Poetical Remains: Poets' Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century

Poetical Remains Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century

SAMANTHA MATTHEWS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York A Blackstone Press Book © Samantha Matthews 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-925463-x 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn, Norfolk

Acknowledgements Poetical Remains, a book preoccupied with surviving and survivals, is a product of my experience of London, a necropolis where the presence of past generations survives to influence and touch the living. I owe a great debt to the city’s institutions, and the individuals who give them life, in particular the Department of English, University College London, and more recently the Department of English & Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College. Past and present members of the University of London and London Institute who have helped me include Isobel Armstrong, Alcuin Blamires, Caroline Dakers, Judith Hawley, Stephen James, Susan Johanknecht, Philip McGowan, Uttara Natarajan, John Sutherland, Pete Swaab, David Trotter, and Kathy Walkup. Among the institutions I have benefited from are the Nineteenth-Century Studies Seminar at Birkbeck; the Institute of English Studies; the British Library and its staff, both at St Pancras and Colindale; the University of London Library; the Westminster Abbey Library; the National Art Library; the Mausolea and Monuments Trust; the Friends of Highgate Cemetery; the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery; the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery. Poetical Remains is also a product of influences from the emergent disciplines of book history and death studies. Positive feedback from Jonathan Rose and the peer-reviewers for Book History encouraged me to start publishing in this area, and contacts in the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) helped to create the sense of a shared enterprise. Peter Jupp and readers at Mortality made useful suggestions on the Tennyson material, and Julie Rugg at the Cemetery Research Group, University of York, changed the way I think about cemeteries. Philip Davis read an early version of the material, and believed that I could do better; this is a more honest and personal book for his constructively forthright criticism and warm encouragement. Frances Whistler and Elizabeth Prochaska at OUP guided the book into print with expedition and efficiency; special thanks to Sophie Goldsworthy for her enthusiasm and commitment to the project.

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Parts of this book have been presented at seminars and conferences, and I have benefited from feedback from audiences including the Death and Society MA group (Reading, 2000); the Tennyson Conference (Lincoln, 2001); ‘Wordsworth’s “Second Selves”: The Poetic Afterlife’ (Lancaster, 2002), and ‘The 1830s’ (Salford, 2002). Sections of this book that have previously appeared elsewhere are republished by permission. An earlier version of part of Ch. 5 was published as ‘Wordsworth’s Mortal Remains’ in The Wordsworth Circle, 34:1 (Winter 2003), and parts of Ch. 8 as ‘Burying Tennyson: The Victorian Laureate Immortalized’, in Mortality, 7:3 (November 2002). I acknowledge with gratitude permission to reuse this material from, respectively, the editor of The Wordsworth Circle, and Taylor & Francis Ltd (http://www.tandf.co.uk). Two people who had formative influences on this project are now dead. Chris Brooks’s example gave me the confidence to pursue connections between nineteenth-century literature, death, and material culture, and I am grateful for his support and engaged reading. To my grandfather, Cliff Lewis, who personified integrity, pride in craftmanship, and dogged determination, I owe the strength of character scholarship demands. This book is dedicated to his memory. The last word should, however, go to the living. My parents Bruce and Maureen Matthews supported me with patience and affection, and without reservation. My professional and personal debt to Danny Karlin is inestimable; he was there at the beginning, and is still here at the end.

Contents List of Illustrations Abbreviations Introduction

vi viii 1

1. Reading the Poet’s Grave with Rossetti

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2. ‘Nothing but Dust’: Resurrecting Burns

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3. ‘The Grave of a Poetess’

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4. Bringing Home Keats and Shelley

113

5. Wordsworth in ‘The Churchyard among the Mountains’

154

6. Thomas Hood in the Cemetery

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7. Poets’ Corner, Browning, and the Hero as Poet

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8. ‘The Last Chapter’: Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Red, White, and Blue

256

Bibliography

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Index

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List of Illustrations 1. Title-page of Poetical Remains of the late Mrs Hemans (1836), BL 994.f.15 By permission of the British Library 2. Henry Wallis, Chatterton, 1856 Copyright: Tate, London 2003 3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Rossetti lamenting the death of his wombat’, 1869 Copyright: The British Museum 4. Title page of William MacDowall, Memorials of St Michael’s, The Old Parish Churchyard of Dumfries (1876), BL 10370.bb.i By permission of the British Library 5. George Romney, Mary Tighe, 1795 Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland 6. Frontispiece to Mary Tighe, Psyche, and Other Poems (4th edn., 1812), BL 11641.e.47 By permission of the British Library 7. John Flaxman, Tomb of Mary Tighe, Inistioge Churchyard, Co. Kilkenny, 1814–15 Courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art 8. The Graves of Severn and Keats, in William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892), BL 10827.dd.7 By permission of the British Library 9. ‘The Ashes of P. B. Shelley’, Binding of BL MS Ashley 5022 By permission of the British Library 10. John Brandred, ‘Wordsworth’s Grave, Grasmere Church Yard’ (pub. London, M. & N. Hanhart, 1852) Author’s own collection 11. ‘From a Sketch drawn by Mr. Hood himself during his last illness’, in Memorials of Thomas Hood (2nd edn., 1869), BL 10855.bb.9 By permission of the British Library 12. ‘Thomas Hood’s monument in Kensal Green, erected by public subscription’, in Memorials of Thomas Hood (2nd edn., 1869), BL 10855.bb.9 By permission of the British Library

6 9

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68 87

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146 153

164

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List of Illustrations 13. Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster 14. ‘Browning: After Death’, Black and White: a weekly illustrated record and review, 12 December 1891 By permission of the University of London Library 15. S. Begg, ‘The Death of Lord Tennyson’ (1892), Supplement to Black and White: a weekly illustrated record and review, 15 October 1892 By permission of the British Library 16. S. C. Crowther, ‘The Last Look: A Sketch at the Funeral of Lord Tennyson at Westminster Abbey Yesterday’, The Daily Graphic, 13 October 1892 Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster

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281

Abbreviations BCCD Bennett

Biagi BL Caine Chorley

Currie

DGRL

EJTL

FHW

Fraser’s Gill Hawthorne

HCR

HL

Burns Chronicle and Club Directory, 2nd ser. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Romantic Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Guido Biagi, The Last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898) British Library Thomas Hall Caine, Recollections of Rossetti, introd. Jan Marsh ([1928]; London: Century, 1990) Memorials of Mrs. Hemans with Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Saunders & Otley, 1836) The Works of Robert Burns; with an Account of his Life, and a Criticism on his Writings To which are prefixed, some Observations on the Character of the Scottish Peasantry, ed., introd., pref. James Currie, 4 vols. (Liverpool: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1800) Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965–7) The Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (London: Henry Frowde/Oxford University Press, 1910) The Works of Felicia Dorothea Hemans; with a memoir of her life by her sister, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood/London: Thomas Cadell, 1839) Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York/London: Modern Language Association of America, 1941) The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle, 1806–1866, ed. Edith J. Morley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927) The Letters of Thomas Hood, ed. Peter F. Morgan (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973)

Abbreviations HMCM HW

Jalland KC

KCH KL

KP

LB

LBP McDiarmid Memoir Memoirs

Memorials

Millgate

MWSL

OED

Owen & Smyser

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Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany (1844–6) Works of Thomas Hood: Comic and Serious, in prose and verse. Edited by his son, 7 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1862–3) Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816–1878, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948; rev. 1965) Keats: The Critical Heritage, ed. G. M. Matthews (London: Routledge, 1971) The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958) John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1978) James Henry Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life, and of his Visit to Italy, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1828) Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980–93) John McDiarmid, Sketches from Nature (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1830) Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: a memoir, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1897) Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, Poet Laureate, D. C. L., 2 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1851) [Frances Freeling Broderip and Tom Hood], Memorials of Thomas Hood: Collected, arranged, and edited by his daughter, with a preface and notes by his son, 2 vols. (London: E. Moxon, 1860) Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–8) The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd. edn., ed. J. A. Simpson and E. C. S. Weiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989; repr. 1991) The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B.

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PBSL PBSP

PMG Psyche 1805 Psyche 1811

RBP

Recollections Severn TL

TP Valete WAM WL

Wolffe

Wolfson

WWP

Abbreviations Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corr. G. M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) The Pall Mall Gazette Mary Tighe, Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (London: James Carpenter, 1805) Mary Tighe, Psyche, with Other Poems: By the late Mrs. Henry Tighe (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Browne, 1811) Robert Browning: The Poems, ed. J. Pettigrew and T. J. Collins, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London: James Carpenter, 1858) William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson Low, 1892) The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jun., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982–90) The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn., 3 vols., ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman, 1987) Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley, Valete: Tennyson and Other Memorial Poems (London: Macmillan, 1893) Westminster Abbey Muniments The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edn., ed. Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970–93) John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford: British Academy, 2000) Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)

Quotations from Shakespeare refer to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London: Collins, 1987). Full details of all other works referred to are listed in the Bibliography.

Introduction poetical remains [The Germans] treat their poets as the Romans did their emperors—alive they are golden heavenly fellows, for whom reviews ascend like triumphal arches—they die,—a weeping willow & an elegy stick over their graves, and as the tree draws nourishment out of their decaying corporeal substance, a younger rival sets the roots of his fame in their literary remains, and flourishes as fast as these latter rot. (T. L. Beddoes to T. F. Kelsall, 29 September 1825)1

Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s summary of the fate of German poets— living gods reduced in death to cultural compost—turns on two related applications of the term ‘remains’ to material forms: ‘That which is left of a person when life is extinct; the (dead) body, corpse’; ‘The literary works (esp. the unpublished ones) left by an author; also, the fragments of an ancient writer’ (OED). Latent in the analogy between ‘decaying corporeal substance’ and ‘literary remains’ is a suggestion of the peculiar vulnerability of authorial death. Where the bodies of obscure humanity rot undisturbed, the poet’s two ‘bodies’ are in the public domain, subject to homage and exploitation. The ‘weeping willow’ and ‘elegy’, overt symbols of cultural mourning, also mask the rising generation’s covert designs on the poet’s undefended ‘literary remains’; Beddoes’s rooting and flourishing imagery condemns the living poet as a parasite or literary flesh-eater, consuming the surviving texts until they are exhausted. Yet what is really at issue here is the source of nourishment found in the ‘literary remains’: the ‘life’ of the poet, his immortal genius or original spirit, which has passed from the body to the book. Beddoes’s view of German poets as victims of a culture of ephemeral celebrity is ironically at odds with his view of their 1

The Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ed. H. W. Donner (1935), 606–7.

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English counterparts. Beddoes was a passionate admirer of Shelley, and had personally underwritten the publication of his Posthumous Poems (1824) the previous year; he was vividly aware that English poets were likely to experience neglect and scorn in their lifetimes, that only after death might the ‘triumphal arches’ rise. Andrew Bennett, in Romantic Poets and the Romantic Culture of Posterity (1999), sees the poets themselves as collusive in this process: their ‘perennial fascination with the immortality effect’, the ‘bookish’ or ‘textual afterlife’, becomes ‘figured as a determining force in cultural production’; the poet writes ‘so that his identity, transformed and transliterated, disseminated in the endless act of reading, will survive’.2 However, although this attitude persisted through the nineteenth century—it can be found, for example, in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Popularity’ (1855), which invokes Keats as the model of the authentic, originative, and unappreciated genius—the Victorian generation that succeeded Beddoes also felt shame and the desire for redress.3 The movement of recuperation and revision that began in the 1830s and gathered momentum in the 1840s had wider effects than the rehabilitation of Keats and Shelley; it formed part of an effort to restore poetry to its place at the centre of British cultural life, and it influenced the ways in which the Victorians thought about the careers—and the deaths—of their own poets. Reflecting in 1889 on the inexorable departure of the age’s Dii majores, Carlyle, Eliot, Arnold, and Browning, Theodore Watts eschewed simplistic affirmations of literary immortality in favour of something more thoughtful and complex: It is almost startling to notice how their death radically alters their relation to us. Not only is their work rounded off, finished in a double sense, completed into a system, informed with a new life, as if, indeed, the poet’s soul had passed at once from the body to the works. . . . Yet a still more vital change comes over our relations to the imaginative creator when his bodily presence is withdrawn. He ceases to be ours alone; Robert Browning no longer speaks only for and to Victorian England. He becomes part of England of the past and of the future—part of the spiritual heritage for which Englishmen have in the past shown themselves willing to die.4 2 4

3 Bennett, 1–2. RBP ii. 722. [Theodore Watts], ‘Mr. Robert Browning’, The Athenaeum, 21 Dec. 1889, 858.

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The gathering of disparate ‘writings’ into ‘an organic whole . . . informed with a new life’ is one aspect of a process in which physical and metaphysical attributes are conjoined. The ‘change’ in writer/reader relations after the ‘bodily presence is withdrawn’ is ‘still more vital’: a metamorphosis takes place by which the writer’s identity is both consummated and transcended. Intimations of mortality lurk in Watts’s phrasing (‘ceases to be . . . no longer speaks’) yet death is robbed of its sting: ‘ceases to be ours alone . . . no longer speaks only for and to Victorian England’. The poet seems to be dead, yet lives; seems silenced, yet speaks; his individual fate is triumphantly merged in a collective destiny. The dead poet’s translation into his immortal works is sometimes theorized as a clean break from materiality and personality; Jeremy Stubbs argues that ‘The writer, the poet, can aspire to a form of immortality, but only by complete effacement of their own person before the symbolic power of language . . . Thanks to the work, death brings not oblivion but communication.’5 This secular and theoretical substitution of an abstract sign system for the material and ‘personal’ body is alien to nineteenth-century sensibility. The work does indeed confer ‘a form of immortality’ on the dead poet, but the immortal corpus does not obliterate the corpse: the two remain in a productive correspondence that can endure and even strengthen over time. For the ‘symbolic power of language’ is not simply transcendent, but embodied; the ‘communication’ with readers enabled by ‘literary remains’ was not purely verbal and impersonal, but biographical, spiritual, affective. Readers sought the presence of their poets, a quest paradoxically facilitated by ‘the death of the author’. The metaphor of the book as a body has resonances beyond the conventional and figurative; the book functioned as a substitute for and transformed incarnation of the poet’s body, and in some cases through biography tied the work to the decayed authorial body itself, sending readers back to the site of the mortal remains. William Godwin’s ‘Essay on Sepulchres’ (1809) makes a serious case for the moral and affective aura of the material remains of genius. Godwin proposes to invest the burial-places of the great with 5 ‘Surrealism and the Death Mask’, in Martin Crowley (ed.), Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers (2000), 69.

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intellectual and cultural value for visitors, by erecting unassuming wooden crosses that will last only as long as the living need to remember them. Thus the spirit is kept alive in the present: ‘I am not contented to visit the house in Bread-Street where Milton was born, or that in Bunhill-Row where he died, I want to repair to the place where he now dwells. Some spirit shall escape from his ashes, and whisper to me things unfelt before. . . . I wish to live in intercourse with the Illustrious Dead of All Ages.’6 Godwin’s attitude is a peculiar fusion of rational conviction that the ‘Illustrious Dead’ can speak across time through their works, with a superstitious or supernatural yearning that the ‘spirit shall escape from his ashes’ in the present. Godwin interprets Milton’s ‘ashes’ as poetical remains in a broader sense, relics capable of evoking sentiments possessing the imaginative power, insight, or sensibility of the poet’s works. The nineteenth-century sensibility that interpreted the book as the embodied medium of the dead poet’s spirit, while the body was attributed with a lingering spiritual aura, can be evoked by briefly considering the sub-genre of posthumous publications that gives this book its title. Literary and poetical ‘remains’ flourished in the period: predicated on the author’s death, they were composed of selections of poems and other fragments, typically accompanied by passages from letters, and a biographical introduction in which the poet’s death-bed, last wishes, last words, and burial-place often featured conspicuously. The posthumous history of the corpse—and its representation—was integral to the poet’s biography: in Godwin’s words, ‘I regard the place of [the writer’s] burial as one part of his biography, without which all other records and remains are left in a maimed and imperfect state.’7 When a writer dies, biography and works are explicitly brought together. While unpublished work can appear posthumously, from that moment no new works can originate, only parasitic growths, as in the ‘resolutions’ that followed Dickens’s last unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).8 The corpus is fixed: in the most graphic and literal sense, the 6 Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (7 vols., 1993), vi. 22. 7 Ibid. 29–30. 8 The many resolutions of the mystery included [Thomas P. James], The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Complete. (Part the Second of the Mystery of Edwin Drood) By the spirit-pen of Charles Dickens, through a medium (1873).

Introduction

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author is dead. Yet death has a recuperative effect on reputation and book sales: as the Pall Mall Gazette noted in 1889, ‘It is a fact of somewhat melancholy interest that nothing sells an author’s books so well as his death.’9 In this context it is virtually impossible to separate biographical from literary-critical judgements; obituarists often invoke the impropriety of discussing the value of a poet’s critical reputation immediately after his death, before going on to do just that. In such a memorial context the title-page became legible as a headstone inscription—name, epigraph, date of publication as compared with name, epitaph, and dates of birth and death: the poet’s death invited the reader to respond to the book as he or she would read and contemplate the poet’s grave. The genre of ‘poetical remains’ was not the exclusive preserve of the famous. The Remains of Henry Kirke White . . . With an account of his life, by Robert Southey, etc. (1807), Arthur Henry Hallam’s Remains in Verse and Prose of A. H. H. (1834), the Poetical Remains of the late Mrs. Hemans (1836), the volumes of Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘remains’ edited by his widow, and The Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald (1889), stand out from the mass of textual memorials of amateur versifiers, edited by dutiful executors and relatives, and published privately or by subscription (Fig. 1). Some took the genre to task for debasing the reputation of true poetry, for admitting bad verses into the public domain, on personal, therapeutic, and philanthropic grounds; notable Romantic spoofs include Shelley and T. J. Hogg’s Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, being poems found amongst the papers of that noted female who attempted the Life of the King in 1786 (1810), and J. H. Reynolds’s The Fancy: a selection from the poetical remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray’s Inn, student at law, with a brief memoir of his life (1820). In a long footnote to ‘Hints from Horace’ (1811), the sequel to ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, Byron protests against patrons cultivating artisan poets such as the cobbler Joseph Blacket, who died ‘leaving one child and two volumes of “Remains” utterly destitute’.10 The survival chances of biological and textual progeny are assessed; the child will be all right ‘if she don’t take a poetical twist’, but the ‘Remains’ are terminally 9

‘Literary Notes, News, and Echoes’, PMG, 21 Dec. 1889, 1. LBP i. 441; The Remains of Joseph Blacket; Consisting of Poems, Dramatic Sketches, The Times, An Ode, and a Memoir of his Life, by Mr. Pratt (1811). 10

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Fig. 1 Title-page of Poetical Remains of the late Mrs Hemans (1836)

‘ricketty’. Byron’s opprobrium is less for Blacket than for those who published bad poems in his memory: ‘Certes these rakers of “Remains” come under the statute against “resurrection men”. What does it signify whether a poor dear dead dunce is to be stuck up in Surgeons’ or in Stationers’ Hall? Is it so bad to unearth his bones

Introduction

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as his blunders? Is it not better to gibbet his body on a heath, than his soul in an octavo?’ As Byron’s topical reference to the ‘resurrection men’ suggests, poets shared with the public a common discourse drawn from the period’s intense engagement with burial issues. The nineteenth century saw a revolution in burial customs in England. Traditional intramural burial within communities and in or around churches was replaced by extramural burial in suburban cemeteries, and by late-century even the taboo against the ‘pagan’ practice of cremation was broken. Perhaps the greatest poetic genius of his age would have felt the distinction between bones and blunders, the gibbet and the octavo more acutely, had he anticipated the vigorous public curiosity about his own corpse in 1824–5, and thereafter: the embalmed and eviscerated poetic body pickled in spirits of wine and cased in tin was subject to minute speculation, down to his morally flabby heart and lame leg. Small wonder that Thomas Moore’s destruction of Byron’s memoirs was condemned as a form of desecration akin to cremation. The collective term ‘remains’ simply describes these often fragmentary and miscellaneous posthumous texts; however, when associated with the corpse, ‘remains’ connotes a disconcerting corporeal disintegration. Psychologically committed as the century was to the body’s continuing integrity even after death—a fiction assisted by its containment in coffins and graves, and persisting in the metaphor of death as rest or sleep—the indirect acknowledgment that the decaying corpse cannot share the transformation of textual disjecta membra into the unified printed volume made the term troublingly unstable. Yet this very instability contributed to the overdetermined drive towards the imaginative completion of textual relics, gathering together biographical and textual fragments to form them into an artistically coherent whole.

‘strange stories of the death of poets’ 11 The heterogeneous afterlives of nineteenth-century corpses and the changing conditions and institutions of burial and public health 11

John Keats to Leigh Hunt, 10 May 1817, KL i. 139–40.

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have become of increasing interest to cultural historians; correspondingly, the period’s literary critics and theorists have turned to posthumous reception and ‘afterlife’ studies.12 By considering representations of the deaths, burials, textual and material memorials of selected Romantic and Victorian poets, this book explores the effect of poets’ deaths on culture and society, in a secularizing and materialist age when ‘poetry’ appeared in danger of debasement or extinction, yet the figure of the poet was increasingly regarded as sacred, a bringer of spiritual, moral, and affective light into the darkened progressive soul of modern England.13 The century may have seen a surge of evangelical piety, Anglican reform, and the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in Britain, but the spiritual revival’s very heterogeneity and sectarianism positioned the popular modern ‘standard poets’—Burns, Byron, Scott, Hemans, Wordsworth, Tennyson— as cultural authorities capable of bringing together disparate social groups in some degree of affective communion. Thomas Carlyle, defining the modern type of ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (1840), found that the phenomenon of the true literary man ‘ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living,—is a rather curious spectacle!’14 Carlyle’s redemption of the neglect topos, in a vision of poets and men of letters as modern-day spiritual ministers, uttering forth ‘what there is at present no name for: The unspeakable Divine Significance, full of splendour, of wonder and terror, that lies in the being of every man and thing’, is a fantasy produced by the

12 e.g. Chris Brooks et al., Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victorian and Edwardian Cemetery (1989); Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799–1883 (1996); Alison Chapman, The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (2000); Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002). 13 On the redirection towards writers of ‘the energies that had once been devoted to the veneration of saints and martyrs, the original subjects of English biography’, see Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (1966), 82. 14 ‘Lecture V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns’, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg (1993), 133. The neglect topos is not new, of course; Carlyle would have known a version of Thomas Heywood’s famous couplet: ‘Seven wealthy Towns contend for Homer Dead | Through which the Living Homer begged his Bread’ (anon., 1698).

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Romantic culture of posterity.15 Yet its prophecy of literary men ruling from their graves is fulfilled in the century’s second half, as dead poets’ texts, in the standard formats of the ‘life and letters’ or poetical works with biographical introductions, become subject to contemplative and devotional reading, and dead poets’ graves and monuments are ‘read’ as an integral part of the worshipped poet’s life and works. Even living poets are, so to speak, measured in readiness for their canonical coffins, to see which will endure to join the modern pantheon. Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting Chatterton, modelled by the young George Meredith, symbolizes this movement: the archetypal neglected poet lies on a mean bed in his Holborn garret, his elegantly arranged corpse oriented to the open chest of scattered manuscripts that was both his death and his passport to literary immortality (Fig. 2).16 The poet’s white shirt, white stockings, and chalky pallor symbolically equate his body with his fragmentary manuscripts, while the

Fig. 2 Henry Wallis, Chatterton (1856) 15

Ibid. 135. The Tate Gallery, London. Although in 1770 Thomas Chatterton’s corpse disappeared into a pauper’s grave in Shoe Lane burial-ground, redemptive mythology suggested that his body was secretly returned ‘home’ for burial in the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, where the fabricated Rowley poems were ‘discovered’. 16

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brilliant reds and blues of his hair and breeches argue for a form of continued vitality, through art and imagination. For the century saw a more liberal and expansive definition of the poet’s role, associated with the poetry readership’s increasing social diversity through the proliferation of cheap editions, and changing attitudes towards who could be a poet. John Stuart Mill’s ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ (1833), begins by registering this broad poetic culture: ‘One may write poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion, speak poetry.’17 Although Mill goes on to characterize the ‘true poet’, his view of poetry as the utterance of ‘strong emotion’ and genuine feelings, and thus a universal capability, is not disavowed. It was a view that strengthened as time passed: when Mill reprinted the essay in 1867, the emphasis on emotional communication was an essential part of what made poetry popular. Such popularity, especially among middle-class, educated readers, manifested itself in recitation and reading aloud, in the copying of favourite extracts into albums, in the high sales of anthologies such as the Keepsake, and in the commodification of the poet’s image through the sale and collecting of cartede-visite portrait photographs. The poet’s name and even biography was common property, and circulated not only in London’s elite literary coteries, but as printing technology became cheaper and faster, amongst the growing literate, self-educated public who had greater access to newspapers and periodicals. Readers’ sense of participating, even in a diminished form, in a common emotional culture with the poet, personalized the relationship; it also gave them a distinctive affective investment in the poet’s death. Seeking an explanation for the wide appeal of ‘last words’, Karl Guthke quotes William Cowper’s thought that ‘few things are more interesting than death-bed memoirs. They interest every reader, because they speak of a period at which all must arrive.’18 The wider ‘human interest’ of ‘death-bed memoirs’ was that they were generally familial and co-operative memorials. Readers of texts describing the death-beds, funerals, and posthumous reception of nineteenth-century poets identified their own commemorative 17 J. S. Mill, ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’, Monthly Repository, ns 7 (January 1833), 66. 18 Quoted in Karl Guthke, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History (rev. edn., 1992), 48.

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11

records, consolatory reading, and demonstrations of grief, with those artistically perfected versions of similar rituals in the public domain. As Pat Jalland notes in Death in the Victorian Family (1996), ‘Diarized death-bed memorials flourished with the Evangelical movement, and provide the most intimate accounts of death-bed scenes . . . chiefly intended as spiritual accounting to God, they also served as personal therapy for the writer and as a written record to preserve the memory of the loved one for the immediate family.’19 Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) could not have attained its status as the consummate Victorian consolation poem without the culture of material and immaterial commemoration to which it so powerfully contributed. Nineteenth-century writers and readers had a heightened awareness of the significant relationship between the materiality of death and the materiality of books. As the ‘last words’ spoken by a dying person had a special sanctity (because of their proximity to God and heaven), so last poems acquired a poignant interest and authority. This context is overtly reflected in Robert Browning entitling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s posthumous collection Last Poems (1862), but the hallowing context of authorial death also embraced minor poets. The Athenaeum described Amy Levy’s collection A London Plane-Tree, and other Verse (1889) as ‘giv[ing] to the world the late Miss Levy’s last printed words. She corrected the proofs, we are informed, only about a week before her death.’20 The enigma of genius remained a focus of powerful empirical curiosity, a mystery to be solved by gathering evidence, analysing, dissecting, and comparing fragments. During the phase of biographical and critical assessment following death, the poet’s body and physical appearance might itself be invoked as evidence, offering clues to the poet’s special character. The body acquired posthumous prestige: it constituted a direct physical link to genius, something remaining of the complex, irreplaceable life and personality now beyond recall. For the mass of readers and admirers the power of immediate physical relics was experienced primarily at the grave. Secular pilgrims left floral tributes, made written or painted records 19

Jalland, 12. ‘Recent Verse’, The Athenaeum, 14 Dec. 1889, 818. The writer either does not know of, or glosses over, Levy’s suicide. 20

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of the experience, and took away souvenirs (the violets removed from Keats’s grave in Rome and preserved in books were legion). There was an extensive Victorian tourist industry dedicated to sentimental pilgrimages to writers’ burial-places. The prototypical guide, William Howitt’s massive Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1847), was followed by many popular imitators. T. P. Grinstead’s Relics of Genius: Visits to the Last Homes of Poets, Painters, and Players, with Biographical Sketches (1859), manifestly finds significance in both the physical ‘relics of genius’ and their ‘last homes’: a project not inconsistent with its epigraph from Longfellow repeating the literary immortality topos: ‘ “ ‘Emigravit’ is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies; | Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies”.’21 The poet’s grave was a consistently fascinating subject for poets themselves: it symbolizes creativity terminated, authors becoming anonymous, compositions decomposing; but also creativity immortalized, authors being commemorated, compositions resurrected. The self-reflexive potential of the poet’s grave becomes actual when we note that the majority of nineteenthcentury poems on the subject were written by male poets during the first fifteen or twenty years of their adult careers, a phase of writerly apprenticeship, emulation, and ambition. Like Beddoes’s German young rivals, the aspirant poet contemplates the graves of his great literary forebears, mourning the loss of genius yet testing himself out as its contemporary incarnation, imitating and paying homage, rejecting and discriminating. Poetic history appears as a line of graves and monuments, which the aspirant hopes his own will join.

‘so hold i commerce with the dead’ 22 The varied imaginative and practical, spiritual, and secular transactions of the living with the corpses and posthumous corpuses of English Romantic and Victorian poets form the subject of this book. Chapter 1 introduces interpretative perspectives, contexts, and recurring themes and motifs, through an analysis of Dante Gabriel 21 22

‘Nuremberg’, Longfellow: Poetical Works (1979), 120, ll. 23–4. In Memoriam, lxxxv. 93.

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Rossetti’s exhumation of his poems from Elizabeth Siddal’s coffin in the Rossetti family grave in Highgate Cemetery in 1869, and the ‘phantom’ graves imagined for Rossetti himself before his burial at Birchington-on-Sea in 1882. The main text divides into three phases: Romantic—premature deaths in marginal, obscure, or exiled conditions (Burns, Mary Tighe and Felicia Hemans, Keats and Shelley); the post-Romantic transition (Wordsworth and Thomas Hood); and high Victorian (Browning and Tennyson). The structure is approximately chronological, taking a poet’s death as a point of intersection between literary and burial issues—exhumation and biography, the poetess’s grave, death in exile, the ‘poetic’ churchyard and ‘unpoetic’ cemetery, and the recuperation of Poets’ Corner—as they become dominant through the century. In Ch. 2 the repeated actual and biographical exhumations of Burns’s remains are considered in the context of linked anxieties about resurrectionism, dissection, and quasi-medical biographical strategies. Chapter 3 discusses Mary Tighe in relation to the insistent representation of the poetess as posthumous, and Felicia Hemans’s use of Tighe’s grave to think through her own relation to this overdetermined model of feminine authorship. The strategies of recuperation and redress initiated by the premature deaths of Keats and Shelley in critical neglect, physical exile, and under quarantine laws, are the subject of Ch. 4. Chapter 5 considers Wordsworth’s pastoral grave at Grasmere as the perfect fulfilment of the literary ideal of the poet’s country churchyard grave, thus possessing a living significance superior to other Wordsworthian memorials. The subject of Ch. 6 is Thomas Hood’s burial in the ‘unpoetic’ landscape of the modern entrepreneurial cemetery, and his ‘neglected’ grave’s later marking by a public monument at odds with his work and uneasily mediated in his children’s textual memorials. The final two chapters consider contrasting burials in Poets’ Corner: that of Robert Browning, repatriated from Italy in order to play an unsuitable role as late-Victorian national poetic hero; and that of Alfred Tennyson, who in death continued to bear the burden of the division between private and public selves that had marked his career as Poet Laureate. In all these episodes of death, burial, and commemoration, the material link between a poet’s body and writing is of crucial importance. There are no final departures or disappearances for these poets; that to which we return is what remains, an emblem both of

14

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mortality and recurrence. Such encounters can be unsettling as well as consoling, darkly comic as well as affecting, but both poets and readers are drawn to them. They form part of that ‘commerce with the dead’ vital to any living culture.

1

Reading the Poet’s Grave with Rossetti rossetti’s wombat In November 1869, to mark the death of a recently acquired pet in the Tudor House menagerie, Dante Gabriel Rossetti improvised a commemorative verse and ink drawing parodying Victorian memorial conventions (Fig. 3). The verse rewrites Thomas Moore’s popular lyric from ‘The Fire-Worshippers’ section of Lalla Rookh, ‘I never nurs’d a dear gazelle’ as ‘I never reared a young Wombat’, the speaker lamenting that when ‘he most was sweet and fat . . . he was sure to die!’1 The drawing poses Rossetti’s distinctive corpulent figure as the conventional ‘female mourner’, eyes covered with a large handkerchief, kneeling over the reciprocally corpulent wombat lying on its back with four feet in the air. The central figures of mourner and mourned are bracketed by irreverently sketchy memorial symbols— the weeping willow and funerary monument, an urn-topped stele ‘carved’ with a cherubic death’s head and death-date ‘6th November 1869’—and the composition is framed by a broad black border signifying primary mourning. It is a self-consciously frivolous and ephemeral revision of a commemorative tradition designed with the profoundly serious aim of permanently recording loss and grief. Rossetti mourning his wombat is a refreshing corrective to lingering stereotypes about the ‘Victorian celebration of death’; by applying tropes found in funeral invitations, memorial cards, sentimental paintings, and mourning jewellery, to an animal at once beloved and absurd, Rossetti queries their relevance and 1 The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (10 vols., 1840–1), vi. 217–18, ll. 283–6: ‘I never nurs’d a dear gazelle, | To glad me with its soft black eye, | But when it came to know me well, | And love me, it was sure to die!’

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Fig. 3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Rossetti lamenting the death of his wombat’ (1869)

Reading the Poet’s Grave

17

sincerity.2 Does the conventional iconography of bereavement retain the capacity to express strong feeling, or has it become a merely conventional display of the trappings of grief, a symptom of the professionalizing funeral industry? The affective and expressive potential of clichéd visual and textual rhetoric (a primary theme of this book), does not however account for this image’s enigmatic intensity. The drawing is typically presented as a portrait of the artist: Rosalie Grylls captions it ‘Rossetti mourning his wombat (selfportrait)’.3 The ‘poet-painter’ has placed himself at the centre of both texts: apparently thwarted by death, he is yet the controlling subject of the verse (‘I never . . . | To glad me’), and his grief dominates the sketch’s composition. The mourner’s expressive attitude, and the vigorous ink line and cross-hatching, assert Rossetti’s newly invigorated creativity; the previous twelve months had seen him turn again to poetry after a long hiatus, and was an optimistic, intense, even hectic period of composition and revision, culminating in the publication of Poems on 26 April 1870.4 Considered in relation to this revitalized self-identification as poet, even the voluminous handkerchief in the drawing is legible as a badge of poetic identity, literalizing the elegist’s pose of weeping ‘melodious tear[s]’, as Milton did for ‘Lycidas’.5 Rossetti’s jeu d’esprit has then a serious subtext, the poet’s protest against or flouting of the death-threat the wombat symbolizes. This refusal of death is presented iconographically: ‘Rossetti’ is positioned between two significant inanimate objects, the corpse and its monument. Body and marker should be mutually exclusive, the monument the permanent substitute for the unstable organic body buried securely beneath. Rossetti alludes playfully here to the medieval artistic convention of simultaneously representing different stages of a life-narrative within one painting: the simultaneous presence of corpse and monument is a visual riddle, which asserts the power of art over death, but remains unresolved.6 However, we may 2 Coined by James Stevens Curl in The Victorian Celebration of Death (1972); see Curl’s recent book of the same title (2000). 3 R. G. Grylls, Portrait of Rossetti (1964), pl. facing 177. 4 Robert N. Keane charts this intensely productive phase in ‘D. G. Rossetti’s Poems, 1870: A Study in Craftsmanship’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 33–4 (1972), 193–209. 5 John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (1971), 241, l. 14. 6 e.g. ‘The Unton Memorial Picture’, c.1596, which tells Sir Henry Unton’s lifestory from cradle to grave; in Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (eds.), Death in England: An Illustrated History (1999), pl. facing 131.

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see these two symbols as representing alternative fates for the reinvigorated poet: loss and decay (the wombat) and literary immortality (the monument). The poet’s anxious negotiation of conflicting signs of death becomes more comprehensible if the interpretative lens of selfportraiture is applied to the image as a whole. The wombat is a plausible other or doppelgänger; Rossetti’s relationship with his pets was not only anthropomorphic but self-reflexive. Rossetti had named the wombat ‘Top’, for ‘Topsy’, the nickname of William Morris, his friend, rival, and troubling double. On 8 November William Michael recorded that Gabriel ‘complains very much of a constant shaking of the hand etc. with corresponding internal sensations . . . The poor wombat died the other day after some spasmodic symptoms: one more instance of the extraordinary ill-luck that has attended G[abriel]’s animals.’7 These shared characteristics of tremors and ‘extraordinary ill-luck’ (as well as eye problems) correspond to the marked resemblance between the two rotund figures, each the other’s mirror image—except that Rossetti’s eyes are hidden. The divided self simultaneously mourns and refuses to look at his dead other. The wombat’s death appears only a premise for the symbolic performance of anxieties about personal and creative annihilation. The disjunction between the corpse and the monument points to a significant absence: there is no grave. The burial-place, the missing link between the organic body and its marker, is suppressed; Rossetti’s living body iconographically disrupts this logical connection. A recent episode had given Rossetti strong motives for externalizing his radically conflicted self-image, and to suppress connections between his creativity and the grave: the opening of the family grave in Highgate Cemetery, so that the fair copy manuscript of Rossetti’s poems, placed in his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s coffin seven years earlier, could be recovered for publication. This context suggests one resolution to the riddle of the mutually exclusive body and monument: Rossetti mourning his wombat is also bowed with guilt and shame, hiding his eyes from the reproachful spectacle of the once-beloved body; the sketch is an unguarded—because indirect— transformation of Rossetti’s conflicted responses to the exhumation of his buried creativity from his dead wife’s grave. 7

William Michael Rossetti (ed.), Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903), 406–7.

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19

Rossetti’s mock-memorial serves as a suggestively multivalent symbol of nineteenth-century anxieties about creative death and renewal. Rossetti’s burial and exhumation of the manuscript poems first intended for publication as Dante at Verona and Other Poems in the early 1860s, is probably the most widely known story growing from the nexus of poets’ graves, bodies, and books in the period. However the biographic and textual history repeats the drawing’s significant absence: what is missing from the almost grotesque literalization of the concept of ‘poetical remains’—unpublished poetry manuscripts actually coffined with the dead body then exhumed from the grave—is the poet’s grave itself. Gabriel was not buried at Highgate; the significant Victorian poet in the family plot was Christina Rossetti (d. 1894). The plot’s private and familial origins— purchased in 1854 by Gabriel’s mother Frances for £15.15s. on the death of his father Gabriele—also complicate its ‘poetic’ symbolism. The subsequent burials of Siddal, Frances, Christina, and William Michael contributed to a statement of clan identity, important for a close-knit immigrant family who had left their ancestral burial-place in Italy. The modest gabled headstone with quatrefoil decoration originally recorded only the heads of the family: the patriarch Gabriele, ‘Born at Vasto Ammone | in the Kingdom of Naples’, with texts documenting his exile (‘He shall return no more, nor see his native country. Jeremiah xxii 20’), Christian hope (‘Now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly. Hebrews vi 10’ [actually 11: 16]), and his dying words (‘Ah Dio Aiutami Tu’);8 and the matriarch and ‘beloved wife’ Frances (d. 1886): ‘Our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . hath abolished death’ (2 Timothy 1: 10) and ‘Friend, go up higher’ (Luke 14: 10). Even Christina, after years of seclusion, was at her death best known as a writer of devotional prose, such as Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). A slab laid flat on the grave commemorates her as a pious daughter: ‘Christina Georgina Rossetti, | daughter of | Gabriele and Frances Rossetti. | Born 5th December 1830, died 29th December 1894.’ Her poetic vocation is legible only to initiated readers, who would recognize the unattributed epitaph as the second stanza of her own poem ‘The Lowest Place’ (1863); the 8 Texts are transcribed from the headstone. ‘O God, aid me!’ See Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic (1960), 141.

20

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line from Dante’s Purgatorio, ‘Volversi a me con salutevol ceno’ (‘They turned to me with an act of salutation’, suggesting the family reunion in heaven) is more obscure.9 In his commemorative poem ‘Christina Rossetti. The Two Christmastides’, Theodore Watts recalled having a vision while standing at the open grave in the snowcovered cemetery in 1894: as ‘The coffin lowers, . . . I can see her now— | See the loved kindred standing by her side.’10 Although he also connects a ‘sudden song | From yonder sunlit tree beside the grave’ with Christina’s poem about the ‘Christmas Robin’, the private and familial note dominates: the poem’s final lines refer to her dead mother and brother (occlusions of the woman poet’s vocation are explored in more depth in Ch. 3). Siddal’s recuperation as an artist and poet is recent; she is the author of ‘fifteen more or less complete poems, plus some fragments . . . the only surviving texts produced by herself, as opposed to the many tales about her created by other people’.11 However, while Siddal’s creative reputation may to some extent be recovered, she was commemorated only as ‘elizabeth eleanor, | wife of their elder son | dante gabriel rossetti.’12

‘all that golden hair undimmed in death’ 13 On the night of 5 October 1869 Rossetti’s friend Charles Augustus Howell and lawyer Henry Vertue Tebbs, with two hired workmen and medical witness Dr Williams, dug up the Rossetti family grave in the west section of Highgate Cemetery, opened the coffin of Gabriel’s wife, and extracted the red-edged book of poems bound in rough grey calf tangled in her hair.14 She had been buried on 17 February 1862, after an inquest decided that her death by laudanum overdose 9 ‘Give me the lowest place: or if for me | That lowest place too high, make one more low | Where I may see | My God and love thee so’ (The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (3 vols., 1979–90), i. 187, ll. 5–8). 10 Theodore Watts-Dunton, The Coming of Love Rhona Boswell’s story and other poems (1906), 253, ll. 23–4. 11 Jan Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989), 198. 12 Initially Siddal was recorded by ‘E. E. R. 1862’ on the reverse of the footstone; the inscription to her memory was added after Gabriel’s death in 1882. 13 ‘Life-in-Love’, l. 14, first pub. Poems (1870). 14 For an account of the exhumation, see Jan Marsh, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet (1999), 368–9, 374–9.

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(early on 11 February) was ‘accidental’, and not the suicide strongly suggested by Elizabeth having pinned a note to her gown (immediately destroyed). Rossetti deliberated painfully about the exhumation, did not inform his family in advance, and did not attend. Most accounts cite Rossetti’s guilt about this ‘act of desecration’ as contributing to the illness, morbidity, and ‘painful delusions’ of the 1870s: in a memoir first published in 1928, Thomas Hall Caine recalled the exhumation as a ‘painful work’, that even as it was taking place ‘the unhappy author of it, now keenly alive to its gravity, [was] already torturing himself with the thought of it as a deed of sacrilege’.15 Caine’s image is fortuitous: Rossetti’s motivation for burying and retrieving the poems was intimately involved with his then uncertain identity as an ‘author’ of poetic ‘work’. Elisabeth Bronfen identifies his poetry’s burial as an act of guilty and grief-struck selfsacrifice, a renunciation of his poetic ambitions: ‘The corpus of his last creative effort was now literally a “dead letter”.’16 This seems confirmed by William Michael Rossetti’s unconsciously punning reflection that ‘The sacrifice was no doubt a grave one.’17 Rossetti’s sacrificial gesture in 1862 explicitly crossed the boundary between personal and artistic identity. Gabriel and Elizabeth’s relationship was founded on artistic co-operation; both produced art and poetry, a mutuality of aim that helped to dignify Siddal’s position as model and muse, cultivating a fiction of equality between them aided by the unpublished status of most of Gabriel’s poems. Although the book that returned from the dead has become one of the most famous elements in Rossetti legend, it originates in a private, even intimate gesture, a transaction between living husband and dead wife: what Jerome McGann describes as ‘a hieratic gift of the most important original poetical work he had done . . . a lovesacrifice . . . of his most valued imaginative possessions’.18 The interred unpublished poems symbolized Rossetti’s willed creative stillbirth, his terminated ambition to be recognized publicly as a poet. Yet the particular book was intimately associated with his wife, whose delivery of a stillborn child in 1861 was a factor in the illness and depression leading to her death. 15

Caine, 30. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), 176. 17 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters (2 vols., 1895), I. 225. 18 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost (2000), 62. 16

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The crude equation between metaphorical and actual ‘stillbirth’— as explored in The House of Life sonnets ‘Stillborn Love’ (lv) and ‘Newborn Death’ (xcix and c)—exemplifies a persistent nineteenthcentury experiential mode: the desire to break down the binary opposition of material and spiritual, to reconcile their seeming antagonism. Walter Pater, in his essay ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ (1883, 1889), defines Rossetti’s poetics in these terms; like Dante, in ‘his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are fused and blent: if the spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material loses its earthiness and impurity’. The physical symbolizes and is literal evidence of intangible emotion, the figurative elevates and transcends the merely material. (Nursing Siddal in April 1860, Rossetti had written ‘She has seemed ready to die daily . . . It makes me feel as if I had been dug out of a vault.’)19 Pater argues that ‘in our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena which the words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably into each other’, explicitly allying his generation with the primitive church of the Middle Ages, with its ‘sacramentalism’ and ‘real faith in the resurrection of the flesh’.20 Apparently remote historical examples are made to speak polemically about the contemporary situation, here the author’s alliance with Rossetti against attacks on the leader of the ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’. The analogy between ‘our actual concrete experience’ and the poetic ‘conceptions’ of Dante and Rossetti also argues against the rationalist split between matter and spirit. Pater’s terms translate to the transactions between mind and body, figurative and literal, and between art and life (and lifewriting) in the nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelite artistic activity was dedicated to dissolving these abstract binaries; but the refusal to separate material, specifically corporeal experience, from the spiritual takes multiple forms during the period. The spiritual and symbolical aura Rossetti sought to portray in his ‘fleshly’ paintings of women is suggestive of attitudes towards incorporated forms, a mode of feeling that continues to attach to bodies after death, and extends to the metaphorical ‘body’ of the book. Rossetti’s heightened emotional state between Siddal’s death and burial, denied not only physiological death, but the evacuation of the spirit or psyche. In this context, Bronfen’s argument 19 20

DGRL i. 364–5. Jerome H. Buckley (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelites (1986), 493–4.

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that Rossetti’s obsessive artistic representation of Elizabeth Siddal as a figure ‘of feminine beauty signed by death, in the liminality between life and death’, and for Siddal’s complicity in this fictional role, suggests that even before the coffin was closed, Rossetti was imagining Siddal’s posthumous material existence in the grave, and integrating it into the spiritual mythology of their life together.21 Siddal’s body was laid out in an open coffin for seven days before the funeral, much of which Rossetti spent scanning the body for signs of life.22 In wrapping her gold hair around the book of poems, Rossetti posited a posthumous marriage between her corporal and his textual body—to be consummated in the grave.23 Metaphorically, it represented a pledge that his poems died with her; in physical terms, the book substituted for the husband’s still-living body. It was also, I would suggest, a gesture of continuing commitment to Siddal’s memory, and to an ideal of physical immortality. This renunciative pledge depends on Rossetti having invested the volume with a nearsacramental significance, as his embodied ‘soul’. The imaginative link between an ambitious poet and his unpublished poems is not easily broken; Rossetti punished himself, by devising a living link between his mind and his wife’s corpse. He buried the book trusting his memory to retain the words; as memory failed, this tantalizing link intensified to breaking-point. This ‘failure’, with its unsettling suggestion that the powers of the living degrade, raised another troubling possibility for Rossetti: that the book was destroyed by the body’s decomposition, physical and poetic ‘soul-beauty’ together resolving to earth. William’s supportive rationalization of Gabriel’s behaviour appears inadequate in this context: My frank opinion is that you have acted right on both occasions. Under the pressure of a great sorrow, you performed an act of self-sacrifice: it did you honour, but was clearly a work of supererogation. You have not retracted the self-sacrifice, for it has taken actual effect in your being bereaved of due poetic fame these seven and a half years past: but you now think—and I quite agree with you—that there is no reason why the self-sacrifice should have no term.24 21

Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 170. Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (1989), 90. 23 Browning may have used the story as the starting point for ‘Gold Hair. A Story of Pornic’, pub. Dramatis Personae (1864). 24 W. M. Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 473. 22

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The loaded description of lost fame as bereavement is misleading, since William reads the transaction in basically material and worldly terms; in the murky psycho-spiritual economy, ‘supererogation’ is an empty signifier, for the debt can never be cleared. The exhumation of grave 5779 represents a violation of imaginative union, and a betrayal on several levels. Reopening a grave for any purpose other than additional burial was a serious matter; as described in Ch. 2, the exhumation of Robert Burns’s body in 1815 is an indicator of public determination to honour the poet’s memory by transfer to a stately and substantial ‘mausoleum’. Rossetti managed the awkward manœuvre of obtaining a special licence from the faculty of the Consistory Court to open the grave, without asking permission from the grave’s owner, his mother. (Rossetti appealed directly to the Home Secretary, Henry A. Bruce, a personal friend; a typical transgression of putative boundaries between the private and public realms.) Grave-disturbance is historically viewed as an abomination, from the curses ‘protecting’ the mummies in Egyptian pyramids to Shakespeare’s epitaph—‘Curst be he who moves my bones’. The burial-ritual lays a spirit to rest, and grave-violation evokes superstitious anxieties about breaking the dead’s peaceful sleep, releasing vengeful spirits. In the eighteenth century these ‘primitive’ fears were actualized by the ‘resurrectionist’ trade in fresh corpses (sold to anatomy schools). Although grave-robbery peaked in the 1820s, anxieties about the buried body’s security persisted throughout the century. Opening the grave connoted desecration, illegality, and disrespect for the dead; the layperson’s protective feelings towards the beloved dead conflicted with the practical necessity for grave-disturbance. Sextons and grave-diggers were traditionally regarded with suspicion; we remember Hamlet’s astonishment at the grave-digger’s lack of sensibility, ‘Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that ’a sings in grave-making?’ (v. i. 65–6). Here, the book also constitutes ‘grave-goods’; Rossetti had presented it to his wife, and clearly understood reclamation as theft. Rossetti’s feeling had no legal sanction; a dead body is not recognized as property—so cannot be stolen—and therefore cannot itself possess property. Ironically however, before the exhumation, ‘It was necessary . . . that a lawyer should be employed in the matter, to speak to the real nature of the MSS., as difficulties were raised to the last by the Cemetery Authorities as to there possibly being papers the removal of which involved a fraud.’ Rossetti’s written instructions to Howell carefully ‘distin-

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guish [the book of poems] from the Bible also there as I told you’;25 whose displeasure did he fear should the Bible be disturbed by mistake? These associations contributed to Rossetti’s fears about the exhumation; but perhaps, for an artist who had continued to use Siddal’s physical image in his paintings, the strongest anxiety was in exposing the ideal portrait etherealized in memory to the cruel change it must have undergone in seven years underground. There are indications that Rossetti shared the nineteenth-century prejudice that the buried corpse should be protected from the air and preserved from decay as long as possible; cemetery companies required that bodies interred in brick vaults were sealed in three coffins of wood and lead. In the week before the exhumation, Rossetti had consulted a doctor who gave ‘medical assurance that all in the coffin would probably be perfect (as it proved to be) [otherwise] I should not have had the courage to make the attempt’.26 He was reassured by Howell’s report that Siddal’s body was still beautiful and ‘perfect’, the coffin filled with her red-gold hair; yet this Sleeping Beauty must have been hard to reconcile with the lock of hair that adhered to the book. Rossetti was seriously affected by breaking his pledge with the dead. The exhumation was a tacit admission that time had not stopped when Siddal died, that neither her memory nor her body were ‘perfect’ and immortal. Conversely, the exhumation may have helped him to finish ‘Beata Beatrix’ in 1870, after obsessive reworking since Siddal’s death; the painting portrays her face with eyes closed in an ecstatic religious trance—but also a death mask. McGann describes it as one of Rossetti’s ‘Holy Sepulchres or pilgrims’ tombs, memorials of the corpus mysticum that is their object of devotion’.27 His letters vacillate between indirectness, as though the subject was too raw for direct reference, and grotesquely literal rationalization. Beforehand, he alluded to the exhumation euphemistically as ‘recovering my lost MSS’. (as though the victim of theft), or affected pseudo-legal objective phrasing (‘the burial in question . . . the book in question’).28 After, Rossetti invoked Siddal’s posthumous authority for his action: ‘Had it been possible to her, I should have found the book on my pillow the night she was 25

G. H. Fleming, That Ne’er Shall Meet Again: Rossetti, Millais, Hunt (1971), 269. DGR to A. C. Swinburne , 26 Oct. 1869, DGRL ii. 761. 27 McGann, Game, 97. 28 DGR to WMR, 13 Oct 1869; DGR to Charles Howell, 16 Sept. 1869, DGRL ii. 751, 744. 26

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buried; and could she have opened the grave no other hand would have been needed.’29 This transaction between the ‘bed’ of the grave, and Rossetti’s pillow, the reanimated Siddal exhuming herself, takes the possibilities of spiritual materialism to an extreme. Gabriel had stipulated discretion about the disinterment; an earlier letter to Howell had required ‘absolute secrecy . . . as the matter ought really not to be talked about’ (his emphasis), the exhumation was nocturnal and private, while not until a week later did he make an account to his brother William, and only then for fear he would hear it first from Howell, who ‘I have begged . . . to hold his tongue for the future, but if he does not I cannot help it.’30 For Rossetti the exhumation was a metaphorical form of publication. While drawing William into a conspiracy of benign silence to protect the Rossetti women, Gabriel viewed exposure as inevitable. The letter continues: ‘To others I shall say at present that I have made the rough copies more available than I hoped; but I suppose the truth must ooze out in time.’ Following closely on from the account of the exhumation, with its graphic detail that the book ‘is soaked through and through, and had to be still further saturated with disinfectants’, it appears that Rossetti equates the fluids of bodily decomposition with the inevitable ‘ooze’ of truth. (Rossetti may be remembering Browning’s ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’, where the bishop protests against the ‘Clammy squares which sweat | As if the corpse they keep were oozing through.’31) Rossetti understood the gradual leaking out of the story as his just fate for betraying the private compact between living and dead; like Pandora’s box, the grave once opened could not close on its secrets again.32 And what had been resurrected from the grave? Rossetti’s letter describes a textual body, being thoroughly disinfected in ‘the hands of the medical man who . . . is carefully drying it leaf by leaf’. The natural process of decay and dissolution was reversed, Dr Williams’s medical care belatedly purifying and embalming the damaged volume. Rossetti’s poems returned from the dead, but their texts were inseparable from the bound body which carried them, and the woman’s body beside which they had lain. Caine suggests the origi29

DGR to ACS, 26 Oct. 1869, ibid. 761. DGR to WMR, 13 Oct. 1869, ibid. 752. 31 Ibid.; RBP, i. 413, ll. 116–17. 32 Jane Morris was modelling for Rossetti’s drawings, pastels, and an oil of ‘Pandora’ in 1869; see Alicia Craig Faxon, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1994), 184, 189. 30

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nal plan was for a third party to transcribe the poems, so Rossetti would not need to see the book; unfortunately his help was required, so ‘that illegible words might be deciphered and deficiencies filled in . . . with what result of fresh distress can easily be imagined’.33 Gay Daly wryly observes that Rossetti was distressed ‘because a worm had eaten a large hole right through the leaves of “Jenny,” . . . How he reconciled the supposed perfection of the corpse with the presence of worms he did not mention.’34 Three long poems from the recovered manuscripts contributed substantially to Poems (1870): the damaged ‘Jenny’, pieced together from memory and with friends’ help, ‘A Last Confession’, and ‘Dante at Verona’; short poems ‘The Portrait’, ‘The Sea-Limits’, and ‘St Luke the Painter’ were also included.35 Even the loyal Caine suggested that the book’s success owed as much to the ‘interest and curiosity which came of a rumour of the book’s romantic history, culminating in its burial for so many years in the grave of the woman whose love and beauty had inspired it’, as in the poems themselves. (Rossetti destroyed the notebook after recovering the texts. This missing link in the textual history of Poems, the impossibility of knowing its exact contents, has frustrated scholars: it gives a special cachet to the ‘Exhumation Proofs’ in the Troxell Collection, which also contains ‘a photostat of T. J. Wise’s note, “A Leaf from the Grave, 1862–1869,” that makes mention of three surviving leaves of this notebook.’36) Burial-places, far from being mere footnotes to poets’ biographies, may play decisive roles both in the evolution and reception of poetic texts and literary biography. Jan Marsh locates the source of her interest in ‘The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal’ in the experience of failing to find the Rossetti grave while helping to clear an overgrown and closed Highgate Cemetery: ‘ “[Y]ou mean Lizzie Siddal?” I said, dredging from my memory a name I did not know it possessed’: a book grew out of this grave.37 Rossetti’s biographers, critics, and readers must come to an accommodation with the exhumation; the event postdated the composition of many of the sonnets, but defined the moment of their publication and reception. Readers are also

33

34 Caine, 31. Daly, Pre-Raphaelites, 363. On the notebook’s impact on Poems, see Keane, ‘Poems, 1870’, 200–6. 36 Keane, 200. See McGann, Game, 63–6, for a persuasive reading of why the early sonnets later titled ‘Another Love’ and ‘Praise and Prayer’ were kept but not published 37 in 1870. Marsh, Legend, 1. 35

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confronted with the apparently uncanny parallels between Rossetti’s poetry and his biography. We cannot know what Rossetti felt reading and handling the ‘exhumed notebook’, or whether its troubled associations contaminated his pleasure in the publication of Poems (1870); but it is certain he paid a high price to secure his poetic reputation. William’s cool rationalization in the posthumous Collected Works (1886) stops where the trouble really began: He had contemplated bringing out in or about 1862 a volume of original poems; but, in the grief and dismay which overwhelmed him in losing his wife, he determined to sacrifice to her memory this long-cherished project, and he buried in her coffin the manuscripts which would have furnished forth the volume. With the lapse of years he came to see that, as a final settlement of the matter, this was neither obligatory nor desirable; so in 1869 the manuscripts were disinterred, and in 1870 his volume named Poems was issued.38

Gabriel tried to exonerate himself, suggesting that he had not instigated the plan but reluctantly acceded to the persuasion of ‘friends’, but in after years behaved as though cursed and condemned. His pathological reaction to Robert Buchanan’s 1871 polemic ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ becomes more explicable as an aspect of this ‘cursed’ state. The morbidly sensitive Rossetti would always have taken a sustained public personal attack badly; but certain remarks carried a particularly venomous sting. Buchanan famously focused on ‘Nuptial Sleep’, reprinting the text then commenting that ‘the man who is too sensitive to exhibit his pictures, and so modest that it takes him years to make up his mind to publish his poems, parades his private sensations before a coarse public, and is gratified by their applause’.39 This must have cut to the quick the man who repudiated Flaubert’s immorality, ‘in body, as in the brain, | Like Morgue-corpse tumid from the Seine’.40 Rossetti’s sonnet about the aftermath of intense carnal experience (with Jane Morris, not Siddal as was generally assumed) is marked with the particularity of personal memory; by framing it with his own scornful critique Buchanan found a cruelly effective means to dramatize the dangers of Rossetti’s publication of intimate and sensitized memories. Such a 38 The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed., pref., notes William M. 39 Rossetti (2 vols., 1886), i. pp. xviii–xix. Buckley, Pre-Raphaelites, 444. 40 ‘Dîs Manibus’, Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911), 246, ll. 5–6.

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double exposure of ‘private sensations’ translates the exhumation scenario into a publishing context. Caine associated Rossetti’s schizophrenic collapse after ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ with a morbid, chloral-fuelled obsession with the grave, describing him as ‘the victim of many painful delusions [including] some that related to the exhumation of his wife’s body, and the curse that was supposed to have followed him for that desecration’.41 Rossetti’s pathological corporeal and textual transactions with the grave that should have been his (reuniting him with wife and family) are unique, but not different in kind from other cases discussed here, with their determined form and fantastic patterning: the multiple exposures and clinical investigations of Burns’s remains, all to glorify his name as Scotland’s national poet; the transformation of Mary Tighe’s poems into a posthumous corpus, and her grave’s adoption as a site for Felicia Hemans’s critical meditation on the posthumousness of the poetess; the poetic appropriation of Keats’s grave to Adonais; the mutilation, fragmentation, and cremation of Shelley’s body, and the compensating drive to reconstitute the corpus and life through proliferating memorial publications; the symbolic dominance of Wordsworth’s pastoral grave as a touchstone of Anglican and conservative values, yet reliant on projecting Wordsworthian spiritual ‘presence’ at the site of his corporeal remains; the contention of material and textual memorials for the memory of Thomas Hood; the late-century reincorporation of a dying poetical race in Poets’ Corner, first through Browning’s repatriation from Italy, then Tennyson’s Abbey funeral. These narratives are frequently fantastic, outré, disconcertingly primitive in their emotional agendas; and like the manuscript poems redeemed from Siddal’s grave, or Mary Shelley’s secret shrine of Shelley’s heart wrapped in a first edition of Adonais, they appear to emanate from a sensibility alien to our own, or at least difficult to reconcile with our vision of an industrial, progressive, entrepreneurial society. Rather than see the nineteenth-century fetishization of material memorials as a ‘barbaric’ survival or superstitious aberration, I suggest that we read these relics sympathetically, as emotionally and spiritually resonant embodied texts, circulating in a culture attempting to come to terms with the march of materialism and secularization. The poet’s corpse, the grave that contains it and the memorial that marks its location, 41

Caine, 36.

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and designates by metaphorical and literary association the poetic corpus, are the concrete and emotional constructs where these seismic spiritual and phenomenological shifts become measurable. For the poet, the grave raises fundamental questions about artistic control, relations between private and public existence, and the potential of a life’s work to transcend the individual’s death. As Michael Millgate explores in Testamentary Acts (1992), for the survivors, there is the tension between personal attachment, grief, anger, subjectivity, and testamentary responsibility. For readers, there is the fascination of a qualitatively different posthumous imaginative contact with the poet; an elegiac dynamic, but also one that gives animating power and ultimate authority to the reader.

‘one sea-side grave’ 42 Gabriel’s own death was sad and incongruously provincial. In a last attempt to save his life, he was taken to convalesce at Westcliff Bungalow, Birchington-on-Sea, near Margate in Kent. Despite the presence of mother, brother, sister, and close friends, his was not seen as a ‘good’ or ‘peaceful’ death.43 He died suddenly in convulsions after the application of a poultice on 9 April 1882 (Easter Sunday). He was 54. His mother recorded the crisis in her diary: ‘suddenly . . . Gabriel, who was sitting, fell back, threw his arms out, screamed out loud two or three times close together, and then lay, breathing but insensible’; William’s journal recorded ‘Found him with head leaning over towards right, eyes starting but nearly closed, mouth open and twitching. He drew hard breaths at intervals.’44 Although attempts were made to suppress these distressingly raw details in later accounts, such a death was arguably an artistically appropriate end to the tortuous narrative of Rossetti’s life: Each of us no doubt had had his vision of how it was to be with Rossetti at the end. In mine he was to die slowly, body and soul sinking gradually to rest, as the boat, coming out of a tempestuous sea, lets fall its sail and glides into harbour. This was to be nature’s recompense for Rossetti’s troubled days and 42 Title of Christina Rossetti’s 1884 poem marking the second anniversary of Gabriel’s death, first pub. Poems (1888). 43 Compare Christina’s painful but ‘good’ Christian death, discussed in David A. Kent, ‘Christina Rossetti’s Dying’, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 5 (1996), 44 84–97. DGR, Family Letters, i. 398–9.

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sleepless nights; the end of his fierce joys and stormy sorrows. But Nature knew better the mysteries of the future, and Rossetti was to be the same tragic figure to the end, in sunshine and shadow, in life and death, always tragic.45

Caine’s retrospective weighing of conflicting ideal deaths is both a summary of Victorian attitudes to the ‘good death’, and a hindsight revision of the specific circumstances of Rossetti’s. The Christian ‘good death’ idealized by the Victorians was slow, painless, conscious, and contemplative, allowing the dying to understand and welcome their end. Conversely, while the maritime imagery speaks to Birchington’s seaside context, Caine’s ‘recollection’ is absolutely dependent upon an ideal of the Victorian poet’s death presented by Alfred Tennyson ten years later, in 1892. The Laureate’s peaceful death in old age (like that of his predecessor, Wordsworth) represented the apogee of a sublime myth of poetic conclusion, a corrective to the Romantic generation’s litany of premature, tragic, and consumptive terminations. Caine’s fantasy recalls generally the idealized eyewitness accounts, elegies, and artists’ impressions printed in newspapers in 1892, drawing specifically on the imagery of Tennyson’s late lyric, ‘Crossing the Bar’, which The Spectator considered the authoritative statement of ‘the true but inarticulate thought with which Englishmen meet death’.46 In Tennyson’s poem, Christ the pilot guides the dying man into the open sea of death; Caine seeks the safety of harbour. In finally rejecting his private wish for ‘recompense’ for Rossetti’s sufferings, Caine conforms to the post-Romantic determination that the poet’s life, works, and death conform to a single aesthetic, while (ironically) finding consolation in its fulfilment of a Romantic archetype. As Tennyson and Rossetti’s poetic careers and reputations were divergent, so their styles of dying were opposed. Discordant, sudden death is recuperable as continuous with a biographical fluctuation between ‘fierce joys and stormy sorrows’: poetic justice can be found in Rossetti being ‘the same tragic figure to the end’. The family’s desire that Gabriel’s appearance in death be documented is typical of the survivors’ sense of responsibility towards posterity. This is one of many cases where the poet’s circle exhibits not only private, domestic grief but behaviour anticipating a public 45 46

Caine, 159–60. First pub. 1928. ‘The Death of Tennyson’, The Spectator, 8 Oct. 1892, 484; TP iii. 24.

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or national interest and investment in the dead. The Rossettis asked Gabriel’s friend Frederic Shields to draw a death-bed portrait; Shields’s chalk drawing ‘The Dead Rossetti’ survives as testimony of personal sacrifice to the greater (cultural) good, as he found it a ‘painful task’ and wept ‘most of the time’.47 Modelled on Joseph Severn’s famous portrait of the dying Keats, the portrait focuses only on the poet’s head, an idealized three-quarter view, which with eyes closed and thick growth of beard is scarcely recognizable as Rossetti.48 The unsettling lack of resemblance between life and death portraits is repeated even when the art employed depends on reproduction, not tear-stained representation. William commissioned casts of his brother’s face and hands from D. Brucciani’s in London (again recalling the death mask and casts made of Keats); he commented that ‘the head proved extremely disappointing to all of us, and seems barely to suggest what my brother was like’.49 Gabriel had tried to destroy all photographs of Siddal after her death, claiming they did not justly represent either her beauty or personality. This implicit commitment to an imaginative ideal or fictive memory picture of the dead in preference to directly documentary arts, typified by Robert Browning’s determination that no portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning should be carved on her tomb, will be encountered repeatedly throughout this book. It testifies to the paradoxically creative stimulus that the poet’s death gives to his or her survivors, the desire to transform and so reclaim the dead. Documentary accounts and retrospective impressions of Rossetti’s death evoke a series of possible graves for this poet of unstable and controversial reputation. These imagined rites and sites represent the principal manners of disposal available in the nineteenth century: a cemetery vault, churchyard grave, cremation and, because of Rossetti’s cultural significance, Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Only the ancestral vault within a church or chapel was discounted by the Rossettis’ immigrant status. The range of possibilities demonstrates the significance that was attached to the style of ritual and location: it was important to get the poet’s grave right, yet even where legally watertight testaments were drawn up, circumstances 47

48 Faxon, Dante Gabriel, 215. Severn, pl. facing 84. DGR, Family Letters, i. 400. Robert S. Fraser reproduces the death mask in ‘The Rossetti Collection of Janet Camp Troxell: A Survey with Some Sidelights’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 33–4 (1972), 150, 173–4. 49

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often militated against fulfilment of the poet’s wishes; and where no such directions existed, there was no consensus or code to help the bereaved to decide. The raising, then dematerializing of these phantom graves performs the tension between incompatible ideal and real modes that is a central theme of this book: the fantasy of a transcendent and aesthetically coherent poet’s grave, and the pragmatic construction of a material site whose features can be contingent and stubbornly ‘unideal’. The poet’s grave, located in a historically specific and contingent real space, may be marked by the influence of this idealizing and transcendent motive; conversely, its multiple visual and verbal representations are in sympathetic and/or antagonistic relation to the grave itself. The family’s decision to bury Rossetti in Birchington churchyard puzzled friends and commentators alike. Why reject an established plot in a romantically landscaped, fashionable London cemetery, for an obscure spot without family tradition? Caine displays his own bias when he ‘wondered why it seemed to occur to nobody that Rossetti should be buried at Highgate with his wife, around whose life (and death) his own life and death had so plainly revolved’.50 The local Keble’s Gazette’s observation that ‘It had at first been intended to have a public funeral at Highgate where his wife and father were interred but for family reasons this idea was abandoned,’ bears the impress of narrative determination typical of accounts of poets’ deaths and interment rituals.51 By the 1880s, the trend of public opinion was that a well-known ‘poet and painter’ should be honoured with a ‘public’ funeral.52 This line of thought was not unknown to the Rossettis; Caine reports William saying that ‘If my brother had his due he would be buried in Westminster Abbey.’53 This deference to Poets’ Corner as the state-sanctioned site for the burial and commemoration of Britain’s important writers and artists is typical of later Victorian ideals, which used similar terms to celebrate dead military leaders, statesmen, scientists, philanthropists, and cultural figures. Carlyle’s 1840 credo was fulfilled: ‘the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will . . . I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men’: they 50

Caine, 162. Henry Campell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Three Papers read to the Rossetti Society of Birchington (1993), 44. 52 Public and state funerals, in the technical sense of state-funded funerals, are a rar53 ity. See ‘The Organization of Funerals’, in Wolffe, 287–93. Caine, 162. 51

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were all heroes to be cited in the evolving greatness of nation and empire.54 Yet for most of the century, Poets’ Corner was shunned by major poets. Thomas Campbell’s burial in 1844 seemed only to confirm its political rather than poetic status. The marginal and apparently unworldly preoccupations of the Romantic poet seemed at odds with the public or national appreciation signified by burial in Poets’ Corner; the most fitting poet’s grave was identified as obscure, rural, modest, and explicitly defined against the mores of public commemoration. Poets themselves repeatedly represented the poet’s grave in this way, taking the lead from Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) in recuperating the terms of obscurity and public neglect as an affirmation of the poet’s true appreciation by a small but genuinely poetry-loving audience. Joshua Scodel has discussed this new early nineteenth-century appeal to the sympathetic reader in relation to the tradition of literary epitaph, noting that ‘In the face of a larger, more heterogeneous readership, epitaphs beg the feeling few to reverence the deceased.’55 The model of the ‘fit audience but few’ is predicated on an ideal small rural community, where monuments are not required to remind visitors to think on their dead, but even an unmarked grass mound signifies to the deceased’s sincere mourners. Thus when Charles Mackay composes ‘The Bard’s Epitaph’, the modest conclusion to a series of poems reflecting on the disparaged identity of the English, he recuperates the obscure ‘bard’ without the public monumental aesthetics epitomized by Poets’ Corner: If to this grave should pilgrims stray, And wonder why no pompous stone Is raised above the mouldering clay, To make the minstrel’s merits known;— Let them but say,—his heart’s delight Found noblest utterance in a song;— He loved, and strove to aid the right; And hated—if he did—the wrong;— And his poor clay in darkness pent, Shall need no other monument.56 54

‘The Hero as Poet’, On Heroes, 70. The English Poetic Epitaph, Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (1991), 11. 56 The Collected Songs of Charles Mackay (1859), 359. Mackay alludes to Burns’s ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ (1786), discussed in Ch. 2. 55

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Mackay’s verse is a concise anthology of literary commonplaces about the cultural role of poets, which would be recognized by any reader of Gray’s ‘Elegy’. The poet was a ‘minstrel’, a traditional figure of the wandering singer or balladeer, whose pure passions (‘He loved . . . | And hated’) were dedicated to simple, true moral ends. Thus the absence of ‘pompous stone’ and formal inscription (the ‘epitaph’ is a textual commentary to the questioning pilgrim, rather than the identifying text) is explained by the survival of the songs that were his ‘noblest utterance’. The ‘Epitaph’s’ conceit is somewhat undone by its published context, as the final poem in Mackay’s volume of Collected Songs; but its emphasis on the poet’s ‘song’ or verse, rather than the site of ‘his poor clay in darkness pent’ is traditional, in its attempt to guard the poet’s biographical privacy. Rossetti’s grave in Birchington churchyard could be seen as a realization of the ideal poet’s grave. However it is one of the inherent ironies of the quest for this ideal that it is often only achieved by mistake, or for pragmatic reasons. It was easier to bury Rossetti at Birchington, where the key family members were already staying. However, the strongest impetus to the ‘family reasons’ cited in Keble’s Gazette was Rossetti’s horror of Highgate. In 1876, believing that he was dying, he demanded of William: ‘Let me not on any account be buried at Highgate, but my remains burnt as I say.’57 One aspect of the Highgate grave’s imaginative potency for him was the prospect of being buried there himself. The original decision to bury Siddal there was made by the family, Gabriel refusing to believe she was really dead. His fear of being persecuted by angry and vengeful spirits, of having no rest even in death, originates in superstition and mania exacerbated by drug dependency. However it also tallies with later-nineteenth-century anxieties about the security of cemeteries. Highgate Cemetery (1839), one of the most popular entrepreneurial cemeteries opened in London to create secure alternatives to the overfilled and ‘managed’ city churchyards, was twenty years after opening in danger of replicating the same dubious conditions (despite the opening of an extension). In 1869 Gabriel had personal experience of the ease with which access could be gained to graves; this knowledge now caused him to guiltily identify himself with grave-robbers and resurrectionists, still potent hate-figures in the 57

Doughty, Victorian Romantic, 303.

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cultural memory. It seems likely, however, that by this stage his persecution mania focused less on physical disturbance from without than psychic disturbance within the grave; as though Siddal would finally get revenge for the broken contract. In stipulating cremation as a solution to his terror, Gabriel engages with contemporary burial reform discourse. The 1870s was an intensive period of procremationist and ecologically concerned campaigning, urging a shift in attitudes towards the dead: rather than artificially preserving the body from decay, it urged acceptance of natural processes, and welcoming, indeed accelerating decomposition. Rossetti’s wishes could not be carried out, because the legal precedent for cremation was not set in Britain until 1884, two years after his death. Cremation campaigners employed a language of hygienic purification, transformation, and physical transcendence that would have appealed strongly to Rossetti: annihilation would allow his body to be dispersed and disappear without a trace; it also promised to prevent him from waking up with Elizabeth Siddal.58 Birchington was chosen for a mixture of negative and pragmatic reasons, yet offered a potentially ideal setting for a poet’s grave. The scene was connected with his life (albeit its close); Caine noted that the plot was ‘only a few yards away [from] the winding path where Rossetti and I had so often walked around the place which was now to be the place of his rest’.59 This patterning between life and death corresponds with the dying Keats asking Joseph Severn to describe his burial-place in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome; though here the pathos derives from hindsight, not anticipation. The cliff-top churchyard overlooking the sea was picturesque, and thought to be at least six centuries old, offering a more attractive model of continuity and tradition than suburban Highgate. Although the ground had twice been enlarged during the century, a prominent plot could still be found for the visiting celebrity ‘near the south porch’ of the medieval church.60 The grave separated from his family also allowed Rossetti’s distinctive achievements as a poet, translator, and artist to be commemorated. 58 Christina ‘disapproved of cremation because of her literal notion of the Resurrection’. See Alison Chapman, ‘History, Hysteria, Histrionics: The Biographical Representation of Christina Rossetti’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 24 (1998), 204–5. 59 Caine, 163. 60 J. P. Barrett, The Annals of Birchington (1893), 195.

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Where Rossetti’s ‘poet’s grave’ deviates from the ideal is its marker. The decision to commission a monument from his Pre-Raphaelite colleague Ford Madox Brown, which would pay iconographic and substantial homage to his public identity, expresses the bereaved’s desire for the grave’s visible form to have aesthetic coherence with the poet’s works. After the private and unremarkable funeral (made distinctive by ‘the figure of the blind poet, Marston, with tears in his sightless eyes’), Caine and Theodore Watts were the last to leave Birchington several weeks later. Caine describes a farewell visit to the then unmarked grave:61 [W]e walked one morning to the churchyard, and found Gabriel’s grave strewn with flowers. It was a quiet spring day, the birds were singing, and the yellow flowers were beginning to show. As we stood by the grave under the shadow of the quaint old church, with the broad sweep of landscape in front, so flat that the great dome of the sea appeared to lie on it, and with the sleepy rumble of the rolling waters borne to us from the shore, we could not but feel that little as we had thought to leave Rossetti there, no other place could be quite so fit.62

Pastoral here gives a peaceful resolution to Rossetti’s stormy existence; spring renewal and fertility signifies the healing seasonal cycle, while the sea’s ‘sleepy rumble’ offers rest for Rossetti after ‘weary years of sleeplessness’. We will become familiar with versions of the ‘we could not feel but . . .’ formula, often employed to suggest reluctant acceptance of death and its contingent circumstances. The funeral service and committal exorcize the phantom graves I have mentioned: generally, the given grave is tolerated, and ultimately recuperated as inevitable. Still, Caine’s adherence to the churchyard ideal is literary rather than responsible; the Rossettis could not leave the grave without permanent testimony to familial or artistic significance. In reality the ‘ideal’ unmarked grave signifies as neglected, and the text must negotiate the grave’s troublingly ambiguous appearance between burial and the erection of a distinctive monument: the poetic ideal is intolerable in reality. The occasions upon which poets make actual and rhetorical pilgrimages to other poets’ graves are legion, and the occasional 61 Several tributes to Rossetti make use of the suggestive figure of the ‘blind poet’, Philip Bourke Marston: Theodore Watts-Dunton’s ‘A Grave by the Sea’ in The Coming of Love, 189, and Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s ‘In Memoriam’ in Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894), 98. 62 Caine, 163–4.

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character of such verse locates the writer as a living witness to dead genius. Of a sample of twelve contemporary elegiac tribute-poems invoking Rossetti’s burial-place, nine are dated in title, subtitle, or a note, generally supported by seasonally specific descriptive detail. Examining one poem in detail will introduce the stresses and overdeterminations typically at work in tribute-poems, a distinctive form produced by the fusion of elegy with epitaph: At the Grave of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. April 9th, 1883. Here of a truth the world’s extremes are met: Amid the grey—the moss-grown tombs of those Who led long lives obscure till came the close When, their calm days being done, their suns were set— Here stands a grave, all monumentless yet, Wrapt like the others in a deep repose; But while yon wakeful ocean ebbs and flows It is a grave the world shall not forget— This grave on which meek violets grow and thyme, Summer’s fair heralds; and a stranger now Pauses to see a poet’s resting-place, But one of those who will in many a clime On each return of this sad day avow Fond love’s regret that ne’er they saw his face.63

This sonnet by 27-year-old Mackenzie Bell (later Christina Rossetti’s first biographer) provides an intriguing record of the grave’s appearance before the monument’s erection; this allows Bell to pay homage to Gray’s ‘Elegy’, and to recuperate the apparently unmarked grave as unforgettable and immortal. The epigrammatic compression and ‘much-in-little’ aesthetic (shared with literal epitaphic inscriptions and literary epitaphs) makes the sonnet a popular form for tributepoems: the formal structure is analogous to the three-dimensional concrete form of a grave monument—a conceit Rossetti himself famously used in The House of Life’s introductory sonnet (‘A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,—| Memorial from the Soul’s eternity | To one dead deathless hour’).64 Bell’s poem is complementarily site-specific; the pattern of demonstratives (‘At the grave of . . .’ ‘Here . . .’, ‘Here . . .’, ‘yon wakeful ocean’, ‘This grave’) assert the 63 64

H. T. M. Bell, Poems of Mackenzie Bell (1909), 108. Works, 74, ll. 1–3.

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poet’s eyewitness authority. Site-specificity goes hand in hand with temporal specificity; the poem turns on the ‘stranger’s’ pathetic communion with the grave, and its contextualization in a longer temporal view, extending to the posterity of immortal genius. The significant date is established in the subtitle (in turn explained by a footnote, ‘Rossetti died at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, on the 9th of April, 1882’); a redundant note, since the poem supposes a particular kind of reader repeatedly encountered in this book, whom I term the ‘initiated reader’: a sympathetic, interested, and knowledgeable reader, much like the ‘stranger’ himself, who will recognize that the poem marks the first anniversary of Rossetti’s death. Like an epitaph, the poem mediates between present contemplation and the past. Although both quatrains of the octet begin with present-tense placing, the opening conceit of a meeting of ‘the world’s extremes’ directs the first quatrain’s tribute to the past, while the second asserts future significance. The churchyard’s typical dead come straight from the ‘Elegy’, the ‘moss-grown tombs’ of the calm and long-lived ‘obscure’ who, forgotten, belong in the past. The poet’s grave instead ‘stands’ in the present and is projected into the future, waiting for the monument that will literalize its enduring meaning: ‘It is a grave the world shall not forget’ (as the speaker looks to the immortal ocean). The sestet turns to the impression the grave has made on the poet, who finds that far from being ‘monumentless’ (Bell’s striking coinage) it is marked by the ideal humble floral tokens of a poet’s grave, ‘meek violets’. In a typical move, the tribute-poem’s focus slips from the ostensible subject—Rossetti —to its own author and the encounter’s broader context. Bell positions himself as a ‘stranger’: at once the generic ‘stranger’ or ‘traveller’ whom classical epitaphs ask to pause (‘siste, viator’), and an individual pilgrim regretting he was literally a ‘stranger’ to Rossetti. Bell is content to subordinate his own creative autonomy to his role as mourner, albeit one privileged to visit the grave on the ‘return of this sad day’. The final line touches upon the curiously paradoxical position of the reader who mourns at the poet’s grave: the intimate reading experience had cultivated the reader’s ‘Fond love’ for the author; yet s/he is a stranger. ‘At the Grave of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ with its epitaphic, ekphrastic, and locodescriptive attributes, constitutes a textual monument, a subjective record of place and grief that circulates through publication, and allows other readers to share Bell’s emotion.

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The late-Victorian period evinced a renewed faith in the social, moral, and aesthetic function of memorials, whether material or the figurative ‘memorials’ of charitable endowments, trusts, and societies. Ford Madox Brown’s white sandstone cross was erected over the Birchington grave in 1885; even this prospect was enough to stimulate a tribute from a schoolboy Lionel Johnson: ‘That Thou Art Dead Is Little (On the Monument Shortly to be Raised in Honour of Rossetti).’65 Brown’s exemplary piece of late-Victorian eclecticism dwarfs the churchyard’s other markers, and symbolizes the distinction between famous and obscure dead played out in Bell’s sonnet. The runic cross alludes to ancient Celtic monuments, while its wide flat shaft gives space for three allegorical bas reliefs: the temptation in the Garden of Eden, ‘the upper part of the serpent being a woman’; the spiritual marriage of Dante and Beatrice; St Luke (patron saint of painters) and an ox (signifying the Evangelist).66 These motifs reflected the fusion of biblical and secular values in Rossetti’s paintings. William composed the inscription: here sleeps GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE ROSSETTI honoured under the name of DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI among painters as a painter and among poets as a poet born in london of parentage mainly italian 12 may 1828 died at birchington 9 april 1882.

Although the inscription invokes Gabriel’s domestic and familial identity, this is subordinated to his ‘honoured . . . name’ as an artist and poet. The dualistic theme is continued with more equality in the epitaph, which asserts the dead man’s genius in two arts, just where we might expect to find a scriptural quotation, and also in the pairings London/Italian (origins) and London/Birchington (termination). The monument is also inscribed with the significant history of its own origins: ‘bespoken by Dante Rossetti’s mother . . . designed by his lifelong friend Ford Madox Brown, executed by J. and H. Patterson, and erected by his brother William and sister Christina’. 65 First pub. The Wykehamist, 26 June 1885. Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson (1915), 298. 66 See Rossetti’s sonnet ‘St Luke the Painter’, retrieved from the exhumed notebook.

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Although Rossetti is physically absent from the Highgate family grave, the familial and private relations it represents are owned and honoured through the monument. Rossetti’s Birchington grave is a highly crafted and self-conscious site. While it is a significant feature of both the churchyard and the Rossetti legend, as a poet’s grave it suffers from anxious overstatement, an elaborate frame of textual and symbolic reference which protests the painter-poet’s significance too much, as though his reputation could not be trusted to speak for itself. This sense of urgency about making the most of past cultural achievements, preserving every detail of association for the future, is part of a larger historical movement towards conservation—exemplified by the National Trust’s foundation in 1893. (It is not a coincidence that one of the National Trust’s founders, Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley [1851–1920], is one of the period’s most prolific writers of memorial and tribute poems.) The site was, however, a focus for secular pilgrimage in the two decades after Rossetti’s death; C. A. G. Coles notes that it was ‘visited by many of Rossetti’s admirers and in 1893 an iron railing was erected to protect it. In the Church safe there is some amusing correspondence accusing American visitors of chipping pieces off the monument.’67 Mark Twain would have recognized these American descendents of the ‘pilgrims’ in The Innocents Abroad (1871), who could not visit a historical site without carrying some of it away. In a century when poets were worshipped with nearreligious fervour, these negative evidences of large visitor numbers, and their destructive demonstrations of homage, were frequently commented on. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tomb in Florence had to be restored after only ten years precisely because of this mania: contemplating repairs in 1875, Robert Browning sighed ‘I wish it were as easy to replace the coarse nature of the relic-mongers by some more human and decent stuff.’68 The late-Victorian proliferation of monuments and testimonials reflects a shift away from the unique site of the mortal remains: the memorial as fetish, rather than the poetic body it marks. The hunger to mark and commemorate minutiae as well as significant locations and periods of writers’ lives comes to appear anxious and insecure, 67

C. A. G. Coles, Some Notes Concerning All Saints’ Church Birchington (1945),

7. 68 RB to George Barrett, 20 Jan. 1875, Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. Paul Landis and Ronald E. Freeman (1958), 298.

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as though seeking to substantiate significant associations before they faded from view or were trampled under the feet of change and modernity. In Rossetti’s case, a memorial window was installed in Birchington church, the Westcliff Bungalow was renamed Rossetti Bungalow (now in Rossetti Avenue); attracting sundry other associations, such as the ‘Rossetti Society of Birchington’ (founded 1993). In London, watercolours were made as documentary records of Tudor House’s interiors (‘just before the contents of 16 Cheyne Walk were dispersed’).69 On the Embankment close to the studio a memorial fountain financed by subscription was also put up in the public gardens, with ‘a bust of Rossetti by Madox Brown’.70 In their proliferation and heterogeneity, these memorial gestures increase the very anxiety they try to allay. Who or what, exactly, is being commemorated? Is the poet’s identity private, or public, or, finally, dissolved in his work? Does the material site of his burial correspond to the presence of his ‘spirit’, or ironically signify its absence? Does the resurrection performed by personal or familial memory conflict with that performed by reading? All these positions could be held, sometimes simultaneously: throughout the nineteenth century the death of a poet occasioned extraordinary fusions of public and private response, and as we shall see this response could be evoked not just by contemporaries but by poets from previous generations and past centuries. 69 Henry Treffry Dunn, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti & his Circle: or, Cheyne Walk Life, ed. Rosalie Mander (1984), 36–7. 70 Ibid. 70–1. Subscribers included Browning, Gosse, Patmore, and Swinburne.

2

‘Nothing but Dust’: Resurrecting Burns shakespeare’s curse and milton’s teeth Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare: Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones, And cursed be he yt moves my bones.

Traditionally held to have been composed by Shakespeare shortly before his death on 23 April 1616, and still protecting his nameless grave in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, this is the most notorious and debated epitaph of any English poet.1 It has been bombarded with analysis and startling theses founded on the rubble, notably the reattribution of Shakespeare’s canon to Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe.2 Many have shared William Honey’s view that the ‘poorness of the doggerel rhyme’ argues against Shakespeare’s authorship, while others treat the warning as a code by which the Bard sought to speak from the grave.3 It is ironic that the first-person defence of ‘my bones’ has so often been appropriated to disprove Shakespeare’s identity, while such debunking readers have in their own way regarded the grave as superstitiously as any Bardolator. To support his speculation that precious manuscripts were secreted in Shakespeare’s grave, Honey sought to discredit historic reports that the grave has long contained ‘nothing but dust’. He scoffed at sexton Edmonds’s testimony, cited in 1 The tradition of Shakespeare authoring the epitaph was first documented in 1693. See Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, (2nd edn., 1991), 67, 83. 2 See Scott Surtees, William Shakespere, of Stratford-on-Avon: His Epitaph Unearthed, and the Author of the Plays Run to Ground (1888); William Honey, The 3 Shakespeare Epitaph Deciphered (1969). Honey, Shakespeare, 9.

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Washington Irving’s ‘Stratford-on-Avon’ in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), of the contents glimpsed when the grave’s side fell in during excavations in 1796: No one, however, presumed to meddle with his remains, so awfully guarded by a malediction; and lest any of the idle or the curious, or any collector of relics, should be tempted to commit depredations, the old sexton kept watch over the place for two days until the vault was finished and the aperture closed again. He told me that he had made bold to look in at the hole, but could see neither coffin nor bones; nothing but dust. It was something, I thought, to have seen the dust of Shakespeare.4

Irving’s final wistful reflection suggests the tempting object of desire which the physical relics of genius can present to later generations. Honey’s fantasy of the grave filled with manuscripts is symptomatic of a persistent cultural denial that the physical relics of genius are simply anonymous, senseless dust and bones. Against all rational and Christian expectations, admirers hope to find poetical remains that confirm the poet’s uniqueness, even imagining the material body’s miraculous transformation into a textual body. By the epitaph’s logic, dead geniuses should be allowed to rest peacefully in their graves, without disturbance for honours—transfer to Poets’ Corner—or insults—relegation to the charnel-house (both possible fates for Shakespeare’s ‘dust’).5 This sentiment was based on a traditional idea that the author made a compact with fame to leave his/her genius embodied in published works and manuscripts as a bequest to later generations; the public had no automatic claim on the author’s private character, which could not ‘explain’ the works. This model’s tenacity is suggested by a 1937 protest against the persistent prurient interest in Robert Burns’s amours: ‘Whose private life would stand the microscopic examination to which Burns’ has been subjected so ruthlessly? . . . [W]hat have we to do with these private and personal matters, except to the extent that they throw light upon any of the writings of the poet?’6 The figure of misapplied scientific ‘microscopic examination’ is pitted against the idealizing trope that ‘It is Burns’ writings that are Burns.’ However, there is more to say about the complex relation 4 The Complete Works of Washington Irving, ed. H. Springer (30 vols., 1978), viii. 5 See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 3–4. 213. 6 James Scott, Personality, and other essays (1937), 60–1.

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between actual grave-disturbance and biographers meddling with poets’ metaphorical remains in the nineteenth century, before I consider Burns’s contested afterlife in depth. Shakespeare’s epitaphic curse is a primary authority for maintaining the decorum separating private man from public figure, and protecting the memory of genius against disturbance and exposure. Yet epitaph also bridges the gap between corpse and corpus, since it is site-specific (referring to or speaking for the body) and biographical (registering the talent that demands commemoration). This helps to explain why during the new biographical era instituted by James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), physical remains and the grave’s sanctity are so often invoked metaphorically to describe the writer’s vulnerability to biographical intrusion. When the Augustan model of objective portraiture, which presented biographical subjects as ideal figures for admiration, instruction, and emulation, was challenged by the more intimate, conversational, subjective, and sometimes scandalous approach of Boswell’s Life, the grave-disturbance trope was revitalized. As Wordsworth observed in the ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’ (1816), ‘The life of Johnson by Boswell had broken through many pre-existing delicacies, and afforded the British public an opportunity of acquiring experience, which before it had happily wanted.’7 The epitaph’s anxiety that ‘Frends’ will ‘digg the dust’ translates into a group of opprobrious terms for biographic disturbance: making the dead turn in their graves, digging the dirt, exposing skeletons in the cupboard. Poets’ nervous anticipation that biographers will disturb their peace is frequently voiced in nineteenth-century poetry, as in Swinburne’s protest against Harry Buxton Forman’s edition of Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, Written in the Years MDCCCIX and MDCCCXX (1878), ‘In Sepulcretis’. The poem’s uncompromising stance on the separation of the writer’s public from private identities is marked by an epigraph translated from Heinrich Heine: ‘To publish even one line of an author which he himself has not intended for the public at large—especially letters which are addressed to private persons—is to commit a despicable act of felony.’8 The 7

Owen & Smyser, iii. 120. First pub. A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (1884); The Complete Poetical Works of A. C. Swinburne (6 vols., 1905), vi. 85. 8

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cultural authority of the ‘Life and Letters’ as the standard Victorian biographical format makes this position absurdly untenable, but Swinburne’s translation of Heine’s textual ethics—identifying transgressors against authorial privacy as criminal transgressors against society—into burial ethics registers a contemporary sense of panic and crisis: ‘In Sepulcretis’ tropes the modern author as victim, critically scorned in life, only for the same critics to batten upon the author’s remains: But now, when death and fame have set one seal On tombs whereat Love, Grief, and Glory kneel, Men sift all secrets, in their critic sieve, Of graves wherein the dust of death might shrink To know what tongues defile the dead man’s name With loathsome love, and praise that stings like shame.

(ll. 6–12)

Swinburne chafes at the dead author’s mute passivity, powerless to repudiate insincere or self-serving comment; the poet’s grave is such a grimly compulsive poetic subject precisely because it performs rhetorical control over a future time when verbal defence is no longer possible. The seal is set on the great man’s grave, yet latent here is an image of ghoulish critics sifting not only ‘secrets’ but ‘the dust of death’. The speaker’s subjective identification with this fate is then reflected in an embodied account of the posthumous subject: Make bare the poor dead secrets of his heart, Strip the stark-naked soul, that all may peer, Spy, smirk, sniff, snap, snort, snivel, snarl, and sneer: Let none so sad, let none so sacred part Lie still for pity, rest unstirred for shame, But all be scanned of all men. This is fame. (ll. 23–8)

By combining the vocabulary of soul and body, Swinburne projects a primitive view of dead genius. Like a corpse displayed in the Paris Morgue, secrets are bared, the already ‘stark-naked’ soul is stripped; the visceral imagery and crude sequence of animalistic, sibilant active verbs mimic the living’s trespass against the dead. Although the predators later explicitly figure as ‘ravenous grave-worms’ consuming the tissues of the dead, here ‘all men’ are implicated: readers’ insatiable curiosity encourages these felonious activities, by which ‘Dead men may keep inviolate not their tomb.’ The profits of tombbreaking are too strong an incentive: ‘Not Shakespeare’s grave would scare them off with rhymes’ (ll. 45–6, 56).

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The cryptic spells guarding Shakespeare’s burial-place worked up to a point; although the sunk and decayed gravestone was substituted with a replica in the mid-eighteenth century, ‘No sexton has desecrated Shakespeare’s grave, nor have his bones been disturbed by modern enthusiasts . . . intent in this curious fashion to illuminate with the light of science the concealing darkness of the poet’s mystery.’9 Other poets’ remains fared less well. Respect for dead genius offers some protection, but fame also gives relics a tempting glamour, helping the curious to dignify and rationalize their investigations. The most graphic example of doubtful acts committed in the name of disinterested motives is the August 1790 violation of John Milton’s coffin during excavations in St Giles’ Church, Cripplegate; indeed, this well-publicized incident may have stimulated the vigilance of Irving’s Stratford sexton six years later. The excavation aimed to locate the body’s position precisely before erecting a monument to the poet’s memory—but unconscionable liberties were taken with it. Scandalized local antiquarian Philip Neve published his interviews with the church overseers and journeymen responsible for the desecration, reporting that ‘Upon first view of the body, it appeared perfect, and completely enveloped in the shroud . . . the ribs standing up regularly. When they disturbed the shroud, the ribs fell.’10 The miracle of a long-buried body appearing ‘perfect’ on first exposure is common; however when the body is Milton’s, the equally common phenomenon of it collapsing to dust on ‘disturbance’ symbolizes the unsettling of posthumous reputation: the ideal image fragments, and the observer’s reverence breaks down: ‘Mr. Fountain . . . pulled hard at the teeth, which resisted, until some one hit them a knock with a stone, when they easily came out . . . Mr. Laming told me, that he had at one time a mind to bring away the whole underjaw with the teeth in it; he had it in his hand, but tossed it back again.’ Grave-digger Elizabeth Grant ‘exhibited the body, at first for 6d. and afterwards for 3d. and 2d. each person’ for the next day and a half. Neve did his best to buy back the relics; Mr Ellis, ‘comedian of the royalty-theatre’, surrendered ‘a small quantity of hair, with which was a piece of the shroud, and, adhering to the hair, a bit of the skin of the skull, of about the size of a shilling. He put them all into my 9

Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 3, 4. A Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton’s Coffin, in the Parish-Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, on Wednesday, 4th of August, 1790 (1790), 17. 10

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hands, with [a] rib-bone.’11 A. N. Wilson explains the incident thus: ‘drunk after a party, some “gay young blades” dug up the body and pulled it to bits’;12 in fact, the episode began in the sober light of a summer morning, and the relics were removed over thirty-six hours. Neve felt that these ‘sacrilegious scenes’, ‘which will strike every liberal mind with horror and disgust’, spoke for themselves: I have procured these relics, which I possess, only in hope of bearing part in a pious and honorable restitution of all that has been taken:—the sole atonement, which can now be made, to the violated rights of the dead; to the insulted parishioners at large; and to the feelings of all good men . . . Unless that be done, in vain will the parish hereafter boast a sumptuous monument to the memory of Milton: it will but display their shame in proportion to its magnificence.13

The relics were restored, but as Neve’s use of the language of atonement suggests, the unambiguously secular treatment of the poet’s remains by church functionaries remained shocking. The trade in relics demonstrates the interrelation of reverential and exploitative feeling typical of popular attitudes to poets’ remains. William Cowper’s outraged ‘Stanzas on the Late Indecent Liberties taken with the Remains of the Great Milton.—Anno 1790’ freely translates from Milton’s early Latin poem to ‘Mansus’, to contrast Milton’s anticipation of finding ‘ “my refuge in the tomb, | And sleep securely there” ’, with the ‘indecent liberties’.14 (‘Mansus’ is a tribute to John Baptista Manso, Tasso’s friend who hosted Milton in Naples; Cowper invokes the lines: ‘Perhaps [the friend] might have my features carved in marble, binding my hair with a wreath of Paphian myrtle or of Parnassian laurel: and I shall rest safe and at peace’ [John Carey’s translation].) Cowper sees the episode as idolatrous as well as an act of desecration: Ill fare the hands that heaved the stones Where Milton’s ashes lay, That trembled not to grasp his bones And steal his dust away! Oh ill-requited bard! Neglect Thy living worth repay’d, 11

A Narrative, 22. A. N. Wilson, The Life of John Milton (1984), 259. 13 A Narrative, 32–3. 14 The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (3 vols., 1995), iii. 64, ll. 6–7; Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (1971), 267. 12

Resurrecting Burns And blind idolatrous respect As much affronts thee dead.

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(ll. 17–24)

Cowper denies any inherent power to Milton’s ashes and bones; the formulation ‘trembled not to grasp . . .’ suggests rather the absence of reverent respect for genius that should have protected his remains. The speaker commiserates with Milton’s spirit for historical and contemporary public abuse (as the rhyme suggests, ‘neglect’ and ‘respect’ have similar outcomes). The phrase ‘blind idolatrous respect’ condemns not only the superstitious relic-worship that led to the desecration, but the monument’s respectable premise: both ‘affront’ Milton’s memory by overlooking his poetry. That later authorities cast doubts on whether the desecrated remains were Milton’s only strengthens Cowper’s point. Biographers, readers and potential subjects had a lively appreciation of the closely allied fates of the authorial corpse and posthumous literary reputation. In 1837 Robert Southey chose a telling metaphor when considering Thomas Noon Talfourd’s The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life (1837): [I]n this age, when a person of any notoriety dies, they lose as little time in making a book of him as they used to do in making a mummy. To be sure, there are some reputations which will not keep, and must therefore be brought to market while they are fresh. But poor Lamb’s is not of that kind. His memory will retain its fragrance as long as the best spice that ever was expended upon one of the Pharaohs.15

Southey, to whom the grave’s horrors were as vividly present as Heaven’s consolations, imagines biography simultaneously as trading in ‘fresh’ bodies, and mummification (a simile inspired by an implied pun on ‘binding’). His own bias as biographer of poets with tragic demises (Chatterton, White, most recently Cowper) may encourage him to indict the publishers’ unseemly haste, for it is the publisher who hurries to ‘make a book’ of the dead man, anxious to sell the goods before they lose marketability. Quickly assembled texts capitalizing on the deaths of the famous are a consistent feature of publishing; however, in a century obsessed with the (in)security, insalubrity, and politics of burial, the construction of biographers, 15 RS to CB, 23 July 1837, The Correspondence of Robert Southey and Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (1881), 352.

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publishers, and editors of posthumous works as ghoulish predators had a topical relevance.

resurrectionists, doctors, and the poets Between the mid-eighteenth century and 1832, every newly buried corpse in Britain was at some risk of being illegally exhumed or ‘resurrected’, and sold to private medical schools, where doctors and students needed an ever-increasing number of human subjects for dissection. The black-market trade in human remains was regarded with horror, and where perpetrators were caught, could provoke furious reprisals and rioting. Even after the 1832 Anatomy Act put the bodysnatchers out of business, they and the dissecting doctors continued to figure prominently as hate-figures in the popular imagination. Dissection was associated with crime and public shame. Surgeons were annually supplied with a handful of executed criminals’ corpses: after being held up to public hatred on the gallows, the body was stripped, flayed, and dissected before a specialized audience in the anatomy theatre, cut up for preservation as specimens or cast on the dung heap.16 Scientific exposure and analysis conflicted with popular attitudes to the corpse, which cherished privacy and ‘the existence of a strong tie between body and personality/soul for an undefined period of time after death’: dissection was a spiritual as well as physical punishment.17 The resurrectionist threat was inseparable from the scandalous condition of the overfilled city churchyards and burial-grounds. Graves were routinely reopened, and bones and semi-decomposed matter dug up and burnt to make room for more burials. In city grounds, human remains were found on the surface, or piled up like compost heaps. The grave, far from being a permanent resting-place, was fundamentally insecure and unstable. The sacred was profaned. Whereas Hannah More absurdly claimed to have ‘a certain tenderness’ about the name ‘resurrection-men’, as adopting ‘terms which have been in a manner consecrated by religious associations, to express common notions and things’, Thomas Hood more sensibly saw it as a sacrilegious 16 17

Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (2nd edn., 2001), 35. Ibid. 7.

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parody of both spiritual and bodily resurrection: updating the song ‘Gin a Body Meet a Body’, he depicts two grave-robbers hauling a fresh corpse out of a coffin, and smirking at the uprooted headstone inscribed ‘resurgam’.18 The resurrection-men did not have it all their own way; communities combined to defend their dead, as suggested by Alexander Rodger’s song ‘Ye who mourn dear friends departed. Written for and sung at a concert given in aid of the Bridgeton Grave Protecting Society.—1824.’19 Undertakers developed a profitable range of patent coffins and security devices, burial-grounds were patrolled and included dead houses and mort-safes, which protected bodies until decomposition made them worthless.20 However, when the money was right, the resurrectionists could find a way; Sir Astley Cooper (d. 1841), the most notable London surgeon of the earlynineteenth century, boasted that ‘There is no person, let his situation in life be what it may, whom, if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain. The law only enhances the price, it does not prevent the exhumation.’21 Writers had good reason to feel personally involved in the turf warfare enacted in the nation’s burial-grounds. The body of Laurence Sterne (d. 1768), buried in a cheap grave in the suburban Marylebone burial-ground of St George’s Church, Hanover Square, was rumoured to have been removed by bodysnatchers; the newspapers later speculated that ‘[t]he Curiosity of having Yorick’s Scull was, no doubt, the Inducement.’22 The writer’s body was recognized on the dissection slab of the Cambridge Professor of Anatomy, Dr Charles Collignon, and sent back to London for reburial.23 Although memorials to Sterne were later erected at Marylebone, the remains’ location was doubtful. The premium on unique or notorious corpses made the famous vulnerable, and gave writers an added incentive for 18 Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, ed. William Roberts ([1834] 4 vols., 1835), i. p. xli; HW iv. 173. 19 Alexander Rodger, Stray Leaves from the Portfolios of Alisander the Seer, Andrew Whaup, and Humphrey Henkeckle (1842), 108. 20 See advertisement for Jarvis’s Patent self-locking iron coffins (c.1810) in Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 (1991), 110; Richardson, Dissection, 84; James Moores Ball, The Sack-’Em-Up Men (1928), 146. 21 Ball, Sack-’Em-Up, 125. 22 The Public Advertiser, 24 March 1769, cited in Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (1986), 331. 23 Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (1929), 491–3.

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treating the subject. Robert Southey’s poem ‘The Surgeon’s Warning’ (1798), which presents the dying confession and burial directions of a surgeon who has made a ghoulish career from the dead, uses a satirical and absurdist idiom, to give fearful readers the relief of mocking and vicariously punishing the bodysnatchers and doctors.24 The surgeon rightly fears he will fall victim to his own predatory apprentice, Joseph, and not all the bribery and patent coffins money can buy will save him from (literally) poetic justice. Southey’s satirical indictment of resurrectionism later invited comparison with the rise of another negative cultural phenomenon justified in the name of scientific revelation—investigative biography—and after grave-robbery ceased to be a literal threat, it gained a new metaphorical life. (The controversial 1832 Anatomy Act criminalized poverty, by giving the unclaimed bodies of paupers to the dissectors.25) Here was a readymade contemporary idiom with which to punish over-hasty biographers, rifling dark private places, digging for sordid treasure that should not see the light of day. Far from being Hamlet’s ‘undiscover’d country from whose dark bourn | No traveller returns’, the author’s afterlife was a constant process of being dragged back to the light: some poets’ graves appear as temporary and insecure refuges, from which the dead are repeatedly exhumed, to listen mute and without redress to competing biographers narrating fictions of the subject’s life. Writing to Southey in 1835, Caroline Bowles reflected bitterly on the degenerate ‘taste of the times’ for indiscreet lives and letters, drawing a witty but potent comparison with ‘The Surgeon’s Warning’: ‘I would as lief have your “Mister Joseph” by my death-bed, if I was a great literary character, as one of those jackals of the Press, and the Evan—“Dis-evangelics” as you well call them—are full as revolting in their way.’26 Bowles puts enterprising and entrepreneurial journalists and memoirists who record dying words on a par with the sly surgeon’s apprentice who carves up his dead master’s body: all hover around the death-bed, waiting to exploit the remains. Bowles has in mind William Roberts’s Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (1834): ‘Witness the short-hand collectors of last dying words that surrounded Hannah More and her poor 24 25 26

The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (10 vols., 1838), vi. 184. See Richardson, Dissection, 219–38. CB to RS, 28 Feb. 1835, Correspondence, 321.

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sisters in their last moments; in her case treasuring up and revealing all that should have been most sacredly veiled, as indications of a decaying and weakened mind. Her Editor has done her memory more dishonour than the most slanderous of her accusers.’ Before her death aged 88 in 1833, the prolific evangelical author had suffered from dementia, and her faithfully recorded rantings made Roberts’s book a best-seller. Roberts’s preface stigmatizes reticence and discretion, boasting that ‘those who know the true uses of biography, will thank the Editor . . . for his open and integral display of the correspondence and intercourse of the interesting subject of his memoir’, even claiming the Bible as his paradigm: ‘The inspired biographers have set us an example which we shall do well to imitate. The sacred volume presents to man his own nature in its true condition of humiliation and corruption.’27 While Roberts claimed to have written an antidote to ‘that infectious biography, which has engrossed of late so much . . . attention, blazoning under colours the most false and alluring, the ministers and minstrels of sin and pollution’, its method is not dissimilar to the landslide of recent Byron biographies he repudiated.28 Bowles sees instead only a more hypocritical dressing-up of the general taste for dissecting personality and peddling gossip. In nineteenth-century discourse, surgical metaphors for literary techniques appear antipathetic to both poetry and biography; going under the knife denotes destructive dissection, not constructive surgery. The binary opposition of dissection and composition questions the purpose and safety of subjecting the delicate and complex mind to detailed analysis, and articulates the persistent post-Romantic anxiety that the march of intellect will trample and kill human imagination. In 1853 an anonymous commentator on Wordsworth’s poetry favourably compared the method of Paradise Lost to that of Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791), arguing that ‘folly [is] always committed when the universal truth of poetry is subordinated to the detailed facts of science’.29 The author protests against the inapplicability of the ‘analytical’ modes of ‘physical science’ to ‘aesthetical’ practice:

27 29

28 More, Memoirs, i. p. ix. Ibid. i. 6. An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth (1853), 7.

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It is the province of the mental philosopher to lay bare, as with a dissectingknife, the minutest parts of our intellectual system; to trace the arterial current of our affections to their palpitating source; and to explore those powerful springs of action which are hidden from the mere observer of their manifested results, as the nerves and sinews of the body are clothed with a substance imparting harmony and grace.30

Although such analysis befits the philosopher, it remains cruel and painful work; the dissection-subject still lives, as the ‘arterial current of our affections [are traced] to their palpitating source’. (The writer, naturally, waited until his own subject was dead before ‘lay[ing] bare’ Wordsworth’s ‘intellectual system’.) As in William Hogarth’s engraving ‘The Reward of Cruelty’ (1750–1), in which the corpse being dissected in a crowded anatomy theatre cries out in pain as its eye is prodded with a scalpel, the subject can feel the sharpness of exploring steel.31 The author’s faith in the poet’s mysterious and godlike creativity, ‘animating by a Promethean heat his own life-like creation’, bears comparison with Wordsworth’s advice in the ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’ (1810): ‘the writer of an epitaph is not an anatomist, who dissects the internal frame of the mind . . . his delineation, we must remember, is performed by the side of the grave . . . of one whom he loves and admires’.32 Wordsworth and his acolyte agree that to break the individual down into his constituent elements—whether affective, physiological, or personal—will not help the reader to understand him: he is literally more than the sum of his parts, and objective analysis will fail to synthesize those elements. Dissection is at odds with poetry and biography because it claims to further knowledge by fragmentation into discrete parts. Southey’s surgeon feared his apprentices would ‘carve me bone from bone’, like the butcher jointing an animal carcass for sale (l. 38). The anatomical school of biography is likewise charged with butchering the carcass for the reader’s consumption, editing and recontextualizing private letters, suppressing and destroying manuscripts, cutting the man to fit the cloth; literary butchery is bloodless, but the writer’s intimates may not recognize the hacked-about textual body of the person they knew. 30

An Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth (1853), 8. Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (2000), 29. 32 An Essay, 8–9; Owen & Smyser, ii. 57–8. 31

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On the strength of this analogy a public interest in the remains and graves of dead genius was claimed. Just as an individual gravepilgrim exercised his emotional or cultural rights by rituals (leaving flowers, taking souvenirs, making records), so communities and nations found meaning in claiming rights of interest and possession in the poet’s remains. During the period of greatest anxiety about bodysnatching, claims that the poet’s remains had a larger duty to perform in national life conflicted starkly with private fears about the security of the beloved dead. Haunted by threatened disturbance to graves of the dear departed, communities compensated by demanding the right to investigate graves of individuals considered in the public domain: that is, public men ‘belong’ to everyone. When issues of exhumation, the returning corpse, anatomy, and dissection were topics of everyday debate, it was at once inevitable that the public should be obsessed with the bodies of its great men, and perverse that this obsession took the form of disturbing graves and scrutinizing remains. The overdetermining influence of doctors and quasi-clinical ‘diagnostic’ and surgical techniques on Robert Burns’s early biography, and the postmortem adventures of his remains, raise questions about how much of the poet’s life, death, and body lies in the public domain. The autobiographical and subjective mode of Burns’s poetry focused contemporary biographical questions about the division between works and life; there was no thought of putting aside ‘private and personal matters, except to the extent that they throw light upon any of the writings of the poet’.33 The personality of his works encouraged readerly identification and emotional involvement; Burns’s involvement in public and political affairs helped stimulate his adoption as a national icon. The poems’ popularity created a huge demand for biographical information; yet after his premature death biographers were faced with the difficult task of fulfilling the public’s simultaneous desire for the ideal and the real-life stories of this unorthodox, intemperate, atheistic republican. I explore how in the context of judgemental, contradictory, fragmentary, and unauthoritative biography, the body of Burns was called upon to represent and ‘explain’ the poet’s genius.

33

Scott, Personality, 61.

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‘i have seen the expiring genius of scotland departing with burns’ 34 Even friends of Burns, such as John Syme, were measuring the poet’s national and historic significance before his body was cold. Four years later, Dr James Currie (Burns’s first official biographer) agreed that his poetry ‘displays, as it were embalms, the peculiar manners of his country; and it may be considered as a monument, not to his own name only, but to the expiring genius of an ancient and once independent nation’.35 ‘Burns’ was in two senses Scotland’s ‘expiring genius’, Scotland’s representative poet dying, and the signature for a body of poetry that symbolized a lamented lost Scotland: the nation mourned the remains of departed genius as a synecdoche for the body politic. Leith Davis comments of this passage that Currie presents Burns as ‘the undertaker of an independent Scotland’.36 My concern is with a different professional stance: Currie’s clinician’s reading of the body of Burns’s poetry, which ‘displays’ and ‘embalms’ the Scottish spirit, yet is also a ‘monument’ (the marker over the body). The doctor’s imagery is drawn not from undertaking, but the anatomical tradition of the écorché figure: the flayed and embalmed human body preserved and displayed in medical schools for instruction.37 Ideas and images of clinical display and preservation figure early in Burns’s afterlife, and the idealizing and mythologizing motive that has predominated in biography and critical commentary on his œuvre until recently, is in dynamic tension with it. Burns’s health had visibly failed in 1795–6; his friend Maria Riddell recalled that ‘The stamp of death was impressed on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity.’38 Allan Cunningham, then a 12-year-old apprentice stonemason in Dumfries, recalled Burns’s dying as a public event: the town ‘was like a besieged place’, and all were talking of the poet’s ‘untimely and approaching fate’; ‘they thought only of his genius . . . and they talked of him with the same awe as of some departing spirit, whose 34 JS to AC, 19 July 1796, ‘Correspondence of John Syme and Alexander Cunningham, 1789–1811’, BCCD, 10 (1935), 40. 35 Currie, i. 31. 36 Leith Davis, ‘James Currie’s Works of Robert Burns: The Politics of Hypochondriasis’, Studies in Romanticism, 36 (1997), 57. 37 38 See Kemp and Wallace (2000), 29, 87. Currie, i. 223.

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voice was to gladden them no more’.39 As the news spread that Burns had died on 21 July 1796, aged 37, hundreds of local people became eager to pay their respects to the body, belatedly acknowledging that a literary god had walked among them. Cunningham joined the mass pilgrimage to the modest Burns family home: I went to see him laid out for the grave; several eldern people were with me. He lay in a plain unadorned coffin, with a linen sheet drawn over his face, and on the bed, and around the body, herbs and flowers were thickly strewn according to the usage of the country. He was wasted somewhat by long illness; but death had not increased the swarthy hue of his face, which was uncommonly dark and deeply marked—the dying pang was visible in the lower part, but his broad and open brow was pale and serene, and around it his sable hair lay in masses, slightly touched with gray. . . . The room where he lay was pale and neat . . . We stood and gazed on him in silence for the space of several minutes.40

Private and public considerations are strangely fused here; Burns was laid out at home with no concessions to celebrity, but Cunningham reads the scene through the eyes of posterity. The eyewitness frames the memory as a picture, with the context— unpretentious coffin, customary herbs and flowers, the humble room—focusing attention on the poet’s face and head, the anatomical locus of his genius. The body’s sanctity is implied in an occluded trope of concealment and revelation: initially a ‘linen sheet [was] drawn over his face’, but a hand must have drawn back the sheet. Cunningham reads the revealed face symbolically, contrasting its ‘uncommon’ darkness and evidence of death, with the noble white brow transcendently ‘broad and open . . . pale and serene’. Awe and respect for the dead man prevented the crowd from ‘justling and crushing’, despite the numbers passing through the small house. The sanctified atmosphere of Cunningham’s narrative is partly an effect of retrospection over almost three decades, imbuing his young self’s impressions with an appropriately sacred aura, in order to heighten the contrast with Byron’s recent chaotic obsequies; it also seeks to refute intervening scandalous and sensational accounts; but the poet’s supporters employed similar defensive tactics as early as the funeral on 25 July 1796. John Syme helped organize the funeral 39 [Allan Cunningham], ‘Robert Burns and Lord Byron’, The London Magazine, 40 10 (August 1824), 118. Ibid. 119.

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procession dignified with military honours (a tribute to Burns’s membership of the Royal Dumfries Volunteers); the body was carried from the Town Hall where it had lain overnight, through the streets to St Michael’s churchyard, with the route lined by the brightly-uniformed Cinque Ports Cavalry and Angusshire Fencibles, watched by large crowds. The occasion was unambiguously public, splendid, and ostentatious. The only close relative present was Burns’s brother Gilbert; his widow Jean Armour was in labour with their ninth child. Private grief was subordinated to military ceremony, personal idiosyncrasies and failings masked with ritualized respect, as soldiers slow-marched with arms reversed, and ‘three vollies fired over his grave, marked the return of Burns to his parent earth!’41 Dumfries diarist William Grierson took the occasion on its own terms, concluding that the funeral ‘on the whole presented a solemn, grand and affecting spectacle and accorded with the general sorrow and regret for the loss of a man whose like we can scarce see again’.42 Although Cunningham also testified to the crowd’s decorum, and celebrated ‘men of all ranks and persuasions and opinions mingling as brothers, and stepping side by side . . . with the remains of him who had sang of their loves and joys and domestic endearments’, he found the military honours ‘an idle ostentation, a piece of superfluous state’ that ‘had no share in increasing the solemnity of the burial scene; and had no connexion with the poet’.43 Syme’s aim had been ‘a grand and proper parade and solemnity’: his idea that military ceremony would make the strongest public statement of respect to Burns’s memory was on its own terms successful; but it decisively emphasized the national icon above the poet; the private man was wholly elided.44 The use of public gestures to conceal Burns behind a protective interpretative shield is endemic in commemoration and later biography.

‘thoughtless follies laid him low’ Burns’s friends began to plan for the future early, with an eye to the family’s urgently needed financial support. In Edinburgh Alexander 41 42 43 44

Currie, i. 227. Apostle to Burns: The Diaries of William Grierson, ed. John Davies (1981), 63. Cunningham, ‘Robert Burns’, 121. JS to AC, 23 July 1796, BCCD 10 (1935), 44.

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Cunningham’s first thought was ‘a Subscription for his Wife and Infant family—and afterwards the Sale of his posthumous works, Letters, Songs, &c., to a respectable London Bookseller’; Syme agreed, adding that ‘A monument must be raised over his grave here.’45 From the start, memorial schemes were dogged by talk of the poet’s bad character: the first widely circulated panegyric on his poems also remarked that ‘The public . . . will learn with regret that his extraordinary endowments were accompanied with frailties which rendered them useless’ (‘Mr Thomson’s’ obituary appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, Glasgow Mercury and [was] copied in many Scottish and English papers’).46 Burns had anticipated the problem; Riddell recalled that his dying regrets were divided between his children and failing to put his papers in order (code for destroying and refining manuscripts), and he ‘shewed great concern about the care of his literary fame, and particularly the publication of his posthumous works. He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation.’47 Initially copyright difficulties obstructed the publication plans, while the citizens of Edinburgh expressed their disapproval of ‘the poor Bard’s frailties’ by withholding financial support. Although by the following spring £700 had been raised for the family, there was insufficient money or consensus to go ahead with the monument: the grave remained unmarked for almost a decade. Activities on Burns’s behalf were energetic and committed, but like the funeral ostentation, defensive. Supporters were constantly repudiating slanders about the poet’s character, and there was a pressing need for a sympathetic ‘authorized’ biography and edition of the poems. Two brief biographies appeared quickly: Maria Riddell’s ‘Memoir Concerning Burns’, printed in the Dumfries Journal in August 1796, and Robert Heron’s psychobiography A Memoir of the Life of the Late Robert Burns (1797). Heron’s work has received more than its fair share of criticism for mythologizing the poet’s drinking, and for unseemly haste into print; Riddell’s reminiscence remains a primary source. This is partly due to her modest and intimate personal portrait, and the author’s prescient understanding that the readiness of writers and readers to sit in judgement on the dead would dog the early 45 46 47

AC to JS, 20 July 1796, ibid. 40. Ian McIntyre, Dirt & Deity: A Life of Robert Burns (1995), 400. Currie, i. 224.

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biography. Riddell anticipated ‘the usual profusion of posthumous anecdotes, memoirs, &c. that commonly spring up at the death of every rare and celebrated personage’, and was determined not to ‘enlist with the numerous corps of biographers, who, it is probable, may, without possessing his genius, arrogate to themselves the privilege of criticizing the character or writings of Mr Burns’.48 The trace of martial imagery (refusing to ‘enlist’ with the ‘corps’) implies Riddell’s opposition to the funeral show, and the latent aggression in the ‘numerous’ biographical phalanx. Carol McGuirk states that ‘virtually every moralizing posture and mythic obliquity in the critical heritage originated in the earliest edition of the poet’s complete works, compiled by Dr. James Currie between 1796 and 1800’.49 Dr James Currie MD (1756–1805), a displaced Dumfries man doctoring in Liverpool, and already suffering from the tuberculosis that killed him, agreed to take on the task only when no high-profile Scottish man of letters or close associate of the poet could be persuaded.50 Currie had met Burns only briefly once in 1792, and considered himself an ‘entire Stranger’ to the poet; a phrase reflecting his quasi-objective relation to his subject. McGuirk notes that ‘Dr. Currie viewed Burns’s remains—both literary and biographical—with the clinical, measuring eye of a physician’, quoting Currie’s promise (when proposing the biography to the publishers) that ‘I shall give it a professional tinge’.51 The Doctor’s ‘clinical, measuring’ approach is evident in his selections from Burns’s works, and in his diagnostic and moralizing stance towards his subject. The Works was another fundraiser for Burns’s family, and Currie’s professional authority and respectability helped to swell the subscription lists; the four-volume The Works of Robert Burns; with an Account of his Life, and a Criticism on his Writings, earned them another £1,200. Currie’s book may be credited with establishing Burns’s fame: it went through multiple editions, and ‘The Life of Robert Burns’ was reprinted separately, abridged, and attached to other publications.52 However, it was also responsible for presenting 48

Currie, i. 254. Carol McGuirk, ‘Currie and the Burns Myth’, 151, in Steven R. McKenna (ed.), Selected Essays on Scottish Language and Literature (1992). 50 See Robert Donald Thornton, James Currie, The Entire Stranger, and Robert Burns (1963); McIntyre, Dirt, 403–12. 51 McGuirk, ‘Currie and the Burns Myth’, 153. 52 e.g. The Life of Robert Burns . . . with his Correspondence and Fragments (1826). 49

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Burns as a medical case history of (in McGuirk’s words) ‘the artist as self-destructive rake and alcoholic’, indulging his passions to excess. Some readers responded with retrospective advice for treatment; diarist Ramsay of Ochtertyre told Currie in 1800, ‘[H]ad [Burns] been put under my excellent friend Dr. Gregory’s regimen . . . it had proved as salutary to his soul as it has been to my tenament of clay.’53 Although Currie was satisfied that he had sensitively fulfilled his preface’s intention to ‘tread lightly over [Burns’] yet warm ashes, and respect the laurels that shelter his untimely grave’, many readers objected to the doctor’s diagnosis that the poet died of dipsomania, and to his intrusive pro-temperance moralizing.54 Charles Lamb complained to Wordsworth that the ‘Life’ was ‘very confusedly and badly written, and interspersed with dull pathological and medical discussions . . . Do you know the well-meaning doctor? Alas! ne sutor ultra crepidam.’55 By invoking the image of the poet’s ‘warm ashes’ and grave, Currie positioned himself as a respectful pilgrim; yet he also takes the more objective stance of the ‘entire stranger’, dependent on documents and the testimony of others, and with a doctor’s concern for factual exposition. He invokes the grave again to articulate the biographer’s responsibility: [T]here are sentiments of respect, and even of tenderness, with which this duty should be performed; there is an awful sanctity which invests the mansions of the dead; and let those who moralize over the graves of their contemporaries reflect with humility on their own errors, nor forget how soon they may themselves require the candour and the sympathy they are called upon to bestow.56

The definite lack of ‘sympathy’ and even ‘respect’ (without the compensating quality of objective coolness) in some parts of his narrative, makes this assertion doubtful. Satisfied Burns’s ‘errors’ were not his own, Currie believed in the authority of his own diagnosis. Visitors were already moralizing over the grave in earnest, and Currie’s biography was implicated in their responses. In his meditation on Burns’s biography, ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’ (1816), Wordsworth recorded ‘the acute sorrow with which, by my own fire-side, I first perused Dr. Currie’s Narrative, and some of the 53 55 56

54 McGuirk, ‘Currie and the Burns Myth’, 154, 55. Currie, i. 31. Qu. in William Findlay, Robert Burns and the Medical Profession (1898), 75. Currie, i. 251.

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letters’ in 1800.57 He felt ‘strong indignation’ about Currie’s lack of sympathy and foresight in revealing ‘to the world’ Burns’s ‘infirmities’; however, he could not entirely forget Currie’s interpretation and revelations when he and Dorothy Wordsworth visited the grave during the walking tour recorded in Dorothy’s journal Recollections of a Tour in Scotland (1803); on 18 August she noted that a local bookseller guided them from the ‘mean’ Burns house to the northeast corner of St Michael’s churchyard.58 The grave had been opened twice since the funeral in 1796, for the bodies of Burns’s posthumous son Maxwell in 1799, and 14-year-old Francis Wallace in July 1803; the knowledge of the grave’s recent opening for Burns’s son influenced the Wordsworths’ emotional reading of the grave: There is no stone to mark the spot; but a hundred guineas have been collected to be expended upon some sort of monument. ‘There,’ said the bookseller, pointing to a pompous monument, ‘lies Mr.—(I have forgotten the name)— a remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and scarcely ever lost a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him, and there they rest as you see.’ We looked at Burns’s grave with melancholy and painful reflections, repeating to each other his own poet’s epitaph:— ‘Is there a man’, &c.59

This is the version of Dorothy’s journal Wordsworth printed as a head-note to the Burns poems in Poems of Early and Late Years (1842); manuscript versions quote stanzas 3 and 4 of ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ in full, and there are small variants, notably Wordsworth’s substitution ‘his own poet’s epitaph’ for Dorothy’s neutral ‘his own verses’. For the decade before Burns’s grave was marked, the surrounding landscape of what Dorothy described as ‘expensive monuments, in all sorts of fantastic shapes—obelisk-wise, pillar-wise, &c.’, made its own eloquently ironic comment on the posthumous fate of poets. Where the respectable, forgettable attorney was guaranteed a ‘pompous monument’, the poet’s grave could not be discovered without a local guide. Burns’s memory was not visibly honoured; however, in a representative moment of selfconscious grave-pilgrimage ritualism, the Wordsworths pay tribute to Burns’s memory by repeating his poem ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ over the grave. 57 58 59

Owen & Smyser, iii. 118. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (2 vols., 1941), i. 198. William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (1999), 472.

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First printed, as Ian McIntyre says ‘ruefully although a shade selfregardingly’ as the closing text to the volume that made his poetic reputation, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ has often been read as the poet’s prophecy of his own fate, and given the authority of ‘last words’.60 It was reprinted as ‘His Epitaph’ (as though carved on a non-existent monument) in the commemorative Verses to the Memory of Robert Burns; With an Account of His Interment at Dumfries, on Monday the 25th of July, 1796. Also His Epitaph, Written by Himself (1796). Spoken as though by the dead, the poem invites the graveside sympathy of three alter egos; the ‘whim-inspir’d fool’, the ‘Bard of rustic song’, and the man who can teach others to live right, ‘Yet runs, himself, life’s mad career’; they should sigh, weep, and ‘o’er this grassy heap sing dool’.61 These projections of the poet’s personality are advised to learn from the ‘Bard’s’ fate—‘thoughtless follies laid him low, | And stain’d his name!’—and the poem concludes by admonishing the reader that ‘prudent, cautious, self-controul | Is Wisdom’s root’ (ll. 23–4, 29–30). Burns therefore seems to invite Wordsworth’s self-reflexive reading, articulated in the ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’, where he questions who lies in the grave in ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’, which he imagines marked by a stone inscribed ‘Thoughtless follies laid him low | And stained his name’: Who but himself,—himself anticipating the too probable termination of his own course? . . .—a confession at once devout, poetical and human—a history in the shape of a prophecy! What more was required of the biographer than to have put his seal to the writing, testifying that the foreboding had been realized, and that the record was authentic?62

Wordsworth’s determination to read the poem as the author’s ‘foreboding’ of his own doom (suggested by the pun on ‘corse’, the body), is a reaction against Currie’s revelatory narrative, and its totalizing effect on the next generation’s opinion of Burns. In his desire for the dead poet to make his own biographical testimony, Wordsworth is forced to the opposite extreme of basing all authority (the biographer’s ‘seal’) on the slender evidence of one text, and reducing the crafted poem to an ‘authentic’ documentary ‘record’. As Kinsley notes, 60

McIntyre, Dirt, 88. ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’, The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. J. Kinsley (3 vols., 1968), i. 247, ll. 1, 7, 15, 5. 62 Owen & Smyser, iii. 126. 61

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lines 29–30 do not reflect ‘Burns’s characteristic attitude’.63 The temptation to read Burns according to ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ was strong; yet it is dubious wisdom to impose upon a text published ten years before Burns’s death, indeed before he had received much public recognition, such a summary authoritative and mythologizing function. The poem might rather be read as a manipulation of the trope of the neglected bard, in which the ambitious young poet asserts his right to notice and support. (Kinsley notes Scott Douglas’s suggestion that the poem ‘was written after—and preferred to—[‘Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseux’] as a final piece’ in the Kilmarnock volume—a more robust play with self-reflexive elegy [‘ruisseux’, meaning ‘brooks’, puns on ‘Burns’]).64 The Wordsworths’ graveside tribute briefly projects the poet’s ‘epitaph’ onto his symbolically neglected grave, before the words poignantly melt into air; but in making ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ the last word on Burns, they acknowledge also the overdetermining influence of Currie’s judgements. Wordsworth’s three substantial poems derived from the pilgrimage are well known: ‘At the Grave of Burns.1803. Seven Years After His Death’; ‘Thoughts Suggested the Day Following, on the Banks of Nith, Near the Poet’s Residence’; and ‘To the Sons of Burns, After Visiting the Grave of Their Father’.65 Despite the occasional titles, much of the material in these poems was added with more than thirty years’ hindsight. Although according to James Muirhead, in 1841 Wordsworth was still ‘reciting, the whole of “the poet’s epitaph on himself,” and add[ing] as a moral at the end of it, that . . . “thoughtless follies laid him low” ’, Wordsworth’s debt to Currie’s portrait of Burns is clearest in his early thoughts after visiting the grave: three stanzas titled ‘Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns’, followed a couple of years later by three stanzas of an ‘Address to the Sons of Burns after visiting their Father’s Grave’.66 Jared Curtis suggests the ‘Ejaculation’ was composed around 18 August 1803, and completed between late March 1804 and early 1807; he dates the ‘Address’ stanzas between early September 1805 and 21 February 1806. Although these early responses assert Wordsworth’s admiration for Burns’s poetry and grief at his premature death, they also suggest the 63

64 65 Poems and Songs, iii. 1180. Ibid. WWP, i. 587, 590, 657. Qu. in Andrew Noble, ‘Wordsworth and Burns: The Anxiety of Being under the Influence’, 55, in Carol McGuirk (ed.), Critical Essays on Robert Burns (1998). 66

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younger poet’s anxiety about his attraction. The striking first two stanzas of the ‘Ejaculation’ imply that Wordsworth fears this emulative response in himself: I shiver, Spirit fierce and bold, At thought of what I now behold! As vapours breath’d from dungeon cold Strike pleasure dead; So sadness comes out of the mold Where Burns is laid! And have I, then, thy bones so near? And Thou forbidden to appear! As if it were Thyself that’s here I shrink with pain; And both my wishes and my fear Alike are vain.67

The speaker’s thrilled response to the grave combines imaginative attention to spiritual and physical quantities. The direct address to the ‘Spirit fierce and bold’ demonstrates his faith in Burns’s troubling vitality, yet this pitying response is tied to the remains; the ambiguous analogy with ‘vapours breath’d from dungeon cold’ (does the dungeon breathe out, or the visitor breathe in?) implies that sadness is unnervingly ‘breath’d’ from ‘out of the mold’ of Burns’s grave. So powerfully does the grave evoke Burns for Wordsworth, that even while invoking the inanimate ‘bones’, he feels pain ‘As if it were Thyself that’s here’, trapped underground. Finally the speaker does resolve his fear (‘wherefore tremble?’), by remembering that the grave is a place ‘of grace; | Of shelter, and of silent peace, | And “friendly aid”: |—Grasp’d is he now in that embrace | For which he pray’d!’ (ll. 14–18). The closure seems forced; when Wordsworth expanded and revised the poem in 1842 as ‘At the Grave of Burns. 1803’, he no longer felt endangered by Burns’s example: the grave was more comfortably God-hallowed and peaceful, the spirit no longer aggressively ‘Grasp’d’, as God ‘Receive[d] thy Spirit in the embrace | For which it prayed!’68 In the early ‘Address to the Sons of Burns’, Wordsworth turns his attention to Burns’s familial posterity, as he warns the poet’s sons about their dangerous paternal 67 68

Poems, in Two Volumes, 534, ll. 1–12. Last Poems, 309, ll. 73–7.

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inheritance. They must guard against a propensity to alcoholism and excess—‘Strong-bodied if ye be to bear | Intemperance with less harm, beware—’ and against company attracted only by their father’s fame: ‘your Father’s name will make | A snare for you’. Despite the more celebratory note to ‘Be independent, generous, brave! | Your Father such example gave’, the closing warning to ‘be admonish’d by his Grave, | And think, and fear!’ literally reads the poet’s grave as itself a warning.69 When Currie visited the grave in June 1804, he found it ‘still uninscribed’.70 Soon after, despairing that a monument would be raised by public subscription, and determined to commemorate her dead sons, Jean Armour paid for a stone to be erected. The only known visual record of the short-lived family memorial is Thomas Stothard’s hasty sketch of August 1809, made while travelling with R. H. Cromek, Burns enthusiast and editor of another memorial volume, the Reliques of Robert Burns; consisting chiefly of Original Letters, Poems, and Critical Observations on Scottish Songs (1808).71 It indicates a typical Scottish table-tomb, a plain inscribed freestone slab raised no more than two feet off the ground by six squat pillars; this modest elevation made the inscription easier to read, and was an economical means of dignifying the slab, the cheapest memorial available.

exhuming the ‘immortal memory’ Despite the continuing problem of the poet’s reputation, a large popular following was organizing across Scotland; ‘by the early years of the nineteenth century, the vogue for Burns Suppers was wellestablished, with recitations of the “Address to a Haggis” and the proposing of numerous toasts’—culminating in the traditional salvo to the poet’s ‘Immortal Memory’.72 The rise in public appreciation exerted pressure upon Dumfries, as custodian of the poet’s body, to make a substantial demonstration of respect. Late in 1813 a committee was formed to open ‘a subscription for erecting a Mausoleum 69

Poems, in Two Volumes, 196–7, ll. 7–8, 17–18; 20–1, 23–4. Qu. from Currie’s letter to his publishers in ‘Burns’s First Grave’, BCCD 12 (1937), 33. 71 Ibid. Sketch in the National Library of Scotland. 72 McIntyre, Dirt, 413. 70

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over his remains in St Michael’s Churchyard’.73 Substantial documentation testifies to the Mausoleum Committee’s troubled progress, and to the participants’ sense of being involved in a highprofile national mission. There were fund-raising concerts and benefit nights, money was solicited and received from across the world. Fifty designs competed for a £10 prize: the architectural commission was awarded to T. F. Hunt of London, and the commission for a sculpture group to go inside the Mausoleum went to an Irish-Italian sculptor, Peter Turnerelli. The Committee aimed to create an impressive public and national memorial, the stone embodiment of an inspiring ideal conception— shown by their choice of a mausoleum in the form of a classical temple, and of Turnerelli’s sculptural rendering of Burns’s dedication to his first volume, ‘The Poetic Genius of my Country found me, as the prophetic bard Elijah did Elisha—at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me’ (Fig. 4).74 The Committee aimed high, and risked bathos. Stone is not a sympathetic medium in which to represent the winged Caledonian muse Coila and the prosaic plough; as Hawthorne observed in 1857, ‘The plough is better than the man, and the man rather better than the goddess, being somewhat heavy and cloddish.’75 This ambition extended also to scale: the Mausoleum was to stand two to three times higher than the rest of the monuments, from which it was distinguished and defended by a large, railed grass enclosure planted with evergreen trees. A mausoleum, the most imposing and symbolically elite tombal structure used in Scottish churchyards, could by physically dominating a large space symbolize Burns’s expanded status, dwarfing the monuments that had previously towered over the obscure grave, and (over)compensating for years of obscurity. The cost of erasing Dumfries’s shaming neglect of its most famous citizen was not simply a financial calculation: the poet’s family must pay in affect for the satisfaction of public pride. The original grave-site was far too small to accommodate this heroic conception. The Mausoleum was built on a large free plot in the churchyard’s south-eastern corner, where Burns’s remains were relocated in 1815. John McDiarmid recalled in 1830 that: 73 74 75

Grierson, Apostle, 259. ‘The Burns Mausoleum: Unveiling of New Statuary’, BCCD 12 (1937), 34. Hawthorne, 501.

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Fig. 4 Title page of William MacDowall, Memorials of St Michael’s (1876), showing the Mausoleum of Robert Burns

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To obtain the consent of Mrs Burns, was a matter of equal delicacy and difficulty . . . To disturb in any way the sanctity of the tomb, is a proceeding most revolting to Scottish feeling; and though it was meet and proper that the remains should be removed to the proud mausoleum prepared for them, her mind was so much disturbed on the occasion, that she retired to the country for a fortnight or more.76

Jean Armour did not record her exact feelings about the civic replacement of the family memorial ‘erected by the widow out of her own slender means’, or the prospective removal of her husband’s body.77 On McDiarmid’s evidence, Armour’s permission appears to have been given under some duress, and resurrectionism shadows the project for Burns’s recuperation. The Scottish objection to disturbing ‘the sanctity of the tomb’ had firm foundation in the busy bodysnatching trade necessary to supply the Edinburgh medical schools. The Mausoleum’s supporters thoroughly suppressed this grim association; yet the self-justificatory and defensive accounts of the 1815 relocation bear witness to the difficulty of dissociating exhumation from desecration. By absenting herself, Armour symbolically refused to condone the exhumation; for the widow to be absent from the opening ceremony was a sour note, and tacit criticism of the privileging of public demands above private feeling. The historical context of exhumation’s symbolic association with grave-robbery is indirectly suggested by a later remark by William MacDowall, historian of St Michael’s churchyard: ‘We have never seen any adequate reason assigned for having this delicate, yet highly honourable, process of exhumation and reinterment done privily and as it were by stealth.’78 That MacDowall even asks the question reflects that by 1876 the corpse’s security had ceased to be controversial; however, he protests too much, for Scotland’s resurrectionist history was by no means erased from the popular imagination, and by justifying the event as unambiguously ‘honourable’, MacDowall only draws attention to the secret and implicitly dubious character of nocturnal grave-disturbance. The exhumation reads as a legitimized re-enactment of resurrectionist anxiety, yet with the community’s position subtly altered by the monument’s erection ‘by 76

77 McDiarmid, 375–6. Ibid. 373. William MacDowall, Memorials of St. Michael’s, the old parish churchyard of Dumfries (1876), 104. 78

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public subscription’. Whereas, on the discovery of resurrectionist activity, outraged citizens assembled at the churchyard, ready to exact revenge on the perpetrators, on the morning after Burns’s exhumation, ‘a few early risers and accidental observers, immediately communicated their suspicions to others, and before the mouth of the vault could be closed, curiosity had risen to such a pitch, that the crowd demanding admittance could only be compared to the letting out of waters’.79 The motivating desire of the crowd restrained by the churchyard’s locked gates was not to defend the dead, but to claim their communal ownership of the genius’s remains, by witnessing them at first hand. John McDiarmid, in no doubt that their mission was righteous, was an eyewitness at the exhumation on the night of 19 September 1815. The intact coffins of the two sons were moved first. Rumours that the poet had been buried in a strong oak coffin proved unfounded, and it was impossible to move the body ‘without opening [the coffin], or disturbing the sacred deposit’: [T]he lid removed, a spectacle was unfolded, which, considering the fame of the mighty dead, has rarely been witnessed by a single human being. There, were the remains of the great poet, to all appearance nearly entire, and retaining various traces of vitality, or rather exhibiting the features of one who had newly sunk into the sleep of death—the lordly forehead, arched and high—the scalp still covered with hair, and the teeth perfectly firm and white. The scene was so imposing, that most of the workmen stood bare and uncovered, as the late Dr Gregory did at the exhumation of the remains of the illustrious hero of Bannockburn, and at the same time felt their frames thrilling with some undefinable emotion, as they gazed on the ashes of him whose fame is as wide as the world itself.80

Although McDiarmid asserts the incomparable and unique character of the ‘spectacle’, his sensational testimony is presented as impersonal and objective; passive constructions minimize human agency, not only that of the workmen, who temporarily become awestruck witnesses, but McDiarmid’s subjective impressions of the scene. In part to counteract the negative associations of disturbing the body, McDiarmid constructs the exhumation as a miraculous revelation. Instead of the skeleton that might have been expected after twenty years underground, the form revealed is recognizable as the ‘great 79 80

McDiarmid, 375. Ibid. 376–7.

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poet’ and natural aristocrat Robert Burns. The body’s uncanny ‘traces of vitality’ hint that genius arrested even the irresistible process of decay, holding out the promise of physical as well as literary immortality. Burns’s physical attributes—the ‘lordly forehead’, ‘scalp still covered with hair’, and sound teeth—signify the poet’s characteristic strength and virility even in death. Such detail lends authority to a deliberate piece of myth-making, which back-projects onto the scene the exhumation at Dunfermline in 1818 of Robert Bruce, the ‘illustrious hero of Bannockburn’, identifying the poet with his heroic namesake, the King of Scotland. The anonymous workmen are associated with James Gregory (1753–1821), Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, the medical witness at the disinterment (the same Dr Gregory whose treatment Ramsay of Ochtertyre had advised for Burns in 1800). Bruce’s heart was removed before his burial at Dunfermline in 1329, and buried with the bones of Douglas in Melrose Abbey. Douglas Mack discusses the detailed resemblances between the exhumation of Robert Wringhim’s grave in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Burns’s 1815 exhumation noted by McGuirk; he argues that Burns and Wringhim’s corpses represent ‘the old popular culture of Scotland’, which the Confessions’ fictional ‘Ettrick Shepherd’ attempts, but fails to protect from the relic-hunting representatives of ‘the modern, enlightened North British elegance and gentility of Scott and his circle’.81 It is impossible to know what the bare-headed workmen actually felt; the experiential authority for ‘frames thrilling with some undefinable emotion’ is McDiarmid, who casts Burns as a barely secular modern and national type of the resurrected Christ witnessed by representative ordinary Scots. The tantalizing possibility McDiarmid offers the reader is of the past coming miraculously into the present, of being in the presence of the long-dead but ‘Immortal Bard’. The recuperative project is, of course, unsustainable; as, according to McGuirk the living body ‘functions in Burns’s poems to silence and subvert rhetoric, legislating, moralizing’, so the poet’s dead body undermines McDiarmid’s overstrained fancy.82 The miracle is 81 Douglas S. Mack, ‘The Body in the Opened Grave: Robert Burns and Robert Wringhim’, Studies in Hogg and his World, 7 (1996), 74–5. 82 ‘Poor Bodies: Robert Burns and the Melancholy of Anatomy’, 36–7, in Carol McGuirk (ed.), Critical Essays on Robert Burns (1998).

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illusory: ‘when they proceeded to insert a shell or case below the coffin, the head separated from the trunk, and the whole body, with the exception of the bones, crumbled into dust’. The body’s collapse is an eloquent symbol of the disappointment and disillusion consequent on disturbance: the ‘mighty dead’ fragments, reduced in a moment from a sign of immortality to mortality. McDiarmid defends the exhumation’s witnesses from the charge of grave-violation, observing that they ‘discharged most sternly their duty as sentinels, by repressing all attempts at obtaining relics, and collecting and removing with the most scrupulous fidelity the whole contents of the respective coffins, down to the minutest portion of what had once been animated dust’.83 The corpse’s thrilling power was compromised by its collapse; however reburial beneath the original tombstone within the Mausoleum restored and sustained the imaginative aura of the fleetingly glimpsed relics. The remains were respectfully treated in 1815, but the first disturbance was not the last. In 1830 McDiarmid regretted that no cast had been taken of the head for phrenological analysis, ‘as no such opportunity can occur again’;84 less than four years later he himself witnessed the second exhumation, this time of the skull. The churchyard’s south-east corner came to be known as ‘the Poet’s Corner’, since ‘the earth by receiving his dust, and hoarding it “with miser care” for nineteen years, obtain[ed] more than priestly consecration’.85

burns’s bumps Jean Armour’s death in March 1834 provided the opportunity to make good this phrenological curiosity. Even allowing for the interval since Armour’s flight from the 1815 exhumation, it is unlikely she would have allowed such an investigation; the doctors had to wait until her death to get permission from Burns’s sons. On 31 March, the night before the funeral, the grave was opened and a cast taken by local doctor Archibald Blacklock, who recorded his encounter with the remains, noting the skull’s nearly ‘perfect’ and ‘high state of preservation’, with ‘portions of black hair’ still adhering.86 83 85 86

84 McDiarmid, 376. Ibid. 377. Ibid.; MacDowall, Memorials, 80. Blacklock’s account, originally published in the Dumfries Courier, is repr. in

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(Although carried out in the name of scientific knowledge, the investigation also gave an opportunity for trophy-gathering: ‘Two or three tiny tresses that had adhered to the napkin in which the cranium was wrapped were retained, as priceless souvenirs of the illustrious dead.’)87 The significance of Burns’s well-preserved remains is different here than in 1815; Blacklock disregards the useless temporal evidence of the poet’s brain tissue (he ‘detach[es] some extraneous matter from the occupit’), in favour of the hard evidence of the skull, which was washed clean to produce an accurate plaster cast, before enclosure in a lead case and reinterment.88 After Jean’s funeral (seeing the crowds reminded Dumfries’s older residents of Burns’s funeral), while works were afoot in the open Mausoleum, ‘thousands had the opportunity of gratifying their curiosity by taking a parting look at the resting-place of genius’.89 Two phrenologists, Robert Cox and George Combe, published analyses of the cast in 1834.90 Combe celebrated the exceptional cerebral development indicated by Burns’s skull, arguing that its measurements (221/4 inch circumference), which ‘exceed the average of Scotch living heads’, implied a large brain of ‘power and activity’. The significant dimensions and bumps, identified in phrenology with specific moral and intellectual qualities, were in Burns’s case judged to be highly developed: the poet’s brain, like the Mausoleum, was on a heroic scale. ‘The portions of the brain which manifest the animal propensities, are uncommonly large, indicating strong passions, and great energy of action,’ however the implied negative tendency to anger and sexual promiscuity is corrected by full development in the ‘organs’ linked with the ‘domestic affections’.91 Combe sketches a simple character portrait, identifying many strengths and using them to counterbalance a few weaknesses: ‘The Skull indicates the combination of strong animal passions, with equally powerful moral emotions.’92 As biography, this is insultingly reductive, the Immortal Bard as the sum of his bumps; the agenda behind employing apparently empirical, scientific evidence of genius is at base hagiographic. Combe concludes that ‘Burns must have walked the earth with a conRobert Cox, An Essay on the Character and Cerebral Development of Robert Burns (1859), 5–6. 87

88 MacDowall, Memorials, 106. Cox, Essay, 6. MacDowall, Memorials, 107. 90 The Phrenological Journal pub. Combe’s brief article in June 1834 and Cox’s in 91 92 Sept. Cox, Essay, 24. Ibid. 25. 89

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sciousness of great superiority over his associates,’ and that had his prodigious talents been nurtured by circumstances, ‘the inferior portion of his nature would have lost part of its energy, while his better qualities would have assumed a decided and permanent superiority’.93 That is, Burns was the tragic victim of iniquities of wealth and class, not inherent moral degradation. Cox’s paper, published three months later, made more ambitious claims to credible biography, by introducing illustrations from authorities such as Currie, Scott, and Cunningham, as when he notes the ‘direct evidence of the intense vivacity with which the poet’s brain was capable of performing its functions’, then quotes Currie’s observation that ‘Burns . . . had in his constitution the peculiarities and the delicacies that belong to the temperament of genius.’94 Cox seeks to substantiate assertions about character with material evidence, and make credible the phrenological system through deference to familiar authorities, figuring the Bard as an exceptional genius (and a scientific rationalist after Cox’s own heart). The skull was gratuitously re-examined in 1857, on the burial of Burns’s last surviving son, when it was found to have barely degraded, and was replaced, sealed in by a layer of protective pitch. When both phrenological essays were reprinted as part of the ‘Burnomania’ accompanying the 1859 birth centenary, the pamphlet was recommended as ‘a worthy memorial of the great bard [because] its material is drawn from a reliable source, and its deductions directed by science’.95 These rummagings in the poet’s grave had little to do with science, and everything to do with relic-worship and hagiography. Resurrecting the poet’s remains did not further revisionary analysis of the biographical sources in the pursuit of truth, or dissect Burnsian mythology, but shored up the popular cult of an anodyne Scottish Bard, the sentimental ploughman-poet hero-worshipped in 1859, and in 1896 at Dumfries’s death centenary festival, and represented in hundreds of statues erected worldwide in the Victorian period.96 digging the dirt The site of the poet’s relics continued to play a central role in the worship of Burns. In 1896 hundreds of commemorative floral wreaths (a 93

Cox, Essay, 26.

94

Ibid. 7.

95

Ibid. 3.

96

McIntyre, Dirt, 426.

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recent Continental fashion) were sent from all over the world—‘The tomb and the space around it are literally shrouded with wreaths’— including the Pennsylvania Tam O’Shanter Society’s gift of ‘laurel and holly from the grave of Walt Whitman’.97 Former prime minister Lord Rosebery acknowledged the importance of Burns’s Mausoleum as a shrine for pilgrimage, daringly suggesting that ‘We are a sort of poetical Mohammedans, gathered in a sort of poetical Mecca.’98 ‘Burns’ had become a fixed national icon and secular saint, and the idea that the remains had been disturbed in the name of either science or biography was anathema. In a volume commemorating the 1896 festivities, Philip Sulley condemned the 1834 exhumation as ‘a wanton act of desecration’ repeated in 1857, prayed ‘Amen’ to another writer’s fervent wish that the body ‘be no more disturbed, we trust, till the day of doom’, and concluded: ‘Pity that the Poet did not, like his great Predecessor, Shakespeare, invoke a curse on those who should disturb his bones.’99 The Dumfries Mausoleum became the impressive and oppressive symbol of the hardening of ‘Robert Burns’ into a static icon of Scottish national identity, zealously guarded by the Burns Federation. One 1936 account identified the Mausoleum as sanctified not only by the poet’s remains, but because ‘it has been visited by millions of people during the last 120 years; and it is indelibly graven in the thoughts and imaginations of all who love Burns’: testimony to the power of association and the human urge towards pilgrimage rituals.100 Although twentieth-century doctors offered various diagnostic solutions to Currie’s first question of ‘What did Burns die of?’ (rheumatic endocarditis, leukaemia, tuberculosis, brucellosis), their speculations were necessarily based on interpreting anecdotal documentary evidence. A 1982 article concluded that (in McIntyre’s words) ‘unless Burns’s remains were exhumed nothing could be proved and a great many things could not be excluded’: it is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which the Burns Federation would permit such an investigation.101 The restored taboo against disturbing the poet’s bones was a literal response to the more visible 97 Philip Sulley, Burns Centenary 21st July, 1896 (1896), 5; John Macintosh, Life of Robert Burns (1906), 287. 98 Sulley, Centenary, 6. 99 Ibid. 21. 100 ‘The Burns Mausoleum: Unveiling the New Statuary’, BCCD 11 (1936), 34. 101 McIntyre, Dirt, 432.

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sacred ban against investigative biography. Potential biographers were likely to find themselves under scrutiny and attack by the organized guardians of the ‘Immortal Memory’. Catherine Carswell prefaced the second edition of her Life of Robert Burns (1930) with an insight gained by bitter experience: ‘Biographers of Burns have all one point at least in common with each other and with their poet. Many eyes “watch for their halting”.’102 She diplomatically attributed this anxious surveillance partly to the vulnerable state of the biographical material, ‘much of it wantonly mutilated and some of it deliberately destroyed’.103 Ironic then that a century after the Anatomy Act had stopped the grave-robbing trade, Carswell found herself vilified by one Glasgow MP as a ‘a kind of body-snatcher engaged in “the resurrection of the ghoulish remains of great men” ’, while a contributor to the Burns Chronicle denounced the biography as ‘an undocumented libel on the dead, compiled on a method of smelling out stories that have grown putrid long ago’.104 Bodysnatching still figures largely in the popular memory. Hardly surprising, then, that when, during the preparation of his definitive 1995 biography, McIntyre enquired into opening the Greenock grave of a possible illegitimate child of Burns and ‘Highland Mary’, to establish paternity through a DNA profile, he got a very frosty reception. Although it would not have been necessary to open Burns’s grave—the DNA sample could be prepared from a lock of hair—the move was blocked, and McIntyre was discredited in the popular press:105 the Glasgow Herald headed a report on leaked correspondence ‘Digging the dirt on Rabbie’s love life’. 102

Catherine Carswell, The Life of Robert Burns, ([1930] 2nd edn., 1951), p. vii. For the hostile reception of Carswell’s Life, see Margery Palmer McCulloch, ‘Sexual Poetics or the Poetry of Desire: Catherine Carswell’s Life of Robert Burns’, 289–98, in Kenneth Simpson (ed.), Love and Liberty: Robert Burns: A Bicentenary Celebration (1997). 104 Catherine Carswell, The Life of Robert Burns, introd. Tom Crawford ([1930] 1990), pp. ix, x. 105 McIntyre, Dirt, 440–2. 103

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‘The Grave of a Poetess’

‘the late mrs. henry tighe’ Glennis Stephenson has argued that Romantic poetesses such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon knowingly constructed their poetic personae in relation to their readers’ assumption that the woman and her text were the same, implicitly that ‘woman’s truth is located in her body, and that this truth cancels out her words’.1 Susan Brown extends this readerly assumption to the literal textual corpus: a ‘commodified aestheticism . . . frequently conflates the woman poet’s body with her literary corpus’, making ‘the poetical body of a woman available for consumption’.2 Yet the high-profile feminine literary body, whether Landon’s tragic improvisatrice gushing fluent verse, the occluded corpse of Mary Tighe within Hemans’s ‘The Grave of a Poetess’, or the dismembered fragments of Sappho’s textual corpus mapped by Yopie Prins in Victorian Sappho (1999), is also overwhelmingly doomed, dying, or dead. Brown’s punning formula for this cultural fascination with the poetess’s ‘mortified body’ economically suggests recurring tropes in the representation and self-construction of female poets in the first half of the century: the ‘mortified’ body publicly humiliated or privately disciplined; the deadening of vital qualities; and pathologically, ‘The death of a part of the body while the rest is living’ (OED). This model figures the feminine textual body as not terminally dead, but tending always to demise. The ambiguous positioning of the feminine corpus as both 1 Glennis Stephenson, ‘Poet Construction: Mrs Hemans, L.E.L., and the Image of the Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet’, in Shirley Neuman and Glennis Stephenson (eds.), ReImagining Women: Representations of Women in Culture (1993), 63. 2 Susan Brown, ‘The Victorian Poetess’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (2000), 181–2.

