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Dr. treasured locks12/9/2023 ![]() ![]() GAIMAN: And the trend of hair gifting happened to coincide with what we now recognize as the birth of celebrity culture. So it’s a bit of you that the other person can keep. It was a very intimate gift you would give it to your lover, you would give it to a close friend, you would give it to a family member. NABUGODI: Hair was something that was very often exchanged. GAIMAN: Today it might be rather strange to mail someone a lock of your hair, but in the early 19th century it was in many places a common practice. So basically she’s saying, “You know, I really like you, but I’m just not feeling it, and by the way, have some of my hair instead.” Well, he was interested in her, but she was not that into him. Mary Shelley sent this lock of hair together with a letter to Hogg. And Shelley actually had this vision, because he was into free love, so he really wanted Mary Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg to end up being a couple as well. Thomas Jefferson Hogg was one of Percy Shelley’s best friends from university. Both of these objects were given as gifts to the same person, whose name was Thomas Jefferson Hogg. NABUGODI: What we have here is a first edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s famous novel, together with a lock of her hair. She uncovers the origins of a selection of extraordinary literary relics in her forthcoming book, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive. Mathelinda Nabugodi is a lecturer in comparative literature at University College London. And that’s of course because those are the parts of the body that don’t rot. MATHELINDA NABUGODI: Frankenstein’s creature is described as being very ugly, and strikes everyone with horror, because it’s a person made of corpses’ parts-but he has very beautiful hair.
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