BEYOND THE TEMPORAL ~ SPIRITS AND FAITH IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND

For our panel today I’ll be talking about the Victorian Cult of Death - a cult of misery and grief which, somewhat ironically, took hold in a time of great energy, with advancements in industry and science that created a bridge to our modern world. And yet, so many Victorians were torn between the new ideas thrown up by this revolutionary age, and the more superstitious pagan beliefs carried down from previous centuries.

Added to this was the sensation of Darwin’s theory of evolution which caused a challenge to the firmest faiths - but was also twisted by charlatans who travelled around with freak shows and claimed to show exhibits, such as mermaids brought from Feejee, which were really the mummified remains of a monkey’s upper torso sewn onto the body of a fish. A clever taxidermist’s trick.

Taken in by things like that, many Victorians also believed in ghosts - a belief that was partly influenced by authors such as Dickens, who had gone on a tour of America where he witnessed the traditions of Halloween and was particularly intrigued by morbid stories of the dead - after which he came back home again and wrote A Christmas Carol.

Robbie Burns’ poem ‘Halloween’ had fairies dance on moonlit nights. Why, even Queen Victoria took part in halloween parades when she was at Balmoral. And perhaps on those nights she also read the popular sensation tales, with spirits seen in mirrors, or women who wailed by misty graves, with eerie worlds of make-believe inspired by death, disease and sex, with crumbling castles and dripping crypts ... and perhaps a rotting corpse or two.

Ah, those pale limp corpses! How the Victorian authors loved them  - but then the mortality rate was high, and all too visible to see. While our ill are confined in hospitals, and even with loved ones who die at home being very quickly whisked away to undertakers’ mortuaries, the Victorians had no National Health Service. No inoculations to protect against fatal childhood diseases. No antibiotics to kill off infections considered as trivial today ... not to mention the complications faced by women during childbirth.

Death could strike at any time. Ruthless, swift, invisible, whatever your age or social class. And for those who strayed too far away from the path of moral righteousness there was the risk of syphilis - a scourge so well alluded to in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula - when he writes of the vampire’s lust for blood, as something sensual and exotic. But also something sinister, corrupting the flesh and bringing death. In the nineteenth century, sexual diseases were rampant, and beneath the surface social veneer many immoral deeds went on, with the consequence of such ‘sins of the flesh’ becoming the time’s great leveller, not discriminating in the least between rich, or poor, or famous. So, illicit sex was linked with death. A nightmare! A real life horror tale - which is surely one reason why the age became obsessed with purity, taking their lead from the Queen, who, along with her husband, Albert, portrayed the ideal marriage.

But when Prince Albert died so young, at the age of only 42 (and not from syphilis, I stress) Victoria turned her misery into something of an art form, with the man she had adored in life then worshipped as a god in death – with the Queen so often heard to say that wished that she could die as well: to join him in Eternity.

While waiting for that eternity, her mortal flesh must still be clothed – and the fetish for mourning now took hold, with the queen remaining dressed in black until she reached her dying day. Mourning was an industry. People visited vast emporiums, which also placed their advertisements in the newspapers and magazines. (The mail order business is nothing new!) People who mourned seemed suspended between the world of the living and dead. They wrote on black-edged stationery, blew their noses on black-stitched handkerchiefs, even sometimes threaded black silk through the lace of their undergarments. They wore black jewellery made of jet - with the best of it from Whitby. (That link to Dracula again!) They tried to keep their loved ones close by wearing lockets with their hair... whereas today we are more content by looking back on photographs.

But, in the Victorian era, photography was very new. Even when studios opened up where personal portraits could be made, this was something of a luxury; an expense beyond most poorer folk– which is why some people at this time only had their pictures taken once ... and often after they had died, when the body would be washed and dressed, then posed as if still living, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the midst of the rest of the family; thus creating a personal memory to treasure in years to come.

In one of the least disturbing of the Post Mortem images I’ve seen, two children are standing at the side of the bed in which their sister lies where, due to the long exposure time, the living children look like ghosts - blurred, because they moved, whereas the little girl who died is very clear for us to see. But then, of course, she was quite still.

Such accidental blurring soon became a deliberate method used by photographer charlatans who claimed to take pictures of ghosts which hovered close while loved ones posed. I’m actually writing about this now in a novel about Edwardian film – with moving pictures being yet another Victorian ‘miracle’ ... when stage magicians often turned to the trade of directing feature films, using smoke and mirror tricks as the forerunners of those special effects we often take for granted now.

It was double exposure, nothing more. Still, it is astonishing to think how people were convinced. But then, we see what we want to see. We believe the things we want to believe - particularly in times of grief.

The Queen’s yearning for her husband meant that she simply couldn’t let him rest, often hiring spirit mediums who claimed to summon up the dead. But was she, along with so many more, really duped into believing that the souls of the dead could rise again - come home and have a chat with them? Well, with grand scientific discoveries, such as the harnessing of electricity, with X Rays to see beneath the flesh, or voices heard through the ether as they travelled along a telegraph wire – why should it not be possible to discover another invisible force, and to tap into the energies of those spirit souls beyond the veil?

I’ve covered some aspects of this cult in my Victorian novels. In The Goddess and the Thief we actually see Victoria meeting with some mediums. Indeed, while he was alive, she and Albert conducted séances. Gladstone, her Prime Minister had been a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research. And another acquaintance of the Queen who firmly believed in the spirit world was a certain Mr Brown; the gamekeeper turned confidente, who claimed to have a psychic gift through which to channel Albert’s soul. If only Victoria’s diaries had not been edited when she died ... since when she shares eternity, not only with Prince Albert's corpse, but with some keepsakes from John Brown. For, after being laid to rest her personal physician testified that the royal tomb at Frogmore contained not just the royal pair, but also a lock of John Brown's hair, a photograph, some letters, and a ring that had once belonged to his mother.

The Queen – like so many of her time - went to her grave a Christian. But she was also influenced by the eastern myths and religions encountered through the Empire’s reach - which also inspired stories such as Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, which was based on the cursed Koh-i-noor, a sacred diamond that was said to have some supernatural powers.

I’ve also woven this into the story of The Goddess and the Thief  which features Alice Willoughby, who was born and raised in India, until at the age of eight she is sent away to England. There she lives with her Aunt Mercy, a fraudulent spirit medium, who forces the young and defenceless child to take part in séances she holds - as described here in this extract, which illustrates some of the tricks that fakes like Mercy might have played ...

Were all those far off whispers real? Will we meet again in the summerlands? The only thing I know for sure is, oh, so very well expressed in the Latin ‘Memento Mori’ - which is: Remember You Must Die.