Cover of the book under review. [Click to enlarge it.]
n Rites of Passage: Death
and Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders examines the
Victorian culture of mourning as a series of customs that evolved over
the century and reflected the changing structures and ideologies of Victorian society.
Her deeply researched and ambitious project sheds
light on the poorer classes as well as the rich and goes beyond the
commonplace that the Victorians were simply death-obsessed, morbidly
fascinated with the the dead and the dying. Indeed Flanders presents a
people who were confronted by death due to a variety of socio-political
factors. The purpose of her book, Flanders writes, is to
understand how "those in the nineteenth century responded [to death],
how they thought, what they believed, how they behaved when faced with
the vast army of the dead" (5).
As someone whose scholarly interests pertain to the culture of death and mourning in the nineteenth century, my understanding of this topic has largely been influenced by critics like Erik Gray who, in "Victoria Dressed in Black: Poetry in an Elegiac Age," expands on the now-famous story of how the death of Albert plunged Queen Victoria into a period of mourning that lasted for four decades. Flanders, too, includes a chapter that minutely details how the Queen responded to her husband’s death: "the decor was given additional elements of homage: regularly refreshed mourning wreaths were laid out on the beds; a portrait bust of Albert was installed; his personal items were transferred from his dressing room and laid out as if for use, even as new washstand china was ordered for the dead man’s ablutions" (256). Recounting the details of Victoria’s prolonged mourning, Gray argues that the actions that would seem morbid to us now "would have been seen as exemplary" for other Victorians. Flanders, on the other hand, in what I view as one of the book’s most significant claims, wholeheartedly rejects this view. She writes:
Today it is often assumed that Queen Victoria’s prolonged grieving was characteristic of the age and was considered admirable by her contemporaries. Neither of these statements is true. Her adoption of perpetual mourning dress was a choice made by many widows, but certainly not all [...] Victoria was stubborn in her grief, however. Those concerned with matters of state thought that she was using her loss as an excuse to do exactly what she wanted to do, and to not do whatever she did not want to do. At least in part, the queen herself knew this, as the confused reasoning in a letter she wrote to Lord Russell, the prime minister, shows. Five years after Albert’s death, she continued to refuse to attend the state opening of Parliament. (257)
Flanders’ view of Victoria’s stubborn grief does not, however, seek to declare her a bad sovereign, nor does it judge a grief that seemed to paralyze Victoria. Instead Flanders, as she does throughout the entire project, grounds her argument in historical documents. In setting herself apart from other critics and historians of the period who believe Victoria’s mourning was considered admirable by her subjects, Flanders reveals a determination to present and to understand the Victorians as not entirely defined by their queen.
The Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897), a recurring figure throughout Rites of Passage, provides an example of this point. "Some quarter-century after Albert's death," Flanders explains, "Mrs. Oliphant wrote, 'I doubt whether nous autres poor women who have had to fight with the world all alone without much sympathy from anybody, can quite enter into the 'unprecedented' character of the Queen’s sufferings'" (qtd on 259). Oliphant, who outlived her husband and all five of her children, understood what it was to be a woman — a mother and wife — in mourning. But in her response to the perpetual mourning of Queen Victoria, her point is clear: Not everyone can afford to be paralyzed by grief.
Oliphant's point is one that is strongly held by Flanders herself. Throughout Rites of Passage, Flanders describes the Victorian process and culture of mourning as largely defined and created by commerce. To this point, she notes that, in 1759, Adam Smith "wrote that the way we sympathize with the dead, and with their survivors, is by putting ourselves in the place of the dead" (159). By discussing the ways in which the dead became "a part of the commercial world, a commodity in themselves," Flanders positions the Victorian culture of mourning as yet another blooming industry. By oscillating between the stories of members of the wealthy and privileged classes, such Queen Victoria, William Gladstone, and Alfred Tennyson, and those of the working and poorer classes, whose stories are heard far less often, Flanders gives voice to an unusually broad range of Victorians.
Rites of Passage deftly examines customs of mourning from the sickroom and deathbed, to the formation of the modern cemetery, the political and legal interpretation of death itself—both natural and unnatural — all the way to beliefs in ghosts and the undead. Throughout this impressively researched project, Flanders weaves the historical with the literary. Although this book is really a piece of historical research, a project composed by a historian, Flanders also discusses the literature of the period; Dickens is referenced with a notable regularity. While the historical documents, like letters and journal/diary entries, introduce the reader to historical figures unlikely to be found in a standard history textbook, the use of literature shows how the culture of mourning was either mirrored in the period's fiction or shaped by authors themselves. For example, to demonstrate the changing view of suicide that occurred throughout the century, Flanders turns to literature, focusing, not surprisingly, on Dickens. Flanders writes, "the change over the decades is most easily seen in Dickens. In Oliver Twist (1837/9), Nancy is a victim [...] Twenty years later, in a magazine piece entitled 'Wapping Workhouse,' Dickens has a young boy callously refer to the women who drown themselves in the river as 'jumpers,' removing their gender, and virtually their humanity" (195).
Another use of Dickens — this time, from his novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) — demonstrates literature’s power to shape what would become a societal view of what makes a good death. The death of Little Nell became "one of the most famous [deaths] in the nineteenth century," and was understood to be a beautiful reward for Little Nell instead of a tragedy (52). To view the death of a child, an all-too-frequent occurrence in the nineteenth century, as an understanding that that child will never grow to suffer as an adult comforted those who had lost children of their own. Likewise, the deaths of famous authors themselves became important in the collective imagination as examples of how a revered individual could, or perhaps should, die. For instance, when Tennyson was coming to the end of his life, his son, Hallam, "helped to set the [deathbed] scene" (43). Hallam Tennyson used his own description of his father's death to craft a scene, the moment of death, befitting the poet of the age. Flanders examines the use of literature and the lives of the authors themselves as a kind of evidence that points to the pervasive nature of the period's culture of death and mourning. Rites of Passage is a tremendously written and researched exploration of a period that remains as richly entwined in the fabric of our own society and culture.
Links to Related Material
- The Art and Culture of Victorian Mourning
- Mourning Dress
- Prescribed Periods of Mourning
- Review of The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction
Bibliography
[Book under review]. Flanders, Judith. Rites of Passage: Death and Mourning in Victorian Britain. London: Picador, 2024.
Gray, Erik. "Victoria Dressed in Black: Poetry in an Elegiac Age." In The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, edited by Karen Weisman, 272-288. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
Created 10 September 2024