Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (review)

When this book was published, in the year nought, John Wolffe was Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the Open University in England. Great Deaths appears in the stately guise of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph. Wolffe, already known as the author of massively researched studies on The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829-1860 (1991) and God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945 (1994), has done the Academy proud. He has also written a book that will be of interest not only to historians of religion, but to all students of Victorian culture and, indeed, to thanatologists of all periods.

Detailed consideration is given to nine cases of "great deaths": Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, whose elaborate obsequies demand a whole chapter to themselves (1852); Prince Albert (1861), who shares a chapter with Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (1892); David Livingstone (1874), who is contrasted with that mysterious imperial hero, General Gordon (1885); Benjamin Disraeli (1881), who is contrasted with his old opponent, William Gladstone (1898); Queen Victoria (1901) and her son, King Edward VII (1910). Other cases illuminate particular themes in the book, among them Thomas Chalmers (1847), Daniel O'Connell (1847), Lord Palmerston (1865), Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany (1884), and Charles Stewart Parnell (1891). (The designers of Great Deaths have shown their respect to these figures by binding the book in a mourning format.)

Wolffe describes the last days and hours of his luminaries with skill and tact. His real interest, however, is in what happened next. Gordon is unique, in that his body was never found. In all the others cases there most certainly was a body, and this study examines what those who were left behind did with it between the deathbed and the grave, with the eyes of the nation upon them. Great public funerals made a considerable impact upon the national psyche, even in an age before television. Even at a cautiously low estimate, it is calculated that almost five percent of the population witnessed the Iron Duke's funeral. When Charles Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Stanley of Westminster asked that the grave be left open, so that his humbler readers, who had not attended the funeral, could lean on the temporary railings and throw in their messages and floral tributes. People of all political persuasions mourned the death of Gladstone, the Grand Old Man, whose public apotheosis extended over five days. When Victoria died, the news interrupted a picture show at the Empire Theatre in Cardiff, and a portrait of the Queen projected on the screen as the band played the "Dead March."

The very fact that great deaths made such an impact put considerable pressure on those who organized public funerals. Edward VII was discussing Victoria's funeral arrangements only an hour after her death. Material gathered in an appendix on "The Organization of Funerals" shows why. A document in the Public Record Office, for example, entitled "Precedents of Public Funerals which May Be Applicable to the Funeral of the Duke of Wellington," lists seven leading figures, ranging from the Lord Chamberlain to the Lord Mayor of London, and their onerous duties, which were hedged about by time-consuming protocol. Things always went wrong, of course, although some slips were more unfortunate than others. The irony of people dying in the crush at the lying in state of Wellington might have provided Thomas Hardy with good copy for a poem. It was the breaking of the horses' traces at Victoria's funeral, on the other hand, that created a moving precedent, as the sailors picked up the broken harnessing and themselves pulled the gun-carriage—silent on its india rubber tyres, at the Queen's special request—through the streets of Windsor...