Materializing Mourning: Dickens, Funerals, and Epitaphs

Funerals against death.

While anthropological studies in non-Western societies show how funerals protect the community from the threat of death, sociological studies of British funerals have so far focused on meanings for the private family. The article reports on results from a Mass Observation directive - the first British study to focus specifically on the entire funeral congregation - and shows how attendees exper...

Bodies, death, and pauper funerals.

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Dickens and the passions.

There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle "examined" the scholars, once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the Warde...

Grotesque in Dickens

[Loss and mourning].

The human being needs ties to grow and develop. When some of these ties are broken a period of great intensity arises that we call mourning. If the loss is radical and definitive, as in the case of death, all of the person's dimensions are affected (the physical, emotional, cognitive, behavioural, social and spiritual dimensions), to such an extent that the person can feel unable to overcome th...