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Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO's Six Feet Under, quipped, "Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything." So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: "Taught by death what life should be."
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Disinterring Death 1
Chapter 1 Down among the Dead: Edwin Chadwick's Burial Reform Discourse in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England 13
Chapter 2 "Taught by Death What Life Should Be": Representations of Death in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barron and North and South 37
Chapter 3 "To Profit Us When He Was Dead": Dead-Body Politics in Our Mutual Friend 67
Chapter 4 Death Eclipsed: The Contested Churchyard Thomas Hardy's Novels 99
Chapter 5 "The Tonic of Fire": Cremation in Late Victorian England 137
Conclusion: Dracula's Last Word 153
Epilogue: The Traffic in Bodies 169
Notes 175
Bibliography 199
Index 211
Overview
Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO's Six Feet Under, quipped, "Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything." So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses...