How were children
remembered and idealised in Victorian cemeteries, consolation
literatures, illustration, and fiction? Then, as now, the death of
a child was considered a "peculiar sorrow", the greatest tragedy
and, for Edith Nesbit, "the pain awoke that is never dead". This
period saw the most widespread extravagant glorifications of
the lost child - immortalised as the most beautiful and innocent
demographic, assured of Heaven in a way that refuted centuries of
gloomy uncertainty. Tombstones, eulogies, effigies, illustrations,
diary entries, poems, prose fictions, post-mortem photography; the
ways in which the dead child could be captured, recorded,
memorialised in all its glory increased exponentially.
Yet the exaltations of the period were matched by the
deepest and most fervent expressions of terror not
only for the child in death but of the child:
Folk tales of pitiful child ghosts transformed into literary
accounts of vengeful spirits and revenant bodies.
This talk examines various examples from the "cult of child death"
from the cemetery to the page, from folklore to literature, from
high theology to popular religions, from the celebrated to the
feared in Anglophone cultures.
Tickets £13.50 including a delightful gin cocktail and a 20% donation to Brompton Cemetery.
Dr Jen Baker
Jen Baker is an
Associate Professor at the University of Warwick and an Associate
Editor for the journal Gothic Studies. An expert on
childhood, child death, ghost stories, and Victorian mourning
cultures, she has published a number of articles and book chapters
on those areas, as well as editing the anthology Minor
Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth in 2021 for the
British Library Tales of the Weird series and co-editing and
contributing to New Directions in the Ghost Story, the
two-volume edited collection of scholarship with Palgrave
2026.
| Ticket | Event time | Cost |
|---|---|---|
|
The Cradle and the Grave
Grief and Terror in Victorian Child Bereavement |
13:30 - 15:00 | £14.85 |
Address
Brompton Cemetery Chapel, North gate off Old Brompton Road, South gate off Fulham Road, London, SW5 9JE
Nearest Station
West Brompton (Tube)
Getting there
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