This page intentionally left blank Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 With high mortality rates, it has been assumed that the poor in Victorian and Edwardian Britain did not mourn their dead. Contesting this approach, Julie- Marie Strange studies the expression of grief among the working classes, demon- strating that poverty increased – rather than deadened – it. She illustrates the mourning practices of the working classes through chapters addressing care of the corpse, the funeral, the cemetery, commemoration and high infant mortality rates. The book draws on a broad range of sources to analyse the feelings and behaviours of the labouring poor, using not only personal testimony but also fiction, journalism and official reports. It concludes that poor people used not only spoken or written words to express their grief, but also complex symbols, actions and, significantly, silence. This book will be an invaluable contribution to an important and neglected area of social and cultural history. JULIE-MARIE STRANGE is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Cambridge So cial and Cul tural Histories Series editors: Margot C. Finn, University of Warwick Colin Jones, University of Warwick Keith Wrightson, Yale University New cultural histories have recently expanded the parameters (and enriched the methodologies) of social history. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories recognises the plurality of current approaches to social and cultural history as distinctive points of entry into a common explanatory project. Open to innovative and interdisciplinary work, regardless of its chronological or geographical location, the series encompasses a broad range of histories of social relationships and of the cultures that inform them and lend them meaning. Histori cal anthropology, historical sociology, comparative history, gender history and historicist literary studies – among other subjects – all fall within the remit of Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories. Titles in the series include: 1 Margot C. Finn The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 2 M. J. D. Roberts Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 3 Karen Harvey Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture 4 Phil Withington The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England 5 Mark S. Dawson Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London 6 Julie-Marie Strange Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 Julie-Marie Strange University of Manchester cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru,UK First published in print format isbn-13 978-0-521-83857-3 isbn-13 978-0-511-12529-4 © Julie-Marie Strange 2005 2005 Informationonthistitle:www.cambrid g e.or g /9780521838573 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. isbn-10 0-511-12529-1 isbn-10 0-521-83857-6 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org hardback eBook (EBL) eBook (EBL) hardback In loving memory of Sylvia Ann Bamber 1944–1993 Contents Acknowledgements page viii List of abbreviations x 1 Introduction: revisiting the Victorian and Edwardian celebration of death 1 2 Life, sickness and death 27 3 Caring for the corpse 66 4 The funeral 98 5 Only a pauper whom nobody owns: reassessing the pauper burial 131 6 Remembering the dead: the cemetery as a landscape for grief 163 7 Loss, memory and the management of feeling 194 8 Grieving for dead children 230 9 Epilogue: death, grief and the Great War 263 Bibliography 274 Index 290 vii Acknowledgements Lots of people have encouraged and supported the writing of this book either by reading parts of it, exchanging ideas over the topic or simply telling me to get a move on and finish it; I would like to thank all of them, especially Paul Johnson, including anonymous readers and referees. Thanks also to the British Academy who funded the thesis. To the students at Birkbeck College and the University of Manchester who took my Death and Bereavement course, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and for making what could be a morbid topic to teach such a fun and enjoyable experience. Thank you also to the editors at Cambridge University Press for patience, feedback and support. It goes without saying that all the omissions, mistakes and opinions cited here are entirely my own. I would also like to thank the editors at Past and Present who published a version of chapter 5 and at Social History who published an essay which included versions of material here from chapters 3, 4 and 7. In particular, howe ver, I wish to thank Jon Lawrence and Andrew Davies who supervised the book when it started life as a thesis. Jon’s blunt and honest criticism and Andy’s more soothing, diplomatic cri- tiques made an excellent pairing and I couldn’t have wished for better supervision. Added to this, the best food I ever ate throughout my thesis and some years afterwards was on account of Jon, Jane and Joe’s generous hospitality: thank you. Bizarre as it may seem, I would like to thank the staff at Wavertree Sports Centre in Liverpool; classes here saved my sanity on more than one occasion. Geographical mobility means that many friendships shift shape as the years go by and I would like to thank the many friends, old and new, who have encouraged the writing of this book at different stages. I would especially like to thank old friends Jane Collins and Heather Ware. Special thanks also go to my sister Suzanne for friendship, love, humour and support – and also, more recently, for introducing me to the delights of being an aunt to a glorious Lily Rose. Special thanks to my parents David and Christina Strange who have supported me unstintingly viii [...]... Johnson, ‘Conspicuous Consumption and Working-Class Culture in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 38 (1988), 27–42 P Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 11 6 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 working-class definitions of respectability, depending as it did on one payment of... Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 this is a problematic and abstract definition as poverty and ‘privation’ are concepts invested with individual and shifting meanings often related to further arbitrary notions of a poverty line.82 In contemporary texts, the poor were variously referred to as the ‘un/deserving poor’, the ‘residue’, ‘people of the abyss’ and, of course, ‘paupers’ Within... 102–11 (104) 16 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 anthropological studies that concentrate on social and cultural practice As Douglas Davies illustrates, theories concerning death, grief and mourning ritual in foreign cultures can be reformulated into tools for approaching both contemporary and historical culture; for exploring that which is pre- and post-modern.56 In a global and historical... Vincent’s account Having noted the difficulties inherent in reading silence in autobiography, Vincent then equates literary emotional containment with ‘coping’ and recovery in an experiential context Approached from a different perspective, it could be argued, as this book does, that silence speaks volumes 12 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 Pioneering in its attempt to approach the interpersonal... insurance of infant lives) have obscured a working-class culture of grief The final chapter is intended as an epilogue, engaging with the literature of death and bereavement in 24 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 relation to the Great War and arguing that responses to soldiers’ deaths not only drew upon existing conceptions of mourning, but, also, reframed and perpetuated those notions into a... Ibid 14 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 future Gissing leaves us, therefore, with a picture of sincere grief which is mute, confused and lonely In shifting analysis away from a preoccupation with consumerism and respectability, this book will take up the themes and metaphors of Gissing’s third funeral in order to reframe a narrative of working-class responses to death in terms of grief. .. of something (or someone) that one had at a previous time Grief indicates the emotional pain and suffering an individual feels at such loss Since the publication of Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in 1917, grief in Western culture has been increasingly pathologised, acquiring a symptomatology and recognised ‘stages’ of recovery and resolution: initial responses of shock, disbelief and denial... disappeared but has been invested with new meaning Prior, Social Organisation of Death, 4–12 P Mellor, ‘Death in High Modernity: The Contemporary Presence and Absence of Death’ in D Clark (ed.), The Sociology of Death: Theory, Culture, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 11–30 20 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 Aries seeks to control and contain his subject Indeed, in emphasising ` death as the... to mourn, he equates grief with a suspension in daily routines and responsibilities It is also worth noting that Vincent refrains from explaining his distinctions between emotional containment, grief and ‘pure’ grief Moreover, in concentrating on the working man (most of the autobiographies were authored by men), he neglects bereaved women and overlooks the potential for friends and relations to turn... the inarticulacy of bereavement and it demonstrates how public rituals of mourning and commemoration were appropriated by individuals and given unique meaning In this sense, a single funeral could represent shared understandings of death and mourning but was fragmented into multiple meanings by those who participated in it Ultimately, it suggests that the apparent candour and resignation of the working . Stuart London 6 Julie-Marie Strange Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 Julie-Marie Strange University. Banks’, 336–7. 6 Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 continues to render the concept ‘confusing’ today. Pointing to the differ- ing criteria for