18th-century writers were obsessed with death – and it shows
Ghosts. Witches. Grave robbers. Some might say 18th-century English writers were obsessed with the (un)dead.
Actually, they were obsessed with death in general, probably because there was a lot of it going on.
“Even those who survived infancy did not share our confidence in reaching old age,” says Peter Walmsley, a professor of English and Cultural Studies. “With public executions, public anatomies of criminals, and many persistent deadly diseases, death was very present in eighteenth-century life.
“Some of the fascination with death probably also came from religious changes: where Catholicism had offered ways to connect with dead loved ones, English Protestant theology was much more noncommittal about the afterlife. Art, in a sense, had to take over these themes.”
Walmsley studies how death is portrayed in 18th-century literature. He’s written about everything from Joseph Addison’s graveyard writing to the cadaver in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic fiction. In the fall of 2008, he even edited a special issue on “Death” for the McMaster journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction.
He says death was definitely a preoccupation of writing in the period – one that is deserving of more concerted investigation.
“You’ve got books like Friendship in Death by Elizabeth Rowe, which is a series of letters from the dead to the living, or Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, whose heroine spends some four hundred pages making arrangements for her own death and burial,” says Walmsley. “Understanding how death is dealt with in these works helps us to better grasp the outlook of the eighteenth century.”
Many of these works can be found in McMaster’s Research Collections, which houses one of the largest archives of 18th-century literature in North America.
These were also the books that influenced later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, and understanding these works can shed light on the development of Gothic writing.
Walmsley points to Ann Radcliffe’s hugely popular The Mysteries of Udolpho as definitive for the conventions that inform modern horror writing and film.
“Radcliffe was the Stephen King of her time,” he says.
Walmsley also says that our own moment has brought something new to the Gothic genre.
“Many scholars have suggested that our preoccupation with zombies may be a reaction to modernity’s sanitized approach to death, or a way of representing the mindless shuffle of bourgeois life in the 21st century,” he says.
