Romantic Circles

Significance

This frontispiece seems to claim and reveal a knowledge the "unknown" to its audience. In the moment of death, angels appear and shed light on the dying person. This image was probably intended to show how the fear of death can be managed by means of a consolatory image. Together with the title, this depiction serves as a preview of what the book is about. It should ease people’s fear of dying, and also help the ones left behind with their mourning. It is interesting that the book was reprinted many times during the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Compare with the Eighteenth Century Online Collection, which holds nineteen scanned copies of the eighteenth-century version only.) This book suggests an additional perspective—differing from and perhaps influencing the fiction of the period—of death in the Romantic era. Since it was published as a number-publication by Thomas Kelly, it can be assumed that the The Christian's Defence against the fears of death was widely distributed among an eighteenth and especially a nineteenth century readership. Altick points out how important illustrations were to number-publications: "The appeal of many number-publications resided as much in their illustrations as in their literary content—at least in the beginning.’ (Altick, The Common Reader, p. 265) The illustrations mainly functioned as advertisements for the books in which they appeared. The frontispiece, shown in this gallery, serves as an elaborate example of such an illustration. It depicts the moment of death in a detail-oriented and complex drawing. Therefore, it certainly can be argued that one of its main purposes was to interest the potential reader in either reading or buying the book. Even though the contemporary readership came to be disappointed that the illustrations in number-publications were few—and though this, consequently, detracted from the marketing strength of these illustrations—it is important to keep the advertising role of these illustrations in mind. Another small detail in Altick’s book appears in the form of a short quote from John Kitto (1804-1854), a famous Bible scholar, who mentions Drelincourt’s work in the same breath with popular and famous works that fascinated him as an adolescent: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Drelincourt on Death, etc. (Altick, The Common Reader, p. 265). However, the book seems to never having been interesting to a wider scholarly audience; Drelincourt was rarely mentioned in encyclopedias of the nineteenth century, and his work disappears almost entirely in the twentieth century.