Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death

1. Brooks B. Hull and Frederick Bold, “Hell, Religion, and Cultural Change,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 150:3 (1994): 447–64. David Spadafora, “Secularization in British Thought, 1730–1789: Some Landmarks,” in W. Warren Wagar, ed., The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 35–56; David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Margaret C. Jacob, “Private Beliefs in Public Temples: The New Religiosity of the Eighteenth Century,” Social Research 59:1 (1992): 59–84; Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts 1 and 2,” American Historical Review 90:2, 3 (1985), 339–62, 547–57; Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (New York: Longman, 1984); M. J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); John Brewer and Roy Porter, ed., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993); John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (New York: Routledge, 1994); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (New York: Routledge, 1995); John Brewer, The Pleasures of Imagination (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 198–217.

2. Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2000); Edward J. Andrew, Conscience and its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

3. Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 124. Camfield calls the original “Wakefield” story an “attack on the very concept of heaven,” 64, and Twain took forty years from first inspiration in 1868 to publication in 1908, writing against Phelps in 1878–80. Far from attacking the “concept of heaven,” however, Twain guts Christian imagery to renovate on deist lines.

4. Samuel Bowden, “An Essay on Health,” Poems on Various Subjects…(Bath, 1754), 343.

5. Observations Upon the English Language. In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1752), 23. The sentence recurs often in grammar books, including A. [Anne] Fisher (1719?–1788), A New Grammar, with Exercises of Bad English; or an Easy Guide to Speaking and Writing the English Language Properly and Correctly, 3rd ed. (London, 1753), 116–17.

6. Critical Review, 64 (July 1787): 75–76; John Taylor, A Letter to Samuel Johnson on the Subject of a Future State (London, 1787), 6. Sir John Hawkins also saw fit to “put to rest the idle reports that [Johnson] dreaded annihilation.” It was his savior he dreaded meeting. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O M Brack Jr. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 340n.

7. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 280.

8. David Hume, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 597.

9. John Asgill, An argument proving, that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life revealed in the Scriptures, Man may be translated from hence into that Eternal Life, without passing through Death, altho the Humane Nature of CHRIST himself could not be thus translated till he had passed through Death ([London], 1700). Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein overlook these biological-immortality pioneers in theology and political theory, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through Those Pearly Gates (New York: Viking, 2009), 186.

10. Political Justice (London, 1793), II, 862. Thomas Holcroft, the author of Anna St. Ives, also opposed death: “It is nonsense to say that we must all die; in the present erroneous system I suppose that I shall die, but why? Because I am a fool!” Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 88. Godwin’s view was much ridiculed, and his skepticism about the afterlife cost him the woman he proposed to the year after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, Marshall, 215, 218, 197–98.

11. Peter Thiel, PayPal’s cofounder, promises, “The great unfinished task of the modern world is to turn death from a fact of life into a problem to be solved—a problem towards whose solution I hope to contribute in whatever way I can.” Thomas Mallon, “Bookends,” New York Times Book Review, June 21, 2015, 27. Ray Kurzweil plans to resurrect his father digitally, according to an NPR interview. In “The Singularity,” immortality is achieved by uploading a digital version of oneself into machines that have acquired consciousness, Jaron Lanier, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold 2.0,” Smithsonian, January 2013, 26; John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011); Elmo Keep, “Life without End,” Smithsonian, June 2017, 44–54.

12. John Asgill, An argument proving, that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life revealed in the Scriptures, Man may be translated from hence into that Eternal Life, 11.

13. Mr. Asgill’s Defence upon his Expulsion from the House of Commons of Great Britain in 1707. With an Introduction, and a Postscript (London, 1712), 46, in A Collection of Tracts Written by John Asgill Esq; From the Year 1700. To the Year 1715. Some relating to Divinity: And others to The History of the Monarchy, The Succession of the Crown, and Constitution of the Government of Great Britain (London, 1715).

14. John Asgill, An argument proving, 3, 4. A lawyer, member of Irish and British parliaments, cofounder of the first land bank, proponent of a land title registry, apologist for the Hanoverian succession, Asgill wrote on poor relief and debt relief. He was active in corporations for employing the poor and the Orphans’ Fund, but his Irish land work fell afoul of corruption charges. Richard Greaves, Oxford DNB.

15. Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144.

16. Henry Grove, Death abolished by Jesus Christ: A Funeral Sermon for Mr. S[amuel] Mullins, who died at Taunton, in the seventeenth year of his age (London, 1727). God could have done so, but death continues as a standing lesson and example of the evil of sin, which death extinguishes, 16–17. It serves for trial of Christian faith and grace, 19, and makes the final end more spectacular, “more glorious for the Redeemer,” 21.

17. Essay on Sepulchres: or, A Proposal for Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot where their Remains have been Interred (London, 1809).

18. In Erasmus’s colloquy “The Funeral,” the dying man expects to see the heavenly light, to be separated from his wife only in the body and only for a little while, and to rejoin his body at the last judgment. Ten Colloquies (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 110–11; Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

19. By the mid-second century, 2 Peter addresses the problem of the “delayed parousia” by explaining that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). The dead are described as “asleep” (2 Peter 3:4). Francis Blackburne attributes to Eusebius and Origen the abandonment of the view that the soul died and corrupted with the body, to await the resurrection. An Historical View of the Controversy concerning an Intermediate State and the Separate Existence of the Soul between Death and the General Resurrection, 2nd. ed. (London, 1772), 270. Watts, The World to Come (London, 1739), 63–65.

20. Francis Blackburne, An Historical View of the Controversy concerning an Intermediate State, 272.

21. B. W. Ball, The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley (Cambridge, England: James Clarke, 2008); William M. Spellman, “Between Death and Judgment: Conflicting Views of the Afterlife in Late Seventeenth-Century English Eulogies,” Harvard Theological Review 87:1 (1994): 49–65, especially 59–62 for soul and body.

22. Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, “Samuel Clarke’s Newtonian Soul,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70:1 (Jan 2009): 48–52; [Defoe], Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: with his Vision of the Angelick World. Written by Himself (London, 1720), 50–51.

