Drowned maidens: Victorian depictions of female suicide

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anatomist, Elizabeth Siddall, Fallen women, found drowned, gender roles, John Waterhouse, Ludovico Brunetti, nineteenth century, Ophelia, Padua, Paris, Sir John Everett Millais, suicide, The Bridge of Sighs, The punished suicide, Thomas Hood, Victorian

Trigger warnings: this post references some recent cases of suicide that some readers may find distressing.

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“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”  Edgar Allan Poe

Ruslana Korshunova’s suicide reported on Fox News 2008.

In 2008, Fox News aired a crime scene video showing a twenty-year-old Model, Ruslana Korshunova, lying dead on the street, after apparently committing suicide by throwing herself from the 9th floor of her New York apartment block. Blood could still be seen oozing from her nose. The image was both shocking and intrusive. But, intrusive media coverage of death and disaster has become an accepted part of our appetite for sensation – a malady we like to think of as particularly modern. However, comments from the reporter, and subsequent comments on social media, which focused on the unworldly beauty of the woman’s corpse, revealed attitudes toward female suicide that find their origin in a much earlier nineteenth-century aesthetic. One that both romanticized female suicide for a male gaze, whilst also serving as a warning to women daring to step outside their proscribed gender roles.

Death becomes her

In the eighteenth-century, male suicide was fairly commonly depicted in art and literature, with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, perhaps the most famous example. The novel created something of a moral panic and ‘Werther Fever’ and the ‘Werther Effect’ were linked to several copy-cat suicides of young men overcome by unrequited love or their own heightened sensibilities [1].

The Werther Effect. Public domain (?)

During the nineteenth century, the depiction of suicide underwent something of a gendered transformation which saw a proliferation in images of female suicide and far fewer images of male suicide [2]. This belied the reality, that in fact, in the nineteenth century, men were (and still are) much more likely to successfully commit suicide than women [3].  Before looking at why this change took place, let’s look at some examples of nineteenth-century images of female suicides.

Firstly, anyone who ever had a Pre-Raphaelite phase at college will be familiar with the poster-girl of drowned maidens, Ophelia.  Painted in 1851 by John Everett Millais, this is considered to be artistic ground zero for the huge proliferation of depictions of drowned females in the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain.

Ophelia, 1851, by John Everett Millais. Google Art Project.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is pulled this way and that by the men in her life. Used by her father and brother in their court intrigues because of her implied liaison with Hamlet, she is then cast off by Hamlet and ultimately drowns through her own actions.  Maybe she was an innocent victim, maybe a fallen woman. Maybe it was an accident, maybe suicide.

Millais’s iconic image presents her watery death in a very eroticized way.  Her lips are half-open, singing as she drowned, perhaps, or expelling her dying breath; or just maybe her parted lips are meant to evoke something far more sexual. It is for the viewer to decide. There is a voyeuristic element to the picture, it is even framed in a proscenium-style arch, giving it a theatrical air – even though the actual death of Ophelia was not usually depicted on stage. [4]

L’inconnue_de_la_Seine. Image via Wikimedia.

The Second image will be familiar to anyone who has done CPR Training.  L’Inconnue de la Seine is said to be the death mask of an unknown woman found drowned in the Seine in the 1880s (although this has been debated).  She was judged to be a suicide. Her corpse was displayed in the Paris Morgue, as was the custom.  One of the morticians was supposed to have been so taken with her beauty, that he cast her death mask.

The image caused a sensation, Richard le Gallienne called her a modern Ophelia while Albert Camus described her ‘Mona Lisa Smile’.  Her mask became a popular, if morbid, fixture in many private homes.  Her image was romanticized and eroticized.  It became a ‘look’ to be emulated by the popular actresses of the day [5].

In 1955 Asmund Laerdal made her even more famous by using her image to create Resusci Anne, giving the unknown woman of the Seine the dubious distinction of having ‘the most kissed lips in history’.  That’s not creepy in the slightest!

The third image, Found Drowned, by George Frederic Watts, c. 1850, presents the scene following a woman’s apparent suicide by drowning. The title reveals something important about how female suicide was recorded, often there were no witnesses to drowning, so while the assumption might be that it was a suicide, societal taboos around female suicide often led to such deaths being hidden under the ambiguous label of ‘found drowned’. [6].

Found Drowned by George Frederick Watts 1850. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

The picture, which was inspired by the influential poem The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood, assumes that the viewer understands the implicit backstory of this image.  The drowned woman is a fallen woman.  Seduced, abandoned and pregnant.  Rather than descend into shame, poverty, and prostitution, the only route left open to her by society, she has chosen to take her life and thereby redeem herself.

Despite the more sympathetic message of the image, the depiction of the woman is still sensual. The woman’s face appears luminous and her limbs flung wide, displaying the victim’s figure to the viewer.

Hood wrote the poem in 1844 and it helped to raise society’s awareness of the plight of the ‘fallen’ woman – who found the only option left to her was suicide.  In one famous passage, he describes how her sin has been washed away by her death:

Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful:
Past all dishonour,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

However, its idea of a fallen-women gaining redemption through drowning, while generating public sympathy, may have also led to an unfortunate increase in life imitating art, as women saw their only option for social redemption, suicide, reinforced [7].

The Punished Suicide. 1863. Photograph by Carlo Vannini and from Ivan Cenzi’s book His Anatomical Majesty

Finally, a lesser-known image of female suicide, this time from Italy.   Ivan Cenzi has brought the story of how this extraordinary image was created to an English speaking audience [8][9]. The subject of this human taxidermy project was an unknown 18-year-old seamstress who drowned herself in the river at Padua, sometime in 1863.  It was pronounced that she had killed herself over an ‘amorous delusion’.

The nearby University of Padova had a long history of anatomical study, and the girl’s body was handed over to the chair of Anatomy himself, Ludovico Brunetti (1813-1899).

Brunetti had a very unusual plan – this was to be no simple anatomical dissection. He intended to create Great Art out of this girl’s pain. He proceeded to take a cast of the girl’s face and bust, then he skinned her, taking care to keep her hair pristine.  He then treated the skin with sulfuric ether and his own special tanning formula, in order to preserve her image for eternity.  The resulting bust is truly startling.

Unfortunately, as the girl had been dragged out of the river using hooks, her face had sustained some damage. However, Brunetti used these flaws to his advantage, seeing them as a way to convey a moral message, as well as display his skill at preservation.  What emerged from his creative processes was a shocking image known as ‘The Punished Suicide‘.  To ram the moral home, that suicide was a mortal sin and suicides would be forever tormented in Hell,  he enveloped her face in writhing snakes and used red candle wax to imitate blood gushing from her wounds.

Somewhat perversely, to modern sensibilities at least, her parents loved it. Brunetti and his Punished Suicide, later wowed the audiences at the Universal Exposition in Paris where he won the Grand Prix in the Arts and Professions category, which in itself says a lot about public attitudes to images of female suicide and public entertainment. This image is still on display in Padova University, and, to modern eyes at least, evokes a strong reaction. Personally, I find the use and display of human remains as art, without the informed consent of the subject, to be highly problematic.  However, nineteenth-century attitudes were clearly very different.

These are only a few of the many such images in nineteenth-century art, literature, and sculpture.  But why were they so popular and what was their purpose?

Women behaving badly

During the nineteenth century, Western Societies underwent a huge demographic shift as the Industrial Revolution lead to mass migrations from the countryside to towns and cities.  From living in traditional rural communities, where everyone knew one and other, many people now found themselves amongst strangers.  Factory work saw more women working outside the home and competing with men.  Poverty and overcrowded housing brought disease and disorderly behavior, drunkenness was a common outlet for the lower classes.  Add to this the blatant social inequality of Victorian society, where the poor (and particularly the female poor) were routinely exploited by those higher up the social ladder, and you and you can begin to see the cracks undermining the edifice of respectable Victorian society.

Overcrowding in Victorian London. Gustave Dore. 1872. British Library.

The Victorian establishment did not only fear the working class becoming politicized or organized via trade unions, they feared the traditional gender roles of society were being challenged.  Women were supposed to be the ‘Angel in the house’ described in Coventry Patmore’s poem, a sweet and passive homemaker for her husband and family.  However the economic reality for many women was very different, and when a woman transgressed society’s norms, particularly if she was considered a ‘fallen’ woman, she could suffer terrible consequences.

The Outcast. Richard Redgrave. 1851. Public domain via Wikimedia.

