What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

How a new culture of bereavement changed the relationship of the Victorian state to its most vulnerable subjects When the Tory Member of Parliament Michael Sadler argued in 1832 for state intervention on behalf of Britain's dying child factory workers, he elicited smirks and ridicule from his Liberal adversaries - a response that would have been unimaginable by the century's end.What We Mourn traces the changing understandings of child death within British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts and reveals the importance of youth and emotion to constructions of the modern state. As childhood took on new meanings over the course of the long nineteenth century, public mourning for the premature deaths of children emerged as a way of asserting and even redefining British rights and citizenship.Factory hands and abolitionists, sanitation reformers and suffragists democratized and politicized their grief as they called upon the state to recognize their lives as part of a new, reimagined poli