On Ideal Presence

Abstract

Of all techniques for imaginatively contacting the dead in the long Romantic period, visits to authors’ homes, haunts, and graves were perhaps the most compelling. Why were readers drawn to such locations? It was not simply that they approached authors’ monuments with reverence, antiquarian interest, or a desire to acquire cultural capital, though all of these things played a part. Literary tourists sought intimacy with authors, a kind of immediacy that reading alone at home could not supply. In their journals, travelogues, and related writings, they affirmed that the cherished dead were uniquely present at special, charged locations. Nonetheless, physical encounters with monuments and relics meant little unless visitors could imaginatively reanimate the authors. Only then could they enjoy (affectively, spiritually) communion with the authors they saw as friends and benefactors. The metaphors they used—conversation, resurrection, and nearness—derived largely from contemporary theories of historiography, biography, and reading.¹

There is, beside all this, an illusion which I am ever willing to indulge at such a consecrated spot. When I approach the hallowed depositary of the remains of the virtuous and excellent, I fancy myself to be brought into something like a nearness to the individuals themselves. Imagination calls up their departed shades, and enters, as it were, into converse with them. Nor can I easily divest myself of the persuasion that the disin-thralled spirit that once animated a body of clay still hovers around the spot where its earthly tabernacle is laid.

Andrew Bigelow, Leaves from a Journal, 1824