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Introduction: Traveling to Meet the Dead Notes Introduction: Traveling to meet the Dead 1. See Woodbridge on the background for Godwin’s thought: “the Reformation’s desire not to speak with the dead [manifested by its destruction of old churches and funeral monuments] was a profoundly antihistorical moment .... If the dead make up the original imagined community ... Renaissance Europe founded a living imagined community, the nation, on the desecrated graves of a dead medieval community” (599). Aware of what had been lost, many thinkers of the Romantic era took special interest in the dead of pre-Reformation times. 2. As Godwin surely knew, agitators in France had decided to clear all of Paris’s ancient burying-grounds, effectively erasing “the human debris of the ancien régime” (Brooks 7). 3. Notable critics have written on “romantic death”—the effort to rescue indi- vidual death from the anonymity of mass carnage. See Kelly’s introduction to Felicia Hemans (26–28). For representative images of the apocalyptic floods, see Hemans’s “A Thought of the Sea,” the famous inundation of Wordsworth’s Prelude V, or any of myriad complaints about the “deluge of print.” 4. A comparable account from the period’s fiction appears in Mary Lamb’s Mrs. Leicester’s School: “I was born in the parsonage-house, which joins the church- yard. The first thing I can remember was my father teaching me the alphabet from the letters on a tombstone that stood at the head of my mother’s grave. ... in this manner, the epitaph on my mother’s tomb being my primmer and my spelling-book, I learned to read” (9–10). 5. One significant change, culminating in Victorian times, was the banishment of corpses from the cities by means of the suburban cemetery movement. But even earlier there were efforts to render death less obtrusive though “a regime of newly segregationist taxonomies of behavior in ... manners and bodily administration” (Roach 50). Benjamin summarizes: “And in the course of the nineteenth century society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its sub- conscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying... In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (“The Storyteller” 93–94). 6. The first organized British travel packages appeared in the wake of Waterloo. Naturally, not everyone could make the trip, but writers were quick to offer the vicarious experience: Byron, Scott, and Southey were among the poets who visited the field of Waterloo and published poems on their impressions. 7. Here I draw on MacCannell: “The actual act of communion between tourist and attraction is less important than the image or the idea of society that the collective act generates” (15). 8. As Newlyn observes, many Romantic-era writers took positions toward liter- ary heritage that seemed to run counter to their usual politics, reminding 174 Notes 175 us “that where death the leveler is concerned, strategies of self-preservation tended to cut across ideological commitments, uniting writers in the wish to find recuperative models of reading” (289). 9. See especially Greenblatt’s “Presidential Address 2002: ‘Stay, Illusion’—On Receiving Messages from the Dead,” PMLA 118.3 (2003): 417–426. 10. Eliot imagines, “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new . work of art among them” (5). As Newlyn notes, the argument here “goes back a long way further than Eliot, into the Romantic tradition he claimed to dis- own” (264). Anna Barbauld offers a similar but humorous depiction of the canonical order of the dead in her “Dialogue in the Shades” (ca. 1813). Clio, the muse of history, determines that pantheon has become too crowded. Therefore, even over the protests of illustrious ghosts, “I must strike off half of them at a venture: the rest must make room,—they must crowd, they must fall into the back-ground” (470). Necromanticism celebrates the illus- trious dead in their simultaneous existence, but it also concerns itself with reducing the dead to their proper numbers. 1 On Ideal Presence 1. Helpful to my thinking about Romantic reading has been Darnton’s classic “Readers Responding to Rousseau.” I also admire Deutch’s Loving Dr. Johnson, with its account of readers’ desire to lay open the author’s heart, as on an anatomist’s table (4). 2. Kames’ influential Elements first appeared in 1762, but it went through many editions both in Britain and America, persisting well into the nineteenth century. All citations in this book (noted by volume, chapter, part, section, and page) refer to the 6th edition of 1785, the last revised by the author. 