I. The Death of the Storyteller

By the time the nineteenth century reached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun.Footnote ¹ No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept.Footnote ² Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling.Footnote ³ Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations 94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.Footnote ⁴

The following paper will approach these themes, but from a slightly different angle and with a separate set of tools. Rather than the epiphanic moment of the deathbed scene explored by Peter Brooks, Garrett Stewart, and Elisabeth Bronfen and so central to the work of the Brontës, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and many others, here I want to delve more fully into the materiality of death and its artifacts.Footnote ⁵ Nineteenth-century Britain saw a resurgence in relic culture, which became, like other death rites, increasingly secular, personal, and private. The relic, most commonly jewelry set with human hair, became a popular plot device in the novel, but also, or perhaps because, it had its own narrative qualities. Relics work as traces of a life and body completed and disappeared, in this sense something like last words, but they also serve as frames or fragments of the moment of loss. Nineteenth-century relic culture speaks, on the one hand, of a desire to see death as not permanent, in that material remains might be proof that the loved one still exists somewhere, somehow. But relic worship also shows a willingness – and here is where my argument dovetails with Benjamin's – to dwell in and with the moment of loss itself, to linger over this evidence of death's presence woven into the texture of life at all turns, giving it one of its essential meanings, its impetus and starting point for stories.Footnote ⁶ The relationship of the body and death, of the material object and grief, became essential themes in Wuthering Heights, as well as in the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alfred Tennyson. In a more general sense, Victorian culture partook in the holding onto and appreciating of death and its materiality, and when this attentiveness shifted, relic culture, not to mention death culture itself, found its demise, by the start of the Great War.

