Book Review: Deborah Lutz, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

When Merlin falls prey to Vivien’s enchanting songs in Idylls of the King, infatuation leads to entrapment, and the power of song within the poem darkens. It is at this point in Merlin and Vivien that Tennyson likens rhyme to relics: this rhyme Is like the fair pearl-necklace of the Queen, That burst in dancing, and the pearls were split; Some lost, some stolen, some as relics kept. [...] It lives dispersedly in many hands, And every minstrel sings it differently (ll. 448-451, 455-456) The common thread that binds together the pearls of bardic matter is snapped, and alongside the variants and verses that scatter, some are venerated, as akin to relics. Such links between relics and verse are the subject of Deborah Lutz’s well-researched monograph, which performs a literary-cultural study of mourning in the nineteenth century. Tennyson, naturally, features prominently, though Lutz limits her analysis to In Memoriam and shorter elegies, alongside chapters on Keats, D. G. Rossetti, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Her focus throughout is on relics as ‘lyrical matter’ (1), a phrase which puns on the book’s conceptual origins in the recent wave of cultural and material analysis. Lutz invokes ‘Thing theory’ (3), and terms such as ‘thingification’ (10), to examine how the dead body, devoid of consciousness, returns to the state of an object: an object that can trigger memories, like an elegy or epitaph.