A01=Lydia Murdoch
Author_Lydia Murdoch
British abolitionists
British history
British rights and citizenship
British sanitation reformers
British state
British suffragists
Category=JBSP1
Category=JHBZ
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
child death
child factory work
child labor
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
global nineteenth-century studies
history of childhood
history of emotions
nineteenth-century Britain
public grief
public mourning
state and empire
transatlantic history
Victorian childhood
Victorian culture
Victorian death
Victorian mourning
Victorian studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780813953823
- Weight: 392g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Dec 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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How a new culture of bereavement changed the relationship of the Victorian state to its most vulnerable subjects
When the Tory Member of Parliament Michael Sadler argued in 1832 for state intervention on behalf of Britain's dying child factory workers, he elicited smirks and ridicule from his Liberal adversaries - a response that would have been unimaginable by the century's end. What We Mourn traces the changing understandings of child death within British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts and reveals the importance of youth and emotion to constructions of the modern state.
As childhood took on new meanings over the course of the long nineteenth century, public mourning for the premature deaths of children emerged as a way of asserting and even redefining British rights and citizenship. Factory hands and abolitionists, sanitation reformers and suffragists democratized and politicized their grief as they called upon the state to recognize their lives as part of a new, reimagined political order. As Lydia Murdoch shows, carrying their own and others' private grief into the public sphere - with petitions and marches, public lectures and poetry - allowed marginalized members of society to assert their claim to rights. What We Mourn explores both the power and the limitations of a new politics founded on grief and the protection of child life.
When the Tory Member of Parliament Michael Sadler argued in 1832 for state intervention on behalf of Britain's dying child factory workers, he elicited smirks and ridicule from his Liberal adversaries - a response that would have been unimaginable by the century's end. What We Mourn traces the changing understandings of child death within British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts and reveals the importance of youth and emotion to constructions of the modern state.
As childhood took on new meanings over the course of the long nineteenth century, public mourning for the premature deaths of children emerged as a way of asserting and even redefining British rights and citizenship. Factory hands and abolitionists, sanitation reformers and suffragists democratized and politicized their grief as they called upon the state to recognize their lives as part of a new, reimagined political order. As Lydia Murdoch shows, carrying their own and others' private grief into the public sphere - with petitions and marches, public lectures and poetry - allowed marginalized members of society to assert their claim to rights. What We Mourn explores both the power and the limitations of a new politics founded on grief and the protection of child life.
Lydia Murdoch is Professor of History at Vassar College and the author of Daily Life of Victorian Women.
