The Victorian Book of the Dead (Paperback)

Description

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The Victorian Book of the Dead unearths extraordinary tales of Victorian funeral fads and fancies, ghost stories, bizarre deaths, mourning novelties, gallows humor, premature burial, post-mortem photographs, death omens, and funeral disasters. Resurrected from original sources, these accounts reveal the oddities and eccentricities of Victorian mourning. Packed with macabre anecdotes, this diverting, yet gruesome collection presents tales ranging from the paranormal and shocking to the heartbreaking.

About the Author

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Chris Woodyard is the author of the best-selling The Victorian Book of the Dead, a look at the popular and material culture of Victorian death and mourning as well as nine books on the ghostlore of Ohio and several collections of Victorian forteana.

Praise For…

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Relentlessly fascinating compendium of grim 19th century arcana.
Allison Meier, Buroughs of the Dead Tours

Woodyard's sober, respectful, and scholarly annotations make this volume an original look at a Golden Age in Death History.
Strange Company

This book is indeed, as it claims, an anthology of ‘long-lost tales of the morbid, mournful and macabre from the Victorian era’. An excellent job of research, true, but definitely not for the faint-hearted!
Lynn Picknett, Magonia Review

The author not only finds obscure sources, she then illustrates these obscure sources with other obscure sources and the whole is told with her edged sense of humour…we come much closer to the essence of the experience of nineteenth-century death through [the author’s]..examples than we would, say, in an essay by Ruskin… Remember the old adage, a historian must read until they can hear the dead speaking? Well, when you finish this they’ll be shouting and what they say is not very nice… Death was central and it was naked in Victorian society, so much more than in ours..
Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog