The Victorian’s death-derived emotion that turned mourning into an elaborate art form might seem at little at odds with our ideas of the Victorians as straight-laced with a permanent stiff upper lip. It was, however, only the staid, stoic, and politely restrained kind of grieving that was admired and culturally acceptable; and not the unrestrained histrionics of the snotty and noisy kind of grief. Such unfortunate excesses might be expected of the lower classes, but people of substance in Victorian society distinguished themselves by following set rituals of death in a social show of good taste and wealth. We need only look at the behavior of Queen Victoria (r.1837-1901), whose public mourning of Albert continued for the rest of her life. Every painting or photograph of the royals after Albert’s death included a bust or painting of him to underscore his continued centrality to the family. Not only did Victoria wear black for the next forty years, but she also involved others in performing her grief as she had the palace maintained just as it had been on the day that Albert died. Victoria’s servants were curating a moment in time while inhabiting it. Every morning Albert’s clothes were laid out and his bed linens changed. A bit of a waste of time, maybe, but this level of maintenance of a memorial to her beloved was not too odd. She also, however, had them bring “him” hot water to shave and scour out his chamber pot every morning, which seems to be taking the idea of his continued presence beyond the merely metaphorical. Indeed, it strays into a charade that denies, or at least suspends, his absence.

Albert was only forty-two years old when he died of typhoid fever in 1861 after twenty-one years of marriage and after having nine children with Victoria. At the time, the children ranged from twenty to six years old, and you have to feel sorry for them growing up so subsumed by their mother’s mourning. This is not, however, just one sad tale of one dysfunctional family traumatized by their mother’s reaction to their father’s death, this death obsession was shared by an entire culture (well at least the middle and upper classes of that culture).

It has often been suggested that Victoria set the trend for fetishizing death in this period, but she was really just riding the wave of a vogue established at the beginning of the nineteenth century and decades old already when Albert died in 1861. (Are you also picturing Victoria surfing on a coffin or is that just me?). Victoria’s elaborate mourning was the pinnacle not the origin of this obsession.

It has also been suggested that high death rates in the Victorian period were the root cause of the Victorian’s death obsession. The math doesn’t quite add up though; overall, death rates were no higher in the nineteenth century than they had been in the eighteenth. The poorest of the poor in the newly industrialized cities might be dying at great rates than their rural ancestors due to overcrowding and lack of sanitation, but these were not the ones who could afford, nor were culturally inclined towards, the elaborate mourning rituals that developed in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in statistical terms at least, death rates seemed to be getting better not worse. In a study of overall life expectancy (with infants included), the life expectancy in 1800 was 28, in 1850 was 36, and by 1900 it was 49. Another study of life expectancy of English women who lived beyond age fifteen (so not including infant mortality) also showed a significant increase in life expectancy: in the period 1680-1779 life expectancy was 56.6 years old, but in 1780-1879 this had increased to 64.6. Infant mortality was a major problem until the twentieth century; but it was no worse than in preceding periods and may actually have got a little better. In a study that compared infant mortality rates in different places and times it was found that there was a fairly persistent rate of child death before the age fifteen of around 48%: in hunter/gatherer period it was 48%; Ancient Rome (200BCE-200CE), 50%; Teotihuacan (Mexico) 300-500CE, 49%; Wari Peru 600-1100CE, 53%; Japan 1300-1400CE, 48%; Sweden 1600-1700CE, 50%; Bavaria 1750-99, 50%; Venice 1800-1900CE, 51%; France 1816-50, 44%; Belgium 1800-1900, 41%. A different study that looked at Victorian Britain and found a steady decline in child mortality of children under five years old between 1800 and 1900:  39% in 1800, to 27% in 1845 and 23% in 1900.

Conditions admittedly were worse for the urban poor, for instance in 1840s Manchester infant mortality was higher than any of the above historic figures at 57%, and this was compared in the same study to a rural infant mortality of 32%. These were not, however, the class of people engaging in elaborate mourning. The amount of expense and inconvenience involved in Victorian mourning meant that it was not available to all; and perhaps this was the point. These death rituals made the passing of the affluent and aspirational more publicly noticeable as a staged tragedy of conspicuous consumption than the more frequent “ordinary” deaths of the working class. When any person of substance had to be mourned in a manner suited to their elevated status, it is no wonder that the mourning of Prince Albert was so extraordinary. From a socialist viewpoint, these elaborate death rituals implied that the lives of the rich had been worth more, and that their deaths were a greater loss, than those of the poor. The rich of Industrial Britain were not unaware of the plight of the urban poor, and so perhaps excessively elevating the deaths of the rich was a way to create a humanity gap between the rich and poor. This allowed the rich to ignore the burgeoning death rates of the urban poor, by accentuating their own socially elevating grief.

Mourning was not, however, just about naked conspicuous consumption, it mixed with Romanticism as well as cloying sentimentality, while perhaps also masking a sense of betrayal that modernity had not been able to prevent untimely deaths and may actually be making things worse for urban workers. There was also an aspect of social control and social judgement in mourning rituals, reinforced with typically vicious Victorian social monitoring. With everyone who was anyone watching and judging how you mourned it was necessary to keep up with or surpass the mourning of the Smythe-Jones, if you wanted to be counted above the hoi poli.

The nineteenth century did offer many opportunities for the young and the healthy to die suddenly and unexpectantly, and these are the circumstances of death that always make the paroxysms of grief more acute, and a collection of individual but especially tragic tragedies could snowball into a cultural mourning trend. Cholera was new; it was a disgusting diarrhea pandemic, and it carried off 55,000 in the 1831-32 outbreak. Five more cholera pandemics followed in the nineteenth century. There were also, of course, long standing epidemic diseases such a typhus, yellow fever, scarlet fever and smallpox; this latter alone carried of 400,000 Europeans a year in the nineteenth century. The germ theory of disease was only discovered in the late nineteenth century.

As England sought to expand its empire in the nineteenth century, it engaged in a lot more foreign wars. There were thirty-five foreign wars with significant involvement of British troops between 1800 and 1900, from the Napoleonic Wars of 1802 to the Second Boxer war of 1902. The British fought in India, China, Afghanistan, Burma, Nepal, New Zealand, and all over Africa; each war meant more and more young British men “taken before their time” thousands of miles from home (and usually many more indigenous people dead but the British were not mourning them). Many of these grieving families would have had no body to ritually take care off in the accustomed manner, and so proxy mourning through objects and rituals became more important. Those with loved ones in danger experienced the prolonged ennui of anxiety about potentially having to mourn, and a lot of time to think about how best to do it. On the back of imperial conquest came colonial civilians, which meant that even more loved ones were away from their anxious families keeping a stiff upper lip and pre-planning how their mourning would look, should the worst happen.

Romanticism, an artistic and intellectual movement that celebrated emotion and individualism, also played a role in the development of elaborate Victorian mourning rituals. Often thought off as a reaction against ugly Industrialization and the stolid practically of the Enlightenment, Romanticism peaked in 1800-1850, giving us a well-timed backdrop against which the dying of the worthy individual could become elaborated into competitive mourning excess. If dying was going to be romantic then the drawn-out, pale and interesting death by consumption (tuberculosis) was far preferrable to the quick and frankly shitty death from cholera. Consumption was conspicuously romantic as the lives of young people slowly faded, and their deaths loomed forward to inhabit their lives. Their thoughts and words took on a romantic urgency in the assured knowledge that they would be of limited supply. Pain medication was often withheld at the end of the lives of the terminally ill, so that they could be lucid enough to utter memorable and profound last words.

Romantic painters painted dead people. John Everet Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52), is very much dead in a stream surrounded by blooming flowers, and Henry Wallis’s portrait of the poet Thomas  Chatterton, aged only seventeen and dead by his own hand, helped secure the fame of both poet and painter. Dying young, even by suicide, was incurably romantic. For the romantic poets, death was not the messy, embarrassing, chaos of reality, but a clean, calm, and liberating fantasy.

The fantasy death of the romantic artists was given a boost in the nineteenth century by real world advances in the mortuary sciences and the development of out-of-town cemetery idylls. In the eighteenth century, embalming was a rare and unusual practice, reserved for kings, prelates, and the highest social elite. Embalming techniques, however, got a boost towards the end of the eighteenth century because of the needs of anatomists. Initially, embalming was not embraced by the funeral business until progress during the nineteenth century in the chemical and pharmacological fields led to the invention of chemical embalming. By the mid-19th century, the invention of arterial injection of chemical solutions and the trend for displaying corpses in the homes of the well-heeled, went hand-in-hand. By the 1830s, embalming was starting to become a commercial business, and in 1837, J.N. Gannal patented a process of injection embalming and envisioned a whole new profession of embalmers.

