Victorian times were tough. People were wading around ankle deep in shit all the time, yet no one could figure out why everyone was coming down with cholera. The last thing you'd need is for your husband to go and die on you. Especially of cholera. So, what were you to do in such turbulent times? Luckily, the suffocatingly rigid societal standards of Victorian England got you covered!

Mourning was as much of a public display of your pity party as it was a period of personal grief. It was a way to communicate to those around you that you’re grieving without actually having to talk about it (which we often don’t after a death). It was also a way for those around you to judge you and accuse you of not loving your husband/parent/child if you’re not wearing the right clothes. Not only do you have to cope with a death in the family, you also have to worry about proving to society that you cared about them enough.

When thinking of mourning attire, the customary clothes of Victorian women are typically what comes to mind. Women had a set of rules for what they could and couldn’t wear after the death of a loved one. Mourning and what was to be worn during it was split up into different parts — deep mourning, second mourning, and half-mourning. From what I can tell, it seems that different etiquette manuals found it hard to come to an agreement on how long mourning should last in different circumstances, but generally a woman would go into deep mourning for a year or two for her husband, half of that for her parents or children, and decreasingly less for more distant relatives.

During the lengthy deep morning, women were not permitted to have a speck of anything besides black in their attire. Note that just because a woman was wearing a black dress doesn't mean she was in mourning – there was a lot more to the attire. So-called “widow’s weeds” were not permitted to be made of material with sheen and could not have lace or other decoration. They could not wear any jewelry, their parasols had to be black and drab, and even their handkerchief had to have a black trim to get the point across. Arguably the most iconic part of the widow’s weeds was the mourning veil, a black, nearly opaque crepe veil that masked a woman’s face. The thing about these veils is that the material they were made of, crepe, would leak out its dye if it got wet. You may be familiar with the fact that back then, paint was made with lead, cadmium, and other toxic materials. Nobody cared about what kind of materials were being used to make these veils, either. The materials used for the crepe didn’t contain these specifically, but it definitely wasn’t nontoxic. So anytime it rained, the dye would leak and stain the woman’s skin, the veil would cause rashes anywhere it rubbed, and would cause her respiratory damage from breathing in the particles it shed. I guess it’s romantic to want to meet your dead husband more quickly?

If the veil didn’t kill her, the mourner can move onto the second mourning, where the regulations start to ease up a bit. Black decorations, such as lace or jewelry, can be worn with the usual mourning attire. Then, during the half-morning, a woman can wear jewelry, white colors and cuffs, and sprinkle gray or lavender into her attire. Then she can quit mourning and start wearing normal clothes again, yay! Too bad her husband's still dead.

Oh, also, people would wear a lock of the deceased's hair by placing it into the locket of ring or necklace or weaving it into a bracelet. Queen Victoria herself wore an entire headress made of human hair during her mourning, which you can see on the left. I don't know if this was her husband's hair or not, and I'm kind of scared to find out.

These rules were much stricter for women than they were for men. Women had an entire sorrowful regalia they had to wear daily — they couldn’t just throw on some black and call it a day. Men were also expected to wear black, but they could essentially just replace their ordinary clothes with a black version. Also, etiquette manuals would detail how long women should be in mourning based on which relative is deceased, but typically didn’t include a male counterpart.

It’s believed that mourning was made such a big deal because Drama Queen Victoria decided it should be a big deal. Obviously, mourning customs were a thing before, but the intensity in how elaborate these were is often attributed to Queen Victoria. In 1861, Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, succumbed to typhoid fever and perished. Victoria did not handle this well. She went into isolation, stuffed her face with comfort food, and rarely made public appearances. When someone did catch sight of her, she would always be covered head-to-toe in mourning black, right up until the day she died in 1901. Dressing in black and holing up in your room moping all day paved the way for a lot more people than just 19th century widows.

So people would do all this way after their loved one passed away, but what about right after it happened? I’ll just let this excerpt from Victorian Monsters’s article on mourning customs do the talking for me.

So much work for just one dead body!

Something of concern for the recently departed was having their grave robbed. Yeah, at the time the only legitimate way medical schools could obtain cadavers were from the execution of criminals, but there weren't enough of those to meet demand, so the university staff kept a scalpel in their right hand and a shovel in their left. To combat this, graves would be bricked over or caged to protect from purloining quacks. This conflicted with another issue following burial, which was the weirdly high incidence of being buried alive. Because doctors were caged off from nabbing cadavers for reference of what a dead person looks like, they would make an oopsie and declare a living person dead every now and again. Fixes for this included burying the person with a rope leading to a bell outside of the grave to be rung, or to use a coffin with windows to make sure they’re not moving while the coffin is being buried.

Another aspect of death with that quirky Victorian charm is postmortem photography, which, as you can probably gather from the name, are photos taken of a loved one’s dead body to remember them by. This was often done for deceased children who passed before they could have a portrait taken of them while they were alive, but photos were taken of adults as well. Sometimes the deceased’s relatives would pose for a family photo with the body and pretend that they weren't dead for the duration of the photo being taken. The corpses would be posed as if the deceased were just soundly asleep or be placed in a coffin. It's also thought that bodies were positioned standing up, but since we can't see any support to stand the body up in these photos, and a dead body is pretty damn heavy, this probably isn't true. Another option was spirit photography, where a mourner could have their photo taken with a “ghost” who was very obviously a different person than their dead relative. It took people a surprisingly long time to figure out that this was just a trick of photography.

These practices seem extreme compared to today’s standards, but it should be kept in mind that mortality was much more prevalent then than it is today. Our concept of modern medicine was still nascent in the 19th century. I mean, patients in hospitals were literally covered in shit and drinking doodoo water until Florence Nightingale pointed out that cleaning up the place may help with the amount of people dying from infections. Families would plan in advance for the untimely demise of their loved ones because of how common death was. Death was considered just as tragic as it is today, but it was a lot harder not to think about. Openly grieving in such a way shows that people of this era were just as heartbroken by loss as any of us would be, but simply had to face mortality head-on anyways.

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