Undertakers and Death with Dr Dan O’Brien LIVE

Please note this is NOT a ZOOM Lecture but an in person lecture. Tickets include a complimentary glass of . Doors open at 6:30pm and talk starts at 7pm

Join us at The Last Tuesday Society for an illustrated talk with Dr Dan O'Brien exploring the imagined world of the early undertaker and some of the most striking depictions of the undertakers’ relationship with death. Death historian Dr Dan O’Brien describes how the fortunes and misfortunes of the undertaker were window on popular ideas about death and the new trade that benefited from it.

An eighteenth-century cartoon imagined a dainty dance between Death and undertaker; the sable-clad death worker was amusingly uncomfortable with his scowling partner. In this busy century, the relationship between undertakers and death was imagined as an uneasy alliance. The early trade’s dependence on death was often caricatured with the gloomy undertaker joined by the familiar skeleton of the memento mori. Death brought joy to the undertaker but this mortal fellow was not invulnerable to its approach and nor could rely upon inevitability of death.

Dr Dan O’Brien

Death historian Dr Dan O’Brien is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. Dan’s research primarily focuses on the development of the undertaking trade and its products in the eighteenth century. He seeks to understand how the undertakers and their goods were perceived by society, by analysing how funerals were presented in the popular culture of the period. Drawing upon an eclectic range of source materials has enabled him to consider simple, but often overlooked, questions about how people’s knowledge about the early trade was formed. His research has produced four chapters, two of which are now published with Routledge and University of Bristol Press. Dan also talks publicly to a wide range of audiences on different themes in mortality history such as funerary gifts, sea burial and mourning jewellery. He has recently appeared on History Hit’s After Dark podcast talking about the funeral of Queen Victoria and describing a funerary crime on Killing Time with Rebecca Rideal.

Dr Dan O’Brien Social Media Links

TikTok : tiktok.com/@dr.dan.o

Instagram: Instagram.com/dr.dan.o

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/drdan.bsky.social

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The venue opens at 18:30. Doors will close at 19:00 to avoid disrupting the speaker. We kindly ask that all guests arrive before 19:00. Refunds are not possible for in person events with less than seven days notice in any circumstances.

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