Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (review)

This is a long-awaited and welcome addition to scholarship on the history of death, dying, and bereavement. For too long now, historical writing on death—from Philippe Aries, John McManners, or Pat Jalland—has focused our attention on the end-of-life experiences of the middle and higher social classes. It has been extremely difficult for scholars in death and dying to access the few highly dispersed and often esoteric historical sources that would allow those of us outside specialist historical circles to find material to balance this bourgeois image of death in the Victorian era. Julie-Marie Strange presents a wonderful sourcebook as well as a highly critical set of arguments about the death, dying, and loss experiences of the British working classes during the late Victorian period.

Strange's sources derive from what she describes as "little-used empirical ma-terial": minutes and correspondence of burial boards; transcripts of meetings of poor law guardians; visitor reports of medical officers of health; as well as the more commonly consulted work of investigative journalists, novelists, and social commentators.

The chapters cover experiences of dying and its care, corpse care, and funerals, as well as grief, loss, and memorialisation experiences of the working classes. The book challenges a number of longstanding stereotypes of working-class images of death and loss—the dominance of silence, passivity, or fatalism—by providing us with contrasting images of sorrow, despair, and agency in accounts of grief experience over the death of children or the care of people who die slowly at home. Strange argues that social qualities such as silence have many meanings and cannot be understood apart from matters of gender, ethnicity, and class. Her often poignant and nuanced analyses strive not just for a deeper sociology of the emotions, but also for a fair historical portrayal of how feelings are mediated, not obliterated, by the social and economic determinants of poverty.

Strange departs from previous historical work on death, dying, and loss in many other ways as well. She resists the common temptation to theorize about grief and loss by engaging with the medical and psychiatric literature, a frequently unsuccessful and unilluminating approach taken by some historians and social scientists. Strange also avoids sentimentalising the mortality experiences of people from these times—no mean feat when reviewing the sheer number of tragic and humiliating experiences of death and loss for this group. Yet she offers the reader an empathic and respectful reading of their emotions and attitudes that, at the same time, stops short of ethnocentrism. There is a cautious and ever-present reserve in the writing that acknowledges the complexities of experience, representation, and retrospective interpretation. Finally, the book rehearses many of the key debates and considerations in historical methodology without belabouring or obscuring them. Indeed, the writing is accessible and engaging. This book is not just an academic history but an enjoyable read.

Strange's contribution to our understanding of how the death and loss experiences of the working classes were appropriated after the Great War is a major achievement in itself. Symbolic languages of loss—such as silence, for example—were augmented after the war, as mourning for the war dead stripped grief of its former middle-class commercial trappings. These are important insights with major sociological implications for how we might chart the role of silence in twentieth-century death, dying, and loss. Silence has frequently attracted poor press for its presence in doctor-patient encounters breaking bad news; in grief and cultural theories about women and loss; as well as in everyday folk theories about the adequacy of silent responses to trauma and grief.

There is much in Strange's book that lays fertile and useful grounds for further investigation, theorization, and teaching. Her critical analysis of silence in grief strengthens the suspicion of many of us in the social sciences that the current emphasis on talk—so dominant in academic and therapeutic American...