Shelley's Grave, Botanical Souvenirs, and Handling Literary Afterlives in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The touristic practice of gathering flowers from famous graves has been allowed to contribute, relatively unexamined by critical scholarship, to narratives of Victorian sentimentality. This essay rethinks the role of such botanical ephemera in constructing and responding to representations of literary afterlives in the nineteenth century. Specifically, it considers botanical souvenirs taken from the grave of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley by Anglophone tourists over the course of the nineteenth century. Shelley's grave at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where his ashes were ultimately interred following his death by drowning in 1822, was a popular destination for literary tourists by mid-century. The numerous botanical souvenirs collected from Shelley's gravesite in the nineteenth century complicate simple narratives of textual reiteration, revealing reciprocal material gestures necessary to posthumous existence. These souvenirs constitute a branch of the Shelley mythology that thrives on the appearance of natural regeneration but that is, in fact, profoundly dependent on the material and emotional investment of readers and admirers. Examining the overlapping cultural discourses of botany, tourism, and the textual reception and reproduction of Shelley's Adonais in which these souvenirs emerged, this essay argues that these souvenirs provide an alternative archive for an embodied, affective posthumous Shelley. However, these souvenirs do not speak only to Shelley's poetical afterlife. Attention to particular souvenirs, such as a rose sent to American author and critic Margaret Fuller, reveals ways in which interest in a dead poet could also be a palpable expression of personal identity and desire.