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morbid and vital, materially embodied and transcendent, mortal and immortal, is the concern of this chapter, which considers the posthumous construction of one iconic Romantic ‘poetess’, Mary Tighe, in Psyche, with Other Poems (1811), and Felicia Hemans’s use of Tighe’s grave to think through her own poetic posthumousness. S. W. H. Ireland’s scurrilous survey of contemporary writing, Scribbleomania (1815), includes a brief tribute to ‘Mrs. Mary Tighe’, and her epic romance, Psyche; or the Legend of Love (1805). It begins with a curious transformation of the female corpse: ‘Tho’ slumb’ring my Minstrel, and cold in the tomb, | Her ashes waft widely a fragrant perfume.’3 Ireland’s poetic figures are as conventional as the trope they illustrate, that the poet’s works survive; death is ‘slumber’, the poet a ‘Minstrel’, the once-animated body is now ‘cold’ ‘ashes’, lingering presence is ‘perfume’. The first line refers abstractly to the poet’s body, the second to her poetry: the corpse’s transformation into corpus turns on ‘ashes’; yet the careful reader can only construe ‘ashes’ as ‘poetry’, by tracing a line of conventional imagery back from woman’s verses troped as fragrant flowers, poetical remains, the disjecta membra of the textual body, the figurative decomposition of a corpse, and the antique practice of cremation. The material sense of ashes deriving from ‘That which remains of a human body after cremation or (by transf.) total decomposition; hence poet. for “mortal remains, buried corpse”’ (OED), undermines the figuration of ashes as the posthumous works: the uneasy subtext is that her poetry too is ephemeral. We comprehend Ireland’s meaning, but his bathetic failure to recuperate the death of his female poetic subject through her ‘fragrant’ verse, hints at the difficulties involved in identifying a dead woman’s poetry with her body. Ireland’s formula for Tighe’s poetry as perfumed ‘ashes’ responds to the overdetermined presentation of her poetry as posthumous remains. At her death, the Anglo-Irishwoman Mary Tighe (née Blachford) was known only within a coterie, as the author of one work, the six-canto epic romance Psyche, composed in 1801–3, and privately printed in an edition of fifty as Psyche; or, The Legend of Love (1805). Tighe was diagnosed with consumption (a disease that ran in her family) in 1803, of which she died aged 36 on 24 March 1810. Her abbreviated life-expectancy would therefore have had a 3 Samuel William Henry Ireland, Scribbleomania; Or, The Printer’s Devil’s Polichronicon (1815), 79, ll. 1–2.

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minimal impact on composition, but probably determined the decision to print in 1805. There are, however, no marked ‘morbid’ signifiers in the presentation of Psyche’s first edition; Tighe instead marshals feminine and private referents to offset the work’s ambition. The compact duodecimo’s fine paper and elegant typography mark it as exclusive, rebuffing the impropriety associated with female publication.4 The author–reader transaction is personalized; the work is identified by title alone, privileging the personal investment of initiated readers, and the author’s preface is hand-finished with her initials, and in some copies autograph dedications. Psyche is introduced by a ‘Sonnet Addressed to My Mother’, ‘[T]o thee belong | The graces which adorn my first wild song’; dedicating the work to her mother, not her husband, implies an independent status.5 Tighe’s preface defends the pure morals of her treatment of ‘the beautiful ancient allegory of Love and the Soul’, the unfashionable allegorical mode, her version’s originality, and even uses the technical difficulty of the Spenserian stanza to suggest her virtuosity.6 Tighe’s authorial self-consciousness is, ironically, most overt when distinguishing private from conventional publication: The author, who dismisses to the public the darling object of his solitary cares, must be prepared to consider, with some degree of indifference, the various reception it may then meet. But from those, who write only for the more interested eye of friendship, no such indifference can be expected. I may therefore be forgiven the egotism which makes me anxious to recommend my readers the tale with which I present them . . .7

This is a confident authorial voice, which exploits a friendly readership’s ‘interest’ to license a female author’s ‘egotism’. There is not space here to extend this reading to Psyche itself. That the poem, as Marlon Ross argues, is resolved not to ‘become monumentally momentous’, and ‘evokes impermanence as the inescapable condition of reality’, suggests only Tighe’s determination to craft a poetics countering ‘what is valued in patriarchal culture’.8 After the poem climaxes in blissful reunion, the poet bids farewell to her intoxicating visions: ‘The page remains’, but the ‘visionary scenes’ are ‘Consigned to dark oblivion’s silent tomb’. A feminine poetics celebrating 4 See Paula R. Feldman, ‘Women Poets and Anonymity in the Romantic Era’, New 5 Psyche 1805, 1, ll. 2–3. Literary History, 33 (2002), 279–89. 6 7 Ibid. p. iv. Ibid. pp. iii–iv. 8 Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (1989), 158.

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the ephemeral and contingent is vulnerable to misinterpretation as itself ephemeral or declining, but here the reader is inclined to begin again and renew the ‘Dreams of Delight’.9 In 1811 the poet’s cousin and brother-in-law William Tighe prepared the first commercial (referred to as the second) edition, which supplemented Psyche with poetical remains and biographical details. Harriet Kramer Linkin argues that ‘The posthumous publication of Psyche, with Other Poems. By the Late Mrs. Henry Tighe seemed to make impossible an appreciation of Tighe’s remarkable poetic achievement that was not inflected with a morbid awareness of her early death, a death made more poignant via repeated references to her great beauty.’10 This ‘morbid awareness’ is introduced in the title page: by substituting the discreet autograph ‘M. T.’ with a printed name defined by marital status, a new posthumous identity is created: ‘the late Mrs. Henry Tighe’. Publication figures unambiguously as posthumous in the editor’s note ‘To the Reader’, and his hagiographic ordering of texts. William Tighe defends his decision to use the occasion of the poet’s death to re-publish Psyche: To possess strong feelings and amiable affections, and to express them with a nice discrimination, has been the attribute of many female writers; some of whom have also participated with the author of Psyche in the unhappy lot of a suffering frame and a premature death. Had the publication of her poems served only as the fleeting record of such a destiny, and as a monument of private regret, her friends would not have thought themselves justified in displaying them to the world. But when a writer intimately acquainted with classical literature, and guided by a taste for real excellence, has delivered in polished language such sentiments as can tend only to encourage and improve the best sensations of the human heart, then it becomes a sort of duty in surviving friends no longer to withhold from the public such precious relics.11

William Tighe’s consciousness of his ‘duty’ to construct a morally respectable public identity for ‘the author of Psyche’ reaches beyond the bereaved family’s traditional task of gathering up uncollected writings for memorial publication. Even in demonstrating ‘typical’ 9

Psyche 1805, 207, ll. 532–40. Harriet Kramer Linkin, ‘Recuperating Romanticism in Mary Tighe’s Psyche’, in Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt (eds.), Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception (1999), 158. 11 Psyche 1811, pp. iii–iv. 10

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traits of female authorship, such as expressing ‘strong feelings and amiable affections’, and suffering invalidism and premature death, Tighe’s claims to masculine critical notice (classical learning, ‘a taste for real excellence’) are asserted, in the editor’s rejection of private ‘monument[s] of private regret’. The phrase ‘precious relics’ is applied to Tighe’s ‘poems’ generally, but properly refers only to the shorter poems; by a rhetorical sleight of hand the editor assimilates the 1805 Psyche to the model of private memorial publication ostensibly rejected. Textual ‘relics’ may have literary merit, but that is not the source of their aura; they are objects ‘carefully preserved and held in esteem or veneration’ because of their intimate relation to the dead subject; they are what remains after the ‘destruction or wasting away’ of the poet (OED). By appearing to distinguish the immortal Psyche from the ‘other poems’, while actually conflating them, the editor gains the advantage of both absolute claims of literary distinction, and the subjective and sentimental benefits of posthumous publication: The smaller poems which complete this volume may perhaps stand in need of that indulgence which a posthumous work always demands when it did not receive the correction of the author. They have been selected from a larger number of poems, which were the occasional effusions of her thoughts, or productions of her leisure, but not originally intended or pointed out by herself for publication.12

The editor’s appeal to readerly ‘indulgence’ is disingenuously displaced from the editor to the work’s ‘demand’. Unlike the whole ‘body’ of Psyche, these poems are disjecta membra, selected from occasional verses according to an unacknowledged agenda; William Tighe takes the same licence that Tricia Lootens argues Victorian editors took with Shakespeare: ‘for creators of canonical monuments, a given writer’s works may be both holy relics and expendable fragments’.13 The fuzzy distinction between lifetime and posthumous publications, relics and fragments, is suggested by the Quarterly Review, which bases current public curiosity on ‘the admiration which the Legend of Love is known to have excited within the limited sphere of its previous existence’ (my emphasis), while noting 12

Ibid. p. iii. Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (1996), 26. 13

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that ‘The death of the author’ prompted the idea of ‘diffusing these memorials’.14 There is a clear split between Psyche’s immortal body and the ‘ephemeral’ poems; the formal logic and sequential integrity of the six cantos contrasts with brief and heterogeneous sonnets, melancholy lyrics, devotional meditations, and elegies. The contents are arranged in an overdetermined movement from life to death, which retrospectively figures all content as ‘posthumous’. The bridging text between Psyche and the ‘other poems’, the late sonnet ‘Written in a Copy of Psyche which had been in the library of C. J. Fox. April, 1809’, ironically foregrounds the power of association in influencing textual meaning: Dear consecrated page! methinks in thee The patriot’s eye hath left eternal light, Beaming o’er every line with influence bright A grace unknown before, nor due to me.15

Tighe’s prescient vision acknowledges the reader’s power to transform authorial intention; however, in speaking of her own text, Tighe does not anticipate that the ‘grace unknown before’ bestowed retrospectively on her own work, is ‘me’, herself: the powerful biographical myth of the consumptive, early-dying poetess, leaving ‘Precious relics’ of genius. This is the story William Tighe ‘read’ in her manuscript poems and reinscribes in 1811. The volume closes with three dated lyrics representing the poet’s decline: ‘The Lily. May, 1809’; ‘Written at Woodstock, in the County of Kilkenny, the Seat of William Tighe. June 30, 1809’; and ‘On Receiving a Branch of Mezereon which Flowered at Woodstock.—Dec. 1809’.16 All three explore questions of material and spiritual mortality and continuity; but the last and latest is startlingly visceral and emotionally engaged. The ‘last poem’s’ authority as the poet’s farewell to the world also relates to the spiritual authority of death-bed testimony, carried over from the Christian view of the dying as mediators between heaven and earth. Women’s last words generate heightened expectations of their particular spiritual value to the living; mothers and daughters have a special responsibil14 15

‘Psyche, with other Poems’, The Quarterly Review, 5 (May 1811), 471. 16 Psyche 1811, 219, ll. 1–4. Ibid. 303–10.

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ity to set an example in dying well.17 This expectation is frustrated by Tighe’s last recorded poetical utterance. The title ‘On Receiving a Branch of Mezereon which Flowered at Woodstock.—Dec. 1809’ signals the lyric’s personal and particular resonance, forging an unambiguous link between speaker and dying author. The preserved branch of scented, spring-flowering shrub that prompts the lyric symbolizes hope and renovation during the winter ‘days of dark alarm’, hope the speaker cannot live to see fulfilled. However the mezereon is quickly forgotten in the speaker’s anguish at the prospect of being parted from her friends. The verse’s power lies in enacting the struggle to relinquish earthly and emotional ties for heaven: Yet why, immortal, vital spark! Thus mortally opprest? Look up, my soul, through prospects dark, And bid thy terrors rest; Forget, forego thy earthly part, Thine heavenly being trust:— Ah, vain attempt! my coward heart Still shuddering clings to dust.18 (ll. 25–32)

Tighe stages the speaker’s anguish as an address to the ‘vital spark’ that ‘To all in life its love would clasp | Clings close and closer yet’ (ll. 23–4). Far from aspiring naturally to heaven, this is a thoroughly embodied soul fused with the ‘spark’ animating the pain-racked body. The poem’s energy is generated by this mortal contest, the speaker’s mental effort to trust in reunion in the afterlife, while unable to ‘Forget, forego [her] earthly part’ (l. 29). The dying woman is disengaged from those around the death-bed, ‘Whose kindness (though far far removed) | My grateful thoughts perceive’ (ll. 41–2); beyond expressing gratitude, her estrangement produces a plausibly self-absorbed final utterance. The poem’s conclusion exacts emotional blackmail reliant on the sacramental quality of last words: Pride of my life, esteemed, beloved, My last sad claim receive! Oh! do not quite your friend forget, Forget alone her faults; 17

See Jalland, 25–38, 61–5.

18

Psyche 1811, 309.

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‘The Grave of a Poetess’ And speak of her with fond regret Who asks your lingering thoughts.

(ll. 43–8)

This forceful final speech makes no concession to death and silencing. The address shifts from first-person exclamation (life) to the selfalienation of third-person reference (proleptic death). The opening motif of imagining a future spring she will not live to see, is ironically recalled in the attempt to imagine but also control her earthly ‘afterlife’. In the context of the poem’s militant adherence to the material and earthly, the desire to be remembered figures as deathdenial, afterlife as vicarious existence. As a ‘last poem’, ‘On Receiving a Branch of Mezereon’ is unorthodox. It presents a woman poet dying without Christian resignation; where the speaker hopes, it is for the ‘brighter hours’ of Woodstock next May. While the refusal to conform to a conscious, pious ‘good death’ is in its way heroic, clinging to bodily existence signifies negatively within a contemporary discourse of female self-sacrifice. Being written at least four months before death also undermines its authority as a final, totalizing utterance. The posthumous volume is constructed as an allegorical narrative of Tighe’s poetical existence, yet the story is incomplete, a deficiency the editor feels bound to supply: The concluding poem of this collection was the last ever composed by the author, who expired at the place where it was written, after six years of protracted malady, on the 24th of March, 1810, in the thirty-seventh year of her age. Her fears of death were perfectly removed before she quitted this scene of trial and suffering; and her spirit departed to a better state of existence, confiding with heavenly joy in the acceptance and love of her Redeemer.19

The attached brother-in-law’s ‘duty’ is now to impose an orthodox Christian termination, the end of life refigured as a translation to ‘a better state of existence’. His epitaphal testimony jars with the poet’s idiosyncratic egotism; the smooth assertion that ‘Her fears of death were perfectly removed’ is unsupported. The disjunction between the editor’s last words and the author’s exposes the resolutely transcendent agenda behind posthumous publication. The myth of the prematurely dying poet is only marketable if it conforms to cultural expectations that women die in Christian resignation. The Quarterly Review’s commentary, which concentrates on Psyche, closes with a long quotation from ‘[T]he last production of the 19

Psyche 1811, 311.

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author, penned only three months before her death, and under the pressure of an illness plainly prophetic of the worst. How much of the interest, which it seems calculated to excite, must be ascribed to the circumstances amidst which it was composed, we are not able, and not very willing, to determine; but, most assuredly, the reader to whose bosom it conveys no emotion, is incompetent to feel the true charm of poetry.’20 Questioning how far the poem’s affective qualities are inherent or dependent on the death-bed context, the writer’s unwillingness to enquire further hints at the latter; yet the ‘true charm of poetry’ is correlated with emotional response: the privileged criterion is affect, not literary merit. This judgement does not stop the writer from omitting the last twelve lines of Tighe’s poem as ‘of very inferior execution’; the emotionalism of the final repetitive, pleading effusion is perhaps too raw. Affective priority is instead more decorously symbolized by closing the review with the editor’s description of Tighe’s resigned death. Thus, most readers who identified Tighe’s poetry as a strong contribution to the evolving women’s tradition first became acquainted with it through a volume structured around the author’s death. William Tighe aimed to enhance Tighe’s reputation by presenting a tragically truncated œuvre, balanced between epic and the more ‘feminine’ personal and lyrical poems. In 1811 and after, the reader approaches Tighe’s 1805 preface through her editor’s address ‘To the Reader’ which, like an epitaph, urges us to pause and contemplate the woman writer’s ‘unhappy lot of a suffering frame and a premature death’ alongside her ‘precious relics’.21 Tighe had no foreknowledge that her preface would be re-presented as pathetic, the surviving voice of the poet dead before she could enjoy her fame; only with physiological death could her writings be refigured as a substitute textual body, a means of lingering in this world. The octavo third edition (also 1811) makes explicit the conflation of poet and text by a frontispiece portrait, engraved by Caroline Watson from a painting by ‘Comerford after Romney’; different versions of this image appeared in the fourth (1812) and fifth (1816) editions, suggesting a different analogy between the posthumous volume and the posthumous poetess. Tighe had sat for the fashionable portraitist George Romney in London in 1794–5—shortly after her marriage (1793), long before any public identification as a ‘poet’—and in May 20

‘Psyche, with other Poems’, 484.

21

Psyche 1811, p. iv.

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1795 described the portrait’s invalidish quality: ‘It is pretty, but perfectly pallid . . . I wonder how it came to be so pale. I suppose everyone goes rouged to be painted . . . [it] looks as if a pretty woman had wept herself pale and sick’ (Fig. 5).22 The portrait’s pallor is not helped by the sitter’s chalky bosom, shroudlike white dress, and turban, but Tighe implies that portraiture is inherently deadening, if a woman needs to ‘paint’ to achieve a more vital likeness. Tighe’s distanced third-person account of her own image obliquely criticizes the alien, ailing aesthetic, lending weight to criticisms that Romney painted ‘repetitive, masklike faces’. The painting is not an authoritative representation of ‘Mary Tighe’, other than in its proleptic representation of the ‘pale and sick’ poetess, doomed to die young. This anticipates Don Juan’s view that ‘by dim lights the portraits of the dead | Have something ghastly, desolate, and dread’, particularly portraits of beautiful women and ‘the pale smile of Beauties in the grave’: . . . their buried locks still wave Along the canvas; their eyes glance like dreams On ours, or spars within some dusky cave, But death is imaged in their shadowy beams. A picture is the past;23

Juan’s perturbation is caused by viewing with literal and metaphorical ‘dim lights’, knowing that the originals of these surviving images are dead and buried, so that the viewer projects into their sparkling eyes death’s ‘shadowy beams’. While ‘A picture is the future’ more accurately describes Romney’s Tighe in 1795, the posthumous portraits fulfil Byron’s dictum. John Comerford’s miniature catches scant likeness, and in the translation to Edward Scriven’s engraving for the fourth edition of 1812, the poetess loses her turban, and slumps doll-like, deprived of skeletal structure or animation, arms dissolved in drapery (Fig. 6).24 The stages of temporal and reprographic removal from a lost and dead ‘original’ (‘Engraved by Scriven from a Miniature by Comerford after a Picture by Romney’) signify the poetess as mythic, remote, and abstracted. The Mary Tighe presented with her poetry in 1812 is a romantically styled, 22 23 24

H. Ward and W. Roberts, Romney (2 vols., 1904), ii. 159. LBP v. 623–4, ll. 135–6, 145, 147–51. Repr. in Richard Walker, Regency Portraits (2 vols., 1985), ii. cat. 1241.

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Fig. 5 George Romney, Mary Tighe (1795)

unindividualized icon of ‘poetic’ femininity; a modern Sappho with averted luminous eyes, dishevelled, seaweedy hair trailing onto her bosom, too consumed by melancholy inner vision to meet the reader’s eye. The visual signs of Tighe’s posterity are confirmed by the facing title page: this is ‘the late Mrs. Henry Tighe’. Francis Wrangham’s copy of the 1812 volume in the British Library, presented by ‘D. T.’ in 1814, includes the donor’s versified reader-response on a blank page, strategically placed to interpret the

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Fig. 6 The late Mrs Henry Tighe, frontispiece to Psyche, and Other Poems (1812 edn.)

contents for aftercomers, and indicating how far the poetess’s death inflected reception.25 ‘D. T.’ found ‘Within this book’ the reflection of a virtuous and superlatively feminine ‘lovely mind’: ‘The purest feeling marks the sweetest lines, | That e’er a tender female heart 25

BL 11641.e.47. Psyche: with other poems (4th edn., 1812).

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express’d’ (ll. 3–4). However the writer struggles to separate this feminine poetics from the poetess’s premature death: Cold is that heart: the book alone remains, A faithful record of a heart so pure: The sighs of death were pour’d in these sweet strains; Yet these of death partake not—these endure. Framed with the fragile breath of sure disease, What noble thoughts life’s weakest period gave: A mind, of pleasure reft, had power to please; And o’er oblivion triumph’d—at the grave. (ll. 5–12)

An attempt is made to recuperate Tighe’s mortality through the surviving record of her ‘heart so pure’. The heart is ambiguously poised between a symbolic seat of the emotions, and a bodily organ, an ambiguity the writer tries to resolve by separating this book and these lines, from that heart. However the triumphant resolution of paradoxes exposes the writer’s irreconcilable desires: the poetess’s ‘sweet strains’, though implied in the transient ‘sighs of death’, ‘endure’; ‘the fragile breath of sure disease’ appears to have strengthened the poet’s ‘noble thoughts’. This partakes of the Romantic glamorization of invalid authorship, as Tighe’s published œuvre is read through her illness and death, resting the poetry’s claim to immortality on the poetess’s mortality. ‘D. T.’ is not alone in melodramatically resituating inspiration and creativity at the site of termination: the poet’s mind triumphed over oblivion ‘—at the grave’.

felicia hemans and ‘the grave of a poetess’ ‘Thou hast left sorrow in thy song, A voice not loud but deep; The glorious bowers of earth among, How often didst thou weep! ‘Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground Thy tender thoughts and high? Now peace the woman’s heart hath found, And joy the poet’s eye.—’ mrs. hemans

When, after Mary Ann Browne’s death in January 1845, the ‘Poetical Remains of the Late Mrs James Gray’ was published in the Dublin University Magazine, each of six bimonthly instalments

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(April 1845 to February 1846) was headed by this epigraph, the last two stanzas of Felicia Hemans’s tribute to Mary Tighe, ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ (1827). Virginia Blain comments that ‘Hemans herself was already dead when these words of hers on another dead poetess were appropriated to the memory of Mary Ann Browne.’26 After Hemans’s death in 1835, ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ was read as a memorial poem for its own author, and its generalized subject allowed it to be applied to a generation of poetesses. The dynamic of appropriation was also reversed: the poem assimilated and consumed the memories of poetesses, and influenced approaches to commemorating and ‘mortifying’ female poets in the period. Why was ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ the definitive account of the poetess as dead and of a morbid feminine poetics in the 1830s? Felicia Hemans’s poetry includes many quotations, allusions to, and echoes from Mary Tighe’s work, a debt and kinship she acknowledged: Tighe’s ‘poetry has always been very touching to my feelings, from a similarity which I imagine I discover between her destiny and my own’.27 Hemans articulated her interest in Tighe in two major memorial poems, ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ (1827) and ‘Written After Visiting a Tomb, Near Woodstock, in the County of Kilkenny’ (1831; 1834), as well as a sonnet ‘On Records of Immature Genius’ (1831). Of the two substantial poems, only the earlier has received critical attention, as commentators associate priority with authenticity, and assume Hemans was later simply repeating a successful formula. I will argue that the poems’ compositional agendas and contexts are very different, that the later problematizes and revises the earlier, and that Mary Tighe’s grave becomes for Hemans a powerfully subjective scene, through which she tries to resolve intense creative anxieties. This self-reflexive engagement with the subject became more visible after Hemans’s own death, as ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ set the seal on the death of the poetess. First published in the New Monthly Magazine in July 1827, ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ was conceived as the last in the Records of Woman sequence, nineteen ‘heroic epistles, familiar epistles, soliloquies, romance narratives, lyrics, and first-person meditations’ about diverse female experience, and the lead item in Hemans’s most 26 Virginia Blain, ‘ “Thou with Earth’s Music Answerest to the Sky”: Felicia Hemans, Mary Ann Browne, and the Myth of Poetic Sisterhood’, Women’s Writing, 27 2:3 (1995), 254. Chorley, ii. 212.

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successful volume, Records of Woman: With Other Poems (1828).28 The poem was composed during a period of upheaval and depression; the death of Hemans’s mother in January 1827, and the breakup of the extended Browne household on her sister’s marriage in 1828, left Hemans in a condition of emotional isolation tantamount to double bereavement: ‘Her sister’s marriage is almost as devastating as her mother’s death, and, in fact, it becomes synonymous with death.’29 Thus Hemans’s preoccupation with what Anthony John Harding calls ‘the ethic of female self-sacrifice’, in which ‘a woman’s life is more worthy of memorializing the more it is played out against the backdrop of another’s death and most especially if it finds its own highest realization in death’, also provides her with a means of creatively transforming private grief.30 The sequence commemorates idealized acts of heroic female self-sacrifice, but also explores tensions between private feeling and public acts of remembrance. The last three ‘Records’ are memorial poems, whose titles allude to specific commemorative sites; each includes a brief prose description and complementary verse epigraph. ‘The Queen of Prussia’s Tomb’ pays tribute to Queen Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1810) ‘who bore ten children, [and] was widely admired for her patriotism during the Napoleonic wars’, through her Charlottenburg mausoleum, a popular monument on the sentimental tourist’s itinerary.31 ‘The Memorial Pillar’ invokes a pillar erected in 1656 by Ann, Countess of Pembroke, ‘for a memorial of her last parting, in this place, with her good and pious mother’; it closes with a first-person affirmation of mother and child’s heavenly reunion, a working through of Hemans’s grief for her own mother.32 The epigraphs for these two poems are taken from contemporary poems by Henry Hart Milman and Samuel Rogers, and attributed by name. Dedicated to an admired living woman poet, Joanna Baillie, the sequence culminates in ‘The Grave of a Poetess’, as Susan Wolfson notes, the only poem to treat ‘a historically contemporary Englishwoman’.33 Yet Tighe might 28

[‘F.H.’], New Monthly Magazine, 20 (July 1827), 69–70; Wolfson, 330. Hemans wrote to Joanna Baillie: ‘I am to lose this, my only sister, . . . O how many deaths there are in the world for the affections’ (Ross, Contours, 296: qu. Chorley, i. 151). 30 ‘Felicia Hemans and the Effacement of Woman’, in Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (eds.), Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (1995), 138–9. 31 32 33 FHW v. 218; Wolfson, 400. FHW v. 220. Wolfson, 405. 29

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function here less as a direct elegiac subject than as a figure for Hemans’s own position as ‘a historically contemporary’ woman poet. The decisive evidence for reading the text as a deeply personal meditation lies in the slippage between its rhetorical claims to authenticity and its actual source. Though set in a pastoral churchyard, uttered in the first person as though beside the grave, and performing loco-descriptive gestures connoting authentic personal experience, the poem is a fantasy, a product of imagination and literary analogues. ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ is literary, artful, and self-reflexive. Jacqueline Labbe places it at the head of the memorial poems now central to a ‘recovered’ genealogy of nineteenth-century women’s poetry: ‘Hemans dedicates “The Grave of a Poetess” to the dead Mary Tighe, Letitia Landon her “Felicia Hemans” and “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans” to the recently deceased Hemans, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning eulogizes Landon in “L. E. L.’s Last Question”.’34 Labbe reads these poets’ creative engagement with their ‘mothers who have died young’ as a search for ‘a poetic community . . . defined, not by the living body of the precursor, but by her new grave’. She finds that ‘they bury the mother in a constant quest to remake poetry as properly or even wholly feminine’, yet perversely the result is the repeated erasure or reburial of the tradition.35 However, the ostensible scenario of ‘The Grave of a Poetess’— the living poetess coming to terms with her literary foremother’s premature death at her grave—is problematized by allusiveness and ambiguity, raising questions about authenticity, subjectivity, and sincerity. The title introduces the poem’s abstract, generic, and literary mode—this could be any, or every poetess’s grave—sustained by two quotations. Like ‘The Queen of Prussia’s Tomb’ and ‘The Memorial Pillar’, ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ includes a note and epigraph, but their presentation is subtly different. The note shifts from head to foot, the epigraph loses its attribution. These delicately marginalizing gestures signal a withdrawal from straightforward reference and the authority of Milman and Rogers. The two quotations are not simple signposts but ambiguous directions. 34 ‘Re-membering: Memory, Posterity and the Memorial Poem’, in Matthew Campbell, Jacqueline M. Labbe, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Memory and Memori35 als, 1789–1914 (2000), 139. Ibid. 140–1.

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Mary Tighe is not named in the poem; the identification is made extra-textually and implicitly, through the footnote quotation:36 ‘Extrinsic interest has lately attached to the fine scenery of Woodstock, near Kilkenny, on account of its having been the last residence of the author of Psyche. Her grave is one of many in the church-yard of the village. The river runs smoothly by. The ruins of an ancient abbey that have been partially converted into a church, reverently throw their mantle of tender shadow over it.’—Tales by the O’Hara Family.37

To appreciate the significance of the poetess’s ‘last residence’ and grave, readers must recognize Tighe as the ‘author of Psyche’, and Michael and John Banim’s popular stories of peasant life, Tales of the O’Hara Family (1825). Is the note a decorously indirect means of identifying the dead poetess to an initiated readership, acknowledgement of a primary source, factitious ‘evidence’ of the lyric’s grounding in experiential and topographical reality, or all three? Hemans’s poem expands imaginatively on the Banims’ thumbnail sketch, but their description is already mediated and fictional; ‘facts’ of location—‘Woodstock, near Kilkenny’, the churchyard grave, river, and abbey ruins—are in tension with picturesque formulae—‘fine scenery’, the ‘smoothly’ running river, and the ruins’ ‘mantle of tender shadow’. The real is reconstructed as idealized text. This instability of real and imagined, factual and rhetorical, is exacerbated in poetic translation. Hemans describes a ‘lowly’ and pastoral grave; there are spring scents and sunlight, ‘The bird, the insect on the wing’, the sound of children’s voices—all motifs adapted from the sentimental country churchyard tradition. The river is signified by ‘music, [which] in a river wave, | Pass’d with a lulling sound’, while ivy ‘fringed the ruins near’ (ll. 3–4, 10). Thus, the text identifying Tighe as the poem’s subject has neither documentary or imaginative authority. The quotation’s semidetached relation to the body of the poem invokes and obscures Tighe’s presence, problematizing the reader’s desire to read the first-person epigraph—which heads the poem as the ‘epitaph’—as ‘voiced’ by the dead poetess. This issue is made overt in the shift from Irish context to French text: ‘ “Ne me plaignez pas—si vous saviez | Combien de peines ce tombeau m’a epargnées!” ’ (‘Do not pity me— if you knew | How many sorrows this grave has spared me!’) 36 37

Compare Linkin, ‘Recuperating Romanticism’, 159. FHW v. 223, and Wolfson, 403–4.

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Hemans’s allusiveness again requires initiated readers, who could identify this uncredited quotation from the end of Germaine de Staël’s phenomenally popular novel Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), and grasp the reference to an earlier self-reflexive meditation on the trials of female genius. Rejected by the man she loves, the despairing eponymous poet-heroine believes she has lost her genius; in Florence’s Santa Croce, Corinne meditates on memorials to ‘perhaps the most brilliant assembly of the dead in Europe’, but they only briefly revive ‘the striving for fame which had gripped her in the past’.38 Bending over the grave of a young man, Corinne identifies so passionately with his epitaph that in fantasy she projects herself into the position of the dead, enacting proleptically the impossible scenario of mourning over her own grave. The epigraph provides a reading model for the poem, in which the living assign their own strong feelings to the dead, and the dead subject is effectively displaced by the speaking, creating poetess. As the dead youth in Santa Croce is made to utter words probably written by grieving parents seeking to console themselves, Hemans makes Tighe speak words not her own—words, moreover, penned by another of Hemans’s dead literary ‘foremothers’, and appropriated by Corinne, the romantic reincarnation of the Sapphic improvisatrice. Allusiveness, then, suggests how much more complex ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ is than a simple tribute from Hemans to Tighe. The multiplication of discourses (biographical and poetic, real and fictive), genres (sentimental prose, elegy, novel, epigraph/epitaph), national cultures (Irish, French, Italian, English), and female authors (Tighe, de Staël, Corinne, and Hemans), stakes an ambitious claim for a female writing tradition—albeit one that codes death as liberation from loveless fame—with Hemans as its only living exponent. The ‘poetess’ becomes a composite in Hemans’s image, drawing her sentimental and creative energies from the dead, ‘containing’ her precursors. This tendency to transform and incorporate the dead is subtly suggested by Hemans’s re-presentation of de Staël’s prose epitaph as verse: the original passage reads: ‘Une autre épitaphe aussi fixa son attention: Ne me plaignez pas, disait un homme mort dans sa jeunesse, si vous saviez combien de peines ce tombeau m’a épargnées!’39 More dramatic is Hemans’s manipulation of her well38 Corinne, 18. 3; Corinne, Or Italy, trans. and ed. Sylvia Raphael, introd. John Isbell (1998), 353. 39 Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie (3 vols., 1807), iii. 283.

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documented personal identification with Corinne: ‘That book (Corinne), in particular towards its close, has a power over me which is quite indescribable. Some passages seem to give me back my own thoughts and feelings, my whole inner being, with a mirror more true than ever friend could hold up.’40 Hemans so privileges empathy that the passive book is imbued with agency, the ‘power’ to double or reflect herself, power troped as uncannily inexpressible, and so worth harnessing. Hemans’s special engagement with the ‘close’ of Corinne marks the epigraph as pointedly self-reflexive, parting words that reposition the poem as a dialogue of the mind with itself. Hemans pretends to ground her meditation in experiential reality, but the literariness of these authorities dissolves the real, revealing the scene of the poem as conspicuously imagined and self-reflexive: the most famous living poetess vicariously plays out her anxieties and desires about death and creativity. Across the poem’s carefully controlled, thirteen 4-line closed stanzas, Hemans’s self-projection onto the composite poetess is dramatized by the speaker’s movement from a ‘mournful’ state of mind, regretting that the ‘poetess’ is ‘Parted from all the song and bloom | Thou wouldst have loved so well’, to the more consoling belief that she is enjoying a painless afterlife amidst the beauties of heaven (ll. 21–2). The harmonious blandness of Hemans’s medium—regular tetrameter/trimeter alternating quatrains—allows small variations, such as the iterated ‘mournful’ that opens stanzas 3 and 4, or the exclamations and rhetorical questions that support the conclusion’s heightened emotional pitch, to carry surprising weight. The artificial relation between speaker and subject is tellingly revealed by the almost offensively intrusive direct address, initiated in the first line (‘I stood beside thy lowly grave’) and sustained almost to the end. Summoning spirits from the grave is an elegiac convention, but vulnerable to bathos; fond and respectful direct address, wishing the dead back to life, develops, with repetition, into a harangue. Hemans uses ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ nineteen times in 52 lines, to structure the transition from regret to consolation; iterating ‘thou’ and ‘you’ beside the grave reveals the device as transparently self-serving: the dead are deaf and dumb. Hemans’s over-insistent second-person address exposes her actual concern with the first-person, an effect strengthened by the interplay of tenses and preoccupation with creative transformation. 40

FHW i. 161

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In the past tense, ‘I stood beside thy lowly grave’, regretting that the poetess is dead (in the present); the pathos of premature death is exacerbated by the landscape’s vivid presentness, where birds and insects ‘Might feel the flush and life of spring—| And thou wert pass’d away’ (ll. 27–8). Then ‘Th’ immortal spirit woke’ (l. 31), and the speaker determines that in another world the poetess still exists: Here a vain love to passing flowers Thou gav’st—but where thou art, The sway is not with changeful hours, There love and death must part. (ll. 41–4)

By changing her perspective, the speaker exchanges a world of mortality and transience for a vision of eternal life; the here and now pales into worthlessness as she projects herself imaginatively into an immortal present. From that eternal present the earth can be viewed retrospectively as beautiful but tainted by misery (‘The glorious bowers of earth among—| How often didst thou weep?’ ll. 47–8). The poem ends with a sustained epiphany and resolution to console the living rather than dead poetess: Where couldst thou fix on mortal ground Thy tender thoughts and high? Now peace the woman’s heart hath found, And joy the poet’s eye. (ll. 49–52)

Within the poem’s infinitely repeatable time-frame, Hemans’s speaker attains a transcendent flight from ‘mortal ground’. The withdrawal into indirect reference—‘the woman’s heart’, ‘the poet’s eye’—dissolves the opposition of ‘I’ and ‘thou’, implying Hemans’s identification with the subject position of the dead (as Labbe notes, ‘the two words merge, producing a “poet’s I” ’). Through a crafted fantasy Hemans takes vicarious pleasure in an anticipation of heavenly bliss. Just as Andrew Bennett views Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘a performance of memory, the paradoxical achievement in the present of a future remembrance’, by ‘remembering’ a visit to a grave that does not yet exist (her own), Hemans creates a landscape in which to transcend her future death.41 41

Bennett, 106.

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There is a price to pay for the imaginative rejection of ‘mortal ground’ and earthly fame. The poem’s revelation turns on a crucial ambiguity; when the speaker’s ‘mournful’ mood is overcome and transformed into the ‘nobler thought’ of the poetess’s eternal heavenly peace, what is ‘Th’ immortal spirit [that] woke, and wrought | Within my thrilling frame’ (ll. 31–2)? The poem’s investment in Christian consolation argues that it is the divine soul that leaves the body; yet this awakening also figures as poetic inspiration and redemption, the moment when the poem we are reading was conceived. For Hemans poetic genius is a subordinate function of the soul, a divine gift that returns to God who gave it: in heaven ‘the woman’s heart’ and ‘poet’s eye’ are finally reconciled. A truly transcendent feminine genius leaves the poetic corpus as an ambivalent legacy for posterity. Psyche, Corinne, and ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ all testify that the feminine textual corpus survives, indeed their identification as posthumous utterances enhances their status as repeatably ‘resurrectable’ by reading. Yet Hemans’s only reference to Tighe’s works, in the final two stanzas that become the authoritative memorial text for a generation of poetesses, is indirect, metaphorical, and contains a jarring allusion. ‘Thou hast left sorrow in thy song, | A voice not loud but deep!’ (ll. 45–6) could refer to the works of any and all of the poetesses Hemans invokes, especially her own: ‘sorrow’ suggesting unworldliness, the subdued profound voice countering the worldly mainstream. However it also evokes Macbeth’s tragic career, and his realization that he will not live to be honoured and loved, but only to receive ‘Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honour’ (v. iii. 27). The echo of ‘curses’ adds a sinister or subversive note; the muted voice may be drowned out or misheard, but also conceals opposition.

‘at the grave itself’ When writing ‘The Grave of a Poetess’, Hemans had not reckoned on her fantasy’s displacement by its objective reality; in some sense she believed in the poetess’s grave she had composed. Her records of visiting Tighe’s grave in Inistioge churchyard, near Woodstock, County Kilkenny, while staying with her brother George Browne in July 1831, suggest that the experience both confounded and disturbingly confirmed her imagining. Hemans writes to John Lodge of wanting

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to record her account ‘before its images become faint in my recollection’, hinting at the pressure imagination exerts on experience.42 The only element to exceed Hemans’s imagination was the ‘magnificent’ romantic setting—‘wild profound glens, rich with every hue and form of foliage, and a rapid river sweeping through them, now lost, and now lighting up the deep woods with sudden flashes of its waves’—far from the poem’s tame pastoral. More disconcerting, Hemans was thwarted in her desire to re-enact the poem’s solitary meditation: I wish I could have been alone with Nature and my thoughts; but, to my surprise, I found myself the object of quite a reception. The chief Justice and many other persons had been invited to meet me, and I was to be made completely the lady of the day. There was no help for it, though I never felt so much as if I wanted a large leaf to wrap me up and shelter me from all curiosity and attention.

Reflection is rudely compromised by company more interested in Hemans’s poetic celebrity than the object of pilgrimage: she, not Tighe, is ‘the lady of the day’. While Hemans typically employs selfobscuring gestures in reference to her fame, and may privilege feminine modesty above authorial pride for Lodge’s benefit, the ironies of her situation are unmistakeable: as in her 1827 poem, Hemans finds herself displacing and incorporating Tighe. This substitution is sharply delineated in her encounter with ‘Mr Henry Tighe, the widower of the poetess’, who has translated into Latin ‘a little poem of mine’, ‘The Graves of a Household’; even Tighe’s widower is more interested in currying favour than in his wife’s memory. The collapse of noble into ignoble sentiments continues at the grave: We went to the tomb, ‘the grave of a poetess,’ where there is a monument by Flaxman: it consists of a recumbent female figure, with much of the repose, the mysterious sweetness of happy death, which is to me so affecting in monumental sculpture. There is, however, a very small Titania-looking sort of figure with wings, which I thought interfered wofully [sic] with the singleness of effect which the tomb would have produced: unfortunately, too, the monument is carved in very rough stone, which allows no delicacy of touch.

In identifying Tighe’s burial-place by her title, Hemans suggests both the text’s imaginative priority, and the marked discrepancy between them. Drawing on the Banims’ statement that ‘Her grave is one of 42

Wolfson, 513–14.

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many in the church-yard of the village,’ Hemans had described the traditional literary ideal of a poet’s grave: modest, minimally marked, natural. What she finds is not a grave, but a substantial ‘tomb’, a statue commissioned from high-profile sculptor John Flaxman—a monumental statement of wealth, status, and cosmopolitan pretension at odds with the village churchyard. Although the ‘Draped female figure in the round, reclining on a mattress with a pillow at the left end, her right arm under her head’ (1814–15; erected 1815), is exposed to the elements, its situation in the elite Tighe family mausoleum represents the antithesis of the pastoral grave (Fig. 7).43 And where ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ indirectly evoked the presence of the poetess’s corpse beneath ground—‘Young voices were abroad, but thou | Their sweetness couldst not hear’; ‘thou wert slumbering low’—the body is displayed for aesthetic gratification (ll.

Fig. 7 John Flaxman, Tomb of Mary Tighe, Inistioge Churchyard, Co. Kilkenny (1814–15) 43 Margaret Whinney and Rupert Gunnis, The Collection of Models by John Flaxman R. A. at University College London (1967), 49.

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11–12, 17). We might expect figurative iconography to disturb Hemans’s vision, as the focus of contemplation shifts from depth to surface, and the tabula rasa of the ‘lowly grave’ is occluded by a sculpture embodying Tighe according to Flaxman’s ideal.44 However, the feminized death aesthetic appears to complement Hemans’s fantasy. There is the ‘mysterious sweetness of happy death’, figured as a woman ‘slumbering low’; an idealized masklike face recalling the posthumous frontispiece portraits; flowing neoclassical yet shroudlike drapery. The sculpture’s embodied character actually encourages empathy and imaginative flight; the closed stone eyes signify spiritual vision: ‘Now peace the woman’s heart hath found, | And joy the poet’s eye.’ Both sculptor and poet’s representations adopt an indirect approach to female authorship. Whereas Flaxman’s monument to William Collins (d. 1759), another early-dying poet whose reputation grew after death, shows the poet at his desk reading the Bible, accompanied by authorial emblems (the lyre and a scroll representing Collins’s best-known poem, The Passions, an Ode), the Tighe monument only alludes to her genius obliquely through the allegorical miniature Psyche.45 This symbol of Tighe’s poetry interferes with Hemans’s intense identification with the icon, diffusing the ‘singleness of effect’, while sculpted stone fails to evoke soulful poetic qualities; as a later writer on memorial sculpture noted, ‘The Greeks symbolized the soul by a butterfly; we, in this material age, typify the soul in a bodily form.’46 Hemans’s comparison with the badtempered Titania of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ii. i, signals the figure’s fairy-like pagan associations—inappropriate for Christian burial. However, neither these associations nor the sculpture’s coarse medium interferes with her self-reflexive interpretation: ‘That place of rest made me very thoughtful; I could not but reflect on the many changes which had brought me to the spot I had commemorated three years since, without the slightest idea of ever visiting it; and though surrounded by attention and the appearance of interest, my heart was envying the repose of her who slept there.’ (The ‘changes’ are the deaths and domestic upheavals that uprooted Hemans from 44 The recumbent effigy had recently become popular again after nearly a century’s neglect; see Brian Kemp, English Church Monuments (1980), 147. 45 David Irwin, John Flaxman 1755–1826 (1979), 167. 46 ‘Fine Arts. Carl Tottie, Designs for Sepulchral Monuments’, The Athenaeum, 23 (Dec. 1843), 1139.

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Wavertree, resulting in the 1831 move to Dublin.) Hemans finds the poetess’s grave she seeks; in the reconstructed present she looks back to the earlier poetic pilgrimage, reads it as uncannily oracular, and rhetorically fulfils her desire to be ‘alone with Nature and my thoughts’ in the contrast between appearances (‘surrounded by attention and the appearance of interest’) and personal reality (‘my heart was envying the repose of her who slept there’). Metaphors of ‘repose’ and sleep apply as readily to Flaxman’s statue as to the subject of ‘The Grave of a Poetess’; euphemism helps Hemans to elide the poetess’s physical remains. The issues of documentary and emotional authenticity pertinent to the 1827 poem emerge also in private letters. Hemans’s selfconstruction varies according to audience; whereas to Lodge she contrasts oppressive public celebrity with her retiring ‘real’ self, a contemporaneous letter to Clara Graves comments sharply on Tighe’s biography and relatives: I was sorry to find that I must give up my beau idéal of Mrs. Tighe’s Character . . . much of her domestic sorrow I learned, was caused by her excessive passion for shining in Society, which quite carried her away from all Homeenjoyments, until her Health gave way, and she was compelled to relinquish this career of dissipation.—How one is obliged to resign one’s fair visions of excellence, my dear Clara, when the strong daylight of truth is thrown upon them; and how painful is the feeling with which we see them melt away!—I thought several times of Lord Byron’s ‘Implora pace,’ whilst listening to these details, which were given me at the tomb itself.—Mr. Henry Tighe, the widower of the Poetess, was amongst our party; he had just been translating a poem of mine into Latin, which I am told is very elegant. He is very intelligent & gentlemanly, nevertheless, ‘I did not like this Dr. Fell’.47

With hindsight Hemans may have envied the poetess’s ‘repose’, but at the grave she was fielding unwanted anecdotal information. She professes the necessity of giving up her ‘beau idéal’ of Tighe, yet her manner of retailing the information discredits its tellers. Although disappointed to discover that Tighe put society before domestic happiness, Hemans indicates that the grave is a profoundly inappropriate site for such revelations. The narrative of feminine ‘dissipation’ terminating in death is presumably a family myth formulated to counter rumours of the Tighes’ unhappy marriage. Supersensitive to public curiosity about her own marital separation, and anticipating 47

Wolfson, 514–15.

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the unregulated posthumous circulation of stories about her private life, Hemans now distinguishes herself from the poetess with whose destiny she had earlier identified personally and poetically; yet the ‘daylight of truth’ is painfully harsh ‘at the tomb itself’, and her sympathy with the suffering poet(ess) is strongly implied. As Wolfson notes, Hemans alludes to letters Byron wrote in June 1819 on viewing epitaphs at Ferrara that read ‘Implora pace’ or ‘Beg for peace’: ‘Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few words say all that can be said or sought; the dead had had enough of life; all they wanted was rest, and this they implore!’48 As Tighe’s memory was disturbed, Hemans thought ‘several times’ of the plea for rest, as in tacit protest. Her deep ambivalence about the posthumous biographical revelation is registered by the source—Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; With Notices of his Life (1830)—ironically, the work that revealed so much of Byron’s immorality that Hemans ceased to wear a treasured locket containing a lock of his hair (‘[It was] one of her favourite ornaments till the Memoirs of the poet appeared. . . . From this time forth she never wore the relic’).49 Despite their diametrically opposed views on the compensations of Christian faith and heaven, Hemans can still sympathize with her old hero through his view of the suffering of human existence; Byron told Murray he wanted ‘Implora pace’ for his epitaph, and as Chorley comments, ‘She frequently referred to that touching epitaph . . . as the words she would wish to be inscribed on her own monument.’50 Hemans’s instinctive hostility towards Henry Tighe—comparing him to the authoritarian Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, about whom Thomas Brown extemporized ‘I do not love thee Dr. Fell’—might be explained by his complicity with the cruel biographical exposure of his wife.

‘the genius of our lady-poets’ Hemans’s decision to publish a new Tighe memorial poem indicates the conviction that she had a responsibility to put the record straight, ‘correcting’ not only her own fantasy, but also the reality. The new poem was first published as a 10-stanza address ‘To a Butterfly Near 48 50

49 Qu. ibid. 515. Chorley, ii. 21–3. Wolfson, 515; Chorley, ii. 323.

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a Tomb’ in the September Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine—even by Hemans’s standards, a rapid transition from manuscript to print.51 This revisionary poem was itself subject to careful revision before appearing as ‘Written After Visiting a Tomb, Near Woodstock, in the County of Kilkenny’ in National Lyrics, and Songs for Music (1834). The same issue of Blackwood’s included a ‘panegyric on the genius of our Lady-poets’ by John Wilson, which may have stimulated Hemans’s rigorous reworking: ‘[W]e name the names of Joanna Baillie, Mrs Tighe, Felicia Hemans, Lucy Eliza Landon [sic], and the Lovely Norton—while we pronounce several other sweetsounding Christian surnames in whispering under-tones of affection, almost as inaudible as the sound of the growing of grass on a dewy evening.’52 The association between feminine authorship and silence becomes significant in the revision, which also gained a specific, documentary title, an epigraph explicitly referencing Tighe, and an important extra stanza. Hemans discovered in Inistioge churchyard that the poetess’s grave was not a merely rhetorical construction, a poetic fiction serving a subjective project, but the implacably material burial-place of a particular woman, the embodied centre of a complex web of biographical, cultural, and emotional tensions. Tighe’s grave was a contested site, literally vulnerable to the aspersions of fame and the biographical fallacy. The contrast makes Hemans’s earlier poetic appropriation of the burial-place appear less a creative transformation than another form of abuse. Contemplating the poetess’s grave urges the vanity of the first poem’s backdoor self-reflexivity, and the inappropriateness of directly addressing the dead; tentatively in 1831, but decisively in 1834, Hemans attempts restitution, through homage directed specifically to Tighe and her poetry, by reassigning direct address away from the dead, critiquing the aesthetic and affectivity efficacy of Flaxman’s statue, and problematizing the grave as a locus for spiritual and creative recuperation. The 1834 title ‘Written After Visiting a Tomb, Near Woodstock, in the County of Kilkenny’ locates the scenario firmly in time and place and replaces the abstract grave with the specific tomb; yet while the title raises expectations of a loco-descriptive counter to the earlier fantasy, if anything it is more determinedly ‘imagined’. The epigraph, 51 52

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 30 (Sept. 1831), 530. Wilson, ‘An Hour’s Talk About Poetry’, 485.

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instead of pointing away from the subject, names and speaks in her voice: ‘Yes! hide beneath the mouldering heap, The undelighting, slighted thing; There in the cold earth, buried deep, In silence let it wait the Spring.’ Mrs Tighe’s Poem on the Lily.53

The poetess’s name is recuperated from the margins, just as her poetry is now the authority for Hemans’s tribute. Hemans invokes one of Tighe’s last poems: in ‘The Lily’ (May 1809), the ‘withered, perished’ lily bulb buried during winter, and its spring ‘latent loveliness’, allegorize the situation of the mortal human body, and the ‘Eternal Spring!’ of spiritual resurrection.54 The lines (stanza 4) incorporated in Hemans’s poem perform in little the spiritual transcendence of mortality. Juxtaposed with the title’s ‘tomb’, the ‘thing’ is immediately understood as the corpse, which contains its own future victory over death. The epigraph affirms the faith signally absent from the ‘Mezereon’ lyric; note the emphatic initial ‘Yes!’, the joyful internal rhyme that redeems the ‘undelighting, slighted thing’, and the calmly confident ‘let it wait the Spring’. Hemans’s choice of epigraph upholds Tighe’s feminine respectability, through Christian orthodoxy and the lily, symbol of Marian virginity and feminine innocence. (Hemans also alludes to ‘The Lily’ formally—both are eleven stanzas long, each in 4-line tetrameter—while substituting rhyming couplets for Tighe’s abab couplets.) Hemans arguably goes beyond mere defence: the title refers unmistakeably to her 1831 visit, and the poem ‘answers’ it, in the knowledge that likely readers include the Kilkenny dignitaries, especially her admirer, Henry Tighe. The epigraph then reads as the poetess’s disembodied voice protesting against neglect, echoing her survivors’ ‘slighting’ attitude towards her memory. The ‘voice not loud but deep’ is taken to its logical extreme of ‘silence’, recuperated as the woman poet’s traditional refuge and self-protection. Having heard posterity’s judgements on the poetess ‘at the tomb itself’, Hemans refigures the grave as a place of feminine safety, withdrawn 53

FHW vi. 265. Psyche 1811, 303, ll. 1, 8, 44. ‘The Lily’ is a fine poem that revitalizes a traditional motif with detailed observation: the root’s ‘scaly folds’ and ‘sapless scales’, the ‘green sheath’s silken string’ and ‘soft petals [sic] silvery light’ (ll. 6, 9, 31, 35). 54

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from worldly misrepresentation, ‘There in the cold earth, buried deep’. This double reading is sustained by the poem’s opening two stanzas: I stood where the lip of song lay low, Where the dust had gather’d on Beauty’s brow; Where stillness hung on the heart of Love, And a marble weeper kept watch above. I stood in the silence of lonely thought, Of deep affections that inly wrought, Troubled, and dreamy, and dim with fear— They knew themselves exiled spirits here! (ll. 1–8)

Again the speaker stands at the grave, but Hemans revises the 1827 opening—‘I stood beside thy lowly grave’—replacing direct address with a respectfully indirect and inchoate metaphor: the trope of Tighe as a silenced singer is unsettled by the physicality of ‘lip’.55 Flexible syntax—‘I stood where . . . | Where . . . | Where . . . | And . . .’, allowing details to float rather than be fixed, sustains the ambiguity. ‘Where stillness hung on the heart of Love’ has the same indeterminacy: how does stillness hang? Is the heart Tighe’s, and is she therefore ‘Love’? These lines alluding, vaguely, to the buried remains, alternate with more precise and negative details of the visible tomb: dust, symbolizing neglect, clouds the statue’s brow (in 1831 the dust ‘was heavy’); describing Psyche as a ‘marble weeper’ hints at Hemans’s objection. Hemans delicately invokes Tighe’s physical presence, while hinting at the necessity of keeping watch over the dead woman’s memory. For even as it evokes Flaxman’s sculpture in words, the stanza is also a bravura performance of all that poetry can do which sculpture’s concrete explicitness cannot, the representation of hidden forms and subjective feelings about them. The obliquely figured material memorial obstructs sentiment as much as stimulating it. The iterated ‘I stood’ identifies the second stanza as an internalized mirror to the first; the speaker is consumed by anxious thoughts and feelings provoked by contemplating the tomb. The speaker’s empathy with the dead is suggested: the ‘silence of lonely thought’ echoes ‘the lip of song lay low’, while metaphors of interiority (‘in the 55 Several sources try to improve on the phrase: The DNB Tighe entry offers ‘the life of song’, while the catalogue entry for Flaxman’s monument suggests ‘lips of song’ (my emphases). David Bindman (ed.), John Flaxman (1979), 110.

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silence’, ‘inly wrought’) urge deep similarity, rather than the superficial opposition of the living who may stand, with the dead who of necessity ‘lay low’. This intuitive sympathy is defined against hostile forces; read beside Hemans’s letter to Lodge, the ‘silence of lonely thought’ is a state of emotional isolation created by (not) belonging to a ‘party’. ‘[D]eep affections’ are ‘exiled spirits’ at the grave, precisely where they should have priority; simply glossed, she represses a strong emotional response, because the situation is unsympathetic. Hemans ascribes independent agency to these feelings, working themselves into turmoil (‘Troubled, and dreamy, and dim with fear’) because of their consciousness of ‘exile’; the speaker’s kinship with the dead is a refuge from the living, indeed, she seems almost a medium for Tighe’s restless spirit. Thus the poem begins with melancholy and stasis, the living speaker possessed by inexpressible ‘deep affections’ for the dead. Just when the creative enterprise appears in danger of being stillborn, a trivial distraction initiates a phase of direct address equally insistent to that of 1827; the addressee is no longer the dead poetess, but ‘Child of the sunbeam, bright butterfly!’ (l. 10). The ‘reckless’ ‘insect on the wing’ appeared fleetingly in ‘The Grave of a Poetess’, but here the sight of it ‘flitting past that solemn tomb, | Over a bright world of joy and bloom’ is the premise for an extended comparison between its brief, joyful existence and the human condition (ll. 13–14). Direct address remains a conspicuously artificial technique, but lacking its former coercive aspect. We cannot know how far the butterfly and the train of thought it inspires are remembered or invented; but Hemans’s description—‘Thou that dost bear, on thy fairy wings, | No burden of mortal sufferings’—deliberately contrasts it with the stony mourning Psyche; the butterfly signifies freedom from human longings and losses: it is ‘Like an embodied breeze at play!’, and has ‘In [its] brief being no strife of mind’ (ll. 11–12, 22, 29). Bennett’s argument that ‘The assertion of the ephemerality of women’s poetry’ by woman poets in the period should be understood in opposition to the masculine investment in the Romantic culture of posterity, helps to account for the butterfly’s symbolic importance.56 The speaker takes refuge from painful empathy with the entombed poetess in imaginative identification with her seeming opposite: ‘One moment, one moment, I envied thee!’ (l. 24). The lingering repetition 56

Bennett, 69.

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of ‘one moment’ signals the attraction of brief, unreflecting existence to one for whom ‘One hour of my soul seem’d infinity!’ (l. 32). This risky hyperbole is part of Hemans’s strategy of problematizing earthly endurance. The woman poet’s burden is symbolized by containing ‘infinity’ within ‘one hour’, as duration connotes endurance. Lasting and surviving, positive signifiers in the masculine tradition, are, in a stanza added in 1834, negatively associated with painful feminine poetic consciousness: And she, that voiceless below me slept, Flow’d not her song from a heart that wept? —O Love and Song! though of Heaven your powers, Dark is your fate in this world of ours. (ll. 33–6)

This interpolation in the extended address to the butterfly again identifies Hemans with Tighe: ‘voiceless’ recalls the epigraph’s buried body waiting ‘In silence’ and the speaker’s ‘silence of lonely thought’, while the mixed metaphor of fluent poem or ‘song’ as tears and/or heart’s blood, and the dissociation of ‘heart’ from the subject ‘she’, echoes the second stanza’s internalized ‘deep affections’. Thus, the invocation to ‘Love and Song!’ speaks for both dead and living poetesses of the incompatibility between feminine genius and ‘this world of ours’ (with its punning echo ‘world of [h]ours’). Yet from this incongruity is born the poem’s transcendent conclusion. Recalling poetry’s source in the divine shows another side of the butterfly’s ‘glancing wings’, which helps them to ‘waft me visions of brighter things!’ (ll. 39–40): Thou that dost image the freed soul’s birth, And its flight away o’er the mists of earth, Oh! Fitly thy path is through flowers that rise Round the dark chamber where Genius lies! (ll. 41–4)

This ending hints that Bennett’s account of the feminine ‘counterdiscourses to the culture of posterity’ could be usefully elaborated by extending his secular remit to the spiritual. The butterfly now signifies not only ephemeral earthly beauty, but the liberty of the translated human soul: in an ironic inversion, the ephemeral becomes the promise of immortality. The flowers are a better marker for ‘Genius’ than the implacable ‘dark chamber’, as they, like the butterfly, aspire heavenwards. As in 1827, the poem ends with the poetess’s selfliberating anticipation of spiritual transcendence; but now Tighe is firmly involved with the movement, through the final stanza’s

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fulfilment of the epigraph’s double affirmation. By appropriating, verbalizing, and spiritualizing Flaxman’s Psyche, Hemans critiques and transcends the scene of Tighe’s tomb, confirming the ‘Heaven’ of ‘Love and Song’ as the long-suffering poetess’s enduring refuge. Hemans’s determined marrying of the Christian afterlife with a feminized reading of genius suggests both an affirmative reading of the figure of the dead poetess, and that Hemans’s invocation of Christian piety is not simply a crude appeal to the respectable mores of a female readership. This ‘second thought’ did not displace from its secure position in Hemans’s canon ‘The Grave of a Poetess’, which retained its priority after Hemans’s death aged 42 in Dublin, on 16 May 1835. Hemans’s œuvre offered a plenitude of ‘last words’ to heighten the poetic and pathetic qualities of her textual afterlife. D. M. Moir’s Poetical Remains of the late Mrs Hemans (1836) begins with the late lyric ‘Despondency and Aspiration’ and ends with ‘Sabbath Sonnet’, subtitled ‘Composed by Mrs Hemans a few days before her death, and dictated to her Brother’. The epigraph to Harriet Hughes’s ‘Memoir’ is from ‘A Poet’s Dying Hymn’, and ‘The Farewell to the Dead’ is cited in an argument against intrusive biography.57 However her friend the poet Rose Lawrence (née D’Aguilar) defined the 1827 poem as Hemans’s authoritative statement on the poetess’s—therefore her own—grave, by presenting the last two stanzas as the titlepage epigraph for her ‘Recollections of Mrs. Hemans: Irregular Stanzas and Fragments’, in The Last Autumn at a Favourite Residence (1836). As Hemans invoked Corinne and its author, so Lawrence invokes Hemans as affective code for an initiated readership, who will recognize the self-reflexive resonances, especially the Wordsworthian pastoral churchyard grave. Yet the appropriation of the dead poetess’s voice to describe her own posthumous situation is disconcerting; intending to touch her readers’ emotions by positioning Hemans as consolator for her own death, Lawrence draws attention to the abusive potential of direct address. Either Lawrence must be thought of as ventriloquizing Hemans, or the dead poetess projects a self-satisfied, self-fulfilling prophecy likely to negate readers’ emotional response. However Lawrence’s choice is also a symptom of her ‘fear of doing injustice to the memory of her friend’ by violating Hemans’s right to privacy; she justifies her memoir as a task ‘only

57

Poetical Remains, 321; FHW i. 2.

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for a woman’s hand’, and herself as the best-qualified candidate given ‘the death of Mrs. Hemans’ much-valued friend Miss Jewsbury, and the absence of her only sister, Mrs. Hughes’.58 Lacking their affective authority, the memoirist defers to the dead: only Hemans’s hand should be trusted to commemorate Hemans. In Memorials of Mrs. Hemans with Illustrations of her Literary Character from her Private Correspondence (1836), Henry F. Chorley evaluates the two Tighe poems: [T]he earlier verses, produced under the strong influence of the imagination alone, are happier, because simpler, than those which may be called the offspring of memory. ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ . . . is throughout full of feeling, and of a spirit more cheerful,—because better able to raise itself above the cares, and changes, and partings of earth,—than that which breathes in the poems of the gifted but melancholy author of ‘Psyche.’59

Chorley’s preference for the ‘strong influence of the imagination’ assigns a morbid influence to Tighe: at the grave, Hemans’s ‘more cheerful’ and transcendent spirit was subdued by ‘that which breathes’ in Tighe’s poems (a leap in logic from corpse to corpus). ‘The Lily’ creates an unhealthily melancholy element, on which Hemans’s poem is (over-)dependent, producing an aesthetically mortified poem. hemans ‘within a silent dell’ Commentators’ commitment to ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ might also be read as a reaction against the neglect motif running through accounts of Hemans’s own grave. Hemans was buried in a vault under St Anne’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin, in the same street where she died. The uncompromisingly urban setting conflicted with her work’s strong endorsement of pastoral burial, and, combined with delay in raising a memorial, implied that the poetess was already forgotten. Lawrence’s remark that ‘No memorial, as yet, marks the place of her rest’ is echoed by Chorley, and by ‘W.A.B’, who introduces the posthumous second edition of National Lyrics (1836): ‘I regret to observe, no memorial yet marks the spot.’60 The chorus of disapproval plays up to the stereotype of women poets being unappreciated, but also assumes readers may want to visit 58

59 Lawrence, Last Autumn, 288. Chorley, ii. 213. Lawrence, Last Autumn, 409–10; Chorley, ii. 354; National Lyrics and Songs for Music: Second edition (1836), p. xli. 60

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Hemans’s grave. Sensitive to the selling-power of Hemans’s posthumous celebrity, these 1836 publications are less concerned with creating lasting memorials, than with serving—and exploiting—readers in the period immediately following the poet’s death. ‘W.A.B.’ writes his introduction ‘upon the very first anniversary of her death’, a gimmick that undermines his vaunted sensitivity to the friends for whom an objective biography would appear like ‘opening the tomb to take the cast, while the clay yet wears the form of life, and decay has left the features unaltered’.61 Lawrence articulates her unease at Hemans’s grave: There was something very painful and repugnant to the feelings of some who loved her, in this destination: better if the half-expressed wish of her heart might have been accomplished—‘To thy earth, mother! Take home thy weary one!’ But it avails not: they are re-united in heaven. It was a comfort to find, afterwards, that this regret was shared: her sister says, ‘. . . it is sadly painful to me to think of her lying in that strange city, in the midst of noise and crowds: she,—such a creature of the woods and mountains! I had the most anxious desire that she might, if possible, be laid beside our dear mother . . .’62

The contrast drawn between the prosaic actual poetess’s grave and the pastoral ideal turns on reunion with the mother (even though Felicity Browne was buried in a similarly urban vault in St Asaph’s Cathedral, Liverpool). The ‘half-expressed wish’ Lawrence puts in Hemans’s mouth compresses the sister’s opposition of the ‘creature of the woods and mountains’ with Dublin’s ‘noise and crowds’; without this context, it could not be established whether ‘To thy earth, mother!’ figures the mother’s body as ‘earth’, or earth as mother. In 1839 Hughes carefully corrects the imputation of neglect, by pointing out that ‘A small tablet has been placed above the spot where she is laid, inscribed with her name, her age, and the date of her death’ and reprinting the inscription, lines ‘from a dirge of her own’.63 William Howitt reproduces the tablet’s wording: In the vault beneath are deposited the Mortal Remains of Felicia Hemans, who died, May 16, 1835,

61 63

National Lyrics, p. xii. FHW i. 314.

62

Lawrence, Last Autumn, 410.

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‘Calm on the bosom of thy God, Fair spirit, rest thee now; Even while with us thy footsteps trod, His seal was on thy brow. Dust to its narrow house beneath, Soul to its place on high! They that have seen thy look in death, No more will fear to die.’64

The lines appear first in The Siege of Valencia. A Dramatic Poem (1823), scene ix, as a ‘death-hymn’ sung over a ‘daughter’s bier’, and Hemans later added a third stanza and separately published them as ‘A Dirge’.65 In both contexts, the ‘Fair spirit’ is markedly younger than Hemans, emphasizing the poet’s innocence; the text is unimpeachably Christian, and fulfils biographical expectations, such as the poet’s poor health (‘His seal was on thy brow’) and peaceful ‘look in death’. Visitors were often disappointed by Hemans’s grave; C. F. Humphreys’s poem ‘The Grave of Mrs. Hemans’ protests ‘This her grave! Ah me! She should be sleeping | In some grass-green churchyard far away’, and asks ‘Was it meet to leave her in the city | Where no sun could fall upon her face? | Lift the cold, grey stone, in love and pity | Bear her out unto a fairer place’, before reconciling herself to a site where the Christian poet lies in fellowship with others.66 But the absence of figurative sculpture, the ‘small tablet’, and oblique reference to Hemans’s poetic identity (her lines are unattributed), harmonize with a feminine poetics that values indirection, modesty, and marginality, and which implies an initiated readership whose affective response is protected by apparent neglect. The self-silencing constructs endorsed by poetesses such as Hemans become problematic and ironic when (mal)adapted by male writers. Thomas Miller’s ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ (1841) adopts the title and topography of Hemans’s poem.67 Although Miller was a prolific contributor to periodicals, this designedly slight romantic fragment verse is presented as written ‘to stand side by side with others produced by authors, many of whom, are old and choice favourites with the reading public’.68 Its brevity is deliberate, a formal complement to its aestheticization of marginality and erasure: 64 William Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (2 vols., 1847), ii. 124. See also his account of Tighe’s neglected memory in i. 410–20. 65 66 FHW iii. 379; iv. 330. Cecil Frances Humphreys, Poems (1896), 346. 67 68 Poems (1841), 173. Ibid. p. v.

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‘The Grave of a Poetess’ Let her be laid within a silent dell, Where hanging trees throw round a twilight gleam, Just within hearing of some village-bell, And by the margin of a low-voiced stream; For these were sights and sounds she once loved well. Then o’er her grave the star-paved sky will beam; While all around the fragrant wild-flowers blow, And sweet birds sing her requiem to the water’s flow.

Miller imagines a pastoral grave for the poetess, buried near home surrounded by ‘sights and sounds she once loved well’, trees, stream, starry sky, wildflowers, songbirds. However, the affirmative vocabulary of obscurity reads uneasily: the grave is in a ‘silent dell’, and the overhanging trees create an evocative but shadowy ‘twilight’; the poetess is reincorporated in nature, her voice transformed into the ‘low-voiced stream’, uneasily recalling Lear’s words while holding the dead Cordelia: ‘Her voice was ever soft, | Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman’ (V. iii. 271–2). Miller repeats a commonplace of contemporary evaluations of women’s poetry; John Wilson’s 1831 Blackwood panegyric on ‘our Lady-poets’ concluded that ‘the thoughts and feelings they inspire, though breathed in words and tones, ‘gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman,’ are yet lofty as the stars, and humble too as the flowers beneath our feet’.69 Any capacity for speech and agency is elided from this commemoration of the poetess; she exists only as a passive object and third person. The lack of marker or epitaph is unsettling; there is no hint that the poetess’s works could transcend her aestheticized and marginal grave: her memory (and body) are decorously diffused in nature, then forgotten. 69

‘An Hour’s Talk about Poetry’, 487.

4

Bringing Home Keats and Shelley ‘where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’ 1 Writing in the London Magazine, Bryan Waller Procter (the poet and dramatist ‘Barry Cornwall’) announced the death from consumption of his fellow-poet John Keats ‘on the 23rd of February, 1821, at Rome, whither he had gone for the benefit of his health’. For Procter this was the chronicle of a death foretold: When Keats left England, he had a presentiment that he should not return: that this has been too sadly realized the reader already knows.—After his arrival in Italy, he revived for a brief period, but soon afterwards declined, and sunk gradually into his grave. He was one of three English poets who had been compelled by circumstances to adopt a foreign country as their own. He was the youngest, but the first to leave us.2

The use of ‘presentiment’—‘a vague expectation resting on no definite reason’ (OED)—is poetic licence, since Keats accurately diagnosed his condition months before the doctors sent him to Italy; ‘[T]hat drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die’.3 Literal departure (‘left England’) uncannily foreshadows the metaphorical ‘departure’ of death (‘the first to leave us’); more surprisingly, Procter equates exile with death: Keats joins Byron and Shelley, too famous to need naming, but here subordinate to Keats’s fatal priority. By associating the exiles in the past (they ‘had been compelled’), and in prospective mortality (who will be next?), Procter 1 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, l. 26. Adapted in Procter’s obituary (see below) to describe Keats’s decline in England. 2 ‘Town Conversation. No. IV’, The London Magazine, 3 (Apr. 1821), 427; repr. in 3 KCH 242. KC ii. 73; See ‘Keats’s prescience’, Bennett, 139–57.

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also, in effect, forecasts the deaths of Shelley and Byron. Our own knowledge that this presentiment was soon ‘too sadly realized’—by Shelley’s drowning in July 1822, and Byron’s death of fever in April 1824—graces the obituary with unmerited prescience. It also raises the question of why the logical conclusion to exile from England is death. Procter links expatriation with domestic critical neglect. What Susan Wolfson calls ‘the culturally prestigious theme of geniuses alienated from an uncomprehending world’, the belief that great poets are prophets scorned in their own country, and that death in exile is the seal of genius, does not mitigate its painfulness.4 Procter continues: ‘[W]e could not reconcile ourselves to . . . letting a poet’s death pass by’; ‘he has been suffered to rise and pass away almost without a notice’; ‘bolder aspirants have been allowed to take their station on the slippery steps of the temple of fame, while he has been nearly hidden among the crowd during his life, and has at last died, solitary and in sorrow, in a foreign land’. (This recalls Canto 1 of ‘The Fall of Hyperion’, where Moneta challenges the speaker, ‘ “If thou canst not ascend | These steps, die on that marble where thou art” ’; ‘my iced foot touch’d | The lowest stair; and as it touch’d, life seem’d | To pour in at the toes: I mounted up’.5) Keats’s death risks being ‘pass[ed] by’ as he himself has ‘pass[ed] away’; his life ‘hidden among the crowd’ leads to a ‘solitary’ death; unrecognized at home, he is abandoned in a ‘foreign land’. These tropes exemplify contemporary ideas about critical blindness and public indifference, physical and metaphysical exile, and poetic termination. The grave ‘in a foreign land’ became the symbolic focus for these issues as the exiles’ fame grew during the century. Byron’s contemporary celebrity, and the heroic circumstances of his death at Missolonghi, ensured that despite popular support for burial in Greece his body was embalmed, cased in tin, and repatriated.6 Notwithstanding the hostility of the state or the Church of England (which refused for nearly 150 years to allow a memorial in Poets’ 4 Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Keats Enters History: Autopsy, Adonais, and the Fame of Keats’, in N. Roe (ed.), Keats and History (1995), 32. 5 KP 363–4, ll. 107–8, 132–4. 6 See Julius Millingen, Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece; . . . With Various Anecdotes Relating to Lord Byron, and an Account of his Last Illness and Death (1831); Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (1993), 461–71.

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Corner), the return of Byron’s body to his ancestral vault at Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, was at least a symbolic homecoming. Large crowds attended the lying in state in London and lined the funeral procession’s route. For Mary Howitt, laying her hands on the coffin at Nottingham was ‘a moment of enthusiastic feeling’, while she complained about the ‘rabble rout’ attending the committal at the country church.7 Keats’s and Shelley’s situations were very different; no popular sentiment supported the attempts of friends, themselves ‘exiles’ and with limited funds and influence, to return the bodies to England. Catholic Italy offered few burial-places for Protestants (‘heretics’). The Cimiterio Acattolici or Protestant Cemetery at Rome was the nearest destination for Keats’s body; although in Shelley’s case Leghorn was nearer, his remains were (eventually) buried in Rome, the resting-place of his son William (d. 1819) and the subject of a famous passage in the preface to Adonais. Such decisions about destination are part of a series of reconstitutive and recuperative gestures, which begin even before death is certified, inflect decisions about disposal and burial, influence the earliest representations of their graves, and play an increasingly significant role in the poets’ textual afterlives.8 There were practical disadvantages to dying in Italy. Yet the bodies’ subjection to Italy’s alien and alienating quarantine laws came to symbolize the equivalent scorn and neglect experienced by the living poets and their poems in England, and this combined narrative of punishment, neglect, and obscurity stimulates a powerful reaction: survivors and aftercomers defend the dead and seek justice. The Italian authorities’ treatment of the corpse as dangerous leads to the survivors’ determination to repossess the remains, and to their recuperation of the burial-place as a refuge exempt from both Italian and English persecution. This point of transition between private and public realms is crucial to later reception; quarantine claims only a brief period of authority over Keats’s and Shelley’s bodies, but the passionate emotions it prompts in witnesses—Joseph Severn, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Edward John Trelawny—powerfully affect their testimonies. As these texts became the standard authorities for Victorian biography and criticism, their embattled sense of 7

Mary Howitt, An Autobiography (2 vols., 1889), i. 184–6. There are more 19th cent. poems about Keats’s and Shelley’s graves than those of all other poets combined. See my ‘Representations of the Grave in NineteenthCentury English Poetry: A Selected Commentary’ (1997), ch. 3. 8

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defending the bodies of their dead was translated into a defence of the poet’s reputation and poetic corpus. Obscurity was reclaimed as the guarantee of genius; pilgrims repaired the remote graves rhetorically and literally; posthumous publications sought to reconstitute the absent body. Yet Keats’s and Shelley’s permanent expatriation in the Protestant Cemetery meant that the shame of historical neglect was never fully erased. The proliferation of metaphorical and actual substitute bodies, relics, and memorials in the century’s second half suggests the power of this shame, and its inexorability; you can’t go home again.

