This engrossing book explores family experiences of dying, death,
grieving, and mourning between 1830 and 1920. Victorian letters and
diaries reveal a deep preoccupation with death because of a shorter
life expectancy, a high death rate for infants and children, and a
dominant Christian culture. Using the private correspondence,
diaries, and death memorials of fifty-five middle and upper-class
British families, Pat Jalland shows us how dying, death, and
grieving were experienced by Victorian families and how the manner
and rituals of death and mourning varied with age, gender, disease,
religious belief, family size and class. She examines deathbed
scenes, good and bad deaths, funerals and cremations, widowhood,
and the roles of religion and medicine. Chapters on the deaths of
children and old people demonstrate the importance of the stages of
the life-cycle, as well as the failure of many actual deathbeds to
achieve the Christian ideal of the good death. The consolations of
Christian faith and private memory, and the transformation in the
ideas and beliefs about heaven, hell, and immortality are analysed.
The rise and decline of Evangelicalism, the influence of unbelief
and secularism, falling mortality, and the trauma of the Great War
are all key motors of change in this period. This fascinating study
of death and bereavement in the past helps us to understand the
present, especially in the context of the modern tendency to avoid
the subject of dying, and to minimize the public expression of
grief. In their practical and compassionate treatment of death, the
Victorians have much to teach us today.
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