This episode was suggested by several listeners, Amber, Mallory, Paul, Odessa, and several others whose names have unfortunately got lost in our many social media outlets. If you'd like to suggest a topic, you can do so on Facebook and Instagram at Morbid Curiosity Podcast, on Twitter at Morbid Podcast, and on our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com. If you'd like to become a patron of the MCP, go to bit.ly slash morbidpatron, that's bit.ly slash morbidpatron, and you can support us for as little as $1 an episode. This episode contains discussions of deceased infants and children.
If that's not something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence. But even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called Morbid Curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.
I am one of those people. My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. Since its invention, photography has been a part of history. Its very purpose is to document moments in time.
The technology of photography has changed so much in the short span of time it's existed, that a person from 100 years ago would be shaken by how inundated our daily lives are with pictures. Advertisements, books, magazines, billboards, posters, Facebook, Instagram, even our own phone contacts are often accompanied by a small picture of our friends and family members. While photography has been used for many purposes, past and present, there are some images from the past that have captured modern fascination. Some of the most fascinating of these historical images are those of deceased Victorians who were photographed with some ceremony.
There are a variety of terms used to describe the practice of photographing the dead. Postmortem photography, mortuary photography, funerary photography, and mourning photography are all used in literature, and each means something slightly different, but all refer to photographing deceased humans as part of funerary and mourning rituals. I'm going to use both mourning and postmortem photography for most of this episode. Photography advanced during a time when disease outbreaks were common, and medicine to treat those diseases was not yet available.
At the same time, science was advancing, peeling back hundreds of years of magical and religious thinking about mortality and disease. The photograph seemed like the ultimate method to preserve the memory of deceased loved ones. While they were dead and buried, the image would live on. This era was the Victorian era, a unique period of time in which mainstream society was quite comfortable with discussing death and dying.
In fact, by today's standards, the Victorians seem quite obsessed with death. The Victorian era began in Britain in the late 1830s, when Queen Victoria ascended the British throne. Even before her coronation, however, funerals were an extravagant affair, even for the least prosperous members of society. However, during her reign, these traditions solidified into a set of rules for appropriate observance and death etiquette.
After the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, Queen Victoria went into deep mourning and further popularized the idea of public mourning and a so-called proper burial. She made mourning fashionable. In Victorian society, the topics of death and dying were not shied away from. This is likely because death was omnipresent.
The Victorian era was a time of epidemics, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever and rubella, all raged through all levels of society, and without vaccines and other modern medicines, these diseases were most often fatal. Therefore, death was an open discussion. There was never any doubt about what the dying person wanted, such as the type of coffin, what they would wear, and where they would be buried. There was also no question of what was expected of their family, as dictated by Victorian death and mourning etiquette.
It was all discussed long beforehand. In fact, women often made their own burial shrouds, and sometimes included them in their wedding dowries. The rules and etiquette began with where the person died, and went all the way through the funeral and on to the mourning rituals of the family and friends of the deceased. The etiquette was quite complicated, and included the appropriate lengths of time to mourn, what to wear during the different stages of mourning, and how to bury the dead.
Not following these rules of etiquette, indicated that the relatives of the deceased were amoral or without honor. It didn't matter if the process caused financial difficulties either, therefore, many less affluent people began saving for a proper burial early on in their lives. Here are some examples of these rules. For the death of a parent or child, 12 months of mourning at least were thought appropriate, while 6 to 9 months was due a grandparent, and 6 months for a sibling.
The length of the mourning period was shorter, the further away from the immediate family the deceased was. These mourning periods were so long, and the deaths so common, that it's likely normal life seemed like short breaks between mourning periods. These mourning periods were never shortened, but taking longer to mourn was acceptable. No one would dare tell another person that they had been in mourning for too long, that was considered crass and a huge breach of protocol.
There were also different phases of mourning. The first phase was known as deep mourning, and was usually the longest period required of widows. Women in general faced much stricter rules for mourning periods and mourning attire. After the death of a husband, they were expected to be in mourning for two years, with the last 6 months of that time being a half mourning period.