‘i shall soon be in a second edition—in sheets—and cold press’ ‘My Physician tells me I must contrive to pass the Winter in Italy . . . My new publication has been out for some days and I have directed a Copy to be bound for you.’9 The publication of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, by John Keats, Author of Endymion (hereafter Poems) on 3 July 1820 coincided with the poet’s conviction that his doctors and friends were conspiring to separate him from Fanny Brawne and send him to Italy; and leaving Fanny, as much as consumption, meant death. For the doctors to admit that they could do no more and that the only hope of survival was a softer climate, was tantamount to a death sentence; Keats tacitly registers the irony of receiving this news along with copies of his new book. Writing to Charles Brown on 14 August 1820, he juxtaposes departure for Italy, scepticism about recovery, and his book’s reception: ‘A winter in England would, I have not a doubt, kill me; so I have resolved to go to Italy. . . . Not that I have any great hopes of that,—for, I think, there is a core of disease in me not easy to pull out. . . . My book has had good success among literary people, and, I believe, has a moderate sale.’10 A strong sequence of negatives (‘not a doubt . . . Not that I have any great hopes . . . not easy to pull out’) reinforces the body’s poor prospects, against which are set the book’s ‘good success’ and ‘moderate sale’. Keats is already detaching himself from the betraying consumptive body: increasingly, posterity is the only form in which he can imagine the 9

JK to Fanny Keats, 15 July 1820 (KL ii. 305).

10

KL ii. 321.

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future.11 Among the preparations he made for the voyage was the informal ‘Testament’ which he sent to his publisher, John Taylor: In case of my death this scrap of Paper may be serviceable in your possession. All my estate real and personal consists in the hopes of the sale of books publish’d or unpublish’d. Now I wish Brown and you to be the first paid Creditors—the rest is in nubibus—but in case it should shower pay my Taylor the few pounds I owe him. My Chest of Books divide among my friends—12

Drawing up a will before a sea-voyage was a standard precaution; Keats’s assessment of his posthumous value is pointedly authorial, comprising ‘hopes of the sale of books publish’d or unpublish’d’— a metaphysical ‘estate’ if ever there was one. (The poignant—and iambic—line, ‘My Chest of Books divide among my friends’ does not form part of this ‘estate’: they are simply mementoes of their owner.13) Nevertheless there is more ‘hope’ here than for the mortal body. When Keats left England he was convinced that both his life, and his active poetic career, were over; what remained was a textual hope. (Keats wrote his last poems before leaving England. The ‘Bright Star’ sonnet, once thought to have been written on board ship, is now known to date from 1819; only two poems are definitely ascribed to 1820, ‘To Fanny’ [‘Physician Nature! let my spirit blood’] around February, and the Spenserian pastiche ‘In after-time, a sage of mickle lore’ around July. The ‘sage’, I note, is ‘Typographus’.) In Rome on Christmas Eve, when he had stopped even writing and reading letters, Keats insisted that Severn report a sally of gallows humour: ‘ “Tell Taylor I shall soon be in a second Edition— in sheets—and cold press”.’14 The joke turns on his books’ unpopularity, that the poet’s closest experience of getting into a second edition, will be the ‘sheets’ of the shroud and the grave’s ‘cold press’. Only the publishers could fully appreciate this irony; in February 1821 Taylor and Hessey were trying to recoup losses, writing to 11 For another reading of relations between Keats’s consumptive body and corpus, see Jennifer Davis Michael, ‘Pectoriloquy: The Narrative of Consumption in the Letters of Keats’, European Romantic Review, 6:1 (1995), 38–56. 12 14 Aug., KL ii. 319. The Testament may be the earliest published Keats manuscript remains, printed in William Hone’s Table Book (1827); see J. D. C., ‘Keats’, The Athenaeum, 22 Aug. 1891, 255–6. Keats’s spelling creates a confusion between John Taylor and his tailor. 13 For Charles Brown’s July 1821 list of Keats’s books see KC i. 253–60. 14 KC i. 182. Keats’s ‘last letter’ was to Brown, 30 Nov. 1820 (KL ii. 359–60).

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Keats’s brother that ‘We are still minus £110 by “Endymion,” and about 100£ by the last Poem “Lamia”.’15 Keats’s darkly witty idea of death as his ‘second edition’, when he will at last be in demand, plays on the conventional identification of books by the author’s name, and the conflation of body and book. Yet the joke is quickly followed by Keats’s ‘last request that no mention be made of him in any manner publically—in Reviews Magazines or Newspapers—that no Engraving be taken from any Picture of him’. If posterity wants to immortalize him, it must do so on his poetry’s account alone.

keats in quarantine The possibility that abroad Keats’s body would be scorned as his poems had been at home dawned on Keats and Severn even before setting foot on Italian soil. The sea-journey’s trials were followed by a ten-day quarantine (21–31 October) on board their ‘black hole’ of a ship, the Maria Crowther, in Naples Bay.16 Vivid material evidence that foreigners were regarded as contagious bodies threatening national health survives in two letters posted from the ship, ‘badly discolored by fumigation’.17 Once released, Keats found no freedom in Naples itself: he and Severn fled to Rome, horrified by ‘the continual visible tyranny of this government’: ‘I could not lie quietly here. I will not leave even my bones in the midst of this despotism.’18 Arriving in Rome, to the lodgings arranged for them by Dr James Clark at 26 Piazza de Spagna (the hub of the English expatriate quarter), was a relief. In 1820 Clark had published ‘an Inquiry into the Effects of A Residence in the South of Europe, in cases of Pulmonary Consumption’. Although Clark recommends Rome as ‘a preferable situation’, and the Piazza di Spagna in particular as ‘well-sheltered’, he is careful to point out that the climate cannot cure full-blown consumption, and he also warns of Roman intolerance due to the ‘almost obsolete opinion of the contagious nature of this disease’.19 It is ‘a very cruel thing to banish such patients from all the comforts of home’; the patient’s 15

16 17 KC i. 215. KL ii. 355. Ibid. 348–9. Richard Monckton Milnes (ed.), The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (2 vols., 1848), ii. 79–80. 19 James Clark, Medical Notes on Climate, Diseases, Hospitals, and Medical Schools, in France, Italy, and Switzerland: Comprising an Inquiry into the Effects of 18

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doctor should ‘hesitate ere he condemns the fated victim of this remorseless malady to the additional evils of expatriation . . . doomed, shortly to add another name to the long and melancholy list of his countrymen that have sought out, with pain and suffering a distant country, only to gain in it an untimely grave!’20 As an experienced and trusted doctor to the English community, Clark was an invaluable friend to Keats and, just as importantly, to Severn; but he could barely palliate the disadvantages of dying in Italy. In December Severn impugned Rome as a ‘wilderness of a place (for an invalid)’, complaining that ‘these wretched Romans have no Idea of comfort’.21 On 24 December, hearing from Clark that their landlady had ‘reported to the Police that Keats is dying of a Consumption’, he railed against ‘this old Cat’ for stating the unbearable truth, but was also alarmed by the authorities’ powers of intervention: [T]he laws are very severe—I do not know the extent of them—should poor Keats die—every thing in his room is condemned to be burned even to paper on the walls the Italians are so alarmed at Consumption ·thatÒ the expences are enormous after a death—for examinations—and precautions to contagion—Fools. . . . should he die the law will demand him to be opened . . .22

Anna Angeletti’s report to the police introduces two forms of unwanted authority into the closed world of the sickroom: certain death, and the Roman Health Office’s interference in the last rites. According to Italian hygiene laws, the consumptive was a contaminant; the corpse must be ‘opened’ to certify death from contagious disease, all objects in contact with the patient destroyed to prevent infection, and the sickroom made good at the survivors’ expense. Severn kept all this from Keats, but his own letters repeatedly anticipate the post-mortem scene of desecration. His fantasies of taking Keats home—‘I most certainly think I shall bring him back to England . . . for half the cause of his danger has arisen from the loss of England’—are an imaginative refuge from and reaction against the looming prospect of ‘the inhumanity the barbarism of these Italians’ and ‘their cursed laws’.23 Severn exercised his ingenuity in A Residence in the South of Europe, in cases of Pulmonary Consumption (1820), 71, 76, 94. 20 Ibid. 117, 118. Compare Clark’s judgement on Keats, KC i. 204. 21 22 JS to CB, 17 Dec. 1820, KL ii. 362, 363. KC i. 184. 23 Ibid. 188, 189–90.

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secretly moving the sickroom, so that only one room and its contents would be destroyed; his textual records evince a similar drive to take at least rhetorical control of an otherwise uncontainable situation. funeral beasts and daisies on a quiet grave Doubts have been raised about Severn’s reliability, but he is our only first-hand witness to Keats’s last days in Rome, death, and burial. His letters evince anger at his powerlessness, but also attempts at recuperation. In particular, Keats’s authority for the pastoral grave in the Protestant Cemetery figures as consolation and compensation; though a ‘stranger’, Keats finds sanctuary and a symbolic ‘home’ in a beautiful landscape outside ‘Roman’ religious and municipal jurisdiction. One of Keats’s last wishes was for Severn to visit the Protestant Cemetery and describe his burial-place; ‘he expressed pleasure at my description of the locality of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, about the grass and the many flowers, particularly the innumerable violets, also about a flock of goats and sheep and a young shepherd— all these intensely interested him’.24 The description inspired the burial fantasy Keats articulated four days before dying: ‘I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave—thank God for the quiet grave—O! I can feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me.’25 These are amongst Keats’s last words, and were answered at the funeral by Clark instructing the gravediggers to ‘put turfs of daisies’ over it: ‘“this would be poor Keats’s wish—could he know it” ’.26 Severn later emphasized the comfort Keats derived from imagining his grave’s pathetic beauty: ‘it formed one of the few pleasant things on which he liked to dwell during his last days. It was a real consolation to him that he was to be laid in so lovely a place of rest, and in the companionship of so many sons of misery like himself.’27 These comforting images (‘even the ‘sons of misery’ signify community) contrast with Severn’s 6 March 1821 polemic against Italian health regulations: the recollection of poor Keats hangs dreadfully upon me—I see him at every glance—I cannot be alone now—my nerves are so shattered.—These brutal Italians have nearly finished their monstrous business—they have burned all 24 25 27

From Severn’s MS ‘Recollections’, Severn, 93. JS to John Taylor, 6 Mar. 1821, KL ii. 378. Severn, 96.

26

Eid., ibid. 379.

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the furniture—and are now scraping the walls—making new windows— new door’s—and even a new floor—You will see all the miseries [?] attendant on these laws—I verily think I have suffered more from their cursed cruelties—than from all I did for Keats—These wretches have taken the moments when I was suffering in mind and body—they have inraged me day after day—until I trembled at the sound of every voice.28

Severn’s haunted, almost hallucinatory sense of Keats’s presence collides with his anguish at the all too real ‘brutal Italians’ and their ‘monstrous business’. The pivotal phrase ‘I cannot be alone now’ refers to his need for companionship, but also to Keats’s troubling persistence. Against this he sets the insistent active verbs describing what the hygiene officials do: ‘burned’, ‘scraping’, ‘making new’— forms of cleansing and regeneration that are devoid of human sympathy and insult the sensibility of the bereaved and the memory of the dead. Moreover, these furnished rooms were the material witnesses to Keats’s dying. For much of the three months at Rome, Severn too was confined there, and he spent many nights watching at Keats’s bedside, expecting death. Following so swiftly on the loss of Keats, the destruction of their dwelling is traumatic, denying Severn even mundane continuities. The temporary home shared with the dead is annihilated, externalizing the annihilation of the dead. While memory seeks comfort in traces of connection, Roman regulations erase all traces, down to the very air the consumptive breathed. (The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association later sought to reconstruct the interior of the 26 Piazza di Spagna rooms, as though the erasure had never happened.) Severn’s consolation was that he, Dr Clark, and an ‘English Nurse’ defended Keats’s remains from official interference until the funeral. On the evening of Friday 23 February, ‘at 11 he died in my arms’; on Saturday Clark arranged for Canova’s assistant Gherardi to make casts of Keats’s face, hand, and foot, and ‘his death [was] made known to the brutes here—yet we kept a strong hand over them—we put them off untill the poor fellow was laid in his grave’.29 The controlling ‘strong hand’ recalls the pre-death crisis when Keats ‘clasped my hand very fast as I held him in my arms’.30 On Sunday ‘Dr Clark 28

KL ii. 377. Ibid. 378–9. Severn also placed in the coffin letters from Fanny Keats and Fanny Brawne which Keats could not bear to read. 30 Ibid. 378. On Severn’s verbal echoes of Keats’s dying words, see Robert DouglasFairhurst, Victorian Afterlives (2002), 9–14. 29

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and Dr Luby with an Italian Surgeon—opened the body’; an initial examination of the chest revealed ‘the worst possible Consumption—the lungs were intirely destroyed’, making the autopsy a formality. When Severn refers to the Italians who conducted Keats’s funeral on Monday 26 February as ‘funeral beasts’, as against the ‘many English [who] requested to follow him’, his animus is both national and religious. Protestant funerals in Rome were traditionally nocturnal, to avoid Catholic protests; Keats’s funeral set off in the dark. (Ambrose Poynter recorded that ‘We started before daylight, a necessary precaution on a Protestant demonstration . . . and arrived just at daybreak.’31) Shortly after dawn they arrived at the Protestant Cemetery at Monte Testaccio, to await the 9 a.m. burial service, conducted by the English chaplain Revd Mr Wolffe. Yet Severn’s emphasis on the ‘many English’ attending—Clark and Luby, artist William Ewing, sculptor Richard Westmacott, and architects Poynter and John Parke—cannot change the fact that Severn himself was the only real mourner.32 Within Rome, Keats’s corpse was stigmatized as contagious and heretic; Severn construed its relocation to a Protestant and Anglicized place of rest as redemptive, and he invested the landscape with complex emotions and ideal attributes. Practically, Keats’s grave was a haven from the noisy reconstruction of their lodgings, and soothed Severn’s grieving fury. He found consolation, too, in the fulfilment of Keats’s last wishes; paradoxically, the organic grave suggests a living presence more successfully than the sculptor’s casts, which record the wasted body’s absence. The drive to aestheticize and recuperate Keats’s death through an artistically coherent and ‘poetic’ terminal scene originates in Severn’s response to events marked from the beginning by alienation and expatriation. But these marks were not permanent. As time passed, Keats’s grave came to signify not just critical and popular neglect, but atonement for that neglect, and the material sign of exile and obscurity was appropriated as a site of national pilgrimage. Ten weeks after the funeral, in answer to letters William Haslam wrote in the first throes of bereavement, Severn gave a description of Keats’s grave that biographers from R. M. Milnes onwards have quoted as a romanticized but self-contained textual picture. Severn’s 31

KC i. 226–7.

32

See KL ii. 379.

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framing of the description, however, suggests that its impetus is purposefully therapeutic. He remarks how painful Haslam’s letters were to read, even though ‘I knew how deeply you would feel these awful things—and I knew that the distance we were from you would increase these feelings’; the man who held Keats in his arms as he died was unprepared for the qualitatively different emotions experienced by absent friends.33 In his final letter Keats had written that ‘Land and Sea, weakness and decline are great seperators, but death is the great divorcer for ever’; for Keats’s intimates in England, who had hoped for his recovery, the trials of separation were compounded by ‘the great divorcer’.34 Severn’s realization that even his distressing experience had compensations denied those at home, and that he was still closer to Keats than the others, influenced his representation of the grave to Haslam. As nurse, eyewitness of Keats’s death and survivor, he has emotional authority: [N]ow thank God it is all quiet and over—poor Keats has his wish—a humble wish indeed—he is at peace in the quiet grave—I walkd there a few days ago and found the daisies had grown all over it—it is in one of the most lovely retired spots in Rome—the Pyramid of Caius Cest[i]us and the Roman Walls are in the same place . . . and many other English are lying in the same romantic spot—you cannot have any such place in England—I visit the place with a most delicious melancholy—which on many occasions has relieved my low spirits—when I recollect that Keats in his life had never one day without ferment or torture of mind and body—and that now he lies at rest in a grave—with the flowers he so much desired upon him—and in a place such as he must have form’d to his minds eye—with no other sound than a few simple sheep and goats with their tinkling bells—this is what I feel grateful for—it was what I pray’d might be.35

Severn acts out a consolatory visit to the grave, which Haslam can imaginatively re-enact, secure that ‘poor Keats has his wish’. Severn ‘finds’ that the grave has been colonized by daisies, as though gifted by nature (rather than ordered by Clark); he suppresses the Protestant Cemetery’s marginal signification, praising its ‘retired’ situation and evocative antiquities. Keats is in the company of ‘many other English’ (Severn omits to mention the many other nationalities present); indeed the site exceeds any English landscape for beauty, though its components form an intensely English version of pastoral. The phrase ‘our dear friend’ embraces the wider circle to whom the 33

KC ii. 238.

34

KL ii. 359.

35

KC i. 238.

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letter will be circulated: Severn is their representative, a medium for the ‘delicious melancholy’ which ‘visiting’ the grave evokes. And Keats himself authorizes this therapeutic scenario: he is buried ‘in a place such as he must have form’d to his minds eye’—an act of imagination dependent on the description given to him by Severn. Readers who have just ‘formed’ the place to their ‘minds eye’ can therefore connect with the pastoral fantasy that ‘must’ have comforted Keats. The gulf in understanding between the Romans and the poet’s English friends has proliferated confusion about even the basic facts of Keats’s death, such as what Rollins calls the ‘extraordinary mixup about the dates of his death and burial’. Severn’s letters fix Keats’s death about 11 p.m. on Friday 23 and the funeral on Monday 26 February. However the burial register entry runs: ‘Giovanni Keats Poeta Inglese Mori li 24 Febraro 1821. Sepolto li 25 do. di Mattina ad ore 15 d’anni 26’ (‘Died the 24th of February 1821. Buried the 25th, ditto, in the morning at 15 o’clock. Aged 26’).36 Rollins attributes some mistakes to entries made belatedly and in various hands. In fact, the death-date of 24 February is technically accurate, since ‘According to the Roman method of reckoning time, whereby one day ended and another began at 6 p.m., Keats did die on February 24 at 5 o’clock, so that the date given in the cemetery register, as well as later on the gravestone and the Keats House in Rome, is correct.’ Despite his three months in Rome, Severn calculated the hours on the English system, setting the pattern for English biographers. Severn’s accounts, indeed, characteristically suppress or transcend alien Italian practices; Keats’s death-bed isolation, separated from lover, sister, and friends, gives Severn’s adherence to ‘English’ time added significance. Conveying the news to those left behind was another problem. Poor communications between England and Italy, in a period before the steam-packet or the telegraph, created a traumatic, often ironic delay, which only imaginative reconstruction eased.37 On 3 March, ten days after his brother’s death, George Keats in Louisville wrote to Brown, ‘I am obliged to your’s of the Decr 21st informing me that my Brother is in Rome, and that he is better’; Brown did not receive 36

KC i 226. This contrasts with the importance of the telegraph in reporting Browning’s last illness and death in Venice: see Ch. 7. 37

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Severn’s 27 February letter describing Keats’s death until 18 March, and George did not hear the news until April.38 In his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), Milnes both recounts one such instance of delay, and offers an exemplary ‘reading’ of it. He quotes from a letter written by Leigh Hunt, who was living in Keats’s former house in Hampstead, and comments: But even while these warm words were being written in his own old home, he had already been committed to that distant grave, which has now become a place of pilgrimage to those fellow-countrymen who then knew not what they had lost, and who are ready, too late, to lavish on his name the love and admiration that might once have been very welcome.39

The syntax shows Milnes enmeshed in oppositions between home and abroad, past and present; he succeeds in articulating the impossibility of recompensing the dead. Hunt’s warm words compensate for their belatedness; not so the praise of Keats’s belatedly worshipping ‘fellow-countrymen’. An oblique, but powerful rebuke is contained within Milnes’s image of pilgrims flocking to a grave to ‘lavish [praise] on [Keats’s] name’—a name the actual gravestone deliberately withholds.

‘[a] sad ditty of this story born . . .’ 40 The circuitous route by which news of Keats’s death travelled, and the uncertain information that characterized the news itself, are clear from the case of Shelley—a case that had momentous consequences both for Keats and for himself. Shelley was resident at Pisa, and had written to Keats at Naples; but he received the news of his death from England in mid-April, in a letter from Leigh Hunt. In turn, he wrote to Byron: ‘Young Keats, whose “Hyperion” showed so great a promise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a bloodvessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book in the Quarterly Review.’ (Keats had wanted to exclude the fragmentary ‘Hyperion’ from the Poems; W. M. Rossetti later speculated that ‘had there been no Hyperion published during the author’s lifetime, there would have been no Adonais written, to proclaim his 38 40

39 KC i. 222. Life, Letters, ii. 94–5. ‘Isabella Or, The Pot of Basil’, l. 501.

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immortality as soon as the mortal part was consigned to the grave’.)41 Adonais and its preface (published in July 1821) were written with the benefit of scant and inaccurate information, and famously express more of Shelley’s resentment against his own reviewers than about Keats’s ‘susceptible mind’ and the fatal ‘wound thus wantonly inflicted’.42 The absence of hard facts that was so stimulating to Shelley’s poetic imagination created a vacuum which the preface fills with an influential memory picture of Keats’s burial-place, an intemperate polemic against vicious critics, and a last-minute tribute to Severn. However, where Procter saw Keats’s death, ‘solitary and in sorrow, in a foreign land’, as the tragic consequence of neglect, Shelley sets Keats’s grave in a beautiful refuge from murderous critics: [Keats] was buried in the romantic and lonely cemetery of the Protestants in that city, under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius, and the massy walls and towers, now mouldering and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.

Shelley did not need to visit Keats’s grave to evoke its setting; he first visited in December 1818, and buried his young son William there in June 1819.43 His prior emotional investment marks the description here: ‘romantic and lonely’ makes loneliness into a positive quality; the Protestant dead are associated with the fallen grandeur of ‘ancient Rome’, not modern religious intolerance. The personal memory that in winter the cemetery is covered ‘with violets and daisies’ fuses with one of several echoes of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘half in love with easeful death’.44 Far from being exiled, Keats’s Roman grave appears in an ideally poetic context, strengthening the contrast with the ‘literary prostitutes’ who ‘wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God’. 41 PBSL ii. 284; The Poetical Works of John Keats: Edited, with a critical memoir, by William Michael Rossetti (1872), p. xix. 42 Shelley cut passages overtly addressing the ‘Persecution, contumely, and calumny [that] have been heaped upon me in profuse measure’ (PBSP 431, 444). 43 See the two 1819 poems ‘To William Shelley’ and ‘My lost William, thou in whom . . .’ (PBSP 581–2). 44 Stuart Curran discusses these echoes in ‘ “Adonais” in Context’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference (1983), 172–6. See also PBSL ii. 60.

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The cemetery haunts Adonais, in abstract allusions to the dead poet’s return to mother earth—‘He is made one with Nature: there is heard | His voice in all her music’ (xlii), ‘He is a portion of the loveliness | Which once he made more lovely’ (xliii)—and in specific directions to the cemetery itself, which features in stanzas xlviii–li. When the reader is directed ‘go to Rome’, ‘Go thou to Rome’, s/he is steered past the ‘wrecks’ and mouldering ‘gray walls’ that provide a sublime backdrop to the burial-place: Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead Thy footsteps to a slope of green access Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;

(xlix)

Shelley is less concerned with locating Keats’s specific grave than with evoking a generalized memorial landscape. The ‘laughing’ flowers arcing across the grass ‘like an infant’s smile’ patently evoke the memory of Shelley’s child, not the poet who was buried beside him. On the ‘field’ ‘a newer band | Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death’ (l); they are young graves that have not yet ‘outgrown the sorrow’ the deaths produced. ‘Adonais’ is lost amongst the mass, suggesting Shelley’s indifference to material memorials. Potent in its evocation of the Cemetery, vague in its representation of the specific grave, Shelley’s poem set the pattern for nineteenthcentury accounts of Keats’s grave. Shelley, like Severn, merges an ideal pastoral idiom with the landscape of the Protestant Cemetery; but Shelley’s account, of course, had a much more immediate impact, one that was incalculably strengthened by the circumstances of his own death and burial.

‘his rest shall be at rome’ 45 On 8 July 1822, Shelley, Edward Williams, and their boy assistant Charles Vivian embarked aboard the Don Juan with a ‘clean bill of health’ from the Leghorn sanitary inspectors to cross the Gulf of Spezia en route to San Terenzo. They drowned in a storm only a few hours later, but it was ten days before the bodies were washed up at different locations along the coast. The corpses were quarantined as 45

MWSL i. 249.

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potential sources of contagion, and immediately buried where found (Vivian’s headless skeleton was found later, and immediately cremated and buried). The removal of Shelley’s remains to the Protestant cemetery at Rome did not take place until six months later, in January 1823, and was licensed only after his widow, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, agreed to his body being cremated. This was done on the beach at Viareggio, a scene that is now so layered in narrative that its original outlines are hard to discern. Between Shelley’s first and second burials his remains were subject to physical intervention by the Italian authorities, to protracted negotiations between these authorities and members of his circle, and to disputes within the circle itself, culminating in an undignified squabble between Hunt and Mary Shelley over the poet’s unburnt heart. The rigorous maritime quarantine laws, which the living Keats experienced at Naples, kept the dead Shelley’s fate uncertain for weeks; in turn, the body’s reduction by fire, and the associated fragmentation and dispersal of relics, influenced attitudes to the poet’s corpus. Mary Shelley’s 15 August 1822 letter to Maria Gisborne is the standard textual authority on Shelley’s death.46 The widow has affective priority, and is intrinsically more reliable than the principal witness, Byron’s adventurer friend Edward John Trelawny. Yet the closely written ten-page letter also pathetically testifies to its own lack of authority, the absence of observers from the death scene, the irresolvable doubts about when and how Shelley died. Mary’s is the earliest and most painful of hundreds of attempts to recover and reconstitute Shelley during the century. Her narrative vividly evokes the terrible suspense before the body’s recovery, and the equally terrible discovery which that entailed: for the body is incomplete, ghastly, a material satire on the ‘spiritual’ otherworldly Shelley. Unable to write the definitive account of Shelley’s fate, Mary relies on the authority of her own experience as a now posthumous subject; she is driven to write ‘some account of the last miserable months of my disastrous life’, even though ‘The scene of my existence is closed’; she ends, ‘Well here is my story—the last story I shall have to tell.’ Mary’s letter is structured around two separations: Shelley’s departure from Casa Magni, and the bodies’ discovery, the final 46

All subsequent references to this letter are from ibid. 244–51.

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irrefutable evidence of ‘the great divorcer’. Death is repeatedly anticipated through motifs of emotional and physical separation, the uncertainties created by topographical distance, and alienation from place. Life at Casa Magni involves a psychic separation between her and Shelley: he is in good health and spirits, revelling in their situation’s sublime wildness, while in her ‘ill health’ she loathes ‘our house & the country’, finds the local Genovese ‘wild & hateful’, their ‘very jargon . . . disgusting’. A near-fatal miscarriage on 16 June leaves her bedridden and depressed; Shelley, in turn, has nightmares: the ‘lacerated’ bodies of Edward and Jane Williams, the sea flooding the house, himself strangling Mary, his own doppelgänger. Although Mary concedes that some of these visions were ‘certainly not prophetic of what has occurred’, the uncanny mood reflects her morbid distress when Shelley and Williams sail for Leghorn to meet Hunt: ‘I could not endure that he should go—I called him back two or three times’, in letters ‘I entreated him to return.’ Fretting about their child, Percy Florence, she fantasizes that Shelley’s return will restore the status quo: ‘when he, when my Shelley returns I shall be happy’. From this point, the quest is structured around lost contact between ‘us’ and ‘them’: ‘This was monday, the fatal monday, but with us it was stormy all day & we did not at all suppose that they could put to sea. At twelve at night we had a thunderstorm; Teusday it rained all day & was calm—the sky wept on their graves.’ The ‘fatal monday’ was only identifiable retrospectively, since the weather conditions ‘with us’ argued against the Don Juan setting sail, and the midnight thunderstorm was only later identified with that which turned the Gulf of Spezia into ‘their graves’. The women became uneasy when two days of fair wind failed to bring the Don Juan, but Jane’s determination to sail to Leghorn on Friday for news was thwarted: ‘the sea detained her’. The murderous sea also frustrated every attempt to seek information. Friday was ‘letter day’, bringing Hunt’s note to Shelley: ‘it said—“pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed monday, & we are anxious” ’. Unlike Hunt’s belated letter to Keats, this missive to the dead was itself a deathly portent. Jane and Mary posted cross-country for information; at Pisa Byron could tell them nothing, and arriving at Leghorn they waited for daylight to hear from Roberts about the Don Juan’s departure. He described his concern about ‘how the boat wd weather the storm’, and his last sight of it through a glass from the tower:

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‘“The haze of the storm,” he said, “hid them from me & I saw them no more”.’ Although they clung to a faint hope that the boat was driven offcourse, from this point Mary’s narrative is contracted and marked by hindsight. Accompanied by Trelawny, they drove back by Viareggio, where the Don Juan’s coracle and water cask had washed ashore, first evidence of the ‘calamity’. Crossing a river after this discovery, Mary suffered a crisis: I cannot describe to you what I felt in the first moment when, fording this river, I felt the water splash about our wheels—I was suffocated—I gasped for breath—I thought I should have gone into convulsions, & I struggled violently that Jane might not perceive it—looking down the river I saw the two great lights burning at the foce [Italian: the mouth of the river]—A voice from within me seemed to cry aloud that is his grave.

Mary’s break from the united ‘we’ dramatizes her isolation even from her fellow-sufferer. The river communicates with Shelley’s grave, the sea; short statements punctuated with dashes mimic Mary’s panic, a sympathetic imitation of drowning that confirms the truth. It is not surprising that Mary’s memory of the period spent waiting at Casa Magni for confirmation is exaggerated; she recorded that twelve days passed between their return ‘home’ on 13 July, and Trelawny going to Leghorn for news; in fact he left only five days later (18 July). She describes the waiting as an inexpressible ‘universe of pain’, symbolized by the local people celebrating festas ‘like wild savages’, who ‘[P]ass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door running into the sea then back again & screaming all the time one perpetuel air—the most detestable in the world—then the scirocco perpetually blew & the sea for ever moaned their dirge.’ These celebrations grate unbearably on Mary’s nerves, but also articulate the grief that threatens to overwhelm her. It is a vision of hell, of the damned tormented by devils: humanity and nature, equally ‘detestable’ in their elemental violence and monotony, combine in a remorseless music, the ‘one perpetuel air’ with the wind that ‘perpetually blew’. Peace was restored only when Trelawny brought the news to Casa Magni on Friday 19 July: ‘all was over—all was quiet now, they had been found washed on shore’. Only near the letter’s close does Mary suggest why she has finally managed to record her experience after almost a month’s prevarication:

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Today—this day—the sun shining in the sky—they are gone to the desolate sea coast to perform the last offices to their earthly remains. Hunt, L[ord] B[yron]. & Trelawny. The quarantine laws would not permit us to remove them sooner—& now only on condition that we burn them to ashes. That I shall not dislike—His rest shall be at Rome beside my child—where one day I also shall join them—Adonais is not Keats’s it is his own elegy—he bids you there go to Rome.—I have seen the spot where he now lies—the sticks that mark the spot where the sands cover him—he shall not be [burned] there it is too nea[r] Via Reggio—They are now about this fearful office—& I live!

Only after completing her ‘posthumous’ narration does Mary acknowledge that she has been writing while the cremation takes place at the coast. Her emphatic ‘Today—this day’ marks the present as of comparable significance with the ‘fatal’ Monday. As Shelley’s body is decomposed by heat, his widow strives to recompose him in text, performing her own ‘fearful office’ to Shelley’s memory. (She was a day out, as her next letter to Gisborne corrected: ‘I said . . . that on that day (August 15) they had gone to perform the last offices for him—however I erred in this, for on that day those of Edward were alone fulfilled & they returned on the 16th to celebrate Shelley’s.’)47 Mary’s reflections on the relation between Shelley’s temporary grave in the shifting sands of Viareggio and his permanent ‘rest’ in Rome suggest a flight into a perfected pastoral future. The consoling fantasy of a family reunited in death, within a scene composed by Shelley, is framed by the restrictions imposed by ‘quarantine laws’, and Mary’s witnessing of ‘the spot where the sands cover him’. Yet surprisingly cremation appears as an agent of transcendence, dematerializing the remains that were not ‘my Shelley’; Mary reassures her correspondent that burning Shelley’s body does not horrify her, indeed ideal rest in Rome demands it; and by referring to Adonais as ‘his own elegy’ she invokes Shelley’s posthumous authority for her choice of burial-place. (After the ashes’ burial at Rome, Mary defended her decision to Jane Williams: ‘All is at rest there [would I were too!] He sleeps beneath the tomb of Cestius | The grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time | Feeds,—Do you not know that verse of Adonais—All | That passage which joined to many other motives kept me firm in my choice, when all opposed it’.48) The instruction to ‘go to Rome’ is far from simple or literal, as it interrogates the 47

Ibid. 253.

48

Ibid. 312. Adonais, l.

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reader’s expectations of what s/he will find there. However, for now the ideal’s conflict with present reality returns her to the incredible paradox that Shelley burns yet ‘I live!’; the widow protests both at the violent dissolution of their union, and her survival.

shelley and ‘lamia, isabell &c. &c.’ Mary’s early fixation on the as yet uncertain Roman grave, and her denial that Keats is the subject of Adonais, resonate with an ironic coincidence manifested at the formal identification of Shelley’s body; a token that confirmed yet complicated the fact that a poet’s body was recovered. Mary did not formally identify the body: for eyewitness testimony we are reliant on official records in the Lucca archives, and what Leslie Marchand describes as ‘at least ten narratives of the events connected with the drowning and cremation of Williams and Shelley’ written by Trelawny during his long life.49 The official report of G. P. Frediani, governor of Viareggio (18 July 1822) records that ‘a body in an advanced state of decay’ was washed up, inspected by the Sanitary Tribunal and ‘interred upon the beach, covered according to the Sanitary regulations now in force, with strong lime’.50 Frediani links the body with the shipwrecked ‘young Englishmen’, and makes a speculative identification: [A]n English book has been found in the pocket of a double-breasted jacket of mixed cloth, such as he always wore. The rest of his attire consisted of a pair of nankeen trowsers from Malta, and a pair of boots with white silk socks underneath, the whole of which have been buried, according to the existing regulations.51

The ‘English book’ that conclusively identified Shelley’s corpse was a borrowed copy of Keats’s Poems. Leigh Hunt later recorded: ‘It had melancholy associations with it already—that volume. It had been given to Mr Leigh Hunt by the author. There was his hand writing in it; and the mere words of the title page “Lamia, Isabell &c. &c.” always brought before the possessor a variety of recollections as painful as they were admiring.’ (Trelawny later claimed to have iden49 Leslie A. Marchand, ‘Trelawny on the Death of Shelley’, Keats-Shelley Memorial, 4 (1952), 10. 50 Reproduced in translation in Biagi; first pub. as Gli Ultimi giorni di P. B. Shelley, 51 con nuovi documenti (Florence, 1892). Biagi, 79.

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tified Shelley’s body by ‘the volume of Sophocles in one pocket, and Keats’s poems in the other’: Biagi reproduces the ‘“Sophocles” taken from Shelley’s dead hand’, but the Bodleian’s water-damaged Sophocles was probably salvaged from the Don Juan.)52 The book’s unique associations account for the conditions of its return: ‘Dear S. had retained a book in his pocket, which he told me he would not part with till he saw me again . . . He borrowed it to read as he went. It will be buried with him: that is to say, it is so already, on the seashore; but if he is taken up to be buried elsewhere, it shall go with him.’53 Shelley’s casual promise not be parted from the book became sacramental in death, and the accidental presence of Hunt’s property at Shelley’s death allows him to fantasize an influence over the disposal rituals, and to forge a permanent material connection with Shelley. The inference that Shelley’s last action was reading Keats, begins early; on 25 July Hunt suggested that Shelley’s death must have been quick because the book was ‘found open and doubled back as if it had been thrust in, in the hurry of a surprise’.54 Was Shelley’s circle troubled that Adonais’s author apparently died reading Keats’s last volume, or that his ravaged body was identified by another poet’s book? While in the lists of authorial combat Shelley had the edge in most respects—maturity, publications, critical and public profile—Keats had beaten him in death. In the context of the ‘Romantic culture of posterity’, this unfortunate precedence has benefits; as Shelley acknowledged, responding to the Gisbornes’ praise of Adonais: ‘The decision of the cause whether or no I am a poet is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity shall assemble.’55 Posterity can only sit in judgement on the dead, so for ‘the present time’, Keats is eligible, Shelley is not. Shelley accepts this positioning publicly in Adonais, which ends ‘The soul of Adonais, like a star, | Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are’, but equivocates in letters: he wrote to Claire that Adonais ‘is better than any thing that I have yet written, & worthy both of him & of me’, and to Ollier of his eagerness to have it published in London: ‘I confess I should be surprised if that Poem were born to an 52 ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, BL MS Ashley 915, repr. in Timothy Webb, ‘Religion of the Heart: Leigh Hunt’s unpublished tribute to Shelley’, Keats-Shelley Review, 7 (1992), 46; Recollections, 120; Biagi, pl. facing 80, 81 n. 53 LH to Elizabeth Kent, 20 July 1822, The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. 54 Thornton Hunt (2 vols., 1862), i. 190. Ibid. 194. 55 9 July 1821, PBSL ii. 310.

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immortality of oblivion.’56 With the poets’ fates so enmeshed in one poem, precedence becomes significant. If, as has been argued, the Keats of Adonais belongs to Shelley—remade in his image and to serve his poetic purposes—then the drowned Shelley may belong to Keats, the corpse of one poet named and known by the corpus of the other. We must remember, however, that Shelley’s cremation also involved the immolation of Keats’s book; or to put it another way, the book itself became a kind of fellow-corpse. The reasons why this should be so are suggested by the records of the cremation on 16 August 1822. shelley and quarantine On 15 August Mary recorded that ‘The quarantine laws would not permit us to remove them sooner—& now only on condition that we burn them to ashes.’ ‘Sooner’ refers not to regulations about the corpse having to remain for a certain length of time where it had been buried, but to the time it took to negotiate terms with several Italian authorities. Edward Dawkins, secretary to the Legation in Tuscany (based at Florence) liaised with the Tuscan authorities about Williams’s remains, and with the Lucchese authorities about Shelley’s, and Trelawny acted as the widows’ authorized representative. Initially the request for removal ‘to the English cemetery’ was refused ‘from a sanitary point of view’, so ‘to avoid the obstacles interposed by the sanitary laws, the ancient custom of burning bodies of the dead to ashes’ was suggested.57 Dickens’s Circumlocution Office would have been proud of the resulting mass of documents; Mary later thanked Trelawny for going through ‘the annoyances of dancing attendance on consuls & governors for permissions to fulfill the last duties to those gone’.58 Finally permission was granted for cremations to be supervised by ‘one of our most skilful and trustworthy health-officers, with all necessary instructions, that the operation in question may be carried out with the utmost regularity’.59 The body of a political libertarian was the subject of a complex web of state bureaucracy; in a further twist, this official intervention in private and affective concerns contributed to the prophetic Shelley inadver56 9 July 1821, PBSL ii. 296, 365. For Shelley’s conflicted attitudes towards poster57 58 ity and audience, see Bennett, 158–78. Biagi, 95, 96. MWSL i. 253. 59 Biagi, 110.

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tently becoming a posthumous pioneer for a progressive method of bodily disposal.60 Shelley’s grave at Viareggio was unconsecrated, unprotected, isolated, and obscure: it violated the bereaved’s hope for a safe, peaceful refuge for the dead, yet the survivors had to take responsibility for disinterment, burning, and relocation. As Hunt comments, their ‘nearest connexions . . . wished to have their remains interred in regular places of burial; and for this purpose they could be removed in no other manner’.61 For the English, both exhumation and cremation carried extremely negative associations in the period, and only exceptional circumstances could justify grave-disturbance. Shelley’s body was disinterred by four dragoons with instruments to prevent contamination by direct contact: ‘They had their peculiar tools . . . long handled tongs, nippers, poles with iron hooks and spikes, and divers others that gave one a lively idea of the implements of torture devised by the holy inquisitors.’62 Then, like the furniture from Keats’s sickroom burned in the Piazza di Spagna, Shelley’s body was publicly reduced to ashes; purification entailed shameful exposure, as public spectacle displaced private ritual. Shelley’s circle could not escape the quarantine regulations’ practical strictures; their means of redress and recuperation lay only in rhetoric, in how they represented these traumatic events to themselves and, later, to the world. Although Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny are usually listed as the key participants at Shelley’s cremation, only Trelawny was a full witness. Hunt sheltered from the heat in Byron’s carriage, intermittently watching from a distance; Byron avoided the spectacle by swimming off to the Bolivar. Trelawny, the prime mover in both cremations, is often criticized for factual unreliability and gothic sensationalism; his editor, H. B. Forman, became reconciled to the ‘protean’ bird hovering over [Shelley’s] cremation—variously a curlew, seagull, and ‘solitary sea bird’—‘with its ghastly unappeased appetite for roast poet’.63 This is a defensible interpretation of the most familiar, later descriptions in the Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858) and Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878), but my interest lies in the unpublished early manuscripts, which are distinguished by a more engaged experiential response. The impulse 60 Cremation, for which no legal precedent was set in England until 1884, did not win public acceptance until after World War I. See P. C. Jupp, ‘The Development of 61 Cremation in England 1820–1990’, 1993. LB i. 338. 62 63 Recollections, 127–8. EJTL p. xvi.

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to repossess and ritually legitimate the body, after all, necessitated encountering it in an advanced state of decomposition. In Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828), Hunt protested against the ‘Calumny’ by which ‘The friends of the deceased, though they took no pains to publish the proceeding, were accused of wishing to make a sensation; of doing a horrible and unfeeling thing, &c.’64 I suggest that the cremation’s cosmetic dressing as a classical ritual, and Trelawny’s graphic early descriptions, are reactions against quarantine restrictions. This also raises the troubling question of how the anonymity, fragmentation, and radical reduction of the body by fire influence ideas about the poet’s posthumous survival.

doubtful remains My concern here is with the poet’s body, but the duplication of corpses and cremations, and the multiplication of documents, mean that Shelley’s body is, so to speak, inseparable from Williams’s. With the corpses severely decomposed from exposure and predation by marine creatures, any distinguishing signs were privileged. Tokens such as Williams’s boot, or Shelley’s jacket with the Keats volume in its pocket, were identifiers, but also indicators of an unsettling attrition of individual or even human characteristics; as Trelawny has Byron say after identifying Williams by his teeth, ‘what are we to resemble that—it may be the carcase of a sheep for all I can distinguish’.65 The loss of individuality is exacerbated by the cremations occurring on successive days, with the same personnel—Trelawny, his friend Captain Shenley, Byron and Hunt, Italian sanitary officials and guards, Italian onlookers—the same iron furnace and similar scenery. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s cremation refers back to Williams’s: ‘I . . . made all the preparations as the day before. There was little variety in the situation from the one I have described as the scene in which the funeral pile of his shipwrecked friend Williams was erected.’66 More startlingly, the text that Mary transcribed into her journal as ‘Trelawny’s account of the Obsequies of Shelley and 64 LB i. 337. Trelawny’s early manuscript was not published in The Liberal because ‘both H[unt] and Marianne [Hunt] loudly exclaimed against its horror & impropriety’ (MWSL i. 297); however Trelawny was Hunt’s authority for the censored account 65 66 in LB. Marchand, ‘Trelawny’, 28. EJTL 10.

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Williams’ in October 1822, pertains only to Williams.67 Identity and authenticity are therefore primary narrative concerns, not just sideeffects of Trelawny’s unreliability. The cremation is often elliptically narrated as a story too well known to need repeating (‘Again and again it has been told how . . . this revival of a classic rite was performed . . . Who needs to be told again, how the copy of Keats’s last book . . . was thrown upon the blazing pyre?’68); this might be viewed as tacit acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconstructing Shelley. Trelawny’s discourse reflects simultaneously his resentment at the regulations, determination to fulfil the widows’ wishes, and his personal opinion that the bodies should have remained undisturbed. As a ‘pagan’ with a passion for the sublime, and lacking the women’s emotional investment in a hallowed grave, Trelawny considered that ‘The situation [of Williams’s body] was well adapted for a Poets grave, and I wished his remains to rest undisturbed; but it was willed otherwise.’ (The association of Williams and the poet’s grave is puzzling; Trelawny later adapted the sentiment to Shelley: ‘I felt we were no better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs, in tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand . . . but the dead have no voice, nor had I power to check the sacrilege.’)69 His anti-authority position is suggested in an early manuscript in the Keats-Shelley Memorial Library: After repeated applications through a variety of offices—I at lenth [sic] succeeded in attaining the necessary permissions of the Tuscan & Lucese goverments . . . to disinter the bodies of Mr. P. B. Shelley & E. E. Williams for the purpose of burning—and conveying their ashes. Mr. S. to Rome, & Mr. W. to England for reenterment, the mangled state in which they had been found precluding the possibility of otherwise removing them—their Familys & friends intreated me to undertake this painful task, and to rescue their remains from the humbling & degrading manner which the severity of Quarantine Laws & bigotry of religion (Catholicism) had consigned ‘to the little house with the narrow gate’—their mangled corses—which had been dragged on shore by hooks and tumbled into shallow holes—barely covered with loose sand and but for a massy old root of a tree—placed over all the next sea would have reclaimed their bodys—An officer cautioned me 67 The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (2 vols., 1987), i. 422. 68 John Cordy Jeaffreson, The Real Shelley (2 vols., 1885), ii. 451–2. 69 Recollections, 133.

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to have the graves guarded or the dogs here half wild would devour them at night!70

What later developed into a self-aggrandizing role as romance hero, is here a righteous stance against an oppressive authority. Trelawny presents himself as acting under the pressure of duty, justifying the disinterment as a ‘rescue’ from injustice and religious ‘bigotry’. The recourse to graphic terminology is not merely sensational, but polemical. The phrase ‘mangled corses’ is the pivot on which Trelawny’s outrage turns; the sea’s impersonal injury is followed by deliberate human insult, ‘humbling and degrading’ as though the dead could feel themselves being dragged ashore and tumbled into insecure graves. Even the warning about the ‘half wild’ dogs recalls Severn’s furious descriptions of the Italians as ‘brutes’ and ‘beasts’, and Mary’s dislike of the ‘half-savage’ Genoese. The extreme terms Trelawny uses to describe Williams’s remains register subjective disgust rather than mere sensationalism: ‘the skull almost bared was now apparent & seperated from the body which was soon wholly palpable . . . it was naked and dredfully mutilated loathsome’. The writer bears witness, but by accumulating terms of revulsion and exposure (the ‘bared’ skull, the ‘wholly palpable’ ‘naked’ body) he condemns the causes. The public nature of the cremation made such exposure even harder to contemplate. In another manuscript Trelawny mentions dragoons and soldiers drafted in ‘to protect us from intrusion’ by Italians keen ‘to gratify their inordinate curiosity to behold a sight so novel’, but the spectacle of Shelley’s body is nightmarishly plain: His dress and linen had become black, and the body was in a state of putridity and very offensive. Both the legs were separated at the knee joint—the thigh bones bared and the flesh hanging loosely about them—the hands were off and the arm bones protruding—the skull black and no flesh or features of the face remaining. The clothes had in some degree protected the body—the flesh was of a dingy blue.71

Not only is Shelley exposed here, he is stripped of selfhood; the possessive pronoun ‘His’ at the start applies only to ‘dress and linen’, as though Shelley no longer owned his body or its parts, which are all 70 71

Trelawny, ‘Leghorn August 13 1822’, in Marchand, ‘Trelawny’, 27. ‘Shelley Via Reggio’, first pub. EJTL 11–12.

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denominated by the definite article: ‘the legs . . . the thigh bones . . . the flesh’ (my emphasis). The distinctive physical emblems of literary vocation—the face, head, and hands—are defined by absence: the writing hands are ‘off’, the skull blackened, the face featureless. Trelawny goes on to say that he ‘collected together his remains’ for the furnace; the conventional euphemism ‘remains’ actually draws attention to how much is already missing. By 1858 Trelawny revised the scene to suggest the corpse’s relative integrity: the limbs ‘did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of Williams’s body, so that the corpse was removed entire into the furnace’; Marchand comments that ‘Such a desire to prettify the story for his more squeamish Victorian contemporaries is understandable.’72 This mythologized body of Shelley belongs to the later Victorian project of representational reconstitution, the artful reunification of the poetic corpse’s scattered fragments in paintings and sculpture, which accompanied the drive towards textual reconstitution begun by Mary Shelley in the Posthumous Poems (1824), Poetical Works (1839), and Essays from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840), and sustained by works such as Lady Shelley’s Shelley Memorials (1859) and Richard Garnett’s Relics of Shelley (1862).73

‘why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart?’ 74 The fact that Shelley’s cremation was legally enforced did not palliate its offensiveness in the context of contemporary English burial practices; but aesthetically it was recuperable as strikingly appropriate for a great poet. The incineration of the poetic body was unique and sublime, antique yet also progressive, scientific and spiritual. Through purification by fire, Shelley’s putrefying body was redeemed; corruption put on incorruption (without the trappings of Christianity). When Trelawny and Shenley added incense, honey, wine, salt, and sugar to the furnace, antique and aesthetic associations overrode both religious ritual and hygiene requirements. Hunt 72

Recollections, 133; Marchand, ‘Trelawny’, 21. e.g. Louis Edouard Fournier’s painting ‘The Funeral of Shelley’ (1889), which shows an intact Shelley on an open pyre (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). 74 Adonais, liii. 469. 73

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was determined to present burning as transcendent: ‘[T]he flame of the fire bore away towards heaven in vigorous amplitude, waving and quivering with a brightness of inconceivable beauty. It seemed as though it contained the glassy essence of vitality. You might have expected a seraphic countenance to look out of it, turning once more, before it departed, to thank the friends that had done their duty.’75 Hunt’s fantasy identifies Shelley’s soul with the destroying flame, and bears witness to the departure from earth of the poet’s ‘essence of vitality’: sanitary process becomes apotheosis. Yet Hunt is also concerned with the body itself, which must also be redeemed and recuperated. Sea and fire together have ‘saved’ it ‘from that gradual corruption, which is seldom contemplated without shuddering’.76 The phrasing reflects Hunt’s materialistic spirituality: ‘saved’ implies salvation, but also rescue and preservation. The only surviving authorial sign on Shelley’s body was Keats’s Poems which, officials notwithstanding, Trelawny examined before igniting the pyre: ‘we could find nothing of it remaining but the leather binding’. (Hunt later told Robert Browning that he had personally thrown the book onto the pyre: ‘Shelley said he would return it with his own hands into mine, and so he shall return it!’ Browning commented: ‘I confess to having felt the grotesqueness of a spirit of a duodecimo as well as that of a man.’)77 However a Shelleyan authorial sign was ‘saved’: the poet’s heart. Oozing oily fluid, it inexplicably resisted the flames that had reduced the body to ashes; Trelawny (of course) intervened. ‘I took the heart in my hand to examine it—after sprinkling it with water: yet it was still so hot as to burn my hand badly.’78 The touch that marks him with the embodied symbol of Shelley’s genius is also fittingly transgressive: ‘had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine’.79 Trelawny may have thought this a symbolic repossession of Shelley as poet; ownership of the heart itself, however, was another matter. Hunt ‘begged it at the funeral pile’, trenchantly denying Mary’s claim.80 75

76 LB i. 339. Ibid. 340. RB to H. Buxton Forman, 2 July 1877, in Letters of Robert Browning, ed. T. L. Hood (1933), 178. 78 Marchand, ‘Trelawny’, 23. It has been argued that Shelley ‘suffered from a progressively calcifying heart’, and that the epitome of Romantic sensibility had ‘a heart of stone’ (Arthur M. Z. Norman, ‘Shelley’s Heart’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 79 80 10 [1955], 114). Recollections, 134–5. MWSL i. 255. 77

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Perhaps Hunt thought Shelley’s heart was a fair exchange for ‘his’ Keats. Jane Williams persuaded him to give it up: ‘how grievous and melancholy it was that Shelley’s remains should become a source of dissension between his dearest friends. Could he be conscious of such a bitterness between Mary and Hunt, how would his gentle spirit be moved and agitated?’81 The painful dispute suggests how dispossessed of Shelley’s body his friends felt, and how correspondingly significant the relics of it became. Hunt’s failure to secure the heart may have contributed, as Timothy Webb suggests, to his ‘later tendency to translate the dead Shelley into a personification of the organ of benevolence’, to dematerialize him and transform the heart ‘from an oleaginous organ to a symbolic property’.82 Cremation simultaneously reduced and multiplied Shelley’s remains. Trelawny gathered the ashen fragments into one of ‘two small boxes about the size of writing desks’, and carried it to Leghorn; a small quantity he kept.83 A week later Mary visited Leghorn to see ‘the small box that contained his earthly dress—that form, those smiles—Great God! No he is not there . . . if his divine spirit did not penetrate mine I could not survive to weep thus’.84 The euphemism ‘earthly dress’ conveys Mary’s shock at the reduction of ‘that form, those smiles’ into the contents of a ‘small box’; F. L. Jones transcribes ‘dress’ as ‘dross’, suggesting that the ashes are the waste of spiritual purification.85 Shelley’s heart, however, remained a possession of unique symbolic value for her, and she withheld it from the last stage of his burial. Shelley’s casket (minus the heart) was transported by sea to Leghorn, on Byron’s yacht the Bolivar, and from there sent overland to Rome. There it spent several weeks in the wine-cellar of the British consular agent, John Freeborn. The ‘long and distressing delay’ prompted Hunt to ask Joseph Severn for help ‘as the friend of Mr. Shelley’s nearest friends’—and also, presumably, as someone with recent experience of managing an English poet’s burial in Rome.86 Mary wished the casket to be buried in or close to William Shelley’s 81 John Gisborne’s memorandum, F. L. Jones (ed.), Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Shelley’s Friends: Their Journals and Letters (1951), 88–9. 82 Webb, ‘Religion’, 3, 26. 83 H. J. Massingham, The Friend of Shelley: A Memoir of Edward John Trelawny (1930), 165. Trelawny gave Claire Clairmont some ashes in 1823. 84 MWSL i. 253. 85 The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones (2 vols., 1944), i. 244. 86 Hunt approached Severn on 16 Dec. 1822; Severn, 130.

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grave, and evidently feared disturbance or desecration, asking that the interment be ‘executed in the most decorous manner the circumstances will permit. . . . I wish also a plain stone to be placed to cover the grave (which you will oblige me by allowing to be very deep).’87 Severn did his best, but the circumstances permitted less decorum than Mary might have wished. Shortly after Keats’s burial close to William Shelley’s grave in 1821, the ‘old’ ground was closed, and an adjacent ‘new’ ground opened.88 Permission was secured to disinter William’s remains for reburial with his father in the extension, but only adult remains were found; Severn recorded: ‘To search further we dare not, for it was in the presence of many respectful but wondering Italians: nay, I thought it would have been a doubtful and horrible thing to disturb any more Stranger’s Graves in a Foreign Land.’89 Shelley’s atheism, combined with the unorthodox state of his ‘body’, added to the danger of scandal; Richard Burgess, the new English chaplain at Rome, ‘considered that as the people in Rome had knowledge of the facts of the death of Shelley . . . and as various speculations were afloat of the kind of Burial he should have’, they should quash ‘all sensational rumours and inter the remains in the cemetery in the usual way’.90 The funeral on 21 January 1823 was therefore an exercise in keeping up appearances: ‘the box was enclosed in a coffin, and it was done altogether as by the hands of Friends’, and there was an Anglican burial service. Then in March Trelawny quietly rode roughshod over these respectable procedures, paying the custodian to relocate the grave in ‘the only interesting spot’, near the ruined tower in the old city walls, planting cypresses and laurels, and laying a plain inscribed slab. He also purchased the adjacent plot for himself, informing Mary: ‘You may lay on the other side, or I will share my narrow bed with you, if you like.’91 Early in 1823 Mary declared that ‘all my actions will be bent towards a journey to that beloved city, whose blue sky is the tomb of those I best love’; she did not, however, visit Shelley’s grave until 1842, during a European tour with their son Percy Florence, and she 87

MWSL i. 256. John Parke was Consul, Freeborn his agent. See H. Nelson Gay and Rennell Rodd, The Protestant Burial-Ground in Rome 89 Severn, 123. (1913). 90 Memorandum by Revd Richard Burgess, qu. in Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and his Friends in Italy (1911), 318. 91 MWS to M. Gisborne, 3 May [1823], MWSL i. 334. 88

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herself was not buried there.92 Perhaps the explanation lies in what happened to the heart, that enduring ‘fetishised object of readerly and critical desire in the poet’s after-fame’, whose potency may have displaced that of the grave.93 The heart had survived a trial by fire; it was a recognizable, tangible relic and a literally enduring embodied symbol of Shelley’s personal love and human compassion. It became an emotional resource all the stronger for its secrecy, not revealed until after Mary’s burial in 1851. As Mary lay speechless and dying, Percy Florence’s wife Jane described her gazing ‘towards her desk so often with a longing and beseeching look . . . as if she wanted to speak and tell us something’.94 The desk had always been locked; its opening, in Jane’s hagiographic account, resembles an exhumation, and a revelation of sacred relics: ‘Lying alone and apart was a copy of the Adonais—the early Pisa edition—with a page torn loose and folded over in four. We opened it reverently and found ashes—dust—and we then knew what Mary had so longed to tell us: all that was left of Shelley’s heart lay there.’95 Wolfson calls this object ‘a ghoulishly literal application’ of Adonais to Shelley.96 I consider the marrying of physical relic with memorial text imaginative and touching; Mary had planned other composite memorials: a locket painted with Shelley’s symbolic pansy and Cestius’s tomb, containing a lock of his hair; the Shelley ‘shell’ icon, the pansy, and texts from Adonais and Ariel’s ‘Song’ painted on black velvet.97 Further, Mary’s ‘beseeching look’ towards it may have meant more than Jane Shelley guessed. Mary had asked to be buried close to her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft (d. 1797) and William Godwin (d. 1836) in St Pancras Churchyard; physical reunion with the dead evidently retained some meaning for her. Her mother’s tomb had a particular significance: it was there, on 26 June 1814, that she had declared her love for Shelley. Perhaps what she ‘so longed to tell’ was that she wished Shelley’s heart, still enshrined in Adonais, to be buried with her at St Pancras. An ideal symbolic reunion would be accomplished: Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Mary and Percy Shelley, two generations meeting again at the place of endings and beginnings, two burial-sites, the Protestant Cemetery and St Pancras, brought together through Adonais. 92 93 95

Ibid. 312. I have found no record of Mary’s encounter with the grave in 1842. 94 Bennett, 152. Maud Rolleston, Talks with Lady Shelley (1925), 30. 96 97 Ibid. 31. Wolfson, ‘Keats’, 37. See MWSL i. 241, 254–5; 262.

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By 1851, however, Old St Pancras was a notoriously overfilled and offensive city churchyard. ‘It would have broken my heart to let her loveliness wither in such a dreadful place,’ Jane Shelley declared. (The heart again!) Instead of taking Mary to her parents, Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s putative remains were exhumed and reburied in a new family vault away from London, ‘in the churchyard at Bournemouth . . . There she rests with her father on one side of her & her mother on the other.’ There was some thought of repatriating Shelley to this ideal country churchyard: ‘we intend to make a pilgrimage to Rome to bring home the Urn containing the ashes of her beloved husband which we shall place in her grave’.98 But Shelley’s incorporation into Anglican orthodoxy, under a plain granite hipped ledger of fine banality, took a different form.99 His ashes stayed in Rome, while he ‘returned’ only symbolically, in the form of Edward Weekes’s memorial (1854) for Christchurch Priory, Hampshire, which depicts Mary cradling Shelley’s obviously dead (but draped and unblemished) body.100 Eventually, when Percy Florence died in 1889, Jane placed the then ashen heart in her Shelley’s coffin, at Bournemouth. (The deaths of the last ‘living links’ with the dead romantics—Severn and Claire in 1879, Trelawny in 1881—brought relics out from the private into the commercial realm; this may have finally convinced Jane to put Shelley’s heart out of circulation in 1889.) But by then, for almost seventy years visitors to the Protestant Cemetery had been reading the description of Shelley as ‘cor cordium’—the ‘heart of hearts’—and drawn their own conclusions about what was in the grave. My typographic representation of Shelley’s and Keats’s graveinscriptions below corresponds to a favourite nineteenth-century misapprehension: that the poets lie side by side, even within the same grave. In the words of Alexander Anderson, ‘And there they sleep, as if their fates had said | They shall not sleep alone; | The singer and the sung must fill one bed, | And make their ashes one.’101

98

Jane Shelley to Alexander Berry, 7 Mar. 1851, in MWS, Letters, ii. 359–60. The tomb and inscription are reproduced in MWSL iii. 225. 100 See Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (1982), 178. 101 Alexander Anderson, ‘John Keats’, A Song of Labour and Other Poems (1873), 14, ll. 53–6. The fantasy continues in the 20th cent.; in a scene filmed at Jack Kerouac’s grave, Allen Ginsberg assures Bob Dylan that Shelley and Keats are buried next to each other (Renaldo and Clara, 1975). 99

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enduring epitaphs PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Cor Cordium

This Grave contains all that was Mortal, of a

YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Natus iv Aut. MDCCXCII Obiit viii Jul. MDCCCXXII

Nothing of him that doth fade

Who, on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart, at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone

But doth suffer a sea-change

‘Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water’ Feb 24th 1821 Into something rich and strange. In fact, Keats’s small upright headstone, decorated with Severn’s relief design of a half-unstrung Grecian lyre, is in the old section of the Cemetery, divided by a wall from the new section where the slab Trelawny laid over Shelley’s casket is in a sloping recess in the ancient city walls (Fig. 8). Never the twain shall meet, although the two inscriptions hint at dialogue: Keats’s bitterness of heart and Shelley’s ‘cor cordium’; Keats’s body as ‘all that was Mortal’, Shelley’s ‘Nothing of him that doth fade’; Keats’s ‘writ in Water’, Shelley’s ‘seachange’; and echoes of Renaissance drama, Ariel’s Song from The Tempest for Shelley, and for Keats a dark echo of Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster’s dying words to his lover’s father: ‘Your memory shall be as foul behind you | As you are living, all your better deeds | Shall be in water writ, but this in marble.’102 The dialogue is teasing, allusive; Victorian devotees longed for something more direct and conclusive, the affirmation of an ideal pattern of reciprocity and union. But the ‘texts’ of the graves, both where they are and what they say, do not assent to this desire. The poets’ mythical union in the grave originates in the commonplace that Adonais is Keats’s ‘monument’—‘the singer and the sung’, 102 Philaster, v. iii. 80–2. See also Oonagh Lahr, ‘Greek Sources of “Writ in Water” ’, and A. J. Woodman, ‘Greek Sources of “Writ in Water”: A Further Note’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 21–2 (1972–3), 17–18; 24 (1975), 12–13.

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Fig. 8 The Graves of Severn and Keats, in William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892)

in Anderson’s formula. Aileen Ward asserts that ‘The first real memorial to Keats was Shelley’s elegy Adonais’, the word ‘real’ seeking to efface or override the prior claim of Keats’s own epitaph.103 This was first published in Procter’s London Magazine obituary in April 1821, and reprinted in other papers: ‘[T]here should be no mention of his name or country; “or if any,” said he, “let it be—Here lies the body of one whose name was writ in water!” ’104 It is true, however, that Adonais was published, and Shelley dead and buried, before Keats’s gravestone was in place. Severn began sketching ideas for Keats’s stone in spring 1821, and soon settled on the icon of the unstrung lyre, but the project was delayed by liaison with Brown, and by the real difficulty of fulfilling Keats’s last wishes without seeming to accept the justice of the epitaph. Severn had not executed Brown’s final draft for Keats’s inscription when Trelawny arrived in Rome in March 1823. He made a bid for Keats, too; when Severn asked his advice, Trelawny proposed: ‘Here lies the spoils | of a | young English poet | “Whose master’s hand is cold, whose silver lyre 103

John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963), 406.

104

KCH 242.

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unstrung” | And by whose desire is inscribed | “Whose name was writ in water”.’ The ‘silver lyre’, of course, comes from Adonais; as Trelawny told Severn, ‘one would like associating two such master spirits as Shelley & Keats—and it would be a tribute to the former’s feeling & affectionate lament of Adonais. . . . he alone of Poets has made a fit offering to the shrine of your noble friend’s memory—one would wish to mingle their great names more closely together’.105 Trelawny’s phrasing clearly subordinates Keats to Shelley, despite the rhetorical equivalence of their ‘master-spirits’. It is unlikely, however, that Severn rejected it for that reason, since Brown’s final text, which Severn approved, exhibits the influence of the Adonais preface. Keats’s original phrase, plain and reticent, seemed to need no comment. When Severn reported it to Mrs Brawne in February 1821, he remarked ‘You will understand this so well that I will not say a word about it’; but Brown felt differently. Determined though he was to act ‘In obedience to [Keats’s] will’, by having ‘his own words engraven there, and not his name’, he could not help his passionate desire to explain, ‘letting the stranger read the cause of his friend’s placing such words’ there.106 Mrs Brawne, an intimate friend of Keats, might understand his meaning; strangers would not. In Brown’s awkward defensiveness—rhetorically performed in the single breathless sentence of the inscription—there is also guilt at his own absence from Keats’s exile death-bed; it may account for his willingness to adopt Shelley’s construction of Keats as the overwrought victim of critical and political faction. The effect was to frame Keats’s epitaph in Shelley’s rhetoric and to make ‘the Malicious Power of his Enemies’ a permanent feature of his subsequent fame. By carving the stone with ephemeral polemic, by weakening the power of the absent name with the vapid substitute ‘a Young English Poet’, Brown showed less prescience than Keats, or for that matter than Taylor, who advised Severn in August 1821 to let the line ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ stand alone, without name or date, since it ‘tells so much of the story that none need be told . . . I foresee that it will be as clear an indication to posterity as the plainest, every-day inscription that one may find in Westminster Abbey.’107 As with the lines from Ariel’s song, Keats’s epitaph has the 105 106

Adonais, xxxvi. 324; see Gay and Rodd, Protestant Burial-Ground, 19. 107 Gay and Rodd, Protestant Burial-Ground, 18. Severn, 107.

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cardinal virtue of being poetry, proving the author’s genius even as it records his past neglect. Keats’s ‘true’ epitaph endures in spite of his friends’ soul-searching and best intentions.108 Trelawny’s inscription for Shelley is far cannier about the qualities of an effective epitaph. Personal feeling is masked and intensified by Latin: the bare essentials of birth and death dates, and the compressed, evocative ‘cor cordium’ (all that remains of Hunt’s long draft inscription), signifying emotional intensity in both Shelley and those who loved him—though it still misleads visitors as to the heart’s whereabouts. Trelawny’s inspired juxtaposition of Hunt’s Latin with the lines from Shakespeare locates Shelley in the canon as an inheritor of both classical and native tradition. Where Brown’s text blusters and blames, Trelawny’s takes Shelley’s greatness as read. Yet the choice of the Tempest quotation also denotes Trelawny’s personal relation with the Shelleys; Mary was touched by the allusion to a shared memory from shortly before her husband’s death, when Trelawny spontaneously quoted Ariel’s song, and ‘dearest Shelley was delighted with the quotation—saying that he wd have it for the motto of his boat’.109 Trelawny’s art of allusion reaches further. He told Mary that the quotation from The Tempest ‘by its double meaning alludes both to the manner of his d—h & his genius’. In Act I, scene ii, Ferdinand recognizes that the ‘ditty’ about his father emanates from a spiritvoice; yet the consolation it suggests is not spiritual but material. The body is made precious—bones turned to coral, eyes to pearls; by association, a magical cloak of lyric covers the details of Shelley’s bodily decomposition—which Trelawny, of all people, knew to have been the reverse of ‘rich and strange’. That phrase figures both the transformative power of Shelley’s poetry, and his own transformation into his poetry; yet the context of the play, which after all is about exile, also intimates the poignancy of Shelley’s final, physical estrangement.110 Concerns that the graves influenced reception are reflected in plans to ‘update’ the memorials. In 1836 Brown expressed deep regret at his Keats text, and Severn drafted revisions, but they could not agree on a new monument; in 1859 Severn again 108 Severn picked up on this in a later idea for revision: ‘Time Having reversed the sentence | His friends and admirers | Now inscribe his name | in Marble | 1859’ (Gay 109 MWSL i. 334. and Rodd, Protestant Burial-Ground, 20). 110 Crabb Robinson complained in 1831 that ‘the lines . . . beautiful as they are, seemed sadly fantastic there’ (HCR I. 390).

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planned to ‘do away with poor Keats’s grave stone, so disrespectful and unjust to his memory’: ‘When this unseemly stone was placed Keats’s memory was cherished by a very few friends, and perhaps his genius known to fewer; but now his fame is world wide . . . this stone has become a downright anomaly.’111 Shelley’s inscription wore better; only for the 1892 centenary did Jane Shelley make an abortive attempt to replace the stone with Edward Onslow Ford’s impractically massive Shelley Memorial.112 Although other memorial ‘signposts’ to the graves were added to the landscape, all attempts to refashion the graves failed or were abandoned; periods of neglect alternated with conservative repairs, limited to cleaning and shoring up foundations. In the end, radical alteration became otiose; however ‘inappropriate’ the Keats inscription, for example, it was what pilgrims expected to find—an icon of Romantic alienation. The texts became hallowed by time and familiarity, and change would have been construed as a slight to the poets’ memories. The primal attachment to the original tomb was a contributory factor; as Severn was worshipped as a living link to the past, the man who witnessed Keats’s death, so the original stones constituted authentic links with the dead, and the inaccessible past.

reparations In 1861 Severn returned to Rome. Writing for an enthusiastic American readership, he estimated ‘the favorable change’ in the poet’s fame: [N]ot as manifested by new editions of his works, or by the contests of publishers about him, or by the way in which most new works are illustrated with quotations from him, or by the fact that some favorite lines of his have passed into proverbs, but by the touching evidence of his silent grave. That grave, which I can remember as once the object of ridicule, has now become the poetic shrine of the world’s pilgrims who care and strive to live in the happy and imaginative region of poetry.113 111

Gay and Rodd, Protestant Burial-Ground, 20. See Stephen White, ‘The Call-Shelley Agreement about Shelley’s and Trelawny’s Graves’, Keats-Shelley Review, 4 (1989), 95–100. 113 Joseph Severn, ‘On the Vicissitudes of Keats’s Fame’, The Atlantic Monthly, 9 (Apr. 1863), 406. 112

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Severn discounts conventional signs of literary popularity in favour of the qualitatively different proof of the silent grave that yet speaks for itself. He leaves us in no doubt about his authority to make this judgement: he was the very first pilgrim to Keats’s grave in 1821— even before Keats was laid in it—and he seems as proud of its progress from obscurity and scorn to mass worship as he is of its occupant. Multiplication of readers, volumes, and quotations may evince Keats’s fame; the grave’s status as a ‘poetic shrine’ is proved by subtraction. Severn relates that visitors do not ‘strew flowers’, but ‘pluck everything that is green and living on the grave of the poet. The Custode tells me, that, notwithstanding all his pains in sowing and planting, he cannot “meet the great consumption”.’114 Severn’s failure to repress a pun on Keats’s fatal illness is a measure of his emotional distance from the cause of his own celebrity, which now gives him a platform for grand gestures: ‘ “Sow and plant twice as much; extend the poet’s domain; for, as it was so scanty during his short life, surely it ought to be afforded to him twofold in his grave”.’ The grave, denuded, almost desecrated by souvenirgatherers demonstrates that there will never be enough ‘Keats’ to satisfy demand. What do the pilgrims believe they are doing by stripping away all ‘that is green and living’? Calling for the poet’s ‘domain’ to reflect his worldwide fame is also a gesture of redress; denied living fame, the poet merits double compensation now: but twofold or manifold, such redress is meaningless to Keats. As Emma Blyton reflects in ‘To the Memory of Keats’ (1858), ‘ ’Tis nought to thee, though thousands weep thy fate, | The praise thou shouldst have had has come too late. | Too late—thy country owns thy promised worth, | For thou art slumbering in the breast of earth!’115 In the 1850s and 1860s, as visitors beat a steady path to the Protestant Cemetery and the poets’ graves became popular subjects for tribute poems, the trope of recuperating neglected exiles persisted. Eliza Ogilvy’s ‘Graves’ (1851) is spoken by a fellow exile travelling restlessly across ‘many isles and continents’, who has knelt at ‘Many stranger graves’ of great artists.116 The act of pilgrimage at these obscure shrines appears as empathetic redress: ‘I have stooped to read some worn-out name, | Of half formed letters, telling 114 Joseph Severn, ‘On the Vicissitudes of Keats’s Fame’, The Atlantic Monthly, 9 (Apr. 1863), 407. 115 Poetical Tributes to the Memories of British Bards, and other poems (1858), 22, 116 ll. 5–8. Poems of Ten Years (1846–1855) (1856), 169.

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underneath | Lay one whom long in spirit I had known, | But never seen in flesh’ (ll. 6–9). The first and foremost of these exiles are Shelley and Keats: I have seen pines o’ershadow Shelley’s urn In Rome’s campagna: I have culled a disc From those abounding daisies whose firm roots Anchor within the melting heart of Keats. (ll. 15–18)

The poets’ unseen physical presence is vital to this encounter. The ashes in Shelley’s ‘o’ershadow[ed]’ grave are recalled by the poetic licence of ‘urn’, while the desire to possess some of Keats’s daisies, suggests by the disconcertingly visceral image of uprooting them from the poet’s very heart, that she wants a piece of him. The drive towards recuperation and reclamation strengthened with time. There were patriotic celebrations of Shelley and Keats as Englishmen abroad, but also calls for literal repatriation.117 The speaker of W. G. Hole’s ‘Keats’s Grave’ complains that ‘This is not home; | You had no part in, sang no song of Rome’.118 The poem seeks to recuperate this alienation, summed up in the gesture of laying English flowers, ‘Faded, alas, from night-long journeying’, on the grave: white, pink, red roses, violets, daisy, cowslips, clover, red poppies, ‘on your grave I lay | From that dear land, how far, how far away!’ Although the campaign for the remains’ return to English soil was abandoned, the project of imaginative repatriation and redress helps us to understand the proliferation of memorial projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ford’s startling sculpture of Shelley as a naked corpse (the pose alluding to Wallis’s 1856 painting, Chatterton [Fig. 2]) raised worshipfully high on an allegorical plinth found a home at University College, Oxford.119 The poem Thomas Hardy wrote in 1920 to raise funds to restore Wentworth Place, Keats’s home in Hampstead, recalls his 1887 visit to the ‘violet-sprinkled spot’ (recorded in ‘At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats’), but the speaker now prefers to think ‘That here, where sang he, more of him | Remains than where he, tuneless, cold, | Passed to the dim’.120 The Wentworth House restoration made a 117 For late-century anxiety about institutionalizing the last remains of Britain’s 118 poetic heritage, see Chs. 7 and 8. New Poems (1907), 13. 119 See David J. Getsy, ‘ “Hard Realism”: the Thanatic Corporeality of Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial’, Visual Culture in Britain, 3:1 (2002), 53–76. 120 ‘At a House in Hampstead Sometime the Dwelling of John Keats’, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922).

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memorial shrine of Keats’s bedroom, grouping around the bed a copy of ‘Severn’s pathetic drawing of Keats upon his death-bed’, Benjamin Haydon’s life-mask, a wreath of myrtle from trees by the grave, and Milnes’s 1849 photograph of the grave.121 As for Shelley, the most idiosyncratic attempt to reconstitute him in England is a volume now in the British Library (Ashley 5022), composed, or confected, by the scholar, bibliophile, and forger Thomas James Wise. The volume consists of the manuscript of Mary Shelley’s 15 August 1822 letter to Maria Gisborne, which narrates the widow’s painful quest for Shelley’s body, together with fragments of the body itself.122 When Wilfred Partington visited Wise in 1919, the volume was the newly completed showpiece of the Ashley collection: ‘a case preserving Mary Shelley’s long account of the shipwreck and cremation of the poet, locks of hair of Shelley and Mary, and some of “his” ashes “snatched . . . from the funeral pyre” ’ (Fig. 9).123 The heavy volume bound in green and red levant morocco, gilded and embossed, presents the locks of hair in inset glass cases inside the rigid front cover, and the ‘ashes’ in an urn-shaped case inside the back cover; the manuscript is bulked out with Wise’s discursive introduction, portrait engravings, and various documents purporting to authenticate the relics. Partington recorded that ‘The few dead cinders seemed unimpressive compared with the moving pathos of Mary Shelley’s living epistle’, and most readers would agree. Yet Ashley 5022 is also a decadent example of a nineteenth-century tradition of memorial objects that transgress boundaries between literary and literal memorials and remains, a booklike container that enshrines textual and physical disjecta membra. The volume is presented as a barely secular reliquary, a sumptuous setting for unique priceless objects hallowed by association. This, at least, is the rhetoric of Wise’s catalogue: ‘The tiny heap of Shelley’s ashes, including fragments of his skull . . . is an object of deep and pathetic attraction, and stands unique as a memorial of one of the greatest of the English

121 The Keats House (Wentworth Place) Hampstead: An Historical and Descriptive Guide (1926), 26. 122 MWS, ‘The Last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including an account of his Shipwreck and Cremation’ (BL, Ashley 5022). 123 Wilfred Partington, Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth (1946), 15.

