Julian Litten was on the curatorial staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1966 and 1999, and Visiting Lecturer in Built Heritage Conservation at Canterbury Christ Church University College, Kent between 1999 and 2004. Described as “England’s foremost funerary historian”, he published The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 in 1991: it has been reprinted on four occasions in revised editions. In 1994 he produced the introductory essay to The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (2nd, revised, ed. 2003), the introductory essay to Grave Concerns: Death and Burial in England 1700-1850 in 1998 and an essay in Arthur, The Forgotten Prince in 2009.