Rites of Passage

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19th Century
A Tale of Two Cities
A01=Judith Flanders
Author_Judith Flanders
Bleak House
Category=JHBZ
Category=NHTF
Charles Dickens
child death
cholera
crime
death
deathbed
disease
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
funeral
grief
history
infant mortality
Judith Flanders
London
mourning
plague
Queen Victoria
social history
The Victorian House
Victorian history
Victorians

Product details

  • ISBN 9781509817511
  • Weight: 254g
  • Dimensions: 130 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 27 Feb 2025
  • Publisher: Pan Macmillan
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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'There is no aspect of Victorian death that does not make it into Judith Flanders’s latest investigation into 19th-century life' - The Sunday Times

'Flanders writes with sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail' - The Telegraph

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.

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.

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