Necropolis: London & it's Dead (28 page)

The procedure was also celebrated in a macabre and misogynistic poem, congratulating Van Butchell on the possession of a wife who never answered back. After Van Butchell died, his son presented Maria’s body to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it went on display in the Hunterian Collection, devoted to medical curiosities. In 1857, one commentator noted:

What a wretched mockery of a once lovely woman it now appears, with its shrunken and rotten-looking bust, its hideous, mahogany-coloured face, and its remarkably fine set of teeth. Between the feet are the remains of a green parrot–whether immolated or not at the death of his mistress is uncertain–but it still retains its plumage. By the side of Mrs Van Butchell is the body of another woman, embalmed by a different process about the same period: she is even more ugly than her neighbour. As curiosities, these few loathsome relics are no doubt both valuable and interesting, but were there a heap of such dry rubbish, one would feel strongly disposed to make a bonfire of the whole, for it looks nothing fit for anything else.

His wish was granted: in 1941, Maria, the green parrot and her ugly neighbour were destroyed during an air raid. The ‘ugly neighbour’ was in fact one Sarah Stone, a medical artist who had been embalmed by her lover, a surgeon, back in 1774, after he had vowed that they would never be parted.
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Prince Albert, despite his elaborate plans for Wellington’s funeral, had stipulated that, when the time came, he wanted an unassuming ceremony for himself. His wishes were respected, but the legacy of the Prince’s sudden death, in December 1861, was a cult of extreme mourning, with his wife as the presiding genius.

10: THE VALE OF TEARS

The Victorian Cult of Mourning

Queen Victoria had been dealt a bitter blow by the death of her mother in March 1861, a cause of such ‘unremitting grief’ that it led to a nervous breakdown. The impact of Prince Albert’s death nine months later was catastrophic. Victoria never recovered from her husband’s sudden demise, ostensibly from typhoid. Although many commentators have suggested that the Queen’s almost pathological grief should not be taken as representative, her bereavement was the defining moment of the Victorian attitude to death. Iconic in her grief, Queen Victoria became the presiding genius of mourning.

With the Prince’s death, the Court was immediately plunged into mourning. The Lord Chamberlain’s Office decreed, on 16 December 1861: ‘The LADIES attending Court to wear black woollen stuffs, trimmed crape, plain linen, black shoes and gloves and crape fans. The GENTLEMEN attending Court to wear black Cloth, plain Linen, Crape Hatbands and black Swords and Buckles. Mourning to commence from the date of this Order.’
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Meanwhile, the Earl Marshall, whose role as organizer of royal funerals dated back to the thirteenth century, immediately ordered: ‘A General Mourning for his late Royal Highness Prince Albert…
in pursuance of Her Majesty’s commands, this is to give public notice that on the melancholy occasion of the death of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, it is commanded that all persons do forthwith dress in decent mourning.’

In contrast to the elaborate ceremony he had organized for the Duke of Wellington, the Prince had left instructions for a modest ceremony, consisting of ‘solemn but exceedingly simple obsequies’. The funeral took place at Windsor on 23 December 1861. As the Prince had requested:

It was of a private character; but all the chief men of state attended the obsequies in the Royal Chapel. The weather was cold and damp, the sky dull and heavy. There was a procession of state carriages to St George’s Chapel, at the door of which the Prince of Wales and other royal mourners were assembled to receive the coffin. Davey noted that ‘the grief of the poor children was very affecting, with Prince Arthur especially sobbing as if his heart were breaking. When all was over, and the last of the long, lingering train of mourners had departed, the attendants descended into the vault with lights and moved the bier and coffin along the narrow passage to the royal vault. The day was observed throughout the realm as one of mourning.
²

Bells tolled throughout the land, and in many churches special services were held. In the towns, shops were closed and window blinds in private residences were drawn down. No respectable people appeared abroad except in mourning, and in seaport towns the flags were hoisted half-mast high.

The Queen’s mourning
was
extreme, even by Victorian standards. In the public realm, her display of grief reached its apotheosis in Sir George Scott’s Albert Memorial, erected in Kensington Gardens in 1871. In private, Prince Albert’s rooms were immaculately preserved, a shaving jug of hot water provided every day. The Queen was often to be found seated before a fire-screen bearing a
picture of Albert’s mausoleum at Frogmore, weeping into a handkerchief embroidered with black tears. And she continued to wear mourning dress, long, long after the statutory two-year period, creating her own trends among European royalty:

When Her Majesty became a widow, she slightly modified the conventional English widow’s cap, by indenting it over the forehead
à la
Marie Stuart, thereby imparting to it a certain picturesqueness which was quite lacking in the former headdress. This coiffure has not only been adopted by her subjects but also by the royal widows abroad. The etiquette of the Imperial House of Germany obliges the Empress Frederick to introduce into her costume two special features during the earlier twelve months of her widowhood. The first concerns the cap, which has both a Marie Stuart point in the centre of the forehead as well as a long veil of black crape falling like a mantle behind to the ground. The second peculiarity to this stately costume is that the orthodox white batiste collar has two narrow white bands falling straight from head to foot. This costume has been very slightly modified from the last three centuries ago when the Princess of the House of Hohenzollern lost her husband.
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Victorian widows had a template for bereavement in their Queen. By 1881, Victoria’s legacy of grief had defined the mourning rituals of her subjects. A middle-class matron would be expected to conform to etiquette, whatever her personal reservations. Such a young woman would wear deep mourning for at least one year, consisting of black clothes made of a non-reflective fabric such as bombazine, Parramatta or black crape, evocatively described by Dickens as ‘the breathless smell of warm black crape, I did not know what the smell was then, but I do now,’ when orphaned David Copperfield is taken to the undertakers to be fitted with mourning for his young mother.
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Matt black was felt to be appropriately lugubrious. Beneath the mourning ensemble, a widow wore funereal lingerie: white broderie anglaise, threaded with black ribbon. The underwear itself was not black, as the dye might wear off on a woman’s skin. Over her hair went a long black veil, reaching to her waist and decorated with ‘weepers’ or black ribbons. The veil covered her face whenever she left the house, to hide tears and deter the curious. Originally made from crape, this oppressive garment frequently afflicted wearers with asthma, catarrh and even cataracts as a result of exposure to the black dyes. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, ‘nun’s veiling’–a lighter material–was used.

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When a young widow did venture out, which was not often, her coat was trimmed with black fur, or sealskin, her only ornaments of jet or bog oak (a thick dark wood) although she might wear an item of mourning jewellery such as a brooch or locket containing a tress of a loved one’s hair, worked into the design of a willow tree, or encased in glass and engraved with the motto
In Memoriam
. A sentimental attachment to locks of hair dates back to the Ancient Greeks, who always cut the first hair of a child, the beard of a youth
and the hair of a young maiden, and offered them to the gods. On the death of a parent, children placed a lock of hair with the body.
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Black enamel jewellery was popular, containing a miniature painted on ivory, or an urn, with a figure weeping over a tombstone. Sometimes these were embellished with seed pearls, redolent of tears. There was a superstition that turquoise was affected by the ill-health of a person wearing it, and that it remained dull and leaden in appearance after death, until worn by a person in good health, when it would regain its distinctive colour.

Once a widow had completed her first year, she dressed in ‘secondary mourning’. This had a less rigorous dress code, and white collars and cuffs, reminiscent of a nun’s habit, were permitted. After nine months came ‘ordinary mourning’, a three-month stretch during which women were permitted to wear shiny fabrics such as silk and velvet, trimmed with lace or beads, and also gold and silver jewellery, with appropriately sombre precious stones like amethysts, garnets and opals. Finally, a widow entered the six months of ‘half-mourning’, when muted colours such as grey, purple and lilac were permissible. Black evening dress was accessorized with a black fan, trimmed with ostrich feathers, and, should she be deaf, a black Vulcanite mourning ear trumpet.

Children were expected to go into black too, although white was also acceptable for infants. Servants also adopted mourning, some dyeing their everyday garments in a laundry copper, with the attendant distinctive smell.

And God help the woman who would not, or could not, afford the best Courtaulds had to offer. ‘This is a time for display, not for borrowing, and who knows better than a widow that a score of coldly criticizing eyes are watching events through broken Venetian blinds and dirty Nottingham lace curtains…one is left wondering where the money comes from to pay for the luxury of grief,’ noted the writer Puckle, relating the sad fate of a young lady who chose to economize on mourning:

A superior servant, a girl, married a house painter. Within a year, the husband fell from a ladder and was killed. The poor little widow bought a cheap black dress and a very simple black straw hat to wear at the funeral. Her former employer, who had much commended this modest outlay, met the girl a few days later swathed in crape, her poor little face only half visible under a hideous widow’s bonnet complete with streamers and a veil. Asked why she had made these purchases she explained that her neighbours and relations had made her life unbearable because she did not want to wear widow’s weeds, and at last she had to give in. ‘They said that if I would not wear a bonnet, it proved we were never married,’ she sobbed.
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Puckle was a savage critic of mourning culture, but understood its oppressive nature, particularly among the poor. Among the wealthy, societal pressure was just as great.

Emily Lopez, in Trollope’s
The Prime Minister
, is driven into widow’s weeds after her husband’s violent death. In deepest mourning, she becomes ‘a monument of bereaved woe’,
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‘a black shade–something almost like a dark ghost.’
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Emily observes all the formalities of Victorian mourning:

She herself had seen no visitor. She had hardly left the house except to go to church, and then had been enveloped in the deepest crape. Once or twice she had allowed herself to be driven out in a carriage, and, when she had done so, her father had always accompanied her. No widow, since the seclusion of widows was first ordained, had been more strict in maintaining the restraints of widowhood as enjoined.
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Even after attending a wedding, for which she dons half-mourning consisting of a grey silk gown, Emily reverts to full mourning as soon as the ceremony is over. But there is a twist to Emily’s costume. Despite complying with Victorian etiquette, it is not her husband
that Emily mourns. She feels ‘disgraced and ashamed’ for marrying Lopez in the first place, against the advice of her family. She takes personal responsibility for the families plunged into debt by Lopez’s fraudulent conduct, and reimburses them. Weeping with loathing at her own shortcomings, Emily is in mourning for her own life. It is only when Arthur Fletcher, her devoted admirer, eventually persuades her to marry him that she can dispense with ‘all the appurtenances of mourning which she usually wore’ and embrace him: ‘In a moment his arms were round her, and her veil was off, and his lips were pressed to hers.’ Widow’s veil ripped away, penance served, Emily permits herself to return to the land of the living.
¹⁰

Just as an entire industry exists today around weddings and childbirth, with clothing and accessories for every contingency, high Victorian mourning demonstrated the ability of the Victorians to exploit an inevitable event. Victorian manufacturers seized upon the commercial possibilities of mourning with characteristic enterprise. There were no less than four mourning emporia in Regent Street including Peter Robinson’s store. One of these later became Dickens & Jones, but the most famous was Jay’s London General Mourning Warehouse, founded in 1841. A department store of death, Jay’s developed from ‘the
Magasin de Deuil
(Store of Mourning), an establishment exclusively devoted to the sale of mourning costumes and all the paraphernalia necessary for the funeral. Long regarded as French, this concept was actually ‘a brilliant and elaborate adaptation of the old
mercerie de lutto
which existed for centuries and still exists in every Italian city, where people in the haste of grief can obtain in a few hours all that the etiquette of civilization requires for mourning in that country as the climate renders speedy interment absolutely necessary.’
¹¹

Black silks were a speciality of the house. The secret of Jay’s success was to buy silks, cashmeres, crapes and tulles from recession-hit European mills at a competitive rate, and sell them to the customers for a small profit. The development of the sewing machine in the 1850s ushered in the era of mass-produced clothing, off the peg and made to measure, with dressmakers leaving the store to take fittings from the bereaved in their own homes. With mourning forever in fashion (demand soared with the death of Prince Albert), Jay’s could never lose.