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I. The Death of the StorytellerBY THE TIME THE NINETEENTH CENTURY reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. 1 No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. 2 Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. 3 Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries "dry dwellers of eternity" because "today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death" (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth-and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion -that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance. 4 The following paper will approach these themes, but from a slightly different angle and with a separate set of tools. Rather than the epiphanic moment of the deathbed scene explored by Peter Brooks, Garrett Stewart, and Elisabeth Bronfen and so central to the work of the 127

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.

Accessible summary• This article is about university researchers and support workers working together when people with disabilities need support with communication to take part in research. This is one way to help people with disabilities to do this.• We talk about a project we did to help explain six different ways of working together to help people with disabilities have more of a say in research.• We found that if the person has a trusting relationship with the worker, the worker can help them understand the research, help them to tell the researcher what they think about the research and remind them about what they know is important to them.• Sometimes problems can happen and people do not get good support from their workers. It is the job of the researchers to make sure that people with disabilities still have a say in the research.

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