Drawing the pillow, laying out and port wine: the moral economy of death, dying and bereavement in England, c.1840–1930

Abstract

In 1997, Gillian Bennett and Steve Roud of the Folklore Society (FLS) highlighted the resources available to historians of death, dying, funerals and bereavement within the archives of the FLS. They contended that, despite the outdated scholarly apparatus employed by the Victorian and early twentieth century folklorists, the FLS archive nonetheless contains a wealth of valuable, yet largely neglected ethnohistorical data. In 2000, Simpson and Roud remarked that ‘There are many books on upper and middle-class funerals [but] [t]here is no single study of folk customs at funerals’. This article is an attempt to remedy this continuing deficiency, drawing upon evidence from Folklore Journal and other contemporary folkloric sources in order to reconstruct working and lower middle-class experiences of the Last Things in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. In so doing, I refer not so much to the well-established narratives of aspirational imitation and conspicuous consumption, but argue that evidence from the folkloric record is testament to the existence of a meaningful, internally consistent ‘moral economy’ of customary social relationships, not only between bereaved people but also between the living and the newly dead in Victorian and early twentieth-century England.