'A Use in Measured Language': Poetic Allusion and the Victorian Culture of Death

This essay discusses the circulation through Victorian culture of two fragmentary quotations from poems that represent the female corpse, Byrons The Giaour and Thomas Hoods The Death Bed. It traces the often unacknowledged appearances of these lines in an array of non-poetic contexts such as newspaper articles and advertisements, and novels such as Gaskells Mary Barton and Stokers Dracula, querying whether they function as quotations or allusions. By reading their textual afterlives through Lacans theory of the Thing, the essay identifies these poetic fragments as reassuringly familiar cultural artefacts that were used to shield the living from the terrifying absence opened up by the death of the other, and suggests that this approach offers a way to understand popular and sentimental artistic responses to death that do not sit easily within Freudian paradigms of mourning.