Beyond the Veil: The Victorian Obsession with Death and Mourning

Intricate hair art made from the deceased’s locks, tranquil postmortem photography, and strict etiquette for the proper colors to wear at each stage of mourning are just some of the ways Victorians honored their dead, as shown in this delightfully morbid collection from historian Gambino (Killer Collections). While highlighting the Victorian era’s most ghoulish trends—including mourning stationary that revealed “how close the sender was to the deceased” via its border thickness, Pre-Raphaelite painters’ peculiar glamorizing of tuberculosis, and the period’s proliferation of serial killers, from the notorious Jack the Ripper to the lesser-known Ogress of Reading, who was “suspected of killing hundreds of infants”—the author doesn’t get lost in the shock value. He consistently emphasizes how the Victorian view of death—“equal parts reverence and fascination”—was “not born of morbid curiosity,” but the result of genuine grief, as mortality rates in the period were high due to rampant disease and pollution, unsafe work conditions, and quack medicine. Still, the stories are undoubtedly macabre—entries cover “spirit photographer” William H. Mumler, who “captured the spirits of the deceased in his portraits”; the “coffin torpedo,” a unique grave-robbing prevention method that “employed an explosive device concealed within the coffin”; and heavy black mourning veils unwittingly treated with “highly toxic chemicals.” It adds up to a captivating survey of how Victorians grimly aestheticized “an existence defined by... loss.” (Sept.)