Two different but overlapping groups were named as ‘the dead’ in Romantic and early Victorian culture. We might think of the smaller and better known of the two as the familiar dead: individuals who could be named, whose appearance and characteristics could be called to mind, and who could therefore be mourned, or abused, or celebrated, in all their distinctive particularity. This is the group invoked by Hartley Coleridge in his ‘Sonnet XII’, when he claims that although it is ‘good to think of death’ it is ‘better far to think upon the Dead’. For him, ‘the Dead’ are ‘they for whom we weep’ and with whom we might hope to be reunited in Heaven if, like Hartley, we ‘credit all the Bible saith’. These familiar dead are also, in this instance, familial:
The poem insists that a heavenly reunion would have greater value if these disembodied dead resembled their embodied selves, and they remained as they were in the memories of the living: unique, distinctive, the ‘very’ ‘same’. This is ‘the dead’ who have been well-served by cultural historians and literary critics in the decades since Philippe Ariès published his ground-breaking work of thanatology, The Hour of Our Death, in 1980; the dead whom Shelley invokes when elegising Keats in Adonais (1821) and who haunt Tennyson’s lyrics on grieving in In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850); the dead recalled in Victoria’s ceaseless mourning for Albert, Dickens’s nightly dreams about his dead sister-in-law Mary Hogarth, and Heathcliff’s enduring passion for Catherine in Wuthering Heights (1847); the dead who returned in ghost stories, were summoned by name to drawing-room séances, and are commemorated in memorial sculptures and epitaphic inscriptions in the garden cemeteries of the 1830s and 1840s; the dead whose hold over the living can only be loosened through the completion of a ‘work’ of mourning, according to Freud, in an essay written in 1917, while a continent sought to reckon with the loss of its sons, brothers, husbands, and friends.2Dead is my father, dead is my good mother,And what on earth have I to do but die?But if by grace I reach the blessed sky,I fain would see the same, and not another;The very father that I used to see,The mother that has nursed me on her knee.1
But ‘the dead’ also named a much larger but paradoxically less prominent group: one that was characterised not by individuality and identity but by plurality and anonymity. This version of the dead was a crowd, a mass, an anonymous monitory presence, a locus of authority, and a symbol and symptom of the enduring power of the past in the present. They were, at times, described as both community and social group, although to understand them as such was also to acknowledge the implicit threat they posed to their living counterparts, whom they vastly outnumbered and against whose interests they frequently seemed to be opposed. They were linked to religious belief, of course, but in unexpected ways: since the abolition of purgatory during the English Reformation, the dead had not required intercessory prayer from the living. They were therefore a largely secular presence; indeed, as we will see, one of the lingering resentments about the dead was a belief that they provided a link to the superstitions of Catholicism and the pre-Enlightenment past. Above all, and because of the very qualities identified here—their anonymity, multiplicity, and historicity—this was a group whose characteristics were first imagined by the living, and then constructed in their literary and cultural texts.
The first of these two groups of the dead will be more familiar to scholars of the Romantic and Victorian periods. This book, therefore, is about the latter; that unwieldy majority whose oppressive size did not easily lend itself to either the individuating narratives of nineteenth-century fiction or the recuperative structures of formal elegy, but which has nevertheless constituted an ‘elaborate cultural construction and a complex social presence’ for as long as anyone can tell.3 It traces a near-forgotten and highly politicised debate in Romantic and early Victorian culture, which focused on the desirability of allowing an ongoing social role to the dead, from its emergence in the French Revolution debates of the 1790s and through the decades that followed. It shows why successive generations argued over the inclusion of the dead in their definitions of the social, how they recruited their affective power to support largely secular and political projects, and the extent to which this wide reimagining of the cultural authority of the dead was informed by revolutionary, reformist, liberal, and conservative ideals. What this book ultimately recounts is a concerted attempt to unmake this group of the dead: to eliminate them from the social body, disenchant their physical remains, police their cultural representation, and aestheticise their material traces. And, in so doing, it shows how people in early nineteenth-century Britain sought to both loosen their affective hold over the living and undermine the authority which had been exercised in their name, by church and state, since time immemorial.
