About

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 at Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution 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.

Attendees 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. The talk also considers 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.

Speaker Dr Dan O'Brien is from the Centre for Death & Society at the University of Bath.