56. John Barrington Cowles (1884)

Illustration from The People's Home Journal, January 1904, in which Armitage bears a striking similarity to ACD

Hello and welcome to Episode 56. Today, we journey to Conan Doyle’s hometown of Edinburgh where a young man falls foul of a mysterious, mesmeric beauty in ‘John Barrington Cowles’ (1884).

Read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/John_Barrington_Cowles

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Synopsis

At Edinburgh University in 1879, a friendship is formed between two medical students, Robert Armitage and John Barrington Cowles. Beyond his scientific pursuits and achievements, Cowles is also interested in art and, at an exhibition at the Scottish Academy, his attention is drawn towards a beautiful woman named Kate Northcott. She, however, is already promised in marriage to a law student named Reeves, although not for long. Her fiancé dies in strange circumstances and she and Cowles are soon engaged. But, as Armitage discovers, she is a woman with a veiled and sinister past which matches her forceful and mysteriously magnetic personality. What is her secret and how can her hold over his friend be broken?

Writing and publication history

In February 1884, Conan Doyle wrote to his mother that he was hard at work on a number of projects. In addition to having been recently commissioned by Cassell’s to write a story based on the druid Dr Price, which became ‘The Blood-Stone Tragedy’ (Episode 55), he had recently completed ‘Our Midnight Visitor’ and was rewriting The Narrative of John Smith, the novel that was famously lost in the post. In this same letter, he said he had an idea for a story about “the strange circumstances connected with the death of John Barrington Cowles which may do for Cornhill…”  

Over the next few days, he continued to work on the story and, later in February, reported that he had been “grinding away all day at the extraordinary circumstances in connection with the death of John Barrington Cowles – which is rapidly assuming large proportions.” The letters give a sense of the themes of this and other stories of the period: “treating of the strange twilight land between the natural and the absolutely supernatural (animal magnetism – mesmerism – and these other acknowledged powers play a large part in them).”

Conan Doyle probably finished the story in March, and it was immediately accepted by Cassell’s Saturday Journal, who published it in two parts in their 12 and 19 April 1884 issues. It was included in The Captain of the Pole-star and other Tales (1890) but it dropped from later anthologies, notably The Conan Doyle Stories (1929). It was not included in the 1930 Crowborough Edition of the author’s works, although that edition includes The Parasite (1894), which explores many of the same themes as ‘John Barrington Cowles’.

An Edinburgh story

The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849)

The story is set in the genteel and cultured Edinburgh new town, a distance from the poorer neighbourhoods in which Conan Doyle and his family lived. Barrington Cowles and the narrator, Robert Armitage, have rooms in Northumberland Street, next to Abercrombie (sic) Place, where Kate Northcott lives with her terrified aunt, Mrs Merton.

As well as drawing on the location of his birth, Conan Doyle includes several other autobiographical details in the story. Armitage is studying at Edinburgh Medical School, Conan Doyle’s alma mater, and his landlady provides accommodation to students, something Mary Doyle did to make ends meet. Cowles and Northcott are united in Peterhead, the town where Conan Doyle set off on his arctic voyage. The Isle of May sequence towards the end is evocative of Conan Doyle’s holiday on the Isle of Arran on the west coast, with his father and sister.

The story is also situated in the artistic centre of Edinburgh. The Royal Scottish Academy and its gallery are located on Princes Street. The gallery at one time displayed works by Charles Altamont Doyle. There is a reference to Noel Paton, the notably pre-Raphaelite, a picture by whom is also included in the strange gallery in ‘The Surgeon of Gaster Fell.’ The artwork that Cowles is enchanted by is most likely The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849), which also captured the imagination of Lewis Carroll (the author of Alice in Wonderland) who counted 165 fairies in the painting.

India

In another example of Imperial Gothic, references to India recur throughout this story. John Barrington Cowles is born in India, his father being colonel of a Sikh regiment. This would put his father on the dangerous North West frontier. Kate Northcott has an uncle, Captain Anthony Northcott, who is said to have served with the 41^st Regiment and to have died in the Persian War (1856). The 41^st Regiment did not serve in the Persian War. The truth about Uncle Anthony’s demonic interests is relayed by Colonel Joyce, a friend of the Armitage family, who is said to know most of the officers that have served in India since the Mutiny. This would be of little use since Northcott died the year before the Mutiny took place but nevertheless Joyce has useful information to impart.

