Working the Dead Beat (17 page)

The
Gentleman's Magazine
was not the only outlet for obituaries. Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine
published a long account in 1819 of the European life and death of John Sackeouse, an “Esquimaux” who had been born in Greenland in 1797 and been converted to Christianity, probably by Danish missionaries. The account, written by Captain Basil Hall, described Sackeouse as about five feet, eight inches tall, broad-chested, and with a very wide face and a great quantity of coarse black hair.

“The expression of his countenance, however, was remarkably pleasing and good-humoured, and not in the least degree savage.” Sackeouse was considered modest, pious, fond of children, and eager to take instruction in religion, drawing, reading, and writing, although he proved a mediocre student in the latter. To modern eyes there is a condescending tone to sentences like this one: “He never expressed any of that idiotic surprise which savages sometimes evince, on seeing anything very different from what they have been accustomed to,” but overall the writer seems genuinely fond of the deceased, especially in his deathbed description, which owes much to Christian redemption and belief in the afterlife. “His dying moments were soothed by the anxious attendance of his friends . . . but he said it was of no use, for his sister had appeared to him and called to him to come away. It must not be supposed, however, that this arose from superstition, or was anything more than the effect of the fever . . . for he was unaffectedly pious under . . . and . . . held in his hand an Icelandic catechism [published in Copenhagen in 1777] till his strength and sight failed him, when the book dropped from his grasp, and he shortly afterwards expired.”

Perhaps the best-remembered obituary from this era, and one of the few that stand apart for its literary value, is philosopher and journalist William Hazlitt's essay “Death of John Cavanagh,” published in the
Examiner
on February 9, 1819. Indeed, Hazlitt was himself so fond of the obituary that he reprinted it in his essay “The Indian Jugglers” in
Table Talk
in 1828. John Cavanagh was an athlete who was especially skilled at a form of handball called fives, a sport that Hazlitt himself loved playing. “When a person dies who does any one thing better than any one else in the world, which so many others are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in society,” Hazlitt wrote effusively. “It is not likely that any one will see the game of fives played in its perfection for many years to come — for Cavanagh is dead and has not left his peer behind him. It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall; there are things, indeed, which make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has ever played at it. It is the finest exercise for the body, and the best relaxation for the mind.”

Although very pretty as a piece of writing, Hazlitt's essay is not much use as an obituary. We learn very little about the deceased — not even his birth or death dates. Instead Hazlitt tells us that Cavanagh, a devout Irish Catholic who never ate meat on Friday, had “a clear, open countenance” and was a “young fellow of sense, humour, and courage” who had suffered a “burst blood vessel” two or three years earlier but was “fast recovering” when “he was suddenly carried off.” That's it. No details about his family, his schooling, his livelihood. Instead Hazlitt has used the occasion of Cavanagh's death “on a Friday” to demonstrate his own poetic prowess and to score a few cheap literary points: “His blows were not undecided and ineffectual — lumbering like Mr. Wordsworth's epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr. Coleridge's lyric prose, nor short of the mark like Mr. Brougham's speeches, nor wide of it like Mr. Canning's wit, nor foul like the
Quarterly
, not
let
balls like the
Edinburgh Review
. Cobbett and Junius together would have made a Cavanagh.”

By championing Cavanagh's athletic skills over the poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hazlitt is clearly snubbing his former literary heroes, their achievements, and their fame. But his hyperbolic text also has another purpose: to create a lasting legacy for the temporal achievements of an athlete — especially important in the days before sporting matches could be recorded on film — when “the noisy shout of the ring happily stood him instead of the unheard voice of posterity.” Hazlitt is trying to cheat death by using his skills as a wordsmith to render Cavanagh immortal. And he has succeeded, even though the essay is read today not as a tribute to Cavanagh but as an example of Hazlitt's own talents as an essayist.

This kind of literary exercise — in which the writing outweighs the significance of the subject — is not restricted to the nineteenth century. The
Economist
devoted a page in August 2009 to the death of a legendary trout named Benson. The fish, which reached an epic size of sixty-four pounds, two ounces (twenty-nine kilograms), was compared to Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch and described by the unnamed obituarist as “lither than either as she cruised through the water-weed, a lazy twist of gold” with lips that “were full, sultry or sulking” and an “unblinking expression.” Hyperbole could not be tamed in the obituary, which finally ended with a description of Benson, having died probably of overeating, lying “like Wisdom drawn up from the deep: as golden, and as quiet.” Frankly, I have always had a personal rule: no animals, although I might have made an exception for Northern Dancer.

As social historians have amply demonstrated, the texture of lives and the context of the times are the glue connecting the legal, military, political, artistic, and cultural achievements of the past in a cohesive pattern. Nigel Starck argues in
Life after Death
that obituaries, which he likens to an “instant exercise in biography,” have, more than other forms of journalism, the “power to deliver an account of what it was like to be a citizen of communities past.”

Reportage on celebrity and the “journalism of death,” as American pundit Elaine Showalter calls newspaper obituaries, became a much more solemn and sombre business after Queen Victoria began her long reign in 1837. By then the
Times
had been publishing for more than fifty years. Launched by John Walter on January 1, 1785, as the
Daily Universal Register
, the newspaper officially changed its name to the
Times
on its third anniversary. From the beginning, the
Times
was interested in bringing news from Europe and especially France to its readers, and in publishing contributions from experts in the scientific, political, literary, and artistic realms.

