Decorated initial The bare facts of death and the limitations of mortality are inevitably subjects of speculation and fear.
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In modern Britain, as in all multicultural societies, there are many ways of dealing with the inevitable. However, it is probably the case that the Christian majority regards death as extrinsic, and moves it as far as possible from the business of everyday living: treated by many as a taboo and confined to private grief, it is anxiously mediated through a variety of euphemisms, in humor, in the official language of the state, and in the traditional codes of religious belief.
These attitudes prevail and do not seem to have changed, despite the terrible losses of the pandemic of 2020–21. Victorian responses to death, on the other hand, are more explicit. Living in an age when life was always threatened by disease and with relatively limited means to treat illness, the Victorians had to engage with the stark realities of death and were always aware of its presence. Life was tenuous and at the population was often ravaged by vast numbers of fatalities that have not occurred in our own, modern time, despite the depredations of the coronavirus.
Of course, the impact of such high levels of mortality was nuanced by class and social position, an issue greatly complicated by social uprisings of the Industrial Revolution. Access to the basic requirements for healthy living was unequally distributed, and it is well-known that the Victorian middle-classes lived longer than the 'lower orders' because they could afford to have nourishing food, clean water to drink and to wash with, and decent housing.
Such advantages made for a healthier life, extending longevity from around 50 (for the average mid-Victorian worker) to 70 or more for the people. Indeed, the bifurcation of the capitalist system, which divided labor into manual and 'brainwork', was openly deleterious for those who worked with their hands, and those doing routine or physical jobs were far likelier to die as a result of poor conditions than those employed in a professional or office job. In an age before antibiotics a wound received while digging a mine was always going to be more dangerous than a paper-cut received in a counting-house. However, all classes were afflicted by the conditions of contemporary living, and were universally exposed to the contagions and epidemics of untreatable illnesses; a child born into a hovel in industrial Manchester in the 'Hungry Forties' might die of dysentery or cholera, but a parallel fate afflicted Prince Albert, who died of a typhoid infection in 1861.
United by the experience of grieving, the Victorians developed what James Curl has dubbed a 'celebration of death' or, more tellingly, a 'cult' or 'culture of death'. This 'culture' developed as a means of managing grief by encoding it in a series of forms and practices which deflected or ameliorated the rawness of loss. The manifestations of what is essentially the Victorians' coping mechanism, as they sought for solace and reassurance, are complex and wide-ranging.
To a large extent, the suffering was diffused by making death into a social display: for the mid-Victorian bourgeoisie, at least, funerals became ostentatious, elaborate and ritualized, a 'pageantry' (Arnold 181) outlined by Dickens in Oliver Twist ( 1838). Post-mortem celebration of a life similarly took the form of large and expensive headstones and tombs in the new municipal cemeteries set up in imitation of Kensal Green and Highgate, and wealth and importance were asserted in defiance of death as the great leveller. Grieving also became a long-standing and demonstrative event, with the heartbroken displaying their feelings in a series of codes. The condition of being 'in mourning' was symbolized by the color black; men wore black armbands, envelopes announcing a death had a black perimeter, jet jewelery was worn, and widows often dressed in black for years following their spouses' passing, a practice conducted in imitation of Victoria's lifetime remembrance of Albert. Grieving took another, stranger turn in the development of séances conducted by clairvoyants; driven by the rise of Spiritualism and the Fox sisters' 'spirit knocking', these popular events became a fad, despite their artifice and despite their shameless exploitation of the heart-broken.