23. Athenian Oracle (London, 1703–04), 201; New Athenian Oracle (London, 1704), 17, 55, 82, 83.

24. Edward Young, A Poem on the Last Day, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1713), 26–27.

25. Christian apologists regarded denials of immortality as tantamount to declarations of atheism, Isabel St. John Bliss, “Young’s Night Thoughts in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics,” PMLA 49:1 (1934): 37–66. It is difficult to find unambiguous denials of belief in an afterlife. David Berman argues that fideist arguments (only the gospel gives immortality) often masked atheism. “Deism, Immortality and the Art of Theological Lying,” Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. Leo J. A. Lemay (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 61–78. Translators of Seneca’s chorus like Rochester certainly flirted with the concept. Among the readers who pushed Creech’s translation of Lucretius (1682) to six editions by 1722, there must have been others like Aphra Behn, who found religion’s arguments “feeble” and “routed,” in her commendatory verses to Creech on his poem (1682), lines bowdlerized when printed (“To Mr Creech [under the name of Daphnis] on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius,” stanza 2). Dryden and Lady Chudleigh demonstrate that orthodox believers could find Lucretius thrilling, but so might the unbeliever. Richard Foster Jones argues that the Royal Society’s linguistic rules were meant to exclude enthusiastic atomists, and the silence of Edmund Halley on religious issues has long been taken as suggestive. “The Rhetoric of Science in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 5–24. Certainly, apologetic writers were sure the world was teeming with atheists. Fielding directs an essay in the Covent Garden Journal against the demotic Robin Hood Society with its dialect-ridden denials of God. John Leland was not sure whether to believe deists’ avowals of a future state: “since at other times they have thrown out suspicions against it, and represented it as a matter of uncertainty; and some of them have used their utmost efforts to invalidate the proofs which are brought for it.” The Advantage and Necessity of the Christian Revelation, shewn from the State of Religion in the Antient Heathen World: Especially with respect to the Knowledge and Worship of the One True God: A Rule of Moral Duty: and A State of Future Rewards and Punishments. To which is prefixed, A Preliminary Discourse on Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. (London, 1764), Vol. II, part 3, chap. 1, p.297.

26. The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), # 135. Feb. 18, 1710, II, 279.

27. Charles Blount, Religio Laici, in a Letter to John Dryden (London, 1683), 49–50, 95; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 234; Zachary Pearce, minister of St.-Martin’s-in-the-Fields, reported on Collins, 1729, Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 177.

28. Works of Benjamin Franklin (London, 1807), 141. His 1731 memorandum for the party of virtue concluded with belief in the immortality of the soul and God’s rewards and punishments “either here or hereafter.” Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), chap. vii, 90.

29. Boswell on the Grand Tour—Germany and Switzerland 1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), 294.

30. Age of Reason, Life and Major Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel, 1961), 464.

31. Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England, 176, 186. Matthew Tindal, An Address to the Inhabiants [sic] of the two great cities of London and Westminster: in relation to a pastoral letter, said to be written by the Bishop of London (London, 1728), 60, 65; Christianity as Old as Creation (London, 1730), 125, 417; Gordon Rupp, Religion in England 1688–1791 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 277.

32. Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 13–14: “His spirit is join’d with its aithereal father/From whom it originally proceeded, /His body yielding likewise to nature/ Is laid again in the Lap of its Mother. /But he’s frequently to rise himself again,/ Yet never to be the same Toland more./ Born ye 30 of Novemb. 1670 [corrected from 1674 by Daniel]/ Dy’d the 11th of March 1722. / If you would know more of him/ Search his Writings.” Daniel interprets “rising again” as being read, 62.

33. Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation (London: Harper, 2008), 341.

34. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, A Letter, Occasion’d by one of Archbishop Tillotson’s Sermons, Philosophical Works of the Late Right Honourable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols., ed. David Mallett (London, 1754), III, 257-58; Fragment 42, V, 322.

35. David Hume frequently used the fideist argument. Joseph Hallett’s was answered by Henry Grove, Some Thoughts Concerning the Proofs of a Future State, from Reason. Occasioned by a Discourse of the Revd. Mr. Joseph Hallett, junr. on the same Subject (London, 1730).

36. Walter McIntosh Merrill, From Statesman to Philosopher: A Study in Bolingbroke’s Deism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 113–17, 134; Bolingbroke, Works, V, 492, 391–92.

37. [Matthew Turner], Answer to Dr. Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Part I (London, 1782), xxx. Preface and postscript signed “William Hammon.”

38. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature [1736] (London, 1740), 18.

39. Man a Machine, ed. Gertrude Carman Bussey (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1012), 147. Joseph Priestley quotes the passage, Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit. To which is added, The History of the Philosophical Doctrine concerning the Origin of the Soul, and the Nature of Matter; with its Influence on Christianity, especially with respect to the Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Christ (London, 1777), 163.

40. Lady Oracle (Toronto: Seal Books, 1976), 106.

41. Religio Laici, 1682, l. 71. Francis Blackburne, An Historical View of the Controversy concerning an Intermediate State, 193. A Philosophical and Religious Dialogue in the Shades between Mr. Hume and Dr. Dodd (London, 1778), 32n.

42. D. P. Walker, Decline of Hell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 6, 67, 104, 107, 133; Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 116–22, 145.

43. Gilbert Burnet, A History of His Own Time, 2 vols. (London, 1724), I, 61.

44. A Sermon Preach’d before the Queen at White-hall, March 7, 1689/90 (London, 1690), 20, 12-13.

45. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 1992), 104.

46. J. V. to John Locke, 26 May 1697, Electronic Enlightenment; Victor Nuovo, ed. John Locke and Christianity: Contemporary Responses to The Reasonableness of Christianity (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1997).

47. “[W]e have a Sort of People who will acknowledge a God, but he must be such a one as they please to make him; a fine well bred good natur’d Gentleman like Deity, that cannot have the Heart to damn any of his Creatures to an Eternal Punishment, nor could not be so weak as to let the Jews crucify his own Son…. [T]he Story of our Saviour they look upon as a meer Novel, and the Miracles of the New Testament as a Legend of Priestcraft.” Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 100.

48. The first editions of 1720 and 1723 were printed for private circulation by Dr. Richard Mead; other Latin editions followed in 1726, 1727, 1728, and 1733.

49. A Treatise concerning the State of the Dead, and of Departed Souls, at the Resurrection. To which is added, An Appendix concerning the future Restoration of the Jews (London, 1737), I, 376–77, 380. Another, and unattributed, translation.

50. Arguing for God’s love as reformative and ultimately restorative were Francis van Helmont, Lady Conway, Henry Hallywell, Archibald Campbell, Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, Almond, Heaven and Hell, 153. The Critical Review considered the ambiguity of “eternal” relative to Thomas Broughton’s “singular” Prospect of Futurity, in Four Dissertations on the Nature and Circumstances of the Life to Come, 25 (April 1768): 273.

