Mary Riso employs a clever research design in The Narrative of the Good Death. She examines 1,200 obituaries published in English evangelical magazines: 300 each for Primitive Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Wesleyan Methodists. For all four denominations, she analyzes 100 each from three different time periods: the 1830s, 1850s, and 1870s. Her data therefore allows her to describe both change over time and continuity, in addition to similarities and differences among the four denominations.

This, then, is a study more of obituaries than of the “evangelical deathbed” in the book's subtitle. Because obituaries are highly formulaic sources, they require careful handling so conventional expressions are not taken to be transparent windows onto past experiences. Fortunately, Riso is sensitive to the challenges that her sources pose. She understands that in obituaries “the deceased is often idealised, and death itself is tamed with poetic imagery and formulaic language based on scripture and hymns” (210). Balancing such conventional portraits, Riso asserts, are “objective statements of fact with vivid detail of the dying process” and “unvarnished remarks about both the fears and flaws of the deceased” (210). Riso thus feels confident in generalizing about evangelical beliefs and practices based on her extensive archive of source material.

As Riso herself admits, her findings generally add depth and texture to what we already know about evangelicals in nineteenth-century England rather than offering startling new insights: “Historical assessments of the Nonconformist denominations represented here are enhanced by the conclusions of the present study” (224). Nonetheless, the book deserves the attention of specialists because its impressive source base adds granular detail to previous discussions of evangelicalism that are often based on either a few prominent individuals or unsubstantiated generalizations. The people memorialized in Riso's obituaries are otherwise generally unremarked upon in the historical record. They include a large number of women, though the percentage of women in obituaries decreased over time, from 44 percent of the total in the 1830s to only 26 percent in the 1870s.

Riso's broadest argument is that the obituaries slowly shifted from being focused on heaven and other religious topics in the 1830s, to a greater emphasis on worldly concerns by the 1870s. Nonconformists, Riso argues, “looked increasingly to earthly existence for the fulfillment of hopes” (xii). This change reflected the steady increase in evangelicals’ social status during the nineteenth century. Over time, evangelicals as a group became more comfortably middle-class, and therefore their obituaries increasingly reflected middle-class concerns, such as respectability, sobriety, thrift, and generosity. Other aspects of the obituaries changed less. The religious concerns of those memorialized—conversion, atonement, sin, Jesus, the Bible, and hymns—remained constant throughout the nineteenth century. Likewise, the deathbed scenes of the deceased demonstrated more continuity than change; indeed, many elements of the evangelical deathbed scene had roots going back to the late medieval Ars moriendi (art of dying). Throughout the period and for all four denominations, good deaths included the dying person displaying piety, patience, resignation to God's will, and a desire to meet Jesus and loved ones in heaven. Most notably, model deathbed scenes included an acceptance of impending death. As a Wesleyan Methodist stated while dying in 1830, “I am now ready to be offered: the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course” (193). Some deathbed scenes, however, departed from the script in interesting ways. Some “young mothers with children expressed a reluctance to die” (193). Other evangelicals on their deathbeds were tormented by fears that they might not be on their way to heaven after all. As one elderly Baptist woman cried out while she was dying in 1832, “O! I am cut off—I have no hope—I shall be cast away. I know not what to do” (201).

Such dramatic moments are, however, the exception to the rule that obituaries rarely depart from the conventional expressions of piety and hope that one would expect. But the book's lack of drama is a consequence not only of its sources. Riso's research design, which is mostly a great strength, also occasionally results in leaden passages in which a barrage of percentages overwhelms the reader's ability to extract significance from the data. In a section on references to Jesus, for example, Riso writes that “the Primitive Methodists were the only group that increased references over the 50-year span, from 43 percent to 51 percent to 54 percent. The other three groups decreased their references slightly but they still remained high at 41 percent for the Baptists and 44 percent for the Wesleyan Methodists in the 1870s” (151). But overall The Narrative of the Good Death contains a wealth of important information that will be of value to scholars of evangelicalism, death, and middle-class respectability in Victorian England.