A Mummy Unwrapping Party

A uniquely Victorian pastime for the very rich;

First, get yourself a several thousand-year-old dead guy, invite all your friends over to watch you unwrap him from his bindings, then grind him into a powder and everyone gets to go home with a powdered mummy souvenir. Fun times!

Unwrapping a mummy.

Well, that was the premise behind the Victorian “Egyptomania” fad. Not only did they scramble all over themselves to get the latest piece of ancient Egyptian sculpture, canopic jar, statue, vase, stylized wallpaper and curtains, but they also wanted that mummy. And mummies were a dime a dozen in Egypt —or gold Egyptian pound a dozen, I suppose—even though it was technically illegal to sell and take these artifacts out of the country. (If you’ve ever been to the British Museum in London, you can’t swing a statue of Bastet without hitting a mummy.)

The fad was to design your home in the fashion of Egypt, or what a European THOUGHT it should look like.

And besides the proliferation of séances and spiritualism in general, this fascination with all things Egyptian was a fad that would take them right up to the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922, where it would only flare up again.

Victorian jewelry reflecting the Egyptomania fad.

So when I set out to write my own Sherlockian pastiche (“Holmesian” for all my Brit fans out there), I wanted them to have that taste of the sensationalism of penny dreadful stories that were popular at the time. Such titles as Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood were pretty much de rigueur for the day. The first book in my An Irregular Detective Mystery series, THE ISOLATED SÉANCE, introduced my own characters, Tim Badger, the former Baker Street Irregular who aged out of Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars, and his black friend from the East End, Ben Watson (no relation to Doctor Watson). The two opened their own detecting agency under the patronage and watchful eye of one Mister Sherlock Holmes.

In my second book in the series, THE MUMMY OF MAYFAIR, my detectives are hired as security for a mummy unwrapping party given by an illustrious surgeon, when Badger and Watson make a rather grisly discovery.

Not only am I having a whale of a time climbing out of the medieval and Tudor milieu, but delighting in the research into the late Victorian period.

Now, the first man to unwrap a mummy for entertainment purposes was surgeon Thomas Pettigrew (left). It happened in front of a group of doctors in 1821, perhaps to give the affair legitimacy, but by the 1830s it was for the shock value of ordinary folk. He began with an introduction and lecture, then unrolled each layer of linen bandages, revealing clay amulets secreted there during the mummifying process. In fact, Alexander Hamilton, the 10^th Duke of Hamilton (not that Alexander Hamilton) hired Pettigrew to mummify him when he died, and bury him in a genuine Egyptian sarcophagus that he had acquired to donate to the British Museum, but kept it for his own purposes and was indeed, mummified and interred in it in 1852.

Now that’s dedication to one’s hobby.

In any case, it was the ultimate in society street cred to be invited to one of these affairs, and they were many. And your powdered mummy? That was a throwback to medieval curatives, a medicine used in the Middle Ages as the latest snake oil. Despite advances in medicine throughout the long Victorian period, Victorians also believed that a tincture made with powdered mummy was a cure-all. (Mmm. Just a little musty-tasting but great when added to my laudanum!)

A mummy, the real deal.

So what could be better than this setting to place one’s mystery, only to have it widen the circle of suspects to St Bart’s Hospital, to smuggling, and more murders that all involve Egyptomania…with Sherlock Holmes popping into the action now and again to set our young detectives on the right path with maddening hints?

I treat the Doyle Canon as I treat other historical periods; As if it were real. I don’t deviate from the “history”. Just include it in the lives of my characters, real or fictional. And so it is the “what if” of my characters coming in contact with Doyle’s characters. What would be natural? Would the reader believe my characters’ reality alongside Doyle’s reality? That’s the fun of a pastiche, I’ve discovered. Blending them as a whole, writing it from the point of view of two blokes, not from the perspective of the Great Detective himself, but as an affectionate complement to it.