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On the evening of 15 October 2024, to launch the inaugural Kappy Lectures, historian and writer will explore the topic of death as portrayed through art in conversation with renowned Canadian mystery writer and American crime writer Donna Leon.

The lecture will take place in Montreal and is open to everyone, free of charge. Judith Flanders is an acclaimed historian, journalist and author whose work concentrates on the Victorian period. She also writes as an arts critic on books, dance and art, and has worked as a historical consultant on video games. She was born in London but spent her childhood in Montreal. After university, Judith returned to London, where she lived for 40 years. Her most recent publication, , released in the UK on 29th Feb 2024, explores death and mourning in Victorian Britain.

Emily Adam (EA): I understand you will be joining us for the 9IÖÆ×÷³§Ãâ·Ñ International Palliative Care Congress in October. Can you tell us more about your links to Palliative Care 9IÖÆ×÷³§Ãâ·Ñ?

Judith Flanders (JF): My mother, Kappy Flanders, was deeply involved in palliative care. She worked with Dr. Balfour Mount over many decades, helping to establish the first chair in Palliative Medicine in North America. She then went on to create the Palliative Care Council at 9IÖÆ×÷³§Ãâ·Ñ. After her death, my younger sister Elle and I wanted to carry on her work. Having recently written a book on 19th-century death and mourning, it seemed useful to include me in the palliative-care congress this year to discuss attitudes to death and dying, and what we can learn from the 19th century… and to thank God for painkillers and antibiotics!

EA: Tell us more about the lecture you will be moderating on 15th October?

JF: Most people experience death these days through art, whether it's television, film or books. Either it's incredibly gory and disgusting, or it's beautiful and heartrending, but it is generally mediated, not dealing with the subject directly. One of the ways many people interact with the idea of death is in crime fiction. So Elle thought it would be interesting to have a discussion involving me as the social historian and Louise Penny and Donna Leon as the crime writers.

EA: What prompted you to visit this topic in such depth in your new book?

JF: I've written several books on domestic life and how Victorians filled their days, so it seemed logical to move on from how they lived to how they died, because it was so much a part of the same narrative. I tell a story in the book of the Dean of Carlisle and his wife. They had seven children ranging from about 12 years old down to a newborn. One of the children caught scarlet fever, and in four weeks, five of their children died. It was horrifying, but not that unusual. There was a group of historians in the 1960s and 1970s who posited that parents in the past did not invest emotion in their children, because they knew the odds were that the children would die in their first few years. I say, as a scholar and a researcher, that this is the dumbest thing I ever heard. The Dean and his wife wrote about these deaths in their journals. It’s clear that they cared about their children, this was a desperate time and they truly never recovered from it. So I became interested in how people lived with this horror, which was incredibly common. What does that do to you?

EA: Your book makes reference to grief and bereavement. Tell me more about this?

JF: One of the characters I talk about in the book is Queen Victoria. Her husband died when she was 42 and she lived into her 80s in perpetual, conspicuous and ostentatious mourning. People today look back and think that those living at the time thought this was admirable, but most people then, too, thought it was wrong. For a while, there was sympathy, but eventually it was felt she should pull herself together and get back to work! I spoke with a therapist specialising in grief and there's no question Victoria had a breakdown after her husband died. Her own doctor noted she spent a couple of years in a state akin to madness. If you look at the * list of indicators that suggest somebody is more likely to be prone to disordered grieving or long-term and excessive grieving, Victoria checked every single one.

*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder

EA: Was there anything else that really surprised you when researching this book?

JF: The resemblance of the responses to the 1832 cholera epidemic and COVID were bizarre and startling. People believed that cholera didn't exist and that it was a government plot. Later, when vaccinations were developed for other illnesses, people suspected this too was a government plot and that they were trying to kill people to get more bodies for medical schools. In 1832 the Anatomy Act was passed, which said that if a body wasn't claimed, it could be sold to a Medical College for anatomy. Of course, nobody in the upper or middle classes got sold to a hospital, so up to a point, they weren't wrong…

EA: Did you come across much around the role of medicine in the context of death and dying in your research?

JF: There was nothing anyone could really do for almost all fatal illnesses, including cholera, in 1832, so there wasn't much I could discuss in terms of medical care. There were many people, like Florence Nightingale for instance, who recovered from a viral infection and later became invalids, because without drugs they sustained heart damage or other illnesses, which they didn't realise were connected. Medical treatment was, technically, mostly palliative. It was an awful lot of opium and booze.

EA: The field of palliative care is one which advocates a need to break the taboos that exist around death. What do you think modern day society can learn about death and dying from the Victorians?

JF: Oddly, in the 19th century it was thought that a good death was a slow death, because you could put your affairs in order, speak to your family and so on. In actuality, a long-protracted death, for the bulk of the population probably meant extreme poverty for the rest of your family, so it was more of an ideal. But there was a sense that the end was coming and that you did talk about it. The big difference between now and then, however, is that death was a part of daily life. By the time you were an adult, you would have nursed family members through several serious illnesses, watched them die, been with them, and those caring for them, as it happened. It wasn’t tucked away in a sanitised space but was part of your home life. I’m obviously not recommending raising the infant mortality rates, but what we can, perhaps, learn from the 19th century was how to incorporate death into life, dying into living.

To learn more about the 9IÖÆ×÷³§Ãâ·Ñ International Palliative Care Congress and the public lecture on Death in Crime Fiction Oct. 15, please go to: