How to die a good death: teaching young children about mortality in nineteenth century America

Abstract

ABSTRACT Infant and child mortality in the United States are at an all-time low, but 150 years ago an infant had a 1 in 4 chance of dying in their first year of life, and older children had only slightly better odds of surviving to adulthood. Scholars have questioned parental emotional investment in periods of high infant and child mortality, but few have considered how children understood mortality and the possibility of their own deaths. Adults in the nineteenth century used a variety of mechanisms to engage children with ideas of death and dying including visits to cemeteries, photography with deceased siblings, literature and poetry, and funeral play with dolls. Sources about these various practices are combined to present a case study in how children in nineteenth Century America may have come to understand death and dying in fundamentally different ways than children in the contemporary, western world.