Dead People's Hair

I recently had the pleasure of spending my birthday with some of my favorite literary and historical icons, fulfilling my answer to the perennial cocktail party question, "If you could have dinner with any figures from history, who would they be?" I didn't have dinner with them, but I spent an entire afternoon as close to the living version of these people as possible while at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. I looked forward to this visit for days, dressing up for it a bit so that I would look respectable in the company of other scholars, as well as the ghosts of famous writers that I am certain haunt the second floor archives. I went so far as to wear shoes I knew were not the best all weather foot wear, but looking like a smarty with a purpose means the occasional sacrifice of fashion over comfort. After filling out the appropriate paperwork and orientation to get a research account, I requested the famous "Collection of Hair formed by J.H. Leigh Hunt," otherwise known as "the hair book," filled with locks of hair of major historical and literary figures. Many specimens were acquired through a hair dresser or clipped just after death.

Some were beautiful, clean and romantic (John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) Others gave me a feeling of a hair lodged in my throat after unknowingly being swallowed with my food. I still can't look at the online sample of Thomas Carlyle's hair without hacking a little. Despite this, I gave respectable time to each lock of hair because it was as close to interacting with George Washington or Napolean as we can have two hundred years after their deaths.

As wonderful as it was to see these other samples, I wanted to see the book specifically for Mary Shelley's Hair. She is a critical figure in both literary and pop culture history, creating an icon that lives large and beyond her story. Moreover, she did it as a challenge to egotistical men (including her husband) that foolishly dismissed her as a teenage girl in love. Her lock of hair was also one of the first things I ever saw on display at the Ransom Center when I was an undergraduate, one of the first things that let me know how special this collection and my university were for acquiring such a thing. This hair was on her head as she trudged, pregnant and on foot, through Europe with her poet husband who's head was lost in the clouds. This hair was on her head, on that dark and stormy night, when the monster in her head came alive on the page. It was a part of her, and it waits between the pages of this book for anyone who wants to touch history.