Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture by Deborah Lutz (review)

Charles Dickens was devastated by the death of his wife’s sister Mary Hogarth at the age of seventeen. Standing beside her deathbed, Dickens clipped a lock of Mary’s hair and slipped a ring from her finger; he continued to wear that ring until his own death decades later. This story, which Deborah Lutz recounts in the third chapter of Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, offers us a hint of the intense attachment the Victorians felt toward objects associated with the dead. Those objects, what Lutz calls the “secular relics” of Victorian culture, are the focus of this book, which makes a case for nothing less than “a new philosophical approach to nineteenth-century materiality and death” (4, 169).

That new approach involves using thing theory to think about the matter of Victorian death culture, about the nineteenth century’s longing to find something transcendent in both the body and the material items it touched during life. Lutz considers the Victorian reverence for preserved pieces of the body itself: hair jewelry, items handled by the dead, postmortem art, and even the spaces formerly occupied by the deceased. These remains, Lutz insists, constitute a uniquely fruitful subject for thing theory. After all, she suggests, “No other objects are, arguably, more infused with the special ‘thingness’ the material culturalist studies: with ideas, with interiority, with the metaphysical” (5). Such cherished matter has the potential, in Lutz’s account, to transform our understanding of nineteenth-century material culture more generally. “One of the uses of bringing the history of relic culture into histories of collecting and of ‘thing theory,’” Lutz writes, “is to ground secular materialism in the long history of the sacred object” (30); understanding the numinousness with which Victorians invested these relics offers us a chance to “shift our understanding of all objects during the period” (4). Central to Lutz’s project, then, is identifying the sacred roots of Victorian relic culture, which Lutz locates in “the Catholic cult of saints” (4). But the history of nineteenth-century death culture, in Lutz’s telling, traces a slow movement away from such religious origins: away from holy relics that were widely legible and toward mementos that were distinctly local, unique, intimate, and resistant to being incorporated into larger religious narratives (even if some Victorians continued to find in such objects icons of more conservative belief systems). Lutz’s history of Victorian relics, in other words, is a history of the rise of secularism: she identifies the Great War as marking the end of the particular relationship to matter that defined Victorian mourning, that relationship having fallen victim to such forces as the rise of commodity culture and the development of technologies like the typewriter and the photograph.

Lutz’s archival work in this book is impressive: she arrays before us the relics hidden away (and often poorly catalogued) in countless libraries and museums. Her readings of the “thick gathering of ideas and gestures” in these objects—and in their representations in fiction and poetry—are another strength of the book (130). Lutz is especially interested in the ways “[t]he body and the book intersected,” how writing served to supplement and to sacralize the remains of the dead, whether that writing be the epitaphic inscription on a piece of hair jewelry, the mid-century fiction in which hair relics are ubiquitous, or Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), which works to create an elegiac shrine for the body of Arthur Henry Hallam (2). Yet the connections between book and body in which Lutz is interested take more literal forms, too: for example, she describes how relics “were usually framed within jewelry or cases—sometimes inscribed—as if they were bound books or formally structured poems,” and she devotes space to the practice of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin (2–3).

Valuable as are Lutz’s readings of the nineteenth...