By the Victorian period, death was increasingly sentimentalised, and was accompanied by a wide range of mementoes of the deceased. These included locks of hair which were kept in a box or mounted in a hair brooch designed by ‘hair artists’. Hair art, which became the most popular form of Victorian mourning jewellery, started as a simple way to keep the memory of a loved one, but it developed into an elaborate art form. Bracelets, rings, earrings, watch fobs and necklaces all became quite common in the later part of the Victorian period. Memorial cards commemorated recent deaths. A particular and tragic example of these is the memorial card to the Taylor children (1862) in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The three children were killed by their parents and the tragedy caused a great sense of public grief and outpouring.
Images of the Afterlife
Images of the Christian afterlife – Heaven, Purgatory and Hell – have survived from the medieval period in illuminated manuscripts, wall paintings and sculptures. From the twelfth century the doctrine of Purgatory brought a significant shift in the way people thought about death. This was reinforced through the vivid images of the torments that were experienced in that state.
The walls of medieval churches provided an ideal place for the display of Christian art and these paintings continued to be produced until the English Reformation and its associated iconoclasm wiped out so many of them. The subjects of wall paintings were mainly based on Gospel accounts and morality tales, but images of Death were often featured in themes such as The Three Living and the Three Dead, The Last Judgement and The Seven Deadly Sins. The Doom was one of the most common themes for wall paintings in the medieval parish church. It depicted the Christian belief in the judgement of souls before they entered Heaven or Hell. The purpose was to remind people of what awaited them after death and what the consequences of sin would be. These images were usually located at the east end of the chancel where they were in full view of the worshippers. On one side of the painting Heaven was depicted and on the other side Hell. Christ was placed in majesty at the top, sitting in judgement. Additional figures might include the Virgin Mary, the Twelve Apostles and angels blowing trumpets to raise the dead for judgement and alternatively welcoming those who had been chosen to enter the gates of Heaven. The unlucky ones were gleefully seized by demons to be taken down into Hell to confront the endless horrors and torments that awaited them there. None of these have survived in the City of London churches. A medieval doom painting on wood over the chancel at St Andrew’s in Enfield was removed in 1779 when the church was widened and later the painting was destroyed. In St Margaret’s in Barking there are beams on each side of the chancel arch showing part of a Doom painting. There are also ‘Resurrection stones’ carved with scenes of the Last Judgement at St Andrew in Holborn and St Mary-at-Hill.
Images of the terrors of Hell and the rewards of Heaven found expression in art throughout the following centuries. Gustave Dore (1832–1883), who produced many vivid illustrations of poverty in London in the nineteenth century in the book London: A Pilgrimage (1872), also drew the illustrations of Hell for a later version of The Divine Comedy. Edmund Spenser (1552–1599), who acknowledged his debt to his birthplace ‘Merry London, my most kindly nurse’, wrote the epic poem The Faerie Queen in which Duessa Lucifera, the head of the House of Pride, and her six advisors represent the Seven Deadly Sins.
From the Reformation of the sixteenth century, Hell presented many Protestants with a problem because whilst they rejected Purgatory, the idea of Hell as a place of eternal tortures and punishments was not consistent with their image of a forgiving and loving God. Many had to rethink this idea. The century after 1650 witnessed a range of debates concerning the issue of life after death – the journey of body and soul, the state between death and the final judgement and the nature of Heaven and Hell.
The emergence of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century challenged many contemporary perspectives of what the afterlife might hold. Romanticism placed a greater emphasis on moral passion and the role of the individual. It was a movement that found expression in romantic images particularly around the themes of love and grief, romantic suicides and melancholy settings. The old hellfire sermons and images of Hell and all that it held for sinners had struck fear into people for generations. However with Romanticism came images of a Heaven which promised reunion and in some cases even rejected the idea of punishment. William Blake (1757–1827) was a notable contributor to these ideas.
Blake had challenged orthodox ideas and believed that Satan was the hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The artist John Martin (1789–1854) shared no such illusions. Although he was an artist and engraver, Martin had also been involved with schemes for the improvement of London. He published pamphlets and plans for the metropolitan water supply, sewerage and dock and railway systems some twenty-five years before those of Joseph Bazalgette. His mezzotints for an edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which were exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1825, depicted a battle between light and darkness. In Martin’s work, the sinners at the Last Judgement are cast down into the inferno while the good are led to a landscape of blue and gold. In another painting by Martin, The Plains of Heaven, the landscape is one of peaceful serenity.
William Blake also worked with a theme that was common in depictions of the apocalypse and death. Death on a Pale Horse was also a theme used by one of England’s greatest artists, John Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). Turner was deeply affected by his father’s death in 1829 and Death on a Pale Horse reflects a much darker shift in Turner’s art as Death, a skeleton, is spreadeagled across a white steed.
