Mapping the Obituary: Notes towards a Bourdieusian Interpretation

Introduction

An important strand of feminist practice has been the reconstruction of women's experience historically, using auto/biographical sources. This process has gone under the metaphorical banner of retrieving the hidden from history, bringing the invisible into visibility, giving voices to the silenced. The language of illumination and speech thus aligns such projects with a still vibrant Enlightenment project even as they draw attention to the ways in which the Enlightenment (and the Renaissance earlier) intensified women's marginalisation within Western bourgeois society.

One social mechanism that has been significant as a first stage towards remembering individuals has been the publication of an obituary on their death. A particularly influential form of collective memory, I want to claim, is derived from these literary memorials. Obituaries reveal and actively shape “how societies remember”: indeed, in doing so, they parallel the school history textbook in shaping a whole generation's stock of knowledge. They do not do so neutrally. As Connerton remarks: ‘The control of a society's memory largely conditions the hierarchy of power’ (1989:1). Obituaries should not be seen merely as homage to individuals but as part of a wider play of symbolic power. Yet they have received very little attention either from sociology, feminism or Marxist cultural studies. The present essay is intended to develop an empirically-based approach to obituary narratives and to propose Bourdieusian theory, supplemented by the work of Paul Ricoeur, to understand this neglected form.

We might think of obituaries as commemorative pacts that help explain the inertia – the continuous reproductive re-enactment – of social structures (see, eg, Halbwachs, 1991). Of course, the obituary is a less cultic and more individualised form, unlike the ritualised institutions which other practices of social remembering, such as Armistice Day or May Day have taken. Yet, despite their appearance as a mere series of individual portraits, the written texts of the obituary possess a certain authority and their subjects receive from such accolades the stamp of legitimacy. Indeed, this social order of remembrance appears only to offer an anticipated bestowal of dignity on those who are in any case ‘naturally’ distinguished. Such an apparently obligatory social order allows us to see in the newspaper obituary something of the character of modern invented traditions (Connerton, 1989:63–64; cf. Hobsbaum and Ranger, 1983).

Yet where there is collective memory there is also organised forgetting. Thus one concern we might have is the question of who is deemed worthy of an obituary – are both genders, all nationalities and all ethnic groups equally represented? Are obituaries restricted to a traditional elite? Or are there specific obituary authors – analogous to Solzenitsyn, for the Gulag victims, and Toni Morrison, for slaves – who purposively stand out so as to rectify such collective oblivion? In such cases, we might say that they personally offer ‘the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting’ (Connerton, 1989). Examples might be the project of the M.P., Tam Dalyell, of contributing to the obituaries of Scottish political figures, or Philip Hobsbaum's sustained work of writing obituaries of poets. The sociological interest in the obituary as a realm of collective memory thus turns out to contain issues of cultural politics of canonisation (or cultural consecration), but also to spread a net wider than these.

Part of the fascination of the obituary is that it represents a contested space – between journalism and literature. That is to say, the obituary shares with journalism the imperatives of truth, to tell things how they really were, and with literature, the concern for form – or at least for a rarity and economy of expression. This literary defamiliarization of the obituary form emerges more in some national traditions than others, the French rather than the American, and especially in the obituaries for jazz singers and poets, more than those for other figures.

There is also the well-known tension between the claims of truth and elements shared by the obituary with religious rites de passage – the comfort to the survivors, the celebration of the life lived well. Thus the day of the obituary might be seen as a secularised judgement day on one's calling, the social equivalent to the figure of God weighing up one's sins and virtues in a divine settling of accounts. But it also raises crucial debates about the status of the obituary, whether as a genre of mere hagiography or, alternatively, as an instrument of realist honesty, and indeed, about the continuation of political battles within the obituary's newspaper columns. ¹

Bourdieu

Bourdieu is the trailblazer in the sociological analysis of obituaries. Indeed, Bourdieu, at his most cynical, regards some individuals as even able to elude death:

The obituary is another such ‘portrait’ allowing the escape from some of the ‘generic alienations’ imposed by death.

