From funeral biscuits to post mortem photos, Victorians turned death into big business
Fancy a Victorian funeral biscuit? These dry, delectable items, part of the great Victorian industry of death and mourning, came individually wrapped in black- edged paper sealed with black wax.
‘Joseph Howell: Rich Wedding cakes and Funeral Biscuits’, the advertisement blared in large lettering. The manufacturer was clearly milking life’s happiest and saddest events.
How about a nice photo of your freshly deceased beloved? Or maybe one taken just before death, marketed as ‘The Final Photograph’? If you were well-off, the photographer would come to your house and snap them lying marble-like. If you were hard-up, you would have to carry your dead child to the studio, as often happened.
They liked a picturesque, christian death, those Victorians. a clergyman described the ideal deathbed scene: dying husband propped up on pillows, his wife beside him, his children in tears, the sombre servants in a group near the door, a medical friend deep in thought and the Book Of Job open at the verse: ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’.
AS FLANDERS emphasises in her highly informative overview, the Victorians were horribly acquainted with death. In 1850, life expectancy was in the mid-40s for the upper-middle class, rising to 63 by 1880; for working class, it was just 22 in the mid- century, rising to 29 in the 1880s.
These statistics were heavily weighted downwards by the deaths of young children — sometimes whole families of siblings, dying one after another in short succession of some incurable contagious illness.
The dreaded moment, both for the child and for the parents, was when the dying person’s hair was cut off shortly before death: this was thought to ‘relieve pressure on the brain’, and was a terrifying precursor of death.
There’s lots in this book to think about, from the fashion for hair jewellery — locks of the deceased placed in a brooch (Robert and elizabeth Browning owned 50 of these), to the ruthless class system when it came to undertakers’ attitudes (you got ‘sighs deep and audible’ if you paid more money), and the evil hidden industry of stealing bodies and selling them for medical experiments.
Hospitals were in on this scheme, and so were undertakers, who removed bodies from coffins and replaced them with bricks so no one would notice.
When we think of Victorian mourning, we think of Queen Victoria, whose reaction to Prince albert’s death was decidedly OTT. First, she refused to face the fact he was dying; then, after he did, she retired from public life for ten years and stubbornly wore black for the remaining 40 years of her life, even at her son’s wedding.
she kept a post-mortem photograph of albert above her bed in each of her royal residences.
But this decades-long mourning was not normal, Flanders writes, and the accepted mourning period grew shorter as the century moved on. The official length of full mourning for a mid-Victorian widow was ‘a year and a day’ — that extra day was added on to indicate the widow was not too eager to divest herself of her black crepe burden — though she probably was, because black mourning crepe was a bore to wear.
a single drop of water would ruin it, so widows stayed indoors on rainy days. The second period of mourning was for another six to 12 months, during which the stipulated colour was still black, but less crepe was worn, before half-mourning allowed slate-grey, mauve and purple.
But when Princess alexandra’s eldest son died in January 1892, she chose not to wear black, but went straight to silver, grey and lavender. By then, Flanders writes, ‘excessive grief was beginning to be seen not as appropriate but as “wicked”’. The era of the stiff upper lip had arrived.