Much of death fascination of the nineteenth century employs the subject of romantic love as a central point around which the peculiar, tragic beauty of death revolves. One needs only to consider the work of major authors of the period such as Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe; and artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and John William Waterhouse to find examples of love and death placed together in an eerie tandem. Ill-fated, star-crossed pairs of lovers appeared steadily in literature and art throughout the nineteenth century, and their stories were extremely popular with audiences who found a forbidding, yet irresistible attraction to the idea of love-and-death, and to the particular idea that death can loom over a pair of lovers like a black cloud from the moment of their meeting. For the most part, such lovers-in-death are fictional; but novels, poems, and plays about historical figures, especially figures of the Tudor era, also draw upon this notion. They accompany melodramatic narratives that, although they presume to be historical in scope, are imaginative and sensational rather than academic. They include inventive retellings about Elizabeth I and her ill-fated love for Essex and Raleigh, or Jane Grey and her doomed love for Dudley, as if death were an essential part of what had brought them together. Some of the most compelling examples of such work tell the fateful story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. As characters in this multi-genre narrative of fatal attraction, their story is unique because the corpses of both Henry and Anne were disinterred during the nineteenth century. Unlike characters in a novel or poem, the physical bodies of these lovers were exhumed, viewed, and analysed according to the academic standards of the day. This facet of their story allows for a unique theory of reading when it comes to Henry and Anne. One might imagine the beloved in death (Poe's Annabel Lee); one might even imagine the revenant lover (Stoker's Lucy Westenra) or the lover as living corpse (Dickens’ Miss Havisham); but the narratives concerning Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn are exceptional because they depict love and death in a disturbingly literal way.