Why the Victorians were smitten with death

As Judith Flanders’s lively history shows, 19th-century mourning was an opportunity for drugs, piety and gothic extravagance

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If death was big business to the Victorians, they were only following the lead of their sovereign, who, after the death of Prince Albert, in 1861, “mourned ostentatiously”, cladding herself in widow’s weeds for the next 40 years. On Victoria’s orders, Albert’s bedroom at Windsor was to remain exactly as he’d left it: hot shaving water was brought up daily and his laundered clothes were placed (and replaced) in readiness. State papers were bordered in black for the remainder of Victoria’s reign. Ladies at court wore dark colours – anything cheerful the queen “decreed to be unseemly”.

The conclusion had to be reached, as one contemporary put it, that Victoria “really enjoys these melancholy entertainments”, which included séances, tablerapping and other spiritualist practices. It was a century of the undead – Frankenstein’s monster; Dracula; Peter Pan, who announced that “to die will be an awfully big adventure”. Judith Flanders is a great historian of the Victorian social scene and her previous books have examined domestic architecture, municipal organisation, and the problems of work and play. In Rites of Passage, she looks at the cult of death, and finds it full of liveliness.

Perhaps in the 19th century, they had no choice, for death was everywhere, a “ghostly army” of starving paupers and terminal cases. Life expectancy was 29 for a labourer, 37 for the middle classes. Mothers commonly died in childbirth or of sepsis shortly afterwards, expiring in “blood and vomit”, as Flanders notes. Few children saw the age of five; and until 1877, babies who died before the age of one “were not even included in government statistics”.

Before the existence of germs and bacteria was understood and accepted, shocking sanitation, contaminated drinking water and bad nutrition were the norm, and parents could lose infant after infant. Epidemics were common, infection was rampant, as was coughing from tuberculosis, or the fevers caused by cholera, typhoid and scarlet fever. Doctors were not much help, as they attempted to alleviate suffering with opium, laudanum, or mustard poultices. Tumours were burnt with nitric acid. There was a brisk trade in patent pharmaceuticals, such as Godfrey’s Cordial, Daffy’s Elixir and Battley’s Sedative Solution. Gyles Brandreth’s ancestors made their fortune with Brandreth’s Pills, which alleviated flatulence. (Gyles himself performs a similar duty on daytime television.)

The deathbed, therefore, let alone the sickroom, was the province of the clergy, rather than a place for effective medical treatment and supervision. Instead of giving advice on bedpans or how to deal with bodily fluids, contemporary nursing handbooks eschewed practicalities in favour of spirituality – tranquillity and piety were meant to prevail, in preparation for a Good Death. This must have been hard when undergoing violent convulsions, like the Duke of Wellington, or agony from cancer, like Gladstone.

No wonder, then, that patients were kept stupefied by brandy to prevent cries of pain “from disturbing the neighbours”. The vicar who said to grieving parents that children died young “to enable them to avoid the temptations of the world as they grew up” surely deserved a punch in the face.

Once dead, a person’s body was washed and laid out, often by the sort of Dickensian grotesques who also did duty as midwives. Orifices were plugged, limbs straightened. The corpse was dressed in its shroud or winding sheet, and the coffin was lined with a mattress, to soak up secretions. William IV’s coffin, in 1837, “had to be punctured to let escape a build-up of gases”, which otherwise risked an explosion.

As Flanders says, “death was expensive”, given the cost of wreaths, hymns, ribbons, press announcements, which were regarded as obligatory. Deathbed portraits were made, photographs and death masks taken – all rather ghoulish. Mourning attire meant an extensive wardrobe of black gloves, scarves, hatbands and armbands. The soles of shoes were blackened, so that when kneeling in church, “no unseemly light colour would show itself ”.

Women, however, were not allowed in church during funerals, as, according to belief, they were “unable to restrain their emotion” and would “interrupt and destroy the solemnity of the ceremony with their sobs”. This tradition persisted into my own Welsh childhood, where funerals were men-only affairs. On the other hand, who else would cut the sandwiches and get the funeral tea ready?

In a 19th-century town, Flanders observes, you could expect to see “funeral mutes standing in front of houses with drawn blinds”. Mirrors were covered and door-knockers muffled. Horses pulling the hearse sported black ostrich plumes. Coffins were covered with purple palls or flags. The parish bell tolled. The congregation was sometimes given souvenir shortbread, embossed with the deceased’s details and wrapped in black-edged paper. Funeral feasts could be as lavish as wedding receptions or baptisms. Instead of wedding rings or christening mugs, families exchanged mourning jewellery, carved from jet and produced in Whitby, where some 1,800 people were employed making cameo brooches and pendants.

With their city churchyards crammed and “saturated with human putrescence” – bones sticking out of the ground, covered in flies – the Victorians set out to build new cemeteries, cities of the dead, indistinguishable from pleasure parks. At Glasgow’s Necropolis (1832) and London’s Kensal Green (1833) and Highgate (1839), tombs were “bordered by trees and flowering plants”, with wandering paths and avenues where families could spend a grand day out.

I’d give a lot to have travelled on the Necropolis Railway – opened in 1854, and sadly not mentioned in Rites of Passage – which ran between Waterloo and Surrey. Coffins and mourners could choose whether to travel first, second or third class, though, of course, the deceased wasn’t in need of a day return. There was a special track and platform for Anglicans, another set of facilities for everyone else. Station buildings contained chapels and refreshment kiosks.

Flanders writes with sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail – the references and citations here take up pages and pages – and rather relishes the swirling gothic atmosphere of her subject, which takes in everything from bodysnatching to suicide, capital punishment to cremation. Cremation, for example, which shocked the Victorians initially, was eventually accepted as “decent, speedy and effectual”, and was pioneered by a Welshman called William Price, who fathered children in his 80s and who wore green trousers and a fox-skin headdress. Price was from Pontypridd, and – according to lore – one of my relatives.

Women were barred from church funerals. In Wales, this was still true when I was a boy