They were expected to wear black dresses, covered in black crepe, a stiff, scratchy fabric, with voluminous quinoline petticoats. Jewelry was allowed, but it had to be a jet, a black stone, or be a special type of mourning jewelry called memento mori, which often included the hair of the deceased in a locket, or inset in a brooch or ring. Memento mori, which means remember you must die, existed before the Victorian era, but became widely popular at this time, along with many other artistic representations of death, but that is the subject for another episode. Men were subject to fewer rules about their attire, and merely expected to wear black gloves, dark colored suits, a black band on one arm, and a black band on their hats.
Children were also expected to participate in mourning, though there were even fewer rules for them. They were not kept from the body, or from any of the ceremonies surrounding death. As child mortality was quite high, children were just as aware of death as adults, sometimes more so, if they had to share a bed with a dying sibling, which was often the case in most lower-income households. Prosperous families were often able to spend more time observing both public and private mourning rituals, however, the passion for proper treatment of the dead was found throughout the social hierarchy, and in both religious and non-religious people.
The etiquette was different depending on social class, religion, and whether the family was urban or rural, but almost always involved a lot of effort and expense. For the least prosperous people, saving for a proper burial in a churchyard with a headstone naming their resting place sometimes meant going without during life. So why did most Victorians care so much about having a proper burial? Death was frequently sudden and tragic at the time, with medicine being unable to prevent death from common diseases as it does today.
Urban growth, which crowded people together, aided in the spread of these diseases, adding to the mortality rate. The government responded to the higher mortality rate with several acts that terrified the public, especially the poor, such as the Poor Law Amendment of 1834, which placed those who could not support themselves into workhouses, facilities that while providing shelter and employment, were many times worse than being out on the streets. When people died in the workhouse, their bodies were often placed in what was called a pauper's grave, a mass grave that often had no headstone indicating who was buried there. It was a confirmation to the living that the deceased was poor, as well as denying any opportunity for their family or community to mourn them properly, as they became anonymous with everyone else buried with them.
There was no ceremony, no remembrance. Bodies from the workhouse were also sometimes claimed by anatomists, thanks to the Anatomy Act of 1832. This led to a near obsession for most of the poor to save up for proper burials in order to avoid anatomization after death. If you want to know more about the Anatomy Act, as well as the rise of anatomy in Britain, check out our corpse theft episode with Dr.
Janet Dittmar. Another reason for observing so many mourning rituals was the rampant fear of being buried alive. As medicine hadn't advanced as far as it has today, there were enough cases of mistaken death that people tended to wait a few days to a week or more to bury their loved ones in order to make sure they were dead. There were also coffins invented with bells and air shafts so that if you were buried alive, you might be able to get help.
For this reason and many others, most Victorians tried to die at home, that way their family could surround their body for an allotted time, making sure they were dead and also mourning them. People also preferred to die at home because the public institutions of the time, such as hospitals, were places to be avoided as they were thought of as impersonal, bleak, and indicative of low status. More times than not, a priest was called for the sick, not a doctor, as medicine had yet to gain the reputation of helping over harming the sick. However, keeping the body at home posed serious health issues, especially among poorer families where death more often occurred and where people were more often crowded together.
In overcrowded homes, life had to continue around the body of the deceased. They were usually only separated from the living by a thin wooden coffin. This was especially hazardous to the family's health during times of contagious disease outbreak. Many times the body was left in the home until the first Sunday of the month, which was the traditional day that churches preformed funerals.
This meant the family sometimes had to wait almost three weeks to bury their dead. Low funds also caused waiting periods before burial, another reason the poor often saved during life to pay for their own funerals. There were societies that could help fund funerals for those who couldn't afford them, but many times they had strict regulations about the deceased in order to prevent exploitation of those funds. For example, if a husband had received funds to bury his first wife, he could not receive them if his second wife died.
More affluent families also kept the bodies of their loved ones at home for a time before burial. They would routinely stand around the body, touch it and look at it, both to confirm the person was dead and to speak about them with friends and visitors that came to see the deceased as part of the mourning ritual. Death, while common, was a community and family affair, where in years before, churchyards and graveyards were places to be avoided due to fears about pestilence and blasphemy. During the Victorian era, the graves of relatives were consistently visited every Sunday in order to pay respect to the dead.
This development was gradual and occurred through national legislation and hygiene improvements. Between 1852 and 1899, around 45 acts of parliament dealing with death and burial were passed. Burial grounds became places of exercise and recreation, similar to parks and gardens. They were landscaped and maintained by the government.
Therefore, public celebration of the dead became almost a civic affair. Because of all these new attitudes surrounding death and burials, the funeral business at all levels of society flourished in the Victorian era, from coffin makers and florists to priests, embalmers and gravediggers. One of the professions that grew out of Victorian mourning practices was the new profession of photographer. Photography was a brand new medium, having been invented in 1839.
The process was long and complicated, with images sometimes taking up to an hour to capture, and even then, keeping them from degrading on the photographic plates was difficult. Portrait photography was more publicly available in the 1850s, thanks to Louis Daguerre and his augmentation of the process, called the daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were non-reproducible images that were created on thin sheets of polished silver called plates by exposing the metal to chemicals and then exposing the treated plate to light through a pinhole apparatus, much like the small pinhole cameras we used in primary school to view eclipses. When light touched the exposed plate, it created an image through a chemical reaction of whatever was in view through the pinhole in shades of gray.
The image was then fixed in place using mercury vapor so that further light exposure wouldn't affect it. This image was still delicate, however, and could be wiped away easily, so daguerreotypes were usually encased in glass immediately after their creation. By the 1860s, special chemically treated paper began to replace silver plates, making photography even more affordable. The number of photographers went up, driving the price of hiring them down.
A lens was also introduced to brighten the image and speed up the time it took to capture an image. It seemed almost like magic how the image of a landscape or person was captured in great detail and transferred onto the plate. The image was also mirrored, giving it almost a supernatural appearance as it wasn't exactly true to life. Images of people, landscapes, and anything else you could see could now be easily captured using photography.
For the first time, a person's portrait could be taken without a painter and without sitting for hours to have the portrait painted. Photography was more affordable and less time-consuming. However, it still took longer than an instant to capture the image. The first daguerreotypes took about one to one and a half minutes to capture.
In the 1860s, new techniques brought that time down to between three and eight seconds, which is faster, but still not as fast as digital photography today. As the mourning culture of the Victorian era was all about remembrance and preserving the memory of the dead, portrait photography immediately became part of the culture in the form of mourning portraits. Soon after a person died, a photographer would stage their body and take a photograph. These images would be displayed at the funeral and in the home afterward.
This type of mourning portrait is what we now call a post-mortem photograph. Before we go into details on how Victorian photographers went about taking photos of a deceased, let's pause for a word from our sponsors. Our regular sponsor is Audible.com. Audible can provide you with interesting and engaging audiobooks.
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You'll have my eternal gratitude. And now, back to the podcast. Post-mortem photography was a new take on an older tradition of creating mourning portraits. Mourning portraits were usually paintings of the deceased, depicted either on their deathbed or just after death.
They were usually usually depicted in their best clothes and laid out as if for display, similar to a still life painting. Many times the name of the artist was not included on the painting out of respect for the individual identity of the dead. Mourning portraits became popular just after the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s. However, they were not treated as treasured heirlooms, so many portraits have not survived to the present day.
The ones that do survive give insight on the funerary customs of the past. Similar arrangement of the deceased for a photograph may have carried on the tradition of laying out the body, which is still a common feature of modern mourning rituals. In the 17th and 18th century, coffin portraits became popular, where a realistic portrait of the deceased in life was placed on the coffin during the funeral. A more ancient version of this tradition is found with the ancient Egyptians who painted the face of the deceased on their sarcophagi.
With the invention of photography and its further development, photographs quickly replaced painted portraits in the 19th century. Many mourning photographs were the only photographs taken of the deceased. The families felt any image was better than no image at all. Most professional photographers included mourning or mortuary photographs as part of their services.
As death and dying were not thought of as taboo subjects, photographers publicly advertised these services. Photography trade journals also discussed how best to take the photos and lay out the body. Most mortuary photographs show the deceased in what was called the last sleep, a pose in which they are arranged to look as if in a gentle slumber. Young deceased children and infants were most often photographed in the arms of their mothers, again posed to appear as if asleep.
