What we mourn : child death and the politics of grief in nineteenth-century Britain / Lydia Murdoch.

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What we mourn : child death and the politics of grief in nineteenth-century Britain / Lydia Murdoch.

9780813953830 (electronic bk.)
0813953839 (electronic bk.)
9780813953816
0813953812
9780813953823
0813953820

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2025.

English

1 online resource.

HQ792.G7 M87 2025eb

HIS015060
SOC047000

305.230941

"By combining concepts from histories of the family, the emotions, and the state, What We Mourn weaves together the personal and political to argue that democratized grief for lost child life became a means to assert and even reimagine British rights and citizenship in the Victorian period"-- Provided by publisher.
"How a new culture of bereavement changed the relationship of the Victorian state to its most vulnerable subjects When the Tory Member of Parliament Michael Sadler argued in 1832 for state intervention on behalf of Britain's dying child factory workers, he elicited smirks and ridicule from his Liberal adversaries-a response that would have been unimaginable by the century's end. What We Mourn traces the changing understandings of child death within British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts and reveals the importance of youth and emotion to constructions of the modern state. As childhood took on new meanings over the course of the long nineteenth century, public mourning for the premature deaths of children emerged as a way of asserting and even redefining British rights and citizenship. Factory hands and abolitionists, sanitation reformers and suffragists democratized and politicized their grief as they called upon the state to recognize their lives as part of a new, reimagined political order. As Lydia Murdoch shows, carrying their own and others' private grief into the public sphere-with petitions and marches, public lectures and poetry-allowed marginalized members of society to assert their claim to rights. What We Mourn explores both the power and the limitations of a new politics founded on grief and the protection of child life. "-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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Print version record.

Victorian literature and culture series

What we mourn.
Print version: 0813953820

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