The Victorian Way of Death

Death, and the fear of death, was an ever-present concern of Victorian writers.  Whilst quoting average life-expectancy figures needs to be treated with caution, (as it is skewed by high rates of infant mortality and the death of women in childbirth), the average life-expectancy of a baby born in a large town early in the century was around 35 years.  By the middle of the century, it had dropped to between 25 – 30 years.   One in five children born during the 1830s – 40s died before their 5^th birthday.  Particularly for the urban poor, poverty and malnutrition, coupled with diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis, in over-crowded, unsanitary conditions, and high levels of violent crime, meant that death was ever-present.  However, if you were lucky enough to survive beyond 40 years, then you might look to live almost as long as people today. 

Funerals were big business in mid-Victorian Britain.  In “Oliver Twist”, Dickens gives us a picture of the fetishising of death that grew up during the period. Oliver obtains a post as a “Mute” – a person who stands silently by the coffin and accompanies it to the churchyard.  He is a part of the elaborate funeral rites that even Victorians of modest means arranged, together with the black-plumed horses and glass coffins.  There was an industry, not just of funeral directors, but of the accompanying “accessories”: black mourning clothes; mourning jewellery, often made of jet from Whitby in Yorkshire; black-edged stationery; garlands and black ribbons for decorating houses and churches.  With the growth in population and move to cities, the old, local churchyards were soon over-flowing. To relieve the pressure for burial space in London, the Victorians opened a ring of cemeteries outside the city – Highgate, Kensal Green, Brompton, Abney Park, West Norwood, Nunhead and Tower Hamlets were all built between 1832 and 1841.  This was the era of the monumental mason – the men who carved the angels, urns, books and cherubs to stand at the head of gravestones, much of which reflected the architecture of the Gothic revival. 

No surprise, then, that Death and the trappings of death infuse the writings of novelists and poets of the period.  This preoccupation stems not just from a melancholy streak in the writers, but from their everyday experience.  Many were directly touched by the deaths of loved ones close to them.  Dickens had a sister who died aged five, his beloved sister-in-law died at the age of seventeen.  Many of Dickens’ characters die young – Little Nell in “The Old Curiosity Shop”, Smyke in “Nicholas Nickleby”, Joe in “Bleak House”.  The poets in the selection were similarly touched by death.  Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam died at the age of 22; the Brontes lost their mother and aunt when they were young and their brother in his 20s, they all died before the age of 40; two of EBB’s brothers died when she was in her twenties and she was in ill-health most of her life; Christina Rossetti also suffered an undiagnosed malady and lived in constant fear of early death, although she survived to 64. The Brontes’ novels are full of dying people: Jane Eyre is an orphan, her friend Helen Burns dies at Lowood House; Francis and Catherine Earnshaw die under the age of 20 as does Linton Heathcliff.  The poetry in the selection has Death as a recurring theme – “In Memoriam – AHH”, Maud’s brother is killed violently, “Died.. ” is about a death notice, “My Last Duchess” has a dead woman at its heart, “The Nurse” is visiting a dead or dying man, “Remember” is written from the point of view of a woman contemplating her own death, in “Echo”, there are images of death, “Drummer Hodge” and “A Wife in London” are about men killed in War.  

For the Victorians, the words of the Burial Service, "In the midst of life we are in death", were very real.

A Note on Themes - Liminal Spaces

The question in the A level examinations will be on a “theme” – a central concern or idea which may form the focus of the poem or be an integral part of its meaning.  You will be asked to explore the presentation of this “theme” in one named poem and one other poem of your choice. 

These “themes” could include, but not be limited to:  an emotion – such as love, loss, sorrow, joy; the evocation of “place”, as the subject of the poem or as the setting for the poem; the treatment of abstract concepts such as Time, or Death, or Religion; a “happening” such as War, Childhood, Marriage; the relationships between men and women.  The range is very broad.  Where a poem lends itself to suggesting a particular theme, this has been noted in the explication.  However, these suggestions are not exhaustive; one of the skills to be mastered is to know the texts well enough to be able to link them to themes which may not be immediately obvious. 

In addition to this, there is one “theme” which seems to run through most of the selection, so it has been explored and illustrated below. 

Liminal Spaces

Liminal means “threshold”, the part of a door that you step across to move from one space to another.  Liminality is the space between different states – between night and day (dawn), between day and night (twilight), between life and death, between out and in.

Most of the poems in the selection are similarly concerned with situations where the poet/persona, or the setting, or the subject matter, or more than one of these, are “in between” states or spaces.  

Tennyson

In “In Memoriam – VII”, Tennyson seems unable to move on from the living presence of Hallam on the street he revisits; “XCV” is set between night and day – a night when he seems to move from sorrow to reconciliation; the “Maud” poems are full of liminal images – “I.xi” is set between the “solid ground” and “sweet heavens”; “I.xviii” is set at the point where Maud is both “his” and “not his” – he is on the verge of a consummation of their love, but it is never realised;  Maud does not “Come into the Garden” – we leave the narrator still waiting; II.iv ”O that ‘twere possible” imagines Maud as a ghost, caught between life and death and the narrator as a confused “wasted frame”.

