Necropolis: London & it's Dead (29 page)

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While the complex code of mourning remained virtually unchanged, new fabrics and styles provided endless variations. As with any fashion house, the buyers went to Europe every season, although in this case it was not to view the designer shows. Instead, they visited the principal silk manufacturers of Lyons, Genoa and Milan, and consulted the top Parisian designers. Grief was no time to be dowdy. Even in bereavement, women wanted to be stylish.

The store sold ‘not only all that is necessary for mourning, but also departments devoted to dresses of a more general description, although the colours are confined to such as could be worn for either full or half mourning’. An advertisement from 1881 reads: ‘Messrs Jay prepare for the season: a variety of black dresses which we can confi
dently recommend both for correctness of Fashion and Economy of Price.’ The names of these dresses are intriguing. ‘The Aesthetic’, designed along Pre-Raphaelite lines, and ‘The Houri’, derived from the Arabic word for the beautiful nymphs who haunt paradise.

Widow’s weeds are presented as anti-erotic in Emily’s case, but in other spheres of Victorian society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed all in black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, ‘so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without conscious intention.’
¹²
The Victorian widow was a femme fatale, both seductive (widows had considerably more freedom than spinsters), and deadly.

On his visit to Jay’s, social commentator Henry Mayhew was overwhelmed by the ‘dazzling mirrors’, and the ‘bevy of bright-eyed fair damsels, clad in black silk’, ready to do his bidding. At its zenith, Jay’s employed over 200 shop assistants. With typical masculine amusement, he spots ‘a wonderful assemblage of caps, which seem to range in density from the frosted spider-web to the petrified “trifle”’. One widow’s cap, preserved in a glass case, is ‘as light as thistledown, with long streamers like fairies’ wings’. There is a variety of collars of white crape, black crape, tulle and muslin, collars dotted with black and edged with black. Writing up his observations, Mayhew quoted a sketch from a satirical magazine of the day:

Shopman
: How deep would you choose to go, ma’am? Do you want to be very poignant?

Lady
: Why, I suppose, crape and bombazine, unless they’ve gone out of fashion…

Shopman
: We have a very extensive assortment, whether for family, court, or complimentary mourning; including the last
novelties from the Continent. Here is one, ma’am, just imported–a widow’s silk–watered, as you perceive, to match the sentiment. It is called the ‘Inconsolable’, and is very much in vogue, in Paris, for matrimonial bereavements.

Squire
: Looks rather flimsy though. Not likely to last long–eh, sir?

Shopman
: Several new fabrics have been introduced to meet the demand for fashionable tribulation.

Lady
: And all in the French style?

Shopman
: Certainly. Of course, ma’am. They excel in the
funèbre.
Here, for instance, is an article for the deeply afflicted. A black crape, expressly adapted to the proposed style of mourning, makes up very sombre and interesting. Or, if you would prefer a velvet, ma’am…

Lady
: Is it proper, sir, to mourn in velvet?

Shopman: Oh, quite! Certainly. Just coming in. Now here is a very rich one–real Genoa–and a splendid black. We call it ‘The Luxury of Woe’. Only eighteen shillings a yard, and a superb quality–in short, fit for the handsomest style of domestic calamity. The mourning of the poor people is very coarse–very. Quite different from that of persons of quality–canvas to crape…

Lady
: To be sure it is! And as to the change of dress, sir: I suppose you have a great variety of half-mourning?

Shopman
: Oh, infinite! The largest stock in town. Full, and half, and quarter, and half-quarter, shaded off, if I may say so, like an India-ink drawing, from a grief
prononcé
to the slightest
nuance
of regret.
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These days, few of us choose to look at pictures of someone on their deathbed. Photographs of Diana dying in the wreckage of her Mercedes were deemed too shocking for general circulation; we are warned before terrorist atrocities are shown on a news bulletin. However, to the Victorians, memorializing the deathbed was part of
the occasion. Like famous last words, famous last hours were recorded for posterity. For instance, an illustration depicting Alfred, Lord Tennyson, expiring peacefully among his pillows was the highlight of a special supplement of the
Black and White Magazine
in October 1892. The death of Prince Albert, surrounded by family and courtiers, was the subject of a famous painting by W. I. Walton, and appeared on numerous greeting cards; and many a Victorian lithograph depicted a weeping mother bidding farewell to her beautiful, dying daughter.

Henry Peach (1830–1901), a ‘pictorialist photographer’ and admirer of the Pre-Raphaelites, exhibited a tableau entitled
Fading Away
in 1858. This depicts a beautiful young girl dying of consumption, surrounded by her despairing family. Although stunted up by actors, the photograph was condemned as a foray into private grief, with one critic claiming that Peach had exploited ‘the most painful sentiments which it is the lot of human beings to experience’. The censure originated from the fact that Peach’s creation was a photograph, rather than a painting, and therefore uncomfortably realistic. Nevertheless, Prince Albert, a keen amateur photographer, was captivated, and ordered a copy; he went on to buy all Peach’s subsequent work, including a portrait of a young girl reclining in a chair with her head on a pillow and eyes closed, presumably about to expire, and entitled
She Never Told Her Love
.

