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Pedalling the Death of a Life: A Late V ictorian Variation on Dealing with Grief
Author(s) -
Cadwallader Alan H.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of religious history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 13
eISSN - 1467-9809
pISSN - 0022-4227
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9809.12136
Subject(s) - pilgrimage , grief , interpretation (philosophy) , stress (linguistics) , counterpoint , afterlife , history , art , literature , religious studies , art history , philosophy , sociology , psychology , ancient history , linguistics , psychotherapist , pedagogy
This article seeks to explore how one forgotten, V ictorian‐formed individual sought to deal privately with the death of his publicly esteemed father. Through the journey that carried a cyclist and train traveller from the north to the south of E ngland, we discover the conjunction of athleticism and mortality, place and people, pilgrimage and passages, religion and leisure, photography and memorialisation, discipline and dissipation, networks and mourning. It provides a counterpoint to the accent on death‐bed and grave in V ictorian E ngland during a time of national readjustment by arguing that the particular method of dealing with a significant death carved by H enry W estcott for himself was novel, cathartic, and yet constantly interacting with and informed by the legacy of a range of V ictorian values. Those values are explored through the writings of his father, B rooke F oss W estcott, a famous biblical exegete who provided a distinctive interpretation of the key s criptural text of V ictorian death: the G ospel of J ohn, chapter 11. Those values became a legacy that is both reinforced in H enry through the death of his famous father and also subtly interrogated and eroded as H enry pedalled through the complexities of disentanglement from the paterfamilias, a journey that H enry recorded in diary and photograph.