Bourdieu's models help to illuminate the world of the dominants, the world that is being negotiated by editors when they make their more difficult and daring choices of obituary subjects. It is The State Nobility (1996b) which offers the best theoretical tools for a critical analysis of the obituaries in general. It is also this book which contains Bourdieu's own analyses of obituaries, using the poignant memorials of recently dead academics as evidence of different modes of university existence. More particularly, the concepts of The State Nobility can aid us in evaluating the frequent contention that an important, pioneering segment of this obituary newspaper field has now moved outside the ‘old boys’ ‘circle of a ‘parochial’ ‘Establishment’ and become – in effect – democratized. This appeal to democratization and the alternative stress on a more meritocratic or varied criteria for memory are key features of modern newspaper obituaries. Take, as an example, James Fergusson's claims that The Independent obituary columns are now open to any one who has made their mark in the world in a significant, striking or surprising way:

Bourdieu's extensive empirical analyses underpin a more disenchanted vision than that of Fergusson (1984; 1989, 1996). He thus offers what we might call ‘an ethic of suspicion’ with regard to such a democratic or universalistic claim. The second reason for choosing Bourdieu as a major source for understanding obituaries is his theory that the dominant class has changed its mode of legitimation. He comments that the dominants' spiritual ‘point d'honneur’ was once religion: in its most famous Weberian version, such rationalisations depend on an assumption that those in a higher caste are there because they are closer to nirvana within the cycle of rebirths, or (in Calvinism) that the asceticism signifying election is divinely favoured by abundant profits. In other words, those most embodying the sacred ideal were recognized as exemplary models (Bourdieu, 1998). In contrast, Bourdieu's distinctive model of the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist societies contains a theory of secularization.

On this account, the contemporary spiritual ‘soul’, has migrated to creative artists, with their characteristically non-economic actions, or to the aristocracy of culture, with their spiritual devotion or ‘love of art’. Such a nobility of culture possesses an aesthetic attitude, which is principally revealed by a formalist commitment to beauty or style for its own sake (Bourdieu, 1984).

My own study shows that telling traces of these social changes appear in the sampled obituaries. ² For example, in the earlier British obituaries of 1900, clergy and missionaries made up 8% of the total known occupations (The Times). In contrast, by 2000–1, they were only 2% in The Times and The Guardian, even fewer (1%) in The Independent. The numbers of those in the arts is vastly higher than it once was, having expanded in The Times from 12% in 1900 to the contemporary 30% and much more spectacularly in The Guardian and The Independent (both 51%). ³ Moreover, obituary subjects whose distinction lies outside the artistic field are now more often given additional seriousness and stature by reference to their love of art: ‘he was a keen opera-goer’ or ‘he collected paintings’ is a frequent signifier of a magnanimous and sensitive character.

Thirdly, in a period some have labelled the ‘auto/biographical society’, Bourdieu offers a critique of an important ‘biographical illusion’ (1986; 1994: 81–89). In a sense his whole theory of practice offers an approach to this, especially its tight-rope passage between Sartrian voluntarism and mechanistic materialism. An article in Actes allows us to pinpoint more exactly his precise critique of commonsense life-histories, which is especially productive for those studying popular biographies or the newspaper obituary (compare, say, the earlier studies by Kracauer, 1995:101–7; and Lowenthal, 1961).

This Actes essay offers us a vantage point from which to criticise the atomized, pre-Freudian, unified self of liberal humanism, without abandoning altogether the notion of an authentic (Kantian) ‘me’. In applying this to the obituary, I accept Bourdieu's view that we must avoid the seductive commonsense inherent in the unitary view of the subject. In clarifying what he calls the ‘biographical illusion’, Bourdieu discusses the ‘contraband’ of the ‘mountain path view’ of life's route. The ‘rhetorical illusion’ he suggests is that life makes up a homogeneous whole, a coherent, directed ensemble, which can be understood as the single arena of a subjective – or even ‘objective’ – intention. Signalled by terms like ‘already’, or ‘from a very young age’ this implies an:

Against this, Bourdieu argues, in an act of ‘rhetorical revolution’, that the biography could be better seen as Macbeth's ‘tale, told by an idiot, a tale full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing’ (Bourdieu, 1986:69–70). Yet his specific critique of the biographical illusion does not imply that subjects or agents are merely clusters of fleeting, refugee selves, caught up in an endless mobile flux created by contingency: the chaotic vision on which some recent writers put too much weight. Bourdieu's concept of the habitus saves us from total contingency, although we should constantly recall also that in his usage, the habitus represents durable dispositions, not an eternal destiny (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 2002a). His general critique of the biographical illusion serves usefully to remind us that the ‘life history approach’ has been shaped overwhelmingly by the structuring mechanism of a steady progression within a career, coupled with the youthful anticipation of this. But this is an upward ascendancy which is more typical of an aristocratic or bourgeois élite than of the lower classes, whose less ordered experience makes their members forcibly more attuned to cyclical or even disrupted rhythms (cf Connerton, 1989:19; Maynes, 1989:105).

