Transports: travel, pleasure, and imaginative geography, 1600–1800

human shape. But upon the middle of the body a fire of coals was smouldering; the flesh had been burnt through. The man was dead, but the smoke of his torment mounted still, a black vapour." In detective fiction, W H Auden said, the corpse must shock "not only because it is a corpse, but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing-room carpet." Machen's corpse is rather more than shockingly out of place, rather more than a mess on a carpet. What fascinates him about it is its shamefulness: the obliteration of human form, the reduction to burnt flesh and vapour. Sherlock Holmes never had to deal with anything quite like this. Machen's story belongs to a vigorous latenineteenth-century revival of Gothic fiction which also included outstandingly nasty contributions from writers such as William Hope Hodgson, M P Shiel, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H G Wells. The distinguishing feature of the horror conjured by these writers, as Kelly Hurley notes, adducing a wealth of examples, was its gratuitousness. Not content with scorched flesh in a suburban villa, Machen interpolated into The three impostors further stories about people who end up as snakes or oily puddles. This fascination with what Hurley, borrowing a phrase from Hodgson, calls the "abhuman"-with rot and deliquescence, with slug-men and beetlewomen-cannot be explained by the requirements of genre. Hurley's explanation for all this abhumaness is "a general anxiety about the nature of human identity permeating lateVictorian and Edwardian culture, an anxiety generated by scientific discourses, biological and sociomedical, which served to dismantle conventional notions of 'the human"'. The "discourses" she has in mind are those associated with Darwin, Huxley, Morel, Lombroso and Nordau. Cultural historians will be grateful to Hurley for the range and perceptiveness of her attention to a genre which still remains, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula apart, to a large extent unfamiliar. Rather more familiar, by now, are the "discourses" which, in her view, establish a context for late-nineteenthcentury Gothic; but here, too, she proves a lucid and economical guide. For the social historian of science and medicine, there is likely to be less of value. Hurley's most ambitious claim is that the Gothic "seizes upon the opportunity at hand-the evacuation of human identity accomplished within the sciences-in order to experiment with the 'plasticity' of human and other bodies". In general, she has more to say about the seizing than about the opportunity. That late-Victorian science and medicine did evacuate human identity remains a proposition asserted early on in the book, and thereafter taken for granted, but never properly tested.