Laying the Victorians to Rest: Funerals, Memorials, and the Funeral Business in Nineteenth‐Century Otago
Australian Economic History Review
Published online on November 25, 2015
Abstract
This article seeks to integrate the history of the physical aspects of burial practices with the cultural aspects of mourning and bereavement by considering the businesses that catered for the demand created by funerals and mourning in the second half of the nineteenth century. The example of the first major industrial and commercial urban centre to develop in New Zealand, Dunedin, is used to show that a range of businesses emerge quickly to cater for the funerary trade. Many were short lived, and few specialised exclusively in the funerary business.