Studying Death
A Podcast and Some Musings
I’ve been involved with the Open Thanatology group at the Open University since 2021. It’s evolved into a cross-disciplinary centre, offering support to researchers working on death, dying, loss and grief, and developing resources and even whole modules on death studies.
Recently, I joined Professor Erica Borgstrom and Dr Sara Mackian to talk about what it’s like researching death. We all come to death studies from different disciplinary backgrounds - Erica is an anthropologist and Sara is a geographer - but we found we had a lot in common and it was a really lovely experience to talk about why we do what we do.
The Victorians loved the idea of a Good Death, a death for which one was prepared, surrounded by loved ones, clean and safe at home, dying with a prayer on one’s lips. Inquests took place after Bad Deaths, deaths that were unexpected, that were violent or criminal. The Victorians did not welcome inquests, for practical and emotional reasons. Normal ‘good’ dying meant the shift from dying to mourning was almost seamless. The washing and laying out of the body - the social transition from life to death - the beginning of the wake and the funeral arrangements all took place very quickly. The funeral usually took place within a day or two, with the body remaining at home, on view and part of the initial mourning period. The inquest shattered this practice. The body became public in a different way, viewed by men who were not in the family’s usual social sphere. The bereaved were questioned, some were asked to give evidence. Even when the inquest was held in the pub four doors down, this still represented a breach in normality. And the Victorians were ashamed when inquests were called, even when they had nothing to be ashamed of. The invasion of privacy, the questioning, the publicisation of their home lives and relationships brought stigma to the household, a sense that they had done something wrong. As one young woman sobbed after her newborn died suddenly in the early twentieth century:
“I done all I could”
In the podcast, I talk about this newsletter, and the reasons I write it and I think it’s worth repeating. I find a lot of true crime really quite difficult to read. The focus is on the investigation, the clues, the method, the trial and sentencing. The story begins with the crime and the victim drops out rapidly, or the narrative pivots to asking what they did to become a victim. There is something about murder that makes us ask… what made the perpetrator do it? What provoked them? Those questions imply absolution, and suggest that anyone can be pushed to kill.
The stories I tell are all in the public domain. These aren’t secret, or hidden. They may have been forgotten, but society simply cannot bear the weight of remembrance for so many victims. I take my stories from the press, which delight in the salacious aspects but… almost as soon as a murder is detected, a narrative of motive and guilt is created. This narrative does not necessarily reflect the facts and it’s moulded by the culture and society in which it is sited. I’ve got a story coming up in a couple of weeks (5th March, it’s AWFUL) where descriptions of the murder method, both in the court and in the press, were wilfully and egregiously WRONG. I only know this because I happened to have access to the original inquest so I know exactly how the cause of death was obfuscated in a way which allowed the crime to appear less vicious and the perpetrator to seem less guilty.
It is a skill to unpick the newspaper stories to find the humans underneath, which is why I often begin with a birth or a wedding, an event that reminds us that these people were often in family units. They were not some flash of aberration, perpetrated by a visible monster, they had parents and children and siblings and friends and neighbours. The crimes I cover were not actually much different to murders now, but I try to give enough context so we can understand what they meant at the time, while also telling you about ordinary life in the nineteenth-century.
I’ll be back on Friday with another horrible murder.