In Victorian and Edwardian England, the grieving process involved numerous mortuary practices but the final and longest lasting of these is the stone monument placed over the grave or an engraving on an existing monument. However, comparison of burial records to monument records in rural Cambridgeshire, England would indicate that not all individuals received such a monument at their passing. This study explores the root of this variation through one of the most psychologically difficult deaths to navigate: that of a child. In this study, I compare those children who did not receive a stone monument to those that did as a function of the family’s socioeconomic class, the year of death, as well as the child’s age, gender, and place in the birth order at time of death. With a database of 11,578 individuals between the ages of 3 and 25 from 114 parishes in Cambridgeshire, this study is the largest of its kind and thus permits the exploration of interactions between these different factors.
Using logistic regression modeling, I illustrate that the decision to erect a stone monument is demonstrably related to the child’s lived experience and the role they played in their household and community. Although rate of commemoration is not commonly explored in historical cemetery studies, this measurement offers valuable insight on the following themes: the emergence of adolescence and the ‘New Woman’, the drop in child fertility and mortality, the rise of the lower class over time, the role of girls within the household, the shift from conceptualizing children as economically useful to economically useless but emotionally priceless over time, the impact of major events like the agricultural depression and the First World War, and the impact that primogeniture had on the likelihood of commemoration. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The death of a child evokes pain and loss that is, in part, reconciled through the grieving process. For Victorian and Edwardian parents in rural Cambridgeshire, England, this process involved burying their child in a local churchyard or cemetery and, in some cases, erecting a stone monument over the grave or having the child’s name carved on an existing monument. But comparison of burial and monument inscription records would indicate that only some children received this relatively expensive and permanent marker at their passing. This study explores differences in commemorative decision-making as a product of the child’s age at death, gender, the socioeconomic class of the family, the year they passed away, and the family structure. While the stone monument is unsurprisingly more common among children of the higher socioeconomic classes, I found that social change, such as shifts in gendered expectations, were also expressed in commemorative practice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/30478 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Thacher, Dana |
| Contributors | Cannon, Aubrey, Anthropology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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