Rites of Passage: Death and Mourning in Victorian Britain

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There is no aspect of Victorian death that does not make it into Judith Flanders's latest investigation into 19th-century life' - The Sunday Times 'Flanders writes with sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail' - The Telegraph 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.

Reviews

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 periods 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 it . . . 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 Flanderss latest investigation into 19th-century life . . . Flanderss 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 *

Author Bio

Judith Flanders is the author of several critically acclaimed and bestselling books: A Circle of Sisters, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award; The Invention of Murder, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction; The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year; The Making of Home; Christmas: A History and A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. In her copious leisure time, she also writes the Sam Clair series of comic crime novels.