Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.(Book Review)

By JOHN WOLFFE (Oxford: Oxford U.P., for the British Academy, 2000; pp. 331. 29.99 [pounds sterling]).

ALL Victorians wanted a good death. A very few achieved a great one. As the title of his book makes plain, it is the latter, more select, group that most interests John Wolffe. His subjects include princes, prime ministers and preachers; monarchs, missionaries and men of war. From the Duke of Wellington to the Duke of Clarence, from Daniel O'Connell to Charles Stewart Parnell, no one who was anyone is forgotten. At one level, at least, this is unabashedly elitist history--but it is also a story with wider implications. For the author is attempting to do more than merely praise great men. Rather, Wolffe wishes to explore the ways in which the deaths of the great shaped the world of the living. In particular, he is interested in how mourning nationally known figures shaped a sense of nationhood, and how this might yield …