In one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, John Henry Newman reminded his congregation that ‘Life is short; death is certain; and the world to come is everlasting.’ Although Newman in fact lived to a ripe old age, the Victorian experience of death was alarming and unpredictable in the face of wasting diseases, epidemics, the risks of childbirth, industrial accidents, and the uncertainties of medical science. Death provided plenty of material for reflection, and it was a staple theme of preaching and religious literature. In this imaginative and thought-provoking study, Mary Riso uses the obituaries published in the monthly magazines of four evangelical denominations—Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists—to track beliefs, attitudes, and social aspirations in the middle years of the nineteenth century. She takes 300 obituaries from each denomination, spread across the 1830s, 1850s, and 1870s, and draws on them to explore theology, social background, the influence of Romanticism, and the last words and experiences of the dying. The chronological sweep enables comparisons across the period, both within and between denominations. Thematic chapters address the major topics of Nonconformist death, obituaries as literature, theology, social mobility, denominational variations, the ‘Romantic Spirit’, last words, and the ‘good death’, and a detailed appendix tabulates obituary content by thirty-nine categories of reference, from theological emphases to lifestyle. Close analysis of the obituaries is linked to broader discussions of Victorian religion, society, and culture, and to older traditions of Christian reflection on mortality in the literature of the ars moriendi.Riso discerns a common shape to the obituaries, a basic fourfold narrative pattern of early life, conversion, subsequent activities, and final illness and death. Emphases varied across the years and across the denominations. The general pattern of development detected here seems to have been a gradual decline in dramatic conversion narratives, a growing attention to or willingness to mention professional or vocational successes, a sense of heaven as a place of continued relationship and service, and an increasing proportion of male (and ministerial) obituaries with the passing decades. These trends, however, were manifest in quite different ways in the different denominations. Riso finds the Congregationalists to be the most professional and the most prosperous, while the Primitive Methodists resisted respectability well into the 1870s. Wesleyans, although increasingly well-to-do, retained a vivid spiritual vocabulary, a commitment to entire sanctification, and a much more equal gender balance than the representatives of Old Dissent.By happy coincidence, one character identified in Riso's sample decade of the 1850s was Samuel Budgett (1794–1851), Wesleyan Methodist founder of a highly successful wholesale grocery business, and subject of a substantial and controversial memoir by William Arthur, The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett (1852). This reviewer was prompted to reflect on the relationship between the obituaries published in the denominational magazines and other extant biographical material, whether funeral sermons and tributes reported in the religious press or full-length books, or, in the case of Methodist ministers, in the officially sanctioned obituaries in the Minutes of Conference. Each was subject to a process of selection, drafting, submission, and editing, but the outcomes seem to have varied considerably. It would be interesting to see some more case studies of the similarities and differences, in content, style, and purpose, between the particular genre of the magazine obituary and memorials shaped for other publications. It would also be illuminating to have some sense of whether Evangelicals in the Church of England (or, indeed, Christians of other theological persuasions) adopted similar or different conventions of memorialization.Dr Riso has read widely in the sources and historiography of nineteenth-century religion, as well as in the various denominational magazines, and she is to be congratulated on a stimulating study which sheds light on the beliefs and values of a significant segment of mid-Victorian society, and which will, no doubt, prompt further investigation and lively debate. This is a worthy and welcome addition to Ashgate's Methodist Studies Series.
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Jul 3, 2022
Amina Marzouk Chouchene 
Open Access