What We Mourn

How a new culture of bereavement changed the relationship of the Victorian state to its most vulnerable subjects When the Tory Member of Parliament Michael Sadler argued in 1832 for state intervention on behalf of Britain’s dying child factory workers, he elicited smirks and ridicule from his Liberal adversaries—a response that would have been unimaginable by the century’s end. What We Mourn traces the changing understandings of child death within British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts an