Racial Alliance and Postal Networks in Conan Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet"

In his 1898 essay “The Reunion of Britain and America,” Andrew Carnegie references William Cowper’s metaphor of shared blood to claim that the Atlantic is no longer a barrier between the two countries and their populations:

The difference of land and water lying between people has hitherto been great, and, in the words of the poet, ... we can say that

“Oceans interposed Make enemies of nations, who else, Like kindred drops, been mingled into one.”

This is quite true of the past; but oceans no longer constitute barriers between nations. These already furnish the cheapest of all modes of communications between men. ¹

Both Cowper and Carnegie desire that blood brotherhood might transcend nation. For Cowper, nations are strangely liquid, and the ocean solid: a barrier that keeps the blood of nations from naturally amalgamating. But, Carnegie triumphantly declares, the development of communication technologies means that the nineteenth-century ocean has become a channel–a web of channels–that will actually facilitate the transnational mingling of kindred drops. The Atlantic is now “the very agency which brings them so close and will ultimately bind them together.” ² In other words, “kindred drops”–which, as I will show, must always be Anglo-Saxon–can now correspond with each other through the veinlike “All Red Routes”–the postal routes and telegraph lines that spanned the globe. ³ Through the medium of postal networks, blood, for Carnegie and other Victorian writers, flows swifter than water.

Postal networks not only materially enabled cross-national communication, they also symbolized it. Writing in the periodical Nineteenth Century at the end of the nineteenth century, Conservative MP J. Henniker Heaton declares that, under Britain’s newly implemented Imperial Penny Postage scheme, “The postage-stamp would become the symbol of Imperial unity, nay, more, the symbol of universal Anglo-Saxon brotherhood.” ⁴ It was a truth widely acknowledged during the nineteenth century that the Victorian “revolution in communications... brought the colonies much nearer” to the mother country ⁵ and that the unity engendered by and through the “All Red Routes” had great imperial utility. ⁶ Heaton suggests, however, that “universal Anglo-Saxon brotherhood” was different from and “more” desirable than “Imperial unity.” In his vision of a community bound by postal communication, racial fraternity trumps colonial collectivity. ⁷ But his particular construction of fraternity is riven by a provocative contradiction: he conflates “universalism” with racial provincialism. In this article, I explore how, for Doyle and others, America provided the resolution to this contradiction and show the special place that America, imagined as the home of Britons’ white blood relatives, held in this trope of “universal brotherhood.”

Doyle believed that national difference should be abandoned in favor of racial unity and that England and America should become one nation. This was by no means an eccentricity on his part: many shared his views. He was one of many avid supporters of a movement that clamored for Anglo-American reunion and the federation of the Anglo-Saxon race. ⁸ “The tendency of the age,” Carnegie summed it up, “is towards consolidation.” ⁹ Though Carnegie wrote this in 1898, the sentiment had been brewing since the late 1840s, when American philanthropist Elihu Burritt had founded the League of Universal Brotherhood, which proclaimed the aim “TO MAKE HOME EVERYWHERE AND ALL NATIONS NEIGHBOURS.”

Making home everywhere, for Burritt and his league, involved rejecting nationalism and embracing a “universal brotherhood” that was, in fact, Anglo-Saxon. Burritt campaigned vigorously against the evils of thinking nationally and thus echoed Robert Knox, who asked his readers to “forget for a time the word nation.” ¹⁰ His sentiments appealed greatly to Liberal, “Little Englander” anti-imperialists. But Burritt’s resultant emphasis on race and Anglo-Saxonism was easily adopted by later-century pro-imperialist jingoists. Reunion sentiment had reached such a popular high in 1898 that Pears Soap ran an advertisement in Harper’s Weekly that showed conjoined American and British flags with the caption “Pear’s Soap and an Anglo-American Alliance Would Improve the Complexion of the Universe.” ¹¹ This slogan about “complexion” succinctly demonstrates the way...