Rites of Passage: Death and Mourning in Victorian Britain (Hardback) - Judith Flanders

A forensic history of dying, death, and mourning in Victorian Britain by the acclaimed historian Judith Flanders, bestselling author of The Victorian House.

'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.

About the Author

Judith Flanders is the author of several critically acclaimed and bestselling books: A Circle of Sisters, which was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award; The Invention of Murder, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction; The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed; The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year; The Making of Home, Christmas: A History, and A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order. In her copious leisure time, she also writes the Sam Clair series of comic crime novels.