Influential sociologists writing about suicide, such as Henry Morselli, writing in 1881, and Emile Durkheim, writing in 1897, both linked urbanization and the breakdown of traditional gender roles as a factor in female suicide. While the stats they relied upon showed that male suicide was more common than female suicide, both promoted the view that women were weaker morally and were safer when protected from the struggles of society [10].

In doing so, they used the stats to reinforced traditional Victorian gender roles by concluding that married people and married people with children were less susceptible to suicide, whereas the unmarried, divorced, widowed or childless were more at risk.  In short, women should stay at home and look after their husbands and family – or risk the consequences. Of course, as Deacon has pointed out, the stats don’t tell the whole picture [11].

There was an underlying hint that perhaps suicide was one way to rid society of unwanted, ungovernable and surplus women.

Idealized family life – the woman is focused on the private home sphere.

Another popular Victorian preconception was that men tended to commit suicide for more important reasons.  Male suicide was viewed as linked to the social and economic well-being of the country, while women were seen as committing suicide for personal and emotional reasons, which were considered less important to society. This had the effect of trivializing female narratives and the reasons for female suicide, often downgrading them by centering them on women’s (failed) relationships with men [12].

As the century progressed, attitudes to suicide also changed, from being considered a sin and a shameful crime, people began to link mental illness to suicide. While this was a good thing, as it led to more understanding of the underlying causes of suicide, it also played into the idea of women as weak, emotional creatures who needed to be protected from themselves or risk the consequences. From Ophelia to the Italian seamstress suffering from ‘Amorous delusions’, women’s suicide was linked to madness and instability in the nineteenth-century mind, further devaluing it by refusing to see it as a final, if desperate, act of autonomy.

From sexual sirens to found drowned

The Mermaid by John Waterhouse, 1900. Via Wikimedia.

The Victorians had a particular fondness for depicting women in water, no doubt because of the long-standing associations between femininity and water.  Women were seen as fickle and changeable as the sea, with sexual undercurrents and life-cycles made up of water, blood, and milk [13]. While sexual sirens might be depicted as mermaids or aquatic nymphs, leading men to drown in their transgressive embrace, the fallen woman was often depicted floating serenely, a beatific expression on her face, lovely to behold. Not remotely like a real drowning victim -bloated and muddy.

It has been suggested that this elevated the fallen woman’s suicide to a kind of redemption and washing away of sins – as implied in Hood’s poem. While this sounds romantic and sympathetic, it also created the pernicious cycle of life imitating art, real fallen women, cast out by society and facing a future of shame and prostitution, saw suicide as a way to redeem themselves and avoid becoming a burden on society because it was tacitly reinforced in popular culture.

Conclusion

To sum up, the Victorians fetishized the image of female suicide.  While male suicide was often seen as a final, possibly heroic, act of autonomy, for women, it was quite different.

Artistic images of female suicide had multiple purposes and meanings.  One of the most obvious was to commodify and pacify the female body by creating an ideal,  female beauty for the (male) viewer to appreciate.  The threatening unruly female, stripped of all power and autonomy after death, but still possessed of erotic and romantic fascination.

In addition this, in a society undergoing radical change, images of female suicide, bound up as they were with ideas of shame, madness, and sexual transgression were often used as a warning to women to keep to their proscribed roles and not try to compete with men in the public sphere.

In the 20th Century, widespread publication of Robert Wiles photograph of Evelyn McHale’s suicide made her death both public and iconic -which went against her expressed wishes for privacy.  More recently,  the 21st Century case of Ruslana Korshunova, where the reporter talked of Ruslana’s life and death, as a fairy-tale-gone-wrong, show that in some ways,  attitudes to representations of female suicide have not changed much since the nineteenth century.

However, more nuanced readings of these images are possible, readings that provide a deeper understanding of attitudes society held towards women and the public consumption of their bodies, both then and now.

While male suicides still predominate today, as in the Victorian age,  the recent tragic suicide of Love Island’s Caroline Flack, in the face of much negative media attention, has made it more important than ever to consider the unrealistic expectations that our society and the media still place on women.

Sources and notes

**Firstly, if you are having a hard time and need to talk to someone, you can contact Samaritans: https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Cenzi, Ivan, The Punished Suicide, 24 Oct 2016, <https://deadmaidens.com/2016/10/24/the-punished-suicide/> [8] [9

Deacon, Deborah, Fallen Women: The Popular Image of Female Suicide in Victorian England, c1837-1901, 7 April 2015, <https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/history/assets/docs/Honours%20Thesis%20-%20Deborah%20Deacon%202015%20.pdf> [2][4][6][7][11]-[13]

Durkheim, Emile, 1952, (originally published 1897) Suicide a Study in Sociology [3][10]

Meeson, Valerie, Res.Ma HLCS, Post-Mortems: Representations of Female Suicide by Drowning in Victorian Culture, [date unknown], <https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/123456789/3754/Meessen%2c_V.P.H._1.pdf?sequence=1> [4]

Mulhall, Brenna, The Romanticization of the the Dead Female Body in Victorian and Contemporary Culture, 2017, Aisthesis Vol 8 [5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact [1]

Enon Chapel – Dancing on the dead in Victorian London

Tags

body bugs, burial, Burial Act, Burial reform, Cemeteries, churchyard, crypts, dancing on the dead, Enon Chapel, George Graveyard Walker, London, Mr Howse, open sewer, pyramid of bones, vaults, Victorian

Slums, sewers, corpses, a corrupt clergyman, a pyramid of bones, and …dancing on the dead. Sometimes the Victorian’s failed, quite spectacularly, to live up to their prim and proper reputation.

Bunhill Fields burial Ground, London.

London’s burial grounds: a mass of putrefaction

London in the mid nineteenth century had a problem: a burgeoning industrial and commercial centre with a population pushing at 2.5 million living souls, it also had an ever growing population of the dead. Inner city burial had been carried out in London for centuries -it has been observed that London, even today, is one huge grave, if you only know where to look. But by the mid nineteenth century fears of disease spread by the miasma from inner city graveyards and a fashion for wealthier people to be buried in suburban cemeteries, meant that London’s remaining inner city burial grounds were often terribly overcrowded and unsanitary. One such place, the ‘Green Ground’ on Portugal Street, a burial ground for the nearby workhouse, was described by George Walker as:

‘[A] mass of putrefaction’ and ‘The soil of this ground is saturated, absolutely saturated, with human putrescence,’ the author noting that ‘The living here breathe on all sides an atmosphere impregnated by the odour of the dead.’ [1]

It was not uncommon for gravediggers to chop into or even discard earlier burials in order to cram new ones into overcrowded graveyards:

‘What a horrid place is St Giles Churchyard! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed, and bodies are removed to the “bonehouse” before they are sufficiently decayed to make removal decent’

So reported the Weekly Despatch in September 1838.

No wonder that women rarely attended burials. Yet these places were often the only resort open to the poor. One scandalous case that provided a catalyst for a change was the infamous Enon Chapel….

Dudley Street Slums, London, 1872. Image source Public domain [?]

Enon Chapel – undercutting the competition

Close to the Strand, on the west side of St Clement’s lane, an insalubrious neighbourhood was to be found. Accessed via a narrow court, Carey Street offered slum housing and overcrowding to the poorest of the poor. It was here in 1822, that an enterprising and cynical Baptist minister, Mr W Howse, founded his ministry: saving souls and selling burials. Enon Chapel itself, fitted into this down at heel locale, sited, as it was, above an open sewer which ran though its vault.

Image by Hogarth. Public domain [?]

As many scholars have noted, prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, fear of the resurrection men was strong. Burke and Hare had yet to set up their fearsome murder trade north of the Border, but before them were others, stealing fresh corpses from graveyards for the anatomists table. This popular fear may have been one of the factors in Mr Howse’s calculations in setting up his burial business at Enon. It had a vault. At barely 59 feet by 12 feet it wasn’t a large vault, but Mr Howse was an enterprising individual and knew how to spin a profit from almost nothing. In 1823 Enon was licensed for burials.

Burials in the vault at Enon Chapel were a mere 15 shillings. This compared very favourably to the competitors – close by at St Clement Danes it cost £1.17s2d for an adult burial, and £1.10.2d to bury a child – and that only covered a churchyard burial.[2] At a time when poor families would often have to warehouse their dead in their homes until they had saved enough for burial, Enon Chapel had a clear advantage over the competition: offering both secure and, more importantly, affordable burials.

