Abstract
Two different but overlapping groups were named as ‘the dead’ in Romantic and early Victorian culture: the familiar dead, who could be named, remembered, and mourned, and another group, the dead as a crowd, a mass, a threatening force. This chapter considers the differences between these two common ways of imagining the dead, before tracing the emergence of a highly politicised debate about their relations to the society of the living. It shows how and why this debate erupted into public view during the Revolution Controversy, the pamphlet war that dominated British responses to the French Revolution throughout the early 1790s. It then traces competing representations of the dead in key texts by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas De Quincey, as revolutionary, liberal, and conservative writers argued over how the living should imagine the dead. Were they unaccountable tyrants, whose dead hand prevented the people from governing in their own best interests? Benevolent ancestors, from whom the living had inherited a just society and who therefore deserved their obedience and loyalty? Or something else entirely: a problem to be measured, legislated against, reformed, cajoled, cleaned-up, re-positioned, reinterpreted, rethought, and ultimately reimagined?
This chapter identifies the dead as a significant trope in the Revolution Controversy, establishes the link between progressive politics and a desire to reimagine the dead, and shows what was at stake in their literary representation both in the 1790s and beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
Hartley Coleridge, ‘Sonnet XII’, in The Complete Poetical Works of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Ramsay Colles (London: George Routledge, 1908), 116.
- 2.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XIV, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 239–60.
- 3.
Peter H. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1. Marshall’s book is one of four that have particularly influenced my sense of the cultural work done by the dead, along with Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), and Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real (Routledge, Abingdon, 2005).
- 4.
Thomas De Quincey, ‘Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium Eater’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1845, 280. A revised and extended version of the first section of ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ was published as ‘The Affliction of Childhood’ in Autobiographic Sketches (1853).
- 5.
Thomas De Quincey, Autobiographic Sketches, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Vol. 19: 12.
- 6.
J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1975), 18–19.
- 7.
De Quincey, ‘Suspiria De Profundis’, 277.
- 8.
De Quincey, Autobiographic Sketches, 24; 27.
- 9.
Alexander Smith, ‘Of Death and the Fear of Dying’, in Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country, ed. Hugh Walker (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), 46.
- 10.
Isaac Taylor, Physical Theory of Another Life (London: William Pickering, 1836), 253; 257.
- 11.
Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 2: 227.
- 12.
‘Essay on Sepulchres; or, A Proposal for Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), 6: 23.
- 13.
Edwin Chadwick, A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (London: 1843), 16.
- 14.
Charles Dickens, ‘Uncommercial Traveller XII’, All the Year Round, 21 July 1860, 351.
- 15.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), Vol. 5: 72.
- 16.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 76–77.
- 17.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006), 6.
- 18.
John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London: Tho. Harper, 1631), 50. For more on the effects of the Reformation on the representation of the dead, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); and Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
- 19.
Weever, 50-1.
- 20.
Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 4.
- 21.
William Wordsworth, ‘A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff’, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974), Vol. I: 19-66.
- 22.
The Political Crisis: Or, a Dissertation on the Rights of Man, in Radicalism and Reform, 1790-92 ed. Gregory Claeys, 3: 149-50. My italics.
- 23.
The Political Crisis, 150.
- 24.
Bram Dijkstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 311.
- 25.
Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London: 1790), 25; 34.
- 26.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell and W. B. Todd, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8: 67.
- 27.
Burke, Reflections, 72.
- 28.
Burke, Reflections, 145.
- 29.
See, for example, Mulford Q. Sibley, ‘Burke and the New Ancestor Worship’, New Republic, 12 March 1956, 24-25; Tom Furniss, ‘Cementing the Nation: Burke’s Reflections on Nationalism and National Identity’, in Reflections on the Revolution in France: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. John Whale (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 134; Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 27; Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988), 21.
- 30.
Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 6.
- 31.
‘Speech on Reform of Representation in the Commons’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke ed. by P.J Marshall and Donald Bryant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), Vol. 4: 219.
- 32.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
- 33.
Burke, ‘Speech on the Reform of Representation’, 219.
- 34.
Burke, Reflections, 189.
- 35.
There has been a great deal of critical interest in Burke’s metaphorics of the body, and this chapter is indebted to two recent studies of the trope in particular. Mark Neocleous provides an interesting reading of the political implications of the monstrous body in the Reflections, before tracing similar tropes through Marx and on into mid-twentieth-century political extremism. See Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005). David Collings argues that Burke switches between evocations of the grotesque body and the divinely inspired corporate body, ‘vilifying one beyond all measure and sanctioning the other as unassailable’. In ‘the wake of the Revolution’, Collings notes, ‘he can find no common ground between them’, a sense of irreconcilable difference which accords with my own analysis of the ways in which his representation of the dead as members of the social body develops in the 1790s. See David Collings, Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny at the End of Early Modern England (Cranbury, NJ.: Associated University Presses, 2009), 60. For more on the legal implications of Burke’s corporate imagery, see Frederick A. Dreyer, Burke’s Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979), 46-50.