Another Indian influence can be seen in the references to theosophy in this story. As with last episode’s ‘The Blood-Stone Tragedy’, Conan Doyle was writing at the height of his interest in Theosophy, which waned two years later to be replaced by a stronger interest in both spiritualism and psychical research. He began taking part in seances and experimenting with mind control from early 1887.

Mesmerism

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) proposed the concept of “animal magnetism”, that magnetism can operate on the body the same way that the moon interacts with the tides. In addition to exploring the use of magnets on the body, there was a strong performative element to mesmerism. Mesmer would call his activities “seances” and use music, dim lights, a glass harmonica, and other effects to create a conducive environment. Medics accepted his results but were divided on why they occurred.

Mesmer began practicing in Vienna, where he befriended the young Mozart, before scandal forced him to relocate to Paris in 1778. After six years, a royal commission was set up to investigate Mesmer’s claims, which included notable scientists including Franklin and Lavoisier. They eventually concluded that mesmerism worked through suggestion only, which destroyed Mesmer’s reputation. He returned to Austria and died in 1815.

Nevertheless, mesmerism periodically reappeared. In the 1830s, Charles Dickens became fascinated by the topic. He rejected spiritualism but saw mesmerism as a means to explain ghostly experiences as tricks of the mind, caused by suggestion. He conducted experiments to mesmerise his wife in the 1840s.

Conan Doyle wrote an article entitled “The Youngest of the Sciences” (c. 1887-1891) which was not published but which survives in manuscript form in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. In it, he demonstrates a deep knowledge of the evolution of mesmerism and argues that it be the subject of rigorous scientific study. Nevertheless, the article shows ACD’s confusion of mesmerism and hypnotism, elegantly illustrated in the subtitle of The Parasite (1894) – ‘A Mesmeric and Hypnotic Story.’ The article may have been written around February 1889, when Conan Doyle took part in a lecture on mesmerism by Monsieur de Meyer. On that occasion, he could not be mesmerised, de Meyer arguing that it would take too long to bring Conan Doyle into a trance-like state.

What is Northcott?

Kate is described as “a ghoul from the pit” and “a vampire soul behind a lovely face” but she doesn’t align with either of these archetypes as we think of them today. She is also of indeterminant age, has mesmeric powers and appears to be capable of astral projection. Conan Doyle was writing thirteen years before Dracula and before the codification of monster types and characteristics that we are familiar with now.

'The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains'

Cowles makes a direct comparison between Northcott and a werewolf, citing a novel by Marryat. This is The Phantom Ship (1839) which includes a story-within-a-story commonly serialised as ‘The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains.’ In it, a serf is enchanted by a young woman whom he marries in a ceremony with strange vows. As a wolf, she kills and devours her stepchildren before being shot dead. Just as the werewolf in Marryat’s story wears a coat with a fur-lined hood, so does Kate Northcott have a dark dress with white fur lining when we first see her at the art gallery.

There is a strong suggestion that Northcott is a product of demonic forces, the consequence of the devil worshipping antics of her uncle. Given the strong physical similarity between the two, it is more likely that Uncle Anthony was Kate’s father. Owen Dudley Edwards suggests ‘John Barrington Cowles’ is a metaphor for syphilis, which can be passed through the family line, as Kate Northcott’s demonic powers may too be hereditary. Syphilis was the subject of Conan Doyle’s PhD thesis, which he was finishing at the time of writing this story.

As for what Northcott tells her victims, we are not explicitly told but it is enough to drive them to suicide. Most likely she reveals her true nature, once her victims are fully infatuated, so as to destroy them in a display of power and cruelty. Her treatment of her dog, Carlo, and the philosophy she espouses about corrective punishment show a strong vindictive streak. To modern eyes (and possibly contemporary ones), there is a sadomasochistic aspect to this story, which is perhaps why Conan Doyle chose later to suppress it.

Kate’s story has strong similarities to Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), especially in the character of Helen Vaughan, around whom circle a string of strange deaths. One wonders if Machen read this story.

Next time

We embark on our exploration of the Conan Doyle classic The Lost World (1912), taking the story to the point where our intrepid crew travel to South America. You can read it here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Lost_World

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.