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An online talk by Dr Julie-Marie Strange looking at the fascinating history of commercial pet cemeteries and pet bereavement from 1880-1948.
Tickets are free but booking is required. Ticket holders will be sent a link and password to join the zoom session on the day of the talk.
The commercial pet cemetery was established in the UK by the mid 1880s. Like scale models of municipal burial grounds, pet cemeteries borrowed heavily from long established mourning practices for humans. But if cemeteries for humans evoked reverence and respect, social commentary on the pet cemetery treated it as a sentimental space, an indulgence of mawkish and excessive feeling. This lecture explores why the pet cemetery, and by extension, pet bereavement were treated with disdain and considers how owners of pet graves sought to use the pet cemetery to create an emotional community for the pet bereaved.
Julie-Marie Strange moved to Durham University as Professor of Modern British History in October 2019. Her first book explored Death, Grief and Poverty, 1870-1914 (CUP 2015), a pitch for understanding working-class and marginalised people’s responses to bereavement as complex, nuanced and profound. Her second monograph, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (CUP 2015) considered what it meant to be and have a working-class dad in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Collaborative books include The Charity Market: Humanitarianism in Britain, 18701-1912 (Bloomsbury, 2018) with Sarah Roddy and The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (Johns Hopkins, 2018) with Michael Worboys and Neil Pemberton. Her new co-authored book with Jane Hamlett, ‘Pets: A History’ will be out in the next 18 months. Julie-Marie’s new solo project is ‘Love in the Time of Capitalism: Emotion and the Making of the Working Class, 1848-1914’ begins in October 2020.
