Waking the Dead Nineteenth-century obituaries as a mirror of Maltese society (1815-c.1910)

Nineteenth-century obituaries did not only commemorate the dead. They also served to indicate the standards of conduct deemed respectable by the Maltese upper classes. This book analyses these obituaries on two levels. Firstly, it seeks to determine the qualities of deceased individuals according to sex, age, profession and occupation. In the second part, it considers obituaries as markers of social identity for a class of society hemmed in between the colonial power above and the mass of the poor and uneducated population below. In so doing, death notices clearly delineated the desiderata of membership to respectable society.