The Victorian period witnessed changing perceptions and artistic representations of the afterlife. A greater emphasis was placed on the idea of peaceful reunion with one’s family in Heaven, and less attention was given to Hell. The extent to which these images influenced, or struck terror into, the mass of population is uncertain. Images probably lost their ability to strike fear into people as they had done in previous times. However they began to find expression in a wider circulation of popular publications which used the combination of illustrations and melodramatic stories. Death was highly visible in Victorian culture as people were encouraged to give public expression to their grief. This was supported by an industry of sentimentality reflected in mourning dress, mementoes, song sheets, memorial cards and locks of hair. Paintings and illustrations of the Victorian deathbed, melodrama, grieving at the graveside, heroic deaths and tragedy became the stuff of many of these publications.
Examples include The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live? (1855) by Henry Alexander Bowler (1824–1903), in the Tate Britain. This painting depicts a woman leaning over the headstone of a grave in deep contemplation, possibly casting doubts on traditional beliefs about the afterlife. Ophelia (1851–1852) by John Everett Millais (1829–1896) portrays the tragic death of Ophelia, the beautiful young woman from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as she falls into a stream and drowns. The Lady of Shallot (1888) by J. W. Waterhouse (1849–1917) shows the romantic but doomed eponymous heroine setting off on her final voyage along the river to Camelot.
The Victoria and Albert Museum displays paintings and artefacts related to Victorian death. Typical of the genre are paintings such as Charles Green’s (1840–1898) Little Nell Awakened by the Bargeman (1876) from Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). The novel tells the story of Little Nell, her grandfather and their financial ruin and subsequent escape and death. The painting shows a pathetic looking Nell sitting by a canal holding her grandfather’s head as he lies dying. Joseph Swain’s (1820–1909) untitled work depicts a woman standing in mourning dress by a grave. A Young Widow (1877) by Edward Killingworth Johnson (1825–1896) has a similarly sad theme: a young woman dressed in mourning clothes holds a wedding dress, intimating that she was a recent bride but now widowed. Deathbed scenes of children were less of a taboo subject than now and in the Victorian period they carried a great deal of sentimentality. Little Sister’s Gone
to Sleep was the title of the picture on the cover of a song sheet, for example.
The art of death over the centuries has informed us about the ways in which different societies have responded to death. The medieval period reflected contemporary fears of an impending apocalypse, punishment for our sins and the threat of pestilence. The Victorians conveyed the visual imagery of death in a diversity of forms and rituals assisted by the rise of an industrial economy and growing commercialisation.
7
Irrational Aspects
Fear of Ghosts and Premature Burial
‘Irrational’ is defined as ‘marked by a lack of accord with reason or sound judgement.’ When making assessments about the actions of people in the past the term has to be used with a degree of caution for it is all too easy to make judgements with the benefit of hindsight and our current levels of scientific knowledge. People thought and acted within the parameters of the knowledge and understanding of the world they had at the time. For all the intellectual and scientific advances over past centuries, many beliefs have persisted into the present, one example being the interest in ghosts. So-called irrational beliefs and the fears they generate have contributed at times to panics, mass hysteria and persecution. Fear has been a constant presence throughout history. Past societies feared plague, disease, pain, fire, war, flood, starvation, the night, bad harvests, the death of an infant, Purgatory, Hell and the end of the world. At the core of so many of these fears is death and the process of dying. The terror of being buried prematurely was very real for many people, some of whom went to great lengths to prevent this from happening.
The perils of the night and the attending darkness brought with them many risks. Night-time was given over to criminals, demons and moonstruck lunatics, a time when doors and windows were bolted to keep out the unknown threats which lurked in the dark. The city bells sounded curfew at nine and people began the more than symbolic ritual of locking doors and closing shutters. Night-time contained elements that were beyond anyone’s control. People had to negotiate streets that were like cramped, dark rabbit warrens with all manner of obstacles. It was not uncommon for pedestrians and others to fall over these obstacles or to be precipitated down into cellars or into rivers. There was also the risk of being attacked and robbed. Some areas had a particularly bad reputation and people travelled these streets at night at their own risk. The notorious and appropriately-nicknamed ‘Cut-Throat Lane’ (Pottery Lane, Kensington) was the main route into one of London’s worst slums. In the 1850s a medical officer described it as ‘one of the most deplorable spots, not only in Kensington, but in the whole metropolis’. Charles Dickens described it as ‘a plague spot’ scarcely equalled in London. Sir John Fielding described Black Boy Alley (off Chick Lane, Holborn) as ‘a terror to the watchmen’ because of the violent attacks by a group of young men known as the Black Boy Alley gang.
Ghosts
The fascination with the afterlife has a long history. Despite the advance of science, secularism and rationalism since the eighteenth century, there continues to be a preoccupation with ghosts. However, present-day interest is of a different nature from that which existed in pre-Reformation times where the belief was manipulated for political and religious purposes. Most people in medieval England believed in ghosts and accepted that the dead might return to haunt the living. The belief in ghosts has shifted over the past 1,000 years from one of general acceptance to one of cynicism. However there have been sporadic revivals such as the growth of spiritualism in the nineteenth century and during the First World War. London, as might be expected, has had more than its fair share of ghosts and ghost sightings.
During the medieval period, the relationship between ghosts and the living served an important function. The Catholic Church revised and rationalised the ancient belief in ghosts. It also taught that such apparitions were the souls of those trapped in Purgatory, unable to rest until they had expiated their sins.
