64. The Story of the Brown Hand (1898)

Illustration by Maurice Toussaint (1920)

This episode, we travel to Wiltshire where an Indian army surgeon is being hounded by a very unwelcome visitor, in ‘The Story of the Brown Hand’ from 1898.

You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Story_of_the_Brown_Hand

Or listen to an audiobook version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-tK9m42tKY

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Synopsis

Following his retirement to an estate on the edge of Salisbury Plain after 40 years’ service in India, Sir Dominic Holden has invited his nephew Dr Hardacre to stay for a weekend. Hardacre assumes that this is simply a family courtesy, as he is only sixth in line of inheritance to his uncle’s fortune. He finds an hospitable enough household but one wrapped in an intense gloom, whose source he cannot fathom. Until, that is, Sir Dominic shows great interest in Hardacre’s ghost-hunting exploits with the Psychical Research Society…

Writing and publication history

‘The Story of the Brown Hand’ is the last of the twelve Round the Fire Stories which were serialised in The Strand Magazine between June 1898 and May 1899. Written out of financial necessity, to fund his new home in Surrey, Conan Doyle wrote the stories between March and October 1898.

Prior to the commission, Conan Doyle hoped to resurrect Sherlock Holmes for a play, but his script was rejected by Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving. It was eventually picked up by William Gillette whose performance as Holmes would cement for many the popular image of Sherlock Holmes.

ACD was not keen on anthologising his ‘Round the Fire’ stories. A letter to his mother in 1903 shows he was suppressing their publication in book form. He relented in 1908, when the twelve stories were collected alongside a small number of miscellaneous stories including ‘Jelland’s Voyage’ and ‘A Pot of Caviare.’

Gothic set up

The story is rife with Gothic motifs, from the opening journey to Rodenhurst through the prehistoric landscape of rural Wiltshire. ACD would repeat a similar journey in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). The name ‘Rodenhurst’ is probably a variant of ‘Stonyhurst’, the Jesuit college that ACD attended and on which he modelled Baskerville Hall.

The protagonist, Dr Hardacre, is another narrator in the ACD mould: a medical practitioner, short of cash, new family, with an interest in psychical research – and welcoming of the prospects from a rich uncle.

The Salisbury Plain location is also suggestive, since ACD had witnessed army manoeuvres there in August 1898, only a few months before he wrote the story.

Throughout ‘The Brown Hand’, ACD makes use of common tropes of Gothic fiction, only to undermine or subvert them later.

Sir Dominic Holden

Sir Anthony Dickson Home

Dr Hardacre’s uncle, Sir Dominic, is a classic Gothic figure too: a large, craggy faced man, once strong now withered, and literally haunted. Sir Dominic has recently returned from India where he served with distinction, earning the CB (Commander of the Order of the Bath) and KCSI (Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India). The latter was established by Victoria in 1861 to recognize distinguished service in India and to reward those who remained loyal to the Crown during the Rebellion of 1857, known to the British as the Mutiny.

Other noted medics and proponents of public health who received the KCSI include Sir Auckland Colvin, Lieutenant Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Chief Commissioner of Oudh, and Sir William Erskine Ward, senior medical officer in India, later Chief Commissioner of Assam.

The most likely candidate for Sir Dominic is Sir Anthony Dickson Home VC KCB (1826-1914). ACD met him in 1885 when he was taken on as a civilian medic at Portsmouth. Home was similarly the most distinguished surgeon in India, being the chief medic of the British Indian army for much of the 1880s. His description closely matches that of Sir Dominic.

Psychical Research

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was in formed1882 after a London conference to foster scientific research into the supernatural and unexplained phenomena. One of its early projects was a two-volume study of visions and apparitions entitled Phantasms of the Living (1886), which is much like the volume Hardacre consults.

ACD joined the SPR in Jan 1893, around the time a talk was given to the Upper Norwood Literary and Scientific Society by Prof. W. F. Barrett. His first recorded experience is as a member of the SPR came in June 1894 when he joined two researchers, Sydney Scott and Frank Podmore, to investigate a haunted house in Charmouth, Dorset. The story becomes part of Hardacre’s experience here and informs Lord John Roxton’s haunted house adventure in The Land of Mist (1925). ACD fell out with Podmore and others and left the SPR in 1930, a few months before his death.

ACD is careful throughout the story to show a rational process of enquiry into the existence of the ghost, beginning when Sir Dominic does not tell his nephew what to expect, so they can compare notes afterwards.

The haunting

In the first inversion of expectations, the ghost is not that of a traditional English manor house but from British India. The Afghan ghost is tangible, being fully solid to Hardacre’s eyes and capable of shaking Sir Dominic awake. It is also missing its right hand.

Sir Dominic’s theory of events – that the Afghan hillman is a man whose hand he amputated and who wanted his hand back at the point of death – is a classic trope of Imperial Gothic. The body part carries with it a curse of a sort that has been brought back to England.

We get more of a sense of the “corrupting” influence of Empire in Hardacre’s description of Sir Dominic’s pathological specimens: ‘I glanced over them, and saw that they really were of a very great value and rarity from a pathological point of view: bloated organs, gaping cysts, distorted bones, odious parasites-a singular exhibition of the products of India.’

Paget's illustration (right) is generically orientalist, perhaps leaning more towards Chinese culture than Afghan. 

Inspirations

The missing hand may be inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s excellent short story ‘The Hand’ (1883) in which Sir John Rowell keeps a severed hand attached to the wall of his drawing room. ACD was very familiar with Maupassant’s work.

Another influence may have been Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard (1863) in which one of the vignettes is ‘The Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’ in which there is a wandering hand.

‘The Brown Hand’ may in turn have inspired other writers. W. W. Jacob’s ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ (1902) appeared shortly afterwards, although it is an inversion of the lucky rabbit’s foot. Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac (1920) tells how a celebrated pianist loses his hands in a train crash, only for them to be replaced with the hands of a murderer, with entirely predictable results…

Afghan and Pashtun traditions

Pashtuns, c. 1890

The Afghan tribesman is probably a Pashtun – or Pathan as the British would have said around this time. A very diverse group – linguistically, culturally and ethnically – they may have had their roots in Eastern Iran or further afield. They dominated the north west borderlands between British India and Afghanistan.

The Pashtunwali – the code of the Pashtuns - dates back to the Persian Empire in the third and fourth centuries BC. There is nothing inherent in the belief system, or forerunner Zoroastrianism, Buddhism or Hinduism, about keeping the body whole. This was a contemporary British belief about Muslims, and ACD was most likely getting confused. If anything, ACD was drawing on Ancient Egyptian beliefs, which are fleetingly mentioned in the story.

At the time of writing the story, the region was in the news. The 1897 Siege of Malakand saw a British frontier force narrowly escape defeat at the hands of the Pashtuns by the arrival of a relief column which included Lieutenant Winston Churchill, obtaining his first experience of battle. His first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, came out in 1897.

Shadwell, Lascars and the amputated hand

Inside HMS Dreadnought

Hardacre decides to source a hand for the ghost and so heads to the Shadwell Seamen’s Hospital, which was a real place. Before the hospital was founded in Greenwich in 1870, medical services were provided from the HMS Dreadnought, a decommissioned Royal Navy battleship that was permanently birthed in Greenwich and became a floating hospital between 1821-1870.

The hospital served all merchant seamen including lascars. The term was broadly applied to sailors from the Indian subcontinent and surrounding regions, as far as the Malay peninsula and China. All merchant seafarers, regardless of race or nationality, fell under the care of the Seamen’s Hospital Society, which extended beyond medical care to providing board, lodging and help to find work.

As a real place, it was probably gothic enough! The description is evocative of the Limehouse opium dens of ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip.’ In ‘The Cardboard Box’, Inspector Montgomery is based at the Shadwell Police Station.

The wrong hand

The comic moment where Hardacre discovers he has procured the wrong hand is another inversion of expectations. In ‘Conan Doyle and the rhetoric of genre’ (Journal of the English Association, 2023), Douglas Kerr (Episode 30) writes how ACD works within and manipulates his audience’s genre literacy to tell this and other stories.

While Imperial Gothic often focuses on the unconscious guilt of British imperialists, it’s notable that in this story the ghost is conned by the white man and reverts to a friendly, compliant native.

Noah Angell’s Ghosts of the British Museum (2024) explores the idea of colonial loot as cursed objects. He notes the inherent tension between the cold, rational scientific study of objects against their spiritual and religious significance in the cultures from which they have been extracted. Written 130 years earlier, ‘The Brown Hand’ has many of these resonances.

MRJ and the Ghost Story

‘The Brown Hand’ is an unconventional ghost story and probably wouldn’t have won thef favour of the master of the genre, Montague Rhodes James. Though a fan of Sherlock Holmes, M. R. James did not favour the kindly ghost, preferring the creeping dread of a terrifying phantom. The two stories share a similarity in that, like the creatures of M. R. James, the Afghan tribesman is a tactile ghost.

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

We will be joined by a mystery interview guest…

Acknowledgements

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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/

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.