Such questions about time and the anticipation of the future are crucial to Bourdieu, as I have argued earlier (Fowler, 1997). The profound difficulty on the part of the subordinates in adopting a rational, future-oriented, progressive model of time is a matter of frequent insistence in both the early and very late work of Bourdieu (Travail et Travailleurs en Algérie, 1964 and Pascalian Meditations, 2000). Indeed, in the picture of the unemployed given in Pascalian Meditations, with its recognition of a Kafka-like fragility in the possession of a justified social existence, we have some of Bourdieu's most compelling and convincing writing.

In brief, as Bourdieu has taught us, when we confront the study of obituaries, we must be wary of those constructions that identify success too much with an individual's self-avowed objectives. Instead, we shall focus on empowerment as a result of birth into an élite or the esprit de corps within great public schools or Oxford and Cambridge (in France, within the grandes écoles) (Bourdieu, 1996b). Moreover, Bourdieu's sociological account of the art-world also appears a promising beginning to understanding the recent European and British obituaries. His approach to the ‘world in reverse’ inhabited by bohemian cultural producers and the position-taking available for the avant-garde, opens an under-explored new path for the qualitative study of the artistic biography.

The sociogenesis of the obituary

In order to understand any contemporary institution, we need to trace it back to its origins. Thus we shall explore briefly points in the genealogy of the obituary. In written form, the original British starting-point for the obituary is commonly thought to be John Aubrey's Brief Lives (1898 – originally 1669 and 1696). The newspaper form became current by the middle of the eighteenth century (O.E.D.). The official History of The Times refers to the inclusion of obituaries from its earliest days (1785) but the form was then already a standard element within all the daily newspapers (Anonymous, 1935, see also Grant, 1871). We therefore chose 1900, as a point at which the obituary was already well-established in a routinised and anonymous column of biographies. By that time the obituary was more than a bare announcement of death, but it was hardly ever as lengthy, elaborate and individuated as the genre that emerged by the mid-twentieth century.

The 1900 obituaries

The ranking of the dead in 1900 is still cast in terms of an estate society, where the obituaries of the higher species (royalty and the barons) have priority in terms of length and precedence over mere gentry and the plebeian strata. Of course there is some fusion of the old and the new in this form. The ‘old’ – the aristocrats of the Regiment and the Navy in particular, representing as many as 34% of the total – are now joined by the ‘new’ with the emergence of certain more modern figures, such as the ‘electrician’ (electrical engineer, Prof. D.E.Hughes, F.R.S.), who invented the telegraph or the chairman of a steamship company.

Women are curiously non-existent within these columns, appearing where they do principally as units of alliance in noble kinship networks. Thus it is extremely rare to read anything much about their individual distinction. The following – which gives a flavour of this whole category – is a complete (and typically stark) entry:

There are only two 1900 exceptions to this. The Hon. Mrs. James Stuart Wortley appears as a ‘one of the most interesting women of the epoch’, while Mary Kingsley's obituary honours a short, but distinguished life as an anthropologist in Africa.

The men in the 1900 obituaries are all exemplary figures, many described in the language of medieval warriors. None descend into barbarism; none are brutalized by the closeness of violence. But the key point is surely this. If there was a fusion by 1834, of the middle class and aristocracy, blood and gold, this was a fusion that left aristocratic culture uppermost in many crucial forms (Mayer, 1981).

Industrial capital does not appear in the 1900 obituaries. There is one exception: an unprepossessing mine owner, who is symptomatically objectified in a manner similar now to the white working-class, in a language saturated with all the ambiguities of class racism:

Thus even in ‘the age of capital’, the merely ‘regional’ industrialists are put in their place.

There are occasional exceptions to the ideal-type warriors who dominated these columns. The second or third sons of aristocrats became Classics-trained clergyman. A minority of these led exemplary lives, living and working in the East End of cities. One such sacrificial figure is a Bristol vicar with a huge parish who died young, of a heart-attack.

