How were children remembered and idealised in Victorian cemeteries, consolation literatures, illustration, and fiction? Then, as now, the death of a child was considered a "peculiar sorrow", the greatest tragedy and, for Edith Nesbit, "the pain awoke that is never dead". This period saw the most widespread extravagant glorifications of the lost child - immortalised as the most beautiful and innocent demographic, assured of Heaven in a way that refuted centuries of gloomy uncertainty. Tombstones, eulogies, effigies, illustrations, diary entries, poems, prose fictions, post-mortem photography; the ways in which the dead child could be captured, recorded, memorialised in all its glory increased exponentially.

  Yet the exaltations of the period were matched by the deepest and most fervent expressions of terror not only for the child in death but of the child: Folk tales of pitiful child ghosts transformed into literary accounts of vengeful spirits and revenant bodies.

This talk examines various examples from the "cult of child death" from the cemetery to the page, from folklore to literature, from high theology to popular religions, from the celebrated to the feared in Anglophone cultures.