Tracing the dawn of the eloquent obituary
(John Thadeus Delane, courtesy of Wikipedia commons)
Kate and I had a brief, affable back and forth during discussion last week about the historical tone of obituaries — i.e., “Was the content presented directly and concisely or expressively and at length?”
Research has shown that obits have been on a creative upswing since their inception at the dawn of the printing press, beginning as short [death] notices and transforming into storytelling tools a few hundred years afterward. Pinning down where and when this revolution took place was a much easier task than expected, and there was one particular man to thank.
A Google Archive search of the obituary’s history, though surely imperfect and hardly scientific, reveals a timeline increasingly populated by the mid- to late-1800s. Per a bit of research, there was a name in journalism that, not coincidentally, was prevalent in regards to obit writing during that period: John Thadeus Delane, editor of The Times of London from 1841-77.
In 2007, The newspaper company’s publishing arm released Great Victorian Lives – An Era in Obituaries, a collection of some of the paper’s highest profile obits of the 1800s, and the paper’s preview singles out Delane’s contributions to obituary writing:
“… under the 36-year editorship of John Thadeus Delane (1841-77) the paper began to respond to the deaths of significant national and international figures in a style – and on a scale – that none of its rivals could match. The death of [the Duke of] Wellington, Delane told his deputy, “will be the only topic”.
For the sake of contrast, notice how the New York Times handled its front page coverage of President Lincoln’s assassination with nary an expressive word, and how that starkly differed from this, which appeared in Delane’s paper:
“The estimates of his character and of the calibre of his intellect since he was suddenly tossed to the surface of a great nation have been numerous and contradictory; but the opinion seems to be daily gaining ground that impartial history will assign to him one of the highest places among the statesmen who have hitherto presided over the North in the supreme agony of the nation.”
Ann Wroe would be proud.