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Fig. 9 Supposed ashes of Shelley, mounted inside the back cover of Sangorski and Sutcliffe’s red and green morocco binding of ‘The Last Days of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including an account of his Shipwreck and Cremation’, BL MS Ashley 5022

poets.’124 Unfortunately, any ‘deep and pathetic attraction’ depends on the ashes’ unimpugned authenticity, undermined by the forger’s blustering rhetoric and contaminating touch. 124 The Ashley Library: A Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts and Autograph Letters Collected by Thomas James Wise (11 vols., 1924), v. 32. Wise’s catalogue description makes claims for authentication which the documentation cannot sustain.

5

Wordsworth in ‘The Churchyard among the Mountains’ cuckoos and cuckoo-clocks: the living death of fame The accounts from Rydal are alarming. I fear that the great poet is approaching to what will be the commencement of his fame as a poet—For there seems an unwillingness to acknowledge the highest merit in any living man—

In April 1850 Henry Crabb Robinson paradoxically ‘fear[ed]’ the death of his friend the ‘great poet’, yet had to welcome the author’s death that conferred immortal life on the surviving works.1 Robinson recognizes that readers’ tendency to conflate works and man destabilizes contemporary critical valuations, an issue Stephen Gill dramatizes in Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998) as the coexistence of two late-Wordsworths: There was ‘Wordsworth’, the identifying term for an ever-increasing body of poetry and prose, some of which reached back to the end of the previous century . . . But there was also William Wordsworth, Esq., of Rydal Mount, latterly, title-pages proudly announced, ‘D. C. L., Poet Laureate, etc. etc.’. . . . Reviews and articles up to 1850 dealing with ‘Wordsworth’ habitually referred to the Lake District sage in person, as if cherishing his continuing existence among the living.2

Gill usefully differentiates the functions of authorship and publishing from those of public image and celebrity; yet the honorifics after Wordsworth’s name on later title-pages—public office and establishment respectability used as marketing tools—hint that the separation of the two was more rhetorical than actual. 1

HCR ii. 724.

2

Gill, 81.

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Wordsworth’s death on 23 April 1850 should mark the definitive separation of transcendent poetry from ephemeral poet. Coincidental details endorsed death’s canonizing power; 23 April was Shakespeare’s birth- and death-day, an anniversary identifying Wordsworth as the Victorian Shakespeare. Wordsworth’s physiological death may be timed precisely by Isabella Fenwick’s Swiss cuckoo-clock (‘Mr. Wordsworth breathed his last calmly, passing away almost insensibly, exactly at twelve o’clock, while the cuckoo clock was striking the hour’); yet some newspapers and periodicals’ comparative indifference suggested that the ‘immortal’ Wordsworth was long dead.3 Nothing new had appeared since Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842), and some papers identified Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems (1835) as the last significant publication, while his acceptance of the Laureateship on Robert Southey’s death in 1843 was conditional on its being purely honorary. ‘The death of a poet creates an official vacancy—the Laureate Wordsworth has departed. It is an historical fact, but not more; for he had long been withdrawn from the world of active life, and even his pen had forgotten its function.’ The Spectator does not display even conventional grief; it chooses the Saturday of Wordsworth’s funeral to object that he functioned neither as Laureate nor poet, that the ‘death of the poet’ (the creative faculty’s extinction) is old news: ‘[H]is glory was on the shelves: man and public officer, he was unknown to the world—was but “a wandering voice” of the past’, the poet of ‘To the Cuckoo’ (1804).4 The tropaic transmogrification of living writer into living works also suggests the ‘glorious’ poetic soul had passed into a ‘shelved’ body. The Illustrated London News notice was a mere caption to a large engraving of Rydal Mount: [W]e announce the death of William Wordsworth, one of the last and most illustrious of a race of poets now all but extinct . . . Full of years and of honours, the venerable bard has passed from amongst us, to rejoin his illustrious friends and contemporaries, Coleridge and Southey. We have no wish, now that the tomb is about to receive his mortal remains, to submit to the cold analysis of criticism the inspirations of his genius.5 3

Edward Quillinan’s journal, quoted in Memoirs, ii. 506–7. ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 23 (27 Apr. 1850), 385; ‘William Wordsworth’, The Athenaeum, 27 Apr. 1850, 448. 5 ‘Death of the Poet Wordsworth’, The Illustrated London News, 16 (27 Apr. 1850), 296. 4

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Wordsworth’s contemporary relevance is subordinated to his nostalgic but redundant character as a Romantic relic, survivor of an illustrious but defunct ‘race of poets’. Etiquette not emotion restrains the dissecting ‘cold analysis of criticism’ (the ‘inspirations of his genius’ might not survive the examination). The ‘venerable bard’ overstayed his welcome, too long surviving not only ‘contemporaries’, but aftercomers. The late Wordsworth had been enshrined in a temple of fame founded on others’ deaths, as suggested by the poetic death register of the ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ (1835), the lingering voice of the mourner asserting his survival. Of the casualties of the 1820s (Keats, Shelley, Byron), 1830s (Hazlitt, Scott, Crabbe, Lamb, Coleridge, Hemans, Godwin, Landon), and early 1840s (Southey, Campbell), only Rogers, Hunt and Landor survived Wordsworth into the high Victorian age, living fossils in a cabinet of curiosities. One effect of survival was Wordsworth’s anticipation of posterity. Gill’s anecdotes of pilgrimage and relic-gathering—from Elizabeth Barrett’s delight at receiving ‘a slip of green’ from Wordsworth’s garden in 1841, to the ‘two thousand names’ entered in the Visitors Book during the 1840s—are graphic indicators of Wordsworth’s premature immortality: ‘For the first time in English history a writer’s home had become a place of general pilgrimage while its saintly incumbent was still alive.’6 Visiting in 1838, American senator Charles Sumner reported ‘I have seen Wordsworth! How odd it seemed to knock at a neighbour’s door, and inquire, “Where does Mr. Wordsworth live?” Think of rapping at Westminster Abbey, and asking for Mr. Shakespeare, or Mr. Milton!’7 ‘Wordsworth’ signifies first a body of canonical literature, making it incredible not only that Sumner has ‘seen Wordsworth’, but that a ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ is still ‘living’ anywhere. The pilgrim’s comparison with other immortals (mistakenly imagined as residents of Poets’ Corner) tropes Wordsworth as already translated. The Victorian Wordsworth had occupied a liminal position between creative demise and the works’ perpetual life, minimizing his death’s impact, diffusing the border between animation and decay, and suggesting why pilgrims transferred their devotions readily to Wordsworth’s grave in St Oswald’s churchyard, Grasmere. Wordsworth’s grave was an intensely popular ‘shrine’ for actual and 6

Gill, 10, 14, 11.

7

Ibid. 14.

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imaginative pilgrimage, a ‘terminal’ site creating hundreds of representations. Few readers regretted that the Poet Laureate had no public funeral or Poets’ Corner grave, and pilgrims actively celebrated what Joseph John Murphy called ‘his low but honoured grave’, realizing his fantasy of future generations coming from around the world to ‘call the place their spirits’ fatherland’.8 Little attention has been paid to the grave’s strong presence in the post-1850 reception, and Gill does not include it with the factors which ‘began the process of transmitting an image of Wordsworth for posterity—the appearance of The Prelude, the publication of the official biography, and the erection of public monuments’.9 The Prelude (1850) and Dr Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851), entering the public domain in close succession and because of the poet’s departure, profoundly influenced midVictorian reception; but they were also unsatisfactory memorials. While Wordsworth’s continuing presence was sought through houses, landscapes and landmarks, personal effects, manuscripts, and published books, he was uniquely ‘present’ at the grave. The Victorians’ view of the poet’s corpse as a physical link to transcendent genius helps account for their ongoing obsession with his burial-place, as does the country churchyard’s iconic status during the 1840s burial crisis, and the authority found for reforming Anglican churchyards (and discrediting the modern cemetery) in his ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’. Wordsworth’s biographical afterlife is involved with his grave’s iconography, a fertile originary site, place of inspiration and creative renewal for many Victorian poets.

wordsworth’s mortal remains Visiting the Lakes in 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne almost ‘pilfer[ed] some flower or ivy-leaf . . . to be kept as sacred memorials’ from the wrong garden (‘How queer, if we should have carried away ivyleaves and tender recollections from this domicile of a respectable quaker’), but the grave was unmistakable: ‘I plucked some grass and weeds from it; and as he was buried within so few years, they may fairly be thought to have drawn their nutriment from Wordsworth’s 8 ‘The Yews of Borrowdale’ (1855), ll. 10, 27, Sonnets and Other Poems Chiefly 9 Religious (1890), 63. Gill, 28–9.

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mortal remains—and I gathered them from just above his head.’10 The souvenir is not evidence only that I was there, but that Wordsworth was too; it is substantially not associatively Wordsworthian, because something has passed from the poet’s brain to the grass—although the modern reader baulks at Hawthorne’s implication that the sprigs are literal relics of genius. ‘Wordsworth’s mortal remains’ appear uncannily potent, though exploited by the visitor’s activity (‘I plucked . . . I gathered’).11 Yet authority for this materialist reading of spirit may be read in The Prelude’s final lines, where the poem’s ‘lasting inspiration’ is identified as ‘how the mind of man becomes | A thousand times more beautiful than the earth | On which he dwells’, while at the same time being ‘Of substance and of fabric more divine’.12 As Andrew Bennett argues, ‘In admitting the “substance and fabric” of the mind even while transcendentalizing it, Wordsworth opens the way, at the end of the poem on the growth of the poet’s mind, for a singular materiality of mind, the remains of consciousness as not only real but corporeal.’13 Bennett’s suggestion that this conclusion performs the ‘dissolution of the conventional opposition between the mind or soul or spirit as “exalted” and “divine”, as permanent or eternal on the one hand, and the body, “frame or “earth” as temporary or transient on the other’, is especially pertinent in the immediate context of the poet’s death, where the Wordsworthian spirit was sought within a climate of mourning. The poet lived in several houses, but had only one ‘last home’; association consecrated the body’s location, creating an enduringly potent point of contact. The site of Wordsworth’s physical remains influenced constructions of Wordsworth significantly more than Thomas Woolner’s wall tablet in Grasmere Church or Frederick Thrupp’s statue in Westminster Abbey (both 1854)—and more successfully inspired emotional contemplation of his memory. Gill comments that late in the century ‘the Wordsworth who had become a national monument continued to claim readers as a vital force’; many such readers went to the grave, which shared with the poetry the redemptive potential to save Wordsworth from becoming a monumental dead weight. 10

Hawthorne, 166, 169. Hawthorne notes that the ‘grass is quite worn away from the top . . . it looks as if people had stood upon it’ (168). 12 The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805 Text), ed. E. de Selincourt, corr. 13 S. Gill (1970), 241, Bk. xiii. ll. 436, 439–41, 445. Bennett, 97. 11

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Only Richard Monckton Milnes, defending poetry’s honour, thought ‘Wordsworth should have had a public funeral’.14 Isabella Fenwick initially objected to a public monument: ‘[W]hen I think of a monument in Westminster Abbey, and know his feeling and opinion of such things, I do dislike the idea with all my disliking feelings. I never heard him approve much of any memorial excepting for statesmen and warriors . . . Who that has visited, or shall ever visit, his grave in the churchyard among the mountains would wish for any monument?’15 Despite his position as the state incarnation of ‘Poetry’, Wordsworth was not in the public domain like ‘statesmen and warriors’: the grave was complete in its natural simplicity, with a small, plain slate headstone, inscribed only with name and year of death. (Fenwick did, however, contribute to the public subscription for the Poets’ Corner monument.) William Knight later considered Grasmere a ‘fitter resting-place for Wordsworth—a quiet spot amongst the graves of the “statesmen,” in a region imperishably associated with himself—than a corner in Westminster Abbey would have been’, consciously associating Wordsworth with the local ‘statesmen’, the Dales yeomen.16 Wordsworth’s grave represents the epitome of nineteenth-century anti-monumental pastoralism, which valued affective memorials rather than didactic ideal sculpture or epitaphs. The anti-monumental strain is strong in Wordsworth’s poetry; in ‘The Brothers’ and Book 6 of The Excursion (‘The Church-yard among the Mountains’), the unmarked grave is not neglected or forgotten, but intelligible only to local people. This harmony between Wordsworth’s public image, poetics, and grave, made the site appear poetically patterned and intentional: Wordsworth’s material grave fulfilled expectations formed by literary ideals.

‘essay upon epitaphs’ The anti-monumental pastoral tradition had already been boosted by a Wordsworthian text ostensibly committed to monumental commemoration, the ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’.17 Of three linked articles drafted in late 1809 and early 1810, only the first was published in 14 29 Apr. 1850, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (3 vols., 15 1938), ii. 697. Autobiography (2 vols., 1885), ii. 56, 61. 16 The Life of William Wordsworth (3 vols., 1889), iii. 491. 17 ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’, Owen & Smyser, ii. 45–119.

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his lifetime (the other two remained in unrevised manuscript drafts until Grosart’s 1876 edition of the Prose). Initially accessible to the limited readership of Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (22 February 1810), by 1850 the ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’ was well known within Wordsworth’s œuvre. Adapted as a documentary pendant to the first edition of The Excursion (1814), it was reprinted in this context (1820), and thereafter in the Poetical Works (1827; 1832; 1836–7; 1849–50) and Poems (1845). W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser note that variants indicate that Wordsworth reviewed the Essay at every opportunity, although revisions were minor after 1827. At the zenith of Wordsworth’s cultural authority (1835–50), he also gave permission for the Essay to appear in three editions of Joseph Snow’s Lyra Memorialis: Original Epitaphs and Churchyard Thoughts (1845; 1847; 1857). Snow’s book participates in the broader Anglican reform movement, by urging that Romanist and secular motifs in epitaphs and monuments be replaced with ‘pure’ Christian doctrine. Snow was judged to ‘suggest a purer taste and a more impressive style in our churchyard memorials, and by every word and thought to point through the shadow of the tomb to the brightness and light beyond it’; the model texts were ‘Sermons in Stones’.18 Snow coyly acknowledges Wordsworth’s useful authority: ‘The Author avails himself of the opportunity publicly to express his thanks to Mr. Wordsworth for the ready permission accorded to him of enriching this little volume with an Essay which enforces, in language just and elegant, the principles on which Epitaphs should be constructed.’19 Snow’s project, and his re-presentation of Wordsworth’s text, typifies the historical moment in being a reaction against threatening burial and commemoration innovations. The doctrinal purity of churchyard inscriptions was not a burning public issue of the 1840s, unlike closing the city churchyards blamed for cholera outbreaks and other public health outrages, and creating secure, respectable burial-space for the urban populace. Lyra Memorialis represents the Anglican backlash against dissenting, secularizing, and commercializing cemeteries, which deprived parish priests of burial and service fees, weakened authority over parishioners, and gave the bereaved 18 Joseph Snow, Lyra Memorialis: Original Epitaphs and Churchyard Thoughts, in Verse. With an Essay, by William Wordsworth (1847), from ‘Notices of the First 19 Edition’. Snow, Lyra, preface to the 2nd edn., n.p.

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more freedom of choice. The practical Anglican response was to repackage the rustic churchyard as the site of true Christian piety, associated with establishment morals and politics. Wordsworth’s ‘Essay’, written as though there was no mainstream alternative to the consecrated Anglican churchyard (as in 1810 there was not), is appropriated to Snow’s covert agenda discrediting progressive burial and calling the faithful back. The ‘Essay’ proposes not only an epitaphal poetics, but an aesthetics of burial. Thus Wordsworth’s confidence that commemoration evinces an implicitly Christian ‘consciousness of a principle of immortality in the human soul’ allows the approval of ancient, pagan custom. The advantages of classical extramural interment are considered: ‘We might ruminate upon the beauty which the monuments, thus placed, must have borrowed from the surrounding images of nature.’20 Nature’s purpose here is its ‘strong appeals to visible appearances’ and ‘affecting analogies’, ‘of admonitions and heart-stirring remembrances, like a refreshing breeze that comes without warning, or the taste of the waters of an unexpected fountain’.21 The allegorical text is grounded in natural phenomena, which are in turn spiritualized by the text; such ‘suggestions’ gave ‘to the language of the senseless stone a voice enforced and endeared by the benignity of that nature with which it was in unison’. The longing to recover a lost ‘unison’ between nature and language adapts to the conservative, nostalgic ideology of the 1840s: ‘We, in modern times, have lost much of these advantages’; ‘when death is in our thoughts, nothing can make amends for the want of the soothing influences of nature, and for the absence of those types of renovation and decay’. Even in 1810, Wordsworth lamented the inexorability of urban burial and ‘modern’ losses; but by mid-century the lack of ‘the soothing influences of nature’ in burial-places was a high-profile problem; city churchyards lacked nature; cemeteries, as modern institutions, were implicitly against nature. The ‘Essay’ quotes from John Edwards’s poem ‘All Saints Church, Derby’, also looking back to a lost ideal of country burial. Wordsworth judiciously edited out Edwards’s anti-Catholic bias (which Snow would have found sympathetic), suggesting that Wordsworth originally conceived his aesthetic as transcending historical and sectarian contingencies. His famous celebration of 20

Owen & Smyser, ii. 50, 53.

21

Ibid. 54.

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the country churchyard presents an ideal associated with his own grave: A village church-yard, lying as it does in the lap of nature, may indeed be most favourably contrasted with that of a town of crowded population . . . The sensations of pious cheerfulness, which attend the celebration of the sabbath-day in rural places, are profitably chastised by the sight of the graves of kindred and friends, gathered together in that general home towards which the thoughtful yet happy spectators themselves are journeying.22

Though abstractly conceived, the description’s expressive sympathy invited mid-century readers to read it back into late-Wordsworthian mythology. Authoritative statements give way to tender personal experience, ‘sensations of pious cheerfulness’ are tempered by profitable chastisement. Wordsworth’s domestic vision of the dead ‘gathered together in that general home’ was written before his own family plot evolved: for later readers, the ‘village churchyard’ was identifiable as St Oswald’s, lying ‘in the lap of nature’, sanctified by the poet’s thoughts and feelings at the ‘sight of the graves of kindred and friends’, an exemplary text. The lasting appeal of Wordsworth’s plain grassed grave lies partly in its understatement as a monument to past greatness. The overt public memorials tend to didacticism; as Edward Quillinan complained, the Memoirs were ‘poisoned’ by ‘Dr. C. W.’s High Church Dogmatism’, while readers’ responses to The Prelude are policed by the author, and public monuments say more about committees than about Wordsworth.23 By contrast, the grave allows visitors to project onto it their own thoughts and feelings about the poet. Moreover, the natural setting and modest aesthetic realize a Romantic literary convention, in which the poet’s ideal grave is a humble grassy mound, minimally marked because, ‘a great poet’s works are his monument, and every other must be as a molehill beside a pyramid’.24 The antimonumental pastoral tradition accounts for a poem such as the Revd Richard Wilton’s centennial sonnet ‘Gray at Grasmere (1769) and Wordsworth’s Grave (1869)’. Wilton reads St Oswald’s through the very phrases of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’: ‘There, in that “country churchyard” we may hail | The “heaving turf” where a great Poet slumbers.’25 For later poets, the organic 22 23 25

Owen & Smyser, ii. 55–6. 24 Gill, 33. Taylor, Autobiography, ii. 59. Wood-notes and Church-bells (1873), 274, ll. 9–10.

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iconography of Wordsworth’s grave offers a conservative model for creative renewal, drawing inspiration from a seemingly transcendent, eternal tradition. The author of the ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’ has no epitaph: according to Edward Quillinan, ‘[Mary Wordsworth’s] Husband had no wish as to his remains, but that they should rest near those of his kindred in Grasmere Church Yard; and all that the family propose to do is to mark his grave by a plain Headstone, with nothing but the name, William Wordsworth, inscribed on it; feeling that it is not for them, but for the Country, to which his fame belongs, to do him more elaborate honour.’26 While the division between familial and national tribute is sharply drawn, Mary Wordsworth’s decision appears to be influenced by the ‘Essay’s’ advice on commemorating ‘The mighty benefactors of mankind’, who, continuing ‘to be known familiarly to latest posterity, do not stand in need of biographic sketches . . . This is already done by their Works, in the memories of men’: only their ‘naked names, and a grand comprehensive sentiment’ are not unworthy tributes.27 The family’s decision is a tacit acknowledgement here that Wordsworth’s grave was not a purely private site; by reducing the inscription to ‘naked name’, the burden of making meaning shifts to the grave-visitors, who are thrown back onto their own associations. The ‘epitaph’ is transformed into a contemplative text, which allows every visitor to find at the grave a ‘Wordsworth’ of their own imaginative construction. ‘the home of the dead children’ Wordsworth’s grave was exclusively his only between 1850 and 1859 when it also became Mary Wordsworth’s ‘last home’. Wordsworth’s grave is at the heart of an extensive family burialgroup orientated towards the church, so that the visitor’s eye moves between the family headstones and the symbol of Christian community (Fig. 10). The location of Wordsworth’s grave had been determined as early as 4 June 1812, when their 3-year-old daughter Catharine died of an 26

EQ to HCR, 11 May 1850, HCR ii. 730. Owen & Smyser, ii. 57, 61. For Wordsworth’s troubled attempts to compose epitaphs for fellow men of letters, see my ‘Epitaphs, Effusions and Final Memorials: Wordsworth and the Grave of Charles Lamb’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, ns, 118 (Apr. 2002), 49–63. 27

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Fig. 10 John Brandred, ‘Wordsworth’s Grave, Grasmere Church Yard’ (1852)

aneurysm. In the parents’ absence, Dorothy chose the plot in the churchyard adjacent to the parsonage in Grasmere where the family were then living. On 23 June, she wrote to Catherine Clarkson that Catharine ‘lies at the South West corner of the church yard under a tall and beautiful hawthorn which stands in the wall. It is visible from Robert Newton’s cottage, and you, my beloved friend, I daresay have often looked at [it]. We have put a small headstone to mark her grave.’28 The scriptural text chosen was traditional for children’s graves: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God’ (Mark 10: 14). When 6-yearold Thomas died from measles on 1 December the same year, Wordsworth chose a separate plot (not standard practice for childburials) and composed the epitaph, ‘Six months to six years added he remain’d’, which Mary recalled ‘it took him years to produce’ (an exaggeration: Dorothy noted on 10 October 1813 that ‘I brought the

28

WL iii. 33.

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measure of the Darling’s tombstone, and William was to have written out the two texts and sent them to me, but it is not done’):29 Here lieth the body of Thomas, the son of William and Mary Wordsworth. He died on the 1st of December, A.D. 1812. Six months to six years added he remain’d Upon this sinful earth, by sin unstain’d, O, blessed Lord, whose mercy then remov’d A child that every eye that look’d on lov’d, Support us; teach us calmly to resign What we possess’d and now is wholly Thine.

The verse reads as a meditation on Catharine’s text, a dialogue between Christ’s tender authority and the bereaved asking for God’s support. The text is carefully patterned: six lines formally recall the six years and six months of Thomas’s age, there is gravity in the counterpointed ‘sinful earth’ and ‘sin unstain’d’, while the first four rhymes (all verbs) express the epitaph’s tension between loss and acceptance (remain’d, unstain’d, remov’d, lov’d), resolved by the last couplet’s submission (resign, Thine). Commentators have questioned why Wordsworth wrote a poem about Catharine—‘Surprised by Joy’ (1813)—but not Thomas, whose death profoundly affected him.30 As an obsessive reviser for whom texts were only ever provisionally ‘finished’, composing epitaphs to be carved in stone was demanding, and his own Essay’s admonitions of grave-inscriptions’ permanence, made barely two years before, must have come back to haunt him: The very form and substance of the monument which has received the inscription, and the appearance of the letters, testifying with what a slow and laborious hand they must have been engraven, might seem to reproach the author who had given way upon this occasion to transports of mind, or to quick turns of conflicting passion; though the same might constitute the life and beauty of a funeral oration or elegiac poem.31

Wordsworth’s imaginative identification with the slow deliberation of engraving on stone is profound, the very letters ‘testify’ to their 29 The Letters of Mary Wordsworth 1800–1855, ed. Mary E. Burton (1958), 88; WL iii. 128. 30 e.g., Mary Moorman, ‘Wordsworth and His Children’, in J. Wordsworth (ed.), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John Alban Finch (1970), 123. 31 Owen & Smyser, ii. 60.

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serious intention. The sudden insights and powerful feelings that are the raw stuff of elegiac poetry are actually antipathetic to the epitaph. Read in the context of St Oswald’s, Thomas’s epitaph is a ‘testamentary act’ of sacramental earnestness; whereas in the Poetical Works (1849–50) ‘Surprised by Joy’ is amongst the ‘Miscellaneous Sonnets’, Thomas’s epitaph is placed with the ‘Epitaphs’. Although the proximity of these traumatic ‘memorials’ to the parsonage caused the move to Rydal Mount, on 12 January 1813, Wordsworth was able to look ahead: ‘Brother and Sister now rest side [by side] in Grasmere Churchyard where we hope that our dust will one day mingle with theirs’; on 1 February Dorothy reflected that while coming to church at Grasmere ‘will be like coming to the home of the dead Children . . . to be entirely removed from them would be a source of lingering regret, and we all wish that our Bodies may lie beside theirs’.32 Wordsworth carefully monitored the churchyard’s evolving landscape, and in 1819 used Sir George Beaumont’s money to plant eight young yew trees. He recalled this regenerative act with some pride in 1843: ‘Having said much of the injury done in this Church-yard let me add that one is at liberty to look forward to a time when by the growth of the Yew Trees, thriving there, a solemnity will be spread over the place that will in some degree make amends for the old simple character which has already been so much encroached upon & will be still more every year.’33 He also protested when an incongruously large obelisk was raised overshadowing the children’s graves; although the owner refused to remove the monument, it providentially collapsed during a storm and was not replaced.34 The yews grew, as did the posthumous family. Wordsworth’s inscription for the grave of Sara Hutchinson, who died in 1835, emphasizes this when it states: Near the graves of two young children, removed from a family to which through life she was devoted, here lies the body of Sarah Hutchinson, the beloved sister and faithful friend of mourners who have caused this stone to be erected with an earnest wish that their own remains may be laid by her side, and a humble hope that through Christ they may together be made partakers of the same blessed resurrection. She was born at Penrith 1st January, 1775, and died at Rydal 23rd June, 1835. 32

WL iii. 69, 78. W. Wordsworth, The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. J. Curtis 34 (1993), 84. See WL iv. 532. 33

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The inscription constitutes a testament carved in stone, a plea to surviving family-members that the aging ‘mourners’—William, Mary, and Dorothy—should lie together, near Catharine and Thomas. Every death strengthened the complex emotional ties between living and dead, and by the late 1840s the dead family was a formidable presence, entirely occupying the south-west corner of the churchyard. The pressure on space was such that in choosing Dora’s grave in July 1847, Wordsworth also had to reserve space for his and Mary’s plot. On Hartley Coleridge’s death in January 1849, the elderly poet acted in loco parentis and selected his grave close by, reminding the sexton to ‘Keep the ground for us,—we are old people, and it cannot be for long.’35 Wordsworth’s thirty-eight-year proprietorial, emotional, and imaginative engagement with St Oswald’s helped to guarantee his desired grave. It is a sustained and deliberate ‘testamentary act’, in Millgate’s phrase, the shaping of a defined posthumous family identity, in which Wordsworth’s public status as Poet Laureate was minimized, within a country churchyard guaranteed preservation by the historic importance of the Wordsworth circle. Yet ironically Wordsworth’s aim of creating a private grave protected from public curiosity by the familial and local context, and Grasmere’s geographical remoteness, was undone not only by the insatiable nineteenth-century appetite for biography, and the rise of mass tourism in the latter half of the century, but also because the churchyard grave can be read as an overdetermined and authoritative Wordsworthian text: it is ‘The Church-Yard in the Mountains’ of The Excursion.36 ‘memorial verses’ The earliest representations of Wordsworth’s grave are in elegiac poems by family friends. Matthew Arnold’s ‘Memorial Verses. April 27, 1850’, which appeared signed ‘A’ in the June Fraser’s Magazine, is still the best-known tribute poem.37 It belongs to the genre of critical elegy or ‘tombeau’, which Arnold facetiously described in a May 1850 letter to Clough as ‘dirg[ing] W. W. in the grand style’; 35

Poems by Hartley Coleridge (2 vols., 1851), i. p. cciii. See John Strachan, ‘Wordsworth’s Memorials: A New Letter by Edward Quillinan’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, ns 109 (Jan. 2000), 2–4. 37 ‘A.’, ‘Memorial Verses. April 27, 1850’, Fraser’s, 41 (1850), 630. 36

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however, Arnold’s attendance at Wordsworth’s funeral (hence the title date) gives a more than conventional force to references to the burial-place.38 ‘Memorial Verses’ begins and ends with the grave’s literary significance. In the opening stanza the grave figures as terminal and silencing: after the deaths of Goethe and Byron, ‘The last poetic voice is dumb. | We stand to-day at Wordsworth’s tomb.’39 By contextualizing Wordsworth’s death with Goethe’s and Byron’s, Arnold extends the poem’s reach chronologically and geographically; just as by using the first-person plural he speaks also for the nation, or humanity. This economically indicates a series of losses in which the latest is terminal, and poetry appears dead (suggested by the dumb/tomb half-rhyme). After the earlier poets’ shocking impact—Byron’s ‘fount of fiery life’, Goethe’s apocalyptic message ‘The end is everywhere, | Art still has truth, take refuge there!’— Wordsworth appears as a ‘soothing voice’ with irreplaceable ‘healing power’, which continues to speak: Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, O Rotha, with thy living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.40

In contrast to the earlier conventional and general formula ‘tomb’, this grave is specific, organic, and vital. The elegiac convention of pathetic fallacy is particularized in the River Rothay, which skirts the churchyard’s edge. Thus although Wordsworth is ‘gone’, his sympathy with nature is projected in the river’s ‘song’; the continuing voice is still Wordsworthian. By reading the beneficial effects of Wordsworth’s poetry from the gravesite, Arnold sets a precedent for self-reflexive interpretations of the grave, poet’s grave as poem. Contemporaneous, though unpublished until the 1870s, is Eliza Fletcher’s ‘Thoughts on Leaving Grasmere Churchyard, April 27, 1850, After the Funeral of William Wordsworth’. While Fletcher’s abstract ‘thoughts’ ascend to Wordsworth’s moral and spiritual teaching, they grow from personal experience: ‘We saw him laid within the quiet grave, | Near to the yew he planted’ and contemplation of nature’s debt to her departed poet: ‘All Nature glowed 38 MA to A. H. Clough [May 1850], The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (3 vols., 1996), i. 172. On ‘tombeaux’ see Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet (1981), ch. 6. 39 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth and Miriam Allott (1979), 239, 40 ll. 4–5. ‘Memorial Verses’, ll. 13, 27–8, 34, 63, 71–5.

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instinct with tender love | For him, her fervent worshipper.’41 The poem re-enacts remembered grave-meditation, emotionally heightened in the funeral context so that even the birdsong seems to ‘welcome him to his last home’. By the time Arnold’s ‘Memorial Verses’ was published in June, Wordsworth’s grave was established in public commemorations. A ‘Sonnet on the Death of Wordsworth’ by ‘H.M.R.’ printed in The Spectator on 25 May had fixed the grave as the focal point of the Westmoreland landscape: ‘Beneath the solemn shadow he doth sleep | Of his own mountains! closed the poet’s eyes | To all earth’s beauty—wood, and lake, and skies.’42 Through quotation and allusion the second quatrain describes the scenery not just as consummately Wordsworthian, but as the poet’s own text, while the sestet addresses directly the poet’s departed spirit, refusing to distinguish between physical landscape and literary representation: ‘These, Wordsworth! thou has left’, to celebrate the ‘immortal train’ of ‘deep human sympathies’ (ll. 9–11). By this logic the breeze is heard as ‘a rich undying strain’, the poet’s song continuing through ‘his own mountains’: the grave is the foundation of the sonnet’s unifying conceit, the focal point of a memorial dispersed across an entire region.

wordsworth’s posthumous poem The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem; By William Wordsworth was the first substantial official publication issuing from Wordsworth’s death; the poem was on sale by 27 July, exactly three months after the funeral, giving Wordsworth first say. Millgate draws a persuasive comparison between Thomas Hardy ghost-writing his own ‘Life’ for posthumous publication, and Wordsworth deferring The Prelude; these differently disingenuous autobiographies each adopts the character of ‘a projective “testament” d’outre-tombe, a final uninterruptible and unanswerable contribution to that long dialogue between himself and his critics in which strategic and tactical advantage had seemed always to belong 41 Autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher with Letters and Other Family Memorials: Edited by the Survivor of her Family [Lady] Mary Richardson (1875), 284, ll. 1–2, 6–7. 42 ‘Sonnet on the Death of Wordsworth’, The Spectator, 23 (25 May 1850), 494, ll. 1–3.

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to [the critics]’.43 Reviews indicate the strategy’s success, at least in the short term: as a verse autobiography—fusing works and man— The Prelude was indeed ‘unanswerable’; its monumental scale alone asserted authorial resistance to superficial assimilation. The Prelude’s deliberate posthumous publication set a trend, famously followed by Carlyle’s Reminiscences (1881) and Trollope’s Autobiography (1883), for having the last word. Some early readers explicitly interpreted the poem as posthumous, a Wordsworthian utterance sanctified by its author’s demise, but also raising questions of whether the poem was an adequate substitute or memorial. In May 1850 Crabb Robinson’s correspondent Catherine Buck Clarkson felt an urgent subjective involvement both in the poet’s death and the Prelude’s publication, indeed she could scarcely distinguish one from the other: ‘I could half fancy that people in general have felt the Solemnity of Wordsworth’s death as I did nor will the feeling with me ever pass away. I shall never feel exactly as I did before—I hope that the Poem on his own Life will be got out as soon as possible lest I should not live to see it.’44 Clarkson’s vocabulary is strangely permeated with death motifs and unconscious puns, from the passing away of feelings to fears of her own demise; her impatience is caused by hoping that in ‘the Poem on his own Life’ Wordsworth left an intelligible spiritual ‘message’ for later generations. Early reviews consistently read the fourteen-book Prelude through the lens of Wordsworth’s recent death. Fraser’s Magazine secreted the title and publication details in a footnote, and headed the review ‘Wordsworth’s Posthumous Poem’: The recent death of the illustrious poet of Rydal Mount has fixed public expectation upon a work which is well known to have been long written by Mr. Wordsworth. The poem, although it had been read, at least partially, to some of his most intimate friends, was, by reason of the personal details and revelations which constituted its peculiarity, and now form its paramount interest, reserved by Mr. Wordsworth for publication after his decease.45

The motif of ‘recent death’ fixing readers’ expectations applies broadly to death’s role in setting the terms of The Prelude’s reception. The transfer of ‘public expectation’ from the ‘illustrious poet’ to the work released by death is dramatized, privileging autobiographical revelation. Although primitive curiosity is then recast as an intensifi43 45

44 Millgate, 186–7. HCR ii. 732. ‘Wordsworth’s Posthumous Poem’, Fraser’s, 42 (Aug. 1850), 119.

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cation of ‘The deep interest which attaches to every production of Mr. Wordsworth’s genius’, the autobiographical imperative overshadows poetical and critical attributes. Fraser’s gives a chronological digest of life-events through quotations, culminating in a eulogaic summary of the poet’s life and works, employing the ‘raised’ discourse of obituary: [T]his remarkable production of the great poet who, full of years and of earthly honours, has been recently called to the presence of Him whose glory was ever paramount in his thoughts, and by whose Spirit his own was strengthened and sustained in the highest flights of his genius. All that was mortal of the illustrious dead now reposes amidst the beauty which inspired his living strains, and which, by association with his name, acquires a touching interest as endurable as the hills which he so long ‘looked upon with tenderness,’ and the streams which he loved.46

The ‘illustrious’ poet’s recent death inhibits critical analysis: hence the hyperbolic but vague description ‘this remarkable production’, conventional sentiment and phrasing, and the retreat to biographical vagueness. Although the reviewer invokes Wordsworth’s transcendent ‘[s]pirit’, the body ‘repos[ing]’ in the landscape that inspired him is crucial to his rhetorical strategy. The sacred ‘mortal remains’ are cited tactically, justifying the evasion of the reviewer’s duty to engage with the work’s purpose, method and artistic success: the (euphemized) corpse asserts a noli me tangere prohibition against analysing the corpus. As in H.M.R.’s ‘Sonnet’, the landscape around the grave is transformed by its ‘endurable’ (in the rare sense of enduring) Wordsworthian associations; the allusion to ‘To Joanna’, one of the ‘Poems on the Naming of Places’, inscribes the entire scene as a dispersed Wordsworthian memorial.47 The Prelude is ostensibly the subject, but the reviewer takes flight to the more legible posthumous Wordsworthian text, the grave. Reviewers who did engage critically with The Prelude were under pressure to read the final work as an authoritative crowning achievement; a critical myth reflected in the editorial orthodoxy of taking the last edition revised during the author’s lifetime as an authoritative text (as in the designation of Whitman’s 1892 revision of Leaves of Grass as the ‘death-bed edition’). This destabilizing influence on 46

Ibid. 129. City-bred Joanna is ‘slow to meet the sympathies of them | Who look upon the hills with tenderness’. WWP i. 445, ll. 6–7. 47

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reception was exacerbated by the disjunction between the Wordsworth who had just died, and the poem’s author. As R. H. Brabant commented to Crabb Robinson, ‘It will serve somewhat to lighten the gloom which thousands feel at England’s loss of . . . her greatest poet . . . that [Wordsworth] has left as a bequest—so large a specimen of his powers in their vigour.’48 Such a ‘specimen’ had arguably not appeared since The Excursion (1814): the advertisement to Moxon’s first edition of The Prelude carefully described it as ‘commenced in the beginning of the year 1799, and completed in the summer of 1805’, masking the substantial later revisions.49 This work of a writer theoretically unrecognizable as the late-career seer of Rydal resists assimilation to a memorial discourse dedicated to ‘the great poet . . . full of years and of earthly honours’. Gill suggests that ‘The Prelude was absorbed without damaging shock to the prevailing image of the lately dead, great poet’: this easy assimilation might also be read as a sign of the active frustration of readers’ desires for revelation.50 Reviews often quoted the poem’s opening and closing passages as prophecies of Wordsworth’s late-career fame now realized. The overdetermined image of Wordsworth as a religious poet by 1850 gave a marvellous prescience to Book I’s ‘—to the open fields I told | A prophecy:—poetic numbers came | Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe | A renovated spirit singled out, | Such hope was mine, for holy services’.51 The prophetic note is reiterated after the ‘proof’ of the main body of the poem. The short concluding book culminates in a confiding direct address to the then merely absent Coleridge, hoping he will soon be ‘Restored to us, in renovated health’, whereupon ‘we may draw | Some pleasure from this Offering of my love’.52 By 1850 this was the dead speaking to the dead, and readers knew that hopes for Coleridge’s renovation had tragically failed, as had the confident prediction that after only ‘a few short years of useful life . . . | Thy monument of glory will be raised’ (xiv. 430, 432). However, the failures of Coleridge’s life and art are muted in the 48

HCR ii. 753. The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem; By William Wordsworth (1850), p. v. As Sally Bushell notes, ‘The Excursion is frequently treated as an “epitaph” marking the death of Wordsworth’s great poetic years and correspondingly placed as the final chapter of critical texts’ (‘Exempla in The Excursion: The Purpose of the Pastor’s Epitaphic Tales’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, ns 105 50 Gill, 29. (1999), 16). 51 52 Prelude (1850), 5, i. 51–4. Ibid. 371, xiv. 426, 428–9. 49

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concluding affirmation, which dissolves distinctions between speaker and addressee to celebrate ‘what we have learnt to know’ regardless of the world’s scorn or ignorance. The poem’s sustained final sentence speaks to the future, which now listens: ‘Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak | A lasting inspiration’, ‘we will teach them how, | Instruct them how the mind of man becomes | A thousand times more beautiful’ (ll. 444–5, 447–9). The prophecy (triumphantly quoted in Fraser’s) appeared gloriously confirmed for the poem’s first readers, holding in their hands the physical embodiment of a ‘lasting inspiration’, that advised them of the divinity of ‘the mind of Man’, revealed in The Prelude and confirmed by the popular adulation of Wordsworth.53

MEMOIRS:

the laureate in a shovel hat

Alan G. Hill comments that Wordsworth ‘had always been opposed to biographies of poets, believing, as stated in the Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns (1816), that “if their works be good, they contain within themselves all that is necessary to their being comprehended and relished”’.54 Christopher Wordsworth recalled that ‘Mr. Wordsworth, in a way very earnest, and to me very impressive and remarkable, disclaimed all value for, all concern about, posthumous fame’; Mary wrote to her son in 1850 that ‘to you who have so often heard him speak so strongly on the subject, I need not repeat that he thought an Author’s—especially a Poet’s works, were the only biography the world had any right to call for’; Quillinan too recalled Fenwick’s confidence that ‘Mr W. did not wish for a full biography in the fashion of the times . . . he even detested the idea of it as a vehicle of impertinence.’55 However, monitoring the posthumous biographies of friends such as Coleridge and Lamb had forced Wordsworth to confront the inevitability and alarming reality of such posthumous narratives—and the expedience of pre-emptive strike. Wordsworth censored the letters he reluctantly contributed to Thomas Noon Talfourd’s The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life (1837), but his primary concern was the Coleridge industry.56 He urged Coleridge’s executor to halt Thomas de 53 55

54 ‘Wordsworth’s Posthumous Poem’, 129. WL viii. 281 n. 56 Memoirs, ii. 466; WL viii. 286–7; HCR ii. 740. Fenwick, p. x.

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Quincey’s 1834 Tait’s Magazine articles ‘so injurious, unfeeling, and untrue’, and doubted Joseph Cottle’s motives in publishing his Early Recollections; Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1837). These striking examples of the authority lost at death resolved Wordsworth to sabotage Barron Field’s ‘Memoirs of the Life and Poetry of William Wordsworth, with Extracts from his Letters to the Author’; the poet’s 1840 campaign of pedantic corrections and annotations effectively censored Field. This narrow escape, plus Wordsworth’s reluctant decision to prevent piracy by publishing early manuscript poems The Borderers and Guilt and Sorrow (1842), determined him to accept Isabella Fenwick’s help in recording the notes on 350 poems dictated in the first half of 1843, now known as the ‘Fenwick Notes’. Although the Notes had more positive stimulus from family trips to the Duddon and Wye valleys, their primary motive was prophylactic, to prevent a biographical freefor-all. Not published complete until 1975, the Fenwick Notes contributed substantially to the Memoirs’ credibility. With partial estrangement from Edward Quillinan (the first candidate) after Dora’s death, Wordsworth had in November 1847 shifted the responsibility to his nephew Dr Christopher Wordsworth, then Canon of Westminster, to write ‘such a brief memoir to be published with his Biographical Poem (after his death) as might be necessary to illustrate his Works’.57 Friends had reservations about Christopher; he knew little about his uncle’s poetry, and was a noted anti-Catholic; Crabb Robinson feared he would ‘try to make W: appear as a Puseyite’.58 Yet he was in other respects an apt instrument for Wordsworth’s damage-limitation project. He had the moral credentials of a prominent Churchman and prolific theological author, and a vested interest in protecting family privacy; Wordsworth was also satisfied that they shared a negative view of authorial biography: what better safeguard than appointing a biographer who disapproved of biography? Wordsworth envisaged the biographical notes only as integrated with The Prelude; indeed, forestalling family disputes about his intentions, Wordsworth recorded his nephew’s authority and the notes’ dependent character in two testamentary memoranda: ‘my nephew Dr Chr Wordsworth has kindly undertaken . . . to prepare 57

WL viii. 286.

58

Ibid. 281 n.

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for publication any notices of my life that may be deemed necessary to illustrate my writings . . . my family Executors & Friends may furnish him with any information or memorandums that they may possess which he may think useful to aid him in the Work’.59 The request for co-operation suggests an inclusive attitude towards informationgathering, but the project’s scope was soon refined to ‘brief personal notices . . . to be attached to my writings’.60 The principles of illustration and attachment figure the notes as subordinate commentary; however the authorized editor broke the contract by designing the Memoirs as a separate publication, even intending at one point to publish with his own publisher (John Murray), not Moxon. Mary tried to reassure her son that ‘I do think Chris is the most amiable Creature I ever had to deal with’, but her anxiety was palpable: [D]epend upon it he will not act in any way contrary to our wishes and judgement—and he has a tender regard for my feelings, and for the world will not go contrary to them, when my mind is convinced.—But I confess I have been harassed by the thoughts of aught being settled contrary to the Will of yr beloved Father—and as he used to say, the considerations of the 3 last days have added some nails to my coffin.61

Mary’s emphatic ‘confession’ identifies the nub of her conflicted feelings: going ‘contrary to the Will of yr beloved Father’. Her invocation of Wordsworth’s vernacular saying is fond but also propitiatory, as though asking permission to go against his ‘Will’. Christopher Wordsworth’s counter-argument that ‘making a fuller biography of it [will] exclude or invalidate any that may and will come from unauthorised quarters’ was in the spirit but violated the letter of the original contract: nails in Wordsworth’s coffin. As the committees gathering subscriptions for material monuments were similarly dividing into factions, Christopher Wordsworth worked with zealous expedition to publish the Memoirs on the first anniversary of the poet’s death: Issued from a familiar publishing house, the two-volume Memoirs told their story with a massive display of authority. Christopher Wordsworth printed an autobiographical memorandum dictated by the poet in his seventyseventh year, quoted from Wordsworth’s previously unpublished commentary on his whole œuvre, referred to and excerpted extensively from unpublished letters and of course emphasized that he was a member of the family writing with its imprimatur.62 59

HCR ii. 728.

60

WL viii. 287 n.

61

Ibid. 285–6.

62

Gill, 32.

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However, this pose masked failings in substance, style, and critical acumen, and while the periodical press treated the book’s appearance as a significant event, and served up potted biographies spiced with quotation, reviewers challenged the biographer’s authority. George Brimley in Fraser’s identified the quotations from Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal and the Fenwick Notes as ‘the only really valuable portion of these two volumes’, drew pointedly on Thomas de Quincey’s ‘Lake Reminiscences’ from Tait’s Magazine (the articles Wordsworth had urged be suppressed) to indicate the paucity of vivid portraits and varied perspectives, and indulged in grumbling asides—‘(in the absence of anything of the sort in Christopher Wordsworth’s volumes)’, ‘(though his nephew seems to know nothing about it)’.63 The Athenaeum characterized the Memoirs as redundant: Of the only active portion of the life of the poet Wordsworth, the record, such as it is, was not long since given to the world by the author himself, in the somewhat unusual form of a posthumous poem, entitled ‘The Prelude.’ In that, and in his other works, indeed, the whole of this author’s uneventful and contemplative life may be said to be written:—written, not only to all intents and purposes, but substantially.64

The identification of the poet’s own ‘record’ as the authentic biographical text echoes Brimley’s privileging of quoted primary documents. The biographer’s justification of his work as simply ‘“a biographical commentary on the Poet’s works”’, is discounted as disingenuous because ‘Within these modest bounds the work before us is especially limited’. The Athenaeum’s reviewer was more polite than Brimley, characterizing the Memoirs’ failures impersonally: ‘there is nothing to commend in these volumes on the score of critical acumen’ and ‘unquestioning . . . reverence . . . constitutes the key-note of the whole production’. Displacing volition from the writer to the work reduces the number of direct attacks on Christopher Wordsworth, and comments on the book’s central problem: where the biographer should discreetly facilitate the telling of his subject’s story, the Memoirs say more about the biographer than his subject. Brimley criticizes Christopher Wordsworth’s failure to discriminate between his uncle and himself, uncovering a plot ‘to stamp 63

George Brimley, ‘Wordsworth. Part II’, Fraser’s, 44 (July 1851), 186, 188. ‘Memoirs of William Wordsworth, Poet-Laureate, D. C. L.’, The Athenaeum, 26 Apr. 1851, 445. 64

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upon its subject those peculiar religious, and political opinions which belong to the biographer’: the Canon has sought to: ‘[P]ersuade the world that this uncle was altogether such an one as himself, contemptuously indifferent to the whole secular life of his times, with its grand results, and grander hopes, and that the laurel crown which glistened greenly amid his silver locks, was, after all, nothing more than a shovel hat.’65 Christopher Wordsworth was not purposely disingenuous, but lacking in imaginative sympathy: hence Brimley’s debunking metamorphosis of the bardic laurel crown into the puritan’s grim ‘shovel hat’, warning readers wishing to discover one Wordsworth that they would find another. The reviews agree ‘these are two ponderous and unattractive volumes’, a textual monument imposed on its subject, not restoring him to life; the poet’s opinions ‘belonged to a living, thinking man, and this man is not given us in the book’.66 Yet Wordsworth’s intentions in appointing his nephew to write the book he did not want written, were adequately fulfilled; Brimley complains, ‘Dr. Christopher Wordsworth may say that he has not professed to write a life of his uncle—granted; but he has filled two octavos with matter that might have gone to the writing of his life, and has thereby played dog in the manger as regards any one else who may wish to write it.’ Although Mary Wordsworth and Quillinan were aghast at the book, they understood its obstructive value; following biographers trod in their predecessor’s footsteps, dependent on the Memoirs’ extracts from unpublished manuscripts, and lacking the primary resources to differ from the family orthodoxy. The Memoirs’ failure as an imaginative memorial contributed indirectly to readers’ quest for more satisfactory points of contact; it also disseminated the biographical significance of St Oswald’s churchyard. Christopher Wordsworth quotes largely from the Fenwick Notes on the ‘Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart.’ (1842), describing Wordsworth’s careful preparations for planting the yew trees in 1819, their protection with ‘a substantial oak fence’, and the churchyard’s improved landscape: The whole eight are now thriving, and are an ornament to a place which, during late years, has lost much of its rustic simplicity by the introduction of iron palisades, to fence off family burying-grounds, and by numerous 65

Brimley, ‘Wordsworth. Part II’, 198. ‘Memoirs of William Wordsworth (Second Notice)’, The Athenaeum, 3 May 1851, 477; Brimley, ibid. 66

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monuments, some of them in very bad taste, from which this place of burial was in my memory quite free: see the lines in the sixth book of ‘The Excursion,’ beginning, ‘Green is the Church-yard.’67

Wordsworth’s present-tense utterance alters in tone by translation from manuscript to the Memoirs. Wordsworth had checked Isabella Fenwick’s dictation carefully for accuracy, but it is uncertain whether he envisaged being quoted verbatim; there may have been some expectation that informal notes would be recast in the third-person for posterity, or synthesized into a coherent narrative. Christopher Wordsworth’s deference to the poet’s recorded words is in some respects valuable; but when recontextualized and hitched to the biographer’s own misconceptions, the authority of the dead poet is in danger of licensing the reduction of poetry into mere illustrations from a fictive life. Wordsworth directly addresses the reader, encouraging him/her to find or recall that particular passage of The Excursion; indeed, the dead poet appears to invoke his own poetry as an authority for the contested ideal of the rustic churchyard. Truth lies in the past; more particularly, the ‘true’ St Oswald’s churchyard belongs to the past documented in his own poem. Essentially a revisiting of the primary grave-interpretation scene of ‘The Brothers’ (1800), the lines alluded to from Book 6 of The Excursion are addressed by the Pastor to the Wanderer, describing a verdant churchyard where the graves are not monumentally marked, but organic traces meaningful only to the initiated eye and the susceptible heart, ‘Ridge rising gently by the side of ridge, | A heaving surface, almost wholly free | From interruption of sepulchral stones’. No memorials, no epitaphs. The graves are: . . . mantled o’er with aboriginal turf And everlasting flowers. These Dalesmen trust The lingering gleam of their departed lives To oral record, and the silent heart; Depositories faithful and more kind Than fondest epitaph: for, if those fail, What boots the sculptured tomb?68

In fact, the ‘inscriptions’ endure in the intangible form of ‘oral record, and the silent heart’, and the absence of epitaphs is a positive virtue. The epithet ‘aboriginal’ (native or indigenous) suggests a 67 68

Memoirs, i. 377–8. The notes are regularized; for original see Fenwick, 65–6. WWP ii. 202–3, ll. 6–8, 609–15.

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transcendent primal nature that is also specific and local; the flowers also are ‘everlasting’. However, the invisible memorial text, recording individual dead ‘Dalesmen’ in communal memory, depends on Wordsworth’s authoritative text to interpret the churchyard’s affective iconography, virtually erasing the already doubtful distinction between the authorial voice and that of his mouthpiece, the Pastor. This typifies the Memoirs’ role in the mid-Victorian overdetermination of Wordsworth’s grave as an authoritative and authentic Wordsworthian text. The Memoirs also details the churchyard’s strong associations with family bereavement, and even Christopher Wordsworth’s attempt to narrate Catharine and Thomas’s deaths as pious exempla in a religious tract—Thomas’s ‘pleasure was to go to Grasmere Churchyard, and sweep the leaves from his sister’s grave’ before ‘he, too, was unexpectedly taken away’—does not undermine the churchyard’s clear significance as a Wordsworthian affective text.69 The Memoirs set another precedent for later biographers, by concluding at the grave. The description of Wordsworth’s grave that ends the Memoirs’ second volume goes far beyond factual signs of closure: it refigures the terminal site of William Wordsworth’s life (and Christopher Wordsworth’s ‘Life’) as a place of spiritual renovation, a conduit to eternal life: His own prophecy, in the lines, ‘Sweet flower! belike one day to have A place upon thy Poet’s grave, I welcome thee once more,’ is now fulfilled. He desired no splendid tomb in a public mausoleum. He reposes, according to his own wish, beneath the green turf, among the dalesmen of Grasmere, under the sycamores and yews of a country churchyard, by the side of a beautiful stream, amid the mountains which he loved; and a solemn voice seems to breathe from his grave, which blends its tones in sweet and holy harmony with the accents of his poetry, speaking the language of humility and love, of adoration and faith, and preparing the soul, by a religious exercise of the kindly affections, and by a devout contemplation of natural beauty, for translation to a purer, and nobler, and more glorious state of existence, and for a fruition of heavenly felicity.70

Wordsworth’s own verse is appropriated as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as though the poet had composed the narrative of his own existence; 69

Memoirs, i. 379–80.

70

Ibid. ii. 507.

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whereas ‘To the Daisy’ (1805), Wordsworth’s elegy on his brother John Wordsworth’s death at sea, yearns for a likeness between his brother’s actual grave and his own future burial-place—it ends ‘And Thou, sweet Flower, shalt sleep and wake | Upon his senseless grave’—the quotation exclusively asserts the poet’s individual genius.71 The humble daisy-marked grave is consummately Wordsworthian, opposed to the ‘splendid tomb in a public mausoleum’; yet in the triumphant affirmation that Wordsworth lies ‘according to his own wish’, authoring his own end, Christopher Wordsworth unwittingly imposes a grand monumental construction on the humblest iconography. After the formal third-person narration that dominates the Memoirs, this move into a prophetic vivid present offers the grave as a site of continuing revelation and significance, a life after life. Wordsworth’s authoritative burial-place reflects the heightened curiosity and homage surrounding the poet in the early 1850s, and the ‘country churchyard’ realizes an ideal that originates in poetry but is culturally pervasive. Generic elements (the green turf and yews) are particularized by characteristic Wordsworthian details: the ‘dalesmen of Grasmere’, the articulate stream, and protecting mountains. In the context of the poet’s recent death, The Prelude’s publication, and then the Memoirs, traditional country churchyard iconography was literalized and updated: finally it was possible to visit the ideal poet’s grave in reality. And despite the effort to interpret the ‘solemn voice’ breathing from the grave as that of a sermonizing didacticist urging the Christian contemplative to look forward to ‘a purer, and nobler, and more glorious state of existence’, the grave remained significant as a site of physical presence within a perfectly complementary landscape. When The Athenaeum quoted from this passage, it pointedly stopped at ‘amid the mountains which he loved’, passing tacit judgement on the nephew’s didactic appropriation. The Memoirs’ conclusive grave-pilgrimage can be traced in Edwin Paxton Hood’s 1856 biography, where at the end of a chapter (not the last) the speaker recalls standing in the churchyard and thinking ‘this is the centre of our Poets’ Land’; Hood imagines ‘the rays of his genius’ converging on the grave, which is described (recalling the Memoirs) as ‘the lesson of humanity’.72 The mountains create a natural ‘amphitheatre’ for the grave, where the speaker feels inspired 71

WWP i. 643, ll. 69–70.

72

William Wordsworth (1856), 215–16.

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to ‘chaunt the Poet’s own lines’ from book V of The Excursion.73 The archetypal scene of homage—the admirer reciting the poet’s lines over his grave, like the Wordsworths reciting ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ over Burns’s in 1803—mimics but literalizes the Memoirs’ conclusion, replacing the religiosity of the ‘solemn voice’ with that of the admirer, ‘chaunting’ Wordsworth’s own lines. Hood secularizes the devotional exercises of pilgrimage, substituting aspiration towards the ‘more glorious state of existence’, for the grave itself: ‘And here in the central shrine of the Poet’s Longest Theme, and by the Grave Stone where lie his remains, we close our reminiscences of the Land of Wordsworth.’

public monuments The grave’s memorial pre-eminence is particularly apparent when contrasted with the public memorials erected in Grasmere Church and Westminster Abbey. The lists of committee members and subscribers ‘are roll-calls of a good part of the English establishment, which testify to Wordsworth’s standing in the worlds of Church and State’; Victoria and Albert, the Bishop of London, Members of Parliament, masters of Cambridge colleges, Gladstone, Tennyson, Arnold, and Thackeray.74 They also testify to such projects’ public and political character; subscribers’ names and contributions were published, mixing motives of civic demonstration with establishment ostentation and political manœuvring. Public tributes were antipathetic to, even corrective of the grave’s private, minimal, and local ethos; yet they were also tacitly judged by comparison to it, and found wanting, even anti-Wordsworthian. In December 1850 Dr Davy and Benson Harrison had taken charge of the Grasmere subscription, arguing that local contributors were concerned that their money would be swallowed up by the slow-moving London project.75 In January 1851 the young PreRaphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner (1825–92) was commissioned for the medallion portrait and commemorative tablet for St Oswald’s Church. Despite being a local project, the family had little involvement. According to Quillinan, Mary Wordsworth would not authorize any public memorial: ‘Her heart is at Grasmere, and there 73

WWP ii. 183–4, ll. 922–77.

74

Gill, 36–7.

75

See HCR ii. 773.

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perhaps, a modest monument within the church, wd not displease her’; even when informed about plans for the medallion, her acquiescence could only be inferred: ‘she offered no objection, but rather seemed by the manner of her silence to approve’.76 The memorial, erected in August 1851, is a white marble tablet in the shape of a squat, stylized obelisk, with the poet’s profile in relief on the base section, against a panel of grey marble. The Art Journal described the memorial as: [A]n inscription from the pen of Professor Keble, surrounded by a band of laurel, under which is a bas-relief of the poet’s head. In two narrow squares on each side of the head are introduced the daffodil, the celandine, the snowdrop and violet—a conceit that is but little in harmony with sculpture. The relief has been executed with great care, and the likeness is satisfactory.77

Woolner’s floral motifs have the merit of alluding to well-loved Wordsworth poems, providing a small affective element in an otherwise austere neoclassical design; Woolner had never met the poet, so the portrait was based ‘on a cast of Chantrey’s bust, borrowed from Robinson’, resulting in an uncompromisingly severe profile.78 Keble’s text was not specially commissioned, but a translation of the Latin dedication to his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1839–42), Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae (1844).79 The inscription reads: to the memory of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, a true philosopher and poet, who, by the special gift and calling of ALMIGHTY GOD, whether he discoursed on man or nature, failed not to lift up the heart to holy things, tired not of maintaining the cause of the poor and simple; and so, in perilous times was raised up to be a chief minister, 76

See HCR ii. 768. ‘Tablet to the Memory of Wordsworth in Grasmere Church’, The Art-Journal, Dec. 1851, 327. 78 Frances Blanshard, Portraits of Wordsworth (1959), 103. 79 See Keble’s Lectures on Poetry 1832–1841, trans. E. K. Francis (1912). 77

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not only of noblest poesy but of high and sacred truth. THIS MEMORIAL IS PLACED HERE BY HIS FRIENDS AND NEIGHBOURS, IN TESTIMONY OF RESPECT, AFFECTION, AND GRATITUDE. ANNO MDCCCLI.

Keble’s text is in several senses a ‘translation’: from Latin to English, book to monument, print to carving, dedication to memorialinscription. Although Samuel Johnson had argued that Latin was the most permanent and dignified language for memorial inscriptions, Keble had felt it necessary to justify delivering his Oxford lectures in Latin, at a time when fewer students were fluent in classical languages than ever before, let alone readers of inscriptions in a rural church. Keble’s decision to dedicate the 1844 volume to Wordsworth demonstrates the indebtedness of The Christian Year (1827), his phenomenally popular collection of devotional verse, to Wordsworth, and acknowledges his appointment to the laureateship; the dedication’s adaptation presents Wordsworth as a public figure (supported by the carved ‘band of laurel’), and an Anglican figurehead. The translation from printed dedication to carved inscription is also striking: Keble’s address to the living (‘To William Wordsworth . . .’) becomes ‘To the Memory of . . .’, while his ostentatious use of the modesty topos (‘This tribute, slight though it be, is offered by one of the multitude who feel ever indebted for the immortal treasure of his splendid poems’), is reduced to the functional statement ‘This memorial is placed here by his friends and neighbours’; a modest rider that sits oddly with Keble’s raised and vaunting rhetoric. Most readers would agree that the dedication does not translate well. While Wordsworth’s portrayal as following a ‘calling of | Almighty God’ as ‘Chief Minister’ is apt for the monument’s proximity to the altar (and the family pew), it is uncomfortably close to the Wordsworth of the Memoirs; the text’s pomposity, superfluous negatives and inversions (‘Failed not . . .’, ‘Tired not . . .’), feels out of place in a rustic church. Woolner might have heeded Tennyson’s cautionary example, a parodic epitaph on the Duke of Wellington: ‘—who possessing the greatest military genius which the world etc. won the battles of Waterloo etc. etc. etc. etc.—who was equally great

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in statesmanship as he was etc.’80 Seldom can ‘etc.’ have been used to such devastating effect; substituting the banal abbreviation for the banalities of public inscriptions shows how interchangeable they are, and how the reader’s eye slides over the text. Following Wordsworth’s prescription in the ‘Essay Upon Epitaphs’, Tennyson’s trenchant advice to Woolner was: ‘Is Wordsworth a great poet? Well then don’t let us talk of him as if he were half known. | To the Memory | of | William Wordsworth | The Great Poet. | Even that seems too much but certainly is much better than the other, far nobler in its simplicity.’ The Westminster Abbey competition, a more controversial and protracted project, was also more painful to the family. Quillinan reported: ‘The less we say on the subject of the public testimonial to Mrs W. the better . . . when she does allude to it she always says—a whole length in Westr Abbey corner—just the thing he would have disapproved of!’81 Frederick Thrupp spent three years working on the seated contemplative figure on a pedestal, taking Haydon’s life mask and drawings as sources, before its erection in the Abbey, with much trouble and expense in 1854. ‘[Chr. W] knows also that the Dean & Cr are most anxious to do away with the practice of erecting such memorials in the Abbey, & wd gladly get rid of many that are there. . . . In this particular instance (of W) they could not refuse.’82 Thrupp requested the figure be located not in Poets’ Corner, but in the baptistery, where, The Athenaeum complained, it is ‘literally entombed’: ‘An inapplicable quotation from the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, alluding to the Abbey and not to the poet, is stuck up near. The statue is poetical, but conventional in costume, and the expression not so like as we could wish. The poet is represented seated on a bank,—his head bent, and one leg crossed over the other.’83 Thrupp intended his figure to be realistic; the figure was in ‘his ordinary dress, covered by a plaid, such as he was wont to do’, but this could also be taken for the ubiquitous toga of public statuary.84 The inscription (upon which the poet appears to be brooding intensely) reads:

80 81 83 84

AT to TW, TL ii. 10. The Duke did not die for another 18 months. 82 HCR ii. 751. Ibid. ‘Fine-Art Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 2 Dec. 1854, 1467. Blanshard, Portraits, 105.

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Blessings be with them—and eternal praise Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares— The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! born april 7 1770 died april 23 1850 buried in grasmere churchyard

The text is not in fact from the ‘Ecclesiastical Sonnets’, but the conclusion to ‘Personal Talk’ (1842).85 The extract is decontextualized, and becomes an uncharacteristically generous homage to other poets, which, in conjunction with the contemplative figure, appears as another Wordsworthian prophecy—since he too now is one of ‘The Poets’. The sonnet is less disinterested, presenting the speaker as a peaceful solitary and contemplative, happily away from the world; the extract is followed by an implied justification of the Wordsworthian ideal of the poet: ‘Oh! might my name be numbered among theirs, | Then gladly would I end my mortal days’ (ll. 55–6). The efficacy of the inscription depends on the reader knowing the poem well enough to supply the last two lines from memory, and sigh over the wish’s fulfilment; but as The Athenaeum’s mistake suggests, only a minority could have managed this. The greatest assistance was given to the inscription by Wordsworth’s great-grandson, who appealed for the statue to be moved from obscurity to its current place between similarly bulky figurative monuments to Campbell and Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner (with Southey’s wall-mounted bust over Wordsworth’s head), where at least the inscription addresses its immediate context.86 In quite different ways, Woolner’s and Thrupp’s memorials fall far short of the harmony created between Wordsworth’s public image and his poetics at the grave in St Oswald’s.

at wordsworth’s grave, again Elegists conventionally perform their worship at the grave even if the act of homage is imaginary; returning to Gill’s idea that ‘As the sense of the poet as a living presence faded, Wordsworth became the 85

WWP i. 568, ll. 51–4.

86

See Ch. 7, ‘Shakespeare’s Pen and Dickens’s Will’.

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published work’, in fact literary pilgrims were still visiting and revisiting the grave to conjure up the poet’s spirit decades later.87 Wordsworth’s grave features in many more poems written between 1880 and the turn of the century than in elegies of the 1850s.88 Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley’s sonnet ‘Wordsworth’s Tomb’ documents the now familiar iconography, fusing features of the ideal humble poet’s grave with local specifics: Plain is the stone that marks the Poet’s rest: Not marble worked beneath Italian skies— A grey slate head-stone tells where Wordsworth lies, Cleft from the native hills he loved the best.89

Rawnsley contrasts Wordsworth’s unpretentious slate with the imported Italian marble statuary that upwardly mobile Victorians favoured in their suburban cemeteries; note that the syntax allows us to read Wordsworth, too, as ‘cleft’ from the hills. The daisy-covered turf, the river Rothay’s natural music, and the ‘eloquently terse’ inscription are also praised as native and characteristic. Rawnsley sees himself as working within a Wordsworthian poetic tradition, here linked with pride in local identity and Englishness. Yet ironically the very simplicity of the poet’s grave-inscription stimulates his fancy that an apt public epitaph is added ‘in gold beneath his title’: ‘“Singer of Humble Themes and Noble Thoughts”’ (ll. 13–14). In the 1880s Wordsworth’s grave was adopted as a symbol for conservative poetics, supposedly stable and transcendent aesthetic values opposed to the morbid stylistic and moral excesses attributed to Swinburne and the European influence. Like Arnold’s ‘Memorial Verses’, William Watson’s tombeau ‘Wordsworth’s Grave’ (1884–7) adopts a grave-pilgrimage motif to argue that whereas nature, specifically the ‘Rotha, remember[s] well who slumbers near’, the current poetic generation forget the true Wordsworthian religion, ‘bow[ing] the knee | To misbegotten strange new gods of song’.90 The poem was ‘begun at Rydal in May 1884’, originating in an actual encounter, but was ‘finished rather more than three years later’, suggesting the need to find imaginative autonomy away from 87

Gill, 81. See also William Allingham, ‘W. W. (April 23rd, 1850)’, Life and Phantasy (1889), 68; James Mackereth, ‘In Grasmere Vale’, In Grasmere Vale and Other Poems (1907), 81–90; Arthur J. Munby, ‘Wordsworth’, Vestigia Retrorsum (1891), 24–8. 89 Sonnets at the English Lakes (1882), 62, ll. 1–4. 90 The Poems of Sir William Watson (1936), 226, ll. 3–12. 88

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authoritatively Wordsworthian territory. Watson’s Wordsworth represents ‘fixity’ and ‘faith’, while contemporary readers are ‘faithless’ and ‘vagrant soul[s]’, who must return to the Wordsworthian fold (ll. 9–10, 15–16). The dead poet appears initially in the third person, respected and remote as the ‘mystery’ revealed in his works, before a shift to eulogistic direct address, examining the distinctive genius of the ‘Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave’ (l. 25). The terms of Watson’s celebration of a godlike Wordsworth, the ‘authentic Presence pure’ who made nature sing, are drawn from the grave’s locale, and inspired by the reticent headstone: ‘Enough;—and wisest who from words forbear. | The gentle river rails not as it glides’ (ll. 49, 137–8). Watson, however, cannot emulate the ‘gentle river’, imagining modern poets ‘falter[ing], half-rebuked’ at Nature’s charges of irrelevance and artificiality, and urging a return to ideal communion, performed in the return to real time and place in the closing stanzas: the poet’s grave: ‘And here, at home, still bides he’ (l. 165). ‘Wordsworth’s Grave’ first appeared in the National Review, indicating Wordsworth’s appropriation for a politically as well as poetically conservative agenda; by 1887 J. M. Sutherland celebrated Wordsworth’s death-date as ‘the anniverary of St. George, the patron saint of England, and of Shakespeare’s birth and death’.91 The conviction that Wordsworth’s immortal spirit continued to emanate from the site of his ‘sacred ashes’ reaches one logical conclusion in a sonnet Rawnsley wrote thirty-five years after ‘Wordsworth’s Tomb’. The pacific ‘Singer of Humble Themes and Noble Thought’ is nowhere to be found in ‘At Wordsworth’s Grave’, written in the early months of World War I, and the conclusion to a sequence of 148 sonnets.92 Here the political sonnets provide the inspiration, as Rawnsley compares the German offensive to the Napoleonic threat. The churchyard landscape appears as usual, but the river is transformed to a ‘freeborn stream’. The speaker plays the part of the isolated Wordsworthian contemplative—‘To-day from all the world I go apart’—but demands action instead of reflection, as is suggested by a shift from the earlier respectful third person to direct address: ‘All of yourself that doth immortal seem | Comes from the grave to bear a patriot’s part’ (ll. 3, 5–6). Rawnsley has no time for 91 National Review, 10 (1887–8), 40–5; James Middleton Sutherland, William Wordsworth (1887), 194. 92 Rawnsley, The European War 1914–1915: Poems (1915), 219.

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respectful one-sided dialogue, hectoring his hero and claiming that Wordsworth’s spirit is resurrected by the nation’s demand for ‘brave song-banners’. Boldly invoking the opening to the sonnet ‘London, 1802’ (1807) ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: | England hath need of thee’, the speaker hails the poet, ‘Wordsworth! an empire needs you at this hour’, and demands his libertarian inspiration:93 Oh! turn not, mighty spirit, to your rest, But bid us forth as happy warriors go With freedom’s unimaginable power. (ll. 12–14)

In 1915, Rawnsley was not the only non-combatant churchman gripped by martial fervour, but spirited and daring as the challenge is, the poem testifies uncomfortably to the failures of sensibility possible for one whose love of country and love of God turns any war into a holy war. His wish to enlist even Wordsworth’s peaceful grave in the fight against a ‘second tyrant’ (l. 10) was to suffer a terrible ironic reversal, in the ‘richer dust concealed’ in Rupert Brooke’s ‘corner of a foreign field | That is for ever England’.94 93 94

WWP i. 579. ‘1914, V: The Soldier’, ll. 2–4, The Collected Poems (1987), 316.

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Thomas Hood in the Cemetery

‘for me no great metropolis of the dead’ Criticizing the ‘bad taste and poverty of invention’ of contemporary sepulchral monuments in 1843, an Athenaeum reviewer complained, ‘[T]he smile of pity at mistaken piety, or the laugh of derision at ostentatious pride, are the emotions most frequently excited in visiting a modern cemetery.’1 The writer’s critique of massproduction’s degradation of makers and consumers (the monumental masons’ ‘book of “patterns”’ is blamed for multiplying a few ‘hackneyed commonplaces’) reflects two early Victorian doubts about the cemetery, an institution then barely two decades old in Britain: that its prevailing affective tone was not mourning and sober contemplation, and that the cemetery was evidence of society’s debased spiritual condition. The cemetery’s monumental iconography, he argues, neither expresses the emotions of the bereaved, nor ‘excite[s] sympathizing emotions in others’; the conventional classical symbols are not profound, but incongruously recall domestic objects: ‘the urn reminds us of the tea-table, and the sarcophagus of the cellaret under the sideboard’. The reviewer blames the fact that ‘This is not a poetical age’, but a ‘material’ one. The current generation’s illiteracy with regard to symbols renders the cemetery itself symbolic of materialistic and unpoetic modern society. The most literal evidence of the early cemetery’s unpoetic character is the apparent reluctance of well-known poets to choose burial there. While the general public readily took to this modern flowering of community and private enterprise, buying cemetery plots in their 1 ‘Fine Arts. Carl Tottie, Designs for Sepulchral Monuments’, The Athenaeum, 23 Dec. 1843, 1139.

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thousands, exceptionally few poets followed the trend. Kensal Green (1833), London’s first and most fashionable cemetery, acquired figures from the capital’s literary and publishing scene. Of these, the highest profile poet was Thomas Hood (d. 1845), and the circumstances were atypical; in this chapter’s close study of Hood’s textual and material memorials, I explore the ironies and tensions generated by burying and commemorating a poet of democratic sympathies within an elite and symbolically prosaic ‘modern cemetery’. Highgate Cemetery (1839), aiming at a more solidly middle- and upper middle-class respectable market, later received the remains of George Eliot (1880), James Thomson (1882), and Christina Rossetti (1894). However, as I argued in Ch. 1, Rossetti’s private funeral in the family grave (instituted in 1854) signified the daughter’s reunion with her parents, not the self-conscious creation of a poet’s grave as a site for pilgrimage. Neither the public honour of burial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, nor its private antithesis in the country churchyard, nor indeed the contingencies of individual circumstances, fully account for poets’ failure to endorse this consummately Victorian institution. As late as 1909, when George Meredith’s cremated ashes were buried in Dorking Cemetery, the space resembled a rural churchyard rather than a cemetery, and like Rossetti, Meredith joined a private, familial grave that eschewed public honour; the grassed plot is marked only by a small book-shaped tablet inscribed ‘Life is but a little holding, lent | To do a mighty labour’.2 The presumption that the cemetery was antagonistic to poetry originates in its radical departure from traditional Christian burial in and around churches, and from the country churchyard idealized in poetry. In Julie Rugg’s words, ‘the laying out of cemeteries broke the centuries-old pattern of burial provision, sometimes in a matter of less than a decade . . . By the 1850s, the virtual monopoly of the churchyard in accommodating the last remains of the deceased had been irrevocably broken.’3 Offering burial ‘in perpetuity’ in a picturesque landscape away from the city, the cemetery was a practical and financial success story, but also a tale of a traumatic ‘break’ with religious and representational tradition. Laman Blanchard noted in 2 ‘The Opera of Camilla’ from the novel Vittoria (1867), The Poetical Works of George Meredith, with notes by G. M. Trevelyan (1919), 577, ll. 31–2. 3 ‘The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in Britain’, in Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (eds.), The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (1997), 105.

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1842 that ‘There is no late step in the progress of opinion or the habits of society so broad as the distinction between the city Churchyard and the suburban Cemetery.’4 By contrasting scandalous conditions in the small, overfilled urban burial-places, Blanchard could champion the cemetery as a positive indicator of social progress; however, measured against the transcendent rural churchyard ideal, its signification was ambivalent. The suburban or ‘garden’ cemetery displaced the dead from intramural churchyards within the community—traditional, familiar, small-scale consecrated and sacred spaces controlled by the Established Church—to semi-rural extramural locations: large-scale, partly or wholly deconsecrated grounds that were more secular in ethos, and in the formative period managed by private companies. The gap between the signification of the cemetery and the ideal churchyard was widest in the early London cemeteries with the greatest potential as Victorian Valhallas of the poets, Kensal Green and Highgate. The two standard cemetery histories, Chris Brooks’s Mortal Remains (1989) and James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death (2000), present the elite London cemeteries as typical of the English commercialization of death in the period.5 Drawing on Julie Rugg’s research into cemetery companies, I argue that the London cemeteries were atypical in their profit-motivated, commercial, and worldly agenda; values symbolically (if not practically) opposed to poetry.6 The cemetery, originally a provincial, Nonconformist, community-based innovation of the 1820s, was appropriated by London speculators in the 1830s and adapted to the demands of a profitable elite and aspirational market. Following the mood of the famous and fashionable Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris (opened 1804), this upwardly mobile class typically consolidated and displayed its new status through self-reflexive substantial monuments, addressed to the current generation.7 The semblance of cemetery monuments being built to last was more apparent than real, for their owners’ priority was generally recognition within their own social milieu. These short-term goals were diametrically opposed to 4 ‘A Visit to the General Cemetery At Kensal Green’, Ainsworth’s Magazine, 2 (Aug. 1842), 178. 5 See Chris Brooks et al., Mortal Remains (1989), 10; James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (2000), 48–68, 83–100. 6 See Julie Rugg, ‘The Rise of Cemetery Companies in Britain 1820–53’ (1992). 7 On Père Lachaise see Richard Etlin, The Architecture of Death (1984), 303–58.

