![]() Were they unaccountable tyrants, whose dead hand prevented the people from governing in their own best interests? Benevolent ancestors, from whom the living had inherited a just society and who therefore deserved their obedience and loyalty? Or something else entirely: a problem to be measured, legislated against, reformed, cajoled, cleaned-up, re-positioned, reinterpreted, rethought, and ultimately reimagined? It then traces competing representations of the dead in key texts by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas De Quincey, as revolutionary, liberal, and conservative writers argued over how the living should imagine the dead. ![]() It shows how and why this debate erupted into public view during the Revolution Controversy, the pamphlet war that dominated British responses to the French Revolution throughout the early 1790s. This chapter considers the differences between these two common ways of imagining the dead, before tracing the emergence of a highly politicised debate about their relations to the society of the living. ![]() ![]() ![]() Two different but overlapping groups were named as ‘the dead’ in Romantic and early Victorian culture: the familiar dead, who could be named, remembered, and mourned, and another group, the dead as a crowd, a mass, a threatening force. ![]()
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