Children Remembered Responses to Untimely Death in the Past

by Woods, Robert

• ISBN13: 9781846310218
• ISBN10: 1846310210
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-15
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

Just one hundred years ago, approximately ten percent of all infants born in the United States died before the age of one. In a major city like Chicago, one in four children would die before the age of five. It is difficult for us to imagine the profound effects of such a loss on an individual levellet alone how commonplace these deaths were. Historians have only recently begun to grapple with the experience of child death.Children Rememberedexplores the experience of parental grief over four centuries in America, England, and France. In contrast to Phillippe Aries's influential hypothesis of "parental indifference," Robert Woods argues that parents did indeed care, memorializing their children through portraits, poems, and other forms of literature. Woods's unique study transforms these creative expressions into a unique form of historical evidence that challenges disciplinary conventions. The first history to fully consider parental grief in all its expressions,Children Rememberedis a groundbreaking addition to this burgeoning debate.

Author Biography

Robert Woods is the John Rankin Professor of Geography at the University of Liverpool and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of An Atlas of Victorian Mortality and The Demography of Victorian England and Wales, the former published by Liverpool University Press.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. ix
List of Figures	p. x
List of Illustrations	p. xi
Introduction: 'the lines of life'	p. 1
Apres la mort des enfants	p. 7
Aries, parental indifference and l'histoire de la mort	p. 7
Vovelle and la longue duree	p. 24
Representing mentalities	p. 29
Mortality, Childcare and Mourning	p. 33
The risk of dying at an early age	p. 35
Childcare in France and England	p. 55
Mourning practices	p. 57
Children in Pictures and Monuments	p. 61
Historians, pictures and the deceased	p. 61
The changing representation of children, and what it signifies	p. 67
Funeral memorials to departed children and their mothers	p. 88
Pictorial ambiguities?	p. 93
Emotions and Literature	p. 95
Grief and other emotions	p. 96
Reception and contextual literary history	p. 101
Autobiographical writing	p. 104
Selection	p. 118
Poems, Mainly of Child Loss	p. 131
The Vocabulary of Grief	p. 169
Emotion lexicons	p. 170
How language changed	p. 175
Relationships	p. 179
Death without grief	p. 200
Parallel Histories: Experience and Expression	p. 209
Acknowledgements	p. 217
Notes on the Sixty-Nine Poems	p. 219
Notes	p. 231
Select Bibliography	p. 270
Index	p. 281
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