Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology by Eleanor Dobson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology by Eleanor Dobson Kathleen Riley Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology. By Eleanor Dobson. (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. xiv+265 pp. £80. ISBN 978-2-4744-7624-9. In her Introduction to Writing the Sphinx, Eleanor Dobson makes an important distinction in terms of classical reception: 'It is [its] relative popular appeal and accessibility that distinguishes Egyptology from comparable disciplines, such as the study of ancient Greece or Rome' (p. 3). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the focal period of Dobson's fascinating monograph—Egypt infiltrated the popular imagination with a fluidity, ubiquity, and marketability that the Graeco-Roman world, for all its aesthetic allure and erudite cachet, simply could not match. As an idea, and very often a fantasy, it bridged highbrow and lowbrow culture with tremendous ease, from Decadence to detective fiction and from Fokine's Cléopâtre to Wilson and Keppel's sand dance (the latter a notable omission from Dobson's otherwise thorough investigation), literally leaving its exotic imprint on everything from Oscar Wilde's gold-tipped cigarettes to the gloves of 1920s flappers sporting Tutankhamen cartouches. As Dobson demonstrates, this period of 'Egyptomania' coincided with, and was nourished by, such phenomena as the democratization of tourism (thanks to Thomas Cook & Son), museum patronage, and book ownership; the commodification of the ancient artefact as an affordable, wearable luxury; and the unprecedented reach and speed of mass media. On the last point, the Tutankhamen excavations, commenced in 1922, were the first archaeological dig to be recorded using moving-picture cameras. Dobson begins her analysis with the highly atmospheric account by Howard Carter and A. C. Mace (in the first volume of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen: Discovered by the Late Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter) of the moment in which Carter peered through the darkness into the tomb of Tutankhamen. The two most enduring and spellbinding phrases in that fabled account are 'everywhere the glint of gold' and 'wonderful things' (quoted p. 21). Rat the passage reads as a romantic adventure tale, rather than the more prosaic excavation diary from which it originated, is the result of Carter's own storytelling sensibilities and the assistance provided by popular novelist Percy White, who, Dobson indicates, 'may [thus] have had a hand in rewriting history' (p. 24). Re collaboration between Carter and White encapsulates Dobson's principal thesis, namely 'the substantial and mutual debt that Egyptologists and authors owed to each other across a period of decades' (p. 5). Another defining aspect of this collaborative relationship, and its impact on [End Page 292] the popular imagination, is Harry Burton's photographs, which accompanied the text of The Tomb of Tut·ankh·Amen, with their almost cinematic composition and lighting. Witness, in particular, the dramatic chiaroscuro of Burton's image depicting Carter 'opening the door of the second shrine' (fig. 1.1), a scene of artfully posed but nonetheless breathtaking wonder. Dobson has, appropriately, excavated a wealth of sources to reveal more fully 'these cultural synapses' (p. 225), as she calls them, the creative connections and conflicts between Egyptologists, writers, and visual artists. In evocative detail she explains how the Egyptological engagement of serious scholars and writers of fiction alike was characterized by a fascination with, and desire to emulate, 'the materiality of ancient Egypt itself' (p. 41). With an admirable set of illustrations she relates how the bindings of all manner of Egyptological texts as well as contemporaneous fiction 'relied upon the glamour of gold, sensation, theatricality and Gothic thrills' (p. 51). She devotes subsequent chapters to the increasing visibility (and physicality) of hieroglyphs in public and private spaces; to the talismanic aura of Marie Corelli's Egyptian necklace; and to Egyptian antiquity as an intoxicating sensory, and especially olfactory, experience to be achieved by ingesting the dust and effluvia of mummies or, more palatably, by incense, tobacco, and perfume. In her final chapter, Dobson explores a particularly intriguing form of cultural exchange or overlap, that between Egyptologists and practitioners of esotericism, uncovering along the way a conviction advanced in the pages of fiction...