51. Peter Walmsley, “ ‘Live to Die, Die to Live’: An Introduction,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 21:1 (2008): 6; Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 92.

52. Alexander Pope, Moral Essay IV: Epistle to Burlington, l. 150; Moral Essay II: To a Lady, l. 108, Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 593, 563.

53. Marie Huber, The World Unmasked, 1736, in Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, 98, 160–61.

54. Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Patricia Sheridan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 232.

55. Adventurer #107, 13 November 1753, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, J. M. Bullitt, L. F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 445.

56. Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 238–39.

57. The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, 2nd ed., ed. Mr. [P.] Des Maizeaux, Fellow of the Royal Society, 5 vols. (London, 1734–1738), I, ci.

58. Pierre Cuppé, Heaven Open to All Men (London, 1743), xxiv.

59. George Craighead, The Nature and Place of Hell Discovered: Or, A Fair Conjecture that the SUN is the only Tartarus, or Receptacle of the DAMNED; and that there is both Everlasting Material Fire there to torture the Body, and Inward Sorrow to torment the Soul. In ANSWER to A late, but atheistical Pamphlet, entituled, Heaven open to all Men; or a Treatise solidly proving from Scripture and Reason, that (without unsettling the Practice of Religion) all Men who are, or hereafter will be upon Earth shall be saved, or made finally happy (Edinburgh, 1748).

60. Gentleman’s Magazine, 30 (April 1760): 181.

61. David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 2 parts (London, 1749), Preface, I, viii.

62. Alexander Robertson of Struan, Poems on Various Subjects and Occasions (Edinburgh, 1752), “Epitaph on John Robertson of Lude, junior,” 12; ‘A Morning Thought,’ 266.

63. Anthony Horneck, DELIGHT AND JUDGMENT: Or, a Prospect of the Great Day of Judgment, And its Power to damp, and imbitter Sensual Delights, Sports, and Recreations (London, 1684), 15.

64. Preface to Sylvae, 1685, Works (Berkeley: University of California Press), III, 11–12.

65. Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Philosophical Writings, 203–09; Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, I, 350; David Hume, “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State,” Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (London, 1748), 217.

66. Theory of Moral Sentiments, hereafter TMS, III.5.7–9, pp. 166–67.

67. Isabel Rivers, Reason Grace and Sentiment II, 260; Smith, TMS, III.5.7, p. 166.

68. “Of a Particular Providence,” Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding, 219.

69. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, 161.

70. The Adventurer, #10, ed. John Hawkesworth, 2 vols. (London, 1752–54), I, 59.

71. 19 April 1740, Contributions to the Champion, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 284.

72. In 1783, when hangings were finally concealed, Samuel Johnson complained that the rage of innovation had reached even Tyburn: “The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the publick was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?” James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (New York: Penguin, 2008), 868.

73. Jeremiah Seed, Discourses on several Important Subjects. To which are added, Eight Sermons Preached at the Lady Moyer’s Lecture, in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London, 2 vols. (London, 1743), Sermon IV. “The Nature and Duration of future Punishments considered; and the Goodness of God fully vindicated; as to that Article against the principal Objections of some late Writers,” II, 108, 97. Seed quantifies the argument Robert Sharrock had made about proportion in 1673. For Sharrock, see Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England, 31.

74. John Leland (1691–1766), The Advantage and Necessity of the Christian Revelation, II, 460. Editions also in 1768, 1776, 1818. Priestley used Leland’s 1768 edition as one of his authorities in Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit. To which is added, the History of the Philosophical Doctrine concerning the Origin of the Soul, and the Nature of Matter; with its Influence on Christianity, especially with Respect to the Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Christ (London, 1777).

75. Pierre Cuppé’s translator, Heaven Open to All Men, xxiv.

76. Bernhard Lang charts Wesley’s reading of Swedenborg, who presented him with a copy of Vera Christiana Religio. Initially sympathetic, Wesley became profoundly hostile. They never met. Meeting in Heaven: Modernizing the Christian Afterlife 1600–2000 (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 133–37.

77. Martin Folkes, president of the Royal Society, had Swedenborg’s De Cultu et Amore Dei, A Catalogue of the Entire and Valuable Library of Martin Folkes, Esq. President of the Royal Society and Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, Lately Deceased (London, 1756), 13; the same title appears in Thomas Payne’s Catalogue of A large Collection of the best Books, 1761. The Philosophical Transactions, giving some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious, in many Considerable Parts of the World, vol. 59, 1769 (London, 1770), reported three books in the “Presents made to the Royal Society in the year 1769, with the names of the donors”: Mr. Em. Swedenborg gave Delitiae Sapientiea; De Unione Mentis & Corporis; Doctrine of the new Church, xviii. Antoine Grimoald Monnet, Nouvelle Hydrologie (Londres, 1772), 210, cites him on Swedish water. James Robson, A Catalogue of a very Large and Capital Collection of Books (London, 1772), offering three clerical libraries, included Doctrine of the New Church, 1769, 105. Bibliotheca Westiana: A Catalogue of the Curious and truly Valuable Library of the late James West, President of the Royal Society (London, 1773), #1598, Swedenborg, Vera Christiana Religio, 100; A Catalogue…the late Mr Hall of Magdalen College, Oxford (London, 1773), Delitiae sapiente de amore conjugali, #2237, 64. A Catalogue…Rev Dr William Borlase (1773) contained Theosophic Lucubrations on the Nature of Influx, 1770; Anton Friedrich Bushing, An Introduction to the Study of Geography (London, 1778) cites him on mines, p. 69. William Bent’s Catalogue (1779) had Heaven and Hell.

78. A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell Containing A Relation of many Wonderful Things Therein, as heard and seen by the Author, the Honourable Emanuel Swedenborg, Of the Senatorial Order of Nobles in the Kingdom of Sweden. Now First Translated from the ORIGINAL LATIN (London, Bristol, Exeter, 1778), 198–99.

79. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (1988) 2nd. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 234, 181–227, 269, 282, 302, 323–24. Bernhard Lang, Meeting in Heaven, 79–142.

80. Peter Walmsley, “Whigs in Heaven: Elizabeth Rowe’s ‘Friendship in Death,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44:3 (2011): 320; Addison, Spectator #447, 2 Aug. 1712, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), IV, 72; Philip Doddridge, Practical Discourses on Regeneration, in Ten Sermons Preached at Northampton. “Sermon V. Of the Incapacity of an Unregenerate Person for relishing the Enjoyments of the Heavenly World.” Running title: “To endure the Presence of God” (London, 1742), 137–68; Laurence Sterne, “Our Conversation in Heaven,” The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996), IV, 278–79; V, 315–16.

