Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

Abstract

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.

Finding Difference in Emotional Communities: New Feminisms of Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Centuryceand Sixth Millenniumbce

“…Hind 2020; Holm 2004; Lutz 2011; Sheumaker 1997), has begun to question the idea that such objects were purely performative. Lutz (2015) examines the materiality of these ‘secular relics’, which often contained locks of hair, photographs and miniatures, through their depictions in literature, as tactile objects of remembering. Such depictions show the highly private nature of people's interactions with mourning objects.…”

“…Such depictions show the highly private nature of people's interactions with mourning objects. They were objects to be handled, often kept close and hidden beneath clothes, and which maintained a tangible physical connection between the living and the dead (Lutz 2015, 1–3). Examination of these objects as private objects of grief not only questions the narrative that the nineteenth-century mourning boom was primarily driven by peer pressures and social climbing, but also highlights that emotionality often forms an integral part of the way people interact with material culture.…”

Introduction—object habits: Legacies of fieldwork and the museum

“…33 The Victorian culture of heirlooms and relics was another strand, in which things were cherished for their potential to store memories and evoke stories. 34 For those of means, genuine Egyptian antiquities could be deployed in these schemas, and their popularity is evident from programme of the Burlington Fine Art Club's 1895 Exhibition of the Art of Ancient Egypt. Out of thirty-six contributors acknowledged in the catalogue, only five were museums.…”

The Corpse Gives Life

“…In early nineteenth-century Britain, before the Anatomy Act of 1832, there was a vogue for covering published accounts of a murderer's trial with the skin from his or her corpse. 30 This was the fate of William Corder's epidermis. Convicted for the sensational Red Barn murder case, he was executed at Bury St. Edmunds in 1828.…”