II. A Brief History of Relics

For the Victorians, artifacts of beloved bodies still held some of the sublime, fetishistic magic of those outmoded holy relics of bygone days. Not only does death bring the tragedy of turning people into things – of subject into object – but it might also start inanimate objects to life. A brief history of secular relics in Britain begins with the end of the Elizabethan Age when the fragments of ordinary individuals began to be made into jewelry and worn on the body as Protestantism took a firm hold, and Catholic practices such as the worship of saint's relics worship continued to be rooted out. (Most importantly, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and further dispersals throughout the 40s and 50s meant that large collections of relics were destroyed or disappeared in Britain.)Footnote ⁷ The sacred moved from the flesh of the saint to that of the beloved individual. One popular type of secular relic that emerged was the bracelet woven entirely of hair, which were often tokens of friendship, familial affection, or love such as those in John Donne's early seventeenth-century poems, “The Funerall” and “The Relique.”Footnote ⁸ Thus three categories of relics can already be organized by this time: the holy relic, the “celebrity” artifact, and the memento of the ordinary person. Extraordinary edifices were built to house the saints’ relics (St. Mark's in Venice and St. Peter's in Rome, to give two famous examples) – little objects or shriveled corpses thought by a community of believers to be divine points of transcendence with magical, healing properties. (Sometimes these were worn on the body, in jewelry reliquaries. For example, the sapphire amulet Charlemagne gave his wife in the ninth century reputedly contained the Virgin's hair and fragments of the True Cross.)Footnote ⁹ God seemed, to the faithful, to intervene in human lives by miraculously infusing the saint's body and its parts with a frozen animation – never to be alive again but also incorrupt, not subject to the decay, rot, and earthly dissolution of all that is human.Footnote ¹⁰ For example, Saint Januarius's ancient, dried blood appears to turn back into liquid when displayed by the Cardinal of Naples on feast days, and witnesses feel linked to an eternity, blessed by an immortality which they can share in, for a moment. (Victricious, the fourth-century Bishop of Rouen, remarked that every fragment of the saint's body is “linked by a bond to the whole stretch of eternity.”)Footnote ¹¹ By the sixteenth century, a second type of relic became common, the “celebrity” memento – fragments of kings, queens, heroes, writers, and artists – and became increasingly popular during the Romantic and early Victorian periods.Footnote ¹² Collectors wanted to own historical relics, such as the ball that killed Nelson, or soldier's bones, handfuls of dirt, pieces of clothing collected after the Battle of Waterloo, to give them the sense that they had played some role in these events, now vividly brought back to life in the souvenir.Footnote ¹³ The collector could also feel he or she authenticated the history or the existence of the celebrity, could affirm, “here is proof that it truly did happen or that she did exist.”Footnote ¹⁴ But the relics under consideration here are of a third type: they came not from the saint, a great historical event or even the famous, but from any ordinary body. They had value only to a handful of people, or even to just one, and if that one died, then the relic became an unmarked grave, of worth to no one. They told a story, highly personal and intimate, sacred to few, alive only in a specific locale and set of years. For those who didn't know the narrative of the donor, the relic became a materialized secret, a kind of dead letter of the object world.Footnote ¹⁵ Collecting and sharing such relics, to continue on with this brief history, became common practice starting around the middle of the eighteenth century. The Romantic fashion for the sentimental, for a cultivation of wrought-up and drawn-out feelings, contributed to the desire to share the emotional intimacy gleaned from giving a friend, relation, or lover a lock of hair, a tooth, or from keeping a postmortem relic.Footnote ¹⁶ Added to this was the heightened importance of the personality and aesthetic reactions of the individual that was part of Romanticism, seen so clearly in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. This radical individualism led to a worship of the body – one's own and that of the other – carried to the extreme that even its decay, its ruins could be adored. Popular from the mid eighteenth century, relic culture became such a craze from the 1850s to the 80s that a busy industry flourished, especially in hair jewelry, although mementos of teeth also had their day, as did hair albums, pictures, and wreaths.Footnote ¹⁷ Advertisements for designers in hair, hair artisans, and hairworkers ran in newspapers, and periodicals discussed the fad as it waxed and waned.Footnote ¹⁸ The London jeweller Antoni Forrer, the best-known professional hairworker mid-century, kept fifty workers employed at his Regent St. shop.Footnote ¹⁹ Among that accumulation of things that was the Great Exhibition, there were at least eleven displays of hair art, and medals were won for miniatures of the royal family worked in hair.Footnote ²⁰ There was even a prize for “a large portrait of Her Majesty Queen Victoria” made of hair (Catalogue 1223). Working in hair became a handcraft for women to practice at home, akin to other types of “fancy work” like embroidery, feather pictures, shellwork, and wax modeling, and had its place in instructional manuals and periodicals.Footnote ²¹ By 1854, the omniscient narrator of Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek, could declare that a hair bracelet is “in England one of the commonest ornaments of woman's wear” (256). And by the time Dickens wrote Our Mutual Friend, men's watch fobs made of hair had become a mark of middle-class respectability. That poor seeker of class approval and stability, Bradley Headstone, wearing all that is proper, “with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck, looked a thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty” (218).Footnote ²²

III. Romanticism: The Beautiful Death

Found behind many Victorian narratives of personal relic collecting is the wish that the relic, rather than being a memento mori, might mark the continued existence of the body to which it once belonged. To possess a piece of the beloved might provide a link to that body lost; it might comfort with its talisman-like ability to contain, and prove the existence of, an eternity, much as sacred relics did in the past for larger communities of believers. Figuring the relic as evidence came from two strands of belief – the Romantic “beautiful death” and the Christian ideal of a domesticated heaven, found in mid-nineteenth-century evangelicalism and spiritualism. The Romantic approach, certainly the more radical and unusual of the two, will be explored first. It entailed the view of death as a moment of beauty, as a transformation of the loved one into a paradise lost, to be yearned for with an erotic ache, and, in this sense, to be understood as the beginning or continuation of a narrative, as Benjamin would later see it.Footnote ²³ Here, the fantasy emerged of heaven as a place where bodies might be re-conjoined, a petite mort fully realized, a liebestod with the tod reemphasized. The sexualized lingering over remains appears throughout the century in writing and art influenced by strains of dark Romanticism and, in a slightly different register, a Gothic relish in the extreme sensations surrounding death and its mysteries: the strewn graveyard, the reopened coffin. While the corporeal keepsake as the proof of erotic possession goes back at least to Donne, its full flowering as a theme came in the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁴ Brontë, Hardy, and Rossetti, to name just a few of many, weave eroticized relics into their stories and thus speak of a certain (although unusual) approach to remains in the larger cultural imagination.

Wuthering Heights, a classic study in relic usage, serves to illuminate the belief that it is in the body that a bridge to the afterlife could be spanned. About midway through the novel, Heathcliff steals into Catherine's death chamber. Finding a locket around her neck, he casts the contents – the light, soft curl of his rival, Edgar Linton – onto the floor and replaces it with his own heavy black crop. Rather than gathering a memento of Catherine for himself, Heathcliff sees to it that a material fragment of his body will go down into the grave with Catherine's corpse, to intermingle with her flesh. He desires his presence to linger, synecdochically, in the place she is, somewhere on the other side of death. Groaning that his soul is in the grave with her body, he comes to be “swallowed in the anticipation” (325) of the fulfillment death will bring him, when he can join her. Catherine's death doesn't mean she has disappeared, but rather that she has become temporarily unlocatable. When she dies, he cries out vehemently, “Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where?” (169). Heathcliff doesn't yearn for a meeting of ethereal, spirit souls, but of fleshly selves erotically melding, an ideal made concrete when he has her grave opened. He explains to Nelly:

For Heathcliff heaven comes when all life has left their limbs and the remains, what's left over, can wile away eternity together. He dreams not of an airy ideal place, but rather of his “heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers” (289). The decay and dissolution usually associated with corpses has no place here: the afterlife inheres in bodies.

Contained in Heathcliff's actions after Catherine's death – inserting a keepsake of himself in Catherine's locket, opening her coffin, etc. – can be found not only a belief in an afterlife, but also a sense that, whatever the world of the dead might be, it has a materiality. Heathcliff imagines his earthly fulfillment in Catherine's remains; a lock of his hair will hopefully keep this promise for the future tangible, tactile. In Hardy's Wessex poem “Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death,” he laments having no material trace of her, “whereby I may picture her,” especially “a thread of her hair” (lines 5, 2).Footnote ²⁵ Rossetti often sensualizes heaven, or postmortem states, such as in “The Blessed Damozel,” with the just dead woman imagined as luminous and full of erotic pining for that lover still on earth. In many of the sonnets in The House of Life, adoration nestles in the recesses of the body of the loved one; the best of life's feelings are exteriorized and reside in the material of the lover, the body as vessel. Thus in “Life-in-Love”: “Not in thy body is thy life at all/But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes;/Through these she yields thee life that vivifies/What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall.” The speaker goes on,

In the rich backdrop of sorrow and death, the lock of hair, now a relic, shines out with meaning and love, perhaps the only there is.Footnote ²⁶ The moving and breathing warmth of life – the heart-beats and fire-heats – can be found only in the object, one surrounded by, held by, the changeless night. Thus all meaning, unbidden, narrows to this point of arrested life. The memento seals in amber the night, its center stilled, yet its referent could be, although there is ambiguity here, an afterlife – some sort of unknown living that endures, works its magic yet. Rossetti finds spiritualism in the everyday object of the lovelock, sparking the inanimate into dark animation, a kindred infusion to Wordsworth's natural supernaturalism in “Tintern Abbey,” when the speaker “sees into the life of things” (line 49).

Brontë, Hardy, and Rossetti work within the milieu of Romanticism, but they also call on a much older fabric of belief – sympathetic magic. The folk wisdom behind the full force of synecdoche is at work here: the piece of the person can bring the presence of the whole.Footnote ²⁷ Lovelocks stand as a simple example. To give a lock is to give one's body in promise.Footnote ²⁸ Such paganism held attraction for Sensation novelists – writers who play with Romantic and Gothic themes alongside their less radical detective fiction narratives. In Wilkie Collins's No Name, when Magdalen draws a morsel of hair out of a white silk bag from around her neck, she speaks to it:

No longer a memento or souvenir of a past time and an absent person, Magdalen's relic almost abolishes time and space; the two bodies meet orgasmically. In the scene referred to earlier in Wuthering Heights, when Heathcliff storms into Catherine's death chamber and replaces Linton's hair with his own in the locket, the bodily fragment expresses an erotic possession through synecdoche – Catherine belongs to Heathcliff because his body, a morsel of it, will go with her to the grave.Footnote ²⁹ After Heathcliff leaves, Nelly Dean, the constant meddler, comes into the room. She finds Edgar Linton's pale snippet of hair on the floor and twines it round Heathcliff's thick black one, placing them both in the locket. With her actions, she opens the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy. Intertwining the hair of two or more individuals made present, some believed, a relationship consigned in reality only to memory, or fantasy. Charlotte Brontë, an occasional user of Gothic devices, has the young Paulina in Villette take locks of hair from her father and her future husband, Dr. Graham Bretton, and plait them together with one of her own curls. “‘Now,’ said she, ‘there is an amulet made, which has the virtue to keep you two always friends. You can never quarrel so long as I wear this’” (532).Footnote ³⁰ The pseudo-science of animal magnetism could also be invoked to describe the powers of the relic. The narrator in M. E. Braddon's The Lovels of Arden, in reference to a locket inset with hair, remarks, “there are those among our disciples of modern magic who believe there is a subtle animal magnetism in such things; that the mere possession of such a token constitutes a kind of spiritual link between two beings” (139).

IV. Evangelicalism and Spiritualism: The Good Death

Yet it was a more conventional type of “magic” that gave the relic sentimental sway. Heavily influenced by Romantic emotionalism and reverence for the heart, the Evangelical revival of the 1830s and 40s and Spiritualism's rise in the 50s and 60s contributed to the mid-century popularity of hairwork and secondary relics like clothing, jewelry, and bedrooms.Footnote ³¹ The Evangelicals and Spiritualists also aestheticized the body's detritus, imbuing it with an after-death narrative. With both came a popular vision of heaven as a return home, a place where all those who have “gone before” would be waiting. To many Evangelicals, and even more clearly to the Spiritualists, the dead remained tangibly among us. Spiritualists believed not only that the worlds of the living and the dead, the absent and the present, were permeable, but that the dead hovered close, and the lines of communication might be kept open. Through séances, table-rappings, tappings, and turnings, and special photography, the air could seem peopled with spirits, the dead invisible companions crowding in. Queen Victoria herself provides a leading example. She felt haunted by the presence of Prince Albert after his sudden death and had a difficult time consoling herself for his loss. “I feel now to be so acquainted with death,” she wrote to the Princess Royal, “and to be much nearer that unseen world” (Qtd. in Hibbert 293). She conducted séances and “table-turnings,” feeling convinced he was near, and sent snippets of Prince Albert's hair to Garrard's – the royal jeweler's – where they were worked into jewelry. At least eight pieces were made that incorporated his hair. One was a gold pin fronted by an onyx cameo of the Prince with a box at the back for a curl, another a bracelet set with tresses from the heads of royal family members, mixed in with Albert's – a present for the Queen from one of her children. Her eight-year-old son was required to wear around his neck “a Locket with beloved Papa's hair” (Qtd. in Bury, Jewellery 664).Footnote ³² Some believed that spirits were sufficiently substantial to be photographed and imagined they appeared with their own peculiar bodily texture: ectoplasmic draperies enveloping their wispy forms. Such spirits leant meaning to the relic, as they floated in the background of the bodily fragment and worked as another form of material evidence of eternal life.