81. Fanatical Conversion; Or, Methodism Displayed. A Satire. Illustrated and versified by Notes from J. Wesley’s Fanatical Journals…unraveling the delusive Craft of that well-invented System of pious Sorcery which turns Lions into Lambs, called, in Derision, METHODISM. (London 1779); John Clowes, A Letter of Exhortation and Admonition to all who receive the Testimony of Emanuel Swedenborg (London, 1783); Brief Remarks on a late Pamphlet entitled “A Letter of Exhortation and Admonition to all who receive the Testimony of Emanuel Swedenborg” (Manchester, 1783); A Simple Layman, A Seasonable Address to those Who receive the Testimony of Emanuel Swedenborg (London, 1783); Thomas Arnold, M.D., Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness, 2 vols. (Leicester, London, 1782), I, 294; Albert M. Lyles, Methodism Mocked: The Satiric Reaction to Methodism in the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth Press, 1960); Misty Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).

82. John Wesley, An Extract from the Rev. Mr. John Wesley’s Journal, from Jan. 1, 1776 to Aug. 8, 1779 (London 1783), 18, 107.

83. Hannah More, Works, 11 vols. (London, 1830), V, 407–08; An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World. By one of the laity (London, 1791), 38. As if emerging from one of the sermons Pope describes, she insists, “The locality of Hell, and the existence of an Evil Spirit, are annihilated, or considered as abstract ideas. They are never named without some periphrasis or circumlocution; as if the very names, instead of being awful and terrible, were only vulgar and illiberal,” Estimate, 34. Bernhard Lang notes that in Stoneham, Massachusetts’s, cemetery the traditional tombstone ornament, a winged skull, was replaced between 1760 and 1780, by a winged head, intimating salvation. By 1790 there were no skulls at all. Meeting in Heaven, 149–50. When the evangelicals succeeded in restoring hell, the results could be dire. William Cowper’s “The Castaway” (1799) finds a believer drowning in gulfs of despair. Satirists claimed that Methodism made its adherents suicidal over failed conversion experiences. The debate over hell continues in Joel Buenting, ed., The Problem of Hell: A Philosophical Anthology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). James Cain explains “Why I Am Unconvinced by Arguments against the Existence of Hell,” 133–44; those around him take its nonexistence as a given.

84. Alexander Pope, “Dying Christian to His Soul,” Poems, 116–17; John Harvey, A Collection of Miscellany Poems and Letters, Comical and Serious (Edinburgh, 1726), “To the Memory of the Illustrious Princess, Anne Dutchess of Hamilton, Who died at her Apartments in the Palace of Holy-rood-house, August 1724,” “To the Memory of the Right Hon William late Earl of Kintore,” “To the Memory of the Right Honourable, the late Lady Blantyrea: A Pastoral”; [Elizabeth Thomas], Poems on Several Occasions. By a Lady (London, 1726), “To the Pious Memory of Mrs Diana Bridgman, An Ode,” “On the Death of the Right Honourable Anne, Lady Dowager de la War”; Peleg Morris, Leisure Hours well employ’d: Being a Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Poems (London, 1740), “Hymn XIII: A View of Heaven.”

85. Kevin Barry, “Learned Blindness: Irish Counter-Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment by Night: Essays on After-Dark Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Serge Soupel, Kevin Cope, and Alexander Pettit (New York: AMS Press, 2010), 291–305.

86. “Hymn XI: The Best Choice,” Peleg Morris, Leisure hours well employ’d, 17–18. Morris’s epigraph is from George Herbert, a pleasant reminder that someone still read him, “A verse may find him, that a Sermon flies…”

87. Thomas Emlyn, Funeral Consolations: Or a Plain Discourse from John 14. Ver. 28. Being the First Sermon he Preach’d after the Death of his Wife Mrs. Esther Emlyn: who Died Octob. 13.1701 (Dublin, 1703), 24.

88. D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell, 158–59. William Whiston challenged Burnet’s theory with his own. In 1696, he dedicated to Newton his view that after the fall a comet hit the earth and altered paradise by affecting the axis. Identified with Halley’s comet, it also caused Noah’s flood and is the site for the second death of Revelation. Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Reveal’d (London, 1717), 75, 147–48, 152, 155–56.

89. Thomas Burnet, A Treatise Concerning the State of the Dead, and of Departed Souls, at the Resurrection. To which is added, an Appendix concerning the future Restoration of the Jews (London, 1737), 352–53, 376–77, 380.

90. Matania Z. Kochani, “One Prophet Interprets Another: Sir Isaac Newton and Daniel,” in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds. The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1994), 105–22.

91. Isaac Watts, The World to Come: Or, Discourses on the Joys or Sorrows of Departed Souls at Death, and the Glory or Terror of the Resurrection. Whereto is Prefix’d, An Essay toward the Proof of a Separate State of Souls after Death (London, 1739), 12–13.

92. Kochani, “One Prophet Interprets Another: Sir Isaac Newton and Daniel,” 116–19.

93. Robert Hooke, Preface, Micrographia (1665) (NY: Dover, 1961), n.p.

94. Jacob Sider Jost, “The Afterlife and The Spectator,” SEL 51:3 (2011): 609–13. See also Jost, Prose Immortality, 1711–1819 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015).

95. Joseph Addison, Spectator #111, July 7, 1711, I, 458–59.

96. Porteus, Bishop of Chester, Sermons on Several Subjects (London, 1783), 125–26.

97. English Review, 21 (1793): 255.

98. London, 1730. Addison was long dead, but Jacob Tonson the bookseller attached his name and credit to the compilation of Spectators.

99. Charles Bonnet (1720–93), Conjectures concerning the Nature of Future Happiness. Translated from the French of Mons. Bonnet of Geneva (York, London, 1785), 25.

100. Spectator # 635, Dec. 20, 1714, V, 171–72.

101. Spectator #635, V, 173.

102. Mary [Lee], Lady Chudleigh, Essays upon Several Subjects In Prose and Verse (London, 1710), 44.

103. Discourses on the Four Last Things, viz. I. Death, II. Judgment, III. Heaven and IV. Hell. And on some Other Subjects Relating thereunto (Dublin, 1724), 457–59, 472–3, 475.

104. Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 91.

105. Joseph Priestly, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Part. I. Containing An Examination of the principal Objections to the Doctrines of Natural Religion, and especially those contained in the Writings of Mr. Hume. 2nd. ed. (Birmingham, 1787), 115. Letter VIII “Of the Evidence for the future Existence of Man.”

106. Bonnet, Conjectures, 11.

107. [William Kenrick], Epistles Philosophical and Moral (London, 1759), 334, l.488.

108. Spectator, # 111, I, 457.

109. The Female Spectator, 4 vols. (London, 1745–46), II, 267–69.

110. Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1762), II, 38.

111. Gentleman’s Magazine (1800): 1158.

112. Spectator, #111, I, 457.

113. Benjamin Martin, Bibliotheca Technologica: Or, a Philological Library of Literary Arts and Sciences (London, 1737), 11.

114. David Hartley, Observations on Man, II, 385.

115. [Kenrick], Epistles Philosophical and Moral, 301–02.

116. Catherine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education. With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (Dublin, 1790), 238, 240.

117. The British Apollo: Containing about Two Thousand Answers to curious Questions in most Arts and Sciences. 4th. ed. (London, 1740), III, 779–780.

118. Adventurer, #120, 2 December 1753, 469–70.

119. Aaron Hill, Free Thoughts upon Faith: Or the Religion of Nature. A poem, with notes (1746) ([Liverpool], 1758), 88.

120. [William Kenrick], Poems Ludicrous, Satirical and Moral (London, 1768), 151, 161.

121. Boswell on the Grand Tour—Germany and Switzerland 1764, 303.

122. [Matthew Turner], Answer to Dr. Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Part I (London, 1782), 14.

123. Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 478–79.

124. Mr. Asgill’s Defence upon his Expulsion, 46.

125. John Boys, trans. Aeneid Book VI (London, 1661), 129, 132. [Sir Robert Howard, attrib.] History of Religion (London, 1694), v.

126. Timothy Manlove, d. 1699, The Immortality of the Soul Asserted, and Practically improved [sic]: Shewing by Scripture, Reason, and the Testimony of the Ancient Philosophers, That the Soul of Man is capable of subsisting and acting in a State of Separation from the Body, And how much it concerns us all to prepare for that State (London, 1697), 76; John Leland, Advantage and Necessity of the Christian Revelation, I, 452.

127. McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 274.

128. W. H. C. Frend, “Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) and Early Christianity,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 45 (1994): 662.

129. Tickell, #634, 17 Dec. 1714, Spectator, V, 169, modifies #574, 30 July 1714, IV, 565.

130. Spectator #166, II, 154.

131. Daniel W. Odell, “Young’s Night Thoughts as an Answer to Pope’s Essay on Man,” SEL 12:3 (1972): 481–51.

132. Beilby Porteus, Bishop of Chester, Sermons on Several Subjects, 134–35.

133. Hugh Blair, Sermons (London, 1780), II, 265.

134. Tatler, #152, March 10, 1710, II, 356; #156, April 8, 1710, II, 373–78.

135. Tatler #15, May 14, 1709, I, 124–32. The child’s welcome is contrasted with that of a duelist, a second, entering by the door of the murdered. Socrates draws near him to instruct in the error of his ways. #26, June 9, 1709, I, 203–04.

136. [Richard and Elizabeth Griffith], A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances. 2 vols. (London, 1757), I, 208.

137. William Sherlock, A Practical Discourse Concerning a Future Judgment, 10th. ed. (1731), 191.

138. Oct. 27, 1727, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), III, 549.

139. Jonathan Pritchard, “Elizabeth Singer Rowe,” Oxford DNB; Almond counts fourteen editions between 1733 and 1816, Heaven and Hell, 104.

140. Theophilus Rowe, “Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe, xlvi. “See Bib. Brit. Tom. Xiii, p. 39.”

141. Rowe’s devotional writings outstripped Friendship in Death (FID) in the early nineteenth century and continued to amass reprints through the 1850s. Paula R. Backscheider, Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 1–2.

142. Benjamin Boyce, “News from Hell: Satiric Communication with the Nether World in English Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” PMLA 58:2 (1943): 402–437; Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead: A Critical History, an Anthology, and a Check List (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730: An Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

143. Peter Walmsley, “Whigs in Heaven,” 325.

144. Twain adopts progress-in-knowledge for infants, at a period when mothers assume they will reclaim their infants as infants in heaven. Twain’s mother thus incurs a second loss in heaven. He also allows the young to flirt in heaven, like the brother with the lute, but there is no whisper of consummated sexual desire in his American heaven. Twain’s missing child is a girl, who excels in knowledge while her mother knows only cranberries. Rowe’s child is a boy, a countess’s heir, so property feels loss in the eighteenth century, but not the American nineteenth century.

145. “On the Death of my dear Daughter Eliza Maria Chudleigh. A Dialogue between Lucinda and Marissa,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1703), 11, 97.

146. Poem on the Last Day, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1713), Dedication, n.p. The Rev. J. Mitford observes that the dedication to the queen was cut from Young’s subsequent reprinting of the poem. Poetical Works of Edward Young, with a Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1854]), “Life of Young,” xi, xiii.

147. Poem on the Last Day, 2nd. ed. (Oxford, 1713), 56–57.

148. “To a lady on the death of her son,” Gentleman’s Magazine, 6 (1736): 546.

149. “A poem sacred to the memory of a dearly beloved and only daughter, who died in the eleventh year of her age. Written by her mourning father,” in A Collection of Poems on Divine and Moral Subjects, selected from various authors, ed. William Giles (London, 1775), 82–88, 223.

150. James Boswell, Boswell in Extremes 1776-1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 114.

151. Walmsley, “Whigs in Heaven,” 321.

152. Rowe, FID, 123–24.

153. FID, 117–18.

154. Edward Young, The Complaint: Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, 8th. ed. (London, 1749), 69.

155. Diaries, Prayers and Annals, anno 1752, James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 129–30.

156. Rowe, Miscellaneous Works, I, xlviii, xliv.

157. E. Derek Taylor, “Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven,” in Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson, ed. Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S. J. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2012), 134–67; Paula R. Backscheider, Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel, 67.

158. Eliza Haywood, History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, ed. John Richetti (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 156.

159. Idler #41, 27 January 1759, Idler and Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, L. F. Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 130.

160. Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, chap. 37.

161. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 28 March 1772, 346–47.