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those typical to poets, who preferred private burial and the transcendent rewards of posterity. The first cemeteries were formed by private joint-stock companies raising capital on shares. The earliest, at Norwich, Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle, were opened by dissenters wanting burial-grounds outside Church of England jurisdiction; profit was very much secondary to religious freedom. However, the first attempt to form a London cemetery company in 1825 by G. F. Carden’s General Burial Ground Company proposed to raise £300,000 capital on shares costing £50. With provincial companies typically aiming for £10,000–15,000 capital and shares rarely above £10, the financial ambition of this failed project is marked. The anonymous author of a doggerel spoof ‘Prospectus’ for a fictitious Life, Death, Burial, and Resurrection Company (also 1825), speculates raising £100,000,000 capital by selling £1 shares: In this age of projectors, when bubbles are spread With illusive attractions to bother each head, When bulls, bears, and jobbers all quit Capel-court To become Speculators, and join in the sport, Who can wonder, when Interest with Intellect clashes, We should have a new Club to dispose of our ashes?8

Topical slang portrays the imaginary company as profiteering in death. ‘Bubble’ companies burst, ‘bulls’ speculate on rising stocks, ‘bears’ on falling ones; the knowing, savvy spoof is itself a symptom of London worldliness, in its automatic assumption that profit can be the only possible motive. In the early 1830s Carden instituted the earliest London cemetery at Kensal Green, motivated partly by public health concerns, but targeting a wealthy and aristocratic clientele to guarantee profits; Norwood (1837), Highgate (1839), Brompton, and Nunhead (both 1840) sought to take advantage of the wealthy London markets. The elite London cemeteries topographically perpetuated metropolitan divisions of religion, wealth, and class. This urban social analogy is reflected in the cemetery’s likeness to a walled city; cemeteries asserted their security, privacy, and coherence as separate space by substantial boundary walls and gated entrances, and contained an internal network of named roads and paths, and plots allocated on a 8

Qu. in James Stevens Curl (ed.), Kensal Green Cemetery (2001), 26.

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grid system; as Rugg notes, ‘the identity of the deceased can be enshrined in the site’s internal order . . . each grave will have an established “address” . . . giving each family a sense of ownership of and control over a particular plot’.9 Cemetery topography was hierarchical: the largest, prominent plots were the most expensive, cheaper plots were small, set back from paths, less accessible. Social divisions were substantiated by monuments; the grandest, the mausoleum or house tomb, was appropriated by the upwardly mobile from its traditional place on aristocratic country estates, as the symbolic complement to the town house. Blanchard quotes another writer’s comments on the meaning of empty mausolea in Père Lachaise: ‘“Know ye not, (he asks) that it is usual with the man of wealth at Paris to possess his town hotel, his country house at St. Cloud, a box at the Italian Opera, and a tomb in this Cemetery?”’; Blanchard denies that such frivolity can be found at Kensal Green, but nevertheless implies that the cemetery functions as an annexe for London society’s competitive display.10 Such metropolitan social topography and iconography is at odds with claims that the cemetery enabled a return to simpler pastoral burial conditions. Kensal Green and Highgate were criticized variously for being secular visitor attractions, pleasure-gardens, cities of the dead, artificial, vulgar, profiting from death, and weakening the attachment of the living to the dead. London’s cemeteries are repeatedly associated not with mourners but tourists and pleasure-seekers. George Collison, a leading light at London’s more inclusive Nonconformist cemetery, Abney Park (1840), criticized its nearest rival for its continuing popularity as ‘a holiday resort for Londoners’: One is so much accustomed to associate ideas of pleasure and holiday making with Highgate and its beautiful vicinity, that a cemetery seems almost the last place we should think of meeting with there; and so little is the former feeling subdued by the general associations of the place, that the author has seen parties of pleasure partaking of their slight refreshments, in rural language called pic-nic, within the consecrated area.11

9 See Julie Rugg, ‘Defining the Place of Burial: What Makes a Cemetery a Cemetery?’, Mortality, 5:3 (2000), 261–4. 10 Blanchard, ‘A Visit’, 186. 11 George Collison, Cemetery Interment (1840), 170.

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By a catalogue of trivial associations—pleasure, holiday, fine views, picnics—Collison suggests that Highgate attracts day-trippers rather than mourners, and that it is an insufficiently sober and sacred environment for the painful business of burial and grave-visiting. As the decades passed, and spacious garden cemeteries scattered with monuments gradually became wildernesses of stone, their latent urban topography was realized. Thinking of Highgate in the 1870s, Philip Bourke Marston urged ‘For me no great metropolis of the dead,— | Highways and byways, squares and crescents of death,—’, but the return to ‘some plot of country grass’.12 Elizabeth Stone’s 1858 account of visiting Kensal Green is particularly resonant here, for it belongs to the Anglican defence of the country churchyard touched on in Ch. 5; Stone repeatedly tests the cemetery’s attractions against this ideal and finds it wanting. She principally objects to the cemetery’s overt commercial motive, symbolized by the gaudy stonemasons’ yard advantageously positioned facing the cemetery entrance; she witheringly describes it as ‘supereminent in its attractions’, a ‘melancholy-pleasure-of-showing-you’ shop.13 Similarly, for a shilling visitors can tour the catacombs or ‘show vaults’, where the guide will point out handsome coffin decorations (‘Miserable foppery!’). Stone also subverts the designation of ‘garden cemetery’, criticizing Kensal Green’s hothouse floral displays, products of human artifice rather than nature, ‘merely beautiful looking’ and ‘flaunting flowers’.14 Such ostentation only draws attention to the many neglected graves, planted in the ‘first impulse of grief’ but then abandoned; the new distance between living and dead was seen as threatening a modern insensibility to memory, the dead, and traditional values: ‘[I]t is a strange fashion, a strange fancy, which can induce persons to prefer to be laid in a gay lounge, the feet of careless, frivolous, and thoughtless promenaders and pleasureseekers all but treading on your grave, rather than to lie in the holy quiet of a churchyard.’15 Stone attempts to stigmatize the cemetery as the mere product of passing fashion and fancy, whether for the shallow society types who consume the ‘fashion’ for ‘artificial, and comparatively unhallowed’ burial-places, or the ‘frivolous’ visitors who come to frolic in the grounds. The landscape park cemetery is given 12 ‘My Grave’, ll. 1–2, 7, The Collected Poems (1892), 368. Marston was buried at Highgate in 1887. 13 God’s Acre; Or, Historical Notices Relating to Churchyards (1858), 11–12. 14 15 Ibid. 116. Ibid. 121–2, 105.

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a vivid, satirical character as ‘a gay lounge’ with the gregarious, gossipy atmosphere of a levee. (Benjamin Clark views the ‘pleasureseekers’ more charitably: ‘[It is] a place of so general resort . . . by the sober-minded part of the public, who wisely prefer a peaceful ride or walk into the country, to the tumultuous revelry of the giddy throng.’16) The indictment of the fashionable London cemeteries as show-places and pleasure-gardens, rather than scenes of mourning, is epitomized in George Augustus Sala’s novel The Seven Sons of Mammon (1862), with its satirical advertisement for a genteel boarding-house close to ‘Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, and within an easy distance of Kensal-Green Cemetery, and other fashionable places of amusement’.17 Thomas Hood was not averse to punning on his own impending death: but how would he have felt about burial in a ‘fashionable place of amusement’?

‘i’m sick of song, and ode, and ballad—’ Thomas Hood’s characteristic adaptation from the Greek, which makes an expression of authorial ennui the excuse for a restorative pun (it continues: ‘So, Thyrsis, take the midnight oil, | And pour it on a lobster salad’), also repeats a commonplace of Hood biography: that he was made sick by churning out songs, odes, ballads, and other miscellaneous writings in the unstable and poorly remunerated periodical market.18 Two of the poems for which he is most remembered, cited on his monument in Kensal Green, treat the causal connection between overwork and mortality with a contagious sympathy: ‘The Song of the Shirt’ and ‘The Bridge of Sighs’. The extraordinary popular success of these two late works, published within eighteen months of Hood’s death, aged 46, on 3 May 1845, helped to secure his fame; but there are good grounds for the popular association between his prodigious output and his death. Thackeray described ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ as Hood’s dying triumph, ‘his Corunna, his Heights of Abraham—sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in full blaze and fame of that great victory’.19 Even his last recorded words, ‘ “Dying! dying!” as if glad to realize the rest 16 17 18 19

Hand-book for Visitors to the Kensal Green Cemetery (1843), p. x. G. A. Sala, The Seven Sons of Mammon (3 vols., 1862), ii. 89. ‘To Minerva. From the Greek’, HW v. 409. J. C. Reid, Thomas Hood (1963), 215.

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implied in them’ were construed as a final release from labour, which yet rings with a lyric cadence; for seemingly Hood had been ‘Dying! dying!’ for most of his career.20 For the readers of Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany (which began publication in January 1844), news of the editor’s death came not as a sudden revelation, but was inseparable from their reading experience: it was the overdetermined conclusion to a narrative of decline in monthly instalments. Each issue closed with ‘The Echo’, a brief editorial initially written by Hood, but latterly voiced by his assistant, Frederick Oldfield Ward. The painful subject of the June 1844 ‘Echo’—an explanation for the editor’s absence—accounts for the disjunction between Hood’s trademark tender wit and Ward’s portentousness: A severe attack of the disorder to which he has long been subject—hemorrhage from the lungs, occasioned by enlargement of the heart (itself brought on by the wearing excitement of ceaseless and excessive literary toil)—has, in the course of a few weeks, reduced Mr. Hood to a state of such extreme debility and exhaustion, that during several days fears were entertained for his life.21

The cause of Hood’s life-threatening disorder—a complex of symptoms including ‘sudden paroxysms of violent palpitation, spasmodic difficulty of breathing, and profuse bleeding from the lungs’ caused by rheumatic heart disease—is presented as ‘ceaseless and excessive literary toil’.22 The association between literary overwork and physical debility is sustained; Hood’s attempt to ‘sketch a few comic designs’ in bed for the next issue produced only a ‘wandering delirium’. He discarded the sketches as without merit, yet Ward salvaged and published them. Ward justifies his disobedience by suggesting a reading model for these ‘sick-bed fancies’, which deconstructs the editor’s usual motive to amuse: ‘the contrast of their sprightly humour with the pain and prostration in the midst of which they were produced, might give them a peculiar interest . . . suggesting . . . by what harassing efforts the food of careless mirth is furnished; and how often the pleasure of the Many costs bitter endurance to One’.23 In specifying the ‘peculiar interest’ of pathos 20

Memorials, ii. 270. F. O. Ward, ‘The Echo’, HMCM 1 (June 1844), 615. 22 From Dr William Elliot’s medical certificate for Hood’s pension application; see 23 Reid, Hood, 236–7. ‘The Echo’, HMCM 1 (June 1844), 616. 21

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instead of laughter, and offering a painfully candid biographical revelation, Ward consciously transgresses the periodical’s editor/reader boundaries, by which the editor’s constructed informal, witty persona deflected possible incursions on privacy. Readers accustomed to enjoying only the printed emanations of ‘T.H.’s’ ‘sprightly humour’ and ‘careless mirth’, are admitted behind the scenes, and lectured in the human cost of entertainment. The two examples of Hood’s ‘quaint picture language’ are appropriated to convey to the readers of ‘Hood’s Mag’ (an image of a magpie in a hood) ‘the editor’s apologies’ (a still-life of medicine bottles, cupping instruments, and leeches). By substituting Hood’s punning first-person voice with the third-person invalid, and shifting the implied reader motivation from entertainment to pathetic ‘interest’, Ward changes readers’ emotional investment and responsibility. The revelation that Hood is near death from overwork implicates readers of the product of that work; thereafter, waiting for the next monthly part is inseparable from anticipating the death of its editor.24 Hood’s close identification with his periodical, epitomized by its proprietorial title, exacerbates the public mediation of mortality. Although Hood returned to work, by November he was again too weak to leave his bed, and death appeared imminent. In ‘The Echo’ for January 1845 Hood described his experience of sitting to ‘Mr. Edward Davis, the well-known sculptor’ in August 1844, for a portrait-bust.25 His account of the sculptor’s studio, with its shelves of clay heads tied in wet cloths ‘from which every moment you expected to hear a sneeze’, and of his own bust’s evolution from a ‘mud doll . . . like “the idol of his own circle” in the Cannibal Islands’ to ‘Christian-like’ likeness, evinces his characteristic humour. However, the expectation of death that had prompted these sittings is also intimated. Hood says the bust has ‘that striking resemblance which is so satisfactory to one’s wife and family, and, as it were, introduces a man to himself’, before explaining that ‘An Engraving by Mr. Heath from this Bust is intended to form the frontispiece to the Second Volume of this Magazine’, and linking the image with his ‘severe indisposition’. This was not the first time Hood had self-consciously textualized his body through his publications; part of the subtitle to Hood’s Own; or laughter from year to 24 See William G. Lane, ‘A Chord in Melancholy: Hood’s Last Years’, Keats-Shelley 25 Journal, 13 (1964), 43–60. ‘The Echo’, HMCM 3 (Jan. 1845), 103.

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year (1839), was ‘Former Runnings of His Comic Vein, with an Infusion of New Blood for General Circulation’. F. A. Heath’s engraving in the March issue, which shows the plaster bust turned threequarter face on a stylized base of three books, is uncompromisingly posthumous and commemorative.26 Its pupil-less eyes averted from the viewer, the bust presents not the image of a living, working writer, but records Hood’s likeness for posterity. Hood’s letters show that he considered the engraving’s circulation as a valedictory gesture; on 12 March he wrote to his aunt and uncle: ‘With this you will receive a Magazine with the Portrait of me, which I promised. I little thought to have been alive at this date’, and he also had extra copies struck off, which he autographed and sent as farewells to friends.27 Ward’s ‘Echo’ makes explicit the transition from man to image: We can hardly congratulate our readers on presenting them, this month, with an effigy of Thomas Hood’s outward features, instead of that portraiture of his mind, and those traces of his kindly heart, which he has been wont, with his own pen, to draw in these pages. . . . [W]e must add a regret to the disappointment of our readers, by communicating to them the sad tidings that the aching original of that pictured brow is again laid low by dangerous illness . . . he has at last been compelled to desist from composition.28

The etched portrait is here not a simple bonus for subscribers, but a lamentably inadequate substitute for interior ‘portraiture’, which also symbolizes the end of Hood’s writing career ‘at last’; the ‘effigy’ is published because the ‘original’ cannot be: ‘We have thought it due to our readers and to the public . . . to make known that Mr. Hood is more seriously ill than even he has ever been before.’29 While Hood often joked about his returns from the brink of the grave, by April he was swollen with dropsy and there was no doubt. ‘The Echo’ is substituted by a ‘notice’ headed ‘Thomas Hood’, giving ‘the sad tidings of his approaching Death’; ‘all hope’ is precluded, his loss is ‘now too certain’.30 Ward presents the man dying with ‘Christian resignation’, yet ‘the Poet still longs for a short reprieve . . . [to] pour out his soul 26 Davis displayed the bust at the Royal Academy in May 1845; Hood’s obituary shared the issue of The Athenaeum that complained about the Academy’s preponderance of vulgar ‘craniology’ (i.e. busts) over ideal sculptures (‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum, 10 May 1845, 466–7). 27 HL 684. See also Reid, Hood, 229. 28 ‘The Echo’, HMCM 3 (Mar. 1845), 312. 29 Hood’s serial ‘Our Family: A Domestic Novel’ was broken off in February, where his last poem appeared, ‘Stanzas’ (‘Farewell, Life! My senses swim’) (HMCM 3 (Feb. 30 1845) 105–13, 142). ‘Thomas Hood’, HMCM, 3 (Apr. 1845), 415.

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in song’. Hood was too weak to fulfill this romantic cliché of poetic swansong, so in order that ‘the last number of his Magazine that he may live to see, shall not go forth without some impress of the Master’s hand’, Ward reprinted the closing lines of ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1827), summarizing Hood’s poetic credo of the interrelation of joy and grief.31 The May issue, printed in late April when death was expected every day, is silent on Hood’s condition, but the newspapers informed readers of his death on 3 May, and the funeral at Kensal Green Cemetery a week later. The June issue assumes readers’ knowledge of the event, and its closing paper on ‘The Late Thomas Hood’ eschews overt mourning for a critical defence, endorsement of the public subscription for Hood’s widow and children, and reprinted extracts from the Literary Gazette and Athenaeum tributes. Ward urges readers to keep buying the magazine (‘Its founder has passed away, but his spirit will still breathe in its pages’), and to contribute to the public subscription, since for authors ‘when death closes the scene of their privations and their struggles, then it is in vain that the immortality of their works is appealed to in aid of the mortal wants of their survivors’.32 The immediate appeal is not to posterity, but practical ‘wants’. Thus between the first announcement of Hood’s ‘severe disorder’ in June 1844 and the posthumous assessment in June 1845, the miscellaneous contents of Hood’s Magazine were, in a sense, secondary to the narration of the editor’s journey towards death. Serials such as the ‘Recollections and Reflections of Gideon Shaddoe, Esq.’ and ‘The Pastor and his Son—a Tale of the Thirty Years’ War’, and the attractions of previously unpublished poems by Keats, Landor, and Browning, were in competition with an overdetermined narrative of ‘peculiar’ human interest;33 what Ward described as ‘the loss of a great writer; great . . . in his almost Shakspearian versatility of genius; great in the few, but noble works he leaves behind; greater still, perhaps, in those which he will carry unwritten to his early tomb’.34 This public mediation of a private man encouraged readers’ emotional involvement in the deprived circumstances of the ‘great 31

32 HW i. 413. ‘The Late Thomas Hood’, HMCM 3 (June 1845), 612–13. Richard Monckton Milnes, working on the Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), gave several Keats sonnets and his own contributions; Browning overcame his aversion to periodical publication to contribute the first part of ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ and ‘The Tomb at St. Praxed’s’). 34 ‘Thomas Hood’, HMCM 3 (Apr. 1845), 415. 33

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writer’s’ death, and self-conscious participation in Hood’s afterlife. Yet Ward’s claim for Hood’s high status as an artist was in tension both with the low estimation conventionally given to humorous writing, with his poems on social outcasts, and rising popularity amongst the lower and working-classes. He appeared to belong not with the ‘great men’, but with the people.

‘what is the modern poet’s fate?’ 35 The Magazine’s readership was broadly middle and lower-middle class, but diversified as circulation increased, and was broadly sympathetic to the plight of the poor and working classes: as Hood noted, ‘my best friends are the reading Public—which will include the people ere long’ (he claimed to value equally the good critical notices for ‘The Labourers’ and being ‘quoted by the big man in Wellington Street who sells Heavy Dry at 4d a pot’).36 His profile as a champion of ‘the people’ had been raised by the popular enthusiasm for ‘The Song of the Shirt’, published anonymously in the Christmas 1843 Punch, but quickly identified and reprinted in other papers; after his death the poem was repeatedly invoked to symbolize his democratic sympathies, as in the public subscription for his family: his ‘pen was ever the ready and efficient advocate of the unfortunate and oppressed (as recently, for instance, in the admirable “Song of the Shirt,” which gave so remarkable an impulse to the movement on behalf of the distressed needlewomen)’.37 One of his last letters was a warning to Sir Robert Peel (who belatedly awarded Hood a £100 pension in November 1844) of the consequences of class division: Certain classes, at the poles of society are already too far asunder: it should be the duty of our writers to draw them nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate the existing repulsion, & place a wider moral gulf between Rich & Poor, with Hate on one side, & Fear on the other. But I am too weak for this task, the last I had set myself. It is death that stops my pen, you see,—not a pension.38 35 ‘To write his thoughts upon a slate; | The critic spits on what is done, | Gives it a wipe—and all is gone.’ Hood to Tennyson, qu. in Memoir, ii. ch. 3. 36 TH to FOW, 6 Nov. 1844, HL 662, 663. 37 ‘The Late Thomas Hood’, HMCM 3 (June 1845), 611. 38 17 Feb. 1845, HL 682–3.

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Yet the funeral was ‘held, at [Richard Monckton Milnes’] instigation, in the new cemetery at Kensal Green’, London’s most socially exclusive cemetery, the favourite burial-place of peers and wealthy arrivistes.39 To bury a poet in a cemetery in itself violates the traditional identification of the poet with the pastoral scene of Gray’s ‘Elegy’; to bury a democratic poet whose death was hastened by poverty and overwork in the most fashionable and commodified cemetery in England could seem the blackest of black comedy. (This contrasts with the calculated working-class subversion of middleclass mores in the funeral of pugilist Tom Sayers at Highgate in 1865.40) Milnes’s exact reasoning is not recorded, but the desire to shore up Hood’s unstable literary reputation is the most likely motive. Hood’s own sensitivity to reception issues was reflected in his reaction to the pension: ‘Seriously it seems to me the reverse of liberal . . . & assigns me a place so much beneath that which the public has bestowed on me, I feel exceedingly tempted to decline.’41 Despite the family’s desperate financial situation, the small pension hurt his pride as an inaccurate reflection of public esteem. He wrote that Peel’s ‘offer is of a pension the lowest ever yet granted to an author or authoress’.42 While Hood’s political opposition to Peel and sensitivity to charity were factors, his main concern was being publicly slighted and underappreciated; he anticipated the judgements refuted by Ward, that he had ‘wasted his talents’ in ‘facetious’ writings, and more generally that humorous poetry could not have serious intentions. Accepting Milnes’s advice about Kensal Green on 7 May, Ward confided his own agenda: I am very anxious that he should receive proper honour, and I regret exceedingly that Sir R. Peel is too busy to come. When his scattered works come to be collected and finally appreciated, they will justify the enthusiasm of his warmest admirers, and make it a pleasant remembrance to have paid him this last respect. I hope you will mention the time and place fixed among your more eminent friends, that they may have the opportunity, if they wish, of attending.43 39 James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise 1809–1851 (1949), 233. 40 See Chris Brooks, ‘Burying Tom Sayers: Heroism, Class and the Victorian Ceme41 42 tery’, Victorian Society Annual (1989), 4–20. HL 662. Ibid. 663. 43 FOW to RMM, 7 May 1845, in T. Wemyss Reid (ed.), The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton (2 vols., 1890), i. 349–50.

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For Ward, this is not the funeral of a private man leaving a widow and two children in straitened circumstances, but that of a ‘great writer’ whose reputation has suffered from specializing in periodical publication. ‘[P]roper honour’ demands the endorsement of public figures such as the Prime Minister and other ‘eminent’ men: Ward is less concerned with Hood’s friends than Milnes’s newsworthy fellow MPs. According to the Memorials of Thomas Hood (1860), the ‘life and letters’ published by Hood’s children, supporters had demanded a grave in Poets’ Corner; however as Hood’s son sarcastically recalled, this suggestion ‘arose from the mistaken notion that England’s Abbey was intended as the last resting-place of her men of genius, and not, as is the case, for any one who is willing to pay about £200 in fees’.44 Even this affirmation of Hood as a ‘man of genius’ hints that the cemetery grave was a compromise, and signals the ironic tensions between public and private that marks the history of his grave and commemoration. Hood’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery is the exception that proves the rule; the rule that the cemetery’s aesthetic and cultural significance was antipathetic to ideas of literary immortality and poetic genius in the period. Milnes’s advice shows a prescient understanding both of fast-changing Victorian mores and the elegiac prestige of the poet in an unpoetical age; but it was a gamble that was almost a disastrous failure. In 1845, Kensal Green was still raw and new but popular; Laman Blanchard noted in 1842 that ‘It is scarcely ten years since the sheep were driven from their pasture, and already have there been about six thousand interments within that noble and spacious enclosure.’45 The year 1843 had marked a significant rise in the Cemetery’s fortunes, when Augustus Frederick, duke of Sussex, broke with royal tradition in wishing to be buried there rather than in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Benjamin Clark’s guidebook carefully presents the Cemetery’s new royal connection as a popular victory: Never, assuredly, was it contemplated . . . that deeply-rooted custom would be so signally departed from, as that a distinguished member of the regal line of England would appoint, as the place of his interment—not the dignified mausoleum at Windsor, but—the less ostentatious, though not less beautiful, asylum of kensal green. He is the first of a royal race, who has chosen, with characteristic condescension, to lay his bones in one of the cemeteries of the people—a circumstance, which, naturally enough, tended to heighten 44

Memorials, ii. 270.

45

Blanchard, ‘A Visit’, 179.

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the public sensation . . . and to enkindle, in an exciteful degree, that sort of melancholy curiosity, which carries throngs of the living to gaze upon the last solemn obsequies of the revered and distinguished dead.46

Clark’s breathless excitement at the Duke’s ‘condescension’ suggests the democratic character claimed for the Cemetery is only relative, since hierarchy is maintained; the ‘throngs’ of gazers indicates a gawping crowd rather than real popular sentiment. He coyly hints that Kensal Green’s inferiority is really its merit: ‘ostentatious’ is marked as pejorative (and relative). Royal endorsement was excellent publicity, bringing at once respectability, royal glamour to attract snobbish clients, and the enhancement of the Cemetery’s claims to cater for all classes. Blanchard’s illustrated feature on Kensal Green in Ainsworth’s Magazine was such good publicity that in 1843 it was republished as a guidebook, with an added memoir on the Duke.47 Blanchard, at the apogee of his fame after editing The Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L. (1841), helped to give the Cemetery cultural credibility; his account minimizes the landscape’s raw turf and brash features by drawing a model of sentimental response and cultivating an indistinctly ‘poetic’ atmosphere and literary associations. The text is starred with graceful passing allusions to Marvell’s ‘The Garden’, Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on the burial-places of Constantinople, and Godwin’s ‘Essay on Sepulchres’. He literally finds poetry in the cemetery, on the memorial to Louisa Mary Ann Wakelin, a ‘beloved daughter’ who died of consumption: ‘These lines—unremembered when we copied them, as breathing the poetical spirit, however wild and disfigured—are from the melancholy muse of Kirk [sic] White.’48 He lingers over affecting proofs of familial affection, construing generously the widow’s testimony to marital bliss with Wyndham Lewis, MP—‘the poet’s dream, “years of unbroken happiness!”’—and the Gosling family’s epitaph, ‘in which the mere overflow of sorrow, without the slightest inspiration of the fancy, seeks in the form of poetry an expression to which ordinary forms of language seem hopelessly inadequate’.49 The 46

Clark, Hand-Book, 39. Blanchard, The Cemetery at Kensal Green: The Grounds & Monuments. With a Memoir of His Royal Highness the Late Duke of Sussex (1843). 48 Ibid. 16. The lines are from White’s juvenilia, ‘Fragment of an Eccentric Drama: The Dance of the Consumptives’, Poetical Works (1830), 104. 49 Blanchard, Cemetery, 4. 47

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inscription ‘Young, beautiful, and good, God in his mercy numbered her with his angels at the early age of seventeen’ is praised for fusing affective, poetic, and literary associations; Blanchard quotes a friend’s testimony to the text’s evidence of the confident faith and love of ‘the bereaved parents’ before revealing that ‘The tears called forth by the inscription thus recorded fall upon the grave of Mary Scott Hogarth, sister of Mrs. Charles Dickens’; the magic name of Dickens, even when displaced to his wife, confers ‘peculiar interest’ on the scene. (Blanchard suppresses the more powerful fact that Dickens himself wrote Mary Hogarth’s epitaph.) The writer’s eye is ‘suddenly arrested’ by another great name, ‘Sir Walter Scott, of Abbotsford, Bart.’, on the tomb of his daughters Charlotte Sophia Lockhart and Anne Scott: ‘What mourners have lingered around! How many eyes which never beheld the sleepers within have wept for their loss, while tracing that revered name—glancing upward in the dusk of eve, almost expecting to see the spirit of Scott descending in the twilight, to hover over the devoted beings he loved so well.’50 Intoxicated by a literary glamour here figured as uncanny, the writer graduates from celebrated ‘mourners’ (such as John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and biographer) to Scott’s enthusiastic readers and followers; Blanchard’s sentimental fantasy is hyperbolic, but it refigures the modern cemetery as a place of poetic continuity and tradition, also providing a more accessible Scott shrine than Dryburgh Abbey. This poetic agenda accounts for his pause in the dissenters’ section at the grave of a minor poet, Lamb’s friend George Dyer (d. 1841), and the quotation in full of Dyer’s (not very poetical) epitaph, beginning ‘Above the scholar’s fame, the poet’s bays, | Thus Dyer on the tomb we write thy praise.’51 In its new character as guidebook, the literary emphasis in Blanchard’s essay suggests the Cemetery’s potential as the pastoral modern alternative to the discredited Poets’ Corner. Milnes is likely to have encountered Blanchard’s essay, and calculated that links with Dickens, Scott, and Dyer, in the Cemetery’s public and publicized setting, would give Hood ‘proper honour’. (Milnes would certainly have heard of Blanchard’s death in February 1845; mentally disturbed after his wife’s sudden death in 1844, he commit50

Ibid. 7–8. Dyer’s epitaph (by Dante translator Henry Francis Cary), now illegible, is reproduced in Curl, Kensal Green Cemetery, 266. 51

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ted suicide ‘in a fit of delirium’, leaving four children. He was buried in Norwood Cemetery.) Prominence was a criterion for the selection of Hood’s grave, a roadside plot on the prestigious Circle, close to elegant new monuments commemorating garden designer John Claudius Loudon and Byron’s publisher John Murray (both d. 1843). The funeral was at noon on Saturday 10 May; his son, then aged 10, recalled the scene for the Memorials, where he idealizes ‘the unfeigned sorrow of those kind and beloved friends who attended’, the ‘beautiful spring day’, and even suggests a sacred symbol for the soul ascending: ‘just as the service concluded, a lark rose up, mounting and singing over our heads’.52 Jane Hood died eighteen months later, and supporters’ concerns and fund-raising were again dedicated to the survivors’ welfare, not testimonials to Hood’s literary immortality. Despite its prominent location, the grave itself remained unmarked (no marker, no name) because the poet’s children Tom and Fanny were orphaned and financially hard-pressed; yet to a stranger’s eye it appeared a dereliction of duty. This symbolic neglect was also an apt comment on Hood’s history of financial and personal disaster; as a later visitor to Charles Lamb’s ‘neglected’ grave in Edmonton Churchyard reflected, ‘[authors’] graves have met with the treatment they themselves met with in their lives’.53

‘without a stone, without a line—’ For almost a decade after Hood’s death his grave remained unmarked amidst the multiplying monumental splendours. Readers who had followed the story of Hood’s decline in Hood’s Magazine, or wanted to pay their tribute to the author of ‘The Song of the Shirt’ and ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, required either the aid of word-of-mouth information, or the confidence to demand Cemetery staff’s assistance in locating the goal of their pilgrimage. Locating and paying tribute at an unmarked grave in a large public cemetery was unsettling, since one obscure trodden turf looks much like another, and the ritual of homage is fatally damaged by doubtful identification. Within Kensal Green’s hierarchical and socially marked topography, such practical obstacles were tied to class divisions; poorer, working-class visitors 52 53

Memorials, ii. 271. ‘The Grave of Charles Lamb,’ The Saturday Review, 4 Oct. 1862, 402.

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appeared conspicuous and incongruous when the majority belonged to the middle and upper classes; lacking the privilege of ‘mourners’, such visitors to Hood’s grave were likely to have felt under surveillance and inhibited about asking for guidance. It is well known that Eliza Cook’s poem ‘Poor Hood’ (1852) initiated the public campaign and subscription that culminated in the erection of a monument over the poet’s grave in 1854; less familiar is an earlier poem by the young working-class poet Gerald Massey, which probably alerted Cook to the obscure condition of Hood’s grave. The title of Massey’s blank verse polemic, ‘Hood, who sang the “Song of the Shirt”’ (1850), signals his view of Hood as a poet of social conscience, Christian champion of the poor and underprivileged; the opening exclamation, ‘ ’Twas the old story!’, selfconsciously invokes Hood’s as an archetypal narrative, that of the martyred visionary scorned and neglected in life: ‘So Hood, our Poet, lived his martyr-life: | . . . And went uncrowned to his untimely tomb.’54 The theme is fervently elaborated in abstract and metaphorical terms, but having established that Hood’s work and memory is cherished by the working-classes—‘we’ll remember him who fought our fight’—Massey nevertheless concludes by demanding a material tribute as a point of pride: His Mausoleum is the People’s heart, There he lies crowned and glorified,—in state, Smiling, with singing robe wrapped richly round. But ’tis not meet, my England, his dear dust Should lie where splendid flatteries flaunt on tombs, With not a line of lettered love to tell What mighty heart lies quenched and broken there. So let us build our Poet’s monument! With passionate hearts of love for corner-stones, And tears that temper for immortal fame. And it were well, my England, shouldst thou come To weep some honest drops above his grave. (ll. 89–100)

Massey’s transition from metaphorical to material monument is predicated on the Cemetery’s class- and wealth-based topography. Although ‘His Mausoleum is the People’s heart’, this personal and invisible commemoration is meaningless and indeed inverted by the 54 Gerald Massey, The Ballad of Babe Christabel: With Other Lyrical Poems (1854), 36–9, ll. 17, 22. ‘Hood’ appears as a self-contained work, with its own title page, in Poetical Works of Gerald Massey (1861), 123–6.

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grave’s context ‘where splendid flatteries flaunt on tombs’. While the intangible and ideal memorial is ‘immortal’, its signification does not translate to the middle-class idiom of display, in which the unmarked grave simply represents neglect, obscurity, shame. In a gesture reminiscent of Hood’s own pleas for the reunion of divided classes, Massey invokes ‘my England’ in order to transcend social barriers, figuring the dignity of an actual tribute to Hood’s memory as a national responsibility (not exclusively that of ‘the People’). Yet his imagined monument appears unstable, insubstantial; the sincere and understated epitaph—the ‘line of lettered love’—has the virtue of simplicity, but the reversion to metaphor is compromising: the monument is to be built from the affective materials of ‘passionate hearts’ and ‘tears’. Massey either does not believe his poem can have influence outside the rhetorical and imaginative sphere, or is unable fully to relinquish his own vision of Hood as the People’s Poet to a more inclusive and privileged social body. Two years later, Eliza Cook published ‘Poor Hood! Written at Kensal Green Cemetery’ in her weekly periodical. Cook’s poem of twenty-one tetrameter quatrains is written from the perspective of a first-time visitor to Hood’s grave, searching fruitlessly amongst the ‘gorgeous cenotaphs . . . | Of Parian shrine and granite vault’, before resorting to the ‘Sexton’ for guidance.55 The device of mediating the scene as through fresh eyes encourages the reader to participate in a deconstruction of the Cemetery’s dubious memorial values. The speaker asks who is buried beneath ‘yon splendid tomb | That stretches out so broad and tall?’ and ‘that other stately pile | Of chiselled glory, staring out’ (ll. 5–6, 9–10). This is not empty rhetoric, for emblematic monumental excess is swiftly particularized by two (in)famous examples. The ‘stately pile’ is a tribute to patent medicine quack John St John Long (d. 1834), while the ‘splendid tomb’ commemorates Astley’s Circus manager, Andrew Ducrow (d. 1842; monument erected 1837 for his wife).56 St John Long’s classical temple of Hygeia and Ducrow’s madly eclectic Graeco-Egyptian mausoleum occupy prestige sites in the Cemetery, corner plots on the junction between Centre Avenue and the Circle; Blanchard observes that ‘On the approach through the central walk from the entrance, they are the first prominent ones that present themselves’, describes 55 56

Eliza Cook’s Journal, 7 (26 June 1852), 144, ll. 1–2, 10. See Curl, Kensal Green Cemetery, 189–91.

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them as ‘two objects [that] require to be noticed’, quotes both lengthy inscriptions, and directs the reader to Delamotte’s accompanying engraving (which grotesquely exaggerates their scale). Such Kensal Green icons would have been known to many of Cook’s readers, at least by hearsay, but in case of doubt her speaker sarcastically explicates the ironic contrast between monumental splendour and actual worth. Ducrow is cut down to size as the owner of ‘trained and tortured steeds’ and a ‘Great Circus Hero’; St John Long ‘shone by juggling craft’ (l. 18), punningly recalling Astley’s and the ‘Hygeist’s’ fame as con-artist: their self-commissioned, self-funded, and self-aggrandizing tombs commemorate not great men, but great frauds. (An Astley’s habitué, Hood would not have shared Cook’s scorn for Ducrow’s talents.) By contrast, the speaker cannot discover ‘Poor Hood’s [grave]—the man who made | That song about the “Bridge of Sighs;”’ without help: What, there! without a single mark,— Without a stone, without a line,— Does watchfire Genius leave no spark To note its ashes as divine? Must strangers come to woo his shade, Scanning rare marbles as they pass; And, when they pause where he is laid, Stop at a trodden mound of grass? And is it thus? well, we suppose, England is far too poor to spare A slab of white, where Truth might write The title of her Poet-Heir. (ll. 29–40)

After excess, negative rhetoric (the iterated ‘without’) combines with dry irony to condemn the pitifully anonymous grave of ‘watchfire Genius’. How Victorian poets regard the unmarked grave varies as to whether the context is rhetorical or actual; in ‘My Grave’, Cook imagined her own unmarked poet’s grave on an unconsecrated sunny hill remembered from childhood.57 However, according to the iconographic conventions of Kensal Green, where ‘rare marbles’ are standard, a ‘trodden mound of grass’ insults Hood’s memory (ll. 34, 36). Like Massey, Cook implicates ‘England’ in this neglect; in three stanzas (cut from later reprintings), she describes a country gripped by monument-mania, but concerned only with public and political 57

The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook (1870), 98.

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value. Hood, as the ‘Poet fool | Who sung of Woman’s woes and wrongs’ is unrewarded: ‘In Life he dearly won his bread,—| In Death—he is not worth a stone!’ (ll. 66–7, 73–4). While Cook’s speaker, again like Massey, is consoled that Hood ‘Can soar above, in Memory’s love, | Without the aid of marble wings’, the closing sarcastic juxtaposition of Ducrow and St John Long with Hood invites redress: Let the Horse-tamer’s bed be known, By the rich mausoleum-shrine; Give the bold Quack his charnel-throne,— Their works were worthier far than thine. And let thy soul serenely sleep While pilgrims stand as I have stood, To worship at a nameless heap, And sadly, fondly, say ‘Poor Hood!’ (ll. 87–94)

Cook’s rhetoric here is carefully pitched to cover three perspectives: the monumental privileging of showmen and quacks over poets; the moralizing and ironic inversion of this fact, which recuperates the ‘nameless’ who attracts sincere pilgrims; and the polemic, which urges the shame of leaving Hood to be pitied rather than praised. (The poem was not reprinted in the several collections of Cook’s poems before 1870, when it was shortened to eighteen stanzas; she may initially have felt that the poem was made redundant by the success of its polemic; but her connection with Hood is now one of her main claims to fame.) ‘Poor Hood’ stimulated a popular campaign for a monument, endorsed by Mark Lemon’s ‘A Tomb for Hood’ in Punch, which supposes a more equitable future, when ‘The workers may not seek, in vain, his tomb | Who pleaded, once, so movingly their cause’, and urges justice for the poet who sought sympathy for the victims of ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ and ‘The Song of the Shirt’.58 The lead item in the 23 October Eliza Cook’s Journal had celebrated the ‘numerous letters and communications’ received from those anxious to ‘assist in raising a Fund’ for a monument, and gave information about the Committee and how to contribute. Cook set this belated and modest 58 Punch, or the London Charivari, 23 (20 Nov. 1852), 213, ll. 7–8, 21–4. Repr. in Memorials of Thomas Hood, rev. edn. (1869), 463–4. Lemon published ‘The Song of the Shirt’ after rejections elsewhere, and dramatized it as The Sempstress; see Arthur A. Adrian, Mark Lemon: First Editor of Punch (1966), 53.

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testimonial in the context of the recent death of another great man— the Duke of Wellington. Although Wellington had died at Walmer Castle on 14 September, the elaborate preparations meant that the public funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral was not held until 18 November; the government came under fire in the more democratic periodicals for ‘wasting’ the huge sum of 80,000 guineas on the funeral and memorial.59 Cook’s criticism is oblique: We will leave government to expend its thousands on the obsequies of our ‘hero duke’ with all the pomp and pageantry of funeral circumstance; give him his gorgeous mausoleum . . . but while we venerate the ashes of a great warrior, let us not forget the remains of a great poet. If Wellington did noble service for his country on the purple battlefield, Thomas Hood did some goodly work in his lonely chamber, pouring forth rich songs of Truth, destined to quicken and invigorate the life-pulse of humanity.60

A moment earlier, ‘we’ was the conventional signifier for the author: ‘We need not say how proudly gratified we shall be in finding our simple, but heart-inspired, lyric the means of effecting that which has been too long delayed.’ Now ‘we’ embraces those who wish to be dissociated from the government’s use of ‘its thousands’, and the campaign for Hood’s monument appears as not simply a separate democratic project, but a commitment to ‘the life-pulse of humanity’, against the deadening excess of ‘funeral circumstance’. When in the preface to the Memorials the poet’s son thanked Cook and the monument committee, with ostentatious discretion he omitted the ‘distinguished names’ on the subscription lists (those who actually funded the project), in order to highlight poor contributors: ‘ “trifling sums from Manchester, Preston, Bideford, and Bristol— from a few poor needlewomen—from seven dress-makers—from twelve poor men”’ (in the Memorials’ final chapter, Broderip regrets not having space to quote from supportive testimonials by ‘the late Lord Macaulay, the late Lady Morgan, Barry Cornwall, Dr. Mackay, Mr. Macready, and other distinguished names’).61 He presents as a filial duty the ‘endeavour to rescue from oblivion these tokens of the gentle remembrance, by the poor, of the Poet | “Who sang the Song of the Shirt”,’ just as these people wanted to rescue Hood.62 The Memorials are ‘Dedicated to the people: for whom thomas 59 60 61

For popular and press responses to Wellington’s obsequies, see Wolffe, 28–55. ‘Hood’s Grave’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, 7 (23 Oct. 1852), 401. 62 Memorials, i. p. xvii; ii. 275. Ibid. i. p. xvii.

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hood wrote and laboured’, and this desire to suppress signifiers of wealth and public influence and foreground Hood’s popular following, while also creating an effective public memorial, is negotiated in the finished monument, unveiled by Richard Monckton Milnes at a ceremony on 19 July 1854. These mixed signals, and the strained tone in which Hood’s democratic significance is claimed, indicate how uneasily such gestures consorted with the Cemetery landscape. To compete with the surrounding monumental splendour it was necessary to use a similar idiom; so how to distinguish Hood from the rest? The Times hints at this problem when quoting from Milnes’s address: he shrank ‘from a public eulogy at the tomb of a man of his character, whose desire was—“To kneel remote upon the simple sod, | And sue in forma pauperis to God”.’63 The monument’s entire raison d’être was to erase the ‘simple sod’ over Hood’s grave, and the poor man had no place at Kensal Green. The paper’s suggestions that the memorial was in some sense ‘authorized’ by Hood, since it was carved with ‘his own self-inscribed epitaph’, and that its simple design and correct execution made it a pleasing contrast with ‘the medley of monuments’, indicate the stresses of erecting a democratic tribute within the Cemetery.64 For the monument’s claim to be ‘one of the chief treasures of the place’ lies not in design or materials, but merely as the symbol of poetic genius.

‘he sang “the song of the shirt” ’ Hood’s pink Peterhead granite pedestal on stepped grey granite base was designed by Matthew Noble (1818–76), a prolific and highprofile sculptor responsible for major public monuments at Leeds, Manchester, and London.65 The design and inscription were simple, but the scale, duochromy, and extensive use of symbolic bronze decorations belonged to a public register; when new, the polished pink 63 ‘Monument to the Memory of Hood’, The Times, 19 July 1854, 9. The lines are slightly misquoted from Hood’s ‘Ode to Rae Wilson, Esq.’, HW iv. 230. 64 This authority is undermined by The Times’s careless transcription: ‘In memory of Thomas Hood, born 23d of May, 1798; died 3d of May, 1854: erected by public subscription A.D. 1845.’ 65 Subjects of Noble’s public statuary include Victoria, Albert, Franklin, Peel, and Wellington. See John Robinson, Descriptive Catalogue of the Lough and Noble Models of Statues, Bas-Reliefs and Busts in Elswick Hall, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1914).

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granite and gleaming bronze must have looked garish. The monument stood twelve feet high, inviting the viewer to gaze worshipfully up to Noble’s bronze bust of Hood, closely modelled on Edward Davis’s 1844 bust. Davis’s homely support (the pile of books) was replaced by conventional symbols for literary immortality (wreaths of amaranth and bay, with anachronistic quill and manuscript scrolls), and this theme was amplified on the stepped pediment by symbols of humour (the mask of comedy) and poetry (the lyre), all in bronze. The sides of the pedestal displayed bas-reliefs of scenes from two of Hood’s best-known poems, ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ (1829) and ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ (1844). The epitaph was inscribed at the head of the pedestal, immediately below the bust and decorations: ‘he sang the song of the shirt.’ The main inscription reads: ‘in memory | of | THOMAS HOOD | born | 23rd may 1798 | died | 3rd may 1845 | erected | by | public subscription | a. d. 1854 | also of JANE HOOD his wife | born 6 nov. 1792 died 4th dec. 1846.’ If poetry is to be found in Hood’s monument, it is not in its inscription. Immediately evident from this description is the marginalization of Hood’s private and domestic character; Jane’s burial is recorded, but the surviving orphans Tom and Fanny are elided. This slighting of the personal argues for Dickens’s right feeling in refusing to contribute to the fund, though he would ‘have a melancholy gratification in privately assisting to place a simple and plain record over the remains of a great writer that should be as modest as he was himself’.66 The epitaph is the only trace of Hood’s own modest wishes for his memory, and secretes within the public idiom a private resonance for his children. One of his last sketches was a ‘posthumous’ selfportrait in profile, laid out in his shroud (Fig. 11). The figure, truncated at the hips, rests on a support that signifies ambiguously as bed and memorial-plinth; it is marked in large capitals ‘HE SANG THE “SONG OF THE SHIRT.”’ The authorial wish recorded was evidently conveyed to Noble in 1853, although the sketch was first published in the Memorials as ‘From a Sketch drawn by Mr. Hood himself during his last illness.’ Here the image’s position facing a transcription of ‘My Last Arrangements’ suggests its private associations; the brief will bequeathed a few books to friends and relatives, 66 CD to John Watkins, 18 Oct. 1852, The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House et al. (12 vols., 1965–2002), vi. 779.

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Fig. 11 ‘From a Sketch drawn by Mr. Hood himself during his last illness’, in Memorials of Thomas Hood (1869 edn.)

and ‘All else that I possess, I give and bequeath to my dear wife, to be used for her benefit and that of our dear children, whom God bless, guide, and preserve.’67 Monuments raised by public subscription tend to eschew the language of love and intimacy, and Hood’s appears to block the empathetic response his poetry invites. I would suggest, however, that Hood’s monument presents different faces to different visitors, and that a more personal, emotional, and politicized response is accessible through familiarity with the poems referenced on the tomb. Hood’s epitaph, which seems at first sight simply descriptive, identifies the poet-as-singer with the poem’s seamstress ‘singer’, affiliating him both with the articulated suffering of society’s victims, and those who are moved to pity them. This covert identification of the poet with his poetic subjects—many of whom were archetypes or fictions based on documented cases— invites a more personalized reading of the oval bas-relief tableaux, also published in the Memorials as engravings by the Brothers Dalziel. This is suggested partly by the images’ position on the sides of the pedestal. Viewed head-on, Hood’s monument is conventional 67

Memorials, ii. pl. facing 273, 273.

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and unremarkable, and the viewer must retain a respectful distance to take it in as a whole; however the detailed three-dimensional pictures (placed at eye-level), can be seen properly only by standing beside the structure, where they are iconographically distinct from the monument as a whole. This marginal position allows scope for less conventional content, for the reader’s individual engagement, and also encourages an oblique reading contextualized by its surroundings. The subjects of neither tableaux are identified, presupposing initiated readers whose memory of the texts invoked will amplify their viewing; reading the dead poet’s work aloud as a tribute or silently as a meditative act beside the grave was common, so the bas-reliefs might be literal ‘illustrations’ to the text. The ‘Eugene Aram’ design foregrounds the repentant murderer Aram sitting distraught and dishevelled at the base of a tree, ‘remote from all | A melancholy man’, and envying the innocent playfulness of the schoolboys in the background. Noble illustrates the lines ‘His hat was off, his vest apart, | To catch heaven’s blessed breeze’, as the haunted man seeks relief from his ‘burning thought’ and heart; the ‘ponderous tome’ he fervently reads for comfort is closed at his feet, recalling the murderer’s wishful analogy between mind and book: ‘ “Oh, God! Could I so close my mind, | And clasp it with a clasp!”’ Visually connecting Aram with the innocents is the ‘gentle lad’ reading ‘The Death of Abel’, who hears Aram’s dream-confession.68 A murderer may seem a doubtful subject for a funeral monument, but ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ was one of Hood’s most powerful and popular works (the Athenaeum obituary had described it as ‘a ballad which we imagine will live as long as the language’), notable partly for the sympathetic and personalized treatment of the criminal’s guilty torment and repentance.69 Readers responded to the vividness of Aram’s dream-vision, which Hood had candidly—and cannily—identified in the preface as derived from his own experience of ‘one of those unaccountable visions, which come upon us like frightful monsters thrown up by storms from the great black deeps of slumber’.70 Hood described a dream of bearing on his back a loved68

HW ii. 293–300, ll. 17–24, 31–6. ‘Thomas Hood’, The Athenaeum, 10 May 1845, 461. See Nancy Jane Tyson, Eugene Aram: Literary History and Typology of the Scholar-Criminal (1983), 48–6. 70 HW ii. 285. 69

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one’s ‘lifeless body’, with a sense of ‘awful responsibility . . . to bury my dead’, but as the duty was repeatedly thwarted, the dreamer’s guilt and misery became unbearable: ‘the mighty agonies of souls tortured on the supernatural racks of sleep, are not to be penned’. Aram’s first-person confession describes his similar torment by the corpse of his victim, which cannot be hidden: ‘I knew my secret then was one | That earth refused to keep’ (ll. 189–90). By revealing his own apparently guilty dream, and associating it with the torments of Aram’s actual guilt, Hood asked readers to empathize with the criminal’s sufferings rather than condemn him; the innocence of a child prompts Aram to unburden his soul, suggesting that his repentance bids for our forgiveness. For while the poem ends with Aram in custody, the right of judgement remains with God not man. The only action given as ‘factual’ in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ is the discovery of a woman’s drowned body in the Thames, and the moment when the ‘Rashly importunate, | Gone to her death!’ is brought to land.71 Noble illustrates this by a simple tableau more assimilable than the complex narrative of ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ to the sentimental idiom of funerary sculpture: the idealized body of the drowned woman is positioned centrally, with three men tenderly supporting her, beneath an arch of Westminster Bridge, the river lapping at their feet. It illustrates the reiterated stanza, ‘Take her up tenderly, | Lift her with care; | Fashion’d so slenderly, | Young, and so fair!’, part of the lyric speaker’s prayer for ‘Christian charity’ rather than moral opprobrium (ll. 5–8, 80–3). Only an initiated reader could know that the woman, whose pose is drawn from images of Christ removed from the cross, is a prostitute who has committed suicide. Just as the poem’s epigraph from Hamlet, Act v, scene vii, ‘“Drown’d! drown’d!”,’ asks for the reader’s sympathy (this knelling phrase, which closes the Queen’s evocation of Ophelia’s suicide, brings her brother Laertes to tears), and the speaker finds the woman’s ‘stains’ and ‘slips’ purified in death, Noble’s image beatifies the prostitute. However, the power of Hood’s lyric lies in its movement from prayerful pity to a vivid imagining of the estrangements, homelessness, and sufferings that drove the woman to suicide. For the initiated reader, the female figure is shadowed by her past rejection from the Christian family (plunging into the ‘black flowing 71

Ibid. vii. 45–9, ll. 3–4.

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river: | Mad from life’s history’), but now recuperated by her union with ‘her Saviour’ (ll. 66–7, 106). The marginal and covert nature of Noble’s images, and their reliance on readers’ prior knowledge of and personal investment in Hood’s poetry for fuller decoding, enables a form of emotional engagement that seemed precluded by its public and conventional symbolism. Noble’s choice of subjects seeks to be representative: on the left-hand side of the pedestal, the type of the male criminal (the man who murders for gain) and on the right, the complementary female type (the woman driven to prostitution and suicide). Hood’s two poems differently problematize these antisocial behaviours, using empathetic strategies to encourage readers to see such outcasts as belonging to the same Christian family as themselves, and deserving equal sympathy and understanding. Within the socially hierarchical and overtly commodified space of Kensal Green such themes of social conscience are politicized. The visitor who turns from a contemplation of ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ tableau, to a survey of the Cemetery landscape, would find the inverse of this Christian humanitarian ethos. In the formative years of Kensal Green, the fashionable monumental style was ‘pagan’, that is, classical and Egyptian (broken columns, pyramids, inverted torches, snakes biting their tails), and the leading motivation was to display familial status and wealth; the expression of Christian and affective sentiments was muted. The initiated reader would, I suggest, view these evocative images of suffering social outcasts against a backdrop of extravagant monuments symbolizing the ruling aristocratic and commercial classes. The disjunction between Hood’s socially unifying empathetic Christian poetics and the memorial’s material context is ironic, since the monument, which should be a badge of belonging, a testimonial to his status as a great man and author, is legible rather as repeating the unmarked grave’s message: that Thomas Hood does not belong in Kensal Green Cemetery. He appears in exile there, as he had been in Germany and Belgium in 1835–40, working off his debts.72 As Roger B. Henkle remarks, if we ‘consider Hood’s poems as a register of the commodification of objects and expressions in the consumer society . . . [they] inscribe resistance’.73 72

Reid, Hood, 135–9. ‘Comedy as Commodity: Thomas Hood’s Poetry of Class Desire’, Victorian Poetry, 26:3 (1988), 302. 73

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‘in this little chamber . . . | both earth and heaven—my universe of love!’ 74 The Memorials of Thomas Hood (1860), edited by Fanny Broderip and Tom Hood the Younger, are Hood’s children’s public monument to their father, but even here Fanny expresses unease about the grave’s location and the monument’s public manner. While giving all due respect to the Committee, and construing the keen support for the project as glorifying her father’s memory, her terms are equivocal: ‘In the September or October of 1852, what the children of Thomas Hood had long planned to do in a modest and unpretending manner, was undertaken by the public.’75 As his closest blood relations and guardians of Hood’s memory, the children’s failure to raise even a ‘modest’ marker is clearly a sensitive issue; yet Broderip’s hint that their duty was usurped by the ‘public’, and her cherishing of a ‘modest and unpretending manner’ when the completed memorial was the reverse, suggests dispossession of the father’s grave. Broderip records a visit to the grave in May 1858 (‘May was an eventful month to him. He was born on the 23rd of May 1799; married on the 5th of May 1824; on the 1st of May 1845—May-day—he was last conscious; on the 3rd, he died; and on the 10th he was buried’): I only really felt the peculiar fitness of the choice of his last resting-place in its fullest force, when, two years ago, I visited the grave, now covered by the noble monument erected by public subscription. It was a lovely morning, just watered by a few fitful showers—the relics of April—which a May sunshine was now lighting up. The pink and white petals of the chestnut blossoms strewed the path, and the scent of the lilacs filled the air with fragrance. The whole aspect of the place was beautiful enough, and though a ‘City of Tombs,’ it had its own peculiar charm in those small silent flower-plots, looking like children’s gardens, but where no children have ever played. Under the open sky, whether in sunshine or storm, with green turf and flowers around, was where, we felt, could he have chosen, he would have wished his last resting-place to be.76

Writing fifteen years after her father’s death, Broderip’s cautious phrasing suggests that it has taken some time to be reconciled to ‘the peculiar fitness’ of Hood’s grave, a delay associated with tensions 74 In ‘On seeing my Wife and Two Children Sleeping in the Same Chamber’, the speaker watches his family ‘in mimic death’, and wishes they might go together to heaven (HW iv. 128). 75 76 Memorials, ii. 274. Ibid. ii. 269–70; 271–2.

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between public and private signification and imaginative possession. By acknowledging the ‘noble monument erected by public subscription’ with an unconscious pun on the sculptor’s name, Broderip registers the awkwardness of another artist’s name competing with Hood’s; this concern about the contested site of Hood’s remains is reflected in her careful distinction of the grave from the monument, which ‘cover[s]’ it, implicitly obscuring imaginative access. The scenic description that evinces her new acceptance emphasizes a transcendent pastoral idiom (chestnut blossom, lilac perfume, ‘small, silent flower-plots’), and more strikingly, the landscape is represented from the vantage point of the monument, cutting the public marker out of the picture. Broderip’s unease at the grave’s context is mediated through a language of sentimental pathos reminiscent of Hood’s serious verse. She weighs showers against sunshine, beauty against the ‘City of Tombs’, the appearance of ‘children’s gardens’ against the fact that ‘no children have ever played’ here. The ‘open sky’ and ‘green turf and flowers’ imagined as fulfilling Hood’s burial wishes present transcendent nature as symbolic consolation for Hood’s life of urban poverty, and evoke the freedom of a liberated Christian soul. Broderip admits no socially or historically contingent specifics of cemetery landscape; ironically, ‘peculiar fitness’ can only be found in the suppression of peculiarities and particularities. The childrens’ Memorials and Tom Hood’s seven-volume edition of The Works of Thomas Hood: Comic and Serious, in Prose and Verse (1862–3) went some way to redressing the familial control of Hood’s afterlife; the title pages identify the works as edited and annotated ‘by his daughter’, ‘by his son’. The preface to the Memorials emphasizes their affective engagement; when their simple idiom ‘warms into a higher strain, it is solely at the promptings of the heart’, and the delay in publication is explained by warmth of feeling: To us, to turn over the MSS. for these pages—to consult the letters, written in that well-known, clear hand—was to recall to memory such a flood of recollections of dead joys, of long past sorrows, of gentle, loving deeds and words, that we may well claim to be excused if we were slow in our progress, and lingered somewhat over pages, that were often hidden from us by our tears.

Tom Hood acknowledges ‘the popular objection to Biographies, written by relatives’, countering it with their ‘intimate knowledge’ of

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their father’s everyday life.77 Such claims to affective authority are repeated, and this possessive attitude towards Hood’s memory is reflected in the Memorials’ textual incorporation of the monument; an engraving of it forms the frontispiece to the second volume, and the bas-reliefs are reproduced in the Dalziels’ engravings. Yet the children’s continuing anxiety about the monument is suggested even in these acts of visual reclamation, for when there was a demand for a second edition, they took the opportunity to make a few small but significant revisions. In the 1860 edition, the frontispiece engraving is captioned ‘Monument to Thomas Hood (designed by M. Noble) erected in Kensal Green Cemetery by Public Subscription’. It depicts the monument as flatteringly elongated and heroic in scale, set against picturesque foliage and with no suggestion that there is another monument for miles around. The bust gazes benignly down from its lofty eminence, and the whole is viewed from the right-hand side, so that the ‘Bridge of Sighs’ bronze is visible. Close by the left-hand side of the monument stand three visitors, a man and two women dressed in the height of fashionable elegance (the man still wearing a tall top-hat). They are clearly curious tourists, not mourners, though one woman looks intently at the ‘Eugene Aram’ bronze. When the revised single-volume edition appeared in 1869, the miscellaneous 1860 ‘Literary Remains’ made redundant by the Works (1862–3) were cut. The preface presents the volume as authoritative—‘it is believed, that there is now little or nothing to be added to this popular record of the life of a Poet, who is so widely loved by English—and English-speaking—people, as Thomas Hood’, a confidence not widely shared. Malcolm Elwin, describing Thackeray’s scorn for the Memorials in 1860 (‘Let there be nothing of this when I am gone!’), condemned it as ‘the worst sort of memoir, scrappy, sketchy, ill-informed, sublimely careless of facts and dates . . . nauseating in the pomposity of its dutiful adulation’.78 In 1869, a new engraving reinstates Davis’s bust as the frontispiece, drawing a direct connection between Hood’s Magazine and his children’s tribute, the Memorials. The engraving of the monument has moved to form a memorial cluster with Hood’s death-bed sketch and his will to conclude the volume (Fig. 12). The caption— ‘Thomas Hood’s Monument in Kensal Green, Erected by Public Subscription’—cuts the sculptor’s name, and although the view of the 77

Ibid. i. p. viii. Memorials (rev. edn., 1869), p. vi; Malcolm Elwin, Thackeray: A Personality (1932), 393. 78

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Fig. 12 ‘Thomas Hood’s monument in Kensal Green, erected by public subscription’, in Memorials of Thomas Hood (1869 edn.)

monument is the same, the image has been redrawn; the structure is more accurately scaled, and an obelisk and part of the Chapel appear in the background. This more realistic depiction, setting the monument within the particular Cemetery context, may seem at odds with Broderip’s transcendent and unspecific recuperation of the site. Its purpose, however, appears to be to reinforce the sacred and personal framing of the memorial within a landscape of bereavement. The stylish visitors of 1860 have been replaced by a man and woman representing the Memorial’s editors, standing to the right. ‘Tom

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Hood’ has removed his hat and strikes a dignified attitude while gazing up at the image of his father; her matronly skirts trailing dramatically behind, ‘Fanny Broderip’ kneels to lay a wreath. By 1867, Hood had a prominent place in H. J. Croft’s guidebook to Kensal Green, as one of the literary luminaries—then joined by Leigh Hunt (d. 1859) and Thackeray (d. 1863)—helping to make Kensal Green a true Victorian rival to Poets’ Corner.79 It is no longer possible to visit the Hood monument the Victorians knew. Walter Jerrold’s 1907 biography includes a front-view photograph of ‘The Thomas Hood Memorial’, showing the encroaching of tombs on either side, some weathering and water-staining, but an intact structure.80 Since then, all its bronze features have been stolen; as Chris Brooks observes, recalling Cook’s poem:81 ‘Neither the humanity of Hood’s poems nor the grateful respect of the Victorian public has served to save his tomb: the bust has gone and the medallions have been ripped from the granite. “Poor Hood”.’ 79

H. J. Croft, Guide to Kensal Green Cemetery ([1867]), 42–4. Thomas Hood: His Life and Times (1907), pl. facing 396. 81 Chris Brooks in Curl, Kensal Green Cemetery, 227. The bronze elements are believed stolen in the 1920s or 1930s, when cemetery maintenance was at its nadir (verbal communication from Julian Litten). 80

7

Poets’ Corner, Browning, and the Hero as Poet shakespeare’s pen and dickens’s will [Spenser’s] hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb. What a funeral was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, in all probability, Shakspeare attended!–what a grave in which the pen of Shakspeare may be mouldering away!1

Dean Stanley’s vision of the great names of Renaissance drama symbolically entombing their elegies and pens in the grave of Edmund Spenser (d. 1599)—a gesture, we should note, that did not preclude the elegies’ publication—belongs to a late-Victorian drive to recuperate Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner as a site of national importance, to which the leading figures of the Victorian renaissance must be assimilated. To sustain the myth, Stanley has to negotiate the problematic absence of the remains of the greatest poet; the leap from speculation (‘in all probability’) to awe (‘what a grave in which the pen of Shakspeare may be mouldering away!’) represents Spenser’s grave as the shrine of Shakespeare’s pen (Marcus Scheemakers’s full-length statue is only partial compensation for the Bard’s burial at Stratford). In the concluding passage of her memoir of Browning, Anne Thackeray Ritchie adapted the story for the present: ‘Perhaps in years to come people may imagine to themselves the men who stood only the other day round Robert Browning’s grave, the friends who loved him, the writers who have written their last tribute to this great and generous poet.’2 Ritchie 1 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey ([1868] 1882), 252. Stanley was dean of Westminster between 1864 and his death in 1881. 2 Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning (1892), 189.

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develops Stanley’s analogy between two literary golden ages, projecting a series of future repetitions of the scene of literary homage at the grave; however, this fantasy is inherently elegiac, a compensation strategy for the dying of a poetic generation for whom no inheritors can be found. As dean of Westminster, responsible for deciding which dead were admitted to Poets’ Corner, Stanley had the power to realize her fantasy, both by creating a powerful mythology with his popular Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (1868), and constructing a Victorian Valhalla on a site hallowed by centuries of literary romance. The Historical Memorials— another textual monument—underwent an ongoing process of revision; the authoritative fifth edition was ‘printed from the copy left by the Dean at his death, and containing his final corrections and additions’. Fifty years before Spenser’s funeral, the remains of Chaucer (d. 1400) had been moved from an obscure grave to the South Transept, and a monument erected; Spenser’s adjacent burial formed the symbolic core of the loose agglomeration of graves and memorials of men of letters later identified as Poets’ Corner (Fig. 13). The site’s function as Britain’s national literary memorial was always more symbolic than actual. The slippage between an ideal of canonical

Fig. 13 Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, showing the graves of Browning and Tennyson with modern memorials

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representation and the disappointing reality is encapsulated by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reactions in 1855. On an early visit, he enjoyed ‘the busts of poets looking down upon you . . . Great poets, too’, such as Jonson, Spenser, Milton, and Gray: the poets’ elevated position reinforce his awe and sense of literary hierarchy.3 However, this reassuringly canonical impression was quickly disturbed by the actual confusion of Poets’ Corner, and its extremely motley company: ‘even their own special Corner contains some whom one does not care to meet’. The credibility of Poets’ Corner suffered both from unwanted presences and, as with Shakespeare, notable absences. Alexander Pope (d. 1744) cast his objections to Abbey burial in a verse epitaph that was not only published (as ‘Epitaph. For One who would not be buried in Westminster-Abbey’) but engraved on a large marble plaque near his grave in Twickenham church: ‘Heroes, and kings! your distance keep: | In peace let one poor Poet sleep, | Who never flatter’d Folks like you: | Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.’4 Stanley notes that ‘we sorely miss’ Pope, whose rebuttal of public honours came to be associated with literary credibility and integrity: the ‘poor Poet’ ‘never flatter’d Folks like you’.5 The most damaging challenge to Stanley’s ideal was the mass defection of the Romantic generation, for which, however, rhetorical reparation could at least be made. Stanley carefully lists the graves of Romantic-period absentees, and by simple association and the compensating presence of memorials, glosses over the marked long-term disassociation of poets from Poets’ Corner: Of that galaxy of poets which ushered in this epoch, Campbell alone has achieved there both grave and monument, on which is inscribed the lofty hope of immortality from his own ode on ‘The Last Man.’ . . . Of the three greatest geniuses of that period, two (Burns and Walter Scott) sleep at Dumfries and at Dryburgh, under their own native hills; the third (Byron) lies at Newstead . . . Coleridge, poet and philosopher, rests at Highgate . . . Southey and Wordsworth have been more fortunate. Though they rest by the lakes they loved so well, Southey’s bust looks down upon us from over the shoulder of Shakspeare; and Wordsworth, by the sentiment of a kinsman, is seated in the Baptistery.6 3 4 5

Hawthorne, 218. Alexander Pope: Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and J. Butt (1954), 376. 6 Historical Memorials, 269–70. Ibid. 281–2.

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When the brightest star in the poetic galaxy is Thomas Campbell (d. 1844), there is clearly a problem. Respected and respectable, he was the only Romantic poet explicitly to request Abbey burial, ‘when a deputation of the Glasgow cemetery company waited on the poor enfeebled poet to beg the favour of his body for their new cemetery’.7 While Stanley tries to talk up Campbell’s ‘achievement’, contemporary accounts indicate that he was buried as a patriot rather than a poet; at the funeral Richard Monckton Milnes had been ‘reproved for muttering . . . that he “had got the Poets’ Corner cheap” ’.8 His presence is patently inadequate compensation for the lack of Burns, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. Two names strikingly missing from the list of the missing, Shelley and Keats, register a problem with Abbey burial, which Stanley acknowledges by his apologetic remarks on Byron’s exclusion. The Church of England could refuse non-Anglicans, atheists, indeed anyone whose morals or beliefs it disliked; Stanley quotes Macaulay’s account of Byron’s funeral procession turning north, away from the Abbey ‘which had been consecrated by the dust of so many great poets, but of which the doors were closed against all that remained of Byron’. Stanley acknowledges the conflict between Anglican consecration, and that conferred by the ‘dust’ of genius, an injustice Thomas Hardy satirized in 1924, during a renewed campaign to commemorate Byron. ‘A Refusal’ is spoken by a generic high-minded dean, outraged ‘That such a creed-scorner | (Not mentioning horner) | Should claim Poets’ Corner’; he is aghast at being asked to give ‘Shelley a tablet’, let alone Swinburne.9 Stanley suggests that the two Laureates, Southey and Wordsworth, were ‘fortunate’ in their commemoration in the Abbey (in Wordsworth’s case, as we have seen, a dubious claim); the anthropomorphic touch to ‘Southey’s bust look[ing] down upon us’ and peering over Shakespeare’s shoulder, with Wordsworth ‘seated in the Baptistery’, hints that the poets have a more vital (because sculpturally embodied) ‘presence’ here than there. Animating the Poets’ Corner statuary, bringing the dead to life through imaginative contemplation of their stony images, is a popular technique for evoking the vital presence of past genius in the present, and suggesting tradi7 8 9

The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell (1852), p. xxx. James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth (1951), 216. The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (1976), 801, ll. 35–7, 50, 54.

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tion’s continuity into the future. As Stanley claims, ‘The remaining glories of Poets’ Corner belong to our own time and to the future.’10 The greatest obstacle was lack of burial-space; Stanley ‘needed to be convinced of strong public support before consenting to an Abbey burial . . . whereas there had been 169 burials in the last twenty years of the seventeenth century, there were only fifteen during Stanley’s time’.11 Only the greatest and most representative names could be admitted. When Charles Dickens died suddenly in June 1870, Stanley ‘was untroubled by the novelist’s unorthodoxy and needed no prompting in offering burial in the Abbey’; John Wolffe argues that the decision to admit Dickens, Darwin (d. 1882), and Tennyson (d. 1892) demonstrates the ‘wish for accommodation between Christianity, heterodoxy, and scepticism in the commemoration of figures of national stature’.12 There was no lack of ‘strong public support’ for burying Dickens in Poets’ Corner, perhaps the ultimate incarnation of Carlyle’s ‘Hero as Man of Letters’. However, there was considerably less accommodation between the writer’s wish for a private burial, and the popular demand for public tribute. Dickens’s will, rapidly printed and disseminated, testified unambiguously to his rejection of public commemoration, and his personal wish to be remembered through the reading public’s affection for his works: I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner, that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial, that at the utmost not more than three plain mourningcoaches be employed, and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity. I direct that my name be inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb without the addition of ‘Mr.’ or ‘Esquire.’ I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever. I rest my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works, and to the remembrance of my friends . . . I commit my soul to the mercy of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; and I exhort my dear children humbly to try to guide themselves by the teaching of the New Testament in its broad spirit.13 10

Historical Memorials, 281. M. S. Stancliffe, ‘The Reign of Dean Stanley’, in Edward Carpenter (ed.), A House of Kings: The History of Westminster Abbey (1966), 303. 12 Wolffe, 72, 75. 13 R. Shelton Mackenzie, Life of Charles Dickens (1870), 482–3. 11

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Dickens’s ‘emphatic’ and detailed polemic testifies to the considerable anxiety he felt about the kind of ceremonial that might otherwise be imposed after death. In August 1869 he had refused to deliver an address marking the completion of a memorial bust for Leigh Hunt’s grave in Kensal Green Cemetery, saying ‘I have a very strong objection to speech-making beside graves . . . the idea of ever being the subject of such a ceremony myself is so repugnant to my soul.’14 The motive driving every element in the will is rejection of public gestures, appearances, and display: ‘inexpensive’, ‘unostentatious’, no announcement, no revolting absurdities, no testimonial. By rejecting the perpetuation of his memory through memorials and testimonials, and resting ‘my claims to the remembrance of my country upon my published works’, Dickens sought to redraw the line between private identity and public ‘works’, so protecting his corpse from excessive attention. However his mistake lay in not stipulating a place of burial; if the will assumes burial in his family grave in Highgate Cemetery, it does not explicitly reject Poets’ Corner, and his executors were unable to resist the public demand. It was decided that so long as the funeral was private, a grave in the Abbey would not be at odds with the novelist’s wishes; a rationalization that goes by the letter not the spirit of the will: ‘The funeral, according to Dickens’ urgent and express desire in his will, was strictly private. It took place at an early hour in the summer morning, the grave having been dug in secret the night before, and the vast solitary space of the Abbey was occupied only by the small band of mourners and the Abbey Clergy.’15 The strict privacy did not last, however; the grave was left open for the rest of the day, allowing thousands to gather behind the barrier and stare down at the exposed coffin. As Stanley recorded in his manuscript memoir, ‘Every class of the community was present, dropping in flowers, verses and memorials of every kind, and, some of them quite poor people, shedding tears.’16 By the afternoon, the coffin was actually hidden beneath flowers. Dickens’s extraordinary popularity meant that his Abbey burial helped re-engage popular feeling in support of giving prominent men of letters nationally significant graves. When Dean Stanley died in 1881 his vision was continued by his successor George Granville 14

15 Ibid. 296. Ibid. Dean Stanley’s Recollections (WAM), qu. in Wolffe, 72. Sketches show a dense crush of people around the grave. 16

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Bradley, who consolidated Poets’ Corner not only as a site of intense historic significance, but contemporary political, social, and moral relevance. However, the precedent set in Dickens’s case, of authorial wishes, family feeling, and the distinctive character of authors’ works being drowned out by the vociferous demands of the lateVictorian public, continued. The symbolic sacrifice made at the Abbey graves of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson was of a different kind from the pens and poems in Spenser’s grave. In assimilating the poet to the national Valhalla, his characteristic and original ‘genius’ is wrenched into an anodyne master-discourse of late-century patriotism.

robert browning: the hero as poet One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.17 The remains arrived at Charing-cross this morning by the six o’clock train from the Continent. The coffin remained at the station in the keeping of a courier until an undertaker could be summoned. With considerable difficulty a hearse was obtained. At length, shortly after eleven o’clock, the body was taken to the house in De Vere-gardens. The crown presented by the municipality of Venice accompanied the body. It is composed of sprays of willow leaves wrought in metal, and of flowers exquisitely reproduced in porcelain.18

Robert Browning died in Venice, aged 77, on 12 December 1889, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on 31 December. The delay, caused by confusion about whether the poet would be buried in Venice, Florence, or London, transportation of the body, and the Christmas season, strongly influenced the reception of his death. Moreover, Browning’s last volume, Asolando: Fancies and Facts, had been published on the day of his death, and its ‘Epilogue’ was claimed as his authoritative utterance. Obituaries mingled with 17

‘Epilogue’, ll. 11–15, RBP ii. 931, first pub. Asolando ([1889], 1890). ‘The Burial of Robert Browning. Latest Arrangements’, PMG, 20 Dec. 1889, 4. All references 1889 unless otherwise stated. 18

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reviews; most commentators had had their say before the funeral, which became a belated performance of closure, less expressive than symbolic. The arrival of Browning’s body is the mid-point of this narrative, a transitional stage in the careful reconstruction of a thoroughly European and cosmopolitan poet as the type of a patriotic Englishman. The Pall Mall Gazette’s commentary on the arrival of Browning’s body typifies the obsessive attention to detail found in representations of the final illnesses, deaths, and funerals of Browning and Tennyson; like the watchers at the death-bed who listened attentively to every word in case it should be the last, the papers treated every fact as sanctified by its context. Undignified commonplaces (‘the six o’clock train from the Continent’, the ‘considerable difficulty’ of obtaining a hearse) mingle with the noble and symbolic. The ‘crown presented by the municipality of Venice’ compensates for England’s casual reception of her poet; with distinctive Continental artistry, it embodies the permanent cultural sovereignty the city ascribes to Browning’s poetry, and was also the only visible sign of the exceptional status of the ‘remains’ that had such an undistinguished reception at Charing Cross. This ‘crown’s’ very concreteness and permanence is, however, susceptible to irony. The poet’s crown should be metaphorical and invisible, enduring because intangible; its materialization is over-literal and dissolves mystique. The poet’s immortal crown belonged to Browning even though he was not Poet Laureate. In ‘The Poet’s Home-Going’, that unstoppable elegist H. D. Rawnsley imagines the spirit of the ‘Singer’ honoured by ‘The crown that cannot wither’, whereupon ‘Thoughts that had long time struggled into birth | Took form melodious, wonderful, full-grown.’19 Rawnsley generously awards the famously ‘obscure’ Browning Tennyson’s ‘melodious’ idiom—in the afterlife. The gaffe, however, does suggest a further problem for commentators seeking to adopt Browning as a transcendent symbol of Victorian poetic immortality: doubt as to whether the poet—and the man—deserved the honour. As Henry James observed, ‘There is no poetic head of equal power—crowned and recrowned by almost importunate hands— from which so many people would withhold the distinctive 19

Poems, Ballads and Bucolics (1890), 2, ll. 106, 110–11.

