BBC - h2g2 - Mourning

The Victorian way of death
“In this world nothing is certain except death and taxes”, said Benjamin Franklin. Taxes some of us can still manage to avoid, given a bit of creative book-keeping, but Death is inevitable and we just have to cope with it.

Every culture and society has its own way of dealing with the trauma of losing loved ones: the Zulu king Chaka slaughtered thousands when his mother died, to ensure that his subjects’ mourning would be genuine. In Egypt they tried to preserve the bodies for ever; conversely in parts of India they exposed them for the vultures.

In Victoria’s England the rituals around death became obsessive, perhaps because the queen herself mourned so single-mindedly when her husband died. For years she wore black, would not appear in public and ordered his rooms to remain untouched.

In Victorian times many children died in infancy. Wax casts of the dead children’s hands were displayed in the drawing room. Locks of hair were worn in lockets or fashioned into brooches. There was a strict code prescribing who had to wear unrelieved black and for how long, when touches of mauve could be added, who could wear lilac or grey and who could get away with merely a black or mauve ribbon on the hat. The closer the connection, the blacker and longer the mourning.

Those in mourning had to use black-bordered stationery, the width of the border gradually decreasing by the month. All social life had to be postponed, weddings cancelled, guests put off. The Victorians had large extended families and mourning periods tended to overlap as great-aunts died while they were still in mourning for some cousin’s baby. Unfortunately for those with sallow complexions, many people were more or less permanently in shades of lilac.

Funerals were attended by men only, the hearse drawn by black-plumed horses and followed by professional mourners who could inject a great deal of sincerity into their weeping at a surprisingly modest fee. Amazing monuments were erected on the graves: marble or granite angels, animals, family groups, even a piano. A Victorian cemetery is well worth a visit.