162. [Richard and Elizabeth Griffith], A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances, 2 vols. (London, 1757), I, 208, letter cxiii. The quotation reworks Altamont’s speech, “[My soul] kindles not with Anger or Revenge;/Love was th’informing, active Fire within,/ Now that is quench’d, the Mass forgets to move,/ And longs to mingle with its kindred Earth.” Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent, (1703), ed. Malcolm Goldstein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 55, Act 4, scene 1, ll.273–76.

163. “Of the Happiness of a Heavenly Conversation,” The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, 12 vols. (London, 1743), I, 202; Walmsley, “Whigs in Heaven,” 324 and 329n47.

164. William Dodd, ed. The Visitor, 2 vols. (London, 1764), Advert, I, A3; II, No. 45, 21–27.

165. Richard Price (1723–91), Four Dissertations (London, 1767), editions with additions, 1768, 1772, 1777; William Morgan, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Richard Price (London 1815), 31.

166. Without actually lying, Johnson was avoiding acknowledging his authorship of Dodd’s pleas for his life.

167. William Dodd, Reflections upon Death, 105.

168. Dodd, Mutual Knowledge in a future State; Offered as an Argument of Consolation (London, 1766), 6–7.

169. David’s dying child is the one conceived in adultery with Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, whom David ordered murdered. This text indexes the change. Sometime before his death in 1755, Joseph Williams had applied it cautiously to his wife in her death. He says nothing of meeting again, but does cite 2 Samuel, “Lord, hasten the time when I shall go to her, since she shall not return to me!” Joseph Williams, Extracts from the Diary, Meditations and Letters of Mr. Joseph Williams of Kidderminster, who died Dec. 21, 1755, aged 63 (Shrewsbury, 1779), 243. By 1782, caution has gone, and confidence reigns: Robert Carter Thelwall closes “all this long disgressive rhapsody on grief with this most consolatory of all reflexions: That though she shall not return to me, I shall go to her.” A Sketch from the Dead; Or, A Monody to the Memory of Mrs. Carter Thelwall (London, 1782), 24.

170. Dodd, Mutual Knowledge in a future State, 4, 6–7, 13–14.

171. Bernhard Lang, “Meeting in Heaven in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,” Tod und Jenseits in der Schriftkultur der Frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz in Kommission, 2008), 130. Rptd. Meeting in Heaven, 52.

172. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 272–78; Philippe Rochat, Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2009.

173. TMS, III.i.3–6, pp. 110–13.

174. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 61. Price was irate about Burke’s accusation. When his sermon was reprinted, he insisted that he had referred not to the October days but to the earlier trip to Paris by the king. “Preface,” Discourse on the Love of Our Country. He did not consider a possible relationship between the two episodes.

175. Four Dissertations. III. On the Reasons for expecting that virtuous Men shall meet after Death in a State of Happiness (London, 1767), 344.

176. Dodd, Reflections on Death, 184.

177. Critical Review, 23 (March 1767): 238.

178. June 1777, James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 602.

179. B. W. Young, “Jortin,” Oxford DNB.

180. John Jortin, Sermons on Different Subjects, 7 vols. (London, 1771), III, 259–64.

181. Jortin, Sermons, III, 258.

182. Catherine Talbot, Essays on various Subjects, 2nd. ed. (London, 1772), Essay ix, 80–81.

183. William James Mickle (1734–88), Voltaire in the Shades (London, 1770), v.

184. Clementina, Letters Religious and Moral (London, 1786), 37; G. Wright, ed. Pleasing Reflections on Life and Manners with Essays, Characters, & Poems, Moral & Entertaining; Principally selected from Fugitive Publications, 2nd. ed. (London, 1788), 55–56.

185. Hugh Blair, Sermons, 3 vols. (London, 1790), “Sermon V: On Death,” III, 100–01.

186. Soul reunites with body, not friend with friend, in such works as Thomas Broughton, A Prospect of Futurity, in Four Dissertations on the Nature and Circumstances of the Life To Come (London, 1768), viii, 428; Samuel Chandler, Sermons (London, 1759–69), 238; Patrick Delany, Sixteen Discourses upon Doctrines and Duties (London, 1754), 187; Caleb Fleming, Of the Search After Soul (London, 1758), 280; John Dupre, Sermons on Various Subjects (London, 1783), 187.

187. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 571, 637.

188. Richard B. Sher, “Hugh Blair,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

189. Blair, “Sermon XV: On the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, as a Preparation for Death,” III, 322, 324–25.

190. Sher, Oxford DNB, quoting T. Somerville, My Own Llife and Times, 1741–1814, ed. W. Lee (1861), 167.

191. Polwhele, Discourses on Different Subjects, 2 vols. (London, 1791), Discourse X, I, 183–84.

192. In Keener’s checklist, most titles mention Styx, Charon, or Shades, except some examples from 1642, 1658, and 1659. Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead: A Critical History, an Anthology, and a Check List, 279–92.

193. Regina Janes, “Henry Fielding Reinvents the Afterlife,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 23:3 (2011): 495–518.

194. Quevedo, Jr., A Particular Account of Cardinal Fleury’s Journey to the Other World, quoted in Boyce, “News from Hell,” 424.

195. Sterne makes no appearance in McDannell and Lang’s Heaven: A History.

196. Improbable as this claim seems, ECCO and EEBO searches fail to retrieve the phrase before Sterne. After Sterne, it appears in “On Beneficence: A Poetical Essay” (1764), Edward Burnaby Greene, Critical Essays (1770), 294, and Byron’s The Vision of Judgement (1822), 3.4. Kushner uses the phrase in the first speech in Act III, Scene 7. Sterne’s invention is confirmed by the OED, which, after Sterne cites Bellamy’s Family Preacher, 1776, and observes that Sterne’s coinage is later treated as an “actual theological concept.”

197. Jane Timbury, The Story of Le Fevre, from the works of Mr. Sterne (London, 1787), 23–4: “The accusing spirit, here reluctant soar’d /To Heaven’s bright chanc’ry with the offending word:/ But doubting, if to deem the oath a sin,/ Blush’d as he gave the accusation in; /While that angelic being, who’s assign’d /T’record the various actions of mankind, /Scarce let the sentence from his pen appear,/ Blotting it out forever with a tear.” “On Beneficence: A Poetical Essay” (1764) also retells LeFevre’s story.