Two inventions helped achieve those goals and to transform the
Times
into the most influential news source of its time. James Watt's steam engine went into production in 1775, a decade before the
Times
was founded, giving rise to steam-driven railways and steamships, which made it possible to ship goods, including newspapers, around the country and the world. Then in 1811, Friedrich Koenig, a German-born printer living in London, applied steam technology to the printing press and invented a single-cylinder steam-driven rotary press. Koenig and his British investor, Thomas Bensley, sold an improved, double-cylinder model of the press (capable of printing 1,100 sheets an hour) to John Walter II, son of the founder of the
Times
and, by 1814, its publisher. The press so improved the speed of production and therefore the dissemination of news that the
Times
was soon selling more than seven thousand copies a day.

Obituary coverage was spotty until John Thaddeus Delane (1817–79), who had trained as a lawyer but never practised, became editor in 1841. He encouraged the writing of long and eloquent essays on the lives of great men because he believed that would boost the paper's circulation and its authority. By 1850 the practice of writing major obituaries for the great and the good was well established, although the daily obituary page did not become an integral part of the paper until the twentieth century. When the Duke of Wellington died in 1852, his massive obituary, containing more than forty thousand words, ran over several dense pages on two successive days. “The Duke of Wellington had exhausted nature and exhausted glory. His career was one un-clouded longest day” was one of the milder tributes.

By the end of the century — Delane retired in 1877 and died two years later — truly maudlin deathbed scenes were creeping in because of the Victorian preoccupation with death. For example, when art critic and social thinker John Ruskin died at age eighty in January 1900, his obituary in the
Times
dwelt extravagantly on the bedside recollections of his cousin Mrs. Severn. Beginning with the onset of a throat irritation on a Thursday, Ruskin takes to his bed; Mrs. Severn sings him a favourite song, “Summer Slumber,” perhaps to take his mind off the fact that it is winter. He has a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit but manages to eat a dinner of sole and pheasant washed down with champagne. On Friday he feels better, but on Saturday he fades away, attended by a doctor and a manservant “now and then feathering the lips with brandy and spraying the head with eau de cologne,” with the faithful Mrs. Severn holding his hand. Afterwards she notices the time of day when she looks out the window and observes, “The brilliant, gorgeous light illumined the hill with splendour; and the spectators felt as if Heaven's gate itself had been flung open to receive the teacher into everlasting peace.”

The fascination with noble and gentle death was blasted to bits in the trenches of northern France and Flanders during the First World War. Consequently the obituary as a popular entertainment and literary form declined in the 1920s. The most widely held theory is that readers were so dispirited by the wanton sacrifice of a promising generation of young men — in a war that was supposed to put an end to war itself — they didn't want to read about death in the newspapers.

Establishment papers carried on with windy accounts of military and political achievements of the great and the good — almost inevitably male — but most people paid little notice. Across the Atlantic, obituaries had been part of regional newspapers such as
Niles' Weekly Register
and the influential Washington-based
National Intelligencer
since at least 1800. Niles was the victim of an obituary hoax in 1818, according to Janice Hume in her book
Obituaries in American Culture
. Editors reported the death of Daniel Boone, who had allegedly “breathed out his last” in a deer lick with “gun in his hand just in the act of firing,” allowing the writer to conclude that “as he lived, so he died.” The paper later printed a retraction for the “fabrication,” suggesting that the hoax was an attempt to mythologize the frontiersman's already dramatic life. Boone actually died of natural causes two years later at the age of eighty-five, after uttering his final words, “I'm going now. My time has come.”

As much as the American Revolution dominated eighteenth-century life in the United States, the Civil War was the watershed that marked the nineteenth century. After four years of bloody carnage, the United States emerged with a strong central government, a nation that was well rooted in the industrial age, and one that was beginning to recognize the concepts of national citizenship and equal rights for men.

The
New York Times
, which was founded in September 1851 as the
New York Daily Times
, took advantage of an improved lithographic rotary printing press manufactured by Richard M. Hoe. He put the type on a revolving cylinder that made it possible to print much faster than on the traditional flatbed printing press. By 1860 the
New York Times
, as it was called by then, had doubled its original size to eight pages a day and had become one of the top newspapers in the city.

Along with industrial advances and the invention of the telegraph, which allowed news dispatches to be delivered rapidly, newspapers began hiring reporters and sending them out to gather news from battlefields, the Western frontier, and the gold rush. All of these measures gave rise to a more news-oriented and egalitarian journalism that was aimed at a mass audience, in obituaries as well as elsewhere. In the same way that the gruesome death tolls in the trenches of northern Europe would have a numbing effect on British obituaries in the 1920s, the post–Civil War era in the U.S. saw a dashing of sentimentality about noble or romantic death. “Obituaries no longer dwelled on the act of dying or its religious implications — death had become far too familiar,” Hume writes about the
New York Times
in 1870 in
Obituaries in American Culture
.

Although the
nyt
did not set out to romanticize death and rarely gave prolonged descriptions of the cause of death, service to country was celebrated. Major General Joseph E. Hamblin was described as one of the “most gallant soldiers that fought for the union in the late war . . . and only sheathed his sword when his country had no further need of his services.” As the country recovered, long lists of young men killed in battle were replaced with obituaries of men working as lawyers, merchants, and manufacturers as wealth and social status took a more prominent role than personal valour.

Hume argues that nineteenth-century obituary writers, who were more concerned with virtuous character traits such as courage, honesty, and gallantry for men and piety for women, were succeeded in the twentieth century by writers who downplayed individual character in their preoccupation with the work ethic and the reflected glory that came from being linked to business and social institutions and associations. Consequently the “ideal American,” at least as represented in newspaper obituaries, changes with the times and meets a specific social need depending on the historical era — for example, the rugged individual in the frontier era, the entrepreneur in the industrial era, the compassionate citizen during the Depression, the hero during wartime. In other words, “Virtue is not stagnant, but adapts to the new cultural demands of a changing society,” as Hume states in
Obituaries in American Culture.