Description
Book SynopsisDeborah Lutz investigates the high value the Victorians placed on the artefacts and personal effects of the dead. By close study of works by Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy, Lutz explores the ways these objects were used in creative narratives for emotional effect.
Trade Review'… Lutz's study invites us to re-consider the centrality of grief and the persistence of mourning across nineteenth-century art and literature.' Michael J. Sullivan, Tennyson Research Bulletin
'… 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
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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.
