Arthur Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist British Commonwealth: “The great unifying force”

Recent scholarship has contextualized Conan Doyle’s spiritualism, legitimizing it in view of the rest of his writing. This article adds new context to the discussion, looking at his post-World War I career, its global nature with overseas lecture tours emphasizing his international concerns. His emphasis is not just on the veracity of psychic phenomena but on spiritualism as an avenue of forming a global, cosmopolitan community, both on earth and on the “other side,” where people keep their own identities but identities are unifying, not divisive. His primary concern remains with the British men and their spiritual failings. They have fallen behind the rest of the world in regards to spiritualism. In keeping with the imperial construction of British masculine identity evidenced in the rest of his works, Conan Doyle wishes to reclaim British men as the arbiters of spiritualism, creating a sort of utopian cosmopolitan Commonwealth.