Death in the Victorian Family

Death in the Victorian Family explores the attitudes and rituals that marked death and dying in prominent middle- and upper-middle-class British families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pat Jalland combed the manuscript collections of fifty-five prominent and predominantly Anglican families, scouring the letters, wills, diaries, and memorials of two (or even three) generations. The result is a rich and highly textured book that captures the voices of the dying person and of individual family members and documents divergences between rhetoric and reality. It is at once intimate and analytic, and it demonstrates that the culture of death is an important topic for historical investigation.

The book opens in the first decades of the nineteenth century, an era when Evangelical piety dominated the lives of this cohort of British men and women. Its religious tenets gave a centrality to the dying process. Indeed, the script it provided linked spiritual salvation to a good death. This was a death that occurred at home; the family was close by, gathering evidence of a tranquil passage, which was the sign of immortality. The ministrations of the clergy took precedence over those of the physician. Since in this era the dying were often children and young adults, these rituals were supposed to provide solace and even tame the terror of death—but Jalland notes that few deaths fit the ideal: “In practice,” she concludes, “the good Evangelical death . . . was achieved more often in Evangelical tracts than in family life” (p. 38).

By the end of the nineteenth century, death and dying were no longer dominated by family. A decline in piety, argues Jalland, led to an increased concern about physical pain. The rituals of the physician, particularly the relief of pain, were elevated over the precepts of the minister. As the dying were more often elderly and senile, deathbed farewells were less meaningful. But these changes, too, were transient: the catastrophic battlefront losses during World War I once again affected the culture of death in Britain. “Social memory,” Jalland maintains, “was turned into new forms of ‘civil religion’ by the terrible mass deaths of the Great War” (p. 358). Her discussion of this final change is very brief and demonstrates that there is still much to be understood about the history of death.

Jalland limits her study to the experiences of one social class. She justifies this decision by noting that in Britain a “cultural gulf between rich and poor affected most aspects of life, including death,” and that generalizations from class to class are misleading (p. 1). This omission should not detract from the book, but there may be more cultural communication between classes than Jalland suggests, particularly in the aftermath of World War I, when families of all social classes mourned the sudden and unanticipated losses of husbands, brothers, and sons. Moreover, social memory, which Jalland maintains became the most common form of grieving, was not the exclusive preserve of the upper class.

Jalland’s interest in the history of death and mourning emerged from her interest in the Victorian family as a social institution, and in the way that religion shaped the lives of its members. Unfortunately, she is less attentive to the effect of specific diseases on the dying process. Three of the four deaths that she explicates to demonstrate conformity with the Evangelical ideal of the good death in the early nineteenth century were of persons who died from consumption. Jalland is puzzled by this fact: “It seems paradoxical,” she writes, “that a disease which was a product of poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions should have been idealized” (p. 40). But she fails to recognize that in this era the disease affected all social classes, or that, before 1882 when Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus, tuberculosis was presumed to be a hereditary rather than a contagious disease and was not linked to the standard of living. Since the disease wasted the body but not the mind, its sufferers’ lucidity allowed their deaths to...