Search Results

Notifying the community that a burial was to take place was challenging in communities having only a weekly newspaper. A variety of means were employed: bells, party-line phones, word of mouth, handmade funeral notices. Obituaries, often published long after the burial, contained a wealth of information not found today, including the deceased’s last words and cause of death. Coffins were carried to the cemetery, or transported there in the back of a wagon, truck or later, in funeral home hearses. Prior to closing the coffin it was customary for mourners to take a final, farewell look at the deceased. There was no societal taboo against this, the touching of remains, or viewing any that were deteriorated.

This chapter considers how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Brontë during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of CharlotteBrontë and Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘Haworth, 1904’, both writers assessing Brontë’s legacy as an author. While Gaskell’s biography unleashed the ‘Charlotte’ cult, whose devotees became instrumental in the establishment of the Brontë Society in 1893 and the eventual opening of the parsonage as a museum, Woolf pondered the negative impact of literary tourism on the legacy of writers. For decades after her death, literary tourists sought traces of Brontë’s ghostly presence in Haworth, initiating the creation of the parsonage as literary shrine and a tourist industry based on the notion of literary pilgrimage. Analysing a range of accounts of visits to Haworth, along with obituaries, this chapter argues that Brontë’s reputation was initially shaped by myths and misconceptions as much as by her literary works.

George I. Sánchez was remembered initially in obituaries and in published memorials, but the quest for more fully appreciating him would continue for decades. The institutional memory of Sánchez at the University of Texas is powerful. And Sánchez as a topic finds his way into a multitude of scholarly studies in and outside of history. In interpreting Sánchez the author has found that the theme of integration—with regard to specific policies as well as in more abstract, intellectual ways—is the key concept. The long fight to integrate the Mexican American and George I. Sánchez's integral role in it is a neglected, but much-needed story in U.S. history.

Chapter 2 turns to a critical moment in postwar Lebanon in which the novelist Elias Khoury wrote tirelessly against the systematic erasure of collective memory and conceived the intellectual’s word as the remaining hope for salvation in obituaries and interviews in the literary journal al-Mulhaq. While it mobilized the postwar intellectual scene, Khoury’s dominant discourse on collective memory was the object of the emerging novelist Rabee Jaber’s critique. This chapter shows how Jaber reconfigured the suicide of a prominent Lebanese intellectual from a messianic gesture to a deeply personal act, challenging thereby the politicization of the intellectual’s death.

The book concludes by examining Gerry Fitt’s place and legacy in the Northern minority’s political memory by drawing on Bridget Fowler’s pioneering work on obituaries as a form of collective memory (Fowler, 2007). Gerry Fitt died from a heart attack on 26 August 2005, following declining health. He died in England, far from his Belfast roots, and very much ‘in a minority of one’ politically. But after his death there was a deconstruction and a reconstruction of the historical memory of Fitt, placing significant emphasis on his ‘socialist’ credentials. What is most interesting is the juxtaposition of Fitt’s working-class upbringing and his final years as Lord Fitt of Baron Hill in Co Down. His obituary reinforced Fitt’s socialism by linking it to his working-class upbringing. Fitt’s boast had always been that he was a self-made man. His accession to peer of the realm was not the key element of Fitt to be remembered. He proclaimed in 1979 that, ‘I for one have never been a nationalist to the total exclusion of my socialist ideals’. This book examines whether this was the case.