Michael Wheeler traces the sentimental “consolatory religious discourse” on resurrection through family hymns, mourning letters, diaries, tracts, and sermons, and he remarks on the construction of heaven in the popular imagination as a home which appeared a good deal like “a middle class suburb in the sky” (121) with couples and families united. In fact, Evangelicalism revitalized the idea of the “good death,” a concept based on Catholic tradition and related to the Romantic “beautiful death,” but with a stronger leaning toward religious faith and away from the erotic.Footnote ³³ The death of the other could be “good” when it brought with it the comfort of eternity, when death did not annihilate the loved one but passed him or her into another, yet-interwoven, state. As St. Paul exclaims, “Oh death, where is thy sting, Oh grave where is thy victory?”Footnote ³⁴ A typical consolation letter used these sentiments, such as this one written by a young woman to her friend in 1870:

It is into the arms of her sister she imagines stepping, into her corporeal touch, her wholly renewed and perfect flesh. The “goodness” of death made the moment of death, and even the expression on the face of the one just dead, a kind of text that could express spiritual salvation, that might be marked with the signs of the loved one's final worthiness of passing into heaven. The beauty of the calm mien of death, sometimes caught in drawings, paintings, effigies, casts and, beginning in the 1840s, photographs, was usually described as Anne Blunt (the wife of the artist and poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt) does in her diary, when she and her husband were making sketches of her just-dead brother-in-law's countenance: “His face was beautiful like the face of a saint as I imagine it to be” (Qtd. in Jalland 289). The painter John Horsley made a drawing of his father, just after his death in 1858. His mother remarked on this drawing, “The peace and beauty of his expression is not to be described” (Qtd. in Jalland 289). Nelly, the Evangelical force in the pagan narrative of Wuthering Heights, expresses a similar sentiment in the “perfect peace” of Catherine's remains: “Her brow smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile. No angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared; and I partook of the infinite calm in which she lay” (167). The dying body itself could hold the proof of imperishability, and thus meaning clustered around it and its more attractive and permanent cast-offs, such as hair. Emily Palmer, a strongly Evangelical High Church woman, gave her reasons for wearing the hair of her recently deceased sister Dorothea.

Representing presence, the fullness and plenitude of meaning, the body and its pieces could express the not-death of the “good” death. The hair jewel says, for some believers, that we will meet again, not that absence will be forever fixed.

Within this general fabric of the “good death” can be found Tennyson and the elegiac mode. If relics were a literature instead of objects, they would probably be elegies, little fragments of poetry, replete with “thingness.” In Memoriam, at certain junctures, marks death as productive of the richest meaning, while at the same time it's the most lacerating, blackly terrible, and unspeakable event imaginable. Without death and unending grief, love does not shine in its deepest luster: “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned,/Let darkness keep her raven gloss;/Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,/To dance with death, to beat the ground” (I: 9–12). Yet, in a turn of emotion characteristic of the different coloring of each of the poems that make up the larger one, it is death that makes the long street unlovely, the call for the “tender day” unending, the darkness vacant. As in Rossetti's poetry, the truth of the other most often resides in his felt presence, in the “touch of a vanished hand,/and the sound of a voice that is still” (“Break, Break, Break” lines 11–12), in other words, in the visceral experience of the warmth and sound of being with the corporeal other. The loss of the body's presence is keenly missed by Tennyson, particularly the hands, their gestures and work.Footnote ³⁵ In poems IX–XX, he fervently imagines Hallam's body – “my lost Author's loved remains” – being carried home from Europe (where he died) to England. Placing himself, imaginatively, upon that “fair ship,” he can “hear the noise about thy keel,” and he feels the calm upon the seas “and dead calm in that noble breast/Which heaves but with the heaving deep” (Poem XI, lines 19–20). He calls to the ship to bring “such precious relics . . . the dust of him” home, to be buried in “English earth” (Poem XVII, lines 18–19).

Caught up in the struggle with faith, in the occasional deep doubt, is the question of what the dead body might mean and if and how it lingers with the still living. In fact, believing that “dust and ashes” retain meaning becomes a bulwark against the flood of the existential abyss.

Thus recovering a sense of the infinite in the finite, in the trace of the once alive – the dust and ashes – becomes a key movement in the shoring up of faith, in the fight against the idea that “Man dies: nor is there hope in dust” (XXXV: line 4).

V. The Shadow of Doubt: Death as Death

While in the long view of In Memoriam consolation and belief in the afterlife are affirmed, the individual poems can be read as, in Timothy Peltason's words, “pockets of rebellious and unassimilated intensity” (48), or statements of pure grief, of doubt unconvinced. In Tennyson can be found a more complex emotional approach to remains than the Evangelical and Spiritualist popular discourse. His was the more common emotional knot than the simple feeling of consolation in the relic, the sense that the corporeal fragment's referent was the still existing. Even many Christians found that it was in the insupportable loss of the loved one that their belief intermingled with doubts. The relic exemplifies the double movement of faith and doubt, of comfort and grief. It is this dual movement that can be found most commonly in nineteenth-century writing about relics. A writer for Cassell's Household Guide points out that it was the “imperishable nature . . . and the great brilliancy and beauty which it retains long after it has been severed, and even after the person to whom it once belonged has passed away” that made hairwork a “cherished memento” (4: 337). The relic both reminds one of the eternal – the imperishable – and calls up the finite in the one now “passed away.” The Family Friend remarked, “A lock of hair from the head of some beloved one is often prized above gold or gems, for it is not a mere purchasable gift, but actually a portion of themselves, present with us when they are absent, surviving while they are mouldering in the grave” (5: 55). The play of presence and absence begins when the relic is touched – the fragment of the body and the memories are here, the being itself, its whole corporeality, gone. To cite another example, in Rhoda Broughton's Cometh Up as a Flower, when Nell's father dies, she cries over a lock of his hair, “and now the sight of the thin grey lock, so sparse, so almost white, recalled to me with such bitter force the head from which it was severed, that he, being dead, yet spake” (345). The hair brings the dead father back to speak, yet foregrounds, at the same time, the eternal silence.

The relic makes apparent the terrible poignancy of the body becoming object; it can reenact that moment, again and again.Footnote ³⁶ To cut a lock of hair from a living being is to divorce it from the organic life and growth of the body, to freeze the moment forever in the unchanging thing. When the keepsake is collected from the dead, it's a synecdoche of that weight of flesh, that moment of death, preserved from its decay yet referring to it endlessly. Marcia Pointon calls hair jewelry, “a material figure for memory” because it “stages the death of its subject and simultaneously . . . instantiates continuity” (“Materializing Mourning” 45). The meaning of the detached fragment of a physical existence is always in its referent. To pore over the relic is to fall into the reverie of memory, to call to mind the absent being. The object disappears and becomes pure symbol, pointing only outside of itself. Yet the texture, its somewhat shocking substantiality as a thing, as an actual piece of that person, can call one back from reverie to feel its bluntness, its weighty, obstinate “thingness,” its non-symbolic quality which refers to nothing but its own presence. It reminds one that “the body is a thing among things” (Brown 4), or even, as Susan Stewart puts it, a container for things. The relic can startle in its defamiliarization: hair, teeth, and other body parts are everyday objects that one has become fully habituated to and thus hardly notices. As relics, divorced from their original contexts, they have been made strange as tactile, silent material.

A fruitful meditation, in uncovering the meaning of relics to the Victorians, comes from juxtaposing the bodily artifact and the photograph. Indeed, out of the complex weave of their historical relationship, one thread can be picked out: the photograph would come to replace the relic.Footnote ³⁷ The photograph and the relic both prove that the absent loved one has been there, that he or she “has been absolutely, irrefutably present” (Barthes 77). This that-has-been can open a “wound” (as Roland Barthes calls it) of longing because what has been lost – and both the photograph and the relic attest to this – was an utterly unique, singular being, a whole that can never be replaced, duplicated, encompassed (even in memory). Although Barthes writes of twentieth-century photography, his remarks on the photograph of his mother in Camera Lucida could have been just as easily written about the relic. The photograph (relic) “achieved . . . the impossible science of the unique being” (71). When his mother died, he lost a living, changing entity, the “grace” of “an individual soul,” and the photograph brings this wholesale loss back to him, all at once. Relics hold this same quality; they are the material sample of a being that will never be given to grow, or seen or felt again. Embedding, emblematic of, the “radiant, irreducible core” (Barthes 75), relics speak of the truth of the loved body, which is a particularity that cannot be universalized, just as the relic can never be reproduced, copied, multiplied. A kind of “dead commodity,” they attest to the never before and the never again.

The need to authenticate identity, to say that-has-been, became a central use of the relic, particularly of hair jewelry. Anxieties emerged in the 1850s about unscrupulous makers of mourning ornaments. The fear was that when one sent a scrap of hair and instructions to the jeweler or hairworker through the mail, (a common practice, especially for those who didn't live in a large city), it might be replaced in the final product by an anonymous donor's hair with the same color – a snippet easier to work because coarser, thicker, and longer.Footnote ³⁸ Thus the jewel returned would not attest to the presence in the past – the absence – of a wholly original being. In fact, perhaps the material trace of the loved one was now lost. The “false” locket or brooch took on the qualities of an unmarked grave and could represent the full mystery of a disappeared and forgotten individual. This anxiety was stoked, perhaps even invented, by women's craft journals and instructional manuals that provided step-by-step directions and patterns on how to create hairwork at home. “Why should we confide to others the precious locks or tress we prize,” the anonymous writer for the Family Friend asks, “risking its being lost, and the hair of some other person being substituted for it, when we may ourselves weave it into the ornament we desire?” (5: 55). And the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine remarks, “When we think of the imperishable nature of human hair, we can easily understand the anxiety with which a tress or lock cut from the forehead of a friend who is perhaps long among the dead . . . is preserved.”Footnote ³⁹ The relic must be the thing itself, without mediation, otherwise its value is lost.Footnote ⁴⁰ The increased mass production of the relic, in its casings and in the anonymity of the worker and his or her division of labor, served to broaden the possibility that the bodily remnant might not be able to express directly and purely the truth of the singular being, something that the relic needed to emphatically repeat to do its work.Footnote ⁴¹

In this vein, the relics that litter Victorian novels with sensational or gothic themes – the snippets of hair, creased gloves, monogrammed handkerchiefs, scraps of handwriting, death masks, lockets, mourning jewelry – often furnish a means to authenticate identity, like an autograph or handwriting, proving the subject and his or her body to be unrepeatable and non-reproducible. Hair, and to a lesser extent, other types of relics, are thus recognized as a material original, like a fingerprint. Locks of hair might prove a character's identity in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Collins's Queen of Hearts, Eliot's Felix Holt, M. E. Braddon's Fenton's Quest, and Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, to name a few of many.Footnote ⁴²

In Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek, the story unfolds around the mystery of a hair bracelet – “made of two kinds of hair [one from her dead aunt and the other her still-alive father] . . . And on the flat clasp of the bracelet there was cut in tiny letters, ‘In memory of S.G.’” (68) – the only clue to the identity of a deaf and dumb foundling girl, Mary (nicknamed Madonna). Madonna, whose outcast (because unwed) mother, dying of inanition, gives up her baby to the kind wife of a circus clown, becomes herself a rare wonder – called “the Beloved Object” (328) – an “irresistible,” “innocent beauty” (146) who “brought fresh life with her to all who lived in her new home” (118). The bracelet works as a secret cabinet of clues that needs to be unlocked using the unique hair that it contains, becoming the driving force of the plot. But through association, or metonymy, Madonna herself comes to have the same qualities as the relic – a kind of holy unknown quantity. Her adoptive father, Valentine Blyth, often finds pleasure in watching her inward thoughts (not subsequently shared with him) cast shadows over her features. “It was one of Valentine's many eccentric fancies that she was not meditating only, at such times as these, but that, deaf and dumb as she was with the creatures of this world, she could talk with the angels, and could hear what the heavenly voices said to her in return” (143–44). Both the hair bracelet and Madonna take on this role of impenetrable cipher; her mystery makes her impossibly desirable to anyone who lays eyes on her.

In many Victorian tales of mystery, uncovering the secret narrative of the curl might reveal the truth of a life, its skein of narrative woven into the lives of others. Pointon calls hair jewelry “textual artifacts,” life stories themselves caught up in narrative (“Wearing Memory” 66). As commodities became ever more symbolic, as the object lost its quality as the “thing itself” and became increasingly mediated by its role as a market “good,” the relic held onto its immediacy. It attests to what Elaine Freedgood has called, in her explorations of “Victorian thing culture,” “a more extravagant form of object relations than ours” (8). Ariès describes objects as holding a greater intensity for their owners before capitalism's full swing, as being part of a material culture that had “the taste for contemplation” of owned things (136). Part of such a culture, relics, having no “use value,” kept the thing-as-thing enchanted. A lively relic culture esteems the object's magic.

The Victorians, on the edge of the dematerialized condition of the modern subject, found in relic culture a means to respect the irreducible self lost. Relics had a “punctum,” a term Barthes uses to name that quality in a photograph that can bruise, prick, or be poignant to him. The punctum, Barthes explains, is “undevelopable . . . [it is] what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of insistence (of the insistent gaze)” (49). The relic can bring a kind of pure grief that doesn't change or develop, but bruises freshly again and again – loss crystallized and unescapable. Tennyson's grief, for instance, was deeply personalized, was felt for one man, without ritual, generalization, or stylization. Found everywhere in In Memoriam is a passionate belief in the unique soul.Footnote ⁴³ Even after death, Tennyson affirms that Hallam cannot be subsumed in the “general Soul,” but must remain what he has always been: a “separate whole,” eternally. Tennyson must still “know him when we meet” (XLVI: 1–8). Just as early Christian saints became linked to precise places, where their holy presence and blessing could be still felt – Hic locus est (“here is the place”) – Tennyson locates Hallam in the singular moment in place and time. While their time together lasted only five years (“those five years in richest field”), yet it encompassed “the eternal landscape of the past.” In other words, “O Love, thy province were not large/A bounded field, nor stretching far” (XLV: 8–16). The sharp grief, Tennyson appears to say, comes from precisely this bounded quality – the specificity of the thing and person – but it's this singularity from which his love emerges. Integral to the project of In Memoriam is the “undeniability of immediate experience,” as Peltason eloquently puts it, “the refusal to place the moment in history” (21–22). Tennyson repudiates the work of mourning. Mastering the “complex art of saving loss itself” (Fuss 27), Tennyson uses the elegy as a kind of relic, a means to continue to see and know absence. Or perhaps In Memoriam is the edifice – the cathedral even – built as an act of reverence, to house (and celebrate) the relics of Hallam. Tennyson shares the death of his friend with all, taking from that life completed, as Walter Benjamin would see it, a story to limn. With their willingness to dwell with the loss of the irreplaceable, to hold onto it, the Victorians expressed a desire to touch the death that surrounds life, to feel its presence as material and spiritual. Such a culture sees death, and the body itself, as the beginning of stories rather than their end.