Necroromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750—1860 by Paul Westover

Abstract

278 BOOK REVIEWS these living museums and reenactments enshrine, however haphazardly. Though Goode readily admits that a place like Colonial Williamsburg has had varied and contradictory aims (the film shown at Williamsburg, The Story ofA Patriot [1957], owes a good deal to Waverly), it and similar institu­ tions do manage to attempt a non-narrative reproduction of daily life, and do produce “a feeling of a historically specific and unique past-ness that is irreducible to an experience of stance or narrative movement” (178). And while Civil War reenactors can be either passed over or mocked, there are “Hardcore” reenactors who so concentrate on the “feeling” of history that they do not even bother refighting the obvious famous battles like Man­ assas, Spotsylvania Courthouse, or Antietam, but instead act out the daily distress of the Confederate soldier, complete with near-starvation, 15-mile barefoot marches, and lice. This devotion, which is certainly grounded in masculine performance, is finally, Goode argues, “a form of Romantic Historicism” (182) that deserves recognition as a descendant of Burke, Scott, and Carlyle. With its large and entertaining variety of sources, its fine historicized readings, and its convincing argument, Sentimental Mascu­ linity and the Rise ofHistory achieves its aims. The coda is also a strong con­ clusion to the book as a whole, as it shows quite eloquently why the book’s explorations matter. James Najarian Boston College Paul Westover. Necroromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750—1860. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. viii+217. $95. Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem” (1812) specu­ lates about a distant future in which North American tourists seek out traces of vanished glory in a Britain imagined as part museum, part ceme­ tery: “With curious search their pilgrim steps shall rove / By many a ruined tower and proud alcove ... I With throbbing bosoms shall the wanderers tread / The hallowed mansions of the silent dead” (lines 151-52, 177-78). Paul Westover’s lively, lucid study investigates the popularity of such necro-tourism among Barbauld’s own contemporaries. Starting in the eighteenth century, Westover argues, a new concept of national cultural heritage emerged, sustaining increasingly popular forms ofdomestic literary tourism. While tourists were eager to visit any kind of site associated with writers’ lives or works, Westover’s contention is that the graves of authors in particular acquired a special attraction as paradigmatic spots for the kind S/R, 53 (Summer 2014) BOOK REVIEWS 279 of contact with the past tourists pursued. While literary in focus, West­ over’s solidly researched book goes beyond the cult of the author to also entertain wider questions about the relationships among tourism, travel writing, and cultural memory. Necroromanticism explores terrain somewhat similar to that mapped by such excellent recent studies as Nicola Watson’s The Literary Tourist (2006), Samantha Matthews’s Poetical Remains (2004), and Ann Rigney’s The After­ lives of Walter Scott (2012). Westover is carefully engaged with this body of scholarship (though Anne Janowitz’s quite relevant England’s Ruins some­ how goes overlooked). The originality ofthis book’s contribution lies both in its compelling close readings and in the broader argument that “traveling to meet the dead” is not a merely peripheral expression of Romantic desires—not simply a way readers act on the desires given impetus by Romantic texts—but rather a primary, organizing element of Romanticera literary activity. One might expect a study ofcultural tourism to be built around particu­ larjourneys or destinations, but Westover structures the book around texts: William Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809); Felicia Hemans’s poems on authors’ graves; travel books by Americans tourists in England; and Victo­ rian illustration books of Walter Scott’s novels and “Scott country.” This approach responds to Westover’s interest in the circuits among reading, writing, and travel. Guidebooks of the period imbue landscapes with liter­ ary and historical associations, while literary texts act as guidebooks, direct­ ing readers to specific landscapes and teaching tourists how to read what they see, or how to see what they read. At tourist sites, Westover observes, literary pilgrims “had difficulty at times deciding whether they were read­ ing, seeing, feeling or remembering,” when “in...