Things went well for Mr Howse for a number of years, if people marvelled at how capacious the tiny vault was, nobody asked any awkward questions. Even when worshippers retched into their hankerchieves or fell unconscious at the noxious stink that was rife in the chapel, especially in warm weather, they said nothing. It may have been harder to ignore the long black flies that emerged from the decaying coffins, or the ‘body bugs’ that would infest worshippers hair and clothes, and neighbours of the chapel noted that meat, if left out, would putrefy within an hour or two. By the 1830’s rumours were beginning to circulate, but still nobody suspected the true scale of the horror beneath their feet.

A Modern Golgotha uncovered

In 1839, following some concerns with goings on at Enon, the Commissioner of Sewers inspected the open sewer under the Chapel with the view that it should be covered or vaulted. However, their investigations took a grusome turn when they discovered human remains, some of them mutilated, discarded in the sewer – whether by design or accident, it was not clear. Oddly enough, despite the sheer horror of this discovery, the remains were not removed and burials did not stop. Mr Howse continued his profitable venture burying up to 500 people a year in the vault until his death in 1842. In total around12,000 people were buried in a vault measuring only 59 feet by 12.

In part, he appears to have managed to cram so many corpses into so limited a space because he discarded the coffins (he and his wife used them for firewood).  This would no doubt have increased the stench exponentially – Julian Litten, in his book The English Way of Death, notes that intramural vault burials usually required a triple encasing for the corpse, in both wood and soldered lead, so as to ensure that the coffin was water-tight and air-tight [3].  Discarding the outer shell of the coffin, Howse disposed of the occupants in deep pits filled with quicklime to help the bodies decompose.

It was also said that extensive building work, such as at Waterloo Bridge, allowed Howse to secretly remove upwards of sixty cart loads of decomposed human remains for use as landfill and bone-meal in the building trade; other remains were unceremoniously dumped in the Thames. It said that it was not uncommon to find a disembodied skull rolling down the streets around Enon Chapel.[4]

Dancing on the dead

Contemporary image of Enon Chapel’s notorious ‘Dancing on the Dead’. Image Source: Wellcome Images.

When Howse died in 1842, burials ceased and Enon Chapel was closed. The new tenant, Mr Fitzpatrick, took up residence in 1844. Despite making the surprising discovery of a large quantity of human bones buried under his kitchen floor, he was not put off, and simply reburied them in the chapel. Later tenants, a sect of Teetotallers, went one better. In the true spirit of Victorian enterprise, combined with a large and profitable dash of Victorian ghoulishness, they reopened Enon Chapel for dances using the great marketing tagline of  ‘Dancing on the dead’:

‘Enon Chapel – Dancing on the Dead – Admission Threepence. No lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings’

Who says teetotallers don’t know how to have fun!

The Poor Man’s Guardian, somewhat disdainfully, reported on these events in 1847:

‘Quadrilles, waltzes, country-dances, gallopades, reels are danced over the masses of mortality in the cellar beneath”

The dances seem to have been very popular, proving that even the Victorian poor, many of whom may have known people interred beneath them, had a dark sense of humour. That, or a pragmatic view of their own mortality and the fleeting nature of pleasure.

George ‘Graveyard’ Walker

George ‘Graveyard’ Walker. Image source: Wellcome Institute.

Not everyone appreciated this grim humour.  George ‘Graveyard’ Walker, a surgeon whose practice was in the vicinity of Enon Chapel, and who had a side-line as a public health campaigner, was Not Amused. And with good reason, he had had the misfortune to have viewed Enon Chapel vault in all its gory glory, first hand. In his book, Gatherings from grave yards, a survey of 47 London burial grounds,  published in 1839, Walker described it thus:

‘This building is situated about midway on the western side of Clement’s Lane; it is surrounded on all sides by houses, crowded by inhabitants, principally of the poorer class. The upper part of this building was opened for the purposes of public worship about 1823; it is separated from the lower part by a boarded floor: this is used as a burying place, and is crowded at one end, even to the top of the ceiling, with dead. It is entered from the inside of the chapel by a trap door; the rafters supporting the floor are not even covered with the usual defence – lath and plaster. Vast numbers of bodies have been placed here in pits, dug for the purpose, the uppermost of which were covered only by a few inches of earth….Soon after interments were made, a peculiarly long narrow black fly was observed to crawl out of many of the coffins; this insect, a product of the putrefaction of the bodies, was observed on the following season to be succeeded by another, which had the appearance of a common bug with wings. The children attending the Sunday School, held in this chapel, in which these insects were to be seen crawling and flying, in vast numbers, during the summer months, called them “body bugs”..’ [5]

As well as a genuine disgust at the way material gain had trumped over moral and religious scruples at Enon Chapel, Walker, and many others at that time, considered the proximity of these putrefying burial grounds to human habitation to be injurious to public health.  It was believed that, similar to sewage, badly overcrowded burial grounds were giving off a deadly graveyard miasma. Walker, himself, had a flair for the dramatic, describing the miasma as ‘the pestiferous exhalations of the dead’.

This miasma was believed to cause diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Gravediggers and those living close by cemeteries were at particular risk, but the threat was to the population as a whole.

Victorian Image showing a slum court, with the living and the dead side by side.

The public scandal of Enon Chapel and its ilk, along with the tireless campaigning of philanthropists such as George Walker and reformer Edwin Chadwick, led to a Parliamentary Select Committee being set up in 1842. The committee was tasked to look at improving London’s overcrowded and unsanitary burial places. The law took it’s time, but pressure from Walker and The National Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns eventually forced the government into action. The Burial Act of 1852 would seal the fate of London’s overcrowded inner city burial places, allowing the government to close them down. It also and allowed the creation of suburban garden cemeteries such as Highgate and Brookwood. Cemeteries that were designed as much to be enjoyed by visitors, as to bury the dead.

Roll up, Roll up – for the gravest show on earth!

There was to be one last macabre act in the tale of Enon Chapel. In 1848 Walker purchased the Chapel with the promise that he would give the inhabitants of the vault a decent burial, at his own expense, at Norwood Cemetery. This philanthropic gesture however, was somewhat marred by Walkers morbid sense of theatre. Rather than discretely disinterring the bodies and having them respectfully removed to their final resting place, he chose to open the event to the public. To drum up interest he had attendants strolling up and down the street holding skulls, a sure fire way to entice in the average Victorian death lover. And the public came in their droves – upwards of 6000 came to tour Enon Chapel and to view the immense pyramid of bones unearthed by Walker.

A Pyramid of Bones. Image source: John Sullivan public domain.

Despite criticism, Walker defended his approach in a typically Victorian way, he emphasised that the spectacle was educational (the same argument used by Madame Tussaud to elevate her Chamber of Horrors to a moral level) and he wasn’t precisely selling tickets – but he did accept contributions from visitors. Less educational and more sensational was the highlight of the Enon tour. Visitors came face to shrivelled face, with the long-dead proprietor Mr Howse. ‘A stark and stiff and shrivelled corpse’ identified by his ‘screw foot’ [6]

A case of poetic justice, the greedy speculator responsible for the desecration of so many of the deceased, found his own final resting place disturbed in the most unseemly way.

Footnote – it’s all in a name

It is interesting to note, as Catherine Arnold does in her fascinating book Necropolis, London and its dead, which I would highly recommend, that if you look beyond the traditional explanation for the name Enon (the place near Salim where John the Baptist baptized converts), a far darker etymology emerges. Arnold points to Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary which provides one possible meaning for Enon as ‘Mass of darkness’ – how very, very apt.

Enon Chapel is long since gone, the London School of Economics sits on its site now and the bones of the dead lie in an unmarked communal grave at Norwood.

If you want to find out more about London’s hidden dead, see the excellent and funny You Tube video by Caitlin Doughty and Dr Lindsay Fitzharris at the end of the sources section)

Sources and notes

Images by Lenora unless otherwise credited.

