Tuesday, 5 August 2008
Posthumous Confusions
Bill Peschel's wonderfully macabre piece on the 'resurrection' of John Milton puts me in mind of the fate suffered by Laurence Sterne's ill-fated remains. Sterne was eventually reburied in 1969 in the churchyard of St Michael's, Coxwold, where the old reprobate had been parson - but even this was (inevitably) no straightforward affair. When his tomb at St George's was reopened, it was found to contain no fewer that five skulls. Reasonably enough, the one with the top sawn off was taken to be Sterne's and removed to Coxwold, along with miscellaneous bones which may or may not have been his. Even the marking of his grave in Coxwold is unstraightforward; there are two gravestones, one full of errors, the other corrected. A lovely village, Coxwold, by the way, and Sterne's parsonage home is open to visitors. I think I wrote a piece about it years ago, but I may be wrong.
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And this puts me in mind of what my wife told me about "The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine," as related by Paul Collins in his book The Trouble with Tom:
ReplyDelete"Shunned as an infidel by every church, [Tom Paine] had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, [William Cobbett,] a former enemy converting to Paine’s cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain, where he planned to build a mausoleum in Paine’s honor. But he never got around to it. So what happened to the body of this founding father?
"Well, it got lost. Paine’s missing bones, like saint’s relics, have been scattered for two centuries, and their travels are the trail of radical democracy itself. Paul Collins combines wry, present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the remains of Tom Paine and finds them hidden in, among other places, a Paris hotel, underneath a London tailor's stool, and inside a roadside statue in New York. Along the way he crosses paths with everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and hellfire ministers-- not to mention a suicidal gunman, a Ferrari dealer, and berserk feral monkeys"--From the book's jacket.
The first I ever knew about this business of collecting bits of an author was when I first read about Trelawny owning parts of Shelley's skull. Seemed rather morbid at the time but it has often made me wonder what bit of an author I'd like to own. For some reason, I think it would be something sturdy from Samuel Johnson. Perhaps a thighbone.
ReplyDeleteAny thoughts, Nige? I see you as a knuckle man. Perhaps from some obscure mid-Victorian author.
Thanks for that, Dave - quite a story. Someone should write a book about these strange posthumous journeys - as well as entire bodies, there are hearts and heads and locks of hair and who know what else... Did you know Sir Walter Ralegh's head was embalmed and presented to his widow, who kept it with her till she died?
ReplyDeleteHmm food for thought there Dick... how about Edgar Allan Poe's index finger? A surefire conversation starter, more than a little scary, and a thousand and one practical uses about the house. I believe someone made off with Napoleon's penis, but I certainly wouldn't want that - non merci...
ReplyDeleteVery pretty village indeed, Nige. Although, as I spent ten years of my life incarcerated in a school just down the road from there, I tended to view it with a jaundiced eye.
ReplyDeleteNige, thanks for your kind comments about poor Milton's bones. I plan on writing about Paine's missing corpus when the time comes, and I'm grateful for the other suggestions here.
ReplyDeleteI'll add that when Shelley's body was burned, his heart was pulled from the fire. Mary Shelley kept it with her the rest of her life.
Then there's the legend of Thomas Hardy's heart, supposedly eaten by the cat. I hadn't been able to trace this one, but it makes for a lovely story anyway (esp. the one version in which the moggy was strangled and put in Hardy's coffin, so at least all his bits would be where they should be).
Here's an extract from Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Penguins, 2006) that deals with the cat and the heart ("A fittingly awkward ending," The Sunday Times, October 1, 2006).
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