Ruskin is another such exception. But with him we see the mould broken, for he is a heretical figure, even nicknamed “the Prophet of Brantwood”. His death established a new way of seeing in the obituary. For it provoked not just a long regular obituary, but an accompanying obituary article, as well as an appreciation from the Chief Rabbi. Within these, Ruskin is heralded, as the inventor of a new artistic field, that of art criticism itself – ‘Through him’ says the main obituarist, ‘a new life was infused into English art’.

Contemporary obituaries

There is a sense in which obituaries offer us not theodicies but sociodicies, accounts which serve to legitimate the social order (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). They are tiny exemplary tales of our times. We expect these narratives to reveal the heroic individuals of our society, even while, as sociologists, we take our distance from them. But there are also negative biographies – those of anti-heroes, villains, call them what you will.

For example, in 2000–1, while post-colonial writing is celebrated, post-colonial politicians, unsurprisingly, may be castigated. Joe Modise can stand for the rest (The Guardian 29/11/01). His obituary charts his rise from street fighter to chief of the armed wing of the ANC, in which capacity he had the Communist, Chris Hani killed in the brutal Quattro camp. As Defence Minister he amassed £5.6 million in shares, but died decorated by Mbeki with the South African Grand Cross.

The obituarist progressively sows the seeds of doubt: his ‘staggering brutality, extraordinary abuse of power’ is followed by later by evidence of corruption. He ends using Shakespearean innuendo to reinforce Modise's critics: ‘So his friends say, for all his sins, Joe Modise served the new South Africa well’. By this mustering of the evidence, the reader realises the verdict should not rest with his friends.

That the obituary is more geared to celebration rather than defamation appears most clearly when its ‘rules’ are flouted. This is the case with the prominent obituary of Lord Shore (Edward Pearce The Guardian: 26/9/01), which uses the impersonal gravitas granted to each individual obituarist for an unusually destructive judgement of the subject's entire personal reputation, a judgement that is underpinned, more evidently than is usual, by its author's antagonistic political agenda. The obituary savagely writes him off for ‘dullmindedness’, reassessing Shore's unsuccessful political odyssey in a series of barbed attacks on his radicalism, consistency and intellectual credibility:

The obituary includes words all the more savage for having the authority of a direct quotation: ‘Wilson's comment to Richard Crossman was the more deadly for lacking anger: “I over-promoted him. He's no good”’. And much more. We might see this as the point-zero of the critical genre.

Obituary samples 2000–1

Theorizing women's marginality within the obituary

Obituaries continue to be predominantly narratives of men. Nevertheless, one element within the selective democratisation of the genre since 1900 is the reduced marginalization of women, now 19% overall (cf. 11% in 1900). There is even a tiny minority of women whose deaths have been recorded in more than one newspaper, such as Barbara Cartland, or Lorna Sage, the literary critic.

When we begin to look more closely at those who do appear, one immediate generalization emerges: these women are distinctive collectively in having had very few children. From 1900 to the contemporary samples, over a third have not had children at all (36%) and a clear majority (53%), either one child only or none. ⁴ In The Independent of 2000–1, as many as 75% are stated to have had one or no children and 63% had been childless. It should not be assumed that such women always chose not to have children. These were the years of either a marriage bar or institutionalized anti-natalist policies for women employees. Professional motherhood had as its other side, compulsory spinsterhood: a historic concession by women in their subversion of male professional closure. As a consequence, it is difficult to establish the mixture of autonomous choice and structural pressures towards celibacy that were responsible for the childlessness of figures such as Brigadier Helen Meechie, Lieutenant-Commander Dame Anne Stephens, the journalist Muriel Bowen or Vera Atkins, the Assistant Head of the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War. We should not expect such childlessness in a later generation, where marriage bars have been swept away. Or should we? There is undoubtedly still a wider structural tension between women having children and what Bourdieu calls ‘the male monopoly of noble tasks’ (2001). I will consider this further later.

We need to pursue a closer, qualitative study of the obituaries of women to see what kind of interpretative analysis is given them. I shall offer this approach to women's obituary discourses through the prism of different genres. These are best approached by illustration, with ideal typical accounts of life histories. I shall then make some general explanatory comments on the rarity of women in the form.