Emily & Charlotte Bronte – The Visionary

The setting is inside, but the focus is on the visitor coming through the winter weather to visit her.  She is in a “limbo”, where the Visionary is anticipated (as in “Come into the garden, Maud”) but not yet realised.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Grief” explores the emotion of the title, with a central image of a statue, lifelike, but dead and unable to “move on”; The subject of “Died...” is both alive and dead at the same time; they are talking about him as if alive, even as his obituary notice travels to them from London.

Robert Browning

The Duke in “My Last Duchess” is, literally, “between” Duchesses; In “Home Thoughts…”, the poet is in Italy but casting his thoughts toward England, and is thus caught between the two; the focus of “Meeting at Night” is in the space between “not with the beloved” and “with the beloved”; In “Love in a Life” the focus is on the emptiness between the beloved being “not found” and “found” and remains unresolved.

Charlotte Bronte

All of the poems in the selection by Charlotte Bronte are set in liminal space.  “The Autumn day” is set at Twilight: “The house was still…” is also set at twilight, and the birds’ songs occupy the space between indoors (the canary) and outdoors (the free bird); “I now had only to retrace” recounts the point at which the poet turns back from her outward walk to head for home; “The Nurse believed…” has a question at its heart – is the man alive or dead?; ”Stanzas” opens with a statement that puts the poet in a space between the world of the imagination and the real world.

Christina Rossetti

“Remember” explores memory – the place where the dead still exist for the living; an “Echo” exists in the space between the first sound and the return (as in the songs between the birds in “The house was still”); “May” captures the very moment when she “passes” from a feeling of hope and joy to one of desolation, as Tennyson does in reverse in XCV; “Somewhere or other” by its title suggests that the poet is caught between anticipation and consummation with only a “hedge between”.

Thomas Hardy

In “At the Inn”, the poet describes the two “As we seemed we were not” – they existed both as lovers, to the innkeeper, but were not; lovers and yet not lovers (like the alive/dead man in “Died…” or in “The Nurse…”); In “I Look into My Glass”, a mirror is a space between the reality and the reflection in the mirror, where Hardy seems to exist as both young, on the inside, and old, on the outside; even “Drummer Hodge” seems to lie between England, where he was born, and Africa, where his body is, as if a bit of England has been transported out there; “A wife in London” captures the time between receiving notice of her husband’s death and a letter written in the dead man’s hand – again, there was a moment where he was both alive AND dead; “The Darkling Thrush” is set at the turn of the year and the turn of the century – New Year’s Eve, 1899.  A liminal space indeed.

Preparation for Victorian Verse - A2

The British Library website and The Victorian Web are good places to start your background reading on Victorian Verse.

Start here: Victorian Poetry  and Victorian Literature

You need to know something about the two, long Tennyson poems from which you are required to study extracts -  In Memoriam AHH  and Maud.  The extracts work as stand-alone poems, but the context is important.  A useful introduction to Tennyson can be found here.

I would strongly suggest that to understand Tennyson, and appreciate how good he is, you should read two of his shorter, and possibly greatest, poems - Ulysses and Tithonus.  Both are in the anthology.  Why they have been omitted from the selection I have no idea, except it suggests an effort to thematically link all the poems in the selection with each other.

There is a Browning society whose website is here

Here is information on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's: Sonnets from the Portugese

Elizabeth and Robert Browning were married.  It was a famous love affair as they had to elope: Elizabeth and Robert's marriage

There is extensive information on Robert Browning on the Victorian Web.  You should read some of his other dramatic monologues to understand his mastery of this form: Porphyria's Lover  and The Laboratory.

Here is information on Christina Rossetti.   You might want to read "Goblin Market" which is probably her most famous poem.  It will shed light on the other poems. There is a critique of it on the BL website here which is also useful for understanding something about her poetic form.

Art and Literature in the Victorian age are closely linked.  "Goblin Market" was illustrated by Christina's brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a famous pre-Raphaelite painter, and she also sat as his model: Ecce Ancilla Domini (Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord).  Here she is shown as the Virgin Mary hearing that she is to bear Christ.

Thomas Hardy is a very different writer.  Although born in 1840, he lived until 1928 and feels more "modern" than the other poets in this collection.  He is probably best known as a writer of novels,such as  "Far from the Madding Crowd " (1874) and "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" (1891) set in the legendary county of Wessex (modern Dorset/Hampshire) which deal with the lives of the rural poor in an England which had become increasingly urbanised and mechanised.

Hardy was also a social reformer.  Here is an interesting article: "You ain't ruined" which looks at Hardy's response to the Victorian (and modern?) link between sexual purity and moral virtue.

Further details on Hardy on the Victorian web.