198. Christians, and Jews, and Turks, and Pagans stand,

199. Life of Johnson, 17 April 1778, 692.

200. As “Edward Search,” Abraham Tucker’s Lockean afterlife solved such problems as sensory data without organs through special thin vehicles, perhaps referred to by Flann O’Brien in The Third Policeman. Pope supplied his epigraph: “The proper study of mankind is man.” The Light of Nature Pursued (London, 1768), 5 vols.

201. “The Devil and Dr. Hornbook,” stanza 2, The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), I, 79.

202. “Epitaph on James Grieve, Laird of Boghead, Tarbolton,” “Epitaph on my own Friend and my Father’s Friend, Wm. Muir in Tarbolton Mill,” Poems and Songs, I, 39, 47.

203. “Recollections of Ramsay of Ochtertyre,” Poems and Songs, III, 1540.

204. TMS V.2.9, pp. 206–07.

205. TMS, I, i. 1. 13, p. 13.

206. Bence Nanay, “Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and Its Contemporary Interpretations,” The Philosophy of Adam Smith: Adam Smith Review, volume 5: Essays commemorating the 250th anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker (New York: Routledge, 2010), 101.

207. TMS II.ii.3.12n, pp. 91, 91–92n.

208. TMS, II.ii.3.12, p. 91.

209. TMS, II.ii.3.12n, pp. 91-92n; Appendix II, p. 400.

210. “Small Victories,” The New Yorker, July 27, 2015, 75.

211. “On Suicide” was also printed and withdrawn. According to Eugene Miller, such hostile critics as William Warburton knew of the essays and alluded to them. They appeared in French translation in 1770, though Hume never knew it. Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 577–78n1.

212. “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” EMPL, 593.

213. The passage first appears in the draft revision of 1759 and in print in editions 2–5, the second edition appearing in 1761. III.2.30–31, p. 128n. Hugh Blair made a similar argument in his sermon, “On our imperfect knowledge of a Future State,” Sermons (London: 1777), 110–12.

214. TMS, VI, iii.3.2., p. 235.

215. TMS, III.ii.12, p. 120.

216. Twain’s “Extract” elevates an unknown poet superior to Shakespeare and a lame military strategist superior in genius to Napoleon, though he never had an opportunity even to join the army. Both Smith’s and Twain’s extending Gray’s unrealized genius suggests the cultural position long held by Gray’s poem. Twain quotes Gray on several occasions and owned Edmund Gosse’s biography of Gray. A reader of Hume, he also had some indirect acquaintance with the common sense and sentimental philosophy of the eighteenth century. No evidence uncovered by Americanists suggests he knew Adam Smith, but they may not have looked. Gregg Camfield, Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 44, 12, 244n16. Alan Gribben, Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1980). Smith’s “humble hope” nods to Pope.

217. Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 182–83.

218. TMS, III.2.33, p. 132.

219. Ian Simpson Ross, wondering how the atonement endured five editions, does not remark on this passage, although he doubts Smith “put stock in an afterlife” and notes his increasing skepticism as he aged. The Life of Adam Smith, 2nd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 432, 173.

220. “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” EMPL, 597.

221. TMS, III. ii. 34, p. 132.

222. TMS, III. ii, 34–35, pp. 132–34.

223. Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith, 436.

224. Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Adam Ferguson,” Oxford DNB (2004, 2009).

225. Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. John Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 46.

226. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 10 vols. (Boston: Little Brown, 1873), X, 213, 244–45.

227. Peter Cochran, “One Ton per Square Foot: The Antecedents of The Vision of Judgement,” Keats-Shelley Review 19 (2005): 64.

228. Emrys Jones adds Seneca’s Ludus, a posthumous attack on the emperor Claudius, and Erasmus’s Junius Exclusus, perhaps inspired by Seneca, “Byron’s Visions of Judgment” Modern Language Review 76:1 (1981): 1–19. Erasmus, Jones observes, never acknowledged the authorship of Julius Exclusus. John Jortin’s edition of 1758–60 made the modern attribution. 9, 11n.

229. William H. Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt and The Liberal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 126–27; “The King against John Hunt,” in Reports of State Trials: New Series (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889), II, 69–104.

230. McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 250.

1. Tatler, no. 156, April 1710, II, 378.

2. William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 113; Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Chorus,” from Hellas, Shelley Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 457. The stardust mantra of TED talks and Neil deGrasse Tyson is Carl Sagan’s, quoted most recently in The Smithsonian, November 2013, 10, “We’re made of star-stuff.”

3. “Cats Will Kill You First, But Wolves Just Rip You Open,” Temple Grandin, interview with Andrew Goldman, New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2013, 14.

4. W. H. Auden, “On Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics,” Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden, 2nd. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1971), 214.

5. Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Christopher Lewis, eds., Beyond Death: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Life After Death (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 183–98.

6. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 41 [b].

7. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Hachette, 2009); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); George Levine, ed., Joy of Secularism: Eleven Essays for How We Live Now (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, Craig Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 362–68, especially 366–68; Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds., Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); W. Warren Wagar, ed., The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982).

8. Tatyana Tolstaya’s Aetherial Worlds, trans. Anya Migdal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), gliding from disbelief to fictions through desire, would make a distinctive seventh, had it arrived earlier. Her story “Emanuel” is the most interesting account of Swedenborg extant.

9. Etgar Keret, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories., trans. Miriam Shlesinger and others (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001), 181.

10. Christopher Falzon, “On Being John Malkovich and Not Being Yourself,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 46–65; Garry L. Hagberg, “The Instructive Impossibility of Being John Malkovich, in LaRocca, 169–89; Daniel Shaw, “On Being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:1 (2006): 111–18; William Young, “Otherwise than Being John Malkovich: Incarnating the Name of God,” Literature and Theology 18:1 (2004): 95–108; Sayantani DasGupta, “Being John Doe Malkovich: Truth, Imagination, and Story in Medicine,” Literature and Medicine 25:2 (2006): 439–62.

11. Given the magical realist features of BJM, the forty-four-year age requirement may have been suggested by the English translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad. In Spanish, it is said of Melquíades’s manuscripts that “no one can read them until they are a hundred years old,” that is, the manuscripts must be one hundred years old. In English, a diligent copy-editor corrected a nonexistent error, and Gregory Rabassa’s translation was made to read, “no one can read them until he is a hundred years old,” that is, the reader must be one hundred years old, as no one ever is in the novel.

12. Three Passovers in the gospel of John, and Luke’s statement that Jesus was about thirty when his ministry began, make Jesus thirty plus three at his resurrection.

13. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

14. Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (New York: Penguin, 1986), 39.