Arnold, Catharine, Necropolis: London and its dead, 2007 [1] [2] [4]

Cochrane, Alex

http://www.unofficialbritain.com/enon-chapel-death-horror-and-dancing-in-victorian-london/

Fitzharris, Dr Lindsay

https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2014/06/17/public-health-victorian-cemetery-reform/

Gibbon, Andrea,

https://writingcities.com/2015/04/08/the-deathly-surprise-on-portugal-street/ 

Jackson, Lee

http://blog.yalebooks.com/2014/10/31/dirty-old-london-graveyards/ [6]

Jackson, Lee

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-grisly-secrets-victorian-london-dead

Litten, Julian, ‘The English Way of Death, the Common Funeral since 1450’,1992 [3]

Valentine, Carla,

http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-londons-victorian-golgotha

Walker, George Alfred, Gatherings from Grave Yards, Particularly Those of London: with a Concise History of the Modes of Interment Among Different Nations, from the Earliest Periods. And a Detail of Dangerous and Fatal Results Produced by the Unwise and Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living,     1839 [5]

Find out where the secret burials of London are with Caitlin Doughty and Dr Lindsay Fitzharris:

 

Memento Mori…Victorian post-mortem photography

Tags

ambrotype, carte de visite, daguerrotype, death, death photos, early photography, fakes, funerals, mourning, post mortem photography, rituals, the good death, the myth of the standing corpse, tintype, Victorian

~A note to the faint-hearted: this post contains photographs of dead people ~

The Victorian celebration of death

It has been noted by many other writers, that today when a loved one passes over, we celebrate their life, often avoiding or glossing over the distressing fact that they have died… almost as if it would be rude to mention it.  Not so our Victorian ancestors, they positively revelled in rituals that celebrated death.  This was unsurprising as it was all around them – poverty, incurable diseases and insanitary housing meant that had you lived in early Victorian England (the 1830 and 40’s) you would have been lucky to make it to your late thirties; while a fifth of children born at that time would not reach the age of five.[1]

Highgate Cemetery

Yet despite these grim statistics, the Victorian fondness for funerals and funeral rituals grew out of more than just a pragmatic realisation that they would undoubtedly be attending an awful a lot of them.  It was far more than that, the spiritual and religious beliefs of Victorians lead them to the view that death was something to prepare for, and that the dead should be remembered, not just in their living but in the manner of their passing.  To have a ‘good death’ was important, to settle ones affairs not only materially, but spiritually as well, in preparation for the transition into the next phase of the souls existence.  One aspect of this tradition which can seem macabre and slightly voyeuristic to the modern eye, is that of post-mortem photography. But creating images of the dead was not invented in the nineteenth century.

How the dead were remembered: from oil paintings to Carte de visite

Lady Venetia Digby on her death-bed, by Van Dyke.

Preserving the memory of the dead has a long history (and pre-history). From the monumental (think pyramids, mausoleums and tombs) to the personal and portable (such as jewelry and images).  While we might find it odd to want an image of a loved one in death, in the past it was not unheard of. In the seventeenth century, when the beautiful Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby, died unexpectedly in her sleep, her distraught husband had her final portrait painted, post-mortem, by non other that Sir Anthony Van Dyke. But such extravagant memento mori (translated as ‘remember that you have to die’) were the preserve of the wealthy upper classes…until, that is, the advent of photography.

Capturing the soul

Post Mortem photography was popular in the UK, USA and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, its popularity peaking in the 1860’s and 70’s. Its rise began in the 1840’s with the birth of photography.

Louis Daguerre, one of the fathers of photography, developed his eponymous Daguerreotype in 1839.  Daguerreotype images were produced on treated silver-plated copper sheets, protected by glass.  The images are strange to look at and change from positive to negative, depending on the angle.  The process was expensive and time-consuming – it could take up to 15 minutes to develop an exposure, and the images created were fragile (often having to be protected in cases or frames).[2][3] Nevertheless it wasn’t long before they were being used to capture the likenesses of the deceased.

Post Mortem Daguerreotype. 1862. Source Astronomy Pictures.

In 1850 the cheaper Ambrotype method superseded the Daguerreotype.  This process created a positive image on glass.  As with the daguerreotype, the finished product was fragile and each image was unique and could only be reproduced by the camera.[4]

Victorian Post Mortem Ambrotype displayed in a case. Source unknown.

The 1860’s and 1870’s brought the tintype photograph to prominence, which as the name suggested was created on a thin sheet of metal.  This method easy to produce and was popular with itinerant photographers on the move.  So the photographer was able to extend beyond the studio setting to other arenas…such the open battlefield, or the private deathbed.[5]

Tintype post-mortem photograph. Source unknown.

The biggest revolution in democratizing photography was the Carte de Visite method, patented by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1854.  His method produced small images made up of albumen prints on card.  The truly revolutionary aspect of this method was that he developed a way of producing up to eight negatives on one plate, thereby driving down costs.[5] This meant that images could more easily be shared amongst family and friends.  With post-mortem images, it allowed family members who were not able to be present at the deathbed or funeral, to have a final image of their loved one.

Carte de visite post-mortem image. Paul Frecker collection.

Post Mortem Photography and The Good Death

In the early and mid-Victorian period, evangelical Christianity had a strong influence on attitudes towards death and dying.  Professor Sir Richard Evans noted in his lecture The Victorians: Life and Death, that the emphasis was on a ‘good death’ – ideally a peaceful and gentle transition in to the afterlife, witnessed by family and friends; where a deathbed struggle with fever or delusion occurred, it could be seen as a metaphor for the Christian struggle for redemption.  Post mortem photography represents part of this tradition, offering a memento mori – an object of reflection to the yet living – as well as, more prosaically, providing symbol of social status because not everyone could afford them.

That is not to say that all Victorians were comfortable with the idea of snapping images the dearly departed – far from it.  As Catharine Arnold notes in Necropolis, photographic images such ‘Fading Away’, created by Henry Peach Robinson in 1858, which used actors to depict the death of a beautiful young girl, were not universally praised.[6] Unlike the tasteful and idealised deathbed scenes depicted in oils, the disturbing intimacy and realism created by the medium of photography seemed to intrude on the very personal and private realm of grief.

‘Fading Away’ by Henry Peach Robinson, 1858. The Royal Photographic Society at the National Media Museum, Bradford.

In the case of ‘Fading Away’, the image was saved from censure when Prince Albert bought a copy, thereby ensuring its popular appeal. It’s a good thing he liked images of deathbeds, because Queen Victoria commissioned both a painting and a photograph of him on his own deathbed, in 1861.  These images are available to view in the Royal Collection (See links at the end of this article).

Styles of post-mortem photography ranged throughout the nineteenth century and varied from the UK and Europe to the USA.  Broadly speaking the earlier images focused on head shots and close ups, with the subject apparently ‘asleep’, later more ‘naturalist’ poses were adopted -where the subject was posed as if in life, and later still the funeral group – with the family gathered round for one last photo with the dearly departed in their coffin – became popular.  However the significant difference between these images and images such as ‘Fading Away’, is that post-mortem photography was intended to be viewed in the private sphere, whereas Peach Robinson’s staged image was clearly for public consumption.

Mirrors with Memories [7]

Deceased man in a naturalist pose c1860. Source Wikipedia.

So, why did the Victorians do it? Why have a stranger come into your home, while you are grieving, and interfere with your loved one, simply in order to take a photo?  Well, it seems that a number of factors collided to produce the right climate for it: evangelical Christianity, with its concept of the good death, technological developments, and the rise of the middle classes, along with a large dash of Victorian morbidity.

In some cases, these images may have been the only images taken of the individual, this is particularly possible with images of babies and young children. And, practically speaking, they were a way of sharing the death of a loved one with relatives unable to attend the actual deathbed.

Deceased child surrounded by flowers. Image Source Wikipedia.

However, as well as a personal remembrance of the individual, they were also used as a way to reflect upon death – demonstrating Victorian preoccupations with both piety and morbidity. The images allowed for a dialogue between the living and the dead – a reconciliation that the viewer too will die.  A Victorian viewing these images would have been able to ‘read’ them in a very different way than we do now -identifying the spiritual narrative, shared social values, the moral lessons in these images.

Jo Smoke, writing in Beyond the Dark Veil,[8]suggested that as well as a moral and spiritual purpose, Memento Mori can also be seen as expressing class goals by equating ‘taste and beauty as metaphors for status and style’ – after all these images were often displayed in beautiful and expensive frames or jeweled cases and not every one could afford them.

He concluded that post mortem photography successfully encompassed both the spiritual and the consumerist nature of Victorian society, stating that they ‘symbolised tangibility by stretching the inevitability of human decay into the future by investing memory into materials of great physicality’.[9]

Identifying Post Mortem Photography

Today, the internet is flooded with images purporting to be Victorian post mortem photographs. Sometimes a sort of ‘check-list’ is deployed to identify them and although one can probably assume that an individual depicted in a coffin, is almost certainly dead, other signs such as closed or painted eyes, blank expressions, visible standing frames, or strange posture aren’t necessarily proof-positive of a post mortem photograph.

