Rites of Passage
Death and Mourning in Victorian Britain
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Published:29th Feb '24
£25.00
Available for immediate dispatch.
A forensic history of dying, death, and mourning in Victorian Britain by the acclaimed historian Judith Flanders, bestselling author of The Victorian House.
'Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders' - Douglas Robert-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis and The Turning Point
In Rites of Passage, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally – to modern eyes – bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain.
Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying.
This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. In elegant, often witty prose, Flanders brings the Victorian way of death vividly to life.
Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders, and in Rites of Passage she offers a compelling and often darkly comic history of the period’s fascination with death. -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces and The Turning Point, A Year That Changed Dickens and the World
Flanders writes with sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail . . . and rather relishes the swirling gothic atmosphere of her subject, which takes in everything from bodysnatching to suicide, capital punishment to cremation * The Telegraph *
The socio-economics of death in the long 19th century proves gruesomely fascinating and Flanders is a skilful marshaller of details to prove i . . . A gifted social historian * Financial Times *
Flanders never forgets the human aspect of the Victorians as she richly documents their varied ways of coping with death. * Literary Review *
Sometimes sad, often witty, Rites of Passage makes for a thought-provoking and surprisingly entertaining sepulchral journey. * The Herald *
There is no aspect of Victorian death that does not make it into Judith Flanders’s latest investigation into 19th-century life . . . Flanders’s strength has always been to move deftly between micro and macro, the general and the particular, the societal and the entirely personal, to produce that kind of panoramic yet teeming view beloved of the Victorians themselves. * Sunday Times *
ISBN: 9781509816972
Dimensions: 241mm x 164mm x 32mm
Weight: 585g
352 pages