IN AT THE DEATH
The Funerary Fashion of Georgian London with Dr Dan O’Brien
on Saturday the 2nd November 2024 at 3:30 pm
The modern funeral is frozen in time. The garb we associate with funeral directors - top hat and black tail coat - is essentially Victorian dress. But what did funerals look like before that time? And indeed who organised them in the days before undertakers (as a one-stop funeral services provider, which also only emerged in Victorian times) existed?
In this talk historian Dan O’Brien steps back a century and looks at the funerals of Georgian London from Westminster to Wapping, drawing upon a diverse range of sources produced by the funeral furnishers trade and its customers. These funerals are a fascinating window on attitudes to death in a changing city. Familiar funerary items made their appearance alongside more unusual features – mourners mixed with mutes, and flambeaux lit the way for feathermen, who led the funeral carrying black ostrich feathers.
By day and night, funerals brought the living closer to the dead, but this was often a complicated process as mournful processions navigated busy and sometimes indifferent streets. We will hear contemporary accounts from both funeral goers and spectators on the experience of a Georgian funeral and how it served as a display of the status of the deceased.
Tickets £12 including a delightful gin cocktail and a 20% donation to the King's Chaplaincy Trust. Please click here to purchase.
Dr. Daniel O'Brien
Dr. Daniel O’Brien is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. His research examines the undertaking trade and its products in eighteenth-century England, focusing on prosperous settlements like Bath, Bristol, and Salisbury. He explores societal perceptions of undertakers and their goods by analyzing funeral representations in popular culture. Using diverse sources, he addresses often overlooked questions about how knowledge of the early trade was formed.
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