I was recently fortunate enough to do a public lecture for the Open University as part of their series of postgrad lectures. In the Q&A session, I was asked why I choose to name the people I write/speak about, and the ethics of doing so.
My work, whether academic or commissioned, takes me into the darkest murk of the past. This is not the history of success, evolution and great men. This is the history of the masses; the history of the poor and the illiterate and the distressed. These histories come to us through the unsympathetic lens of the legal system, whether it be an inquest, police court or assizes. But this paperwork is the end product of an investigation, and it pulls the threads of many lives and events into a few sheets of paper. This process of distillation is most apparent in the criminal trial records.
A name, a crime, a verdict, a sentence.
I am a compulsive storyteller. I want to tell everyone about the frankly insane things I trip over in the records. I cannot let them go. But a thesis is not a story, nor is it a book. A thesis is an argument. The only stories that are allowed in are those that evidence that argument. There are hundreds of stories I will not be able to tell in my thesis.
I cannot put them aside. They linger in my brain. Telling these stories online, whether through twitter, or on this website, or in my substack, is an act of exorcism. However, I am uninterested in voyeurism. I do not wish to point at the subjects of these stories and laugh, or pore over the wreckage of their bodies, or tut at their misfortune. I have no desire to be salacious, to sex up the nineteenth century (it does not NEED sexing up, believe me). I want to tell a truth these people would recognise, if they could somehow skip through time and read it.
So, naming the dead. We do not ask biographers about how they decide whether or not to name their subject. We assume that biography is a good thing, a celebration, a reflection of glory. But writing about death or crime is furtive, a thing that may shock, an inheritance of shame.
Nothing I write about is a secret, nothing I write about is difficult to source. It is all a matter of public record, and I don’t mean hidden and uncatalogued in an obscure archive. These stories are in the newspapers. They are digitised, searchable in a way the subjects could never have imagined, in their world of ribboned files, inkpens, wax seals, carbon paper and parchment. The ease of access blurs the ethical lines: if I can find this so easily, so can anyone, so it doesn’t matter.
But it does matter. My academic work is extremely localised, and there are descendants of my subjects around here. This has become increasingly apparent when doing family histories for friends and neighbours, and finding their distant ancestors living in the parish next door. So when I did a talk on a murderer, who killed in 1880, but did not die until 1942, and had six children while living in the city, I was very conscious that I might be talking to their great-grandchildren.
But I still named them, as I name almost everyone I write or talk about.
It humanises them.
Academic history requires an amount of mental gymnastics. One writes as if the history fell upon the page by accident. I cannot be angry in my thesis, I cannot rail against injustice, I cannot mourn. I have to dismantle their lives to make my point. I have to use their deaths to make my point. I have to be measured… I have to be distant.
But I am not distant.
I am enmeshed in imagining the lives of my subjects; I cannot do justice to their stories if I remain unmoved and impartial. I have wept in the archive at a mother’s testimony of finding her dead child. I have flinched at descriptions of dreadful injuries sustained and briefly survived. I have dwelled on the state of mind of the deceased far longer than any coroner’s jury seems to have done.
There are 1080 inquests in my data. It doesn’t matter whether they died in their sleep, or were murdered; they all matter to me. I want to retain their dignity. In telling you about their deaths, I hope I can give you an insight into their lives and their experiences.
And that starts with a name.
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I write about death every week, and you can subscribe to my substack by clicking on this link.
Get in touch with your own family research problems and questions using the contact page above.
Sophie Michell 