ABSTRACT
Across the English-speaking world from 1800 to 2000, confidence in life after death and expectations of Heavenly reunions peaked in the early 1800s and again in the 1860s. Wars, pandemics, and infant deaths contributed to a culture of solace, including commercial elements. However, much more was occurring, particularly with individuals’ statements about their access to Heaven. The solace dimension, fading substantially by 1900, was not the only theme in the history of the post-mortem identity. Some individuals voiced their fitness for Heaven, prompting theological criticism of sentimental romanticism and religious latitudinarianism. A few self-declarations also revealed anti-authoritarian attitudes, some of which raised moral complications. Various cross-currents developed during an incomplete but perceptible transition from the religious stance that the soul was not eradicated at death to the materialistic position that the mind was a product of the brain that did not survive the organism’s death. World War I added a further layer of complexity to this history, for it failed to inspire a solace response equivalent in scale to prior conflicts.
The analysis of individuals’ popular beliefs originated from earlier research into suicide inquest files. However, the current exploration goes beyond these suggestive records, thanks to the digitization of books (Google N-gram Viewer), and the hundreds of digitized newspapers available for the United Kingdom (British Newspaper Archive), Australia (Trove, National Library of Australia), and New Zealand (Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand). These sources pointed to long- and short-term patterns and yielded supporting statements
