The eighteenth-century way of death in Bath

Eighteenth-century Bath was a place of healing and leisurely diversion, but its streets were also stalked by death and many who came never left.

This talk examines how an entrepreneurial undertaking trade developed in the city and how new ideas about death transformed the streets into a stage for funerary show. We will discover how the novel trade of funeral undertaking led some to success and others to failure, a conflict that was parodied in contemporary satire. We also consider the place of the Abbey as a permanent stage for the preservation of posthumous reputation, where the identities of the dead could be secured forever.

Dr Dan O’Brien (Centre for Death & Society, University of Bath) is a historian of death in long-eighteenth-century England. His research primarily focuses on the development of the undertaking trade and the role of the trade in funerals of the period. Dan seeks to understand how the undertakers and their goods were perceived by society, by analysing how funerals were presented in the popular culture of the period. Drawing upon an eclectic range of source materials has enabled him to consider simple, but often overlooked, questions about how people’s knowledge about the early trade was formed.