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with him. 32
    Tennyson’s and Stoker’s consciousness of the potential of unbridled Nature red in both tooth and claw was similarly shared by another of Stoker’s close acquaintances, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lyceum had staged Doyle’s play
Waterloo
to great critical and popular acclaim in September 1894, Doyle in turn praising
Dracula
as ‘the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years’. 33 Discreet allusions to Conan Doyle’s works pepper the stories in this collection, from the overarching horroar of strong women that is the hallmark of
The Parasite
(1894), the story of a female mesmerist and her powers of sexual manipulation, to ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’ (1910) in which a huge subterranean antediluvian beast terrorizes the inhabitants of the Peak District countryside. ‘It is only the natural process of evolution, ’ Nathaniel de Salis tells Adam Salton ( Chapter XXV ); however, Conan Doyle’s and Stoker’s stories reveal an anxiety about the potentials of evolution, both biological
and
social, which has the equal possibility of undermining their species and their sex. In stating that ‘We are in a quagmire, my boy, as vast and as deep as that in which the monsters of the geologic age found shelter and perhaps advance’, de Salis concertinas the millennial process of evolution, effectively questioning both man and mankind on present, past and future planes ( Chapter XXXVIII ). Conan Doyle was to undertake a very similar approach in his 1912 novel,
The Lost World
, in which the discovery of a colony of dinosaurs and ape-men on a remote plateau in South America leads to a fundamental questioning of both hegemony and humanity.
    An anxiety over species transgression and hereditary robustness is further compounded in Stoker’s texts by a central concern over racial autonomy. Throughout these stories, frequent references are made to the might and resilience of Englishness, from the narrator’s exclamation in ‘Dracula’s Guest’ that ‘All my English blood rose’ when challenged by the German coach-driver,to the self-affirmatory ‘I was an Englishman and would make a fight for it’ by the narrator of ‘The Burial of the Rats’. In
The Lair of the White Worm
, likewise, the whiteness of the white worm, whilst certainly relatable to the beds of valuable china clay that lie beneath Diana’s Grove, also introduce a racial theme to the narrative that makes contact with the many ‘Invasion of England’ novels such as Richard Marsh’s
The Beetle
(1897), Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot 249’ (1892) and even Stoker’s own
Dracula
, which were popular during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Written in the wake of Sir George Chesney’s
The Battle of Dorking
(1871), such narratives played with the conjecture of an assault upon the country from a foreign power and the potential colonization of England’s shores that would result. The chief threat against the foundations of England and Englishness in
The Lair of the White Worm
, however, comes from one of its own inhabitants and is manifestly concealed beneath a surface of respectability and assumed propriety: traditional boundaries between native and invading foreigner are thus destabilized whilst, paradoxically, the associations between whiteness and value are reinforced. These opposing (and permeable) worlds of civilization and barbarity are further highlighted by the figure of Edgar Caswall’s African servant, Oolanga. Depicted as belonging to an even more primitive evolutionary system than the white worm, he is a ‘negroid of the lowest type; hideously ugly, with the animal instincts developed as in the lowest brutes… so brutal as to be hardly human’ (Chapter V). Adverse stereotyping of the racial ‘Other’ is similarly prevalent in
Dracula
where the ‘Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez’, 34 who is responsible for removing the Count’s boxes of earth at