Mirrors of Mortality (Routledge Revivals)

Social Studies in the History of Death

Joachim Whaley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415618601
• eBook ISBN: 9781136810602
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1981, this reissue examines mankind's preoccupation with death and mortality by isolating various societies in different periods of time. The authors examine not only the formal rituals associated with the last rite of passage, but also the social attitudes to death and dying which these rituals evidence. The essays establish that different periods do seem to be characterized by different images of death and attitudes to it, but the authors wisely avoid trying to impose strict chronological pattern. A pioneering work in the historical study of attitudes to death, this reissue should reignite discussion on the significance of death in human history.

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood examines attitudes to death as reflected in myth and religious thought in Ancient Greece and relates them to social and economic change. R. C. Finucane analysis the social significance of the 'exemplary' deaths of kings, criminals, traitors and saints in medieval Europe. Paul Fritz's essay illustrates the importance of royal burials in early modern Britian; while Joachim Whaley examines the social and political significance of funerals in Hamburg between 1500 and 1800. John McManners discusses the work of Phililppe Aries and other prominent French scholars on the history of attitudes to death. David Irwin examines the images of death portrayed in European tombs around 1800. C.A Bayly analyzes the relationship between death ritual and society in Hindu Northern India, while David Cannadine discusses the impact of war on attitudes to death in modern Britain.

VIII

War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain

DAVID CANNADINE

The history of death in the Anglo-Saxon world during the modern period seems to be well established, at least in outline. The surveys of Ariès and Stannard, combined with the sociological studies of Gorer and Feifel, and the psychological investigations of Lifton and Olson, add up to an impressively uniform view.¹ During the nineteenth century, so the argument runs, western society was obsessed with death, whereas sex was virtually ignored. At a time of unprecedentedly high death rates, children were introduced to death—their own, their siblings’ or their parents’—at an early age. The ceremonial of mourning and the ostentation of cemeteries reached new heights of extravagance: death, grief and bereavement were integral parts of life. But during the last eighty years or so, the position has been exactly reversed. Sex, formerly the taboo subject par excellence, has now been brought out into the open, while death, once the centre of attention, has ‘become shameful and forbidden’. Patients now die alone and in hospital, instead of at home, surrounded by loving families, as in former times. In England, funerals are now perfunctory in the extreme—an attempt to deny death rather than come to terms with it. And in America, the same prevailing attitude has led to that extraordinary charade of morticians, caskets, embalming and ‘Beautiful Memory Pictures’ so hilariously sent up by Evelyn Waugh and devastatingly exposed by Jessica Mitford.² What was once commonplace has become forbidden; while what was once forbidden has become commonplace. In so far as the history of the western world is the history of the bedroom, the love-bed has replaced the death-bed as the central object of interest and attention.

As well as embodying a beguilingly symmetrical argument, this interpretation enjoys the dubious distinction of enlisting nostalgia in its support—in the case of death, even if less so in the case of sex. The key work here, to which all subsequent studies are indebted, is Gorer's survey of grief and mourning in modern Britain. For, although his study was of contemporary England, his interpretation embodied a powerful and exceedingly influential historical perspective, which assumed that in the nineteenth century there had been a golden age of grief, in which the carefully structured and universally observed rituals of mourning provided necessary and successful support to those who were bereaved and in need of restructuring their lives.³ But, he went on to argue, the decline of these important and useful rituals in the twentieth century has resulted in a society which gives little if any support to the bereaved. As a result, mourning, rather than being kept out in the open, is now treated ‘as if it were a weakness, a self-indulgence, a reprehensible, bad habit, instead of a psychological necessity’.⁴ Grieving has never been as traumatic as it is in modern Britain. The decline of the rituals of mourning, which had prevailed to such good purpose in the nineteenth century, is seen as a development in all ways to be regretted.

To this interpretation of grief the historians have recently added a corresponding argument with regard to dying. For if grieving in the nineteenth century was successful, death was almost pleasurable. Both Stannard and Ariès, in luxuriant, nostalgic prose, picture the Victorian death-bed scene as ‘a ritual ceremony over which the dying person presides amidst his assembled relatives and friends’, eagerly awaiting the ‘sweet glory of sal-vation’ and ‘removal to a better world’.⁵ By contrast, death in the twentieth century is degraded to the level of ‘termination’, a mere ‘technical phenomenon’, characterized by ‘loneliness, irrelevance and an absence of awareness’, in which the dying patient is cruelly, callously ‘ejected from his customary social milieu’, and leaves this world drugged, lonely and afraid.⁶ In the twentieth century, death is as terrible as grieving is ineffective. Whatever may have happened to sex, the developments on the death front—at the level of dying as much as at the level of bereavement—are regarded with disapproval.⁷

This essay, by examining some aspects of war and death, grief and mourning, seeks to argue that this historical picture may be as mistaken as the nostalgia which underlies it is misplaced—at least in the case of modern Britain. It will suggest that the conventional picture of death in the nineteenth century is excessively romanticized and insufficiently nuanced; that it makes assumptions about the functional and therapeutic values of the elaborate death-bed, funerary and mourning rituals which are unproven; and that it ignores significant developments—both ceremonial and demographic—at the end of the century. It will also maintain that the impact of the First World War on attitudes to death has been underrated by sociologists and historians; that its significance was profound for at least a generation; and that inter-war Britain was probably more obsessed with death than any other period in modern history. Finally, in the light of this alternative historical perspective, it will argue that, contrary to both the received view and the prevailing nostalgia, the best time to die and to grieve in modern Britain is probably now.

