Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 96)

Description

Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life - not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead. Cover Half-title Series information Title page Copyright information Dedication Table of contents List of illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: lyrical matter Chapter 1 Infinite materiality: Keats, D. G. Rossetti, and the Romantics The heart that wanders and speaks The endless time of the body-as-thing The secret life of objects and the beautiful death Rossetti and the Victorian beautiful death Chapter 2 The miracle of ordinary things: Brontë and Wuthering Heights Secondary Relics "Like a child reviving" The Evangelical Good Death Chapter 3 The many faces of death masks: Dickens and Great Expectations Death masks The corpse as collage, frieze, or waxwork The jovial, dancing cadaver to be skinned, eaten, or read Chapter 4 The elegy as shrine: Tennyson and In Memoriam Spaces of intimacy Saintly and secular shrines The elegy as shrine In Memoriam's shrine space Spiritualism and loss as loss Chapter 5 Hair jewelry as congealed time: Hardy and Far From the Madding Crowd Making of the moment something permanent Material magic Being toward death Afterword: death as death Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Afterword Bibliography Index