The lives and afterlives of Charlotte, Lady Canning (1817–1861): gender, commemoration, and narratives of loss

This essay explores the themes of memory and memorial by scrutinizing the afterlives of two objects made in memory of Charlotte, Lady Canning (1817–61). The first is an inlaid marble tomb monument by George Gilbert Scott and John Birnie Philip, which today stands outside St John’s Church, Kolkata. The second is the Lady Canning Memorial Album, a private album compiled in the 1860s and now housed in the British Library. Following the afterlives of these commemorative objects will shed light on how they have shaped and continue to shape colonial and postcolonial identities. These objects emerge as sites of tension where gender, imperial ideologies, and expressions of personal loss intersect and sometimes collide. As such, this study complicates, but does not efface, boundaries between the permanence of masculine public memorial art and feminine ephemeral or transitory memento. And it highlights particular ways that the commemoration of the female body, even in death, could act as a boundary marker for the creation and ordering of difference.