The tradition of depicting the deceased as though living, often accompanied by living relatives and children, has created even more difficulty in differentiating between what may simply be an awkward and uncomfortable looking living individual and a posed corpse.

Deceased young girl with her parents. Source BBC.

In the above post mortem image, the dead girl is propped up by her parents, with her head on one side.  She appears notably sharper than her living parents who appear slightly blurred. Even when developments in photography led to reduced exposure times, it was still difficult to remain still during the process (unless of course, you were dead).  This was such a problem that the living were often supported with apparatus, such as a Brady Stand.  The use of these stands has led to what some call the ‘Myth of the standing corpse’ [10] – whereby any images of a slightly suspect individual, where a stand is visible, may be identified as post mortem (a particular problem on commercial selling sites).

This man has decidedly odd eyes and is supported by a Stand – but is he dead? Source: hchronicles blog.

This image has often been described as a post mortem photo, demonstrating the use of the stand – but the jury is out. Image source – unknown.

However there seems to be a strong argument against the possibility that the Brady stand, or any other stand (even combined with wires), could have ever actually support the dead-weight (pardon the pun) of a corpse, in anything approaching a natural manner. [11][12 – see the video at the foot of this post for more on this debate.]

The girl in the middle is said to be dead. Petrolia Archive Collection.

The image above, originally from the Petrolia Archive, appears on many sites online as a post mortem photograph. The young girl in the middle is supposed to be dead – her painted on eyes are cited as evidence for it. However, given the ease at which a photograph could be spoiled by a sudden twitch or blink during the long exposure time, it can be argued that this is not necessarily certain proof that the subject is dead. [13] And in fact, this could explain a lot of the blank, dead-eyed stares that gaze out from us from some of these photographs.

Other images are more obviously photo-shopped, such as this fabulously gruesome image of two sisters, which would stretch even the Victorians capacity for morbidity!

Image often cited as Victorian Post Mortem, but actually an art project from about 2009. [Artist unknown]

The original picture before manipulation [Source Unknown]

 Changing attitudes

It has been said that the advent of the Kodak box brownie, allowing families to document entire lives from birth to death, caused the Post Mortem Photograph to fall out of favour, [14] but there was more to its decline than technical innovation.  By the end of the Victorian period and beginning of the Edwardian, there was a fundamental shift in attitudes to death. For one, evangelical Christianity, with its particular interpretation of the ‘good death’, had waned. By the Edwardian period a ‘good death’ had transformed into one more familiar to us today – a death without suffering or one that took the subject unawares, such as in their sleep.  As such, conversations about death and dying became less acceptable than they had been in the early and mid-Victorian periods.  Catastrophic conflicts such as the First World War, also played their part in changing attitudes.  Such brutal conflicts took death away from the intimate family setting, and while death could be presented as a patriotic sacrifice to the state, it often occurred violently, or to far from home to allow for a photographic memento mori to be either desirable or practically possible.

In this modern world, where we have become desensitized to the graphic images of death reported in the media, we have shut death out, except in its most extreme and impersonal form.  In contrast, these quiet, contemplative and very personal images of the dead offer us the opportunity to open a dialogue with death, and to reflect on that great leveler.  And of course, they also provide an ever so  gentle reminder that we too will die.

Memento Mori.

Post Mortem Images on the net

Anne Longmore-Etheridge Collection:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/60861613@N00/albums/72157629160486891/with/23906381332/

Petrolia Heritage

http://www.petroliaheritage.com/people.html

Royal Collection:

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/2506826/prince-albert-on-his-deathbed-december-1861

The Burns Archive:

http://www.burnsarchive.com/Explore/Historical/Memorial/index.html

The Thanatos Archive:

http://thanatos.net/preview/

Sources and notes

Arnold, Catharine, ‘Necropolis: London and its dead’ 2007, Simon and Schuster [3] [6]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36389581

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/overview_victorians_01.shtml [1]

Evans, Professor Sir Richard, https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-victorians-life-and-death

http://metro.co.uk/2014/11/26/victorian-post-mortem-photographs-are-as-creepy-as-they-sound-4963836/ [this article contains some disputed post mortem photographs]

http://mourningportraits.blogspot.co.uk/p/hoaxes-scams-ebay-optimism.html [13]

Mord, Jack, ‘Beyond the Dark Veil’, 2013, Grand Central Press [7][8][9][14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrotype [4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_de_visite [5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintype [5]

https://dealer042.wixsite.com/post-mortem-photos The Myth of the stand alone corpse [10][11][12]

 

 

Whitby Goth Weekend April 2015

Tags

199, 2015, 21s Anniversary, Alternative, April, Goth, Jordan Reyne, Manuskript, Music Festival, St Marys Church, Steam punk, Steampunk, Steps, Victorian, WGW, Whitby, Whitby Abbey, Whitby Goth Weekend

Whitby Goth Weekend.

Anyone who has had a good poke around on this blog probably knows that I absolutely LOVE Whitby Goth Weekend.  Having missed a couple of events over the past year or so I was all set to head off to the home of Goth for the Halloween WGW last year when disaster struck.  Boggle Hole YHA inexplicably decided to cancel all of their bookings over that weekend at the last minute.   Of course by that time there was no accommodation left within a 20 mile radius of Whitby ….Grrrr didn’t they know I needed my Whitby fix?

Anyway, patience was finally rewarded, and this weekend I got to stay in Abbey House (my favorite YHA – right next to the Abbey ruins and St Mary’s graveyard) and wander about a variety of historic settings in Whitby dressed in full Victorian Goth regalia and enjoying some fantastic bands in the evenings.

This years events are special because Whitby Goth Weekend is celebrating its 21st anniversary.  Jo Hampshire probably never imagined how her alternative music festival would mushroom over the years.  These days the Music festival element can seem a little swamped by all of the weekend Goths, Victorian enthusiasts and the ever-growing steam punk invasion, but for those who still remember the original raison d’être for the weekend there were some fantastic bands on at the Spa Pavillion including Abney Park, Jordan Reyne, Manuskript, The Chameleons, Doctor and the Medics and The Damned (to name but a few).

Anyway, here are some of my photos of this weekends event…

First glimpse of the Whitby Abbey.

St Marys Churchyard and the 199 Steps

St Marys Church, Whitby

 

Heading down into the Whitby from St Mary’s

Down in Whitby town

A First Class Steam punk general

The proud owner of possibly the coolest wheelchair ever.

A group of intrepid steam punks outside the penny arcade.

Whitby Goth Weekend Saturday Night at the Pavillion

Saturday night at the Spa Pavillion – Jordan Reyne

 

Jordan Reyne

Manuskript

A Night Walk

The path through the churchyard that leads to the Abbey

 Photographs

All photographs by Lenora

Whitby Goth Weekend Music Festival

http://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/news.php

 

Boulton and Park: a tale of Victorian cross-dressing

Tags

Boulton and Park, cross dressing, Ernest Boulton, Fanny and Stella, Frederick Park, gay, homosexual, Neil McKenna, police corruption, prostitution, sub culture, transvestites, Victorian, victorian theatre, victorian trials

Picking up Boulton and Park

As some of you may know, I have been a little pressed for time this year what with one thing and another, so for a well-earned break I recently took myself off to my local bookshop and decided to see if anything took my fancy. Needless to say I did not come away empty-handed (although empty was probably a good way to describe my bank account afterwards). It was on this foray that purely by chance I picked up ‘Fanny and Stella’ by biographer Neil McKenna. Mainly, I have to admit, because the cover image had more than a passing resemblance to Emily and Florence of Little Britain fame.

‘Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England’ is a rippingly good read, by turns high camp, archly knowing, tragic, joyful, and utterly gripping from start to finish. McKenna has such a lively style of writing, getting into the mindset of all of his ‘characters’ often to great comic effect, yet not omitting the sometimes eye-watering details of their lives.  ‘Fanny and Stella’ reveals and revels in a vibrant Victorian sub-culture of cross-dressing ‘He-she ladies’, their amorous beaus and the ‘moral majority’ that was by turns horrified and fascinated by them.

Matt Lucas and David Walliams as unconvincing transvestites Emily Howard and Florence Rose from Little Britain

So, for your delectation, here is a brief jaunt through the lives of the glorious and irrepressible Fanny and Stella.

A Decidedly Theatrical Nature

Ernest Boulton was often mistaken for a woman in mens clothes.

