Death in England: An Illustrated History (review)

Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings, eds. Death in England: An Illustrated History. Reprint. Originally published in 1999. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. xiv + 282 pp. Ill. $60.00 (cloth), $30.00 (paperbound).

Death in England is, surprisingly, the first full historical overview of this subject; or perhaps it is not so surprising: moving from prehistory to the present day, this dizzying length of time might well have put off individual authors from attempting such a massive project. The solution adopted in this case is to use several distinguished historians of death (Rosemary Horrox, Clare Gittings, Ralph Houlbrooke, Patricia Jalland, and so on) from different periods to patch together a book that manages to come in at under three hundred pages.

In ten chapters, the book progresses from "remote times to the Bronze Age," the Iron and Roman Ages, "Pagans and Christians" (400-1150), the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (1558-1660), the Enlightenment (1660-1760), Romanticism (1760-1850), the Victorian era (1850-1918), and the rest of the twentieth century to 1998. The periodization here is interesting and possibly objectionable, challenging some of the more common dates of traditional history by transforming the Romantic period into a "long" one of 1760-1850 rather than the usual 1790-1832. Is this the Romanticists' revenge for the recent encroachment of the "long" eighteenth century on their period?

One wonders who selected the dates as a division of labor in this volume, as this issue of organization goes to the heart of the usual question about a multiauthor volume: will it be coherent? For example, Ralph Houlbrooke's and Julie Rugg's excellent essays on the cusp of 1760 do not really offer a discontinuity or modulation between Houlbrooke's depiction of the rational attitude of the earlier eighteenth century toward death and Rugg's apparent sense of the novelty of a late eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics that is, by rights, of a piece with the rest of that century and therefore should fall under Houlbrooke's remit. Rugg is on firmer ground when discussing the rise of the Evangelical movement and its effects on attitudes to death, but even then it could be placed much earlier than 1760. While she rightly states that the transition toward a more "modern," secular experience of death was not an easy progression, the movement from Houlbrooke's piece to her own makes the experience of the reader smoother than it should be.

The editors make a virtue of diversity by stressing that, although the book covers certain core themes such as "demography and the causes of death, the process of dying, concepts of the afterlife, funeral rites, bereavement and commemoration" (p. 1), the individual contributors are free to follow their own inclinations on how much weight to accord each element. The interdisciplinary nature of the project is aided by the differing methodologies of the authors, including archaeology (clearly essential in the early periods), sociology, and history, with a reasonable portion of medical history, and a certain amount of art history--although the aesthetic element in this lavishly illustrated history (141 illustrations and plates) is subservient to the historical imperative of the volume. The medical element ranges from discussion of the demographics of disease, such as the effects of the plague and cholera, to the divergent representations of diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer.

Does it work? With certain caveats, the answer is yes. The quality of the scholarship is first-rate all the way through, even if it is mostly a lucid precis of the authors' previous, more in-depth writing: Patricia Jalland's chapter on Victorian death, for example, does not move too far from her seminal book Death in the Victorian Family (1996). However, this is not a criticism, for the editors' avowed intention is to address the general reader rather than the specialist: the contributors provide a useful select bibliography for each period. Taken as a whole...