Old rituals hold clues to dealing with death today

By Damon Shorter

When it comes to dealing with death, we have a lot to learn from 19th-century British families, according to an ANU historian who has spent several years studying death, grief, mourning and the different Western rituals associated with dying.

"In Victorian times, death was a natural part of family life in a way it has ceased to be today," said Professor Pat Jalland from the Research School of Social Sciences. "We now expect people to die when they are old. But in the 19th century, infancy was the most probable time of death."

Prof Jalland said the prevalence of death in 19th century Britain meant people were more accustomed to dealing with grief and coped better with the loss of friends and family than they do today.

Prof Jalland's book, Death in the Victorian Family, published by Oxford University Press, examines family experiences of dying, grieving and mourning in Britain between 1830 and 1920. Chapters on the deaths of children and old people explore the importance of age, religion, class, gender and disease, as well as the failure of many actual deathbed experiences to achieve the Christian ideal of a 'good death'.

The book, which has been short-listed for the NSW Premier's Prize for History, describes how the funerals and mourning rituals of Victorian Britain helped the bereaved cope with the pain and loss of death by providing support systems and a structured framework for grieving. For most Victorian Protestants, religious belief also helped soften the blow of death, Prof Jalland said.

In preparing her history of death, she sifted through the archives of more than 65 middle and upper-class Victorian families, studying private diaries, memorials and correspondence, death memorabilia and letters of condolence.

Prof Jalland became fascinated by the preoccupation with death in Victorian letters and diaries while researching for a book about women, marriage and politics in the last century. "This intense concern with death was an understandable response to the high mortality rates and frequent occurrence of death in infancy and early childhood before 1900, reinforced by the dominant Christian culture," she explained.

Demographic and medical changes between 1830 and 1920 contributed to a fundamental shift in attitudes towards death, Prof Jalland said. So also did the decline in the influence in Christianity, the rising influence of science and secularism, and exposure to the mass deaths of the First World War. These factors undermined traditional certainties about death and the nature of immortality, she wrote.

The book raises questions which are relevant today, as debates about euthanasia, palliative care, new developments in medical technology and AIDS once again focus public attention on dying, and modern rituals that exist for dealing with grief.