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Without and Within: Victorian Mourning and Treatment of the Dead

Drawing of Little Nell

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Introductory Sermon: “Death doesn't change us more than life,” Little Nell is assured by the older mourner in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Commenting on her own frail appearance in the face of passing time, the old woman also touches on the founding goal of this anthology. While this anthology is concerned with the material practices of death and mourning during the Victorian period, its subject matter is morbid, and there are plenty of horrors hidden in the pages, I want to present the dead as a lens to see into living Victorian bodies. Victorian practices surrounding the dead beg us to reconcile the inherent contradiction in their modes of revering, presenting, and using the dead: one between outward displays of grief in an ever-growing and stranger-based society, and the interiority of praising the life/body of an individual. By focusing on death and the (mis)treatment of the dead, we see a divided society mourning not only the dead, but also the loss of individual sanctity in an ever-growing populace of strangers.

Literary and social critics tend to highlight the spectacle of the death-obsessed Victorians with similar focus paid to the movement of bodies among Victorian communities. As one would expect, literary critics like David McAllister and John Kuich focus on the language of death in popular poetical and literary forms to highlight the psychological influence of public death had on the general populace. Kuich engages with how Dickens primarily challenges the cultural work of the author to respond to the "death worship" popular with contemporary Victorian writers. Dickens, and thus other writers, are not death obsessed and morbid, but rather responds to the harsh mortality rates of a cultural shift toward modernity.

Yet what both McAllister and Kuich seem to sidestep is the actual presence and usage of the dead within Victorian fiction. My greatest critique then, and what I hope to accomplish here in this anthology, is the lack of these literary critics to allow the dead to speak through their cultural silence. Instead of looking for moments of grief-stricken widows and families, I rather want to pay particular attention to the evolution of the dead as subject to be mourned and object to be used for cultural, scientific, or economic gain. No longer merely content with the traditional psychoanalytic reading of Victorian death rites, I want to reframe the discussion away from direct literary representations of death and ground us in the cultural discussions that reveal a populace that is not merely grieving for those lost to modernity, but also their ability to become objects in an ever-growing society of strangers. Building off of Rebecca Mitchell's work on reading for progressive feminist ideals in Victorian mourning attire and Deborah Lutz's return to the material objects of mourning jewlery, I want to read for social and cultural resistance to hegemonic narratives surrounding progress and modernity within the Victorian era. I want to, like Lutz and Mitchell, view the moments where the dead are purely material goods that circulate among the living, and where they are actually given a modicum of subjectivity. Doing so, I hope to not only show where Victorian citizens uphold the control of personhood through mourning rites, but also where some fringe groups (body-snatchers, the sick, and, at times, the medical community) seek to escape or alter the sociological narratives of state control.

As such, this anthology tracks the exchange of the dead from royal mourning rooms and parlors, to churchyards, and, finally, to the dissection table. Doing so, I hope to showcase not only the complicated relationship with the dead the Victorians maintained, but also how they used the dead to reflect inwardly on their own subjectivity. The dead, I argue, allowed the Victorian subject to deconstruct herself (placing all outward attention on the dying and newly dead), and then reconstruct their relationship to the group of strangers around her through the highly regulated public mourning rituals. In this way, the old woman mourning in Dickens’s narrative, her returning to the grave of her young husband and her inability to read the gravestone’s inscription, models the movement I am trying to highlight—it is not death that changes the Victorian subject, but rather the life that swarms around the dead, that has the ability to change, vilify, or promote social practices within a larger community.

Without and Within’s structure follows the progression of death within Victorian England. We begin with the obsession many Victorians (in London and abroad in the colonies) seemed to showcase: public health and quackery cures. Looking to early public health records within contemporary periodicals, we can see a strange attention devoted to the individual seen through the lens of societal preservation. Here the individual, the sick, dying, and poor, are either demonized as a force to be cleansed or healed for public stability. The regulation of one’s body is viewed not for individual well-being, but rather the overall wellness of the state. Turning to Victorian literary utopias, we are able to see imagined communities filled with beautiful and healthy citizens of equally (at times) idyllic states. The utopian bodies, I argue, build off the obsession with regulating public health, turning the individual into a mirror of state vitality.

When public health efforts fail, our attention turns to the gruesome corporeal leftovers: the dead. In the following section, we begin our walk to the mourners’ home at the moment of death. This section, drawing primarily from etiquette guides (secular and religious), presents a shift to the highly personalized spectacle of death—mourning the newly dead. Here our attention is fixated on the concept of “the good” and just death, one surrounded by family. From the public, we turn to the royal family, focusing on the death of Prince Albert and Victoria’s prolonged mourning. Here a national standard of public mourning was moved out of the private chambers of the home, and set to be consumed publically in outward devotions.

Victoria’s mourning lays the groundwork of the following section concerning mourning rituals and rites. Here, drawing from fashion magazines, satirical and utopian fiction, and contemporary periodicals, our attention is placed no longer on the body of the dearly departed, but rather the mourners clad in black. Death, for the Victorians, became highly commercialized and regulated. This section also represents the turn in this anthology—looking no longer at the views of death, but rather the movement of private grief (highly ritualized and individualized) to an ever-growing sphere of public strangers. By wearing memorial jewelry, taking post-mortem photographs, and wearing the latest black-clad fashions, the Victorian citizen displays a more modern conception of social ability; public attention is not on the object of grief, but rather directed toward the proper negotiation of the living amidst their social circles as they grieve.

The final two sections form the second half of the anthology and look to remedy this commercialization by focusing on moments where the dead seem to crawl from their graves back into public life. The first section devotes itself to a collection of sensational events: murder and selling bodies for anatomical dissections and the Burke and Hare murders. I isolate these events as the catalyst to the paranoia surrounding the stealing of the dead, or the Resurrectionist movement. The final section deals with the narrative surrounding the utility of the dead for scientific knowledge. Here the dead are no longer merely a trinket for the living to wear, but are rather framed as dead heroes, devoting their remains to advance public welfare. With the end of this section we are back to the narrative of individual subject being used as a tool of the state for the larger public’s good.

Though I propose a narrative in the introduction of this anthology, you are able to navigate freely, making your own connections through the practices that I have isolated surrounding death. With this way of access in mind, I have kept each section in its own chronological order. This means that you always, regardless of the section you navigate through, start at the beginning of the Victorian era and progress forward into time. This allows you, I hope, to make connections temporally between readings and sections; for example, you may wish to look at the early narratives surrounding body-snatching and place them in dialogue with the conceptions of the “good” death. To aid in this, a brief introduction appears at the start of each section. These mini-introductions serve as signposts that will help reorient you within that given section, if you have fallen down into the abyss of digital overload.

One final note: the anthology is indexed and many documents, though often excerpted for readability in this digital form, can be viewed in their entirety within the public domain. I have done this to allow the readers to continue their seeking out of other connections between documents, sections, and even continents. For example: one of the etiquette guides is available on Archive.org. Readers may view this document and then fall into a stream of related content, reading from etiquette guides from the United States that were not included in this Victorian-centric anthology. It is my hope that this anthology is not merely an endpoint for research, but rather an opening that spurs the user to continue to explore historical and literary documents within the time period.
Introductory Sermon: “Death doesn't change us more than life,” Little Nell is assured by the older mourner in Dicken’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Commenting on her own frail appearance in the face of passing time, the old women also touches on the founding goal of this anthology. While this anthology is concerned with the material practices of death and mourning during the Victorian period, its subject matter is morbid, and there are plenty of horrors hidden in the pages, I want to rather present the dead as a lens to see into living Victorian bodies. Victorian practices surrounding the dead beg us to reconcile the inherent contradiction in their modes of revering, presenting, and using the dead: one between outward displays of grief in an ever-growing and stranger-based society, and the interiority of praising the life/body of an individual. By focusing on death and the (mis)treatment of the dead, we see a divided society mourning not only the dead, but also the loss of individual sanctity in an ever-growing populous of strangers.

This anthology tracks the exchange of the dead from royal mourning rooms and parlors, to churchyards, and, finally, to the dissection table. Doing so, I hope to showcase not only the complicated relationship with the dead the Victorians maintained, but also how they used the dead to reflect inwardly on their own subjectivity. The dead, I argue, allowed the Victorian subject to deconstruct herself (placing all outward attention on the dying and newly dead), and then reconstruct their relationship to the group of strangers around her through the highly regulated public mourning rituals. In this way, the old woman mourning in Dickens’s narrative, her returning to the grave of her young husband and her inability to read the gravestone’s inscription, models the movement I am trying to highlight—it is not death that changes the Victorian subject, but rather the life that swarms around the dead, that has the ability to change, vilify, or promote social practices within a larger community.
Without and Within’s structure follows the progression of death within Victorian England. We begin with the obsession many Victorians (in London and abroad in the colonies) seemed to showcase: public health and quackery cures. Looking to early public health records within contemporary periodicals, we can see a strange attention devoted to the individual seen through the lens of societal preservation. Here the individual, the sick, dying, and poor, are either demonized as a force to be cleansed or healed for public stability. The regulation of one’s body is viewed not for individual well-being, but rather the overall wellness of the state. Turning to Victorian literary utopias, we are able to see imagined communities filled with beautiful and healthy citizens of equally (at times) idyllic states. The utopia bodies, I argue, build off the obsession with regulating public health, turning the individual into a mirror of state vitality.

When public health efforts fail, our attention turns to the gruesome corporeal leftovers: the dead. In the following section, we begin our walk to the mourners’ home at the moment of death. This section, drawing primarily from etiquette guides (secular and religious), presents a shift to the highly personalized spectacle of death—mourning the newly dead. Here our attention is fixated on the concept of “the good” and just death, one surrounded by family. From the public, we turn to the royal family, focusing on the death of Prince Albert and Victoria’s prolonged mourning. Here a national standard of public mourning was moved out of the private chambers of the home, and rather set to be consumed publically in outward devotions.
Victoria’s mourning lays the groundwork of the following section concerning mourning rituals and rites. Here, drawing from fashion magazines, satirical and utopian fiction, and contemporary periodicals, our attention is placed no longer on the body of the dearly departed, but rather the mourners clad in black. Death, for the Victorians, became highly commercialized and regulated. This section also represents the turn in this anthology—looking no longer at the views of death, but rather the movement of private grief (highly ritualized and individualized) to an ever-growing sphere of public strangers. By wearing memorial jewelry, taking post-mortem photographs, and wearing the latest black-clad fashions, the Victorian citizen displays a more modern conception of social ability; public attention is not on the object of grief, but rather directed toward the proper negotiation of the living amidst their social circles as they grieve.

The final two sections form the second half of the anthology and look to remedy this commercialization by focusing on moments where the dead seem to crawl from their graves back into public life. The first section devotes itself to a sensational event murder and selling bodies for anatomical dissections: The Burke and Hare murders. I isolate this event as the catalyst to the paranoia surrounding the stealing of the dead, or the Resurrectionist movement. The final section deals with the narrative surrounding the utility of the dead for scientific knowledge. Here the dead are no longer merely a trinket for the living to wear, but are rather framed as dead heroes, devoting their remains to advance public welfare. With the end of this section we are back to the narrative of individual subject being used as a tool of the state for the larger public’s good.
Though I propose a narrative in the introduction of this anthology, you are able to navigate freely, making your own connections through the practices that I have isolated surrounding death. With this way of access in mind, I have kept each section in its own chronological order. This means that you always, regardless of the section you navigate through, start at the beginning of the Victorian era and progress forward into time. This allows you, I hope, to make connection temporally between connections; for example, you may wish to look at the early narratives surrounding body-snatching and place them in dialogue with the conceptions of the “good” death. To aid in this, a brief introduction appears at the start of each section. These mini-introductions serve as signposts that will help reorient you within that given section, if you have fallen down into the abyss of digital overload.

One final note: the anthology is indexed and many documents, though often excerpted for readability in this digital form, can be viewed in their entirety within the public domain. I have done this to allow the readers to continue their seeking out of other connections between documents, sections, and even continents. For example: one of the etiquette guides is available on Archive.org. Readers may view this document and then fall into a stream of related content, reading from etiquette guides from the United States that were not included in this Victorian-centric anthology. It is my hope that this anthology is not merely an endpoint for research, but rather an opening that spurs the user to continue to explore historical and literary documents within the time period.
Introductory Sermon:
“Death doesn't change us more than life,” Little Nell is assured by the older mourner in Dicken’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Commenting on her own frail appearance in the face of passing time, the old women also touches on the founding goal of this anthology. While this anthology is concerned with the material practices of death and mourning during the Victorian period, its subject matter is morbid, and there are plenty of horrors hidden in the pages, I want to rather present the dead as a lens to see into living Victorian bodies. Victorian practices surrounding the dead beg us to reconcile the inherent contradiction in their modes of revering, presenting, and using the dead: one between outward displays of grief in an ever-growing and stranger-based society, and the interiority of praising the life/body of an individual. By focusing on death and the (mis)treatment of the dead, we see a divided society mourning not only the dead, but also the loss of individual sanctity in an ever-growing populous of strangers.

