Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 by Paul Westover (review)

Following in the wake of recent scholarship on death studies, literary afterlives and literary tourism, Necromanticism explores the cultural fascination with visiting the graves and memorials of dead writers and the places associated with their lives and works. The trend is a particularly Romantic phenomenon, as Paul Westover sees it, involving ‘a complex of antiquarian revival, book-love, ghost-hunting, and monument-building’. The book’s focus is on how this rather macabre aspect of literary tourism manifests within literary culture through the ways in which living authors are drawn to visit and write about dead ones.

An illustrative example of the narratives considered is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s account of her trip to pay her respects to the memory of Thomas Gray: ‘we were bent upon looking up the church which gave rise to Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”’, Stowe writes, ‘intending when we got there to have a little scene over it’. But, as Westover relates, ‘after communing with Gray’s spirit and the Elegy’s mute, inglorious Miltons, she finds that she has visited the wrong churchyard’. Capturing a central tension in literary tourism between authentic experience and imagined communion, Stowe records:

Imagine our chagrin at being informed that we had not been to the genuine churchyard after all. The gentleman who wept over the scenes of his early days on the wrong doorstep was not more grievously disappointed. However, we could both console ourselves with the reflection that the emotion was admirable, and wanted only the right place to make it the most appropriate in the world.

Failed encounters such as Stowe’s raise a number of questions central to Westover’s study: what is invested in locating oneself at the ‘right place’? How much does the sense of an emotional connection to the dead rely upon the created impression of physical proximity? To what extent is the pursuit of the dead as much a process of imaginative journeying as geographical?

Necromanticism involves seeking out real locations in order to conjure a sense of ‘ideal presence’ (a term Westover develops from Lord Kames), where the graveside provides the meeting point between the materiality of the author’s body and an imagined communion with their spiritual essence. Rather than being diametrically opposed, the real and ideal intersect at physical sites which hold out the possibility for an ‘authentic’ experience, though one which relies largely on an act of imagining in order to make felt the presence of authorial absence. Westover writes that ‘literary tourism posits visits to dead authors as a solution to what might be called literature’s reality problem, but that in the end such visits merely reenact that problem’. The practices associated with necromanticism thus offer an allegory of reading which provides insight into the kind of relationship that exists between reader and writer.

Based on the premise that the only good author is a dead one, nineteenth-century literary tourists developed a tendency to commemorate famous living authors as though they were already dead. Drawing on Andrew Bennett’s account of the Romantic culture of posterity, Westover traces the emphasis placed on deferred reception whereby ‘literary immortality became predicated on authors’ demises and upon future reader-tourists’ devotions’. While paying homage to deceased authors might be seen to celebrate the model of individual genius, the trend could also result in ‘a kind of flattening, in which all writers were at once dead and immortal, and in which a visit to any one author became in a sense a visit to them all’, Westover writes, citing as a marked example the number of literary immortals gathered together in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The touristic impulse to visit the graves, birthplaces and ‘homes and haunts’ of writers, as well as the places made famous in their works (Wordsworth’s Lake District, Sir Walter Scott’s Scotland) is bound up with practices relating to nationalism and the fostering...