William Godwin, Necro-Tourism, and the Empirical Afterlife of the Dead

Abstract

In 1825, William Hazlitt named William Godwin one of the Spirits of the Age. Godwin deserved that designation not only as reformer, philosopher, biographer, and novelist, but also as an apostle of literary necro-tourism. His Essay on Sepulchres offers the Romantic era’s most fully developed description of tourism as a quest to locate the dead, helping us to recognize Romanticism’s dependence not just on the past, but more precisely on bodies dead and buried. The Essay grounds (quite literally) literary commemoration in the grave, and it applies that same logic of authentication to national imaginings.

The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf of a cultural artifact or symbolic fragment or made thing … that is without any other basis in material reality: that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis of substantiation.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

All this consideration of hic jacet, it must be granted, is very little. But such is the system of the universe, that it is all that we have for it.

William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres