Recently, the VV visited the Newman Bros. Coffin Works in Birmingham to speak on the Victorian cult of death, a somewhat fitting topic while she stood between rows of old sewing machines and tables piled high with tassels, lace, and the coloured threads and bolts of cloth that were once made into coffin shrouds. Here is an abridged version of that talk -
My knowledge of the trade of death is very much restricted to the limited research that I've done when writing my historical novels. So, you'll find some deaths and funerals, perhaps a graveyard scene or two, but those scenes are all imaginary. I almost shiver when thinking of the reality of such events and the pain of any last goodbye when, however clichéd it may sound, there is only one certainty in life – and that is the fact, literally expressed in the Latin Memento Mori – Remember You Must Die.
The Blue Room at Windsor Castle - kept as a shrine after Albert's Death
During the Victorian era it was very hard to forget. Mortality rates were high. There was no National Health Service. No inoculations to protect against fatal childhood diseases. No antibiotics to kill off infections. Death could strike at any time. Ruthless, swift, invisible, whatever your age or social class. And perhaps that might in some small way explain what many have described as the Victorian Cult of Death. And that cult had a great deal to do with the behaviour of Queen Victoria, when her husband died so very young, when the widow turned her suffering into something of an art form... with the man she had adored in life almost worshipped as a god in death.
In the Coffin works you can view all the fixtures and fittings that were used in coffin manufacture – such as name plates, handles, or metal figurines that would decorate the casket. But, those Victorians who continued to live, and grieve, also revelled in their own ‘fittings’ of mourning – the items worn or placed in homes to signify remembrance – all the things that could be purchased from enormous mourning emporiums – by visiting in person, by inviting the sellers into your home, or else by mail order, with adverts placed in newspapers and the pages of popular magazines. Should you want to read more in fiction about such enterprises, I recommend Michelle Lovric's The Mourning Emporium, or Diana Setterfield's Bellman & Black - and for a review of the latter you can read this guest post by Adele Geras.
The discerning and fashionable widow might choose to order black edged stationery, a black fan or a black fringed parasol, some black embroidered handkerchiefs; even black satin ribbons to thread through the lace of her undergarments.
And what fashions the emporiums stocked... though the strictest rules and traditions were applied to the colours permitted for those who dressed in mourning: the blacks, the greys, browns, purples and mauves made fashionable by the Widow of Windsor.
Jewellery was acceptable, but nothing too bright or colourful - which was why jet was so popular: a great boost for places like Whitby where the finest was said to be found, with necklaces, brooches, bracelets or rings very often being customised with a loved one’s name or initials, or even the numbers to signify the date or age when death occurred.
Today we remember with photographs...with videos, and voicemails too. But, in the Victorian era photography was very new. And even when professionals began to set up studios, a portrait was a luxury; an expense that many could ill afford – which is why some people were only ever photographed once in their entire lives – or I should say when life was gone, at the time when they were newly dead, thus creating a personal memory for a family to treasure in years to come.
In these Post Mortem photographs the corpses were often dressed and posed as if they were still living; sometimes with other family members. If you want to see some for yourself, you’ll find plenty through a Google search. But I warn you, they can be disturbing which is why I’ll only show you two. The first is a family’s beloved pet...
The second shows two children who are standing beside the bed in which their little sister lies, and where - due to the long exposure time – the living children look like ghosts, because they are blurred, because they moved whereas the dead girl is clear to see. But then, of course, she has not moved. I find that very poignant.
Such accidental blurring soon became a deliberate method used by all those charlatans who claimed to take pictures of the dead, who appeared as ghosts in photographs.
It was double exposure. Nothing more. Still, it is astonishing, how many people were convinced. But then, people see what they want to see – they believe what they want to believe – particularly in times of grief. And the Victorians also lived in times of great scientific advancements, like the harnessing of electricity, or communication by telegraph, and for many it seemed inevitable that other invisible energies could also be harnessed, allowing man to penetrate the Veil of death and communicate with ‘the other side.’...with the energy of human souls.
Here we see Prince Albert, photographed on his deathbed: when the soul had clearly fled the flesh. But his wife often tried to call it back - as I describe in various scenes in my novel, The Goddess and the Thief - when she met with spirit mediums for séances held in candlelit rooms in Buckingham Palace and Windsor, and no doubt her other homes as well - though during Albert's lifetime when the couple once used a Ouija board while holidaying in Osborne, the table was said to levitate and move about so violently that Albert had the object burned and demanded his wife never again meddle in the spirit world. In that matter she did not remain the most obedient of wives.
This new belief in the spirit world – all a part of the cult of death – is thought to have first gained momentum in America, after the Civil War, when so many young men had lost their lives and survivors were desperate to contact them. But other external influences were also coming into play – with ideas taken from eastern faiths encountered through the Empire’s reach, when ancient myths and mysteries were to capture imaginations – and back home, in England, such tales went on to feature in popular novels like The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins’ which centred around the imaginary theft of the infamous Koh-i-noor diamond.
I’ve also woven the Koh-i-noor into The Goddess and the Thief - in the story of a young woman who is born and raised in India, who then comes to England to live with an aunt who works as a spiritualist medium and who lures her niece into her trade... and other darker mysteries surrounding the Victorian - and also an Indian - cult of death.
The paperback of The Goddess and the Thief will be published by Orion Books in November, 2014