Introduction: Traveling to Meet the Dead

Abstract

In his 1809 Essay on Sepulchres, William Godwin begins with a desire to speak with the dead. He also explains what may be at stake in failing to do so. Calling for an “Atlas of those who Have Lived, for the Use of Men Hereafter to be Born” (29), Godwin promotes the erection and mapping of memorials to Britain’s worthy departed, a formal strategy he devises to combat the modern drive to “cut ourselves off from the inheritance of our ancestors” (14). His chief anxiety, avowedly, is the failure of cultural memory. He warns that an innate anti-memorial drive, if not resisted, will keep society perpetually “in its infancy” by limiting its collective wisdom to that which can be acquired in a single generation (8, 14).

When history… is perceived to have become a force of erasure rather than of inscription … then images of an apocalyptic sea inevitably surge up in the human imagination. Such images remind us that history exists in a covenant that has a history of its own, and a finite one at that; and remind us furthermore that only an ever-vigilant awareness of the covenant’s finitude assures its perpetuity.

Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead