The Victorian Celebration Of Death

Professor Curl has fashioned an absorbing, lucid and entertaining book describing the Victorian response to the only certainty in life--death. It includes disposal of the dead, landscaped cemeteries funerals and more.

From humble working-class exequies to the massive outpourings of grief at the State funerals of Wellington and Queen Victoria herself, this book covers an immense canvas. It describes the change in sensibility that led to a new tenderness towards the dead; disposal of the dead as part of the great sanitary reforms of the epoch; the history of the urban cemeteries with their architecture and landscapes; the ephemera of death and dying (including wreaths, mourning-cards and jewelry, elaborate hearses crowned with ostrich-feather plumes, mourning-dress, and much more); State funerals as national spectacles; and the utilitarian reactions towards the end of the 19th century. Beautifully illustrated. Over 100 illustrations.

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.

Originally published in 1989, Death, Ritual and Bereavement examines the social history of death and dying from 1500 to the 1930s. This edited collection focuses on the death-bed, funerals, burials, mourning customs, and the expression of grief. The essays throw fresh light on developments which lie at the roots of present-day tendencies to minimize or conceal the most unpleasant aspects of death, among them the growing participation of doctors in the management of death-beds in the eighteenth century and the creation of extra-mural cemeteries, followed by the introduction of cremation in the nineteenth century. The volume also underlines the importance of religious belief, in helping the bereaved in past times. The book will appeal to students and academics of family and social history as well as history of medicine, religion and anthropology.

With high mortality rates, it has been assumed that the poor in Victorian and Edwardian Britain did not mourn their dead. Contesting this approach, Julie-Marie Strange studies the expression of grief among the working class, demonstrating that poverty increased - rather than deadened - it. She illustrates the mourning practices of the working classes through chapters addressing care of the corpse, the funeral, the cemetery, commemoration, and high infant mortality rates. The book draws on a broad range of sources to analyse the feelings and behaviours of the labouring poor, using not only personal testimony but also fiction, journalism, and official reports. It concludes that poor people did not only use spoken or written words to express their grief, but also complex symbols, actions and, significantly, silence. This book will be an invaluable contribution to an important and neglected area of social and cultural history.

Popular culture has reimagined death as entertainment and monsters as heroes, reflecting a profound contempt for the human race