Between 1050 and 1250 the Church underwent significant changes. In its attempt to define the faith it persecuted heretics and those it saw as non-believers through crusades and the inquisition. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a renewed interest in saving the souls of people. Chronicles provide rich sources for stories concerning miracles, demons, fairies, ghosts and other worlds. Stories of the dead rising from their graves at night were told to torment the living and maintain a sense of terror and obedience. In order to allay these threats frightened parishioners asked their priests to perform exorcisms. The many tales of ghosts and the belief in them during the medieval period also served to emphasise the sanctity of the grave. By reinforcing the image of Purgatory and life after death the population could be controlled through fear.
The concept of Purgatory, a halfway stage after death between earth and Heaven, was an important development of the twelfth century. In Purgatory the soul could repent its sins through punishment and then after time it might be considered fit for Heaven. In order to shorten their stay in Purgatory, people could buy indulgences. This corrupt system came under attack, particularly by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century. In 2002, when archaeologists excavated some 10,500 graves in a large fourteenth-century cemetery in the former Hospital of St Mary Spital in Spitalfields, they found four bodies in their coffins clutching lead papal indulgences. These individuals would have bought the indulgences as a pardon for the sins committed during their life and would have been reassured that they had purchased their ticket to the perpetual delights of Heaven.
The doctrine of Purgatory led to a significant shift in thinking about death as well as the relationship between the living and the dead. Ideas of sin and salvation were constant preoccupations of many people and Christianity based so much of its teaching on preparing men and women for death and an understanding of what followed in the afterlife. The ubiquity of graveyards in London with their associated churches was a constant reminder of the presence of death.
In the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by death with disease, plague, famine and what now seems a short life-expectancy. This climate proved conducive for the belief in Purgatory and ghosts. Although there is an almost complete absence of ghosts in the Bible, one passage from Luke (16:30) carried particular potency: ‘But if someone from the dead visits them, they will repent’. The appeal to ghosts was reflected in twelfth-century London when oaths were taken on a deceased person’s tomb. It was believed that the ghost residing there would avenge any injury or betrayal of a last dying wish. There are accounts of medieval ghosts reappearing to haunt the living, particularly those who had committed an offence against the deceased or otherwise alienated them. If a criminal committed an offence without any witnesses, it was believed that ghostly visitations from the victim would force the guilty party to confess.
Such was the reverence for the dead that anyone seeking to disturb their graves did so with the risk that they too would be avenged or menaced. An example of this occurred after the disturbance of the tomb of Sybil Penn. Penn was a nurse to Prince Edward, later Edward VI, in 1538. Her widower ordered that her body be removed from its original burial place in 1564 and interred alongside his. She lay in a tomb in Hampton church until 1829 when the old church was pulled down and Penn’s tomb was moved to the new church. Sybil had now been disturbed twice. Stories circulated about strange noises and the sound of a woman working on a spinning wheel in the south-west wing of Hampton Court Palace. When the area was searched, a previously unknown chamber was found which contained, among various articles, a spinning wheel. Sightings of the ghost of Sybil Penn wearing a long, grey robe continued to be reported for many years. Hampton Court also has other ghosts including two of the wives of Henry VIII. Jane Seymour has been seen dressed in white holding a candle and the ghost of Catherine Howard re-enacts the moment of her arrest. This scene is accompanied by Catherine’s desperate screams in her attempt to break free of her guards.
Another example of spirits coming back to avenge their dying wishes was that of Rich
ard Cloudesley, a wealthy landowner and benefactor who had places in Islington named after him. When he died in 1517 he asked to be buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity in Islington, but it was rumoured that he was actually buried in a nearby field, although the reason for this is unclear. An account written in 1842, The Islington Ghost, Needless to say Beauclair die, claimed that there was a ‘wondrous commotion’ whereby the earth swelled and turned ‘up on every side.’ The story went on to add that Richard Cloudesley ‘lay buried in or near that place, and that his body being restless, on the score of some sin’, signified that his spirit should be laid to rest in the chosen place. After ‘certain exorcisers set to rest the unruly spirit, the earth did return to its pristine shape.’ Richard’s body was re-interred in the church in 1813.
Ghosts often returned as bearers of warnings or prophetic messages. The inscription on the grave of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in the Church of Holy Trinity, Stratford-Upon-Avon, offers such a warning:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebeare
To digg the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
The Reformation of the sixteenth century gave voice to religious reformers who rejected the existence of Purgatory, arguing that all people went to Heaven or Hell according to their past deeds. Protestants also rejected all manifestations of communion with the dead and, along with Purgatory, the belief in ghosts also came under attack. Reformers dismissed such beliefs as the elaborate frauds of popish priests. In 1564 the Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, claimed that the doctrine of Purgatory was ‘maintained principally by feigned apparatus, visions of spirits and other like fables.’ Similarly, the diarist Henry Machyn noted that when Bishop Jewel preached at the funeral for a member of the Skinners’ Company in 1560 he commented ‘that there was no purgatore.’
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