I

The starting point from which the conventional argument is made is the undoubted ostentation of the Victorian funeral, at all levels of society. The last rites of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 were on a scale of grandeur and magnificence which was never attained before and has never been equalled since. ‘Nothing shall be wanting in this tribute of national gratitude’ observed Prince Albert, who was responsible for the arrangements; and nothing was.⁸ Even relatively little-known aristocrats, like the sixth Duke of Devonshire, were made the centre of great pageants, with their coffins extravagantly decorated, and immensely long, solemn and splendid processions. When the fifth Duke of Rutland died in 1857, his lying-in-state was attended by 1,037 persons on the first day and 2,674 on the second, including five labourers who walked twenty-five miles each way.⁹ In death as much as in life, the aristocracy was set apart on a plane different from that of ordinary mortals. And, although the middle classes could produce nothing to compare with this, the deaths of great civic or entrepreneurial worthies were commemorated with all possible pomp, as in the case of Robert Milligan, first Mayor of Bradford, M.P. for the town from 1852 to 1857, and the founder of one of its great mercantile houses.¹⁰ Even members of the working class sought, in death, a level of ostentation which had been denied them in life. ‘Nothing can exceed their desire for an imposing funeral’, noted Edwin Chadwick in 1843. ‘They would starve to pay the undertaker.’ Indeed, in that year, it was calculated that of the £24 million deposited by the working classes in savings banks, over one quarter represented savings for funerals. As Ariès rightly notes, this was the period in which ‘mourning was unfurled with an uncustomary degree of ostentation’.¹¹

Why was this? What was its purpose? According to most authorities, the ritual and ceremonial of the death-bed, the graveside and of mourning fulfilled important functions, giving the greatest possible comfort to the dying, and meeting effectively the psychological needs of the bereaved survivors.¹² But this argument, influential though it is, is far from proven. To begin with, the assumption that extravagant ceremony and ostentation helped to ease the prospect of death for the dying is more easily asserted than it is demonstrated. As Lawrence Stone has recently argued, the picture of graceful, peaceful death in the bosom of the family is excessively romanticized. All too often, in the nineteenth century, death was painful, agonizing, even foul and embarrassing. In particular, the all-too-frequent death-bed scenes in which children were the central characters can rarely have approximated to that idealized final tableau in which the Victorian paterfamilias took moving and stately farewell of his nearest and dearest. Nor is it entirely clear that all victims looked on death as the road to glory: the fear of hell and damnation was for many as real as it was horrifying.¹³

In the same way, it remains undemonstrated exactly how—if at all—the elaborate rituals of mourning actually helped to assuage the grief of the survivors.¹⁴ Olson and Lifton may assert that there is ‘considerable psychological wisdom’ in correct rituals of mourning.¹⁵ But the nature of this wisdom remains elusive. At the most trivial level, even the wearing of mourning clothes might be more of a sartorial torture than it was psychologically therapeutic. Contemporaries noted that black veils were ‘most unhealthy; they harm the eyes and injure the skin’. Likewise, black kid gloves were described as ‘painfully warm and smutty, disfiguring the hand and soiling the handkerchief and face’.¹⁶ More importantly, it might be argued that, far from wishing to make exhibitions of themselves by donning yards of black crêpe, most mourners would have preferred to be treated as normal human beings as soon as possible: something which the ostentatious wearing of black and the need to stay apart from society for a year or more by definition prevented. For the excessive concentration of mourning did not so much help the bereaved to come to terms with their loss and make a new life for themselves, but actually robbed them of the will to recover, and condemned them to spend their remaining years more obsessed with death than was either necessary or healthy—as exemplified most spectacularly in the case of Queen Victoria. When Dr Watson's wife died, Sherlock Holmes told him that ‘work is the best antidote to sorrow’, and his scepticism of the assumed efficacy of conventional modes of mourning is one which merits further attention.¹⁷

In other words, it is arguable that the Victorian celebration of death was not so much a golden age of effective psychological support as a bonanza of commercial exploitation. The elaborate funerary and mourning rituals were more an assertion of status than a means of assuaging sorrow, a display of conspicuous consumption rather than an exercise in grief therapy, from which the chief beneficiary was more likely to be the undertaker than the widow. Indeed, in both its extravagance and its ineffectiveness, the English way of death in the nineteenth century may most plausibly be seen as the direct precursor of the American way of death in the twentieth. Then, in England, as now in America, the bereaved were pestered by undertakers whose main aim was to make as much money as possible. The yards of crepe which mourning etiquette required were of more importance in making the fortunes of firms like Courtaulds than they were in comforting the bereaved. The whole obsessive paraphernalia of mourning pin cushions, mourning brooches, mourning aprons, mourning lockets, mourning necklaces, mourning earrings, mourning parasols, mourning handkerchiefs and even mourning bathing costumes, were more a cause of financial anxiety to the bereaved than a source of emotional solace.¹⁸ ‘The terror of inevitable expense’ was a very real thr...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Routledge Revivals
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction Joachim Whale
• I To Die and Enter the House of Hades: Homer, Before and After Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
• II Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the later Middle Ages R. C. Finucane
• III From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’: The Royal Funerals in England, 1500–1830 Paul S. Fritz
• IV Symbolism for the Survivors: The Disposal of the Dead in Hamburg in the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Joachim Whaley
• V Death and the French Historians John McManners
• VI Sentiment and Antiquity: European Tombs, 1750–1830 David Irwin
• VII From Ritual to Ceremony: Death Ritual and Society in Hindu north India since 1600 C. A. Bayly
• VIII War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain David Cannadine
• Index