At the same time, new out-of-town cemeteries were created by government decree to combat unhealthy levels of overcrowding of the dead in inner city churchyards. People were disturbed that previously buried bodies were being mutilated to fit new bodies in, and that these new bodies were being buried dangerously close to the surface. In a period when cremation was rare and culturally unacceptable, the graveyards around city churches were beyond capacity. From 1832 to 1841, new cemeteries were built outside of London to provide a more fitting, peaceful, respectful, and above all, respectable resting place for the well-to-do dead. The “Magnificent Seven” is the informal modern name for the seven large, private cemeteries designed as parks for pleasant strolls among the dead. The first to be opened was Kensal Green in 1831, but the most famous is probably Highgate Cemetery, opened in 1839. Brookwood cemetery in Surrey was so far out of London, that it was serviced by its own special Necropolis Railway, which carried both coffins and mourners. Like all things Victorian, class divisions were in place, and the carriages and waiting rooms were divided into first-, second-, and third-class facilities.

Effectively, death and burial were removed from the church space and became an event apart. While burials were still church-bound, the emphasis on Christian notions of the blessed afterlife for the souls of the deceased seemed to keep mourning in check: after all, in the House of God one should not be too sad that your loved one has gone to join Him. The new cemeteries, however, allowed focus to shift from the deceased’s souls to their physical remains as well as highlighting the mourners. While burials had been held in churchyards, they occupied the same space as life’s other rites of passage: baptism at birth, confirmation if one was lucky enough to survive childhood, marriage at the proper time, one’s children’s baptisms, and then, finally, one’s own death and burial. Death was impressed upon the consciousness as part of the cycle of life, and it was reinforced communally week in and week out as friends and neighbors hit their own highs and lows on this same cycle.

Mourning as part of the cycle of life was interrupted when burial and mourning were removed from the parish church and placed far away into these new cemeteries.  A planned trip was required to visit the grave of a loved one, which wasn’t cycle-of-life contextualized in the same way as the churchyard. It also was not standardized; these new cemeteries were private businesses, keen to offer final resting places at a variety of price points with expensive, but meaningful, accessories.

The Victorians developed extensive symbolic grave art for these new cemeteries. Angels, were of course, always popular, guarding the tomb, guiding the dead and directing the attention of the living heavenwards, sometimes by a none-too-subtle point of the angelic finger. A full column meant that the deceased had lived a full life, but a broken column declared that the deceased had died too young. A lily represented the restoration of innocence and purity after death, and ivy, an evergreen, symbolized immortality. A laurel wreath indicated victory over death; an urn with a flame meant undying remembrance, and a draped urn symbolized the separation of the living from the dead. The contemporary fad for all things Egyptian that followed Napoleon’s excellent spin-doctoring of his debacle in Egypt (1798-1801) also invaded the British cemeteries. An obelisk, an ancient Egyptian sun worshipping symbol, was used on nineteenth century British graves to represent rebirth and the spiritual connections between life and afterlife, Heaven and Earth, and the same symbolism was attached to an eye of Ra (and we probably wouldn’t have seen many of those in a church graveyard).

Another new feature of these out-of-town cemeteries were family vaults; this was the kind of thing that was previously found on great landed estates. These were fashioned as small private houses for the dead of just one family, and often evoked classical lines, perhaps to lend an air of antiquity. These would be repeatedly opened to deposit more and more family members. One has to wonder if it was witnessing a burial in such a family vault, or perhaps being dragged there every weekend for two years of a childhood that led one Edinburgh child to turn to the peculiar coping mechanism of burying seventeen coffined dolls on Arthur’s Seat in 1832. Well, perhaps, the timing fits.

In 1817 to 1820, a road had to be cut through Old Calton Burial Ground, and in order to facilitate the building of Waterloo Place, some of the dead were disinterred and they and their gravestones were moved to New Calton Burial Ground. The new site was far larger and grander than was needed for these displaced dead, however, and it became a model Victorian cemetery for Edinburgh’s expanding population. New Calton Burial Ground imitated the very romantic French cemetery, Pére Lachaise, and it was replete with symbolic grave art and rows of family vaults. It also, it should be noted, as you can see in the photograph accompanying this blog, that New Calton Burial Ground has spectacular views of Arthur’s Seat.

Photo Credit: Stephencdickson. Monuments in New Calton Burial Ground [with Arthur’s Seat in the Background] February, 25, 2018.

Anne Carol (2019) Embalming and the materiality of death (France, nineteenth century), Mortality, 24:2, 183-192, DOI: 10.1080/13576275.2019.1585784

Serena Trowbridge, “Cities of the Dead: the Victorian obsession with graveyards,” The Conversation, May 14, 2020.https://theconversation.com/cities-of-the-dead-the-victorian-obsession-with-graveyards-137722

Michael ledger Lomas, “Queen Victoria’s Mourning: How death became her,” Church Times, July 23, 2021. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/23-july/features/features/queen-victoria-s-mourning-how-death-became-her

Romola J. Davenport, ‘Nineteenth Century Mortality Trends: a response to Szreter and Mooney,” The Economic History Review, September 6, 2021. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ehr.13109