The Narrative of the Good Death: The Evangelical Deathbed in Victorian England by Mary Riso (review)

In The Narrative of the Good Death: The Evangelical Deathbed in Victorian England, Mary Riso's study of obituaries in evangelical Nonconformist magazines from 1830 to 1880, we encounter lists of the ways in which people have died: "being struck by a tree branch on a farm or a heavy stone at work, falling into a flour mill, breaking the skull while repairing machinery in an iron forge, [and] injury by a ballast wagon"; others left this life by "being thrown from a carriage" or from "a bruise on the arm that mortified," from "a cold caught while on a voyage," an attack "by an enraged bull," and being "run over by a train" (qtd. in Riso 106). Riso fills her book with such vivid lists, pulled from 1,200 accounts of the lives and deaths of Dissenters. These tales of unique existences and endings are the best parts of Riso's diligently researched project, and they seem to start off the page. There is Mary Ann Mayos of Hereford, who was eighty when she died in 1879. She "instituted a preaching service in a cottage close by which led to the formation of a class of which she was leader. The group grew and a chapel was built mainly at her own expense" (qtd. in Riso 115). Of the Primitive Methodist William Swinden, a shoemaker in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, who died suddenly when he was seventy-one, we learn, "His natural temperament was a little peculiar, and on some occasions his manner, to a stranger especially, would appear rather repulsive" (qtd. in Riso 48).

We read about many so-called good deaths, such as Miss Oakden's, which was, according to the obituary in The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, "not only peaceful, but ineffably beautiful; so strikingly so, that her friends for some moments seemed to lose the idea of mortality in the glorious transition of the soul to life" (qtd. in Riso 37). The Baptist J. E. Giles's death in 1870 was "like one who had fallen asleep," and John Smith, who died in 1834 at fifty-three, "fixed his eyes on the foot of the bed, and with a transport of joy, exclaimed, 'O my Jesus is there!'" then said to his wife, "'I am dying, do you hear the beautiful music? I must go'" (qtd. in Riso 53, 147). Tracking changes in attitudes about death throughout these years, Riso finds more authenticity and openness later in the century. Instead of purely consolatory words on the rapture at death, statements tinged with a sense of despair and injustice were printed. The Congregational Minister Henry Wonnacott, a young man from Hull, died in 1877 saying of himself, "'Just think … only twenty-seven, and the heart failing! … Thousands of prayers have been offered for me: they will not be answered; God says "No!" and therefore it must be right; must it not?'" (qtd. in Riso 202).

Riso, a historian at Gordon College in Massachusetts, follows the rise in concerns about respectability—responsibility, generosity, sobriety, but also income and social status—as well as shifts in gender norms during these years. The decrease in obituaries about women was due in part, Riso explains, to women's circumscribed and less visible activities in the larger world; as obituaries became worldlier, they focused on men. She explores the influence of Romantic poetry on the writing style of obituaries, especially in the 1850s, with an increase in sentimentality, symbolism, and imaginative prose, not to mention quotations from the poems of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Romantic notions such as the sacredness of everyday life and the celebration of subjective experience began to inform these accounts of lives and deaths.

The stories of these individuals have such vitality because Riso's prose, in contrast, feels mostly uninspired and at times even flat. Whether or not...