Types of obituary for women

First, none of the obituaries for women have the grand heroic stature of those portrayals of the State Nobility, such as the full-page for Viscount Hailsham (The Guardian 15/10/01). Male figures, like Hailsham, lie in the most venerable tradition of the obituary, as we have seen. They represent old money, allied to noble tasks of domination: they are credited with untrammelled excellence of character. Even in the Centre-Left papers like The Guardian, their personalities are depicted as moulded like gloves for their offices. For these heroic figures, Bourdieu's words on the State Nobility and its training in the elite schools are memorable. They have both technical skills and the magic derived from office: both feed beneficially off each other.

The stakes in the game

How then should we understand the obituary in general as a power-soaked, authoritative discourse? I want to expand Bourdieu's model of biographical illusion, taking into account his Pascalian Meditations on modes of anticipating the future. I shall consider especially the investment of time – as well as other stakes – in the illusio of professional fields: art, architecture, politics, science. Here I shall move on from his late works, like The Rules of Art, to a consideration of the games of art and science, both being characterized by their considerable scope for autonomy. Within these, Bourdieu perceives a sphere for indeterminacy, in the sense that the artist or writer is able to put into specific novels or poems a view of more than one social world, made possible through the writer's dream of social flying. Far from a reductively determinist view of the writer, etc. these late works – and especially Science de la science (2002b) – develop a view that succeeds in both objectivating the writer or scientist and in adopting a more generous interpretation of their potential for reflexivity (1996, 2000; Guillory, 1997). Indeed, Bourdieu here emphasizes the ways in which the professional world itself encourages such reflexivity (2002b).

One way to elaborate further on Bourdieu's notion of the vocational habitus is to take up, as McNay has done, Ricoeur's ideas about the phenomenology of time. This allows me to theorize further the transformative aspects of agency which may be disclosed in the obituary (McNay, 2000; Ricoeur, 1984). ⁶

The key determinant of whether or not women receive obituaries is not just the question of how active they have been in the artistic or political field. Nor is it just a consequence of the filters used in interpreting their action: those interpretative practices of women obituarists or feminist men which enhance their historical visibility. My view is rather that the fundamental issue for women concerns their own perception of time and their involvement in a specific game. This is another way of approaching the thorny problem of canonisation, or, in Terry Lovell's concept, the notion of ‘literary survival value’ (Lovell 1987). It is also another way of returning to the fact that 36% of the women subjects overall do

not have children. ⁷

Bourdieu prompts us to ask: ‘What stakes have women acquired in a game? To what degree has your fundamental sense of yourself and what you live for become tied up in that field?’ Here he has some important points about the pre-reflexive ‘protension’ or imagining of the future, in which the future unfolds as part of the logic of the habitus, as in the case of the male State Nobility and their great worldmaking activities. In fact, as Bourdieu insists, it is only at a certain level of distance from necessity that alternative projects for the future can be anticipated: the future loses its doxic, taken-for-granted character and becomes a changed place, collectively achieved as in the classic trade-union imaginary or through individual practice (2000:216–7). Such active projects for the future – along with obligations to others – serve to distinguish those individuals with a ‘justified’ ‘social existence’ from those without. The power of ‘symbolic baubles’ (entry to Who's Who, honours etc) is to act as a support for the social game. That is, they act as buttresses for the decision to cope with one's own finitude or mortality, not by fleeing the world, but by seeking social esteem. This is the fundamental source of investment in a specific field:

The possibility of a celebratory obituary could clearly count as one of the long string of ‘symbolic baubles’.

Earlier, Bourdieu writes about the harsher face of competitive struggles – for example, when the surrealist, André Breton broke Pierre de Massot's arm in an argument about the future of art (1996:383). Now when we raise questions about women and time, it is to these kinds of phenomenological questions about the future that we should be turning. The issue raised by the surrealists' conflict is this: when does your artistic or craft effort seem so important that you will dedicate your whole life to it? Such an engagement is in part a question of not being caught up in other experiences of time: revolutionaries' ‘disruptive’ commitments, for example. In terms of those scientists or artists not so directly caught up, the passion with which you throw yourself into these disinterested fields or vocations is a key determinant of achievement. The performance of the work-in-hand becomes infused with an extraordinary importance. Undergoing this routine activity everyday, seeking, say, to understand cancer cells may be your way of changing the world …

Bourdieu writes of the doxa which preserves noble tasks for men. But women- or any carers – of very young children, cannot be involved in the same sense with the illusio of their work as a life and death struggle. Instead they are constrained to participate in other more pressing life and death struggles, such as their children's vulnerability to fatal illness or to ontological insecurity. Hence, one might write without any essentialist presuppositions, of their deficit of professional engagement, for they show, reluctantly, a suspension of effort.

