Book cover for Rites of Passage

Rites of Passage

Synopsis

Details

29 February 2024
352 pages
9781509816972
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders, and in Rites of Passage she offers a compelling and often darkly comic history of the period’s fascination with death.
Flanders writes with sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail . . . and rather relishes the swirling gothic atmosphere of her subject, which takes in everything from bodysnatching to suicide, capital punishment to cremation
The socio-economics of death in the long 19th century proves gruesomely fascinating and Flanders is a skilful marshaller of details to prove i . . . A gifted social historian
Flanders never forgets the human aspect of the Victorians as she richly documents their varied ways of coping with death.