This anthology tracks the exchange of the dead from royal mourning rooms and parlors, to churchyards, and, finally, to the dissection table. Doing so, I hope to showcase not only the complicated relationship with the dead the Victorians maintained, but also how they used the dead to reflect inwardly on their own subjectivity. The dead, I argue, allowed the Victorian subject to deconstruct herself (placing all outward attention on the dying and newly dead), and then reconstruct their relationship to the group of strangers around her through the highly regulated public mourning rituals. In this way, the old woman mourning in Dickens’s narrative, her returning to the grave of her young husband and her inability to read the gravestone’s inscription, models the movement I am trying to highlight—it is not death that changes the Victorian subject, but rather the life that swarms around the dead, that has the ability to change, vilify, or promote social practices within a larger community.
Without and Within’s structure follows the progression of death within Victorian England. We begin with the obsession many Victorians (in London and abroad in the colonies) seemed to showcase: public health and quackery cures. Looking to early public health records within contemporary periodicals, we can see a strange attention devoted to the individual seen through the lens of societal preservation. Here the individual, the sick, dying, and poor, are either demonized as a force to be cleansed or healed for public stability. The regulation of one’s body is viewed not for individual well-being, but rather the overall wellness of the state. Turning to Victorian literary utopias, we are able to see imagined communities filled with beautiful and healthy citizens of equally (at times) idyllic states. The utopia bodies, I argue, build off the obsession with regulating public health, turning the individual into a mirror of state vitality.

When public health efforts fail, our attention turns to the gruesome corporeal leftovers: the dead. In the following section, we begin our walk to the mourners’ home at the moment of death. This section, drawing primarily from etiquette guides (secular and religious), presents a shift to the highly personalized spectacle of death—mourning the newly dead. Here our attention is fixated on the concept of “the good” and just death, one surrounded by family. From the public, we turn to the royal family, focusing on the death of Prince Albert and Victoria’s prolonged mourning. Here a national standard of public mourning was moved out of the private chambers of the home, and rather set to be consumed publically in outward devotions.
Victoria’s mourning lays the groundwork of the following section concerning mourning rituals and rites. Here, drawing from fashion magazines, satirical and utopian fiction, and contemporary periodicals, our attention is placed no longer on the body of the dearly departed, but rather the mourners clad in black. Death, for the Victorians, became highly commercialized and regulated. This section also represents the turn in this anthology—looking no longer at the views of death, but rather the movement of private grief (highly ritualized and individualized) to an ever-growing sphere of public strangers. By wearing memorial jewelry, taking post-mortem photographs, and wearing the latest black-clad fashions, the Victorian citizen displays a more modern conception of social ability; public attention is not on the object of grief, but rather directed toward the proper negotiation of the living amidst their social circles as they grieve.

The final two sections form the second half of the anthology and look to remedy this commercialization by focusing on moments where the dead seem to crawl from their graves back into public life. The first section devotes itself to a sensational event murder and selling bodies for anatomical dissections: The Burke and Hare murders. I isolate this event as the catalyst to the paranoia surrounding the stealing of the dead, or the Resurrectionist movement. The final section deals with the narrative surrounding the utility of the dead for scientific knowledge. Here the dead are no longer merely a trinket for the living to wear, but are rather framed as dead heroes, devoting their remains to advance public welfare. With the end of this section we are back to the narrative of individual subject being used as a tool of the state for the larger public’s good.
Though I propose a narrative in the introduction of this anthology, you are able to navigate freely, making your own connections through the practices that I have isolated surrounding death. With this way of access in mind, I have kept each section in its own chronological order. This means that you always, regardless of the section you navigate through, start at the beginning of the Victorian era and progress forward into time. This allows you, I hope, to make connection temporally between connections; for example, you may wish to look at the early narratives surrounding body-snatching and place them in dialogue with the conceptions of the “good” death. To aid in this, a brief introduction appears at the start of each section. These mini-introductions serve as signposts that will help reorient you within that given section, if you have fallen down into the abyss of digital overload.

One final note: the anthology is indexed and many documents, though often excerpted for readability in this digital form, can be viewed in their entirety within the public domain. I have done this to allow the readers to continue their seeking out of other connections between documents, sections, and even continents. For example: one of the etiquette guides is available on Archive.org. Readers may view this document and then fall into a stream of related content, reading from etiquette guides from the United States that were not included in this Victorian-centric anthology. It is my hope that this anthology is not merely an endpoint for research, but rather an opening that spurs the user to continue to explore historical and literary documents within the time period.