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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 ...
Feb 28, 2017 · Death was a familiar part of life in the Victorian age. Infant mortality remained high throughout the 19th century and it was only in the late Victorian period that public health reforms and medical advances caused life expectancy to rise, gradually establishing the now common pattern of death in old age. This intimacy with death had a profound ...
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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- Rituals of Death
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Victorians treated death morbidly and in public. Grief was ritualized, and elaborate ceremonies surrounded sending a loved one off into the hereafter. In the 19th century, three children out of every 20 died before their first birthdays, and those that survived infancy could not expect more than 42 years of life. So, death was a constant and common...
The centrepiece of the Victorian approach to death was the funeral. M.C. Dunbar advised in Dunbar’s Complete Handbook of Etiquette(1834) that “The arrangements for the funeral should be such as to show proper respect for the dead, rather than a pompous display, denoting vulgarity and ostentation; on the other hand illiberality or meanness in expend...
People did not attend the funeral service and internment unless invited. It was also clear that, if invited, you attended. Not turning up was a major social gaffe. Sometimes, if a contagious disease caused the death, the family might announce in a newspaper that the funeral was “private.” This was the signal to mourners to stay away. The service wa...
Queen Victoriaturned 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 were d...
The invention of photography started a new phenomenon for Victorians; posed snapshots of the deceased. They were called memento mori, which can be translated to mean “remember death.” Some of the bereaved family chose to pose with their dead loved ones. The long exposures needed for the film of the day presented some difficulties for the photograph...
Victorians of the English-speaking world were shocked to learn that in Paris, nightclubs could be found in which death was celebrated. At the Cabaret du Néant (The Cabaret of Nothingness), people d...Nineteenth-century London had a huge problem in disposing of dead bodies. For those with money, there were private cemeteries; for everybody else, there was a scramble to find a plot. Writing in Th...After Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria instructed servants to tend to his rooms exactly as they had before. Also, they were to bring hot water to his dressing room each morning for his shave. The...“The Victorian Way of Death.” Catherine Cavendish, December 31, 2012.Rupert Taylor (author)from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada on June 14, 2019: Thank you G.A. Tinsley there is more of the same if you go to my profile. G.A. Tinsleyon June 14, 2019: Fascinating and well-written article. More of the same, please. :-)
Feb 14, 2024 · Am going soon.”. Victoria’s death in 1901 provides a neat closing point to the age of ceremonious endings. The 20th century, as the author remarks at the conclusion of an absorbing and quietly ...
- Miranda Seymour
James was 30. Octavia was 20. At the end of 1890, the couple had their first and only child, Jacob, who passed away shortly after his birth due to an illness in January 1891. Octavia became ill herself following her son’s death, becoming bedridden over the next few months. She eventually slipped into a coma.
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Victorian death culture, about the nineteenth century’s longing to find something transcendent in both the body and the material items it touched during life. Lutz con-siders the Victorian reverence for preserved pieces of the body itself: hair jewelry, items handled by the dead, postmortem art, and even the spaces formerly occupied by the