15. The west or western wind makes a considerable figure in verse, but Stern probably has in mind the anonymous Tudor poem, in modernized spelling: “Western wind when wilt thou blow, /the small rain down can rain, /Christ if my love were in my arms/ and I in my bed again.” Unmodernized: “Westron wynde when wyll thow blow/ the smalle rayne downe can Rayne/ Cryst yf my love were in my Armys/ And I yn my bed Agayne.” Charles Frey, “Interpreting ‘Western Wind,’” ELH 4:3 (1976): 259.

16. Steve Stern, The Frozen Rabbi (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010), 171.

17. For variations on the trope, see Karen Russell, “The Prospectors,” The New Yorker, June 8 and 15, 2015, 91–101; Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress (New York: Anchor, 2015), 15.

18. The single-appearance trope appears most prominently in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945) and its source, Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom: A Legend in Seven Scenes and a Prologue.

19. George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation (New York: Penguin, 2006), 227.

20. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 17.

21. Dirk Klopper, “ ‘We Are Not Made for Revelation’: Letters to Francis Bacon in the Postscript to J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello,” English in Africa 35:2 (2008): 120–21.

22. Moral Essay I: Epistle to Cobham, 1734, ll.29–30, 35–40, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 551.

23. H. Stefan Schultz, “Hofmannsthal and Bacon: The Sources of the Chandos Letter,” Comparative Literature 13:1 (1961): 1–15; Reingard Nethersole, “Reading in the In-between: Pre-scripting the ‘Postscript’ to Elizabeth Costello,” Journal of Literary Studies 21:3–4 (2005): 254–77.

24. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (1990) (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

25. Not everyone agrees, but surely characters should be more interesting than authors? Does a wife who doesn’t want to meet her husband make critics uneasy? François Ricard testifies to her charm in his title, Agnès’s Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Work of Milan Kundera, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). So in Being John Malkovich, “John Malkovich” has less character than Cusack-Malkovich or Bean-Malkovich.

26. Ricard, Agnès’s Final Afternoon, 204–06.

27. Aaron Gerow and Tanaka Junko, “Documentarists of Japan #12: Koreeda Hirokazu,” trans. Michael Raine, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, web. 14.

28. Aaron Gerow and Tanaka Junko, “Documentarists of Japan #12, Koreeda Hirokazu”; Roger Ebert, “After Life,” Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 6, 1999, Rogerebert.com.

29. Taitetsu Unno, River of Fire, River of Water: An Introduction to the Pure Land Tradition of Shin Buddhism (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 180; E. A. Burtt, ed. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, 188–89.

30. Gabriel M. Paletz and Ayako Saito, “The Halfway House of Memory: An Interview with Hirokazu Kore-eda,” CineAction (Winter 2003): 58.

31. Timothy Iles, “The Light of Life and Death: The Function of Cinematography and Lighting in Two Films by Kore-eda Hirokazu,” Asian Cinema 16:1 (2005): 216.

32. David Desser, “After Life: History, Memory, Trauma and the Transcendent,” Film Criticism 35: 2/3 (2011): 52–54. Counting the seconds that elapse in the jump cuts, Desser brilliantly shows how an initially rapid rhythm slows down, breaks up, comes back.

33. A year’s seasons pass in the days of one week. Kristi McKim, “Learning to Love What Passes: Sensual Perception, Temporal Transformation, and Epistemic Production in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life,” Camera Obscura 68:2 (2008): 79.

34. Desser’s figure, “After Life: History, Memory, Trauma,” 56. The film twice insists on calling the instigation of those riots “false rumors.” The allusion, Desser observes, evokes the history of anti-Korean prejudice in Japan, 57.

35. It seems not unreasonable to locate in WR a deliberate ideological construction intended to intervene in a current cultural malaise, adapting American happy talk to address a particular social moment in Japan. Tetsuya Ozaki connects a rising Japanese suicide rate in 1998 (from 24,391 to 32,863, remaining above 30,000 ever since) to the Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen’s 1994 Ningen o kōfuku ni shinai Nihon to iu shisutemu (Japan: A System That Doesn’t Make People Happy) and its concern with contempt for salary men and pornographic manga. David Elliott with Tetsuya Ozaki, Bye Bye Kitty !!!: Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art. New York: Japan Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 49, 53, 59. Kore-eda’s subsequent films often track recent traumas, carrying into fiction the purposefulness of his earlier documentaries, for example, Nobody Knows (2004), Air Doll (2009), I Wish (2011).

36. Haruo Shirane, ed., Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 553.

37. David Desser’s otherwise brilliant “After Life: History, Memory, Trauma, and the Transcendent,” describes Watanabe and Kyoko on the bench as one of the “memory recreations,” 49. Lars-Martin Sørensen even says that the memories to be screened are videotaped. “Reality’s Poetry: Kore-eda Hirokazu between Fact and Fiction,” Film Criticism 35:2/3 (2011): 30.

38. Liza Bear, “Hirokazu Koreeda on Wandafuru raifu (After Life),” September 7, 1999, www.filmscouts.com.

39. Elaine Sciolino, “Poet’s Nightmare in Chinese Prison,” New York Times, April 10, 2013, C5.

40. Samuel Beckett, “Words and Music,” in The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 131; “Rockaby,” 280.

41. Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Plays, “Rockaby,” 280; “Embers,” 91. Beckett’s Lethe may be remembering Tatler #118, Jan. 10, 1710, II, 201–02. John Partridge reported from the banks of Styx that “Our Time passes away much after the same Manner as it did when we were among you; Eating, Drinking, and Sleeping, are our chief Diversions…. they have several warm Liquors made of the Waters of Lethe, with very good Poppy Tea. We that are the sprightly Genius’s of the Place, refresh our selves frequently with a Bottle of Mum, and tell Stories till we fall asleep.” He wanted a copy of Dodwell against the immortality of the soul in order to rest forever. Dodwell had argued that the soul is not naturally immortal, but immortalized by baptism by a priest in the apostolic succession, thus including Catholics and cutting out dissenters. Henry Dodwell, An Epistolary Discourse, Proving from the Scriptures and the First Fathers, that the Soul Is A Principle Naturally Mortal: But Immortalized Actually by the Pleasure of God, to Punishment; or, to Reward, by its Union with the Divine Baptismal Spirit. Wherein is Proved, That None have the Power of Giving this Divine Immortalizing Spirit, since the Apostles, but only the Bishops, (London, 1706).