Visions of Future Past

In the wake of the First World War, Arthur Conan Doyle found a new impetus that would pour fresh energy into his political, religious and creative work throughout the final decade of his life. This same energy, however, would also drive him away from the mainstream success that he had previously enjoyed and would cast a lingering shadow over his reputation. While the war dramatically reconfigured Doyle's attitude towards the trends of twentieth-century modernity, it was only in the aftermath of the conflict that he began to self-consciously synthesise the hitherto disparate aspects of his ideology into a coherent response to the post-war landscape. With the physical and emotional wounds still raw from the conflict, Doyle identified a historic convergence of social and political forces that, he thought, would enable him to directly assault both the dominant modes of religious belief and the damaging tendencies of scientific materialism.

While the finer points of this intervention would be honed in public lecture halls around the world, he had clearly identified the Strand Magazine as a key site of the conflict. Yet after the First World War the magazine itself was also changing both in terms of its treatment of world events and in the kinds of fiction that it featured. Close attention to the magazine in this period reveals a new emphasis on levity, a preponderance of comedy writing by a generation inspired by Wodehouse and new species of popular fiction directly influenced by American cinema. This chapter will explore the nature of the iconoclastic, radical beliefs that under-pinned Doyle's work in this period and how they were contested on the pages of the Strand.

Between 1891 and 1930 the Strand published fourteen articles specifically on the subject of spiritualism. These articles can be split into successive waves.