One thing in life we can be certain of: death. But how we talk about death—its inevitability, its causes and its course, its effects, or its places—is susceptible to changing cultural conditions. Reviewing a history of death that begins in prehistory, the distinguished historian of death Thomas Laqueur doubts it is possible to comprehend (in both senses) the topic: ‘Our awareness of death and the dead stands at the edge of culture. As such they may not have a history in the usual sense but only more and more iterations, endless and infinitely varied, that we shape into n engagement with the past and the present’.

The work of poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) has been consistently associated with life writing through the successive revelations of her autobiographical paratexts. While the life of the author is therefore familiar, Smith’s contribution to the relationship between life writing and death has been less examined. Several of her novels and poems demonstrate an awareness of and departure from the tropes of mid-eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry’. Central among these is the churchyard, and through this landscape Smith revises the literary community of the ‘graveyard school’ but also its conventional life writing of the dead. Reversing the recuperation of the dead through religious, familial, or other compensations common to elegies, epitaphs, funeral sermons, and ‘graveyard poetry’, Smith unearths merely decaying corpses; in doing so she re-writes the life of the dead and re-imagines the life of living communities that have been divested of the humic foundations the idealised, familiar, localised dead provide. Situated in the context of churchyard literature and the churchyard’s long history of transmortal relationships, this article argues that Smith’s sonnet ‘Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789) intervenes in the reclamation of the dead through life writing to interrogate what happens when these consolatory processes are eroded.

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The churchyard has always been a site of pilgrimage. The remains of the dead, sanctified as holy relics, conferred a hallowed status on their location in the earth; this, in turn, became a destination for travellers. By the eighteenth century, ‘pilgrims’ consciously mapped their interest in literary remains onto these sacred spaces, drawing their pursuit of literary tourism into a long history of travel to the realms of the venerated dead. Using a series of photographs, I retrace my churchyard pilgrimages in London and Thomas Gray’s Stoke Poges, reflecting on the context of thanatourism and thinking about the ways in which the places of the dead—chief among them the churchyard—still mean today.