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Victorian dying was informed by the concept of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ death. The ‘good’ death, as historians such as Mary Riso and Pat Jalland have explained, was derived from the medieval concept of ‘ars moriendi’, or ‘the art of dying’, and was codified in terms of a series of elements. In the words of Catherine Arnold, the ...
- The Art of Dying
- A Good Death
- Mourning Dress
- The Art of Death
- Victorian Funerals
Since the 15th Century the Ars Moriendi or the ‘Art of Dying’ had been a recognised model for the ideal death. However after a period of scepticism during the Enlightenment of the 18th Century, it resurged with vigour under the growing Evangelicalism of Victorian Britain. The denial of purgatory after the Protestant Reformation had left the dying w...
Since our consignment to heaven or hell was to be decided at the hour of death, the ‘good death’ became increasingly significant. Early Victorians idealised the notion of an end slow enough to give the dying the chance to say goodbye to their families and to prepare themselves spiritually for this all important moment. Families would cluster around...
After death relatives and friends of the deceased would go into mourning, a practice taken up wholeheartedly by Queen Victoria after the death of her husband Albert. Mourning dress consisted of whole outfits to inform onlookers of your state of grief, with fabrics and colours changing over time to mark how long it had been since the death of your l...
The Victorian fascination with death extended to the production of a range of Memento Mori, objects designed to remind the owner of the death of a loved one and indeed, their own eventual demise. These took several forms, locks of hair cut from the dead were arranged and worn in lockets, death masks were created and the images and symbols of death ...
Another feature of Victorian death was the rise of the funeral director. Where funerals had previously been arranged between the family and the church, the increasing pomp of funerals required some serious stage management. The undertaker emerged from being a side-line job of the local carpenter or job-master (who hired out horses) to presiding ove...
Dec 8, 2018 · Victorian rules for the end of life. The Victorian society of the late 1800s was obsessed with death. Queen Victoria set the tone for this after the death of her husband Prince Albert. She was ...
Mar 25, 2024 · Queen Victoria turned mourning the loss of her husband Prince Albert in 1861 into the central core of her being. She fell into a deep depression and practically disappeared from view for several years. Her subjects took their cue from the monarch and created a complex ritual around the end of life. When someone died, the curtains in the house ...
Jun 4, 2016 · By Bethan Bell. Photographs of loved ones taken after they died may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the ...
Rites of Passage: Death and Mourning in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders. Picador, pp. 352, £25. Death’s great paradox is its inconstant constancy. Its forms and rituals change from ...
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Nov 7, 2012 · To pile on the miseries, the monarch of the Victorian Age, Queen Victoria, was obsessed with death after her beloved husband Prince Albert died at the young age of 42. For the next 40 years, the queen wore black and froze her house in time, having servants continue to lay out her husband’s clothing. Just as fashion from Paris is in vogue in ...
