The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Sir Dunstan Gryme, Toxicologist (The Azrael of Anarchy, 1894)

Trade paperback, 173 pages
Published unknown (originally 1894)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2019

The Azrael of Anarchy by Gustave Linbach

[H]e seized the invalid's wrist, and bluntly demanded his letters, putting into the contact of his fingers and the glance of his eye all the hypnotic force he could command.
     For a second or two Lady Ellice passively resisted the influence; then she succumbed.
     [...]
     Before he left he administered a dose of medicine to Lady Ellice with his own hands, winning the nurse's admiration for his care.
     That night the Lady Ellice Bruce-Smith died. (76-7)

This short work of proto-science fiction is somewhat inaccurately described by John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: the main character is Sir Dunstan Gryme, M.D., the son of an English army-surgeon and an Indian princess. Raised by his mother to hate England, he mixes European medical training with "Asiatic ingenuity," training as both a physician and an occultist (20). He can hypnotize people, and he has also devised an array of deadly poisons. He belongs to a group of anarchists, but unlike the scientists in the anarchists of George Griffith, he's not there because he believes in the cause, but because he sees an opportunity: when they topple the government, he will become Dictator of the Empire.

Mostly the book follows Sir Dunstan as he constantly bamboozles everyone around him, serving as personal physician to royalty, helping commit anarchist bombings, raping sick women with his hypnotic powers. When a cholera epidemic hits England, Sir Dunstan is appointed Special Royal Commissioner for fighting it, and uses this as an opportunity to spread the disease; suddenly the novel lurches from an occult thriller into an apocalyptic one.

It's not a great book, and probably not even a good one, but it is above average for this sort of thing ("this sort of thing" being somewhat wretched in general, in my experience). Sir Dunstan doesn't really qualify as a scientist, though; the emphasis of the narrator is definitely on his occult, "Asiatic" aspects. Racial crossing turns out to be dangerous because Hindoo nefariousness ends up mixed with European competence. He doesn't really see the world scientifically, only as a self-interested seeker of vengeance on an entire society.

Most sources (including the SFE) say Gustave Linbach is a pseudonym for an unknown author, but I discovered a 27 Nov. 1895 article from The Sketch digitized in Google Books that reveals the book was a collaboration between Henry Edlin, a librettist, and Charles L. Carson, editor of The Stage, a theatrical periodical.  Truly I have solved a great literary mystery here.

(Google Books also reveals that Sir Dunstan appears in a Kim Newman novel, Angels of Music, alongside a number of other nefarious fin de siècle characters like L. T. Meade's Madame Sara, but Newman consistently misspells his name "Sir Dunston." I suspect this is because Jess Nevins misspells the name the same way in the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana, so I guess we can conclude Newman did not actually read Azrael of Anarchy. To be fair, the only way to do so is an extortionately priced print-on-demand reprint from the British Library; I got my university library to buy a copy.)