Memorialisation and Continued Curation: Locating Dickens, Eliot and Wilde in an Evolving Heritage Sector

This thesis investigates the memorialisation of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde.
The term ‘memorialise’ contains a formal history of how authorial figures have been preserved.
Rather than exploring this formal history further, this thesis demonstrates its relevance by
examining the current active processes of authorial memorialisation.
This thesis focuses on three memorial sites: the Charles Dickens Museum, Oscar
Wilde’s Grave, and George Eliot’s former home of Griff House. My reading of the Charles
Dickens Museum is object focused, using the lens of two glass windows to explore Dickens’s
own mediation of content, before thinking about how this mode of representation is mirrored
in the Museum’s exhibit. To consider Oscar Wilde I read De Profundis, his last completed work,
and Wilde’s grave site – characterised by Jacob Epstein’s Sphinx – as texts and objects which
inform Wilde’s legacy. This chapter moves towards a more experiential approach which
includes my reflections of visiting the cemetery and its archives. Finally, my George Eliot
chapter reads The Mill on the Floss and the fictional place of St. Ogg’s as a way of thinking
about the significance of Eliot’s childhood home at Griff House. This chapter is forward-
thinking in terms of suggesting an alternative approach towards memorialising Eliot locally,
relying on interviews and reflections of visits to Warwickshire to give a sense of local place
today. At the heart of the Eliot chapter is an ongoing debate regarding some agricultural
outbuildings attached to Eliot’s former home. I use The Mill on the Floss as a way of
considering Eliot’s own approach to heritage and curation, in response to the proposed
demolition of these existing structures today.
This thesis introduces a new approach to heritage studies. By exploring canonical
heritage through the live practice-based questions necessitated by this thesis, this project will
contribute to ongoing academic and non-academic developments and partnerships.