3. The material on ideal presence first appeared in D’Israeli’s 1818 second edition. Citations in this chapter refer to the two-volume third edition of 1822. 4. Compare the famous pronouncement from Shelley’s Defence, “A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.” 5. Godwin says, “I wished to ... to enable [my reader] to feel for the instant as if he had lived with Chaucer” (Chaucer xi); Stowe reports of her visit to Melrose Abbey: “I felt, for the moment, verily persuaded that if the guide would pry up one of the stones we should see [the dead Michael Scott] there as described” (I.154); Calvert, recalling his pilgrimage to Trinity Church in Stratford, writes: “For an instant I seemed to feel the presence of Shakespeare” (Scenes and Thoughts 8). These writers and many others understand the difficulty of preserving the “waking dream” of ideal presence. 6. Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” line 52. 7. The line Wordsworth recalls is from Young’s Night Thoughts: “And half-create the wondrous world they see” (vi, 424). 8. It is no coincidence that the Romantic era’s most enthusiastic bibliophiles— people like Leigh Hunt and Thomas Frognall Dibdin—were also literary tourists. In addition to touring authorial graves, homes, and haunts, Dibdin 176 Notes championed a form of literary tourism in which rare books and manuscripts were themselves the principal attractions, fighting a rear-guard action for aura in an age of mass-production. 2 The Origins of Literary Tourism 1. Notable exceptions include Ousby, Santesso, and Watson. 2. See Dekker 5, Watson 33, among others. For a focused version of this argu- ment, see Péter Dávidházi’s The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare. 3. Cf. Tricia Lootens, whose 1996 Lost Saints returned the question of religious tradition to the canon debate at a moment when many critics argued that religion’s influence on literary canonization was “superficial at best” (3–4). Lootens observed, “literary canonization not only mobilized and trans- formed complex discourse and practices of reverence but was inscribed by them in turn” (3). 4. Source: http://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/ (March 2007) [accessed 14 October 2011]. 5. Zemgulys’ argument focuses on the English religious landscape, but most of her observations apply to the American context as well. See Mulvey on Beecher, Coxe, and Stowe (75, 81–93). 6. Colonel Gardiner (that is, Colonel G—) is one of only two historical charac- ters in Waverley, the other being Prince Charles Edward Stewart. In the 1829 edition, Scott inserts information about Gardiner in his notes, most of it extracted from Doddridge. Gardiner lived from 1688 to 1745—fitting dates for a defender of Protestant Succession. 7. If any proof were needed, we might observe that religious pilgrimage was (and is) a living practice. Goethe, making his famous Italian voyage in 1786, encountered pilgrims bearing the scallop shell and pilgrim’s hat (Adler 1372). English Protestants might describe such pilgrims as survivals of a benighted past age. Still, Victorian guidebooks commonly referred to literary shrines as a “Loretto” or “Mecca,” illustrating that religious pilgrimage was a model ready to hand, even when reference to it was ironic. 8. On post-Waterloo versions of the Grand Tour, see Buzard, The Beaten Track, and Siegel, Haunted Museum. 9. Nonetheless, Johnson supplied some of the words most often quoted by later literary tourists: “To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavored, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona” (140–41). 10. Perhaps the earliest account of Burns tourism appeared in 1788: Stebbing Shaw’s A Tour, in 1787. In Shaw’s account of Ayr, he writes, “Before I take leave of this promising county I must mention, that ... [it is] proud of giving Notes 177 birth to a genius of originality and fancy who has lately published his poems chiefly in the Scotch dialect” (123). 11. The Wordsworths visited several Ossianic sites on their 1803 Scottish tour. Reflecting on the experience, William later wrote a poem called “Glen Amain; or the Narrow Glen,” which takes up basic problems of literary pil- grimage. The speaker asks, “Does then the bard sleep here indeed, / Or is it but a groundless creed?” (lines 17–18).
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