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"There was a general perception that Queen Victoria's mourning was neither normal nor acceptable”

BBC History UK

March 2024

JUDITH FLANDERS talks to Rebecca Franks about her new book, which delves into the customs surrounding dying, death and mourning in Victorian Britain

- JUDITH FLANDERS

"There was a general perception that Queen Victoria's mourning was neither normal nor acceptable”

Rebecca Franks: How different was the Victorian view of death to our modern conception of it?

Judith Flanders: The main difference was that death was part of daily life. It wasn't neatly tucked away in hospitals where you could go in and visit someone for an hour but didn't see anyone die. Today, many people now go happily through their whole lives without ever seeing a dead person, which was simply not possible in the 19th century. Hospitals were very limited in the kinds of diseases and illnesses they cared for, and they were a place of last resort for people who were too poor or desperate to be cared for at home. Infant death was vastly more common than it is today, though that was also simply due to the vagaries of population. There were more young people than there were old people, and infant death therefore accounted for a much larger percentage of death than death in old age.

How did the level of infant mortality impact society?

For many years there was a theory among historians that because children died so frequently and so young, their parents didn't care about them - it wasn't worth investing emotion into small lives that might soon be lost. However, if you read the scraps of evidence we have regarding the working classes and their responses to children's deaths, this simply isn't true. For instance, we see parents naming their newborns after older siblings who had died. This was previously interpreted as proof of not caring, but it seems to me so obvious that for the most impoverished in society - particularly in the early part of the 19th century, when permanent gravestones were not common - this was the only way that they could memorialise their lost children. Because people do love their babies. We don't have to be terribly smart to know that.