Beyond the Veil: The Victorian Obsession With Death and Mourning

The visual history of how we deal with death – the grief and mourning, the funerals, symbols and ceremonies – is fascinatingly rich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and travelling from Victorian England across to the US, Beyond the Veil is a visual tour through this curious world, charting the often peculiar and at times macabre ways of how the living memorialise the dead. Humans have always had ways of marking death, but in Victorian England death became a morbid obsession that went global – death was as much ‘celebrated’ as it was a source of fear and sadness. Queen Victoria herself became a figurehead of grief after the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861. Her ensuing fascination with death took many visual forms – from her ritualised embrace of black clothing to the building of ostentatious monuments – and massively influenced cultural norms in both the UK and further afield. The Victorians built complex cemeteries, collected precious memento mori, commissioned bizarre death portraits and obsessed over the correct mourning attire and funerary protocol, while turn-of-the century America saw reflections of many of these cultural phenomena. The bestsellers of the period were often about life and death (think Frankenstein and Dracula), while the art, architecture and style – with its often dark and heavy gothic overtones – revelled in the glamorisation of death. Beyond the Veil brings this extraordinarily elaborate and stylised visual culture together while expertly explaining and elaborating on its most peculiar and fascinating aspects.

Table of Contents:
Introduction  I .THRONES & BONES The Grief that Governs  I I . In the SHADOW of the SCYTHE Life and Death in the Victorian Era  I I I . MOURNING COUTURE Dying’s Influence over Fashion I V. BRUSHES with MORTALITY Victorian Art in the Shadow of Death  V. CITY of the DEAD Family Plots to the Necropolis  VI . CROSSING OVER Communicating with the Great Beyond  VII. The DARK ARTS A Dance with Death in Literature and Culture  V I I I . A MEMENTO MORI Keepsakes of the Dead  IX. The HOUSE OF SHADOWS From Home to Funeral Home  X. SHOOTING the DEAD A Final Focus  XI . TOIL and TRAGEDY Working Yourself to Death  X I I. TWIN SHADOWS The Butcher and the Bunco Artist  X I I I . The QUEEN’S LAST BREATH A Monarch’s Farewell  Endnotes  Picture Credits  Index  Acknowledgements About the Author

About the Author :
US-based Paul Gambino has been an avid collector of the bizarre for over 20 years with an extensive collection of Victorian memorial photographs, antique funeria, mug shots, and vintage religious items (including a life-sized St. Sebastian and Virgin Mary salvaged from a 19th-century church in Pennsylvania).