Sweet Sadness

When did cities in ruins become a thing of beauty? When the eighteenth-century tourist thought them beautiful. The ruin "craze" that followed transformed the art world and turned art into a subjective experience that involved a new sensation: the melancholy mood. In his book, Sweet Sadness, Tyson Gardner personifies this mood and envisions the garden cemetery as Sweet Sadness's realm, where she reigns as supreme muse. A child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the garden cemetery matured under the Victorians. In this memoir with pictures, Tyson shares his encounters with Sweet Sadness in Philadelphia's renowned Laurel Hill, the second garden cemetery in the United States and offers hints on where to find her in any Victorian cemetery, much as the Victorians did.