What I have called here the necessary suspension of professional effort is neither lifelong nor found in all professional working women. Sarah Checkland, for example, writes vividly of Barbara Hepworth being accepted for a Venice Biennale, and of her husband Ben Nicolson – who had not been picked – enviously smashing her sculpted maquette. Hepworth's young triplets did not impede her artistic ‘worldmaking activities’, nor, indeed, her participation in the international constructivist group, the Circle, which enfolded both husband and wife (Checkland, 2000).

Bourdieu took from Husserl and Heidegger certain approaches to time which he went on to fuse with a more relationist historical sociology. Now Ricoeur has developed further one aspect of this earlier German phenomenology which may help theorise agency, as McNay also argues (McNay, 2000:85–96).

I note in particular Ricoeur's distinction between the contrasting experiences of ‘linear, calendar time’ and ‘eternal time’ (Ricoeur, 1984:25). Now we might call such ‘eternal time’, following Bourdieu, the time of posterity, the future in which the scientist or artist might make his or her mark. More interestingly, for feminism, Ricoeur has also stressed the effects of the imagination and utopia in freeing agency (1991:319–324). He has addressed Proust's long novel, Remembrance of Things Past, (tr. 1941) as a story about the author's oscillation between a vivid sensual understanding of the lost childhood time and the adult sense of disillusionment and knowledge of power, via his narrator, Marcel. The novel culminates in a commitment to vocational time as Marcel learns to unify these different worlds in order to become a writer (Ricoeur, 1985:144–5). Perhaps we can salvage something from this novel and go beyond its privileged milieu? Then this narrative might reveal for women on the ground more broadly the nature and dynamics of the engagement or illusion with modern fields of cultural production or the public sphere.

Now, from a critical perspective, the subjects of obituaries are often authority figures, linked more closely to what Ricoeur labels ‘monumental’ and ‘official time’ than to his ‘eternal time’ or Bourdieu's time of posterity (Ricoeur, 1985:106, 112). The obituary genre as a whole is wider than the depiction of original or distinctive achievements as in the meritocratic model, still being caught up with old forms of elitism. But with the narrowing of the gender difference in terms of a full engagement with the illusio of the field, the disparity between the numbers of obituaries for men and women will undoubtedly become less marked. Ricoeur's approaches to what he calls ‘temporal refiguring’, the enhancing of imaginative possibilities through the narratives in modernist novels, may turn out to clarify those forms of often transformative agency on which the modern meritocratic obituary typically draws (1988:274). But we would then have to remember that it is not simply the raising of consciousness that is at stake, but rather an activity as thorough and remorseless as ‘involving repeated exercises [which alone] can, like an athlete's training, durably transform habitus' (Bourdieu, 2000:172).

Conclusion

Perhaps it is now possible to sketch further components of the obituary. First, holding economic capital on its own is only rarely a prerequisite for an obituary, at any point in the 100-odd year selection. Lowenthal – writing about such American ‘heroes of production’, in the early twentieth century – may be describing a distinctively American cast of biography (Lowenthal, 1961). The closest to this in Britain is The Times (2000) with still only 15% industrialists and bankers.

Second, I note the importance of art in the prophetic figure of Ruskin, in the 1900 The Times. In 2000–1 there has been a much greater increase in the arts-based occupations (see Appendix). This, and especially the turn to the popular arts, indicates the undeniable resonance with Lowenthal's 1960s analysis, and its stress on the growing significance of the ‘heroes of consumption’. It is in this context that Bourdieu's recent diagnosis of contemporary practices in the arts is especially telling.

Finally, there has been a decline from 1900 in portrayals of hard-working, exemplary lives. Not only are there virtually no manual workers, but no teachers and nurses appear now. Since women particularly are linked with these professions, this may be related to their relative lack of representation. Given the importance of the obituary as an accolade and as a measure of valued activities, it is surprising that there are not more exemplary headteachers or self-sacrificing trade-unionists to stand alongside the outstanding achievements of the Hoyles, Anscombes, Bodmers and Quines.