Death

It may seem odd to consider death in a study of everyday life, yet this was a recurring theme in these one hundred autobiographies. The quote at the start of this chapter is just one of many relating to death and was written by autobiographer Elizabeth Blackburn who was born in 1902 in Lancashire. She wrote her autobiography in 1977, some seventy-five years after her birth, to reflect on how much had changed during her lifetime. As a child in the early twentieth century, she noted that death had been much more present in everyday life: ‘death was much nearer to us. Babies often died in fits and convulsions, school mates of diphtheria, big brothers and sisters of “consumption”, fathers in industrial accidents and mothers sometimes died when their children were born’.