The Folklore of Death and Dying in Nineteenth-century Rural England

Histories of nineteenth-century death culture have largely focused on the fancy funerals and extensive mourning rituals of the urban middle and upper classes. This obscured the experiences of the rural working classes who were untroubled by the attentions of doctors or undertakers due to their poverty and relative isolation. I argue that during the nineteenth century rural and urban death cultures diverged; in the cities, sanitary concerns, the medicalisation of death and the commodification of funerals all served to outsource death to a series of professionals, while in the countryside, death remained a family-centric event. Using the large body of folklore collected by folklorists towards the end of the nineteenth century as a source of rural working-class customs connected to death and dying, this thesis recovers the sequence of folkloric rituals that guided behaviour during the period of death. Using a functionalist approach, I propose that death folklore served important social and emotional functions in reconfirming social relationships, establishing norms of behaviour, lending agency, guiding emotional responses to and encouraging an acceptance of death. The rural working classes, like much of nineteenth-century society, held a plurality of beliefs which allowed science, religion and magical thinking to coexist and interplay. However, enacting folklore did not necessarily indicate belief as many people engaged with folklore due to the social and emotional function it served rather than because they believed in it. This project follows the chronology of death and dying – starting with death omens, moving on to the deathbed, followed by the preparation of the body for burial, visiting the corpse and ending with the funeral – to recreate the death culture of the rural working classes. In doing so it reveals how a close involvement with the corpse and a family-centric, community supported death helped families to manage emotional responses to death.