Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

Deborah Lutz (Author)

9781107434394, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 July 2017

261 pages, 16 b/w illus.
23 x 15 x 1.4 cm, 0.39 kg

'… Lutz supplies a fascinating discussion of the many ways besides lockets of hair that Victorians preserved parts of their loved ones' corpses as relics. … Lutz reveals that death was an intimate part of life for Victorians - not ghastly and Other, as it is for us.' Sarah Gates, Dickens Studies Annual

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.

Introduction: lyrical matter
1. Infinite materiality: Keats, D. G. Rossetti and the Romantics
2. The miracle of ordinary things: Brontë and Wuthering Heights
3. The many faces of death masks: Dickens and Great Expectations
4. The elegy as shrine: Tennyson and 'In Memoriam'
5. Hair jewelry as congealed time: Hardy and Far from the Madding Crowd
Afterword: death as death
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]