From an early age both Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park exhibited a decidedly theatrical bent. Ernest was born in 1848 in Tottenham, son of a stockbroker, and grew into a beautiful boy, so beautiful that he was often mistaken for a girl. In fact he soon found that dressing up as a girl suited his style admirably. His doting mother considered it quaint and playful when he impersonated maids and even loaned him dresses, kept a photo album and joined in when his theatrical friends began calling him Stella. Little did she know that her blue-eyed boy was out on the ‘pad’ nightly, finding pleasure (and extra income) in the arms of rugged chaps from all classes of Society. Stunningly beautiful, Stella lived up to her name and became something of star of the cross dressing demi-monde. Willful, mercurial and petulant Stella was definitely high maintenance – nevertheless she eventually captured the heart of a peer of the realm, Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton and was able to restyle herself, Lady Clinton.

Fanny, standing, Lord Pelham Clinton, sitting and Stella kneeling.

The imperious Fanny Park

Frederick Park was born in the same year as Stella, son of a respectable Judge. Never a match for Stella’s extraordinary good looks, she made up for it with style and attitude. Fanny, as she became known, was imperious and haughty with something of the air of a duchess about her – and was fond of littering her speech with French phrases.

By the 1860’s Fanny and Stella had found in each other devoted sisters. Together they formed a theatrical duo. Stella would invariably play the beautiful ingénue, often bringing the audience to tears with her lovely singing voice, while Fanny would excel as the imperious, often comic, matron. Together they flirted, flounced and trolled their way around the West End of London with a band of equally flamboyant confederates such as The Comical Countess and Carlotta Gibbings.

Wild cross dressing balls were organised in particular, by Carlotta, who later turned out to be a very good friend to Fanny and Stella when things turned sour.  In fact one of London’s most famous male prostitutes of the day, Jack Saul, in his Sins of the City of the Plain (an early work of homosexual pornography) provides a vignette of Lord and Lady Clinton en amoureux at one such ball held at Haxell’s Hotel.

Fanny, right, and Stella, left, in theatrical mode.

A night at the opera

All might have carried on quite spiffingly for the flamboyant duo and their trail of lovers.  After all, London’s theatre land was full of eccentric, outre people out for a good time: the respectable classes rubbed shoulders (and other things) with ‘gay’ ladies (high-end female prostitutes), male prostitutes, men in drag and ladies dressed as gents. Unfortunately for Fanny and Stella, their very overt behaviour seems to have touched a nerve with Victorian Society (usually fairly good at living with double standards where sexuality was concerned).

As Neil McKenna so succinctly put it

“As sodomites, especially as effeminate sodomites, disguised as women, and prostituting themselves, Fanny and Stella and everything they stood for touched some of society’s deepest and darkest fears of dirt, degeneration, syphilis, excrement, poverty, violence and empheminisation.” [1]

On 28 April 1870, after a particularly drunken and lascivious appearance at the Strand Theatre, Fanny and Stella, accompanied by Hugh Mundell (one of their beau’s) were nicked by the police and hauled off to face charges.

 

Fanny and Stella arrested at the Strand Theatre

The arrest caused a sensation, equal parts horror and fascination.  The public was morally outraged and strangely titillated.  The unfortunate pair was dragged off to jail and subjected to a humiliating examination carried out without their consent, to ascertain if they had committed sodomy (which was at that time a crime).  The following day, at Bow Street Magistrate they were brought before the judge still in their female finery.  Huge crowds gathered outside the court and the newspapers eagerly reported on every salacious detail.

But Fanny and Stella were not hung out to dry.  Their good friend Carlotta Giddings moved quickly to try to protect them, she had shared lodgings with them and set to work removing evidence from their rooms, she also visited them in jail and brought mens clothing for them so they would appear less more conventional at their next appearance (much to the disappointment of the public who had come to gawp).

The Trial

After several terrible months in prison Fanny and Stella were released on bail and it was in May the following year that the trial was commenced.  They were charged alongside a number of others, some of whom had legged it well before the trial.  Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton, with whom Stella had lived as man and wife,  may be seen as a tragic fatality of the trial. He was said to have died of Scarlet Fever on the day he received his subpoena, but he may have committed suicide to escape the stigma of a trial for sodomy.  McKenna reports that at the time many people thought his death had been faked and he was in fact living abroad, one can only hope.

The Trial, Stella centre, Fanny, right.

Many witnesses were brought to trial to testify to the louche and raucous behaviour of Fanny and Stella, to demonstrate that these individuals habitually dressed as women and entertained men. The prosecution even pandered to the sensational element of the trial by bringing in Fanny and Stells’s extensive wardrobe of female dress (which oddly enough also included a false beard!)

Police raid Fanny and Stella’s wardrobe.

However, with a strong defending council in the form of Mr George Lewis, the prosecution was in the end ripped to shreds.  Not only that, but an alarming level of police corruption was revealed as well as  what could have amounted to an establishment sponsored conspiracy to make an example of Fanny and Stella as a threat to the morals of the nation (and as a warning to the others perhaps?)

One of the key pieces of evidence against the pair came from Dr Paul, with his specialism in identifying the signs of sodomy.  He had examined the behinds of the Boulton and Parks on the night of their arrest, and found unequivocal evidence of dastardly doings. For the trial further medical experts were brought in to back up these claims.  However, by the time the veritable coach party of eminent physicians got to poke and prod at the fundaments of the unfortunate duo, several months had passed thereby giving ample time for any physical evidence to become less obvious. This left the charge of sodomy very hard to prove.

Although sodomy was definitely illegal, simply dressing up as a woman and parading around the West End flirting with men was not actually a crime – however much the ‘moral majority’ might have wished it to be. After all, although Fanny and Stella dressed as women, they often made it very clear that they were in fact men so they could hardly be seen to by trying to trick unsuspecting men into committing the crime of sodomy against their will. Unlike Emily Howard’s constant refrain of ‘I’m a Lady’ in Little Britain, Stella actually wrote to one of her suitors, Hugh Mundell, explicitly stating that she was a man dressed as a woman (this did not put off this keen individual, he still fancied the pants of Stella, such was her charm).

This left the prosecution with the unenviable task of trying to make the nebulous charge of conspiracy to incite sodomy stick, as McKenna noted:

“Not to put too fine a point on it, the case against the four young men was all at sea…..Instead of being tried for the crimes they had committed, these four young men were on trial for crimes they had yet to commit, for crimes they might have thought about, or talked about, or imagined for a moment in their mind’s eye – or not, as the case may be.” [2]

As McKenna points out, this kind of unlimited thought policing was enough send a nervous shiver down the spine of a number of those present at the trial – ‘moral majority’ included.

The Verdict

With the prosecution in tatters, the tide turned in favour of Fanny and Stella (especially after a sterlingly sentimental performance by Stella’s devoted mother as a witness for the defence) and in the end the jury took only 53 minutes to acquit them of all charges.  They were free.

The Final Act

Despite their victory in the courts, both Fanny and Stella left England and headed, separately, to New York.  Continuing in the theatrical professions they found some measure of success but never achieved the stardom they had craved.

Sadly, both died young and probably as the result of syphilis. Fanny died at only 33 years of age, but she did find some kind of happiness across the pond. Stella carried on a trooper until long after her beauty had faded, and died in 1904 at the age of 56.

As part of the sometimes painfully slow road to toleration and acceptance of alternative lifestyles that many people in the west now take for granted (although a significant number still rail at), theirs is a tragi-comic operetta of a tale well worth recounting. Fanny and Stella chose to live their lives the way they (and a significant number of others at the time) wanted to, rather than acquiesce and live the narrow life prescribed for them by Society. They faced opprobrium and censure with great spirit and remained true to their own natures helping to pave the way for those that came after them and for that they should be applauded.  As Fanny in haughty duchess mode might have said – vive la difference!

Sisters: Fanny and Stella

Sources & Notes

McKenna, Neil, 2013, Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England, Faber & Faber Notes: 1 [280] 2 [289]
Wikipedia, Boulton and Park, accessed 29/12/14
A Gender Variance Who’s Who, http://zagria.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/ernest-boulton-1849-and-frederick.html, accessed 29/12/14
Off the Pedestal, http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/offthepedestal/otp10.html, accessed 29/12/14
Penny Dreadful account of Boulton and Park, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/deviance/sexuality/anonymous/18-8-1%20boulton%20park.htm, accessed 29/12/14

‘El Magnifico’ and the Hamilton Mausoleum

Tags

Alexander Handyside Ritchie, David Bryce, David Hamilton, Duke of Hamilton, Hamilton palace, Lanarkshire, Mausoleums, Scotland, The whispering wa's, Victorian

The finest private tomb in the country

Hamilton Mausoleum, image by G Laird via Wikimedia Commons

By the side of Muir Street in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire stands an unusual building.  Most visitors casually passing through Hamilton pay little attention to the Victorian domed structure which seems a little lonely, a little lost amidst a green park, flanked by an ice rink.  On closer examination what is revealed is an incredible structure, an extraordinary piece of architecture, which possesses a fascinating history linked to one of the most decadent and notorious Scottish aristocratic families, the Dukes of Hamilton.