Photographs of people dying, or pretending to (Peach, was, after all, a photographic artist), were rare, but the Victorians did use the resources of photography to document their dead. Beyond the confines of the pathology lab or the battlefield (grim casualty photographs played a decisive part in the public perception of the American Civil War), post-mortem photography seems to us a grisly concept–but if photography allowed one to photograph the living, why not the dead? Yet again, one of the great nineteenth-century inventions played its part in the Victorian way of death. Post-mortem photography formed part of the Good Death, a means of preserving the memory of a loved one’s dying minutes for those unable to attend,
consolation for their absence from his or her deathbed. It was designed, not for public consumption, but for circulation within the family, and preservation in a memorial album. In an age of high infant mortality, post-mortem photography was also a way of preserving some lasting memory of children. When a newborn died, a photograph of an infant, apparently asleep in its cradle, was all that grieving parents had to remember their child by. Sometimes these bore an inscription, such as
A Last Sleep
, or devotional verses.

Louis Jacques Daguerre unveiled the Daguerreotype in 1839, but it was a time-consuming and costly procedure, with exposures taking up to fifteen minutes. This restricted post-mortem portraiture to the rich. The development of the ambrotype in the 1850s made photography cheaper. It consisted of imaging a negative on glass backed by a dark surface. Then came tintype, or ferrotype: positive photographs made directly onto iron plate and varnished with a thin sensitised film. The
carte de visite
method for producing multiple prints on a single plate meant that copies could be sent to all members of the family. American journalist David Bartlett visited the grave of one such subject at Stoke Newington.

Here, a few years ago, was buried a pretty, prattling girl whom I knew, and loved, and who often used to come and play among the flowers on our lawn. One day, very suddenly, she died of a heart disease. The suddenness of the stroke almost killed her father and mother. Her portrait was taken after death, and when she was arranged for the artist, I came in and looked at her. Never saw I so touching a sight. She was dressed as if alive, and was half reclining upon a sofa in the drawing room. Her cheeks were like the rose-leaves, and if her eyes had not been closed I should have believed her alive. The southern windows were thrown open–it was a June morn–and the odour of flowers came in with the songs of the birds. Her mother entered the room–the sight was too much for her and she fainted. The fair girl was buried in this sweet spot, but will never be forgotten by those who knew her.
¹⁴

Beautiful in death, these creations are the apotheosis of the passive Victorian woman. In some quarters, the level of objectification suggests more than a hint of necrophilia, particularly among the Pre-Raphaelites and their admirers. The doomed Elizabeth Siddal modelled for Millais’
Ophelia
, dressed in a brocade gown, in a bath of water scattered with lilies. Siddal almost caught her death of cold when the candles which heated the bath from underneath went out, and was eventually recovered, shivering and blue. Atkinson Grimshaw’s
Elaine
depicts the heroine’s dead body borne downriver on a barge draped in black samite. The poem ‘Consumption’, by the forgotten poet Henry Kirk White, who succumbed to the disease himself at the age of twenty-five, gives the silent killer a sensual air, reminiscent of the
danse macabre
:

In the dismal night-air dressed

I will creep into her breast

Flush her cheek and blanch her skin,

And feed on the vital fire within.

Lover, do not trust her eyes

When they sparkle most, she dies;

Mother, do not trust her breath,

Comfort she will breathe in death;

Father, do not strive to save her,

She is mine, and I must have her;

The coffin must be her bridal bed,

The winding sheet must wrap her head;

The whispering winds must o’er her sigh,

For soon in the grave the maid must lie;

The worm it will riot on heavenly diet,

When death has deflowered her eye.
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The Victorians were half in love with death. Even Fallen Women, who did not meet a Good Death, seemed to undergo some form of redemption by drowning. Paintings such as
Found Drowned
,
depicting the corpse of a prostitute, were regarded as salutary; the vogue was inspired by Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, which idealizes a drowned woman thus:

Take her up tenderly

Lift her with care;

Fashion’d so slenderly

Young, and so fair!

Look at her garments

Clinging like cerements;

Whilst the wave constantly

Drips from her clothing.
¹⁶

Waterloo Bridge was particularly associated with the death of Fallen Women in the popular imagination, with the River Thames forming a last resting-place for the unfortunate, although it was the Serpentine, and the canals, in which the majority of suicides took place. (Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine in 1816.
¹⁷
) In France and Germany, reproductions of the death mask of a beautiful woman found drowned in the Seine became a popular feature of French and German parlours. This, of course, was the romantic ideal: the reality consisted of the Dredgermen, who made their living dragging decomposed corpses out of the Thames and looting the bodies.

Monuments were integral to the Victorian cult of mourning. Visiting the grave to commune with the spirit of the dear departed was a practice which had developed over the previous 100 years, a consequence of the Romantic and sentimental sensibility. In 1809, William Godwin’s
Essay on Sepulchres
had proposed the construction of simple monuments to commemorate notable historical figures whose remains had been lost in the mists of time. The
Essay
also revealed a changing attitude towards death and the treatment
of the dead. Although a corpse itself was worthless (except to the Resurrection Men), a memorial, however simple, served to keep that person’s memory alive. In physical terms, it occupied a space where survivors could mourn, and also commune with the dead person.

When I meet the name of a great man inscribed in the cemetery, I would have my whole soul awakened to honour his memory…call his ghost from the tomb to communicate with me…I am not satisfied to converse only with the generation of men that now happens to subsist; I wish to live in intercourse with the illustrious Dead of all ages…I would say with Ezekiel, the Hebrew, ‘Let these dry bones live!’ as my friends, my philosophers, my instructors and my guides!
¹⁸

The journalist Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) developed this theme in his account of a trip to Kensal Green in 1842: ‘With what a different impulse does memory revisit this Asylum of the Dead…Kneeling beside the bed of the Sleeper, the watcher Love has felt for a time that Death was but a dream, and Life little more. Affection has said, “Let these dry bones Live!”…the lost has been restored, and the separated have been joined.’
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