Last on a series of posts on Victorian Egyptomania. One of the ways Victorians enjoyed themselves a good mummy was from the mummy unwrapping parties that became popular, beginning in 1821 when a man named Giovanni Belzoni did a highly publicized event near Piccadilly Circus that attracted over 2000 people. The fad took off from there, with famous surgeon and Ancient Egyptophile Thomas Pettigrew becoming England’s most reknown mummy unraveler. You can see some attendees of a mummy unwrapping in this photo.
The fascination with mummies is interesting in its own right, but the way Egyptian mummies were fetishized also gives a good insight into the concerns of Victorian folks. Imperialism was of course part of England’s story in the 19th century, and mummies were often stand-ins for how Victorians viewed the “Oriental”/”them” group. (Always easier to colonize peoples that seem strange to you).
Also, the rich archaeological heritage of Egypt confronted Europeans, who themselves were facing enormous changes in their world view due to the innovative technologies of steam power, electricity, and scientific discoveries of the day. Victorians were imbued with a sense of nationalism and expressed it with pride in these advancements, but were also terrified about the unknown ways they might challenge their belief systems. The “monstrous” mummy of Victorian literature was a stand-in for these fears — the reanimated dead didn’t jive easily with the Christian view of resurrection.
Some (very bad IMHO) poems by Alexander Copland from 1834 called “The Mummy Awakens” and “The Mummy’s Reply” illustrate these points. In them, the European modern speaker brags about his technology (“will you believe that men can now espy/ The very mountains of the changeful moon? Two rings round Saturn, and some belts which lie/ On Jupiter . . . “). Meanwhile the mummy responds that humans are no replacement for Divine acts (“Show me some wonders! . . . Touch my poor frame, and make my body all/ Just as it was before grim Death stood by./ If you can do but this, then I’ll believe/ That you can all which you have said achieve.”).
Source(s): _The Neo-Victorian Parlour_ is the image of the mummy unwrapping. Alexander Copland, _The Existence of Other World’s, Peoples with Living and Intelligent Beings, Deduced from the Nature of the Universe,” London, J.G.&F. Rivington, 1834. _Vicorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt_ Eleanor Dobson, editor, chapter one, Jasmine Day, “Allamistakeo awakes: the earliest image of an ambulatory mummy,” 2020, Manchester University Press. @mentalfloss.com, “9 Strange Uses for Ancient Mummies,” August 18, 2015, Bess Lovejoy, who points out that the spurious notion that mummies were used as train fuel likely originated from a Mark Twain satire.
