Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Lydia Murdoch, author of What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain

What inspired you to write this book? 

As a historian of Victorian childhood, I couldn’t help but be struck by the horrifically high rates of child mortality in the nineteenth century. We often forget how common it was to die young. What then drew me into the project was realizing how people began to think of child death in new ways, as a result of societal failing rather than divine intervention, and how they began to politicize these deaths and their own communal mourning. I wanted to write a political history of sorts by shifting the focus onto subjects that haven’t always been thought of as political, including children, women, and emotions.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

I hope readers come away willing to engage the slipperiness of childhood and the importance of communal mourning. The book showed me again the relative newness of our modern understanding of childhood as a time of innocence and dependence. More than this, I came to see how political appeals based on protecting children could often be used to argue for the rights of all, but more often than not they became selective and limited. I hope the book also adds to conversations about the political meanings of public mourning and whose lives are recognized, whose lives are not.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

I didn’t anticipate how central the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be to the story I wanted to tell. Of course, I’d read “The Cry of the Children” (1843) as an undergraduate, but at the time I dismissed it as too sentimental. Through writing the book I came to appreciate what many already understood: the weird, often radical nature of her rhymes. It was a joy to trace how so many activists, from the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond to the feminist Josephine Butler, connected their work with Barrett Browning.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

I love the moment in 1832 when Michael Sadler paused during his three-hour parliamentary speech in favor of the Factories’ Regulation Bill to note that his words had provoked the “risibility” of one of his Liberal opponents. So much about working on the history of grief requires interpretative leaps, but here was concrete physical evidence of vastly different emotional responses: The child deaths that Sadler presented as tragic prompted smirks and laughter from his opponent. It was a moment that helped me comprehend, in very tangible terms, two vastly different political understandings of child death.

What’s next? 

I’m working on a book about the use of children to transmit the first smallpox vaccines globally. After Edward Jenner discovered the vaccine in the 1790s, scientists raced to ship it around the world. They tried many methods, but at first humans—particularly children—proved the most effective carriers through a process of successive vaccination. After a successful vaccination, doctors extracted lymph from the child to vaccinate other children, a process that they then repeated to keep the virus alive during long sea and overland voyages. Through microhistories drawn from London and East India Company outposts, I’m hoping to better understand how children enabled one of the most important medical discoveries of the modern era and became a focal point for the rising anti-vaccination movement.