Both of these models of the dead—the known familiar and the threatening mass—are invoked by Thomas de Quincey in two autobiographical essays about his childhood. Written in the 1840s and early 1850s, but recalling events which took place in the 1790s, these essays conveniently span the decades covered by this book and thus exemplify the enduring nature of these distinctions through the Romantic and early Victorian periods. They detail, among other events, the deaths of De Quincey’s father and two of his sisters. In the first of these, ‘Suspiria De Profundis’ (1845), De Quincey identifies the affective power of the familiar dead in his account of how, as a young child, he stole into his sister Elizabeth’s bedroom on the day after her sudden death, so that he could look at the corpse that was laid out on her bed. The mature De Quincey claims that his seven-year-old self perceived that the material form confronting him both was and was not Elizabeth, but rather Elizabeth transformed into something uncannily othered: ‘[t]he forehead, indeed…that might be the same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm’, all testified to her changed status, and could not be ‘mistaken for life’.4 This encounter had both an immediate, and more enduring, impact on De Quincey. Firstly, it initiated a visionary trance in which he saw a ‘vault…open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever’, which led him into the presence of the divine. De Quincey felt his spirit rise ‘as if on billows’ which ‘seemed to pursue the throne of God’ (280), but an encounter with God was denied to him as the divine presence endlessly receded from his view. When he came to and found himself alone in his sister’s room, it became clear to De Quincey that the benign and unitary God of his childish imagination was incompatible with the changes that had taken place to the awful, beloved, and complex thing that lay on the bed. ‘Some mighty relation between God and death dimly struggled to evolve itself from the dreadful antagonism between them’, he would later write, in an explicit acknowledgement of this episode’s ongoing significance: ‘shadowy meanings even yet continued to exercise and torment, in dreams, the deciphering oracle within me’.5 It was a formative experience, one that coloured ‘all his existence thereafter’, as J. Hillis Miller notes.6 De Quincey himself claims that it ‘ran after my steps far into life’ and that ‘perhaps at this day I resemble little for good or for ill that which else I should have been’,7 and it is clear that the effects of this ‘terrific grief’ (272) would stay with him into adulthood, shaping the dreams and visions of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and other writings.
The familiar dead were thus crucial to De Quincey’s imaginative formation, but his recollections of childhood also show that the idea of the dead as an anonymous crowd also played a shaping role. ‘Introduction to the World of Strife’ (1853) describes how De Quincey’s elder brother William—a ‘wholly unmanageable’ child, and author of a fragmentary work on necromancy titled ‘How to raise a Ghost; and when you’ve got him down, how to keep him down’—repeatedly ‘thrilled’ his siblings with tales of the insurrectionary potential of the dead.8 He told them that it was ‘not at all unlikely’ that ‘a federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might take place amongst the infinite generations’ of the dead, who would conspire to overthrow ‘the single generation of men at any one time composing the garrison of earth’.
Although William’s account emphasises the sheer weight of numbers of the dead, their return is a curiously well-ordered affair. This is no chaotic zombie apocalypse but rather a democratic revolution; the overthrow of a privileged elite by a disenfranchised mass whose spies, in the shape of dead ‘sham-men’ who were ‘undistinguishable…from authentic men of flesh and blood’, were already walking amongst the living ‘and meditating treason against us all’ (27). De Quincey thus grew up fearing that revenant fifth-columnists stalked the rural lanes of Greenheys, where he lived on the outskirts of Manchester: another imagination-shaping terror to add to those which he had encountered beside his dead sister’s bed. Yet, there is no suggestion that his father or sisters had been recruited into this terrifying army of the dead, or that he himself would one day be pressed into its ranks: for De Quincey, this version of the dead and the other seem not to overlap.The Roman phrase for expressing that a man had died—viz., ‘Abiit ad plures’ (He has gone over to the majority)—my brother explained to us; and we easily comprehended that any one generation of the living human race, even if combined, and acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, by comparison with all the incalculable generations that had trod this earth before us. The Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons united, what a miserable array against the Upper and Lower House composing the Parliament of ghosts! (27)
This is partly because both William’s account of the dead as a majority and Thomas’s comprehension of their threat as fundamentally political bear the impress of the politicised discourse surrounding the dead that emerged in these years in response to the French Revolution, and which is the subject of this introduction. De Quincey goes on to note that Greenheys was the site of class conflict in the 1790s, as he and William engaged in twice-daily skirmishes with local factory boys who objected to their ‘aristocratic’ dress and manners. Although they were shabbily dressed, these antagonists were not ‘absolutely sans culottes’, De Quincey recalls, in a passage that imports the language of the Revolution to his account of a less cataclysmic antagonism, and thus invites us to understand one event in terms of the other. The factory children were patriotic enough to abjure ‘any sympathy with the Jacobinism that then desolated France’ but exercised instead what De Quincey describes as a ‘personal Jacobinism’ that was ‘impatient of inequality’, which was visibly represented by the smart attire worn by the well-to-do Quincey brothers. By day, De Quincey felt he was at war with proletarian Jacobins, while by night he imagined a revolt of the dead in terms of a parliamentary overthrow by a vast and unmanageable ‘majority’; there can be little doubt that his anxiety over the fearful ‘majority’ of the dead encoded his concerns about the spread of revolutionary and democratising energies from France to England. Why else would a child imagine that t...