Awards

• Winner of Winner of 1997 New South Wales Premier's History Award.

Overview

This enthralling book explores the experience of dying, death, grieving, and mourning in the years between 1830-1920. 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. Drawing upon the private correspondence, diaries and death memorial of fifty-five middle and upper class families, Pat Jalland shows us how dying, death and grieving were experience 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, mourning rituals, widowhood, and the roles of religion and medicine.

Full Product Details

Author:   Pat Jalland (Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences, Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.70cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.754kg
ISBN:  

9780198208327

ISBN 10:   0198208324
Pages:   476
Publication Date:   04 November 1999
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order  
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

PART 1. DEATH AND DYING The Evangelical ideal of the 'Good Death' The Revival and Decline of the Good Christian Death Bad Deaths, Sudden Deaths, and Suicides Death and the Victorian Doctors Nurses, Consultants, and Terminal Prognoses 'That Little Company of Angels': The Tragedy of Children's Deaths Death in Old Age In Search of the Good Death: Death in the Gladstone and Lyttelton Families 1835-1915 PART II. GRIEF AND MOURNING Introduction to Part II Funeral Reform and the Cremation Debate The Funeral Week Widows: Gendered Experiences of Widowhood Widowers: Gendered Experiences of Widowhood Christian Consolations and Heavenly Reunions The Consolations of Memory Rituals of Sorrow: Mourning-Dress and Condolence Letters Chronic and Abnormal Grief: Queen Victoria, Lady Frederick Cavendish, and Emma Haden 'A Solitude beyond the Reach of God or Man': Victorian Agnostics and Death Epilogue. After the Victorians: Social Memory, Spiritualism, and the Great War Notes Location of Manuscript Collections Index

Reviews

This is by far the best account we have of elite Victorian attitudes toward dying and death....[It is] a book rich in telling detail, sensitive to its subjects, a very important contribution to a growing literature on death and dying. --Victorian Studies<br> .,. in both depth and breadth this is a valuable contribution to Victorian social history, revealing the rich diversities and intriguing implications in the social construction of a universal and inevitable physiological process. --American Historical Review<br> Well conceived, organized, and written... --Choice<br> This book deserves a wide audience for its thoughtful and thoroughly professional approach to a topic of vital contemporary concern and interest. --The Catholic Historical Review<br>

<br> This is by far the best account we have of elite Victorian attitudes toward dying and death....[It is] a book rich in telling detail, sensitive to its subjects, a very important contribution to a growing literature on death and dying. --Victorian Studies<br>. ..in both depth and breadth this is a valuable contribution to Victorian social history, revealing the rich diversities and intriguing implications in the social construction of a universal and inevitable physiological process. --American Historical Review<br> Well conceived, organized, and written... --Choice<br> This book deserves a wide audience for its thoughtful and thoroughly professional approach to a topic of vital contemporary concern and interest. --The Catholic Historical Review<br>

This is a fascinating book, considering a very interesting topic at what ... is the period of our history which it finds its most enlightening form. Its strength lies in its detail and the picture of individual lives that it creates. This is a welcome addition to the history of the period. PW. Pat Jalland's research is impressive, drawing on a vast range of resources taken from the archives of 55 Victorian and Edwardian families. PW.

Author Information

Pat Jalland is Associate Professor of History at Murdoch University, WA. From 27 January 1997 she will be Professor of History at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University. Her books include Women, Marriage, and Politics 1860-1914, which won the non-fiction prize in the 1987 Western Australia Week Literary Awards.

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