, Bellingham’s mummy (a ‘reveal’ that does a fair job of demolishing any potential sense of suspense in the story), Conan Doyle also uses the scene to hint at the nature of the relationship between Monkhouse Lee and Bellingham. Pointedly, Bellingham expresses anxiety firstly at the idea of Smith leaving, not Monkhouse Lee, who clearly knows him well because his sister is engaged to him. Indeed, the fact that Monkhouse Lee refers to Bellingham as ‘Ned’ suggests a degree of intimacy between the two men beyond filial familiarity, given that we might guess that diminutives are not habitually used between mere acquaintances. Lee assumes (wrongly) that the mummy was some sort of labourer – denoting subservience – and this is further developed when he says that he is prepared to do whatever Bellingham wishes.
Smith’s relationship with Bellingham is developed, despite Smith’s reluctance to make the latter anything other than an ‘acquaintance’. There’s something peculiarly flirtatious in the language Conan Doyle uses here – Bellingham is described as making ‘advances’ towards Smith, to whom he has ‘taken a fancy’. Smith moves from being unable to resist these advances out of civility to expressing admiration for Bellingham’s erudition and ‘suave’ manner. If this is a flirtation, platonic or otherwise, Bellingham effectively makes a pass at Smith in what amounts to the most extraordinary paragraph in the story:
“It is a wonderful thing,” he cried, “to feel that one can command powers of good and of evil—a ministering angel or a demon of vengeance.” And again, of Monkhouse Lee, he said,—”Lee is a good fellow, an honest fellow, but he is without strength or ambition. He would not make a fit partner for a man with a great enterprise. He would not make a fit partner for me.”
Of course, on one level, this is a not particularly elegant piece of foreshadowing on the point of Conan Doyle – the angel / demon is the reanimated mummy that will have a go at strangling Norton (who laid a stick across Bellingham’s back in an altercation), chuck Monkhouse Lee into a river, and give Smith the terrors on a moonlit road. However, it’s also clearly an attempt to hook Smith in some capacity. In stating that he thinks Monkhouse Lee lacks ‘strength or ambition’, he’s clearly implying Smith doesn’t, and that these make him a ‘fit partner’. Note how Conan Doyle juxtaposes the idea of a master and servant with that of partnership – this is Bellingham’s attempt to invite Smith into a deeper sort of intimacy, one in which he will be party to knowledge not permitted to the likes of Monkhouse Lee- and the terms are clear – you can be with me, pulling the strings, or you can be at the mercy of a ‘demon of vengeance’.
Of course, it fails. Smith responds to Bellingham’s advance with raised eyebrows and muttered advice to go to bed earlier.
There follows a brief episode in which Smith tersely dismisses the qualms that the college servant, Styles, has about Bellingham – which at some level suggests that Smith feels a sense of obligation towards his ‘acquaintance’ – one expressed by snapping at the lower orders, so it seems. However, we have in essence reached the crisis point of the story, and the falling action, as well as depicting various act of mummy-related terrorism, also depicts the unravelling of Smith and Bellingham’s friendship.
This is achieved in several ways. Bellingham initially lies to Smith about the sound of another person in his room – and this breaks the unspoken bond of trust between the two men. Smith’s encounters with Bellingham then become fleeting and sinister, and what information we are given about Bellingham is chiefly transmitted through secondhand accounts from both Hastie and Monkhouse Lee. On a simple level, the aspects of friendship exhibited through trust, respect and shared values transfer away from Bellingham and to the other two men, even if Monkhouse Lee cannot divulge the bombshell secret, which absolutely no reader has guessed, that Bellingham has supernatural mummy-commanding powers, and instead, we are forced to humour Conan Doyle’s red herring, namely that Bellingham has a woman secreted in his room.
There’s a fairly satisfying parallel between Bellingham’s fainting fit at the start of the story and Abercrombie Smith’s terror when the mummy chases him down a road (‘like a tiger’) – which he describes as something that quite ‘unmans’ him – but all in all, the narrative suffers more than a little from the fact that any suspense generated in the opening pages, can’t really be matched in the ending’s exposition of supernatural horror, or indeed the moral indignation expressed by Smith and the Reverend Plumptree Peterson.
What’s perhaps more significant is that the piece ends with an act of coercion, where it began with aid and expressions of friendship, and that is justified by an appeal to a moral order beyond any of the characters. Smith invokes the law, specifically against witchcraft, when he first challenges Bellingham, and then refers to the law again when he wishes to protect himself against any potential charges of murder. He then threatens his enemy with a gun (with the dependable Hastie waiting in an adjacent room).
Bellingham’s final attempt to rescue his ‘great enterprise’ rests on an appeal to the aspect of friendship classical philosophy values the least, that of utility. He offers to share his secret knowledge if only Smith will let him copy the papyrus scroll. Rather disappointingly, Smith merely seizes the scroll himself and burns it. Bellingham leaves for the Sudan.
Gatiss, for the record, changed the ending in his BBC adaptation. It is somewhat less “friendly”.
Dog Standard 