The great stigma in death, as in life, was to be recognised as a pauper. They were denied the send-off that befitted the respectability of a working-class funeral.
Mourning dress also became an important accessory to death, although black mourning clothes had been adopted from the late fourteenth century and mourning cloaks and hats continued to be popular with chief mourners until the late seventeenth century. Additional accessories gradually emerged for men such as black gloves, belts, waistcoats, hats, shoes, stockings and buttons. Women wore dresses made from black silk and white linen and black and white caps beneath veils or hoods. The wearing of a black armband, particularly among men during the eighteenth century, became an established symbol after the death of someone close.
In addition to the personal grief suffered by the loss of a loved one, death also had a deep impact on the financial vulnerability of widows. For working-class women in particular the loss of a husband or partner represented a huge deprivation in security and protection and many had to resort to parish support. There are many sad stories recalling how generations of widows finished their days in the workhouse. The Friendly Almshouses, formerly the Friendly Female Society in the borough of Lambeth, made few concessions to sensitivity when it advertised itself as a place for the ‘relief of poor infirm aged widows … who have seen better days.’ Others had to rely on the support of their family, a Friendly Society or simply had to try and make ends meet. Not surprisingly, many looked to the church or spiritual means for comfort and solace.
Class distinctions in death had been apparent from early times and were determined by what people could afford. Such distinctions applied on the Necropolis one-way train between London and Brookwood from its opening in 1854. First-, second- or third-class coffin tickets were available with separate carriages for Anglican and Nonconformist corpses, the latter divided between ‘Roman Catholics, Jews, Parsees and other Dissenters’. David Bartlett, an American writing in London by Day and by Night (1852) commented on the ‘unpleasant subject’ of ‘London burials’. Noting the grand tombs and memorials to the rich and powerful he asked: ‘where are the poor buried’? This question led him to discuss the issue of Enon Chapel in Clement’s Lane (opened 1823) off the Strand, which became a subject before a Committee of the House of Commons. A corrupt Baptist minister, Mr Howse, had promised that for a fee of fifteen shillings he could provide burials. In the vault, which was 60 feet long, 29 feet wide and 6 feet deep, he packed in some 12,000 corpses over a twenty-year period. One way of getting rid of these human remains was to mix them with loads of mingled dirt and then to throw them into the Thames on the other side of Waterloo Bridge. On one occasion a portion of a load fell off in the street, and the crowd picked a human skull out of it. Howse resorted to various other means of disposal including the use of quicklime to get rid of the corpses. One witness testified before the Committee: ‘I have seen the man and his wife burn them, it is quite a common thing.’ Samuel Pitts was a regular attendee at the Chapel who testified:
the smell was most abominable and very injurious; I have frequently gone home myself with a severe headache … there were insects, something similar to a bug in shape and appearance, only with wings … I have seen in the summertime hundreds of them flying about in the chapel … we always considered that they proceeded from the dead bodies underneath.
The case of Enon Chapel was not an isolated incident. St Martin’s in Ludgate, St Anne’s in Soho, St Clement’s on Portugal Street and many others were guilty of similar practices. The gravedigger at St Clement’s testified that the ground was so full of bodies that he could not make a new grave. He said, ‘we have come to bodies quite perfect, and we have cut parts away with choppers and pickaxes. We have opened the lids of coffins, and the bodies have been so perfect that we could distinguish males from females and all those have been chopped and cut up.’ Other gravediggers gave similar accounts, one describing his experience as ‘more horrible than ever Dante saw in Hell.’
At least the incident led to reform and the government were sent many weird and wonderful suggestions for ways of improving the burial of the dead. For example, one architect proposed the use of catacombs shaped like pyramids with each outer stone containing a coffin. Despite such ideas between 1837 and 1841, Parliament approved a plan for seven privately-operated ‘Gardens of the Dead’ to be laid out in London’s outer suburbs at Highgate, Brompton, Nunhead, Kensal Green, Tower Hamlets, Abney Park and West Norwood.
Ostentatious funerals, by the mid-nineteenth century, were beginning to be looked upon with some degree of disdain by various Victorian publications. The Times had been critical of the expense, pomp, ‘plumes’ and ‘undertaking millinery’ at the funeral of the Duke of Northumberland in 1865. The Lancet in 1894 expressed relief that the expense of funerals had been reduced, hailing the fact that ‘elaborate funerals of the past generations are almost as extinct as the dodo.’
The mourning industry started to decline after the 1880s and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 marked the passing of an age in which the rigidity of mourning and all its regulations were dictated by the Victorian code of etiquette. The working classes could at least manage, by the assistance of death insurance from funeral clubs, to have a reasonable ‘send-off’. The trappings of the funerary industry became simpler and writers were still criticising what they saw as the shabbiness of the cheap undertaking trade. In an attempt to improve the status of their profession the British Undertakers Association was established in 1905.
The term ‘wake’ stems from an old tradition of watching over the body in the hope that life might return. Later the practice became particularly associated with the aftermath of the funeral service when food and drink are served. The wake has a long history in Ireland and many Irish immigrants who came to London continued this tradition, as depicted in illustrations and satirical cartoons in the eighteenth century such as The Humours of an Irish-Wake as celebrated at St Giles London. The picture shows the deceased still laying on his deathbed surrounded by fifteen people in various states of grief: some praying, others sobbing and two drinking.
As early as 1180, William FitzStephen commented upon the way in which Londoners were famed for their celebrations, which included ‘their care in regard to the rites of funerals and the burial of the dead.’ The Drapers Company in 1523 recorded the death of Sir William Roche, alderman. After the pomp and ceremony of the funeral, guests came back to the home where they drank wine, beer and ate spiced bread. The following day they attended church, which was followed by a meal at the Draper’s Hall consisting of ‘First, brawn and mustard, boiled capon, swan roast, capon and mustard’. The second course consisted of pigeons, tarts, bread, wine, ale and beer. In addition, Lady Roche provided them with ‘four gallons of French wine, a box of wafers and a pottell [measure equivalent to two quarts] of ipocras’. The latter was a rare sweet wine reserved for royalty or special ceremonial occasions.
Henry Machyn recorded many funerary feasts in the sixteenth century, such as that in November 1550 held in honour of ‘Lady Judde, Mayoress of London and wife of Sir Andrew Judde, Mayor of London, and buried in the parish of St Helen in Bishopsgate Street’. After the burial, Machyn commented that the ‘lord mayor and his brethren … and all the street and the church were hanged with black’ and there followed ‘a great dole and a great dinner’. In May 1551, he noted that on the following day of the burial of Lady Huberthorn, there was a sumptuous dinner. In the same month the funeral of Lady Morris, wife of Sir Christopher Morris, knight and the master of the ordnance by King Henry VIII, there was ‘a great dole and a great dinner as I have seen of fish and other things’. In July 1553, at the funeral of Ralph Warren, Knight, mercer and alderman, ‘there was as great a dinner as I have seen.’
Funeral feasts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were important aspects of the funeral and often entailed half of the total cost. Thomas Sutton (1532–1611) was a civil servant, businessman and moneylender and one of the richest men in
England. On his death in December 1611 his body was embalmed and his funeral procession from Paternoster Row to Christ Church in Newgate Street took some six hours. His funeral feast took place in May 1612, as it was often the custom to celebrate the funeral of eminent persons some time after their internment. The feast took place at the Stationers Hall and it was a sumptuous affair consisting of:
32 neat’s [cow’s] tongues, 40 stone of beef, 24 marrow-bones, 1 lamb, 40 capons, 32 geese, 4 pheasants, 12 pheasant pullets, 12 godwits [large wading bird], 24 rabbits, 6 hernshaws [heron], 43 turkey-chickens, 48 roast chickens, 18 house pigeons, 72 field pigeons, 36 quails, 48 ducklings, 160 eggs, 3 salmon, 4 congers, 10 turbots, 24 lobsters, 4 mullets, 9 firkin and a keg of sturgeon, 3 barrels of pickled oysters, 6 gammon of bacon, 4 Westphalia gammons, 16 fried tongues, 16 chicken pies, 16 pasties, 16 made dishes of rice, 16 neat’s and tongue pies, 16 custards, 16 dishes of bait, 16 mince pies, 16 orange pies, 16 gooseberry tarts and 6 grand salads.
Such lavish expense did not go down very well with the puritans who campaigned against such excesses of pomp and display and many requested that their own funerals be kept frugal. One such was William Ambler, who was buried in Bunhill Fields. He asked that no more than ‘twelve persons be invited to my burial because the most of what I have is in other men’s handes.’ There were many others beside puritans who did not spend lavishly on food and drink after the funeral. In March 1664, twenty guests attended the funeral of Tom Pepys, brother of Samuel, and were served ‘six biscuits a-piece and what they pleased of burnt claret’. Ned Ward (author of The London Spy) wrote before his death in 1731:
No costly funeral prepare,
Twixt sun and sun I only crave,
A hearse and one black coach to bear,
My wife and children to my grave.
An irreverent depiction of an eighteenth-century wake is Hogarth’s series of illustrations, The Harlot’s Progress, which tells the story of Moll, a twenty-three-year-old prostitute. The last engraving in the series is a funeral wake which depicts a telling mixture of grief and indifference. Many of those assembled have been fuelled by drink. The parson has a glass of brandy in one hand whilst his other hand is up the skirt of a girl. Another girl can be seen stealing the undertaker’s handkerchief. Moll’s madam is appropriately drunk whilst other prostitutes are distracted in various activities which include admiring themselves in the mirror or showing off their sores. The only one demonstrating any grief is Moll’s maid who is disgusted at the use of Moll’s coffin as a bar for drinks.
Although Christianity introduced some new festivals, there were many customs and rituals in existence before the Christian period. However, by the eighteenth century the rituals surrounding death combined a mixture of secular, folklore and religious practices with a growing commercial involvement. The custom of eating after the funeral is an ancient one but the custom of sin-eating seems to be more recent. Sin-eating as a funeral custom is mentioned in records from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and was practiced in parts of England, the lowlands of Scotland and the Welsh borders. For a small payment of money a local person was paid to take upon him or herself the sins of the deceased and their consequences in the afterlife by eating and drinking near the deceased body. The writer and English antiquary John Aubrey (1626–1697) noted that the ritual was performed when the deceased was being removed from the house for burial. A loaf of bread and a jug of beer were passed over the deceased, or actually briefly placed on the body, and then the sin-eater consumed them. By this action the sin-eater was assumed to have taken on the sins of the deceased and to have brought peace to the departed soul.
Other examples of giving out food after the death of an individual are those associated with medieval Requiems and the custom of giving alms (including food) to the poor in exchange for their prayers. In late Elizabethan London there were at least sixty-two separate distributions of bread to the poor every Sunday. For some of the benefactors it was a way in which they could sustain memories of themselves by the reading of their names before the distribution. In St Giles, Cripplegate, a stone slab commemorates the brewer Charles Langlie who died in 1602. Langlie donated annual gifts to the poor of the parish as well as an accompanying sermon hoping that others might ‘follow Langlies waies.’ Sir John Milborne, draper and mayor of London in 1521, required that his thirteen bedesmen (poor people living in his almshouses) displayed their gratitude for his charity by insisting that they attend mass every morning at 8.00 a.m. near the tomb of their benefactor. Nicholas Wilkinson, a Shakespearian actor who lived in Holywell Street, was given recognition by an altar erected in St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch as a benefactor who gave an annual six pounds and ten pence to the poor inhabitants of the parish.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century funeral feasts were an important element of the whole ritual of death and, for the wealthy, they could be on a very grand scale. By the nineteenth century, the feast continued and many working-class families made the most of giving the deceased a good ‘send-off’. However, for many middle- and upper-class families, the feast diminished in its scale and extravagance and became much more sedate.
The century after 1780 witnessed the distinct emergence of a mourning industry accompanied by a whole paraphernalia of pattern books, invitation cards, mourning dress, commemorative keepsakes, the commercialisation of undertakers and a complex set of rules regarding what to wear and the period of time spent in mourning. The growth of this industry created a demand for mourning fashions such as black hats with knotted bands, black woollen suits and dresses, which stimulated the tailoring industry. In addition, technological developments in printing assisted the placing of announcements and notices in newspapers regarding deaths and funerals. They also assisted the growth of advertising and promoted funerary fashions in the growing number of magazines.
