Victorian Perspectives on Death
The Victorian era was a jumping-off point for a variety of strange and curious traditions surrounding death, none of which survive, yet remain ingrained in our perceptions of the time. Mourning jewelry, death portraits, and more reveal the materiality of death as well as the scientific and spiritual notions of the period. Despite Victorians’ belief in the sanctity of bodily relics after passing, they partook in mummy unrolling and even incorporated parts of them in homeopathic remedies.
Victorians were associated with relic culture, as a means to preserve life and challenge the permanent, enduring state of death. Material remains served as proof of a loved one’s continued presence and existence within the realm of the living. Mourning jewelry was intended to frame a moment of loss, holding a kind of magical aura within the fragment of the life they represented. Born from memento mori jewelry of the Middle Ages, mourning jewelry evolves from something to remember death by to memorializing the individual, continuing the narrative of their life. Victorians included the deceased’s hair as it was believed to contain the essence of the person, and its imperishable quality symbolized immortality. Hair was styled in delicate hoops, braids, and was typically accompanied by a portrait of the deceased. Designs in gold and pearls were popularized by Queen Victoria, who wore pearls in her period of grief after Prince Albert’s death. Pearls were thought to be formed by the tears of gods.
A Victorian mourning brooch
More than mourning jewelry was employed in times of grief, as Victorians had traditions of taking post-mortem photographs after their loved ones had passed. They frequently propped up their bodies with posing stands to make their positions look more life-like, supporting the idea that in an era where people died younger and more frequently, Victorians established elaborate rituals and traditions to provide comfort and meaning in the face of their fleeting lives.
Simultaneously, mummy unrolling was becoming popular among 19th century Britain, wherein Egyptian bodies acquired by British soldiers, diplomats, and collectors were subject to desecration and inspection to an audience. Egyptmania, alongside other questionable fascinations with what Europeans deemed ‘primitive’ cultures, turned the study of non-western cultures into a spectacle, a source of entertainment. Mummies’ lives as exoticized souvenirs ended with the 1832 Anatomy Act, but not before Victorians could harvest portions of the mummies for homeopathic remedies to cure internal bleeding, head ailments, and more.
Additionally, human fat treated external ailments, and blood cured ailments believed to come from the blood. The cure to an affliction would reflect its root cause, and ingesting a virgin or young man’s blood would bestow strength and purity to the one who consumed it. Human remains were believed to contain the spirit of the body they were taken from, a continuation, perhaps, of their material use after death.
from the desk of Madison Kelley
Bibliography
Lutz, Deborah. “THE DEAD STILL AMONG US: VICTORIAN SECULAR RELICS, HAIR JEWELRY, AND DEATH CULTURE.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011): 127–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41307854.
Moshenka, Gabriel. “Unrolling Egyptian Mummies in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” The British Journal for the History of Science 47, no. 3 (2014): 451–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43820513.