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wreath.’20 The Graphic noted that ‘he never became popular as a poet, in the broadest sense of the word’, and this syntactical ambiguity (the broadest sense of ‘popular’ or of ‘poet’?) pinpoints the difficulty.21 Browning’s always circumscribed ‘popularity’ was barely twenty years old (the reception of The Ring and the Book in 1868–9 is the critical watershed); again in contrast to Tennyson, whose readership had grown steadily since the publication of In Memoriam and his accession to the Laureateship in 1850. Moreover, Tennyson projected a satisfyingly Romantic image; many considered Browning troublingly ‘unpoetical’. ‘Unlike almost every other poet’, The Times remarked, ‘Mr. Browning knew everybody and went everywhere’; the Pall Mall Gazette put it more positively: ‘In Society Mr. Browning had nothing of the conventional poet about him. Nobody was more entirely free from the airs and graces and affectations in which all minor poets and some greater ones are apt to indulge.’22 Such images suggest something odd or unassimilable about Browning, which might characterize his verse itself as ‘unpoetical’. Joseph Jacobs stigmatized as magnificent failures Browning’s portraits of ‘humbugs’ such as Mr Sludge and Bishop Blougram, who ‘condemn themselves as unfit topics for poetry’, while ‘the whole method of [The Ring and the Book] is anti-poetical’.23 The Graphic commented: ‘It is useless to speculate as to the exact place which Browning will hold in the history of English literature. Much of his work will no doubt be neglected by posterity. . . . But, when every possible deduction has been made, enough of noble work will remain to secure for Browning an enduring and lofty place among modern poets.’24 That last, effortful sentence suggests that there was a felt need to overcome doubts as to Browning’s stature, a need that can be understood in the context of a wider anxiety about the impending end of the century, of Victoria’s reign, and the ‘Victorian’ age. Reviewing Asolando in early 1890, Theodore Watts reflected gloomily that unlike the age of Byron, when poetry was ‘a passion’, ‘we live in a time when poetry is . . . a taste cultivated by the few’.25 20 ‘Browning in Westminster Abbey’ (first pub. The Speaker, 4 Jan. 1890), English Hours, introd. Leon Edel ([1905] 1981), 32. 21 ‘Robert Browning’, The Graphic, 21 Dec., 764. 22 ‘Death of Robert Browning’, The Times, 13 Dec., 9; ‘In Society . . .’ PMG, 14 Dec., 6. 23 [Joseph Jacobs], ‘Mr. Robert Browning’, The Athenaeum, 21 Dec., 858, 859. 24 ‘Topics of the Week: Robert Browning’, The Graphic, 21 Dec., 742. 25 ‘Asolando: Fancies and Facts’, The Athenaeum, 18 Jan. 1890, 75.

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The late-century critical lament about poetry’s diminished status was recuperated in the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘The mere fact that the funeral of a poet, and of a poet so little “popular” as the author of “Sordello”, should attract so large and so representative a gathering, was of itself not without significance.’26 We may assume that few in this ‘representative . . . gathering’ had read the impenetrable Sordello; the poet’s ‘significance’ is founded less on his poetry than on the values he may be held to represent. Where for Watts ‘Science . . . bids fair to still the voices of the muses altogether’, the Gazette interprets Browning’s popularity as a hopeful sign of mass disenchantment with this ‘material age’, a reaffirmation of the timeless qualities Carlyle described in ‘The Hero as Poet’ (1840): ‘The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce.’27 Fifty years later, Carlyle’s rhetorical opposition of the ‘newest’ and ‘oldest’ ages had acquired an unexpected edge. For the ‘newest age’ was felt to be an old age, loath to countenance the encroachment of the new, modern, and untested. The cheers of ‘Long live the Queen!’ during the Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1887 had a painfully literal echo; the Queen had ‘lived long’, as had many of her great men. It did not escape notice that Tennyson’s Demeter and Other Poems was published in the same week as Browning’s Asolando; as Margaret Oliphant put it: And the year comes in royally with two poets, our two old poets, the great singers of our time, both bringing their wintry garlands to deck the old century. Talk of youth and its achievements! The young ones are only chirping; their voices are callow; we can’t tell what they may yet come to. . . . [N]ow that we have come to the end of the age, it is a curious parallel and contrast to find that the Great Twin Brethren, the two whose supremacy no one can contest, are both of them crowned with the snows of life . . . true Laureates of their century, though only one can wear the national crown. Tennyson and Browning!28

The dinning repetition of ‘two’ and ‘both’ is a show of strength against the homogenous ‘chirping’ of young poets; yet the admission that ‘we have come to the end of the age’ suggests the necessity of 26

‘In the Abbey’, PMG, 1 Jan. 1890, 1. ‘Lecture III. The Hero as Poet. Dante, Shakspeare’, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. M. K. Goldberg (1993), 67. 28 [Margaret Oliphant,] ‘The Old Saloon’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 147 (Jan. 1890), 133. 27

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finding Poet-Heroes to follow ‘our veterans’. The urgency of looking to the future is dramatically emphasized within the review, which was begun before news of Browning’s death had reached Oliphant; in the midst of a critique of Asolando she breaks off: ‘While we were all talking of him, discussing his last offering . . . Robert Browning had passed out of hearing of all these voices. . . . It is the extinction of a great light, one of the twin stars which have illuminated our entire generation,—a poet such as we, at least of the older race, will never see again.’29 Oliphant’s decision not to rewrite the article, but to ‘perform’ death’s interruption, demonstrates the fragility of this fiction of the twin poet-heroes. The commonplace of a star extinguished is shadowed by its logical conclusion—both lights snuffed, bringing in a cultural dark age. This threat, and the failure to imagine whose poetry could fill the void, is a feature of tributes to Browning and Tennyson. According to The Dial, ‘the inevitable sorrow that a great spirit has departed this life, [is] intensified, in the case of Mr. Browning, by the thought that . . . we are brought by it a long step nearer to the close of an epoch in English poetry—and that epoch second only to the great Elizabethan one’.30 Oliphant’s review is also a poignant demonstration of the close links between the dead poet and his final works—the ‘last offering’. Not only was Asolando published on the day of Browning’s death, but it was reported that the dying poet received news of its favourable reception (by telegraph), and that his last words had been ‘How gratifying!’ (There is controversy as to the exact words. The best authority is Browning’s nurse, Evelyn Barclay, who reports that when Pen read the telegram from Browning’s publisher, he murmured ‘More than satisfied’, and then: ‘I am dying. My dear boy. My dear boy.’31) Such a coincidence only accentuated the drive towards overdetermined and ‘poetic’ narratives of poets’ deaths. The Times is typical in interpreting Asolando’s publication as one element in a ‘perfect’ death, which harmonizes with a cultural ideal of a national Poet-Hero: ‘As if to crown the whole, the applause bestowed on the latest effort of his minstrelsy was echoing around his death-bed, like 29

[Margaret Oliphant,], 136. William Morton Payne, ‘Recent Books of Poetry’, The Dial, 10 (Feb. 1890), 279. America was experiencing comparable losses of longevitous major poets: Longfellow (d. 1882), J. R. Lowell (d. 1891), Whitman (d. 1892), and Whittier (d. 1892). 31 B. R. Jerman, ‘The Death of Robert Browning’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 35 (1965), 59–60. 30

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the cries of triumph borne to the ears of the general expiring on the field of victory.’ One might compare Arthur Symons’s ‘Dead in Venice’, in which the speaker is one of the ‘soldiers who have lost their chief’: ‘[H]e had conquered: that was well; | Well that the latest sound of all | Upon his dying ears to fall | Before the final silence fell, || Was triumph . . .’32 Asolando was read as a sign both of Browning’s death and his continuing vigour: Oliphant referred to ‘the little volume, now adorned with so sad yet so odorous a funeral garland, which lies all fresh from the press before us’.33 The collection which before the poet’s death was a ‘wintry garland to deck the old century’, becomes a memorial ‘adorned’ with a garland; yet the ‘odorous . . . garland’ also suggests the poems themselves, which bear the touch of ‘an old man, yet young at heart’, a youthfulness also attributed to the book ‘all fresh from the press’.34 Commentators were quick to read Browning’s œuvre as a body, and to attribute his characteristics to his books: ‘Each printed page is a photograph of his brain at its toil.’35 The Saturday Review hoped ‘that Asolando . . . will soon be united to the rest of the author’s works in an edition at once complete and compact’, an unspotted corpus; Browning’s Poetical Works (16 vols., 1888–9) was being reprinted when he died; Asolando was incorporated in 1894 as volume xvii, bulked out with ‘Biographical and Historical Notes to the Poems’.36 In the quest to transform the private and idiosyncratic poet into a representative public Poet, Theodore Watts waxed literal: Seventeen volumes represent the poet’s legacy to his countrymen. And what volumes! Crammed with thought, suffused with imagination, crowded with figures with life more real than half the people we meet, filled with suggestion, historic, ethical, artistic, and contemporary . . . notwithstanding all deductions of faulty form, of infelicitous choice of subject and medium, a large body of work remains of Browning the poet.37

This ‘body of work’ is treated as a living being, and shares an intellectual energy, humanistic vision, and breadth of scope identified with Browning himself—even though what ‘remains of Browning 32 [Robert Browning], The Times, 14 Dec., 9; Symons, ‘Dead in Venice’, The 33 Oliphant, ‘Saloon’, 136. Athenaeum, 21 Dec., 860, ll. 4, 9–13. 34 35 Ibid. 137. The Times, 14 Dec., 9. 36 ‘Two Books of Poems’, The Saturday Review, 68 (21 Dec.), 712. 37 ‘Mr. Robert Browning’, The Athenaeum, 21 Dec., 858.

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the poet’ comes unsettlingly close to being his ‘remains’. The Times made this analogy explicitly physiological, celebrating Browning’s ‘vigorous’ constitution, strength, and capacity for ‘multifarious exertions’, and finding these traits in his last work: ‘but yesterday appeared “Asolando”, a work which displays all the old qualities, the old fire, and the old audacity, apparently untouched by advancing years or even by imminent death’. The ‘old’ is youthful, the poems, like the poet, could ‘walk and talk with the energy of youth or middle age’ (Gosse refutes this: ‘For a year past no close observer could have doubted that the robustness which seemed still invincible in the summer of 1888 was rudely shaken’).38 Such affirmations of preternatural energy and life in the immediate context of death and mourning, disconcerting and ironic as they may seem to us, fit a moralizing interpretation of Browning’s life and work, one that values his ‘ruggedness’ as ‘a protest against the creamy smoothness [in contemporary poetry] which emasculates religion, enervates literature, and robs character of its virility’.39

home-thoughts, from abroad The identification of Browning’s books with his character and body sharpened the issue of where he would end up. Despite its Italianate title, Asolando was published at home; but the poet had died abroad. In accounts of Browning’s protracted death rituals, we see a striking turnaround from the initial assumption that he would be buried in Italy, to considerable support for burial in Westminster Abbey. Victorian technologies played a part in this change; the telegraph was crucial in helping England to reclaim ‘her’ poet. More importantly, the elderly culture’s hunger for ‘the Poet as Hero’ was answered by the ‘perfection’ of Browning’s death-scene, while ironically, the very qualities that bound the poet to Italy—the romance of his life, the setting of his greatest works—acted as a spur for England to reclaim him. This process is at work in the conclusion to the Pall Mall Gazette death-notice, which moves from a tribute to the Italian side of 38 ‘Death of Robert Browning’, The Times, 13 Dec., 9; Edmund Gosse, Robert Browning: Personalia (1890), 77. 39 ‘The Poetical Works of Robert Browning / Asolando’, The Quarterly Review, 170 (Jan./Apr. 1890), 475.

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Browning’s story to an implicit affirmation of his national significance: Seldom in literary history has there been a page of so many poetic coincidences as might be written on Mr. Browning’s death. Many years ago he wrote in De Gustibus:— Open my heart, and you will see Graved inside of it Italy. He has died in that land of his love and his adoption. Florence was the city of his married life, Venice of his later years . . . And he has died at last in the lap of the lagoons that he loved. And above all he passed painlessly away . . . on the very day of the publication of these lines, with which we may fitly take farewell of the great man whose poems will be an abiding inheritance [quotes ‘Epilogue’, stanzas 1 and 4].40

Already the very perfection of the ‘poetic coincidences’ are pressing up against the concept of ‘an abiding inheritance’. But abiding where? And at whose instigation? Initially it was assumed that Browning would be buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Florence with his wife. In 1865 he had written: ‘I am glad that the place is not to hold any more people: that will not, of course, exclude me,—should I die within easy reach,—as my abode is prepared, and not to find.’41 Browning’s caveat about dying within easy reach indicates that he had no absolute wish to be buried with Elizabeth; indeed, while he had taken great pains to create an appropriate monument for the age’s major woman poet, its painful emotional associations had prevented him from returning to Florence.42 His will made no reference to his grave’s preferred location, and his spoken wishes were motivated by avoiding fuss and ceremony, according to his friend and biographer Alexandra Sutherland Orr: ‘He had said to his sister in the foregoing summer, that he wished to be buried wherever he might die: if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife.’43 The decision fell to the poet’s son ‘Pen’ (Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning). The municipality of Venice offered a civic funeral and 40 ‘Robert Browning’, PMG, 13 Dec., 1. The quotation from ‘De Gustibus—’ is from ll. 43–4, first pub. Men and Women (1855). 41 RB to Isa Blagden, 19 Sept. 1865, in Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isa Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer (1951), 223. 42 See my ‘Entombing the Woman Poet: Tributes to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, 24 (2001), 31–53. 43 Alexandra Sutherland Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning (1891), 427.

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grave, but Pen was loyal to his parents’ myth (he published their courtship correspondence in 1899, the bravest action of his life), and it would have seemed natural to choose Florence; however the cemetery had closed to new burials in 1877. One solution would have been to move his mother’s remains and monument to a grave in the cemetery’s new suburban extension, where Browning too could be buried.44 Pen preferred to appeal to the Florentine authorities for a special dispensation; however, the speed of modern communications applied pressure from a different quarter. In Orr’s words ‘all difficulties were laid at rest’ by the dean of Westminster, George Granville Bradley, who telegraphed Pen on 14 December, offering a grave in the Abbey, which was promptly accepted. Bradley had assumed the funeral would be at Florence, and initially telegraphed to arrange a memorial service, to ‘give [Browning]’s friends and others an opportunity of expressing their sense of the honour due to him, and of the loss which they had sustained’.45 However the dean’s thoughts of a modest service were altered by rumours circulating in London about the Florence closure, confirmed by Browning’s friend Sir Frederic Leighton. The idea did not originate with Bradley, but with Browning’s publisher George Murray Smith, who received a telegram around midnight on 12 December, and ‘approached the Dean of Westminster about Browning’s burial in Poets’ Corner’.46 The incongruous role of publishers in helping to determine the public character of their author’s burial (thus stimulating publicity and sales) recurs with Tennyson in 1892. The dean had final sanction on who was buried in the Abbey, but graves were officially offered in response to a call from respected establishment figures. Though confident that he was following Stanley’s precedent, Bradley drummed up the necessary support. On 14 December he ‘communicated [his] feeling on the subject to Mr. Hallam Tennyson’ (by then acting for his father), and in a letter to The Times justified his independent offer on the grounds that ‘immediate action was absolutely necessary’, and expressed confidence that he ‘shall secure the approval of those to whom on such a question the nation at large would look up as its natural representatives 44 45 46

‘The Late Mr. Robert Browning’, PMG, 16 Dec., 5. First Report on Lack of Space for Monuments (WAM, 1890). Joanna Richardson, The Brownings: A Biography (1986), 271–2.

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and recognized leaders’.47 The dean’s request for support was not a genuine appeal, but invoked a social ideal by which the vaguely defined ‘nation at large’ has no doubt about who its ‘natural representatives’ are, and could recognize its ‘leaders’. By the time Bradley’s letter was published on 16 December, Hallam Tennyson had already ‘brought [him] a memorial expressing entire and grateful approval, signed by a little over 25 persons of sufficient variety, standing, and weight to set all such scruples at rest’.48 When this ‘memorial’ was printed in The Times on 17 December, Bradley did not mention that he had effectively commissioned it: ‘[I]ts interest and its value are, I need hardly say, enhanced by my receiving it from the hands of Mr. Hallam Tennyson, the name of whose honoured father is included among those who have signed it.’ (The list included the duke of Argyll, the archbishop of Canterbury, T. H. Huxley, Benjamin Jowett, Frederic Leighton, Palgrave, and—ironically— Swinburne.)49 The Pall Mall Gazette praised Bradley’s action, and began to reconstruct the poet as a national hero: The Abbey is sacred above all to our statesmen and our poets. There was in the virile verse of Robert Browning much of that solid stuff of which the best English statesmen have been made. One recalls on hearing of the Dean’s decision the poet’s well-known lines on returning home:— Here and here hath England helped me, how can I help England? Say, Whoso turns as I this evening turn to God to praise and pray. Robert Browning helped England by the inspiration of his verse and the example of his life. It is well that England should honour his memory by laying his bones among those who have made their country great.50

The Gazette had moved a long way from its romantic depiction of Browning dying in Italy, ‘that land of his love and his adoption’. The quotation from ‘De Gustibus—’ (‘Open my heart and you will see | Graved inside of it Italy’) is replaced by one from ‘Home-Thoughts, from the Sea’, one of Browning’s rare consciously patriotic poems, here made to exemplify ‘virile verse’ and statesmanlike ‘solid stuff’. 47 First Report, item 5; G. G. Bradley, ‘Robert Browning. To the Editor’, The Times, 16 Dec., 9. 48 First Report, item 5. 49 ‘The Late Robert Browning’, The Times, 17 Dec., 7. 50 [Robert Browning,] PMG, 16 Dec., 2. The quotation is from ‘Home-Thoughts, from the Sea’, ll. 5–6 (l. 5 should read ‘did England help me’). First pub. 1845 with a different title; for its complex textual history, see The Poems of Browning, ed. J. Woolford and D. Karlin (2 vols., 1991), ii. 246.

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(The Italian authorities, in turn, reclaimed the lines from ‘De Gustibus’; they were reproduced on a tablet at the Rezzonico Palace recording Browning’s death, and again on a tablet at the house where he stayed at Asolo.51) The article also renarrates the story of Browning’s grave, refiguring an ultra-English destiny ‘among those who have made their country great’ as the inevitable, not fortuitous, outcome. The displacement of Italy by England, using the same two poems, recurs in H. D. Rawnsley’s ‘Robert Browning. December 12th, 1889’. The opening ‘Browning is dead at Venice!’ knells through the sonnet three times, the news ‘hush[ing] all his latest tender song’; the simple technique of statement and repetition suggests death’s inexorability and the numb incomprehension of first grief.52 In the sestet Rawnsley reclaims Browning by rewriting his own verse: Browning is dead! with Florence on his heart Writ large; but larger, England underneath— The England of his helping; for he knew The mind where Freedom is, and, to the death, For souls in pain who dare the Angel part, Onset and victory his brave trumpet blew. (ll. 9–14)

Rawnsley confidently rereads or re-engraves the text on the poet’s opened heart. The substitution of ‘Italy’ with ‘Florence’ shows a concern with burial-places more than emotional affiliation, while the ‘larger’ writing of ‘England underneath’ implies that despite Browning’s acquired Italian influences, he could not erase his nationality. And to reinforce ‘the England of his helping’, Rawnsley adds his own allusion: Browning blowing ‘his brave trumpet’ to the death is a patriotic reworking of Childe Roland, dauntlessly blowing his ‘slughorn’ at the Dark Tower.53 The task of giving Browning’s Italian story an English ending faced two very different challenges. The first has a comic tinge, though it was no joke to the challenger. The Pall Mall Gazette of 17 December (the same edition that reprinted Bradley’s memorial) published a letter headed ‘A Protest Against Burials in the Abbey’, by ‘Sanitary Engineer’ Sir Robert Rawlinson (1810–98), an inspector under the 51

52 See Osbert Burdett, The Brownings (1928), 328–9. Valete, 99. ‘Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set | And blew: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.” (‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, ll. 203–4, first pub. Men and Women, 1855). 53

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Public Health Act (1848) who had headed the Sanitary Commission sent to inspect conditions during the Crimean War: ‘The Dean of Westminster has done ill in sanctioning the burial in the Abbey of the great poet whose remains are resting in the cemetery of Venice. As a modern sanitarian I denounce this mode of burial as a practice dangerous to the health of the living, and as contrary to the sound laws of hygiene.’54 Identifying himself with progressive and scientific values, Sir Robert recounts and rebuts typical defences of intramural burial, discounting the precedent of Abbey burial, since ‘to add impurity to impurity must be wrong’. His reverence for ‘the great poet’ does not inhibit frank discussion of the possible dangers of Browning’s body: ‘I may be told that means will be taken to prevent gases of decomposition rising to taint the air of the Cathedral. But I may tell the Dean that no chemist of repute will vouch for this. Lead does not prevent, as coffins of this metal burst; earth, lime or cement cannot prevent escapes, so that this danger will be present.’ Amidst the respectful ‘high’ diction of obituaries and reviews, and the poet’s perfect death, consideration of the ‘gases of decomposition’ emitted from Browning’s body comes as a shock. Where the Quarterly Review described Browning’s poetry as a tonic or ‘counter-irritant to that poison of subjectivity which impels poets to shut themselves up in the maze of their own experiences’, Rawlinson raises the possibility that the Poet-Hero could be poisonous to the British public.55 Surgeon Thomas Spencer Wells proposed a compromise: he agreed that ‘although burial of the whole of a corruptible body is undoubtedly dangerous to the living . . . burial of the remains of a body after purification by fire must be quite harmless’.56 Although Wells does not use the word ‘cremation’, this early suggestion that the practice could be a means to solve not only the hygiene problem, but also to maximize burial-space in Poets’ Corner, set an important precedent. Throughout the 1880s the construction of a memorial annexe was debated, resulting in the appointment of a Royal Commission (1890); nothing came of the extension, but space was found to inter cremated remains (Hardy in 1928; Kipling in 1936).57 Browning was not cremated, but the flurry of concern helps to 54

‘A Protest Against Burials in the Abbey. To the Editor’, PMG, 17 Dec., 2. ‘The Poetical Works of Robert Browning / Asolando’, 476. 56 T. Spencer Wells, ‘Burial in Westminster Abbey’, The Times, 20 Dec., 9. The debate concluded in Edward Haughton, ‘Burials in Westminster Abbey’, PMG, 21 57 Dec., 7. See Stancliffe, ‘Reign of Dean Stanley’, 303–4. 55

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explain some pointed details in accounts of the burial, such as ‘The body had been lying encased in an air-tight coffin’, and inclusion of charcoal in the grave as a hygiene measure.58 A more serious objection arose, again from the Italian quarter, concerning the separation which an Abbey burial enforced between Robert Browning and his wife. Great play was made with the Protestant Cemetery’s supposedly immutable closure, but this technicality was rapidly superseded by a more subtle and powerful rhetorical ploy: should she not be buried with him in the Abbey? This shifted the presumption of first choice of location from Florence to London, and shifted the ground of the argument. On 17 December a letter from James Knowles, Tennyson’s close friend and influential founder of The Nineteenth Century, appeared in The Times, appealing that Mrs Browning’s remains be moved to the Abbey, ‘and thus fulfil the poet’s dying wish to be laid in the same grave with his wife’.59 Knowles draws on the sentimental sanctity of ‘last words’ to strengthen his point, which is that ‘a fit and glorious addition indeed would then be made to the tombs of our poets’. Perhaps Knowles had in mind an inglorious parallel with the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome: comparisons were frequently drawn between these expatriate graves and Barrett Browning’s at Florence; if Browning joined her there England’s loss would be doubled, but if she could be brought back . . . A correspondent to the Pall Mall Gazette elaborated: Whether we consider the uniqueness of a marriage union between persons of such genius as theirs, the singular strength of their affection for each other, or the high place they are likely to hold in the national estimation, the one as almost the greatest poet of the latter part of the Victorian era, the other as the greatest, if not the only woman poet, as distinguished from mere poetess, England has produced in a thousand years, [interring both in the Abbey] seems equally to commend itself.60

Recourse to a language of extremity (‘uniqueness’, ‘singular’, ‘greatest’) suggests the writer’s concern that any painful associations of exhumation be subordinated to the noble cause. The writer’s claim that Barrett Browning is England’s only woman poet of the millenni58

‘The Burial of Mr. Browning’, PMG, 31 Dec., 4. James Knowles, ‘The Late Robert Browning’, The Times, 17 Dec., 7. 60 [A.M.M.], ‘Correspondence. Browning and Westminster Abbey’, PMG, 18 Dec., 2. 59

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um says more about the strong patriarchal bias to public and national commemoration even today legible on the walls of Poets’ Corner, than about traditions of women’s poetry. However, the call was boosted by the news that part of ‘Mrs. Browning’s poem entitled “The Sleep” ’ had been set to music, to be sung at the poet’s funeral; the Gazette promised that it would be ‘[o]ne of the most interesting and impressive things at the burial’, and quoted the first and last verses.61 This advance notice of ‘Mrs. Browning’s’ authorial role in the ceremonial heightened the sense that her presence was required to fulfil the romantic legend. Rawnsley—inevitably—responded with ‘Take Home Her Heart’, a sonnet published on 30 December with the polemical head-note: ‘A sonnet written on hearing that Robert Browning’s wish to be buried beside his wife in Florence could not be satisfied, and that, instead, his body was being brought home for sepulture in Westminster Abbey’:62 Take home the heart! her heart that cannot rest For all Italia’s southern-hearted ground, Take home the heart, that fire and fullness found In that sure heart which still would be its guest. Take home her heart! the heart that at its best Was bettered by his singing whose strong sound Was sweetened by her song, for she was crowned Queen of a heart that was her King confessed. Hearts such as these have never ceased their beating, Hearts such as these by sympathy divine In dust will palpitate harmonious measure, And still I hear a spirit-voice entreating Let Arno give the Thames her poet treasure, One grave the mortal of immortals shrine!

Although the sonnet was Rawnsley’s preferred form, here the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) provide the tone, a few images, and the formal inspiration.63 The obsessively repeated heart motif performs the rhythmic palpitation of a heartbeat: the act of reading elicits vital signs from a comparatively lifeless text. With its 61 ‘The Sleep’, The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897), 130; ‘Literary Notes, News and Echoes’, PMG, 21 Dec., 1. 62 PMG, 30 Dec., 7. Revised as ‘A Cry From Florence’ (Valete, 101). 63 Poetical Works, 312–21. The heart motif occurs in iii, where the Belovèd is addressed as ‘O princely Heart!’, v, which begins ‘I lift my heavy heart up solemnly’, xxv, ‘A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne’, and xxxiv, ‘With the same heart, I said, I’ll answer thee’.

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enjambed lines and relentless rhythm, the octave makes a supportive framework for the involved and circular syntax that expresses the poets’ mutual influence and reliance: the subjects do not need to be named, but the meshing of ‘her’, ‘his’, and indefinite articles fuses the lovers in an androgynous union. The syntax enacts their complementary relation and productive exchange of masculine and feminine qualities (ll. 5–8). ‘Mrs. Browning’s’ heart is at different points in the sonnet purely metaphorical and intensely physical. The poem’s raison d’être is to influence public and family opinion, so that the woman poet’s ‘body’ will be unearthed and returned to England. Rawnsley distracts the reader from the more painful connotations of this practical intent (such as the body’s condition after twenty-eight years underground), by using ‘heart’ as a synecdoche for ‘body’; yet to embody the spiritual yearning for reunion that he attributes to Barrett Browning, the heart must live and beat. The sonnet’s eerie power, heightened by the later title ‘A Cry from Florence’, derives from the vital physicality of the heart buried in what is now the ‘wrong’ grave: Rawnsley suggests that ‘[H]er heart that cannot rest’ is buried alive. In the end, however, we find not only commentators and tributepoets, but also the family opting for the maintenance of a transcendent and metaphorical ideal that left the body undisturbed. Dean Bradley immediately consented to Pen’s request on 24 December ‘for the re-interment of his mother also in her husband’s grave’, but finally, as Orr summarized: ‘Mr. Barrett Browning could not reconcile himself to the thought of disturbing his mother’s grave, so long consecrated to Florence by her warm love and by its grateful remembrance’ (‘Grateful remembrance’ echoes ‘Firenze grata’ on the Casa Guidi tablet).64 This is the same horror of disturbing his mother’s grave that militated against the poets’ reunion in a double grave at the new Florentine Cemetery. If Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were to be reunited, it would be spiritually and poetically, through the medium of the imagination. Such an imagined reunion did indeed feature in reports of the funeral; but the debate over what was to happen to her smoothed the way for what happened to him. England—or that part of it represented by Dean Bradley and his grand old men—got Browning back.

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Life and Letters, 430–1.

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browning’s first funeral: ‘In a Gondola’ 65 During these exchanges in the English press, the long ceremonial of Browning’s funeral had already begun in Venice. Although disappointed in its wish to have Browning buried in Venice, the municipality performed its duty with honour. On Sunday 15 December the body, crowned with a wreath of bay leaves, was laid in a wood shell, sealed in a lead case, then enclosed in a large continental-style octagonal coffin of light polished wood. At 2 o’clock a British chaplain performed a private service at the Rezzonico Palace, then under a chilly mid-winter sunset, the coffin was carried across the Lido to the mortuary island of San Michele in a municipal funeral barge (a winged angel at the prow and winged lion at the stern) heaped with floral tributes, accompanied by picturesquely uniformed attendants, with the family and officials following in a gondola procession. In the chapel Orr noted two symbolic tributes: the metal and porcelain crown inscribed ‘Venezia a Roberto Browning’ (already mentioned), and, on the coffin, ‘one comprehensive symbol of the fulfilled prophecy: a wreath of laurel-leaves which his son had placed there’.66 Thus although the official purpose of the body’s wait at San Michele was hygienic, the ceremonial was coherent with the developing Poet as Hero narrative. English tribute-writers such as Mackenzie Bell treated the Venetian ceremony as a vital part of the ritual; his ‘Browning’s Funeral’ comprises two sonnets, ‘Venice, December 15th, 1889’ and ‘Westminster Abbey, December 31st, 1889’. The first sketches the dramatic gondola funeral procession, and imagines the mourners seeing the ‘Rich domes and frescoed palaces’ confusedly, ‘Like dreams, amid the fevered sleep of pain’.67 Bell offers for their consolation the appropriateness of ‘such obsequies’ for the writer of ‘a wondrous poem, passion-fraught,—| Breathing of love and Venice’, that is ‘In a Gondola’; this poem appears transformed as ‘A shining scroll of pure and ageless story’, a transcendent and immortal creation to complement Venice’s ‘deathless glory’ (ll. 11–14). Despite Bell’s commitment to the Venetian ceremony’s artistic perfection, however, the second sonnet celebrates only a spiritual reunion of the married poets, ‘While England, as ’tis right, in sacred trust | Keeps through the centuries his hallowed dust’ (ll. 27–8). 65 67

Title of a poem pub. Dramatic Lyrics (1842). Poems of Mackenzie Bell (1909), 108, ll. 7–8.

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Life and Letters, 428–9.

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browning’s second funeral: ‘they scratch his name on the abbey-stones’ 68 On 31 December the funeral started from the poet’s house in De Vere Gardens. The date—‘the last of the dying year’—seemed apt to the Pall Mall Gazette, but picturesque details—the purple ‘satin pall edged with gold lace’, and the ‘crosses, circlets, and bunches of the most exquisite flowers’—were obscured by dense freezing fog.69 A crowd gathered to see the coffin depart in a glass-sided hearse evinced some popular sentiment; William Sharp noted that ‘Lambeth artizans and a few poor working-women . . . threw sprays of laurel before the hearse.’70 Sharp notices one ‘desolate, starving, woe-weary gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed with a heart-wrung though silent emotion’, and threw ‘a large white chrysanthemum’. His sacrificial gesture (a costly bloom in midwinter from a ‘starving’ man) makes him a symbol of the poet’s anonymous public, who came to the poet’s home because they were excluded from the Abbey ceremony. Printed accounts of the service and committal are generic and patterned, cast in the conventional rhetoric employed to describe funerals of statesmen and military heroes. Typically, passages describing the Abbey’s historic setting or evoking atmosphere are punctuated by catalogues of names—senders of floral tributes, pall-bearers, participants in the funeral procession, those present in the Abbey, those invited who could not attend. The contrast between the poor man’s symbolic anonymity and the litany of establishment names suggests another problem with the funeral. Although its ostensible purpose was to honour the dead and provide a communal ritual in which mourners could share their sense of loss, living celebrities distracted attention from Browning. Evidently the Pall Mall Gazette posted a journalist in Dean’s Yard to spot ‘Mr. Oscar Wilde’ and ‘Sir Frederick [sic] Leighton’, and to note that ‘One of the latest celebrities to arrive was Sir Arthur Sullivan.’71 Following the funerary narrative through the Daily Telegraph’s account, we find a marked tension between ‘raised’ diction— indexed to tradition, and immortal genius—and reporting of the homely features incidental to mass gatherings. The report opens 68 69 71

‘The Last Ride Together’, l. 65 (first pub. Men and Women, 1855). 70 ‘The Burial of Mr. Browning’, PMG, 31 Dec., 4. Sharp, Life, 197. ‘The Burial of Mr. Browning’, PMG, 31 Dec., 4.

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grandly: ‘At noon yesterday, in the Abbey Church of St. Peter’s, Westminster, and in the best of all good company—the dust of the English poets who have sung for all time, as he himself will sing—all that was mortal of Robert Browning was laid to rest.’72 If it is odd to find the dead ‘good company’ (as though Browning’s social persona were still active), the vocabulary and cadence signal the transformation of ‘Robert Browning’ into a transcendent symbol of the Poet. The writer fixes Browning ‘among his compeers’ in Poets’ Corner, naming the superlative ‘dearest sons of English memory and greatest heirs of English fame’. He quotes Milton’s epitaphic sonnet on Shakespeare (‘What needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones, | The labour of an age in piled stones’)—more aptly cited in Wordsworth’s ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’—only to recuperate the Abbey’s ‘piled stones’, consecrated by patriotic feeling: ‘no Englishman would tolerate the barest suggestion of parting with Poets’ Corner’.73 He goes on to assert Browning’s right to be recognized through Abbey interment: The last guest brought to the house full of narrow chambers of silence and reconciliation seems to have been welcomed there by the unanimous, although silent, wish of the entire English people, a wish promptly and eloquently made audible by the Dean of Westminster. Not a dissentient voice could be raised, not a carping criticism could be heard to impugn the propriety of burying the author of ‘The Ring and the Book’ among the greatest of English writers.

The tribute is fulsome, but evasive: a body is a ‘guest’, a grave is a ‘narrow chamber of silence and reconciliation’, a nation speaks unanimously but silently. The diction strains to reject the quotidian, the world of ‘carping criticism’, telegrams, and hygienic charcoallined graves. This is affective propaganda, encouraging readers to take pride in the ‘greatest of English writers’, and to identify themselves with ‘the entire English people’. For Browning to be an apt focus for these sentiments, he must appear as an English hero: ‘Browning had fought for his country, although his weapon was the pen and not the sword. He fought the good fight.’ The reporter struggles to maintain this lofty attitude throughout, but bathos keeps breaking in, partly due to the bitterly cold and foggy English winter. His mind wanders while waiting for the service to begin; he recalls that mourners at Canning and Castlereagh’s 72 73

‘Funeral of Robert Browning’, Daily Telegraph, 1 Jan. 1890, 6. Owen & Smyser, ii. 61–2.

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funerals caught ‘chills, which in many cases proved fatal’, enlarges redundantly on the ‘prudence’ of mourners ‘thickly muffled in sealskins’, and is distressed ‘to hear the scattered re-echoing of hacking coughs which from time to time broke the solemn stillness that reigned throughout the vast fane of the Confessor’. It is hard to feel grand on a miserable English winter’s day, and hard to appreciate grand surroundings: ‘No dim religious light, subdued but ruddy, streamed through windows dight with painted glass. What light there was came in bald gray patches through window panes which were not painted at all.’ Clearly the requirement that a poet’s funeral be a ‘picturesque’ occasion was not met; the chilly light of unmediated reality dominated. At noon a few rays of watery sun broke through the fog, and the procession began, allowing the identification of pall-bearers— headed by ‘the Hon. Hallam Tennyson, representing his illustrious father’, and George Murray Smith—followed by the long catalogue of invited guests. The coffin was placed beneath the Lantern, and key features of the Order of Service were noted: the organ music accompanying the procession (by Croft and Purcell), the ‘affecting lesson’, and Frederick Bridge’s setting of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Sleep’ (titled ‘Meditation’). The Daily Telegraph’s description of the funeral is designed to distract the reader from inconsistencies and ironies: the profusion of generic elements and occasional details helps the task of ideological appropriation, disguising the incongruity of burying Browning as though he were indeed a national hero, and doing so according to the rite of the Church of England to which, as a Dissenter, he had never belonged. (Browning’s Dissenting roots were acknowledged only in the singing of John Wesley’s anthem ‘All Go to One Place’.) The coffin was processed to the South Transept for the committal: [T]he scene presented was in the highest degree solemn, imposing, and august. The purple pall being lifted from the coffin, which was of polished pine, it was reverently lowered into the grave, and the concluding words of the austerely beautiful Burial Service of the Church of England were slowly and solemnly said. Difficult it must have been for even the most callous, the least sensitive of spectators to avoid feeling something like a thrill of emotion at that moment. Beneath mouldered the coil of the mighty dead; but their monuments and their effigies looked down upon a great assemblage of the mighty living.

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What kind of ‘thrill’? For ‘the most callous, the least sensitive’, it seems more like voyeuristic curiosity than an awed sense of communion, as the coffin was stripped of its pall and its naked surface was glimpsed. This inexactitude is mimicked by the writer’s garbled memory of Hamlet’s ‘This mortal coil’; ‘coil’ is an archaic term for turmoil or disturbance, not the body. Browning himself has disappeared beneath the inexact impressiveness of ceremonial, brought low in the act of being ‘reverently lowered’. The Daily Telegraph correspondent had a radically overdetermined narrative to relate, of ‘The past and the present of English culture, of English erudition, and of the diviner flame which burns only in the poet’s heart’, but this high-toned story was sustained at the cost of erasing Browning. The report concluded satisfied that ‘grave honour and the affectionate reverence due to an illustrious Englishman had been paid’ as ‘the great gathering broke up into groups and slowly passed out into the workaday world’; the sense of relief at an obligation discharged is palpable. While the funeral was a social success—‘the last and by far the finest of all the Private Views which R. B. had graced with his presence’, said Edmund Gosse—its emotional core was vacant.74 ‘Poets’ Corner was deserted for a while,’ Gosse observed, ‘and making for it I found the grave open, with the coffin exposed to view, a few flowers resting on the bare wood.’ As Fannie Barrett Browning noted, one of the wreaths was ‘Lord Tennyson’s of roses and violets’, another ‘my husband’s . . . wreath of bay and laurel placed on the pillow upon which his father’s head was laid’.75 Thus, with a unified symbolism that almost lives up to the Elizabethan elegists’ sacrifices in Spenser’s grave, the flowers of the Laureate and the symbolic laurels from the poet’s son were sealed in the grave with Browning’s coffin.

‘help and get it over! reunited to his wife . . .’ 76 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s presence through music and words was the funeral’s affective climax (‘ “He giveth His belovèd—sleep” ’). In 74 75 76

Gosse, MS account of RB’s funeral (BL), qu. in Millgate, 20. Some Memories of Robert Browning (1928), 33. ‘The Householder’, l. 25 (the Epilogue to Fifine at the Fair, 1872).

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William Sharp’s sequence of twelve adapted sonnets ‘Robert Browning’, the ‘Meditation’ re-enacts the spiritual reunion of the wedded poets. A passive and spiritualized Elizabeth appears amidst a crowd of welcoming allegorical spirits: ‘Joy spake not, for, from out the Deathless land, | She led God’s loveliest gift, his long-lost Bride’; after the silence of death his wife, restored to youth, speaks in a tone all the more precious for their long separation: ‘Sweet, sweet the voice that long had silent been!’77 However, Elizabeth appears not as a poet, but a heavenly ‘Bride’ and helpmate. In Henrietta Huxley’s rapidly improvised poem ‘This day within the Abbey’, the chanting of ‘her hymn’ evokes the separated graves—‘The perishable forms these two once wore, | In different lands lie sundered by the sea’—but transcends the separation by insubstantial and spiritual reunion, confirmed by the poets’ spirits smiling at the living’s ‘fond regret’.78 Spiritual reunion might be adequate for poetic and affective purposes, but calls continued for the relationship to be commemorated at Browning’s grave. The indefatigable president of the London Browning society, Frederick J. Furnivall, had opened the campaign the week after Browning’s death: Cannot the opportunity be taken now, to put some memorial of her with him in Westminster Abbey? She is confessedly the greatest poetess of modern times; in my belief of all time. In Italy, Florence has done her due honour. In America the Vassar College for Women has its Mrs. Browning room sacred to her memory. England alone has nothing, has made no sign. Cannot a memorial of the poet-wife be joined with that to the poet-husband in our Maker’s sacred shrine? Cannot her son there record his Mother’s as well as his Father’s face?79

Furnivall’s indictment contrasts English neglect with the homage of romantic and literary Florence (the plaque on Casa Guidi, whose sonorous inscription, by the great Risorgimento writer Niccolò Tommaseo, Browning quotes in the closing lines of The Ring and the Book) and practical, feminist America. The rhetorical questions conclude with Furnivall’s favourite idea that Pen Browning should be the artist to design memorial portraits of his parents for the Abbey. In fact no memorial of any kind appeared, and not until the summer of 77 Songs and Poems Old and New (1909), 144, ll. 59–60, 66. The epigraph to ‘Robert Browning’ is, inevitably, from the Asolando ‘Epilogue’. 78 ‘This day within the Abbey’, PMG, 31 Dec., 2, ll. 18–20. 79 ‘A Few More Words on Robert Browning’, PMG, 18 Dec., 3.

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1894—eighteen months after Tennyson’s adjacent burial—was Robert Browning’s elegantly Continental tablet (of polished red porphyry, framed with cream Italian marble) ready to be laid.80 The only additions to the plain gold lettering—‘ROBERT BROWNING || may 7 1812 || dec 12 1889’—were stylized flowers—the English rose and Florentine lily. It was Barrett Browning’s birth-centenary (1906) that inspired the addition of these words to the foot of Browning’s gravestone: ‘His wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning—1806–1861—is buried in Florence.’ Barrett Browning was the first woman poet whose name was admitted to Poets’ Corner (albeit as ‘His wife’); her centenary was celebrated both at her grave in Florence (Swinburne and Watts sent large floral wreaths), and at Browning’s in London.81

‘the very chair i sat on breaks the rank’ 82 If Browning’s grave was the centre of a web of sentimental association, his death also conferred gravitas on relics. Philip Kelley and Betty Coley’s reconstruction of The Browning Collections lists at least ten locks of Browning’s hair ‘cut after death’ or marked with the poet’s death-date.83 Most were preserved in cases or enshrined in jewellery, with inscriptions describing provenance and significance; several are ‘heart-shaped’—item H488, for instance, ‘a heart-shaped silver locket, with envelope inscribed by Miss Leigh Smith: “This curious old locket was given to me by Mrs. Bronson of Venice & it contains some hair of Robert Browning who died in Venice Dec 12th 1889.” ’ Item H586 is from a group of relics associated with the funeral: ‘Laurel Leaves. From RB’s funeral wreath; ranging in length from 41/2 to 51/2 in., preserved in glassed wooden frame which measures 5 in. ¥ 111/2 in. with 1/2 in. border of blue and gold; taken by Mrs. Bronson from wreath on RB’s casket in Italy; 1889.’84 Katharine Bronson, Browning’s closest friend in his later Venetian years, had helped Pen and Fannie arrange the funeral, and was Asolando’s dedicatee: this item carries a particular charge. Such 80

Westminster Abbey Funeral Fee Book (1811–99). WAM 61741, letter from R. Barrett Browning, 4 Aug. 1906. See Hommage Français à Elizabeth Barrett Browning à l’occasion de son centenaire (1906), 6–7. 82 ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’, l. 45 (first pub. Men and Women, 1855). 83 The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction, ed. Philip Kelley and Betty A. 84 Coley (1984), 510–11. Ibid. 518. 81

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intimate and delicate relics were especially prized by women, perhaps in contrast to the demands for public plaques and tributes preferred by male supporters such as Furnivall. At a further remove from the corpse and its dispersed relics, photographic portraits also changed their meaning with the subject’s death; the mass-produced carte-de-visite Browning portraits on sale abruptly acquired a poignant memorial significance. The Pall Mall Gazette scooped ‘what has proved to be the last photograph taken of the poet’, and interviewed the photographer William Grove, Browning’s valet of fifteen years before the poet set him up in business: ‘I took him in an attitude I have seen him in thousands of times, his head leaning on his hand. He would sit like that for half an hour sometimes, and then take up his pen to jot something down.’85 Immortalizing the poet in the characteristic attitude of composition created an expressive portrait of the writer at work. However death ironized the viewer’s reading of the image, which shifted from representational to memorial mode: the writer who will not write again looks back as a ghost. In Henry James’s words, ‘We possess a great man most when we begin to look at him, through the glass plate of death.’86 This differs from the effect of Browning’s post-mortem portrait, where he appears as a sleeper, head pillowed and sheets pulled up to his white beard; however the light falling directly on his face and the slight post-mortem ‘smile’ (caused by rigor mortis) makes clear this is death (Fig. 14).87 Several newspaper artists secured Pen’s permission to draw the poet’s study at De Vere Gardens. These images focused on the desk with its vacant chair, papers scattered on the writing-slope and screwed-up in the waste bin, as though the writer had left the room only for a moment.88 Such images were carefully stage-managed, Pen contributing to the effect by making a shrine of the study as Browning left it. While the motif of the ‘vacant chair’ was a popular symbol for writers’ deaths, it was also literalized and trivialized by the various chairs supposedly sat in by the poet.89 The Pall Mall Gazette 85 ‘Robert Browning at Home [A Chat with a Former Servant of the Poet, William 86 Grove]’, PMG, 16 Dec., 3. James, ‘Browning’, 31. 87 First pub. William F. Revell, Browning’s Criticism of Life (1892), frontispiece. 88 See e.g. ‘The Poet’s Study in 29, De Vere Gardens’, Pall Mall Budget, 19 Dec., 1616. 89 At Dickens’s death many representations of his vacant chair were published; his ‘writing’ chair is a key relic in the British Library exhibition galleries.

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Fig. 14 ‘Browning After Death’, Black and White, 12 December 1891

solemnly observed that Mrs Bronson had ‘In her sitting-room . . . a handsome comfortable armchair with a silver chain fastened by a padlock barring the front. It bears the inscription “This is Robert Browning’s chair,” and the padlock was unfastened and the silver chain loosened only when the poet was in the house’ (one recalls Carlyle on ‘The Hero as Poet’: ‘The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much’).90 The Gazette forgoes the opportunity to poke fun at Mrs Bronson’s matronly preciosity; if anything it raises the symbolic stakes: ‘Now that the golden bowl is broken the silver cord will never more be loosed, at least not as long as the present owner lives.’

‘medicinable leaves’ 91 In seeking to evoke the subject’s presence, such material commemorative forms can, ironically, make their subject seem more absent and dispersed. They also suggest an idea of death at odds with Browning’s poetic and personal identity. William Sharp relates an outburst by Browning towards the end of his life: 90 91

‘Robert Browning’s Chair’, PMG, 23 Dec., 2; On Heroes, 67. The Ring and the Book, i. 774 (first pub. 1868–9).

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‘Why, amico mio, you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our crapelike churchyardy word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Pshaw! it is foolish to argue upon such a thing even. For myself, I deny death as an end of everything. Never say of me that I am dead!’92

It is the trenchant and optimistic ‘Never say of me that I am dead!’, the Browning of Asolando’s ‘Epilogue’, rather than Browning’s more subtle sense of the human place in natural cycles of death and renewal, that was taken up in tributes. Sharp frames this recollection with an instance of ironic pathos: ‘It seems but a day or two ago that [I] heard from the lips of the dead poet a mockery of death’s vanity—a brave assertion of the glory of life.’ Sharp’s phrasing, which seems to draw words from dead lips, touches on a difficulty with such sentiments. The poet who spoke so bravely of death is now dead; how then can we avoid saying him dead? Sharp’s book is one response: by publishing his own memories of Browning’s habits, manners, and sayings, he invites the reader to enter into a vicarious, if one-sided acquaintance with the dead. Here again reading has a resuscitative energy: through imaginative reconstruction the reader has a peculiarly creative role in the poet’s posthumous life. In this context spontaneously recorded anecdotal biography acquires a surprising prestige. The book, in the literal sense of the physical volume, is at once dead matter and a latently live body, material and immaterial. Edmund Gosse prefaced his Personalia (also 1890) with a comparable justification: ‘If such notes as these are to have any permanent value, they must be recorded before the imagination has had time to play tricks with the memory. Such as they are, I am sure they are faithful to-day; to-morrow I should be sure of nothing.’93 In an apparent paradox, ‘permanent value’ is conferred not by scrupulous deliberation but ‘unreflective’ recording. Value in the immediate context of the poet’s death derives from the memoirist’s recent contact with the poet; Gosse, like Sharp (and, in metaphorical terms, like the first edition of Asolando) becomes a ‘living’ link with dead genius, a relationship which at once gives him authority and the character of a passive spirit medium. Gosse’s essay ‘Personal Impressions’ evaluates the distinctive weight of biography and poetry: 92

Sharp, Life, 195–6.

93

Gosse, Browning, 9.

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It is natural in these first moments to think more of the man than of his works. The latter remain with us, and coming generations will comprehend them better than we do. But our memories of the former, though far less salient, have this importance—that they will pass away with us. Every hour henceforward makes the man more shadowy. We must condense our recollections, if they are not to prove wholly volatile and fugitive.94

The works have a stable and transcendent value; they ‘remain with us’, a legacy for future generations. The ‘man’ however is in danger of disappearing. Gosse was preoccupied with the ‘importance’ of what will ‘pass away with us’; ephemerae that appear trivial in a short view become priceless in the long term. Memories carried only in an individual’s brain are unstable and shape-changing, ‘shadowy’, ‘volatile and fugitive’. Gosse’s responsibility as a witness is to ‘condense’ his memories of Browning, a process that began with writing and recording, and was consolidated by publication. And after ‘these first moments’ such books of memoirs and homage send the reader back to the works, looking to find again the Browning who said ‘Never say of me that I am dead!’

‘if only ghosts might blab!’ 95 When readers voice a text it is also as if the poet himself speaks. But what happens when as if becomes literal, when the immaterial is rematerialized? On the day following the body’s arrival from Italy, the Pall Mall Gazette printed this notice: The most unique, and in some ways the most precious, memorial of the dead poet now existing is one which is preserved in Edison House, Northumberland-avenue. This is a phonogram of his voice. Mr. Browning once spoke into a phonograph for Colonel Gouraud, who has carefully treasured his words. Science has few greater marvels to record than its power of thus preserving ‘the sound of a voice that is still.’96

This memorial sums up a peculiarly Victorian alliance between technology and sentiment, materiality and spirituality, philistinism and poetry; the electric telegraph, high-speed printing, rail transport, and mass-produced photography all played decisive parts in creating Browning’s posthumous narrative. The ‘phonogram’ recorded on 7 94 96

95 Ibid. 79–80. ‘Bad Dreams IV’, l. 45 (first pub. Asolando, 1889). ‘Literary Notes, News and Echoes’, PMG, 21 Dec., 1.

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April 1889, eight months before his death, represents an extraordinary meeting between the ‘newest’ and ‘oldest’ ages embraced by Carlyle’s poet-hero. A recording technology in its infancy was recruited to create an unprecedented form of immortality for the poet’s voice. The reader’s own investment was needed to breathe life into print; the wax cylinder preserved the living voice, and promised endless, if not infinite repetition. The moment’s strangeness is captured by mingled secular and religious imagery: science is also marvellous, and its distinctive power is best illustrated by one of the age’s favourite memorial texts: ‘But O for the touch of a vanished hand, | And the sound of a voice that is still!’: not Browning’s voice, but Tennyson’s (‘Break, break, break’). The phonograph’s capacity to record voices initially appeared almost miraculous, and the cylinder ‘preserving’ the poet’s voice was treated with superstitious reverence: the instrument ‘took’ the voice, much as some societies believed the camera ‘took’ the soul. On the first anniversary of Browning’s death the cylinder was played again in the presence of witnesses, a commemorative test of ‘the integrity of the cylinder containing his voice’. As H. R. Haweis testified, ‘[A]n event unique in the history of science and of strange sympathetic significance took place at Edison-house. The voice of the dead man was heard speaking. This is the first time that Robert Browning’s or any other voice has been heard from beyond the grave.’97 Haweis’s sense of awe makes occult feeling (‘strange sympathetic significance’) a tributary of science; this is a materialist séance, with the author of ‘Mr. Sludge, the Medium’ as its unwitting subject.98 In a tone of rational, scientific inquiry he transcribes the occasion’s every detail, from the appearance of ‘The small white wax cylinder . . . carefully wrapped in wool’ to the solemn phonographic recording of the witnesses testifying that ‘the record of Robert Browning’s voice was audible, satisfactory, and . . . wonderfully perfect’. On the second death-anniversary Black and White redescribed this ‘séance’, illustrating ‘The Wax-Cylinder or Phonogram . . . bearing the Record of Words Spoken by Browning, April 7, 1889’ and ‘A Microscopic Enlargement (400 times magnified) of part of the Wax Cylinder or 97

‘Robert Browning’s Voice. To the Editor’, The Times, 13 Dec. 1890, 10. On transactions between technology and spiritualism, see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), ch. 17: ‘A Gramophone in Every Grave’. 98

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Phonogram, showing the Indentations caused by Browning’s voice.’99 The content of this ‘invaluable relic’? Browning had been asked to read one of his most popular poems, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’:100 Robert Browning’s familiar and cheery voice suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ready?’ and immediately afterwards followed:— ‘I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he; ‘I galloped,’ &c. And all went on in a most spirited manner down to the words, ‘Speed echoed the . . .’ then the voice said hurriedly, ‘I forget it! er—’ (some one prompts), and Browning goes on, ‘Then the gate shut behind us, the lights sank to rest’ (and again the poet halted). ‘I—I am exceedingly sorry that I can’t remember my own verses; but one thing I shall remember all my life is the astonishing sensation produced upon me by your wonderful invention’. . . . Browning left the speaking-tube, but, on being asked to authenticate his own words, returned. So presently, in a loud voice, came shouted at us ‘Robert Browning.’101

Much as James observed that sympathetic Browningites would have identified the Abbey funeral as ‘exactly one of those occasions in which his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced’, we feel that had Browning been less caught up in the phonogram’s ‘astonishing sensation’, he would have relished the irony of a great poet being immortalized fluffing his own lines.102 However, for the men listening to this first voice speaking ‘beyond the grave’, the important words were not the poetry, but the poet’s oral signature, ‘Robert Browning’. 99 100 101

W. Hall Griffin, ‘Browning in Italy’, Black and White, 12 Dec. 1891, 778–80. First pub. Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845). 102 Haweis, ‘Robert Browning’s Voice’, 10. James, ‘Browning’, 30.

8

‘The Last Chapter’: Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Red, White, and Blue Amongst the mass of floral tributes sent to Westminster Abbey for the Poet Laureate’s funeral on Wednesday 12 October 1892, was a wreath of mignonette and fern made by the Prime Minister’s wife, Catherine Gladstone. It was inscribed with the closing couplet of Tennyson’s first laureate publication, the ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ (1852): ‘And in the vast cathedral leave him, | God accept him, Christ receive him.’1 The Gladstones’ tribute exemplifies the complex interaction of private and public values in Tennyson’s death rituals. The handmade wreath of garden flowers signified private affection, while the ‘Ode’ identifies Tennyson’s Abbey grave with Wellington’s in St Paul’s: two national heroes. However, Hallam Tennyson may also have told the Gladstones of an incident later recorded in his Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897): ‘as he was passing away, I spoke over him his own prayer, “God accept him! Christ receive him!” because I knew that he would have wished it.’2 The most public gesture may have a private face. This chapter considers the crisis of literary and cultural inheritance produced by Tennyson’s death on Thursday 6 October 1892, by tracing connections between Tennyson’s immortal corpus and his ephemeral corpse in the obituaries, elegies, and funeral accounts that filled newspapers and journals. The Gladstones’ wreath introduces key themes: quotation adapted to describe and transcend its author’s death; Tennyson’s posthumous authority over the occasion; and tense negotiations between private grief and national sentiment.

1

TP i. 492, ll. 280–1.

2

Memoir, ii. 428.

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the remains of ‘in memoriam’ The phenomenon of a poet’s own poetry being used to describe his end—a feature of commentaries on Browning’s death, but notably absent from his funeral—is exceptionally pertinent to the death of the author of In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850). The poem was inextricably associated with Tennyson succeeding Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850: Albert’s enthusiasm for the poem made him an influential supporter of Tennyson’s candidacy, an association that in turn encouraged Victoria to turn to the Laureate for comfort after Albert’s death in 1861. Here I draw some connections between the importance of the body of the beloved dead within the poem, the book as a substitute for that lost body, and readers’ treatment of separate editions of the poem as memorial objects or talismans. I suggest that many readers recognized that the therapeutic consolation they sought in reading In Memoriam was founded upon a passionate imaginative attachment to the body—recalled in Emily Sellwood’s early description of the poem as a ‘spirit monument’ to Arthur Henry Hallam—and that on an intuitive level the material form of the book helps to ‘recall’ this tangible relation to the dead.3 Thus the synecdochic relation between past and absent body and the (in two senses) present book, may partly explain why in 1892 the Laureate’s corpse was an object of such extraordinary curiosity, as readers who had identified their personal losses with the poet’s grief for Hallam, reread In Memoriam in terms of their grief for their Laureate, and by extension for the golden age symbolically terminated with his death. Being the author of the age’s consummate poem of consolation and commemoration was a mixed blessing. On 25 April 1886, offering her condolences on the recent death of Tennyson’s son Lionel, the Queen wrote that ‘You, who have written such words of comfort for others, will I am sure feel the comfort of them again in yourself’: modern readers may find it hard to share her faith.4 More positively, in 1892 the poem appeared to offer some reassurance to Tennyson’s bereaved family, and to the nation. His son Hallam recorded of the Laureate’s death-bed, that ‘we felt thankful for the love and the utter peace of it all; and his own lines of comfort from “In Memoriam” were strongly borne in upon us’, while at the funeral ‘Many were 3

ES to Catherine Rawnsley, 1 Apr. [1850], TL i. 323.

4

Memoir, ii. 446.

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seen reading “In Memoriam” while waiting before the service.’5 As one hagiographer noted, ‘the great consolation at his burial was his own great consolation to all who are bereaved; the poem which might well be in the house of mourning for ever’.6 The poem was the obvious lens through which to view Tennyson’s own death. The poet’s name is a bridging point between the body—which at death paradoxically seems at once anonymous, vacated by the poet’s spirit, and the only place where the author may be found—and his published works. During his lifetime, Tennyson never allowed an edition of In Memoriam to appear with his name on the title page, despite the well-known fact of his authorship, and its inclusion in collected editions after 1870. Anonymous authorship meant that the only identifier on the volume was the abbreviated form of Arthur Hallam’s own name and death-date: ‘In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit mdcccxxxiii.’7 ‘[T]he Elegies’ were originally printed in an extremely restricted, cautious trial edition, Tennyson advising Moxon in March 1850, ‘You may print these and distribute the types . . . print 1/2 dozen copies and send me them. Give none away and retain none yourself.’8 In this context anonymous publication was a gesture of respect towards the dead, as well as an indication of Tennyson’s extreme anxiety about personal exposure. Ostensibly the lack of authorial name militated against the author overshadowing his subject, although in practice nothing was more likely to stimulate curiosity and speculation. In a fitting irony, given the mixed reception of Tennyson’s earlier publications, In Memoriam was an instant success: word went around that Tennyson was the author and this ‘anonymous’ poem literally made his name. If the austere title page of early editions of In Memoriam is strongly redolent of a headstone inscription, the poem’s 131 sections knit together to form a textual ‘body’ that originates in yearning for a physical body. The shockingly unexpected death of his closest friend Arthur Henry Hallam affected Tennyson profoundly; he died suddenly in Vienna on 15 September 1833 of an ‘apoplexy’ or brain haemorrhage, aged 22; as Ricks says, ‘No event in Tennyson’s life 5

6 Memoir, ii. 428. Robert F. Horton, Tennyson: A Saintly Life (1900), 300. See Memoir, i. 248, for the contrastingly elaborate inscription Henry Hallam composed for his son’s grave in Clevedon Church, still extant. 8 TL i. 322. Tennyson intended to print a trial run of twenty-five copies, to be ‘let out among friends under the same condition of either return or cremation’ (TL i. 321). 7

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was of greater importance.’9 He first heard of Arthur’s death on 1 October 1833, in a letter from Arthur’s uncle that noted that ‘his Remains come by Sea from Trieste’.10 For Tennyson, the use of the word ‘remains’ to refer to both the dead body and written works left after death had a painful personal resonance. R. J. Tennant wrote to Tennyson in November: ‘It appears to be a universal wish . . . that whatever writings Arthur has left should be collected and published, that there may be some memorial of him amongst us.’11Arthur’s father Henry Hallam asked Tennyson for a memoir, but he was incapacitated by grief: That you intend to print some of my friend’s remains (though only for private circulation) has given me greater pleasure than anything I have experienced for a length of time. I attempted to draw up a memoir of his life and character, but I failed to do him justice . . . I hope to be able at a future period to concentrate whatever powers I may possess on the construction of some tribute to those high speculative endowments and comprehensive sympathies which I ever loved to contemplate.12

This letter contains the seeds of In Memoriam, in the commitment to a loving tribute which in some way also answers as ‘a memoir of his life and character’. Sending a copy of the resulting Remains in Verse and Prose of Arthur Henry Hallam (1834) to his grandfather, Tennyson justified his non-participation: ‘[A]t that time my heart seemed too crushed . . . otherwise I had not been found wanting in the dearest office I could discharge to the memory of one whom I can never forget.’13 Tennyson’s failure might also be read as deliberate reticence, a withdrawal symptomatic of emotional denial: despite his approval of the testimonial, he personally resisted participating in the transference of emotional attachment from the physical to textual remains of Hallam implied in even the act of private publication. One of the best-known facts about In Memoriam is that an interval of seventeen years passed between Arthur’s death and the poem’s publication in June 1850. Victorian readers liked to believe that Tennyson had stored up his feeling for years before writing the poem in a cathartic burst of inspiration: Andrew Lang’s 1892 elegy echoes Lycidas in asserting that ‘New grief is dumb: himself thro’ many a year | Withheld the meed of his melodious tear | While Hallam 9 12 13

10 11 TP ii. 305. TL i. 93. Ibid. 110. AT to Henry Hallam, 14 Feb. 1834, ibid. 108. AT to George Tennyson, mid-July 1834, ibid. 112.

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slept.’14 Textual investigation long ago established that writing, revision, and reordering went on throughout this period. The verses written soon after Hallam’s death indicate that the body lies at In Memoriam’s emotional core.15 Hallam’s body is alluded to repeatedly in the sequence’s first quarter. It is ‘a dark freight, a vanished life’ (x. 8), there is ‘dead calm in that noble breast | Which heaves but with the heaving deep’ (xi. 19, 20), and ‘The Danube to the Severn gave | The darkened heart that beat no more’ (xix. 1–2). Almost as persistent is the yearning for physical contact—the word ‘touch’ is indeed a touchstone. In the Memoir Hallam quotes ‘some fragmentary lines . . . which proved to be the germ of “In Memoriam” ’: ‘Where is the voice I loved? ah where | Is that dear hand that I would press?’16 The news that ‘his Remains come by Sea from Trieste’ formed the basis of the earliest verse ix (composed 6 October 1833), a tender prayer bidding swift and safe passage to the ship which carried ‘my lost Arthur’s loved remains’ (ix. 3) from Italy, expressing a strong emotional and spiritual involvement with the absent body through the possessive ‘my lost Arthur’; later in the same section the speaker claims him as ‘My friend, the brother of my love; || My Arthur’ (ix. 16–17, my emphasis). The image of the ship as a travelling reliquary carrying ‘precious relics’ (xvii. 18) sustains several early poems, evoking the painful two-month hiatus while Hallam’s body was in transit by ship, when Tennyson seems to have been preoccupied by its safe return. The language here is more sacrilegious than sacred, implying that Hallam’s body is ‘precious’ as a saint’s. Tennyson did not attend Hallam’s funeral at Clevedon early in 1834, and did not—or could not bear to—visit the grave until after his marriage and the publication of In Memoriam in 1850. This extraordinary but deliberate omission prosaically explains why in lxvii Tennyson originally wrote that Hallam was buried in the chancel.17 Such matters of fact 14 ‘On the Death of Lord Tennyson’, The Poetical Works of Andrew Lang, ed. Mrs Lang (4 vols., 1923), iii. 31, ll. 13–15. 15 For textual history, see TP ii. 310. 16 Memoir, i. 107. The single most popular quotation from Victorian poetry inscribed on gravestones is this couplet’s published form—‘O for the touch of a vanished hand, | And the sound of a voice that is still!’—from ‘Break, break, break’ (TP ii. 24). 17 For an account of Tennyson’s commitment to his ‘error’ (which I regard as an issue of imaginative priority), see Darrel Mansell, ‘Displacing Hallam’s Tomb in Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, Victorian Poetry, 36 (1998), 97–109.

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did not prevent an ideal pastoral burial-site being explicitly indexed as the source of In Memoriam’s inspiration: I sing to him that rests below, And, since the grasses round me wave, I take the grasses of the grave, And make them pipes whereon to blow. (xxi. 1–4)

The poem’s motive is here declared as a song to the beloved in his grave, and the speaker defends his decision to use ‘the grasses of the grave’—the conditions of his grief—to make the song. He does not avoid or transform the dead body through simile or metaphor, but artistically transforms the emotions that grow from it. The later In Memoriam poems present multiple perspectives on grief and loss, which become increasingly independent of Hallam’s implied body. However the priority given in nineteenth-century mourning practice to body-centred rituals, such as the death-bed vigil, washing and laying out of the corpse by female family members, grave-visiting and tending, reflects the body’s central role in early grieving. In this context the physical volume that enshrines a meditation on the lost body may be read as a form of personalized and mobile memorial, a metaphor for the body which, like the body, is also material. Henry Taylor gives anecdotal evidence for the poem’s literal memorial function; on a train journey in the mid-1860s Taylor struck up a conversation about Tennyson with an elderly man: ‘[H]e spoke of “In Memoriam,” and said he had made a sort of churchyard of it, and had appropriated some passage of it to each of his departed friends; and that he read it every Sunday and never came to the bottom of the depths of it.’18 Nearing death himself, the man personalizes the poem’s landscape, adopting extracts as emotionally charged metaphorical ‘graves’ (anticipating the electronic ‘virtual cemetery’). The logic of the old man’s metaphor is that poetry surpasses grave inscriptions, by evoking the physical setting and complex emotional context of grave-contemplation repeatedly. In the early Edward Moxon editions of In Memoriam this mimetic relation of verse and grave was supported by layout: each numbered poem began on a fresh page, so that regardless of length, it retained visual integrity and could be contemplated individually. This effect disappeared in later collected and scholarly editions, where poems are 18

Taylor, Autobiography (2 vols., 1885), ii. 62.

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presented economically in unbroken sequence hedged in by editorial matter. To invoke Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s description of a sonnet as ‘a moment’s monument’, the patterned structure of lyric poetry— unlike continuous prose—has concrete form which the poet can exploit; the characteristic abba rhymed In Memoriam stanza has the potential to function as a textual monument. One might compare Rawnsley’s sonnet ‘On hearing Lord Tennyson read his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, which praises the ‘Great builder of this monument of sound’, claiming the Ode as a ‘sonorous cenotaph’ that will outlast the Pyramids and St Paul’s Cathedral.19 A similar recognition influenced individuals’ valuation of their copies. Whereas most lyric poems were collected for volume publication with other verses on disparate themes, In Memoriam was sufficiently long and substantial for separate publication, encouraging the gathering of intense emotional associations around individual copies. Dennis Taylor argues for the importance of Thomas Hardy’s annotated 1875 edition, signed by Hardy on the title page, because of its associations with ‘the death by suicide of Horace Moule in 1873, a death which was as traumatic for Hardy as Arthur Hallam’s for Tennyson’, and also with Hardy’s courtship and marriage to Emma: ‘In his Life Hardy noted for 1870 that he and Emma “were reading Tennyson in the grounds of the rectory”, a time and a scene which inspired “[s]everal of the pieces . . . grouped as ‘Poems of 1912–13’ ”.’20 Copies of In Memoriam were bequeathed in wills; in the late 1880s ‘W. E. Gladstone’s daughter Mary Drew . . . made special bequests of her two copies of the poem in her informal will.’21 The value attributed to each was strikingly different. A white vellum edition presented as a love token by Hallam Tennyson, was left to a close friend: the pristine luxury edition’s economic value was subordinated to the sentimental and significant associations conferred by the original donor, christened in memory of his father’s friend. Conversely Drew described the second copy as ‘My little old blue morocco “In Memoriam”, very shabby and all the things I had first written on it cut out’: here value is founded in Mary’s reading and handling of a beloved consolatory text, which will therefore remind the inheritor of Mary herself. The commercial and aesthetic valuation of 19

Valete, 23, ll. 1, 8–14. Dennis Taylor, ‘Hardy’s Copy of Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, The Thomas Hardy 21 Journal, 13:1 (Feb. 1997), 43–4. Jalland, 283. 20

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the white vellum copy would be high, that of the blue morocco negligible. After his death, publishers could finally name Tennyson on In Memoriam’s title page, redirecting attention from the elegy’s nominal subject to the name of the author. This change is reflected in publications such as Joseph Jacobs’s Tennyson and In Memoriam: An Appreciation and Study (1892) or early scholarly editions such as Israel Gollancz’s for the Temple Classics (1899), with appended ‘Poetical Remains of A.H.H.’ The frontispiece to Gollancz’s edition depicts a portrait bust of Hallam; however, the title page describes the work as ‘In Memoriam By Alfred Lord Tennyson’, omitting Hallam’s initials and death-date, and the bust appears as an indirect tribute to Tennyson himself. More overtly, an outline of a memorial stone appears on the front endpaper, ‘Alfred Lord Tennyson—Born 1810 [sic] Died 1892—First Edition In Memoriam published 1850.’22

last words, last poems: ‘crossing the bar’ Sublimation of the poet’s physical body into the metaphorical textual body is least resolved at the author’s death. Death put Tennyson’s ‘person’ in public view to an extent he never permitted while living, and the funeral performed a rhetorical and literal presentation of the elusive Laureate to the nation. At the same time, late poems ‘Crossing the Bar’ and ‘The Silent Voices’ (the latter first aired at the funeral)—acquired the authority of ‘last words’ and epitaphic or memorial inscriptions, supplementing In Memoriam and the ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, allowing the poet to continue speaking from beyond the grave. For Millgate, the last-minute addition of ‘Crossing the Bar’ to Demeter and Other Poems, published in December 1889, demonstrates Tennyson’s ‘personal consciousness of physical frailty and of the necessary termination ahead’.23 The volume’s reception was strongly inflected by the simultaneous appearance of Browning’s Asolando and his death. Reviewers of Demeter, the last volume published in Tennyson’s lifetime, treated it as a potential final memorial, 22 In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. I. Gollancz, The Temple Classics 23 (1899). Millgate, 42.

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and were of one mind as to the high status of ‘Crossing the Bar’ as ‘last words’ or swan-song.24 Tennyson invited this response by beginning and ending the volume with elegiac poems, which Theodore Watts praised as ‘so pathetic and so noble as to pass altogether beyond the pale of criticism. . . . These verses from the dedicatory poem to the Marquis of Dufferin would be the most pathetic lines that even Lord Tennyson has ever written were it not that the volume ends with a poem more noble and more pathetic still.’25 Commentators almost universally read the ‘last verses’ as an authoritative summation that militated against analysis, preferring simply to quote it in full: ‘One can only say “Amen!” to so melodious, so touching, so manly a prayer for euthanasia. But long may the answer be delayed! There are songs yet to be sung by a voice that has still such notes in it.’26 In a circular self-fulfilling movement, this fervent prayer for the Laureate’s continuing life is yet driven by the idea that ‘Crossing the Bar’ is itself an ‘Amen’. Herbert B. Garrod similarly defined the poem as a crowning achievement, while denying the closure suggested by the coincidence with Browning’s death: Finis coronat opus. ‘Crossing the Bar,’ which closes the present volume, is a little lyric that is certain to live in all future anthologies of English poetry. Solemn without sadness, this latest poem of our living master chimes in strangely harmonious with the last poem of his newly-dead poetic brother. The Epilogue to Asolando closes a life as well as a book. ‘Crossing the Bar’ speaks of ‘a clear call,’ as all hope, not yet.27

As a meditation on death as the ‘boundless deep’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ is a perfect foil to ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’. Whereas Lionel caught typhoid in the nightmarishly specific ‘haunts of junglepoisoned air’, embarked from a ‘fatal shore’ in a ‘funereal boat’, and was literally buried at sea under the heedless and implicitly pagan ‘hard Arabian moon | And alien stars’ (ll. 31, 33–4, 45–6), the poet ‘put[s] out to sea’ under the propitious elemental symbols of ‘Sunset 24 David Sonstroem reads ‘Crossing the Bar’ as a ‘synthesis and reconciliation’ of Tennysonian themes, forming ‘the last word in the drama of a divided poet’s struggle to compose himself’. ‘ “Crossing the Bar” as Last Word’, Victorian Poetry, 7 (1970), 55–60. 25 Theodore Watts, ‘Literature. Demeter, and other poems’, The Athenaeum, 28 Dec. 1889, 884. ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’ (TP iii. 198), an elegy on Lionel Tennyson, was described as ‘a miniature “In Memoriam” ’ (‘Lord Tennyson’s New Poems’, PMG, 13 Dec. 1889, 2). 26 ‘Lord Tennyson’s New Poems’, PMG, 13 Dec. 1889, 3. 27 Herbert B. Garrod, ‘Demeter, and other Poems’, The Academy, 921 (28 Dec. 1889), 414.

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and evening star’, confident that beyond ‘our bourne of Time and Place’ he will meet God.28 While the abba stanza of ‘Dufferin and Ava’ describes a circular and contained movement, a brooding meditation on the terrible question ‘why | The sons before the fathers die’ (ll. 46–7) (a question which, in a stark occupatio, Tennyson invokes and scorns, because ‘I may meet him soon’), the abab stanza of ‘Crossing the Bar’ combines the alternating expansions and contractions of the tide swelling and withdrawing (‘When that which drew from out the boundless deep | Turns again home’ (ll. 7–8) ), with a purposive forward trajectory. Demeter and, by implication Tennyson’s career, ends with the first-person assurance that ‘I hope to see my Pilot face to face | When I have crossed the bar’ (ll. 15–16). Tennyson endorsed the poem as his ‘last words’: ‘Mind you put my Crossing the Bar at the end of all editions of my poems.’29 In October 1892 ‘Crossing the Bar’ was immediately taken up by the papers. The Spectator asserted that ‘He, and he alone, has graven in words the true but inarticulate thought with which Englishmen meet death, the way in which they hope to “pass the bar” ’, the very misquotation demonstrating the poem’s popular currency.30 The Keswick School of Industrial Art’s linen pall, which covered Tennyson’s coffin during the rustic procession from Aldworth to Haslemere and covered the new grave after the funeral, was embroidered with the poem’s last stanza (with forty-two English roses, one for each year of Tennyson’s Laureateship). Hallam set the seal on ‘Crossing the Bar’s’ status; chapter 22 of the Memoir, describing the poet’s death, is titled ‘The Last Chapter’, explicitly presenting the poet’s life as a patterned narrative driving towards closure. The chapter is bracketed by two complete reprintings of the poem: as epigraph, then the manuscript facsimile.31 The facsimile faces the final page of Hallam’s text, which reprints the inscriptions at Freshwater commemorating Tennyson with his wife Emily (d. 1896). ‘he has passed beyond our time . . .’ When news of the 83-year-old Laureate’s death in the early hours of 6 October 1892 filtered through to the public by telegraph and telephone, and was publicly announced the following day in newspaper 28

29 ‘Crossing the Bar’, TP iii. 253, ll. 1–4. TP iii. 253. ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 75 (8 Oct. 1892), 484. All following refer31 ences are 1892 unless otherwise stated. Memoir, ii. 420, 432. 30

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reports, obituaries, and elegies, his body became the subject of intense media scrutiny. The newspaper obituaries employ a rhetoric of extremity and tragedy that expresses both genuine grief at loss, and excitement at belonging to the generation who witnessed the greatest poet’s demise. The Saturday Review was typical in promoting Tennyson’s death as ‘more than [a] momentous national event’: Seventy years have elapsed since the last English poet entitled to rank with Lord tennyson passed away . . . To the great majority of Englishmen, therefore, the melancholy event . . . is an absolutely new experience . . . They now know what it is to witness the extinction of one of those beacon-lights of humanity which often remain unkindled for generations, and, when extinguished, leave as long a darkness behind them.32

The melodramatic tone is in danger of overreaching itself; the intensifier ‘absolutely’, the violence of ‘extinction’, the exaggeration of ‘generations’, accumulate to signal anxious overstatement more than tragic dignity. The poet’s characterization as a ‘beacon-light’ exemplifies the survival of a Romantic view of genius (represented, one infers, by Byron); only now the last light has gone out, and the dark ages threatened by Browning’s death have begun. If, as Joseph Jacobs asserted ‘[Tennyson] was emphatically, for the Victorian era, the man that sang the nation’s songs’, what might the singer’s death mean for the nation’s future?33 The response was to transform a traumatic silencing event into a symbol of hope and continuity; accounts of the death-bed and funeral reveal not only patriotic and triumphalist rhetoric professing faith in the ‘immortal’ metaphorical body of Tennyson’s poetic corpus, but an anxious drive to recuperate the poet’s material body. As suggested by the urgent attempt to cast Browning as Poet-Hero, the trope of immortal, transcendent genius was alive and well. Victoria’s consolatory telegram to Hallam reads: ‘The Queen deeply laments and mourns her noble Poet Laureate, who will be so universally regretted, but he has left undying works behind him which we shall ever treasure.’34 Victoria’s use of tense is informative: her lamentation is present, while two quantities compete in the future: the regretted Laureate, and his undying works. However, the syntactic sequence makes it clear that the mortal ‘Laureate’ will be dis32 33 34

‘Lord Tennyson’, The Saturday Review, 74 (8 Oct.), 405–6. ‘Alfred Lord Tennyson’, The Academy, 42 (15 Oct.), 337. Memoir, ii. 455.

