Description

‘Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders’ – Douglas Robert-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis and The Turning Point

In Rites of Passage, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally – to modern eyes – bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain.

Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying.

This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. In elegant, often witty prose, Flanders brings the Victorian way of death vividly to life.

Publisher Review

Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders, and in Rites of Passage she offers a compelling and often darkly comic history of the period's fascination with death. Ranging from mourning jewellery to vampires, and from miniature coffins to the opening of Britain's first crematorium, her book helps modern readers understand what it was like to live at a time when thoughts of not living were as inescapable as gravity. -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces and The Turning Point, A Year That Changed Dickens and the World