Victorian Mourning Rituals

Mourning rituals of the Victorian era included elaborate graves, expensive funerals, withdrawing from society, wearing black mourning clothes, and adorning oneself with memorabilia of the deceased. Elizabeth Wilson states the mourning ritual was not “conspicuous consumption” instead, it expressed “both the deep seriousness of the Victorian evangelical sensibility and the generalized hysteria of the culture”. In an era where the middle class population was large and increasingly affluent, with life expectancy rising, Wilson notes “the particular emphasis on mourning throughout the nineteenth century may have been because death at any age was no longer taken for granted”. Myrtle and Gilbert could afford children and death was not expected, instead they had hopes of a full life for their daughter. Myrtle embraced all the mourning rituals expected of her, hoping they would cure and lessen the pain she felt from the loss of her daughter and her husband. Unlike Myrtle, some were more skeptical of mourning rituals. Jalland describes how a Victorian doctor Keith Norman MacDonald wrote a pamphlet in 1875 on “Death and how to Divest it of its Terrors” in which he “rejected the wearing of mourning-dress as a “silly custom” which “adds to the embaressments’ of mourners”. Jalland also notes that Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens, “tended to ridicule extremes in mourning etiquette, enhancing the impression that widows were motivated more often by social emulation, convention and vanity than genuine sorrow”.