Ceiling and oculus of the Mausoleum, image by Miss Jessel edited by Lenora

In 1842, the fabulously eccentric 10^th Duke of Hamilton, Alexander, decided that what he and his family deserved to reflect their glory and eminence was a mausoleum.  Not any mausoleum, Alexander wanted the grandest money could buy.  Drawing from his love of the classical world he commissioned the architect David Hamilton to design and build a Roman-styled domed structure of panelled masonry in the grounds of the now demolished Hamilton Palace.  At some point along the way the building project was taken over by the architect David Bryce and the Scottish sculptor, Alexander Handyside Ritchie. In 1858, sixteen years after the work had started, the building was finally completed. Unfortunately this was too late for the duke who had died five years previous. So sadly the proud duke never lived to see his dream fulfilled.

The building stands at a height of 37 metres with massive bronze doors modelled on those of the Florence Baptistry. The floor itself is incredibly beautiful. Produced by the Edinburgh firm of Wallace and Whyte, it is made up of 10000 pieces of marble taken from 42 Italian quarries and arranged in a Winding Stair Pattern. The floor is believed to incorporate elements of masonic symbolism in its design. Despite being an airy building the architects cleverly installed under floor heating so that mourners would not suffer during the long Scottish winters. In order not to spoil the mausoleum’s serene image the chimney 200 yards long was laid underground with the smoke emerging from the top of the caretaker’s cottage. At the time the mausoleum was considered to be one of the finest private tombs in the country and as one journalist wrote,

“The Mausoleum is believed to be the most costly and magnificent temple for the reception of the dead anywhere in the world with the exception of the pyramids”1

Floor tiles, image by Miss Jessel edited by Lenora

Life, Death, Immortality

Death Mask, image by Miss Jessel edited by Lenora

The entire building is imbued with symbolic meaning.  Carvings and architectural devices were designed to instil in the mourners/visitors a respect for the transient nature of life as well as displaying the duke’s love and knowledge of the ancient world.  You enter the crypt via a central archway (the two either side are false entrances). Above these archways are three sculptures representing Life, Death and Immortality.

The head representing “Life” is garlanded with fruits and flowers, possibly embodying the life-giving force of nature. His face is lined with the cares and worries which life inflicts. Above him a clock hand points to noon representing the mid-point of his existence.

The head representing “Death” is crowned with poppies symbolising everlasting sleep. His finger is gently placed on his lips, asking for silence, his eyes are closed.

The head representing “Immortality” is beautiful. His face his unlined and above his brow are lilies and circles as well as a snake holding his tail in its mouth representing eternity.  In the centre there is a delicate carving of a butterfly, the Greek symbol of immortality.

It is significant that the only way to enter the crypt is to pass under the head representing death. It is also unnerving that the bust of life is the most worn of the three sculptures whilst immortality looks like it has hardly been touched.

The Mausoleum Sentries

Sleeping Lion, image by Miss Jessel edited by Lenora

The entrance of the crypt is guarded by two lions. One sleeps whilst the other isawake, alert. The lions carved from a single block of sandstone are incredibly lifelike and beautiful. Some believe that one represents life and the other death whilst others say that one lion keeps a vigil while the other sleeps until it is his time to take over guard duty. Interestingly the sleeping lion lies with his claws extended. In general cats sleep with claws retracted, maybe the sculptor made a mistake, maybe the sleeping lion is not really sleeping, maybe he is just lulling us into a false sense of security, waiting to pounce.

An illustrious family

Below the chapel is a stone crypt with room for the remains of 28 members of the duke’s family. It is hard to believe that the Dukes of Hamilton buried in the crypt ever really laid in peace and repose. A number of them led interesting lives none more so that the 4^th, 6^th, 8^th and 10^th dukes.

The duelling duke

4th Duke duelling, public domain image via wikimedia

The 4^th Duke of Hamilton, James had a way of courting bad press. Described as perpetually drunk, selfish, arrogant, a disaster and a “bone-headed wastrel”1. He was a leader of the Scottish National Party and a vocal opponent of Scotland’s union with England. In November 1712 he was killed in a duel which shocked polite society and changed the law. His adversary was Charles Mohun, 4^th Baron Mohun with whom he had for eleven years been embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over an inheritance. Both men had married nieces of the Earl of Macclesfield but on his deathbed the Earl named Mohun as sole heir. Hamilton disputed the validity of the confession and the credibility of one of the witnesses.  Mohun himself was no saint, having already stood trial three times for murder. Finally emotions became so heated on both sides that they decided a duel was needed to settle the matter for once and for all. They met in Hyde Park along with their Seconds, George MacCartney and Colonel John Hamilton.  In the event Hamilton killed Mohun who in turn severely wounded Hamilton.  Furious MacCartney lunged at Hamilton, running him through with his sword. It is very likely that Colonel Hamilton in retaliation fought MacCartney as both men fled to the continent in fear of arrest. The duel had been so bloody that the government was persuaded to ban duels using swords in favour of pistols which inflicted less horrific injuries. The incident was immortalised by Thackeray in his novel “The History of Henry Esmond”.

A Curtain Ring Wedding

Elizabeth Gunning

The 6^th Duke of Hamilton’s (another James) claim to notoriety was very different. He enters the history books as a womaniser and debaucher. On the 14 February 1752 he finally found a woman he could not have his wicked way with in the form of the Society Beauty, Elizabeth Gunning. Elizabeth was penniless but refused to give in to the duke’s demands without marriage. That same night at 12.30 he plucked a parson out of bed to perform the marriage, using a bed curtain ring as a wedding ring. Presumably at 2am he finally got the girl and she got her duke.

The Hamilton House Dance

8th Duke of Hamilton, public domain

Following in family tradition, Douglas, the 8^th Duke of Hamilton was famous for his looks which he used to good effect as a womaniser. He inherited the title on his brother’s death in 1769. In April 1778 he married Elizabeth Anne Burrell, a match his family disapproved of as unequal. They had no children and were divorced after sixteen years possibly due to the duke’s numerous affairs primarily with the actress Mrs Esten and Frances Twysden, wife of the Earl of Eglinton, although the duchess was also rumoured to bed hop on occasion. Affairs were pretty much the norm amongst the upper classes but people were expected to behave discreetly, not so Hamilton. In fact Lady Eglinton actually asked her husband’s servant “if he would admit the Duke of Hamilton into her bedchamber”3. Loyally the servant refused. The dance the “Hamilton House” was named after the duke and duchess with the steps and numerous changes of partners symbolising their infidelities.

“The proudest man in England”

El Magnifico himself

The builder of the mausoleum, Alexander Douglas Hamilton, 10^th Duke of Hamilton was born on the 3^rd October 1767. In 1806 he was appointed to the Privy Council, serving as Ambassador to the Court of St Petersburg and in 1836 became a Knight of the Garter. He was strongly involved with the Freemasons, serving as Grandmaster between 1820 and 1822 hence the masonic symbolism embedded in the mausoleum’s design (and the continued use of the building by the Freemasons today). In April 1810 he married Susan Euphemia Beckford. He was a famous dandy and Lord Lemington in his book “The Days of the Dandies” wrote “Never was such a magnifico as the 10^th Duke”. Extremely proud of his ancestry, he was convinced he was heir to the Scottish crown. His inflated sense of his own importance resulted in him hiring his own hermit to adorn the grounds of Hamilton Palace. Increasingly eccentric as he grew older, he was affectionately called “El Magnifico” by the locals as he wandered around Hamilton wearing the Douglas tartan. He died at the age of 84 in London on the 18^th August 1852. An obituary notice read

“With a great pre-disposition to over-estimate the importance of ancient birth…he was well deserved to be considered the proudest man in England.”4

A sarcophagus fit for a duke

Unlike his other relatives, the 10^th Duke was not content to be buried in the crypt; instead he was laid to rest in the chapel in a sarcophagus. The story goes that whilst acting as a buyer for the British Museum, he ‘accidentally’ acquired a sarcophagus, not of an Egyptian of royal birth but of an ordinary citizen. The British Museum uninterested in the purchase allowed Hamilton to keep it. On his death and according to his wishes, the duke’s body was mummified and placed in the sarcophagus. It is not known how they managed to fit his body in the sarcophagus as the duke was eight inches taller than the original occupant but it has been suggested that his legs were rearranged with a sledge-hammer and bent under him.  Unfortunately as the mausoleum had no roof, the duke had the ignominy of lying in state with building work going on around him. Probably not the grand exit the duke had envisaged for himself. Eventually his sarcophagus was placed on a black marble slab, resting in a grand manner as “El Magnifico” deserved.

