Death in the Victorian Family - Hardcover

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.)

Jalland s exploration of death and bereavement has broken new ground in the study of death. (Julie-Marie Strange, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.35.)

The value of Jalland s study, however, lies in the fact that she has moved the discussion of death beyond the boundaries of funeral custom (and expense) and the cemetry to consider grief as a pervasive experience which often stretched from the sickness of the dying to long after their burial had taken place. (Julie-Marie Strange, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.35.)

Jalland s text is perhaps exceptional in her attempt to gauge the disparate, -experimental- aspect of death and bereavement prior to the privatization of death during the twentieth century. (Julie-Marie Strange, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.35.)

This is by far the best account we have of the elite Victorian attitudes toward dying and death ... a book rich in telling detail, sensitive to its subjects, a very important contribution to a growing literature on death and dying ... this fine book provides a vivid portrait of concepts of dying in another, very different era. (John R Gillis, Victorian Studies, Autumn 1997)

Jalland offers a revealing picture of the process and perception of death in middle-class Victorian society ... This book deserves a wide audience for its thoughtful and thoroughly professional approach to a topic of vital contemporary concern and interest. (Richard J. Janet, Catholic Historical Review)

the power of her book lies simply in its detail - in this case the intelligent use of a mass of Victorian family papers and the individual histories they throw up...This is an excellent book, learned, wide-ranging (The Spectator)

Her book is the first really to grapple with the connection between personal behaviour and public precept in this area (The Guardian)

cool and sombre study (The Sunday Times)

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.