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Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, by Deborah Lutz; pp. xii + 244. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, £60.00, $90.00.
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...