The widespread expression of mourning reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. This century saw a continuation of some of the practices established in the eighteenth century as well as expansion and change in other practices. The period spent in mourning became more prolonged. This was particularly evident when Prince Albert died in 1861 and Queen Victoria undertook her long passage of grief. The regulations concerning mourning became more complex and rigid. The attempt to regulate what should be worn on these occasions had similarities to the old sumptuary laws, which had also tried to dictate what people should wear (and the number of courses they were allowed to eat). Mourning dress, as with other forms of dress, had been circumscribed in the old sumptuary laws, which tried to ensure that a person’s social class was identifiable by their dress. Edward III (1327–1377) has been described as ‘the King who taught the English how to dress’ by providing the first national sumptuary laws in 1336, 1337 and 1363. An example of the complex laws during the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) stipulated that ‘None shall wear … cloth of gold or silver, or silk of purple colour … except … Earls, all above that rank, and Knights of the King’ and so on down each rank of society. Although the penalties were harsh, very few people were prosecuted under the laws and James I (r. 1603–1625) repealed them.
Similarly, mourning dress from the eighteenth century was the subject of convoluted regulations. Etiquette dictated the wearing of different attire depending on the family relationship as well as the appropriate length of time spent in mourning. Mrs Humphry, a popular London writer and journalist, wrote in Manners for Women in 1897:
Widows’ weeds used to be worn for a year and six months. It was then reduced to a year and a month, the vulgar reading of which was a year and a day. During the last few years deep crepe and distinctive headgear have been dropped at the end of six months, the period known technically as ‘black silk’ then setting in, this lasting for six months instead of three, as used to the case when the very deep weeds were worn for a year.
If there was any doubt that these rules seemed trivial, Mrs Humphry quickly pointed out that ‘they are a crystallisation in externals of kindhea
rtedness and those good manners that are the fruit of noble minds.’ However, wearing mourning dress did not commence until a week after the death for fear of the suggestion that the dress had been prepared in advance.
Fashion magazines such as Queen and The Gentlewoman advised on many aspects of mourning including the strict dress code to be followed. The New York magazine, Harpers’ Bazaar, of April 1886 mockingly noted that we do not have ‘the mutes, or the nodding feathers of the hearse, that still forms part of the English funeral equipage.’ Mourning attire was regarded by many as an ideal way to display wealth and respectability. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, started in 1852 at two-pence a copy, was founded by Samuel Beeton, the husband of Isabella who as Mrs Beeton was the author of the extraordinarily successful The Book of Household Management. It was the first cheap magazine for women and included colour plates of fashion and cut-out paper patterns. It advised many widows ‘never to put on their colours again.’ Although the thought of wearing black clothes must have seemed dull, many women went to great lengths to appear fashionable in times of mourning. There were changes by the mid-nineteenth century in the style of skirts, shawls, shoes, fans, gloves and small displays of defiance by wearing hair beneath the bonnet. By 1875 the women’s magazine industry was well established. As more magazines started to appeal to lower middle-class and working-class women they marked a rejection of the more literary and elitist style of late eighteenth-century feminine literature.
Such prolonged and visible displays of mourning could be interpreted as a sign of respect for the departed, as help in coping with grief, the result of society’s expectations or a recognisable symbol that invited sympathy. Etiquette manuals and magazines gave some advice, as Pat Jalland points out in her book Death in the Victorian Family (1996). In Manners and Social Usages (1884) it was suggested that: ‘a mourning dress does protect from unwanted intrusion on private grief against the untimely gayety of a passing stranger. It is a wall, a cell of refuge.’ The Queen magazine in 1875, however, tempered the wearing of mourning dress against the unnecessary cost involved and advised women ‘to use common sense’ suggesting that ‘a plain black dress is by no means inordinately costly.’ Not everyone approved of mourning dress and there were those who either criticised it for the embarrassing pressure it placed on women or those who felt it was both wasteful and indulgent sentimentality. One reformer was Katherine Hume-Rothery who, in her 1876 publication Anti-Mourning, made a scathing attack on those who perpetuated and promoted elaborate mourning rituals. She argued that this ‘miserable custom’ was a burden imposed on the less wealthy classes who, ‘are, in the senseless slavery imposed by fashion [and] driven, to spend their last farthing, or worse, to incur debt they cannot pay … in this foolish mockery of supposed respect to the dead.’
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