Alexander Hamilton’s sarcophagus c1880’s. Image source http://www.natemaas.com

The Whispering Wa’s

One unusual consequence of the design was the whispering wa’s or walls. Two people can stand at either end of the rotunda and have a whispered conversation that can’t be heard from another person standing only a couple of inches away. This together with the echo which lasting 15 seconds has been recorded as the longest lasting echo of any man-made structure in the world, made the building unusable as a chapel but perfect for concerts and brass bands.

A lasting testimony

Unfortunately due to subsidence and flooding all the bodies were removed and reburied in the 1920s, with the majority of them being interred down the road at Bent Cemetery. I think that the mausoleum is one of the most surprising, interesting and beautiful buildings I have ever visited. It stands testimony to the vision (and ego) of one man and the skills of others as well as being the only surviving reminder of one of the grandest estates in Britain.

Immortality

 Notes

1 http://www.skirret.com/archive/misc/misc-h/hamiltonmausoleum1.html

2 http://everything2.com/title/Duke+of+Hamilton

3 http://lifetakeslemons.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/handsome-devils-and-their-digs-douglas-douglas-hamilton-8th-duke-of-hamilton

4 http://www.thepeerage.com/p10947.htm#c109462.1

References

The Hamilton Mausoleum or The Duke’s Folly by Brother Robert T. Sime, http://www.skirret.com/archive/misc/misc-h/hamiltonmausoleum1.html

The Hamilton Dukes, http://everything2.com/title/Duke+of+Hamilton

James Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton, 1st Duke of Brandon, http://www.clanmacfarlanegenealogy.info/genealogy/TNGWebsite/getperson.php?personID=I12265&tree=CC

Famous Beauties of Two Reigns: Being an Account of Some Fair Women of Stuart & Georgian Times, Mary Craven, Martin Andrew Sharp Hume

The Kit-Cat Club, Ophelia Field

Handsome Devils and Their Digs: Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton, http://lifetakeslemons.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/handsome-devils-and-their-digs-douglas-douglas-hamilton-8th-duke-of-hamilton/

Pamphlet guide on the Hamilton Mausoleum produced by Low Parks Mausoleum

Guilty Pleasures…Leech’s pictures from Punch Magazine

Tags

Caricatures, comic sketches, English history, John Leech, Punch Magazine, Social History, Social Satire, Victorian

The cheap tailor and his workmen by Leech (detail) by John Leech

Just a short post today as I have been a bit busy this week.  I haven’t posted any guilty pleasures for a while and one of my biggest guilty pleasures of all time is the purchase, acquisition and general obsession with books.  Especially crusty old leather-bound tomes…

Finding a (rare) idle moment today I was perusing my book shelf and came across a book I had almost forgotten about… Leech’s Pictures.

Image by Simon Finch Books, Holt

I picked this book up in a wonderful dusty little bookshop in Holt, a beautiful little Georgian market town in Norfolk.  The bookshop is in a rickety and maze-like seventeenth century building with crampt and winding staircases that require careful navigating – especially with a pile of books in your arms!  When ever I visit Holt I make a beeline for this bookshop – there are so few independent booksellers left on the High Street these days, it’s always a treat to find a real Gem like this one.

John Leech – Caricaturist

John Leech, public domain image via Wikimedia

John Leech was born in London on 29th August 1817, his parents hailed from Ireland.  Even as a child he was quick with his pencil and his talent was quickly recognised.  He went to Charterhouse school and there became friends with William Makepeace Thackeray (famously the author of Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair) – the two remained friends for life.

Although he had some medical training, by eighteen he had begun to focus on his art as a profession and published some comic character sketches under the name of Etchings and Sketchings by A. Pen, Esq.  He then worked on a number of  magazines and produced illustrations for Dickens novels such as A Christmas Carol.

He worked in Lithograph and Wood Engraving, the latter being his main method of illustration in Punch Magazine.

Mr Leech and Mr Punch

Mr Punch, himself

He began his long association with Punch satirical magazine in 1841 and this continued until his death in 1864.  Leech’s style and technique quickly developed and by 1845 Ruskin was applauding Leech in fine style describing his work as:

“admittedly the finest definition and natural history of the classes of our society, the kindest and subtlest analysis of its foibles, the tenderest flattery of its pretty and well-bred ways”

Leech’s satirical sketches mainly focus on mocking the social foibles of all classes, and he was also famous for his sporting scenes.  Nevertheless his illustrations also sometimes have a keener edge.  Leech was not afraid to look at some of the harsher truths of life in the Mid Victorian world and he seems to have had a keen sympathy for the plight of horses.

I find the sketches to be a fascinating window onto  the world of Mid Victorian Britain: its mores, its aspirations, its foibles.  Leech’s pictures help, literally, to illustrate some aspects of the Victorian mindset and world view.  As such, his humour can take a somewhat hierarchical, patriarchical and ultimately imperialist tone (some of the depictions of other races in particular, can appear very distasteful to the modern eye).   However as an overall barometer for his era they provide a valuable social commentary.  Despite these flaws, many of his sketches show a keen eye for human nature, and even after nearly 150 years the humour remains evident in many of them.

Leech’s Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of Mr Punch

Here are a few images from my copy of Leech’s pictures, they are from his Second Series and seem to date from the 1860’s – the book has clearly been read and re-read hence some of the images are a little, shall we say, crumpled!  If you click on the images they come up full size so you can read the captions.

The topics covered range from social satire, to political comments; events such as Crystal Palace Exhibition, the Crimea and sea bathing as well as a look at the  social mobility of the lower classes…ENJOY

My copy of Leech’s Pictures c1860’s

Frontispiece of Leech’s Pictures

Latest from Paris

The cheap tailor and his workmen

A Very Bad Way
‘You look quite wretched Frank’
‘Wretched, my boy! You may imagine how wretched I am when I tell you I don’t even care how my Twowsers are made!’

Managing Mama. ‘My goodness Ellen, how pale you look, for goodness’ sake bite your lips and rub your cheeks.’

Seaside – the bathing hour

New cricketing dress to protect all England against the present swift bowling.

Servantgalism. ‘Ousemaid from town ‘is Hann Jenkins at home?’
Suburban cook: ‘no; she has just gone to her milliners’
‘ousemaid ‘then give her my card, please, and tell her I ‘ope she got home safely from the ball’

dropped something madam?

The parliamentary female

The railway engine and the foxhunter – a prospective sketch

A country ball

The Beard and Moustache movement
Railway Guard ‘Now Ma’am, is this your luggage?’
Old lady (Who concludes she is attacked by brigands) ‘Oh yes! Gentlemen, it’s mine Take it-take all I have! But spare, oh, spare our lives!’

Further illustrations of the mining districts
First polite native: Who’s ‘im Bill?’
Second ditto ‘A stranger!’
First ditto ”eave a brick at ‘im’

Police wear beards and moustaches, panic among the street boys

Comments on the effectiveness of table tapping

The British Weather

New Christmas game for fox-hunters during a long frost.

Scene on the English coast

What a shame
Young lady (inclining to embonpoint). ‘I shall want him again this afternoond – from two to four!’

The Great exhibition at Crystal Palace emptied the theatres

An early example of Goth fashion?

The Crimean War
‘Well, Jack. Here’s good news from home. We’re to have a medal’
That’s very kind. Maybe one of these days we’ll have a coat to stick it on!’

A hint for the horseguards.
Showing how all the weight of our heavies might be preserved, and more fairly adjusted.

The peril of keeping ones gloves in ones hat.

Sources

Leech, John, Pictures from Life and Character From the Collection of Mr Punch,  Second Series, published c1860 by Bradbury and Evans

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leech_%28caricaturist%29