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placed by the more literally valuable ‘undying works’. Lewis Morris, one of several poets aspiring to the Laureateship, adapted this figure in his elegy ‘October 6, 1892’: Our race can never lose thee, whose fair page, Rich with the harvest of a soul inspired, So many a weakling life and heart has fired. Thou art not wholly gone, but livest yet Till thy great England’s sons their tongue forget!35

Directly addressing the dead is an elegiac convention, but Morris’s insistent hailing of the Laureate’s spirit immediately after his death appears tactless (the poem first appeared in The Times on 7 October). However, the subject of Morris’s address might be open to question: the syntax of ‘thee, whose fair page’ suggests either the author and his book, or the author as book. The second, more poetic possibility is strengthened by lines 35–6, where what survives (‘Thou art not wholly gone’) is his poetry, identified with English nationhood. Death transforming the poet into transcendent texts is a key motif in elegies on Tennyson; yet the hint of textual embodiment reflects the simultaneous tracking of the corpse’s journey to the grave, a more literal determination to ‘never lose thee’. The Times first reported Tennyson’s terminal illness on 5 October, when the paper sent a special correspondent to Haslemere, the Surrey town (equipped with railway and telegraph) a few miles from the Tennysons’ home, Aldworth House. Commentators recognized technology’s role in disseminating the news, though perhaps not the irony that technology assisted at the death of an outmoded archetype of the poet: as Harry Buxton Forman wrote, ‘A thousand wires have flashed the word | That he has passed beyond our time.’36 The telephone spread information at unprecedented speed, allowing papers to give detailed, up-to-the-minute reports. Readers’ knowledge of the latest news was closer to real time than ever before, encouraging engagement with the developing narrative of the ‘afterlife’ of Tennyson’s corpse. The reporters’ first problem was to balance demand for information with respect for the bereaved family. Tennyson had always morbidly guarded his privacy; a concerned telegram from the Queen prompted the dying poet to protest ‘O, that Press will get hold of me 35 36

The Works of Sir Lewis Morris (1907), 629, ll. 32–6. Midnight: 5–6 October, 1892 (1893), 2, ll. 15–16.

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now!’37 Privacy was in fact a marked characteristic of his public persona: ‘Of Tennyson the man the public know nothing; it was his dignified wish to live his life apart.’ This cultivated reticence was defeated by unprecedented media curiosity. The Graphic noted that a flood of condolence telegrams had arrived, and ‘Many callers left cards at Aldworth, but the strictest privacy was maintained.’38 As with Dickens’s funeral, the strict privacy of Tennyson’s widow Emily and the immediate family was embattled, their right to grieve privately contested by powerful public interest.

tennyson’s spectacular death Early significant information released was an idealized description of Tennyson’s death-bed. Even thirty years later, William Watson invoked this scene to summarize the event’s affective impact: ‘When he came to die that magnificent, and, if I may so phrase it, spectacular death, as of some mighty bard of old, passing from ken in a blaze of honour and glory . . . even we who had carped and cavilled a little during his lifetime were carried out of ourselves by a great surging wave of emotion.’39 The particular and historically specific is transcended, a suspension of disbelief participated in too by the critics and poets ‘who had carped and cavilled’. However this inspiring ideal is at odds with that striking phrase (about which Watson too has some scruples) of Tennyson’s ‘spectacular death’, and this conflict between the ideal and the spectacular recurs. Thus Watson speaks of writing his passionate elegy ‘Lacrimae Musarum’ ‘under the stress of that emotion’—an emotion closely related to that which stimulated readers to scan the papers for updates.40 Tennyson’s ‘spectacular death’, described by his friend and doctor Dr George Dabbs, in one of the bulletins fixed to Aldworth’s gates on 6 October, was widely copied, and became a key scene in the Memoir: Nothing could have been more striking than the scene during the last few hours. On the bed a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the oriel window; his hand clasping 37 38 39 40

Memoir, i. 426. Jacobs, Academy, 337; ‘Lord Tennyson’, The Graphic, 15 Oct., 445. The Poems of Sir William Watson (1936), 282. First pub. The Illustrated London News, 101 (15 Oct.), 474.

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the Shakespeare which he had asked for but recently, and which he had kept by him to the end; the moonlight, the majestic figure as he lay there, ‘drawing thicker breath’, irresistibly brought to our minds his own ‘Passing of Arthur.’41

Dabbs writes knowing that his account will set the tone for the deluge of tributes about to pour forth.42 His comparative emotional detachment is not clinical, but registers awe at the aesthetic perfection of the poet’s death. Tennyson’s passionate feeling for moonlight effects in poetry and in life was well-known, giving an exquisite appropriateness to his dying illuminated by a sublime full moon, while the Shakespeare volume identifies Tennyson as an inheritor of English literary tradition. Gerhard Joseph and Herbert F. Tucker suggest that Tennyson planned Shakespeare’s iconographic prominence: ‘For several days before his decease . . . and well aware of its imminence, Alfred Tennyson took to summoning his most illustrious predecessor in the English literary pantheon. “Where is my Shakespeare? I must have my Shakespeare”.’43 This association is registered in Hallam’s uncertainty about whether the poet’s official last words ‘I have opened it’ referred to this volume—which fell open at Cymbeline, v. v. 263–4, where the dying king tells his recovered daughter, ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, | Till the tree die’—or a recollection from ‘one of his last poems’, ‘Fear not . . . | The silent Opener of the Gate’.44 Swinburne was one of many who perpetuated the bardic connection; his ‘Threnody’ describes Tennyson dying ‘his proud head pillowed on Shakespeare’s breast’.45 (Hallam withholds the very last words, ‘a farewell blessing, to my mother and myself’.) As Hallam notes, the sublime scene also recalls ‘The Passing of Arthur’ from The Idylls of the King, where King Arthur dies nobly under ‘the long glories of the winter moon’ supported by Bedivere, who cries, ‘now I see the true old times are dead’.46 Joseph and Tucker note the ‘composed, elaborated quality . . . the stately pace, the allusive and premeditated weave’ of Hallam’s account, ‘lovingly recorded yet artfully wrought’: art and life become indistinguishable, as the poet’s death aspires to 41

Memoir, ii. 428–9. For tributes pub. in 1892, see Kirk H. Beetz, Tennyson: A Bibliography, 1827–1982 (1984), 133–63. 43 ‘Passing On: Death’, in Herbert F. Tucker (ed.), A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (1999), 112. 44 Memoir, ii. 428; ‘God and the Universe’ (1892), TP iii. 251. 45 First pub. Jan. 1893; Complete Poetical Works of A. C. Swinburne (6 vols., 46 1905), vi. 217, l. 6. TP iii. 558–9, ll. 360, 397. 42

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the condition of a poem.47 The other doctor present, Sir Andrew Clarke, concurred with Dabbs’s view of the death-bed as an ‘exquisite picture’: ‘In all my experience I have never witnessed anything more glorious. . . . The soft beams of light fell upon the bed and played upon the features of the dying poet like a halo of Rembrandt.’48 Clarke’s readiness to describe a death-bed as ‘glorious’ jars on modern ears, and The Spectator recognized Clarke’s reaction as ‘strangely characteristic of the age’. Death’s pain and pathos are strictly subordinated to an idealized, triumphalist aesthetic, translated to the curious nation in the terms of another art. The pictorial rendering was picked up in artists’ impressions: one shows the grief-struck Hallam, Audrey, and Dabbs, the dead Laureate’s finger inserted at Cymbeline, and the moon shining down on sheets tumbled like ‘a tide as moving seems asleep’ (Fig. 15).49 Dabbs’s account compresses the hours of dying into a single sublime frame, a tableau centred on the ‘figure of breathing marble’. This influential phrase describes the poet as a permanent marble beauty rather than a troublingly transient corpse, and was taken up by elegists. Roden Noel included in ‘The Death of Tennyson’ the last words with Emily, the Shakespeare, and the moonlight: ‘Then the moon hallowed that sublime repose, | As of pale marble in cathedral gloom.’50 The sculptural trope anticipates Tennyson’s destination amongst the statuary in the ‘cathedral gloom’ of Poets’ Corner; it also expresses a desire to preserve and immortalize the body, reflected in other active denials of ‘change’: ‘For three hours and a half that solemn and wonderful scene continued . . . The body lay for five days, grand and majestic, perfect peace upon the unfurrowed brow.’51 However, as with Browning the issue of preservation was also pragmatic; ‘an undertaker in Ryde offer[ed] his services, suggesting in detail how the body could be preserved with damp salt’.52 Dabbs’s record was telegraphed to the London papers early enough on Thursday for quickfire elegists such as Edwin Arnold, Alfred Austin, and (as we have seen) Lewis Morris, to allude to it in poems printed on Friday. William Hurrell Mallock’s memoirs include a scurrilous story about two poets—‘we may call them Sir E. 47 48 49 50 51

Joseph and Tucker, ‘Passing On’, 112. ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 75 (8 Oct.), 481. ‘Crossing the Bar’ (l. 5), in TP iii. 253. The Nineteenth Century, 32 (Nov.), 836, ll. 34–5. 52 Horton, Saintly Life, 299. Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson (1996), 16.

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Fig. 15 S. Begg, ‘The Death of Lord Tennyson’, Supplement to Black and White, 15 October 1892

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and Sir L.’—visiting a country house at ‘the time of Tennyson’s last illness’. After overindulging in plum-tart the poets retired to their rooms, apparently indisposed: Next morning came the news of Tennyson’s death. The two bards remained in their cells till noon, after which they both reappeared like men who had got rid of a burden. The true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected, was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which the country had just suffered—compositions implying . . . that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair it’.53

(Mallock puns scatologically on the poets’ ‘burden’.) The inferior Alfred, Alfred Austin, cannibalized the Idylls in ‘The Passing of Merlin’. He borrows lines from ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ (‘I am Merlin, | And I am dying, | I am Merlin | Who follow The Gleam’) for an epigraph, and quotes pointedly from ‘The Passing of Arthur’ in the jarring couplet ‘From the great deep to the great deep hath He | Passed, and, if now He knows, is mute eternally.’54 Austin makes no bones of his ambition: ‘When fresh renown prolongs Victoria’s Reign, | Some patriot hand will sweep the living lyre, | And prove, with native notes, that Merlin was his sire’ (ll. 93–5). Quotation and allusion are the tribute-poet’s stock-in-trade, but here the drive to represent Tennyson’s death as consummately ‘Tennysonian’ is unusually fierce and emulative. Tennyson’s death-bed was both ‘spectacular’ and private; initially his corpse was mediated to the public in an indirect, aestheticized form. It still belonged to his family, and they controlled access and information. The Laureate’s will made no stipulations about the funeral, because his wishes were verbally entrusted to his wife and son. Emily, despite not being strong enough to attend a public occasion, gave her husband up for a funeral in Westminster Abbey arranged by Hallam and his father’s publishing house, Macmillans, on 12 October. The newspapers did not stop discussing the body in the interval between death and funeral; The Times’s readers could participate vicariously in every stage of the rite. For instance, it was reported that at 11 a.m. on 7 October Lady Tennyson asked that ‘the inner shell of the coffin’ be stored in an outhouse, because ‘at the last 53 54

W. H. Mallock, Memoirs of Life and Literature (1920), 90. TP iii. 206, ll. 7–10; ‘The Passing of Merlin’, The Times, 7 Oct., 7, ll. 34–5.

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moment [she] begged that that body might remain undisturbed for a little longer’; later the body was reverently transferred to the shell. Readers were also informed of the location in Poets’ Corner of ‘the resting-place of the body’, adjacent to Browning’s grave, and that ‘there was yesterday an unusual number of visitors in the Abbey’.55 This advance tourism, visiting to view where the grave will be, is reflected in illustrations, which show the environs of Poets’ Corner, with Chaucer and Spenser’s tombs prominent, and figures representing Hallam and his wife Audrey looking down at a flagstone marked with a cross. Such images necessarily depend for their meaning on the absent corpse: the Tennysons appear to look through the stone floor to where the poet will lie. The Times also shared with its readers the significant ritual of closing the coffin on 10 October: ‘The face still wore that look of calm majesty . . . the hands were crossed upon the breast, flowers lay beside the body, laurel leaves at the head and feet.’56 This does not simply show that the poet is appropriately presented, but asserts that the body—miraculously—has not visibly begun to decay, sustaining the immortalizing note struck by Dabbs. Adding a touch of drama to the closing ceremony, the report observes that ‘At the very last moment, one of the nurses . . . placed within the coffin a packet containing—one knows not what.’ The packet contained Audrey’s copy of Cymbeline: evidently Tennyson’s Shakespeare, the textual body that should have lain with the body of the Victorian Shakespeare, was too precious, leading to a slightly bathetic substitution. Even the nocturnal grave-digging in Westminster Abbey on 10 and 11 October was recorded in detail. The Graphic saw an impressive and sublime ‘scene’, with the workmen’s shadows ‘standing out in Rembrandt-like mystery’ against ‘the flaming gas-jets around the open grave’.57 The account, again invoking Rembrandt’s strong contrasts of light and dark, is truly dramatic, in the sense of registering atmosphere and sound as well as appearances, such as the organist practising the ‘Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul. Although the press was kept informed about arrangements at Aldworth, no major concessions were made to Tennyson’s public character until the coffin’s arrival at Westminster Abbey on the 55 56 57

‘The Late Lord Tennyson. Funeral Arrangments’, The Times, 8 Oct., 9. ‘Lord Tennyson. (From our special correspondent)’, The Times, 11 Oct., 7–8. ‘Lord Tennyson’, The Graphic, 15 Oct., 445.

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evening of Tuesday 11 October. The body had travelled from Aldworth by night, recalling the nocturnal funerals of previous centuries, and representing an interim stage in the transition from private to public: The Times’s description of the journey as characterized by ‘absolute simplicity’ reads as a barely altered press release from the family, and a polemic against the terms of public ceremony. Emily had parted with her husband’s body in private and remained at Aldworth. Tennyson’s dislike of conventional funerary trappings was honoured, ‘There were no hearses, no mourning carriages; there was no parade of grief’, and the coffined body was carried on a shooting cart decorated with ivy, red Virginia creeper, and fern, with the mourners walking after.58 The witnesses were not just reporters, but local people inclined to view Tennyson as their (eccentric) squire, rather than a celebrity poet. The body was put on a special train at Haslemere, Audrey accompanying it to Waterloo, where a small crowd waited. Although Tennyson’s body was moved at night to minimize disturbance and exposure, at Waterloo the Union flag was spread over the coffin, informing people on the street that the Poet Laureate was passing by. Another ‘Extremely dense’ but ‘reverent’ crowd waited at the Abbey: ‘Passers-by whispered one to the other “Lord Tennyson”, and clustered round the gateway, baring their heads.’59 The coffin stayed in St Faith’s Chapel overnight, a scene represented by several artists with moonlight streaming through the windows, as on the death-bed.

the ‘red, white and blue’ According to The Spectator, Tennyson’s funeral was ‘the occasion for an unexampled exhibition of public regard—the feeling shown being like that usually reserved for some great statesman or man of action’.60 It was an opportunity to see the poet’s coffin, public figures, and a great British ceremonial, but it also allowed a mass demonstration of sentiment. The demand for admission tickets far outstripped supply (there were eleven thousand applications for one thousand tickets), and more crowds gathered to watch ‘mourners’ entering the Abbey. As embodied testimony to the mass sentiment for 58 60

‘The Late Lord Tennyson’, The Times, 12 Oct., 6. ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 15 Oct., 515.

59

Ibid.

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Tennyson, the crowds acquired a prestige value: newspaper accounts are themselves packed with phrases such as ‘densely thronged’, ‘densely crowded’, ‘every unreserved space . . . was occupied’. Mourners jostled for good vantage points close to or overlooking the open grave. The numbers who went to Westminster suggest the strength of public feeling, nourished by seven days’ coverage; but for the hundreds who came, there were thousands more who wanted to read all about it; places were reserved for ‘the gentlemen of the press’ very close to the grave. An Abbey funeral is an elaborate spectacle paradoxically predicated on concealing the event’s focal object. Readers who had been following the papers were conditioned to participate in an event where the unseen must be imaginatively reconstructed from given information. They had been fed predigested, detailed eyewitness testimony and practical details of the poet’s death-bed and laying out; they knew the music to be played during the service, and which important figures would appear in the funeral procession; plans showed the placing of principal mourners and identified pallbearers. On 11 October The Times printed advance details, demonstrating the codes of symbolic displacement common to viewing the coffin and the procession of mourners: ‘As representative of the Queen, Sir Henry Ponsonby . . . The Prince of Wales will be represented by Sir Dighton Probyn. Next to these will follow a long procession, composed of notable and representative men belonging to [the universities] . . . and representatives of working men.’61 Just as seventeenth-century nobility sent their escutcheoned carriages, empty, to stand in for them during a hearse’s procession through the streets, so the royal family sent lesser dignitaries—and, failing that, wreaths—to represent them. Many individuals acted in the ceremony as symbolic representatives of specific institutions and values. Thus, while observers might have found it hard to regard Sir Henry Ponsonby as bearing the full dignity of Queen Victoria, they understood how to read his presence; they similarly read the flag-draped coffin as representing the Laureate’s body. The distinction is, of course, that while Victoria was literally absent, Tennyson’s corpse was present, concealed inside the coffin which also symbolized it; but in both cases observers saw one thing, and made an imaginative leap to the unseen. This gaze is penetrative: its conceit is that one looks 61

‘Lord Tennyson. (From our special correspondent)’, The Times, 11 Oct., 7.

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through the coffin to the corpse. Theodore Watts sums up this viewing strategy in his poem ‘In Westminster Abbey’, published a few weeks later. A close friend of Tennyson, Watts was alienated by the occasion, and questioned the pomp by taking a downmarket source for his epigraph: ‘ “The crowd in the Abbey was very great”—Morning Newspaper’. The poem opens by distancing itself from this vulgar authority: I saw no crowd: yet did these eyes behold What others saw not—his lov’d face sublime Beneath that pall of death in deathless prime Of Tennyson’s long day that grows not old;62

In order to make a personal connection with the dead man, Watts must be blind to the crowds of other ‘mourners’, yet with second sight he can see what they cannot. He searches beyond death’s mask to ‘his lov’d face sublime | . . . in deathless prime’, invoking both the apparent youthfulness of Tennyson’s face in death, and his ‘deathless’ poetry. There was strong foundation for Watts’s special relationship with Tennyson; but by imaginative participation in the Laureate’s death rituals through the newspapers and illustrated papers, many in the crowd shared this sense of privileged vision and emotional involvement. Tennyson’s body played the central role in accounts of the funeral service; it was referred to euphemistically, but every change of position or lighting was noted and interpreted, allowing readers to chart its progress. The Graphic refers to the suspenseful ‘breathless silence’, as the congregation awaited the coffin’s entry from the chapel, accompanied by the sound of the organ and the choir rolling like waves through the Abbey: ‘Its volume of sound ebbed . . . then swelled again as the Laureate’s body was borne up the broad nave, where crowds of faces were bent eagerly forward to get a glimpse of the coffin that contained all that could die of Alfred Tennyson.’63 Music, a powerful emotional stimulus in funerary ritual, appears to carry the coffin up the aisle, as though borne by the sea. Although this poetic image might allude to the sea-like crowd, their keenness to ‘get a glimpse’ suggests curiosity rather than profound grief. The reporter refers to the ‘body’ both explicitly and euphemistically (‘all that could die’); the coffin is only mentioned for what it contains. He 62 63

Nineteenth Century, 32 (Nov.), 842, ll. 1–4. ‘Lord Tennyson’, The Graphic, 15 Oct., 445.

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goes on to pick out an unusual light effect playing over the Abbey’s interior, ‘one ray wavering lower [that] touched the wreath that rested above the poet’s body’. This uncanny effect recalls the moonlit death-bed, as the daylight of public ceremonial both invokes and displaces the private scene. Both are signs of God’s favour; here the single ray points to the body through the laurel wreath that symbolizes poetic vocation. The Daily Telegraph’s patriotic, conservative voice perfectly answered the mass need to claim and possess the nation’s poet: its report of the coffin’s arrival mounts to a high-pitched nationalistic and ‘raised’ rhetoric. Grief is subordinated to ceremonial: the reporter characterizes the funeral as ‘a spectacle to make the country proud as well as mournful, so full was it of all the elements which have rendered England powerful, renowned, and secure’.64 The conviction that the people are playing in a national drama is framed in imperial rhetoric, which seeks to restore confidence damaged by the Laureate’s death. This extends to the anthropomorphic conceit by which the ‘marble effigies’ lining the Abbey appear to come alive and wait with the rest of the congregation for ‘that which was soon to be borne into our midst’. The symbolic ray is clouded, the atmosphere intensifies: The thousands present in the edifice have at that moment one emotion, one heart . . . now are seen the white robes of the clergy, advancing . . . and next—that for which all have been reverently waiting. It comes in sight—the coffin of English heart-of-oak, to-day holding all that was mortal of England’s lover and teacher and chief poet, Alfred Tennyson.65

In their concentration upon one object and idea, the ‘thousands’ (including the sculpted great men) become ‘one’: for the Telegraph’s readership, this emotional identity is unified by an explicitly patriotic subject. Suspense is wound up by referring to the body indirectly, so that the paragraph culminates triumphantly in Tennyson’s name. Tennyson is claimed as the embodiment of proud English virtues; even the coffin’s substance—another of the poet’s last wishes—punningly claims the poet’s heart to be English as the oak. The flag-draped coffin was then placed on trestles covered in purple cloth under the lantern, at the Abbey’s symbolic heart, for the 64 65

‘Lord Tennyson. Burial in the Abbey’, Daily Telegraph, 13 Oct., 7. Ibid.

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short service. The poet’s body was presented to the nation accompanied by the plangent tones of the organ playing Purcell’s setting of the 90th Psalm, and Frederick Bridge’s vocal settings of two late Tennyson poems meditating on death, ‘Crossing the Bar’ and ‘The Silent Voices’: the latter was ‘composed not long ago by Lord Tennyson, and set to music by Lady Tennyson at her husband’s request a short time before his death’.66 Both texts were readily assimilable to the grand and generalized tone of a public funeral, resolving the speaker’s death-anxiety by anticipating the afterlife. However, again we find evidence of authorial preparation and control, specifically a personal idiom within the spectacular rhetoric of public funeral allowing Emily some presence, though absent. Several commentators reflected on the pathetic fact of her being able to ‘attend’ only by musical proxy, recalling the demands for the return of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s remains to England in 1889. The Laureate’s voice was prolonged beyond the grave, a miracle daringly registered by allusion to Hebrews 10: 4: ‘This seemed, indeed, the very voice of the Laureate, to which those thousands breathlessly listened. “He being dead, yet speaketh”.’ Commentators did not, however, appear to realize the extent to which the poet had sought to author his own end. Then, to Chopin’s Marche Funèbre, bearers carried the coffin in procession round to Poets’ Corner. Hallam and Audrey Tennyson stood at the head of the coffin, while at the foot Dean Bradley read the prayers, committal, and the collect. In the context of such funerary spectacle, private, personal grief is not a right. The Telegraph speaks not for the family but the nation when its reporter contemplates ‘that little gaping patch of black void yawn[ing] in the pavement, where all we hold of him must soon be laid’: we cling to the poet’s body, and we reluctantly give him up to the exigencies of burial.67 At the crucial moment when the coffin was lowered into the grave, Tennyson is associated with Queen and country, not widow and son: And now they lower Tennyson into that gaping slit in the pavement, the Queen’s laurel wreath and three or four other special crowns of honour being first laid upon the clean-stripped oaken coffin. The Jack has been carefully removed, but the coffin lid shows still bright with ‘red, white, and blue’, 66 ‘The Late Lord Tennyson. Arrangements for the Funeral Service’, The Times, 11 Oct., 7; TP iii. 251. 67 ‘Lord Tennyson. Burial in the Abbey’, Daily Telegraph, 13 Oct., 7.

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for the wreaths upon it contain the roses and violets of England, as well as her lilies.68

Special attention is paid to Victoria’s laurel wreath, which, inscribed in the Queen’s own hand, authorizes Tennyson as the nation’s official poet. The flag’s removal briefly raises the hope of a more personal final note, roses, violets, and lilies speaking in the language of flowers of love, memory, and purity. However, the Telegraph sees only the ‘red, white and blue’, and concludes that the flag was ‘the proudest token which was placed on the coffin, more appropriate even than the widowed Lady Tennyson’s magnificent cross’. This stridently patriotic interpretation is complemented by the reporter’s fantasy that Scheemakers’s monument of Shakespeare is one of those reanimated marble figures ‘looking towards the very spot of the Laureate’s interment’. England’s greatest writer is visible and embodied, a symbolic player in the funeral spectacle, encouraging and welcoming another great English writer; yet he is also a book: ‘The thought flies to the mind that inside that coffin, now disappearing in the dark purple trappings of the grave, the dead man bears on his breast a little packet containing Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”.’ Thus at the funeral’s dramatic climax the reporter’s gaze penetrates the concealing (and disappearing) coffin. The ostensible reason is to complete the association of two great English poets, simplifying ‘Shakespeare’ into a noble but anodyne cipher, in order to immortalize Tennyson as the Victorian Shakespeare. Yet it is striking that the moment of committal is chosen for this last look at Tennyson’s body, the symbolic book fused to his poet’s ‘breast’. The reporter’s daring imaginative transgression of the sealed container performs rhetorically as a final, tragic reminder of what we are losing; yet simultaneously it affirms that we are not losing Tennyson to a ‘black void’, but rather installing him permanently at the heart of English cultural life, in Poets’ Corner. The newspapers ensured that the public read Tennyson’s funeral as a noble and dignified occasion, distinguished by crowds of heartfelt and docile admirers from all classes. Their high-toned rhetoric works hard to suppress elements that fail to live up to these grand illusions, casting the crowd’s behaviour as quasi-religious adoration, rather than mass feeling mingled with thrill-seeking curiosity. The ideal reading was put under pressure by the conflict between the supposed 68

Ibid.

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ritual closure performed by the funeral, and the coffin’s accessibility. The coffin was not covered until the Abbey closed in the evening: the spectacle was not yet over: [G]reat numbers of the congregation filed past the open grave to take one last look at the coffin . . . The rite was over, but crowds were still waiting patiently outside to show their affectionate veneration for the greatest singer of their time. For hours the long array of pilgrims continued to flock into the Abbey and to gaze upon the grave. Not till the short autumn day was drawing to its end, and the portals of the Abbey were closed, was Alfred Tennyson left alone in the great temple with his peers.69

The Times editorial both aestheticizes and privileges the crowds: the religious ‘rite’ was over, but the ‘greatest singer’ was then subject to secular ‘veneration’ by a mass of ‘pilgrims’. Many of the congregation would barely have caught a glimpse of the coffin from their hard-won seats, so their desire to ‘take one last look’ suggests the attempt to make imagination and reality cohere. For the crowds outside, however, the act of pilgrimage was more ambivalent. With hundreds converging on a six-foot trench, paying respects became gestural: intellectual or imaginative communion was impossible when new ‘pilgrims’ were streaming in for their turn, and the Abbey echoed with footsteps and voices. The funeral was over, but the spectacle continued. Tennyson’s coffin was the ostensible object of the mass gaze, but the gazers self-consciously performed for the newspaper artists, whose sketches show the grave besieged by men and women, heads bowed in attitudes more redolent of intense curiosity than humble respect (Fig. 16); as Wolffe observes, ‘[I]n the days after the funeral the grave drew thousands of pilgrims, to the extent that the Abbey authorities found themselves obliged to call in the police in order to regulate the crowds.’70 This was a crowd that needed to be controlled.

‘now I see the true old times are dead’ I have argued that the project to transform a morbidly private poet into the nation’s immortal Laureate necessitated the presentation of Tennyson’s body to the people, both actually through burial in the 69 70

‘London, Thursday, October 13, 1892’, The Times, 13 Oct., 7. Wolffe, 73.

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Fig. 16 S. C. Crowther, ‘The Last Look: A Sketch at the Funeral of Lord Tennyson at Westminster Abbey Yesterday’, The Daily Graphic, 13 October 1892

state-sanctioned memorial site of Poets’ Corner, and rhetorically through sketches, descriptions, obituaries, critical retrospectives, and tribute poems. However, there were dissenters; many literary people and friends of the poet felt that the manner of the funeral and the homogenizing tone of the newspapers betrayed Tennyson. The Saturday Review injects a shot of realism and disillusion into the body of patriotic pride: The funeral of Lord Tennyson was in some respects like most occasions on which large numbers of human beings are collected together . . . The sightseer element was very conspicuously present, and behaved as it is wont to do in all crushes. Men pushed, women fought, elbowed, and twisted their way in as they might have done at the door of a pit. . . . [i]t was perhaps inevitable, but it was certainly incongruous, that the ‘gentlemen of the Press’ should be seen within a few feet of the grave, sketching or making notes, with

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no deliberate irreverence, certainly, but with very businesslike secular activity.71

Contrary to the overdetermined figuring of Tennyson’s death as unique and incomparable, here the funeral is read as disappointingly typical of mass events. The ‘pilgrims’ are redefined by their touristic gaze as ‘the sightseer element’, and are themselves vulgarly ‘conspicuous’. The eagerness to sightsee does not stop at the eye, however; it involves physically making way through a press of bodies comparable to a theatre audience stampeding for the cheapest seats. This mass behaviour is explicitly associated with the ‘very businesslike secular activity’ of the press, whose ‘gentlemanly’ attributes are ironically disputed: there is an economy of spectacle, which suggests that the press are to a good extent responsible for the crowd. Even when concluding that despite the ‘unseemly conduct’ of the starers and boasters, ‘Lord Tennyson was buried in his appropriate resting-place in a manner not unworthy of the nation which was honoured by his genius’, the reviewer’s negative phrasing leaves the lingering suspicion that the crowd’s behaviour was precisely worthy of a nation that Tennyson honoured more than it deserved. Reservations about the funeral were expressed with less restraint in private. Edmund Gosse, who composed his regret at the funeral’s subordination of private feeling to public sentiment into a fine poem set at the grave, ‘In Poets’ Corner’, also turned his analytical eye on the invited ‘mourners’: [H]ere and everywhere, a crowd of perfectly callous nonentities, treating the thing as a show and rather a poor one . . . at last the mob overflowed all the seats, and stood massed, flooding all the gangways. It was a huge but by no means an impressive scene to me, not comparable with Browning’s funeral in the same place.72

Unlike the earlier positive imagery of the coffin carried on an ebbing and swelling tide of sound, here the mob ‘overflowed’ and ‘flood[ed]’ the Abbey: a conscious ironic transformation, I would suggest, of the solemn ‘flood’, ‘Too full for sound and foam’, which carries the speaker of ‘Crossing the Bar’ to ‘see my Pilot face to face’.73 Gosse also complained about the aspiring Laureates Edwin Arnold and 71

‘The Funeral of Lord Tennyson’, The Saturday Review, 15 Oct., 442. ‘In Poets’ Corner’, In Russet and Silver (1894), 91; Gosse, ‘Tennyson’s Funeral’ (BL), repr. in Paul Henderson, Tennyson: Poet and Prophet (1978), 208–9. 73 TP iii. 254, ll. 14, 7, 15. 72

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Lewis Morris showing off, one ‘brawling in vain, with the vergers for a more honourable position’, the other ‘nodding self-consciously to his friends. The whole thing was enormous, crushing, exceedingly well-done, national and prosaic.’74 Gosse’s complaints exhibit a possessive emotional claim characteristic of the mourning behaviour of writers’ companions and relations: however, the assertion that a great poet’s funeral was ‘prosaic’ invites further comment. Millgate finds other evidence of the occasion’s literally ‘unpoetic’ nature, such as the ‘poor representation of literature, none of the twelve pallbearers having any connection with poetry or with any other form of imaginative writing’, and he cites Walter Besant’s damning speculation that Tennyson’s publisher Macmillan & Co. were ‘trying to make the thing a mass advertisement for their “shop” ’.75 I would suggest that while the compromises of the funeral inevitably pained friends unable to relate their individual bereavement to a mass event, Tennyson himself would have justified such compromises as patriotic sacrifice. After Browning’s burial in Poets’ Corner, Tennyson knew there would be a grave there for him. Despite his strong objections to publicity and funerary display, his loyalty to Queen and Country framed a nationally significant grave as an honour and duty. The Laureate certainly sought to exercise posthumous authority over his own death and rituals, through explicit instructions (the simple funeral procession, ‘heart-of-oak’ coffin, and Union flag pall), and implicit will (Hallam speaking the ‘prayer’ from the Wellington ‘Ode’ over his dying father ‘because I knew that he would have wished it’). These verbal ‘last wishes’ suggest the sacrifice of personal to national feeling evinced by Emily’s telegram to Dean Bradley about the grave’s location: ‘If it is thought better, let him have the flag of England on his coffin, and rest in the churchyard of the dear place where his happiest days have been passed. Only, let the flag represent the feeling of the beloved Queen, and the nation, and the empire he loved so dearly.’76 Judgement is shifted from individual human choice, to the Union flag with its emotive patriotic signification. Emily articulates this deference to the flag, but mediates Tennyson’s wishes: her loyalty yet alludes to the personal sacrifice required of her. Emily’s wish was for Freshwater on the ‘dear’ Isle of Wight, where she was buried in 1896. Bradley’s answering telegram read: 74

Henderson, Tennyson, 209.

75

Millgate, 46.

76

Memoir, ii. 430.

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‘Quite understand your feeling but share national wish present and future for burial Poets’ Corner.’77 The telegram’s marked stylistic contrast corresponds to their writers’ roles and responsibilities: where Emily’s dignified and emotional prose (which allows no rhetorical concessions to the modern medium) makes a personal appeal for familial feeling and privacy, the dean’s perfunctory telegraphese speaks bluntly for the demands of the modern nation. John Wolffe has noted that Darwin, Tennyson, and Gladstone’s Abbey funerals were criticized as ‘over-formal and distancing the dead man from the more partisan springs of his popularity and identity’, tolerantly arguing that ‘this was the necessary corollary of using such occasions to affirm national consensus’.78 Questions remain, however, as to whether a publishing house should employ a writer’s funeral to advertise his works and display its other authors, whether even a Laureate’s funeral should be turned to an ideological purpose, and whether the mass dissemination of Tennyson’s works was not a more effective—because affective—means to create such consensus. Yet the public and national association between Tennyson and Victoria’s reign was strangely confirmed in March 1900, when the elderly Queen drove past the Abbey:79 ‘For the first time, too, within living memory a flag was flown on the North West Tower of the Abbey in honour of the occasion. It was the Union Jack which had covered the coffin of Lord Tennyson at his funeral in 1892.’ 77 78 79

Thwaite, Emily Tennyson, 11. Wolffe, 74. Lawrence E. Tanner, Recollections of a Westminster Antiquary (1969), 21.

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Sutherland, J. M., William Wordsworth: The Story of his Life, with Critical Remarks on his Writings (London: Elliot Stock, 1887). Swinburne, A. C., The Complete Poetical Works of A. C. Swinburne, 6 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905). Symons, A., ‘Dead in Venice’, The Athenaeum, 21 December 1889, 860. ‘Tablet to the Memory of Wordsworth in Grasmere Church’, The ArtJournal, December 1851, 327. Tanner, L. E., Recollections of a Westminster Antiquary (London: John Baker, 1969). Taylor, D., ‘Hardy’s Copy of Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, The Thomas Hardy Journal, 13:1 (February 1997), 43–63. Taylor, H., Autobiography 1800–1875, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1885). Tennyson, A., In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. I. Gollancz, The Temple Classics (London: J. M. Dent, 1899). ‘Thomas Hood’, The Athenaeum, 10 May 1845, 461–2. Thornton, R. D., James Currie, The Entire Stranger, and Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963). Thwaite, A., Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (London: Faber, 1996). ‘Topics of the Week: Robert Browning’, The Graphic, 21 December 1889, 742. ‘Two Books of Poems’, The Saturday Review, 68 (21 December 1889), 711–12. Tyson, N. J., Eugene Aram: Literary History and Typology of the ScholarCriminal (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1983). Verses to the Memory of Robert Burns; With an Account of His Interment at Dumfries, on Monday the 25th of July, 1796. Also His Epitaph, Written by Himself (Glasgow: Brash & Reid, 1796). Walker, R., Regency Portraits, 2 vols. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1985). Ward, A., John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963). Ward, F. O., ‘The Echo’, Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany, 1 (June 1844), 615–16. —— ‘The Echo’, Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany, 3 (March 1845), 312. —— ‘Thomas Hood’, Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany, 3 (April 1845), 415. —— ‘The Late Thomas Hood’, Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany, 3 (June 1845), 611–21. Ward, H., and Roberts, R., Romney, A Biographical and Critical Essay, with a Catalogue Raisonné of his Works (London: Thomas Agnew, 1904). Watson, W., ‘Wordsworth’s Grave’, National Review, 10 (1887–8), 40–5.

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Index Abney Park Cemetery 193 Ainsworth’s Magazine 203 Albert, Prince Consort: death 257 Anatomy Act (1832) 50, 52 Anderson, Alexander 145–6 Angeletti, Anna 119 Argyll, 8th Duke of 237 Armour, Jean (Burns’s widow) 58, 69; death 72–3 Arnold, Sir Edwin 270, 282 Arnold, Matthew: death 2; attends Wordsworth’s funeral 168; ‘Memorial Verses. April 27, 1850’ 167–9, 186 Art Journal, The 181 ashes and dust: spirit in 4; Shakespeare’s 44; disturbed 45, 48; Swinburne on 46; Burns’s 72; Mary Tighe’s 78; Shelley’s 134, 141, 143, 152–3; George Meredith’s 190 Ashley Library 152–3 Astley’s Circus 207–8 Athenaeum (periodical) 11, 176, 180, 184, 189, 214 Austin, Alfred 270, 272 Bacon, Francis 43 Baillie, Joanna 103 Banim, Michael and John: Tales by the O’Hara Family 93, 98 Barclay, Evelyn 232 Beaumont, Sir George 166 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 1–2, 12 Begg, S.: ‘The Death of Tennyson’ (illustration) 271 Bell, H. T. Mackenzie 38–9, 243 Bennett, Andrew: Romantic Poets and the Romantic Culture of Posterity 2, 96, 106–7, 158 Benson, Edward White, Archbishop of Canterbury 37 Besant, Sir Walter 283 Biagi, Dr Guido 132–3 Birchington-on-Sea 13, 31, 33, 35–7, 39–42 Black and White (magazine) 251, 254 Blacket, Joseph 5–6 Blacklock, Archibald 72–3 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 103, 112 Blanchard, Laman: on Kensal Green Cemetery 190–1, 193, 203–4, 207; death and burial 204–5; (ed.) The Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L. 203

Blyton, Emma: ‘To the Memory of Keats’ 150 bodysnatching see resurrectionism book as body 3, 132–3, 233–4, 258–61, 279 Boswell, James: Life of Samuel Johnson 45 Bowles, Caroline 52 Bracciani, D. 32 Bradley, George Granville, Dean of Westminster 227–8, 236–9, 242, 283 Brandred, John: ‘Wordsworth’s Grave, Grasmere Church Yard’ (print) 164 Brawne, Fanny 116, 121 n., 147 Bridge, Frederick 278 Bridgeton Grave Protecting Society 51 Brimley, George 176–7 Broderip, Fanny (née Hood) 205, 210, 212, 217–18, 220–1; see also Memorials of Thomas Hood Bronfen, Elisabeth 21, 22 Bronson, Katharine 249–50 Brooke, Rupert 188 Brooks, Chris: Mortal Remains 191, 221 Brown, Charles 116–17, 124, 146–8 Brown, Ford Madox 37, 40, 42 Brown, Susan 77 Brown, Thomas 102 Browne, Felicity (Felicia Hemans’s mother) 110 Browne, George 97 Browne, Mary Ann 89, 91 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: RB bans portrait on tomb 32; tomb damaged by visitors 41; possesses green from Wordsworth’s garden 155; buried in Florence 235–6, 240; proposed reinterment in Westminster Abbey 240–2, 278; and RB’s funeral 247–8; Westminster Abbey memorial proposed 248; name added to RB’s memorial tablet 249; Last Poems 11; ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’ 92; ‘The Sleep’ 241, 246–7 Browning, Fannie Barrett (née Coddington; Pen’s wife) 247, 249 Browning, Robert: illness and death in Venice 2, 124 n., 228, 232, 234–5, 238, 257, 266; literary reputation 2, 13, 229–34; and EBB’s Last Poems 11; burial in Poets’ Corner 13, 29, 223, 228–9, 236–7, 241, 245–8, 283; bans portrait of EBB on tomb 32; on repairing EBB’s

Index tomb 41; Anne Ritchie memoir on 222; Venice funeral ceremonial 243; London funeral 244; memorial tablet 249; relics and memorabilia 249–51, 253; on death 251–3; phonograph recording of voice 253–5; Asolando: Fancies and Facts 228, 230–4, 249, 252, 263–4; ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ 26; ‘De Gustibus’ 235, 237–8; ‘Home-Thoughts from the Sea’ 237; Poetical Works 233; ‘Popularity’ 2; The Ring and the Book 230 Browning, Robert Wiedemann Barrett (‘Pen’) 232, 235–6, 242, 248–50 Bruce, Henry A. 24 Bruce, Robert VIII de, King of Scotland: exhumed 71 Buchanan, Robert: ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ 28–9 Burgess, Richard 142 Burns, Gilbert 58 Burns, Maxwell (Robert’s son) 62, 70 Burns, Robert: status 8; death 13, 57; exhumations 24, 29, 55, 69–73; popular following 44, 55, 66; health decline 56; posthumous reputation 56, 59, 76; funeral 58; grave memorials delayed 59, 62, 66; obituary tributes and memoirs 59–60; subscription raised for family 59; epitaph 62–4; mausoleum planned and built 66–7, 69, 72–3; posthumous cast and analysis of skull 72–4; burial place as shrine 74–5, 224–5; cause of death 75; ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ 62–4, 181; Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect 63 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron: bodily remains returned to England 7, 114–15; memoirs destroyed 7; poetic reputation 8; obsequies 57; Hemans quotes 101–2; exile and death 113–14; and Shelley’s death 129–30; and Shelley’s cremation 135–6; in Arnold’s ‘Memorial Verses’ 168; burial place 224–5; Don Juan 96; ‘Hints from Horace’ 5–7 Caine, Thomas Hall 21, 26–7, 29, 31, 33, 36–7 Campbell, Thomas 34, 156, 224–5 Carden, G. F. 192 Carlyle, Thomas: death 2; on heroes 33; ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ 8, 226; ‘The Hero as Poet’ 231, 251, 254; Reminiscences 170 Carswell, Catherine: Life of Robert Burns 76 cemetery, the 35–6, 189–95, 201–21 Chatterton, Thomas 9, 49 Chaucer, Geoffrey 223, 273 Chorley, Henry F.: Memorials of Mrs Hemans 109 Christchurch Priory, Hampshire 144

303

Christianity see religion (Christian) churchyard, the city 35, 50, 143–4 churchyard, the country 33–9, 144, 159–63, 166–7; see also Birchington-on-Sea; Grasmere; Woodstock Clairmont, Claire 133, 145 Clark, Benjamin 195 Clark, Dr James 118–22 Clarke, Sir Andrew 270 Clarkson, Catherine Buck 164, 170 Clough, Arthur Hugh 5, 167 Coleridge, Hartley 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: death 155; addressed in Wordsworth’s Prelude 172–3; burial place 224–5 Collignon, Dr Charles 51 Collins, William 100 Collison, George 193–4 Combe, George 73 contagion 26, 118–19, 121, 128, 132, 238–40 Cook, Eliza: calls for monument for Hood 209–10; ‘My Grave’ 208; ‘Poor Hood’ 206–9, 221 Cooper, Sir Astley 51 corpses: public interest in Byron’s 7; protection from air 25, 175; Burns’s 57, 70–1; Shelley’s and Williams’s 136–9; Browning’s 228–9, 239, 243–7; Tennyson’s 275; see also dissection corpus 1–4, 21, 49, 77–8, 97, 139, 233–4, 253 Cottle, Joseph: Early Recollections 174 Cowper, William 10, 49; ‘Stanzas on the Late Indecent Liberties taken with the Remains of the Great Milton’ 48–9 Cox, Robert 73–4 cremation 7, 35–6, 131–2, 134–40, 239 Croft, H. J.: Kensal Green guidebook 221 Cromek, Robert Hartley 66 Crowther, S. C.: ‘The Last Look: A Sketch at the Funeral of Lord Tennyson’ 281 Cunningham, Alexander 58–9 Cunningham, Allan 56–8, 74 Curl, James Stevens: The Victorian Celebration of Death 191 Currie, Dr James 56, 60–1, 66, 74–5; The Life of Robert Burns 60–4; The Works of Robert Burns; with an Account of his Life, and a Criticism on his Writings 60 Curtis, Jared 64 Dabbs, Dr George 268–70, 273 Daily Telegraph: reports Browning’s funeral 244, 247; reports Tennyson’s funeral 277, 279 Daly, Gay 27 Dalziel Brothers 213 Dante Alighieri 22

304

Index

Darwin, Charles: burial in Westminster Abbey 226, 284 Davis, Edward 197, 198 n., 212, 219 Davis, Leith 56 Davy, Dr John 181 Dawkins, Edward 134 death: and creativity 1, 12, 17–19, 25, 30, 54; effect on writers’ reputations 5; Siddal’s 25; Christian 31; Mary Tighe on 89; Hemans on 92–7, 107–9; Keats’s 116–18; Browning on renewal cycle of 252 death-bed, the: and last words and memorials 10–11; behaviour and deportment on 30–1; Rossetti’s 30–2; public interest in 52; Burns’s 57; Mary Tighe’s 83–5; Keats’s 121, 152; Hood’s 212–13; Tennyson’s 268–72 death-masks 25, 32, 121 de Quincey, Thomas 173–4; ‘Lake Reminiscences’ 176 desecration: and exhumation 21; of Burns’s remains 24, 69–70, 75; Shakespeare warns against 24, 43–5, 47, 75–6; of tombs and graves by visitors 41, 45; Swinburne condemns 45–6; of Milton’s remains 47–9; and resurrectionism 50–2; of Mary Tighe 101–2; and Keats 119–22, 150; of Shelley 135; of Hood’s tomb 221 Dickens, Charles: writes Mary Hogarth’s epitaph 204; declines to contribute to Hood’s monument fund 212; burial in Poets’ Corner 226–7, 268; wishes to avoid death ceremonial 226–7; refuses to deliver memorial address for Leigh Hunt 227; The Mystery of Edwin Drood 4 dissection 44, 50–4 Don Juan (sailing boat) 127, 129–30, 133 Douglas, Scott 64 Drew, Mary (née Gladstone) 262 Ducrow, Andrew 207–9 Dumfries 66–7, 74–5 Dyer, George 204 Edwards, John: ‘All Saints Church, Derby’ 161 elegy 1, 131, 167–9, 222, 257–61 Eliot, George: death and burial 2, 190 Eliza Cook’s Journal 207, 209 Elwin, Malcolm 219 emotion: communicated by poets 10, 79; at graveside 61; in Mary Tighe’s Psyche 80–2, 85; and Hemans’s isolation 91–2, 105–6; and deaths abroad of Keats and Shelley 114–16, 120–1, 123–4; and Mary Shelley’s bereavement 128–30; and reactions to Wordsworth’s death 170; display of in cemeteries 189, 193–5, 203–4, 207; and Hood’s comic writing 196–7; and Hood’s grave monument 207,

213–15, 218; in popular reaction to Dickens’s death 227–8; and death of Browning 237–8, 244; and recording of Browning’s voice 254; in Tennyson’s In Memoriam 257, 259–62; and Tennyson’s death and funeral 268, 274, 281–3 epitaphs and grave inscriptions: Rossetti’s and Elizabeth Siddal’s 19–20, 39–40; for public readership 34–5; Shakespeare’s admonitions 43–5; Wordsworth’s essay on 54, 159–61, 163, 165, 184, 245; Wordsworth recites over Burns’s grave 62–3; in Hemans’s poem to Mary Tighe 93, 95, 101–2; in Mme de Staël’s Corinna 94–5; Byron reads at Ferrara 102; on Hemans’s grave 110–11; Keats’s and Shelley’s 144–9; Wordsworth’s 159, 163, 182–6; for Wordsworth’s children 164–6; Hood’s 212–13; the Brownings’ 249 Ewing, William 122 exhumation 18–19, 21, 24–8, 47–8, 69–72, 75, 135, 142, 242 Fenwick, Isabella 155, 159, 173, 177–8 Field, Barron: ‘Memoirs of the Life and Poetry of William Wordsworth’ 174 FitzGerald, Edward 5 Flaubert, Gustave 28 Flaxman, John: tomb sculpture of Mary Tighe 99–101, 103, 105, 108 Fletcher, Eliza: ‘Thoughts on Leaving Grasmere Churchyard, April 27, 1850’ 168 Florence: Elizabeth Barrett Browning buried and memorialized in 235–6, 240–2, 248–9 flowers and floral tributes: at poets’ graves 11–12; and Keats 12, 120, 123, 126, 151; for Burns 57, 74–5; at Wordsworth’s grave 180, 182; and Hood 217–18; at Dickens’s burial 227; at Browning’s second funeral 244, 247, 249; for Tennyson’s funeral 256, 279 Ford, Edward Onslow 149 Forman, Harry Buxton 45, 135, 267 Fraser’s Magazine 167, 170–1, 173, 176 Freeborn, John 141 Friend, The (periodical) 160 funerals: public 33; Rossetti’s private 37; Burns’s 57–8; in Italy 115; Keats’s 122; Shelley’s 142; Wordsworth’s 168; Hood’s 201–2; Blanchard’s 205; Dickens’s view of 226–7; Browning’s two 243–7; Tennyson’s 274–84 Furnivall, Frederick J. 248 Garnett, Richard: Relics of Shelley 139 Garrod, Herbert B. 264 genius 1, 11, 56, 73–4, 155–6, 158, 162, 172, 225, 229–30, 266–7

Index Gherardi, Antonio 121 Gill, Stephen: Wordsworth and the Victorians 154, 156, 172, 185 Gisborne, Maria 128, 131, 133, 152 Gladstone, Catherine 256 Gladstone, William Ewart: Abbey burial 284 Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft 143–4 Godwin, William 143–4; ‘Essay on Sepulchres’ 3–4, 203 Gollancz, Israel 263 Gosse, Sir Edmund 234, 247; ‘In Poets’ Corner’ 282–3; ‘Personal Impressions’ 252–3; Personalia 252 Gouraud, Colonel George 253 Grant, Elizabeth 47 Graphic, The (journal) 230, 268, 273, 276 Grasmere (St Oswald’s church): Wordsworth’s grave in 155, 159, 162–4, 166–7, 177–8; public memorial 181–2, 185 grave robbery see resurrectionism Graves, Clara 101 graves, unmarked 34–5, 37–9, 61–2, 109–10, 135, 159, 178, 205–9, 248–9 Gray, Thomas: Abbey memorial 234; ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ 34–5, 38, 162, 201 Gregory, Dr James 61, 70–1 Grierson, William 58 Grinstead, T. P.: Relics of Genius 12 Grove, William 250 Grylls, Rosalie 17 Guthke, Karl 10 hair 20, 23, 25, 73, 102, 149, 152, 249 Hallam, Arthur Henry 5, 257–61; Remains in Verse and Prose 259 Harding, Anthony John 91 Hardy, Emma 262 Hardy, Thomas: cremated remains buried in Poets’ Corner 239; and Horace Moule’s death 262; ‘At a House in Hampstead’ 151; ‘A Refusal’ 225 Harrison, Benson 181 Haslam, William 122–3 Haweis, Hugh Reginald 254 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 67, 157–8, 224 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 152, 184 heart (human) 7, 29, 89, 140, 143–5, 148, 151, 241–2 Heine, Heinrich 45–6 Hemans, Felicia Dorothea (née Browne): reputation 8, 29; death 13, 108; identification with works 77; poetic themes and style 89–97, 105–8; imagination and landscape 97–8; moves to Dublin 100–1; changes view of Mary Tighe 101–2; marriage breakdown 101; grave and inscription (Dublin) 109–11; ‘A

305

Dirge’ 111; ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ 77–8, 90–7, 99–101, 106, 108–9; ‘The Graves of a Household’ 98; National Lyrics, and Songs for Music 103, 109; ‘On Records of Immature Genius’ 90; Poetical Remains 5–6, 89; Records of Woman 90–1; The Siege of Valencia (play) 111; ‘To a Butterfly Near a Tomb’ 102–3; ‘Written after Visiting a Tomb, near Woodstock, in the County of Kilkenny’ 82, 90, 103–6 Henkle, Roger B. 216 Heron, Robert: A Memoir of the Life of the Late Robert Burns 59 Hessey, James Augustus 117 Highgate Cemetery 13, 18–19, 27, 33, 35, 190–4 Hill, Alan G. 173 Hogarth, Mary Scott 204 Hogarth, William: ‘The Reward of Cruelty’ (engraving) 54 Hogg, James (‘the Ettrick Shepherd’) 71, 156 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson: Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (with Shelley) 5 Hole, W. G.: ‘Keats’s Grave’ 151 Honey, William 43–4 Hood, Edwin Paxton 180–1 Hood, Jane 205, 212 Hood, Thomas: death and burial 13, 190, 195–6, 199, 201, 205–6, 216–17; memorials 29; on resurrectionists 50; overwork and health decline 196–9; poetry 196–7, 200; bust 197–8, 212; public subscription for widow and children 199; awarded pension 200–1; literary reputation 200–2; poetic tributes to 206–9; campaign for tomb monument for 209–11; monument design 211–16, 219–20; sketch of memorial and epitaph 212–13; ‘The Bridge of Sighs’ 195, 212, 215–16, 219; ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ 212, 214–15, 219; Hood’s Own; or laughter from year to year 197–8; ‘Literary Remains’ 219; ‘Ode to Melancholy’ 199; ‘The Song of the Shirt’ 195, 200; Works (ed. Tom Hood, Jr) 218–19 Hood, Tom, Jr 205, 212, 218, 220–1; see also Memorials of Thomas Hood Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany 196–7, 199–200, 205, 219 Howell, Charles Augustus 20, 24–6 Howitt, Mary 115 Howitt, William: Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets 12, 110 Hughes, Harriet 108–10 Humphreys, Cecil Frances (Mrs Alexander): ‘The Grave of Mrs Hemans’ 111

306

Index

Hunt, Leigh: on death of Keats 125; dispute with Mary Shelley over Shelley’s heart 128, 140–1; Shelley sails to meet 129; personal copy of Keats’s Poems found on Shelley’s body 132–3; attends Shelley’s cremation 135–6, 141; drafts Latin inscription for Shelley memorial 148; buried in Kensal Green 221, 227; Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries 136 Hunt, T. F. 67 Hutchinson, Sarah 166 Huxley, Henrietta: ‘This day within the Abbey’ 248 Huxley, Thomas Henry 237 Inistioge churchyard, near Woodstock, Kilkenny 93, 97, 99, 103 Ireland, S. W. H.: Scribbleomania 78 Irving, Washington: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 44, 47 Jacobs, Joseph 230, 263, 266 Jalland, Pat: Death in the Victorian Family 11, 262 James, Henry 229, 250, 254 Jerrold, Walter 221 Jewsbury, Maria Jane 109 Johnson, Lionel: ‘That Thou Art Dead Is Little’ 40 Johnson, Samuel 45, 183 Jones, F. L. 141 Jonson, Ben: Abbey burial 224 Joseph, Gerhard and Herbert F. Tucker 269 Jowett, Benjamin 237 Keats, Fanny 121 n. Keats, George 118, 124–5 Keats, John: Browning invokes as genius 2; letter to Leigh Hunt 7 n.; violets removed from grave 12, 150; death 13, 113, 124, 126; and Shelley’s Adonais 29, 126–7, 131, 134, 145–6; Severn’s portrait of 32; burial place 36, 115–16, 225, 240; foresees death 113, 117–18; testament 117; moves to Italy to die 116–21; post mortem and disposal under Italian law 119–22; grave 120, 122, 126, 145–6, 149; death casts of face, hand and foot 121; funeral 122; reputation 124–5, 149–52; book of poems found on Shelley’s body 132–4, 136–7, 140; epitaph 144–9; ‘Hyperion’ 125; Letters to Fanny Brawne (ed. Forman) 45; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 126; Poems (1820) 116, 125, 132, 140 Keats-Shelley Memorial Association 121 Keble, John 182–3; The Christian Year 183 Keble’s Gazette 33, 35 Kelley, Philip and Betty Coley: The Browning Collections 249 Kensal Green Cemetery (London): Blanchard describes 190–1, 193, 203–4, 207; Hood

buried in 190, 199, 201, 205, 207, 216; Elizabeth Stone visits 194; opening and character 194–5, 216; Hood’s monument in 195, 205–6, 211, 219–21; Duke of Sussex buried in 202–3; Eliza Cook’s poem on 206–8; Croft’s guidebook on 221 Kinsley, James 63–4 Kipling, Rudyard 239 Knight, William 159 Knowles, James 240 Labbe, Jacqueline M. 92, 96 Lamb, Charles 49, 61, 173, 205 Landon, Letitia (‘L.E.L.’) 77, 92, 103 Lang, Andrew 259 last words: popular appeal of 10–11; sanctity of 11, 240; Mary Tighe and 82–5; in Hemans’s poem 108; Keats’s 117, 120; Hood and 212–13; Browning’s 232–3; Tennyson and 263–5, 269; see also death-bed Lawrence, Rose (née D’Aguilar) 108, 110 Leighton, Frederic, Baron 237, 244 Lemon, Mark: ‘A Tomb for Hood’ 209 Levy, Amy: A London Plane-Tree, and other Verse 11 Linkin, Harriet Kramer 80 literary remains 1, 5–6, 81, 89–90, 219 Lockhart, Charlotte Sophia 204 Lockhart, John Gibson 204 Lodge, John 10, 97, 106 London Magazine 146 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 12 Lootens, Tricia 81 Loudon, John Claudius 205 Louise, Queen of Mecklenburg-Strelitz 91 Luby, Dr 122 McDiarmid, John 67, 69–72 McDowall, William: and Burns’s exhumation 69; Memorials of St Michael’s 68 McGann, Jerome 21, 25 McGuirk, Carol 60–1, 71 McIntyre, Ian 63, 75–6 Mack, Douglas 71 Mackay, Charles 34–5 Macmillan & Co. (publishers) 283 Mallock, William Hurrell 270, 272 Manso, John Baptista 48 Marchand, Leslie 132 Marlowe, Christopher 43 Marsh, Jan 27 Marston, Philip Bourke 37, 194 Massey, Gerald 206–9 Memorials of Thomas Hood (ed. Fanny Broderip and Tom Hood, Jr) 202, 205, 210, 212–13, 217–19 Meredith, George: models for Wallis’s Chatterton 9; ashes buried 190

Index Mill, John Stuart: ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ 10 Miller, Thomas: ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ 111–12 Millgate, Michael: Testamentary Acts 30, 263, 283 Milman, Henry Hart 91–2 Milnes, Richard Monckton (1st Baron Houghton): advocates public funeral for Wordsworth 159; and Hood’s funeral 201–2, 204; unveils Hood monument 211; on burial of Campbell in Westminster Abbey 225; Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats 122, 125, 152, 199 n. Milton, John: burial place 4, 224; body disinterred and desecrated 47–9; sonnet on Shakespeare 245; ‘Lycidas’ 17; Paradise Lost 53 Moir, David Macbeth: Poetical Remains of the late Mrs Hemans 108 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 203 monuments: Rossetti’s 40–1; for Burns 66–7; for Mary Tighe 91, 98–100; Keats’s and Shelley’s 144–9; Wordsworth’s public 181–5; for Hood 211–21; in Poets’ Corner 224–5; proliferation of 238 Moore, Thomas: destroys Byron’s memoirs 7; Lalla Rookh 15; Letters and Journals of Lord Byron; With Notices of his Life 102 More, Hannah 50, 52–3 Morris, Jane 26 n., 28 Morris, Sir Lewis 270, 272, 283; ‘October 6, 1892’ 267 Morris, William 18 Moxon, Edward 258, 261 Muirhead, James 64 Murphy, Joseph John 156 Murray, John 102, 175, 205 neglect 2, 8–9, 48–9, 64, 109–10, 114–16, 122, 126, 205–9 Neve, Philip 47–8 Noble, Matthew 211–12, 214–16, 219 Noel, Roden: ‘The Death of Tennyson’ 270 Norton, Caroline 103 Ogilvy, Eliza: ‘Graves’ 150 Oliphant, Margaret 231–3 Ollier, Charles 133 Orr, Alexandra Sutherland 235–6, 242–3 Owen, W. J .B. and Jane Worthington Smyser 160 Palgrave, Francis Turner 237 Pall Mall Gazette 5, 229–31, 234, 237–8, 240–1, 244, 250–1, 253 Parke, John 122 Partington, Wilfred 152

307

Pater, Walter 22 Peel, Sir Robert 200–1 Pembroke, Ann, Countess of 91 Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris 191, 193 pilgrimage: to poets’ graves 11–12; to Rossetti at Birchington 39, 41; to Burns 61, 64, 75; to Mary Tighe 97–8, 101; to Keats 125, 150–1; to Shelley 142; to Wordsworth 156–8, 186; to Hood at Kensal Green 207, 217, 219; to Tennyson in Abbey 280 Poets’ Corner (Westminster Abbey): Victorian revival of 13, 29, 32–4, 202, 222–4, 228; individuals honoured 32, 222–6; Byron memorial proposed for 114–15; Wordsworth memorial in 184–5; monuments to Campbell and Shakespeare in 185; Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s name added to Robert’s tablet 249; see also Browning, Robert; Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron Pope, Alexander: ‘Epitaph. For One who would not be buried in WestminsterAbbey’ 224 portraits, posthumous 31–2, 85–8, 197–8, 250–1, 271–2 posterity 30–1, 57, 59, 104, 118, 133–4, 147, 156, 230 Poynter, Ambrose 122 prescience 112–14, 172–3, 202, 263–4 Prins, Yopie: Victorian Sappho 77 Procter, Bryan Waller (‘Barry Cornwall’) 113–14, 126, 146 Punch 200 Quarterly Review 81, 84, 239 Quillinan, Edward 162–3, 173–4, 177, 181 R., H. M.: ‘Sonnet on the Death of Wordsworth’ 169, 171 Ramsay, John, of Ochtertyre 61, 71 Rawlinson, Sir Robert: ‘A Protest Against Burials in the Abbey’ 238–9 Rawnsley, Hardwick Drummond 41; ‘At Wordsworth’s Grave’ 187–8; ‘The Poet’s Home-Going’ 229; ‘Robert Browning. December 12th, 1889’ 238; ‘Take Home Her Heart’ (later ‘A Cry from Florence’) 241–2; ‘Wordsworth’s Tomb’ 186 relics 41, 47–8, 51, 73, 143, 149–53, 157–8, 249–51, 253–4 religion (Christian): denominational 8; Evangelical 11, 52–3; and Mary Tighe’s death 84; Church denies memorial to Byron 115, 225; sectarian in Italy 115, 122, 137–8, 142, 144; and epitaphs and monuments 160–2; Wordsworth and 177, 180, 183; and cemeteries 192; and burial in Poets’ Corner 225–6; Browning’s dissenting 246; and Tennyson’s funeral 256, 265, 278

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resurrectionism (bodysnatching) 6–7, 24, 35, 50–3, 55, 69–70, 76 Reynolds, J. H.: The Fancy 5 Ricks, Christopher 258 Riddell, Maria 56, 59; ‘Memoir Concerning Burns’ 59–60 Ritchie, Anne, Lady (née Thackeray) 222 Roberts, William: Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More 52–3 Robinson, Henry Crabb 148 n., 154, 170, 172, 174 Rogers, Samuel 91–2 Rollins, Hyder Edward 124 Rome: Protestant Cemetery 115–16, 120, 122–3, 144, 240; Keats in 118–21 Romney, George: portrait of Mary Tighe 85–7 Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of 75 Ross, Marlon B. 79 Rossetti, Christina: grave 19–20, 190; death 30 n.; disapproves of cremation 36 n.; erects monument to DGR 40 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: burial and grave 13, 19, 33, 35–41; exhumes poems from Elizabeth Siddal’s coffin 13, 18, 20–1, 24–8; parodies Tom Moore with wombat drawing and poem 15–19; nurses Siddal 22; paintings of women 22–3, 25; and Siddal’s death and burial with poems 23; relations with Jane Morris 28; nervous collapse 29; death 30–2, 39; death-bed portrait 32; wish for cremation 35–6; persecution mania 36; memorials 37, 40, 42; tribute poems to 38–9; description of sonnet 262; ‘Beata Beatrix’ 25; Collected Works (ed. W. M. Rossetti, 1886) 28; Dante at Verona and Other Poems 19; The House of Life 38; ‘Newborn Death’ 22; Poems (1870) 17, 27–8; ‘Stillborn Love’ 22 Rossetti, Frances (DGR’s mother) 19, 24, 30 Rossetti, Gabriele (DGR’s father) 9 Rossetti, William Michael (DGR’s brother): burial 19; and DGR’s burying poems with Elizabeth Siddal 21, 23–4; and exhumation of poems from Siddal’s grave 26; on DGR’s death 30; commissions casts of DGR’s face and hands 32; and DGR’s burial place 33, 35; erects monument to DGR 40 Rugg, Julie 190–1, 193 Rydal Mount 166 St Anne’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin 109 St Giles’ Church, Cripplegate, London 47 St John Long, John 207–9 St Pancras Church, London 143–4

Sala, George Augustus: The Seven Sons of Mammon 195 Saturday Review 233, 266, 281 Sayers, Tom 201 Scheemakers, Marcus 222, 279 Scodel, Joshua 34 Scott, Anne 204 Scott, Sir Walter: reputation 8; and reading of Burns’s skull 74; and daughters’ tomb 204; burial place 224–5 Severn, Joseph: portrait of Keats 32; and Keats’s illness and death in Rome 36, 115, 117–25, 127, 138, 149; Shelley’s tribute to 126; and delay in burying Shelley 141–2; death 144; and design of Keats’s headstone 145–8; grave 146; and Keats’s posthumous reputation 149–50 Shakespeare, William: epitaph 24, 43–5; grave undisturbed 47; birth- and deathday (23 April) 155; statue 222, 279; burial place 224; Tennyson reads on death-bed 269; Cymbeline 270, 273, 279; Hamlet 24, 52, 215; King Lear 112; Macbeth 97; The Tempest 145, 148 Sharp, William 244, 251–2; ‘Robert Browning’ (sonnets) 248 Shelley, Jane (later Lady; Percy Florence’s wife) 143–4, 149; Shelley Memorials 139 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: preserves Shelley’s heart 29, 128, 140–1, 143; and Shelley’s burial 115, 131–2; account of Shelley’s death 128–31, 152; authorizes Shelley’s cremation 128, 131, 134; on obsequies for Shelley and Williams 136–7; publishes Shelley’s Posthumous Poems and Poetical Works 139; visits Shelley’s grave with son 142; burial place and grave 143–4, 240; and Trelawny’s quoting The Tempest 148; relics 152 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: Beddoes admires 2; death and cremation 13, 114, 127–31, 134–6, 138–9, 141; disposal of body and burial 29, 136–8, 141–2; heart preserved 29, 128, 140–1, 143, 144; exile 113, 115; burial place and grave 115–16, 131–2, 135, 142, 144–5, 225; learns of Keats’s death 125; on Keats’s grave 126–7; body identified 132–3, 136, 140; epitaph 144–5, 148–9; posthumous reputation 151–2; Adonais 29, 115, 126–7, 131, 133–4, 143, 145–7; Poetical Works (1839) 139; Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (with T. J. Hogg) 5; Posthumous Poems 139 Shelley, (Sir) Percy Florence 129, 142, 144 Shelley, William 126, 141–2 Shenley, Captain 136, 139 Shields, Frederic 32 Siddal, Elizabeth: D. G. Rossetti’s poems exhumed from grave 13, 18, 20–1, 24–6,

Index 29; death and burial 19–21, 23, 35–6; posthumous reputation 20; D. G. Rossetti paints 22–3, 25; D. G. Rossetti destroys photographs of 32 silence 103, 106, 109–12, 149–50, 233, 245 Smith, George Murray 236, 246 Snow, Joseph: Lyra Memoralis 160–1 Southey, Robert 49, 155–6, 185, 224–5; ‘The Surgeon’s Warning’ 52, 54 Spectator (journal) 31, 155, 169, 265, 270, 274 Spenser, Edmund 222–4, 228, 273 spirit (and soul): and accounting to God 11; and the corporeal 22–3; Wordsworth invokes Burns as 64; and dying Mary Tighe 83–4, 97, 104, 106–7, 111; symbolized by butterfly 100, 107; Mary Shelley on PBS’s 141; Wordsworth’s 171; Hood’s 199, 205; and uniting of the Brownings 242, 248 Staël, Germaine, baronne de: Corinne, ou l’Italie 94–5, 97, 108 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, Dean of Westminster 222–7; Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey 223 Stephenson, Glennis 77 Sterne, Laurence 51 Stone, Elizabeth 194 Stothard, Thomas 66 Stratford-upon-Avon: Holy Trinity Church 43–4 Stubbs, Jeremy 3 Sulley, Philip 75 Sumner, Charles 155 Sussex, Augustus Frederick, Duke of 202 Sutherland, James Middleton 187 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 237, 249; ‘In Sepulcretis’ 45–6; ‘Threnody’ 269 Syme, John 56–7, 59 Symons, Arthur: ‘Dead in Venice’ 233 Talfourd, Thomas Noon: The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life 49, 173 Taylor, Dennis 262 Taylor, Henry 162, 261 Taylor, John 117, 147 Tebbs, Henry Vertue 20 Tennant, R. J. 259; ‘The Silent Voices’ 263 Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron: reputation 8, 230, 232; burial in Poets’ Corner 13, 29, 223, 226, 228, 256, 272–84; death and tributes 13, 31, 256, 265–72; advice on memorial inscription to Wordsworth 184; Laureateship 230, 257, 265; affected by Hallam’s death 258–60; linen pall 265; privacy 267–8; body preserved 270, 272–3; and Union flag pall 274, 278–9, 283–4; visitors to grave 280–2; ‘Break, break, break’ 254; ‘Crossing the Bar’ 31,

309

263–5, 278, 282; Demeter and Other Poems 231, 263, 265; In Memoriam 11, 230, 257–63; ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ 256, 262–3, 283; ‘The Silent Voices’ 278; ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’ 264–5 Tennyson, Audrey (Hallam’s wife) 270, 273–4, 278 Tennyson, Emily, Lady (née Sellwood) 257, 268, 270, 272–4, 279, 283–4 Tennyson, Hallam (Alfred’s son): and arrangements for father’s Abbey burial 236–7, 272; attends father’s funeral 246, 278; on In Memoriam 257; Queen Victoria sends condolences to 266; at father’s death-bed 269–70; reads ‘prayer’ from ‘Wellington Ode’ over dying father 283; Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir 256, 260, 265 Tennyson, Lionel (Alfred’s son): death 257, 264 testaments and wills: Rossetti’s 35–6; Keats’s 117–18; Wordsworth’s 169–70, 174–5; Hood’s 212–13; Dickens’s 226–7; Browning’s 235–6; and bequests of copies of Tennyson’s In Memoriam 262 Thackeray, William Makepeace 195, 219, 221 Thomson, James 190 Thrupp, Frederick 158, 184–5 Tighe, Henry 98, 101–2, 104 Tighe, Mary (née Blachford): death 13, 78, 82, 84; poems 29; Hemans’s poems on 77–8, 90, 92–4, 97, 101, 103–9; poetic qualities 79–85; portraits 85–8; burial place 97–8, 103; tomb sculpture 99–101, 103, 105, 108; character 101; John Wilson cites 103; ‘The Lily’ 104, 109; ‘On Receiving a Branch of Mezereon’ 83–4; Psyche, with Other Poems 78–82, 84, 88, 97; ‘Written in a Copy of Psyche’ 82 Tighe, William 80, 82, 84–5 Times, The: on Hood memorial 211; on Browning’s ubiquity 230; on publication of Browning’s Asolando 232, 234; letter from Bradley on burial of Tennyson 236–7; letter from Knowles proposing reinterment of E. B. Browning in Abbey 240; reports Tennyson’s death and funeral 267, 272–5, 280 Tommaseo, Niccolò 248 Trelawny, Edward John: and Italian quarantine of Shelley’s body 115, 132; and Shelley’s death 128, 130, 135–7; account of Shelley’s drowning and cremation 132, 136; presence at Shelley’s cremation 135, 141; on identification of Williams’s body 136, 138; handles Shelley’s heart 140; and Shelley’s grave

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and inscription 142, 145, 148; death 144; proposes inscription for Keats’s grave 146–7 Trollope, Anthony: Autobiography 170 Turnerelli, Peter 67 Venice: Browning’s death and funeral ceremonial in 228, 234–5, 238, 243 Victoria, Queen: Golden Jubilee (1887) 231; sends condolences on death of Tennyson’s son 257; condolences on Tennyson’s death 266; sends telegram to Tennyson 267; represented at Tennyson’s funeral 275, 279, 283; drives past Westminster Abbey 284 Vivian, Charles 127–8 Wakelin, Louisa Mary Ann 203 Wallace, Francis 62, 70 Wallis, Henry: Chatterton (painting) 9, 151 Ward, Frederick Oldfield 196–202 Watson, Caroline 85 Watson, Sir William: on death of Tennyson 278; ‘Wordsworth’s Grave’ 186–7 Watts(-Dunton), Theodore: on effect of poets’ deaths 2–3; at D. G. Rossetti’s grave in Birchington 37; reviews Browning’s Asolando 230–1; on Browning’s Poetical Works (1888–9) 233; sends wreath for E. B. Browning’s centenary 249; reviews Tennyson’s Demeter 264; on Tennyson’s Abbey funeral 276; ‘Christina Rossetti. The Two Christmastides’ 20; ‘In Westminster Abbey’ 276 Webb, Timothy 141 Weekes, Edward: memorial to Shelley 144 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of: death 183, 210 Wells, Thomas Spencer 239 Wentworth Place, Hampstead 151–2 Westmacott, Richard 122 Westminster Abbey: public memorial to Wordsworth 181, 184–5; sanitary objections to burials in 238–40; see also Poets’ Corner White, Henry Kirke 5, 49 Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass 171 Williams, Edward 127, 129, 132, 134, 136–9 Williams, Jane 129, 131, 141 Wilson, A. N. 48 Wilson, John 103, 112

Wilton, Revd Richard: ‘Gray at Grasmere’ 162 Wise, Thomas James 27, 152 Wolffe, John 226, 280, 284 Wolffe, Revd Mr (English chaplain in Rome) 122 Wolfson, Susan 91, 102, 143 Woodstock, near Kilkenny 93, 97, 99, 103 Woolner, Thomas 158, 181–3, 185 Wordsworth, Catharine (William/Mary’s daughter) 163, 165, 167, 179 Wordsworth, Christopher (William’s nephew) 162, 174, 184; Memoirs of William Wordsworth 157, 173, 175–80 Wordsworth, Dora (Dorothy; William/Mary’s daughter) 174 Wordsworth, Dorothy (William’s sister) 62, 164, 176 Wordsworth, John (William’s brother) 180 Wordsworth, Mary (William’s wife) 163–4, 167, 173, 175, 177, 181, 184 Wordsworth, Thomas (William/Mary’s son) 164–5, 167, 179 Wordsworth, William: reputation 8, 158–9, 173; death 13, 31, 153–5, 170–2; grave 29, 156–9, 162–3, 167, 169, 179, 186, 224–5; and Currie’s ‘Life’ of Burns 61–2; and Burns’s epitaph and grave 62–5; Bennett on 96; Laureateship 154–5, 167; public image 154–6, 159, 185–6; and death of children 165–6; poetic tributes to 167–9, 171, 186–8; concern over posthumous memoirs 173–7; public memorials 181–5, 224–5; ‘Address to the Sons of Burns’ 64–5; ‘At the Grave of Burns’ 64–5; The Borderers 174; ‘The Brothers’ 178; ‘The Church-Yard in the Mountains’ (from The Excursion) 167; ‘Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns’ 64–5; ‘Epistle to Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart.’ 177; ‘Essay upon Epitaphs’ 54, 159–61, 163, 165, 184, 245; The Excursion 159–60, 167, 172, 178, 181; ‘Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg’ 156; Guilt and Sorrow 174; ‘Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns’ 45, 61, 63, 173; Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years 155; The Prelude 157–8, 162, 169–74, 180; ‘Surprised by Joy’ 165–6; ‘Thoughts Suggested, the Day Following’ 64; ‘To the Daisy’ 180; ‘To the Sons of Burns’ 64; Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems 155 Wrangham, Francis 87