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Without and Within: Victorian Mourning and Treatment of the Dead

First London Drinking Fountain

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Fleeing Death: Victorian Paranoia Concerning Public Health And flee death some Victorians did. In this chapter, we explore the manner in which the public health obsession in periodicals controlled individual bodies, taking advantage of their own concerns for health and wellness, in order to promote a general health of the state. Here the individual body is used and promoted as a smaller element of a larger societal organism. While critics tend to focus on the regulation of bodies through literary texts, I wanted to ground us in the printed discourses that inform those fictional sources. In the following sections, I argue that the Victorian focus on regulation, of maintaining a healthy society in which to live, establishes the trend of objectification that we will see again within the final chapter of this anthology. Here, sick and othered bodies, must be contained, removed, or altered to prevent the contagious spread of both health-based and social ills. Where in the last chapter the dead are resurrected to provide a heroic service to the state, here the objectified-living are excised and made abject in relationship to the state.

The first section of this chapter details the obsession Victorians had with sickness and influencing miasmas surrounding their cities. We begin this section with the concerns more respectable Londoners had relating to the dirty, sick, or negatively influencing strangers and their habitations. We then move abroad to India to see a similar rigid control of health standards to prevent the spread of cholera in the colonies. By placing these two narratives together, we can see the obsession around British identity and the sickness of the economic or racial other. Finally, we head back to the metropole and examine two public documents outlining the mortality rates in London, as well as Charles Dickens’s take on the popular concept of the cloud of sickness known as miasma.

The second section focuses on the preventative cures that highlight popular methods to keep the individual subject healthy. We begin this section with three periodical articles that highlight popular treatments of common ailments and illnesses, moving on to the more cosmetic health (an outward display of vitality). We then turn to utopian fiction to see how even print-culture was affected by the need to promote health in the form of end-of-text advertisements. Finally, we turn to the advancement of the natural sciences to aid in maintaining a healthy English populace.

For reading: You can either click any of the sub-sections presented on this page, or start with "Influencing Miasma" and follow the prescribed path to the end of this chapter.