Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley on Breathers of an Ampler Day

For the second time this year we are thrilled to welcome back Emeritus Professor Ian Bradley author of The Coffin Roads and God Save the King. This November Ian will discuss Breathers of an Ampler Day: Victorian Views of Heaven.

Death is coming back into our public discourse and collective consciousness. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic brought it starkly centre-stage, a growing concern was being expressed that death has been shunted too far out of our modern minds, with all the emphasis being on how it can be cheated and avoided rather than on faced and embraced. Growing calls for assisted dying, fascination with near-death experiences and the rise and spread of death cafés are among the signs of increasing engagement with a topic that has long remained the last taboo.

Unlike us, the Victorians had no inhibitions about talking about death, nor imagining what would follow it. Their most distinguished and popular poets frequently took this as their subject. Alongside an acknowledgement of death’s undeniable cruelty and trauma went a sense of its naturalness and also of its possibilities. Breathers of an Ampler Day explores the main ways in which death and the future life were imagined and conceived in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Reverend Professor Ian Campbell Bradley is a British academic, author and broadcaster.

He is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews, where he was Principal of St Mary's College and honorary Church of Scotland Chaplain.

The author of over 35 books, Bradley has written widely on cultural and spiritual matters, including Celtic Christianity, hymns, carols, Gilbert and Sullivan and musical theatre.