- 36.
Burke, Reflections, 67; 84; 54; 55; 57; 73. There are dozens of further examples that one might select to prove the point.
- 37.
Burke, Reflections, 72; 146.
- 38.
Burke, Reflections, 57.
- 39.
Burke, Reflections, 146.
- 40.
Burke argues that prejudice should be cherished, because otherwise each man has to ‘live and trade each on his own private stock of reason’, which may be so small that ‘the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages’ by perpetuating the prejudices held by their ancestors. See Reflections, 183.
- 41.
Collings, Monstrous Society, 86.
- 42.
Burke, Reflections, 138.
- 43.
Burke, Reflections, 71.
- 44.
Collings, Monstrous Society, 86.
- 45.
Burke, Reflections, 147. Although Burke chooses not to deploy a bodily metaphor in this famous passage, there is actually little to distinguish this social contract from the corporate bodies that he metaphorises elsewhere, as Frederick A. Dreyer points out: ‘the institution [Burke] actually described in this famous passage was not a partnership nor in any strict sense a contractual association. But it was a [legal] corporation’. Like a corporation, Burke’s society ‘possessed a capacity for endless duration’ and a ‘legal succession was created which embraced past, present, and future members’. See Burke’s Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1979), 47.
- 46.
Burke, Reflections, 210.
- 47.
Burke, Reflections, 128.
- 48.
Dreyer, Burke’s Politics, 51.
- 49.
David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 53.
- 50.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.
- 51.
James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae: Defence of the French Revolution: A Critical Edition, ed. Edmund Garratt (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 53–4.
- 52.
Catherine Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France (1790) in The Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 1: 124; Thomas Christie, Letters on the Revolution of France (1791), in The Political Writings of the 1790s, Vol. 1, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 1:163.
- 53.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke 2nd ed., in The Political Writings of the 1790s, Vol. 1, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 1: 11. Emphasis in the original.
- 54.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Gregory Claeys (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 15.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Paine, Rights of Man, 17.
- 57.
Paine, Rights of Man, 37.
- 58.
Robert Lamb points out that Paine’s rights-based liberalism is much closer to Locke’s theory of natural rights than to Hobbes, but that, even here, the resemblance between the two is superficial. Lamb argues convincingly that Paine’s revitalisation of natural rights theory in the 1790s represents a distinctively modern adaptation of the tradition. See Robert Lamb, Thomas Paine and the Idea of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 32–34.
- 59.
Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816, in Thomas Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers, Vol. 4, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (London, 1829), 299.
- 60.
Jefferson, Memoirs, 406.
- 61.
Paine, Rights of Man, 15.
- 62.
Mark Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead, 20.
- 63.
The Political Crisis: Or, a Dissertation on the Rights of Man in Political Writings of the 1790s, in The Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 3: 127.
- 64.
Jerom Alley, A Review of the Political Principles of the Modern Whigs (London: 1792), 32–3. There are innumerable other references to the dead which follow Paine’s lead in similar terms to Alley, but they are too numerous and repetitive to include here.
- 65.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 119.
- 66.
Remarks on Mr. Paine’s Pamphlet, called The Rights of Man. In a letter to a Friend (Dublin: 1791), 12–13.
- 67.
Rights of citizens, being an examination of Mr. Paine’s principles, touching government. By a barrister (Dublin: 1791), 38.
- 68.
Ibid. 40. Emphasis original.
- 69.
Joseph Gerrald, ‘The Address of the British Convention assembled at Edinburgh November 19, 1793 to the People of Great Britain’, in The Political Writings of the 1790s ed. Gregory Claeys, 4: 90.
- 70.
John Thelwall, ‘Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord’, in Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 337. For further examples, see ‘The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons’, 21; 20; 19; ‘Including a Delineation of the Character of Cromwell’, 302; ‘The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments’, 394. There are dozens of similar references to ancestry in Thelwall’s writings of the 1790s.
- 71.
Neocleous, The Monstrous and the Dead, 31.
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McAllister, D. (2018). Introduction: Revolutionising the Dead: Burke, Paine, De Quincey. In: Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790–1848. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97731-7_1
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