Memorial Cards

These cards started informally as poems and rhymes for the dead, mostly written by relations and others close to children who had died. As time passed and the funeral industry grew, local poets began to contribute verse and with the commercialisation of the trade in the 19th century, printed decorative examples became common, usually with an elegy and the details of the time and place of death. They were so plentiful that some people worked solely as distributors.