Death and Violence in Some Victorian School Reading Books

Abstract

Attitudes toward death and the management of death and dying have changed markedly over the last century. The Victorian obsession with death—manifest in literature and in elaborate funerary and mourning rites—was superseded in the twentieth century by what Aries calls "the interdict laid upon death in industrialized societies" with death medicalized and removed to hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices. The last two decades, however, have seen that interdict challenged in a sizable literature on death and how it should be managed. Tony Walter, for example, notes a 1987 bibliography listing 1,700 books in English on death and dying published between 1979 and 1986.