Ashes to Ashes: Death, Grief and Mourning in the Long Eighteenth Century

‘Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,/ Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,/ Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,/ The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.’

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751).

Abstract

Thomas Gray’s 1751 memorialisation of the humble denizens of an English country churchyard also testifies to a historically specific relationship between the living and the dead over the long eighteenth century. By the end of the Georgian period, scholars have argued, the living would be increasingly separated from the remains of their ancestors, as the latter were relocated from churchyards to cemeteries on the edge of town. As dying and internment became medicalised and subject to public health regimes, the experience of death became increasingly secular. Restrained forms of mourning grounded in submission to God’s will gave way to more emotionally expressive modes of grief. Forms of literature including the elegy, epitaph, dialogue and obituary shaped and reflected such shifts, offering textual sites upon which men and women could commemorate, commune and self-create.

This one-day interdisciplinary conference revisits and re-evaluates some of these well-established narratives. Drawing on literary, historical, archaeological, and art historical perspectives it will explore, amongst other subjects, domestic death rituals and ideas of the ‘good death’, the material culture of mourning and memorialisation, narratives of grief, and literary modes of mourning and commemoration.

Tickets

• Full price: £20
• Reduced rate for external students and unwaged: £10
• University of York staff and students: Free

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Programme of the day

9.40am to 10am                   

• Registration

10am to 10.05am                 

• Introduction and welcome

10.05am to 11.20am      

Narrating Grief 

• Kate Morris: ‘Writing through Grief: Narrative Meaning-Making in Nonconformist Death Memoirs’.
• Helen Metcalfe: “Unbroken Sadness”: Loss, Estrangement and Grief in the Life of Mary Ann Hunn’.

11.20am to 11.40am

• Tea and coffee break

11.40am to 1pm

The Art of Dying 

• Hannah Barker: ‘Dying well in Georgian England’.
• Sophie Coulombeau: ‘Gender, Fame, Form: Hester Thrale Piozzi's Auto-Postmortem’

1pm to 1.45pm

• Lunch

1.45pm to 3.05pm

Memorialising Loss

• Séverine Angers: ‘Grasping the Laurels: British Soldiers’ Memorialization and the Military Hero in the Napoleonic Era’.
• Frances Long: Title TBC

3.05pm to 3.25pm

• Tea and coffee break

3.25pm to 4.45pm

Domestic Rituals and Material Markers                       

• Chloe Wigston Smith: ‘Marking Loss in Early America: Elegies in Thread and Verse’.
• Emily Vine: ‘Death and domestic religion in eighteenth-century London’.