This was the most popular pose in the first 40 years or so of post-mortem photography. Sometimes the living were photographed alongside the deceased. This was called a morning tableau. Either the family was gathered around a chair or bed in which the deceased was reclining, or the deceased was laid on the floor with pillows and other props, again to make it seem as if they were asleep with their family standing around them.
Later morning photographs have the deceased in their coffin, either alone or with their family standing around them. Sometimes these were even taken at the funeral with all the guests standing around the coffin. This type of setup was most popular in Europe, while the sleeping pose remained most popular in Britain and the United States. When reproducible paper prints became available, many smaller images would be printed and sent to relatives who couldn't make it to the funeral, or sometimes even used as common postcards.
A rumor has spread online in more recent years that metal stands were used to prop up the dead so that they could be photographed in more lifelike positions. This is not true. There were metal posing stands, but these were made to help living people sit still enough to be photographed. Remember, at this time the subject of the photograph had to sit very still for a long time while the image was being captured.
Any movement during that time caused intense blurring of the image. Posing stands were not sturdy enough to support the dead weight of a human, but they could help a living person remain in the same pose for the time needed to capture their image. Many images circulating on the internet that are labeled as postmortem photographs are not actually images of deceased people. Thanks to error, mislabeling and some intentional misrepresentation, many of the images you find when searching for postmortem photographs are just photographs of living people.
The stiff posture, staring eyes and awkward body positions are often mistaken for the person being dead, but really the person was just trying to hold absolutely still for around 8 seconds. The strange colors and light variations on the person's eyes and face are a sign of the old system of photography, not that they're dead. There was no color photography at the time, only black and white and sepia, a brownish tone. The photographer also had to manually develop these photos by dipping them in chemicals, so the lighting largely depended on how long the photographer left the photographs in the chemicals.
Certain details were lost if the image was left in the chemicals for too short a time, which resulted in a brighter but fainter image, or too long, which resulted in a darkened image. The details and shading also depended on how long the photographer took to capture the image. With so many variables, the images were bound to come out with strange shading, and lost or intense details occasionally. More important than both of these, trying to set up a corpse for a photograph is very complicated, especially if the person has been dead for more than a few hours.
Rigor mortis or post-death stiffening begins to set in between 2 and 6 hours after death, manipulating a dead body into any pose is almost impossible once rigor mortis has set in. After it wears off, between 48 and 60 hours later, the body has already begun to decay, and likely won't make an image the deceased's family would want to keep. Therefore, most true post-mortem photographs show the deceased as asleep, likely in a pose very close to the position they died in. If a person looks alive in a so-called post-mortem image, it's probably because they are alive.
Modern people are fascinated with Victorian post-mortem photographs because we want to believe they really went to the effort of posing dead bodies, but that's just not the case. As photography became more and more accessible to all levels of society, it became a more and more private affair to take morning photographs, and by the 1890s, professionals were no longer the only source. This led to the more modern misconception that morning photographs faded out with the Victorians, but that is not the case, the practice just became more private, its popularity also moved from the upper classes to the middle and lower classes, which makes sense seeing as it had become more affordable. Post-mortem photography spread quickly across Europe and the United States, it became very popular among Americans involved in the spiritualist movement, and where a completely new type of photography branched out from it, spirit photography, but that is a whole other subject, possibly for another episode.
Post-mortem photographs were popular up until World War I in Britain, but the practice began to fade away during the interwar years, this is likely due to the fact that most of Europe was in mourning, everyone had lost someone in the great war, and any extravagance on the behalf of a single individual felt wrong to most people, therefore large funerals, long mourning periods and many of the traditions associated with them faded. As the technology of photography changed, so did the attitudes toward death and dying. Late in the Victorian age, due to many inner city churchyards being full, and a growing awareness of the health issues that come with keeping the dead in the home, burials began to occur in pre-planned cemeteries in the country, many of which had spaces to store bodies until burial. This removed the deceased from the home, but added an expense for transporting the body to all levels of society.
In addition, these new cemeteries were civic facilities, and not associated with churches. Before, because relatives were buried at the churchyard, their families visited every Sunday, making mourning rituals quite easy to uphold. Now the family had to go out of their way to visit their dead, this added even more expense and time, therefore the desire to observe extended mourning periods also faded. The high mortality rate suffered during the Victorian era also began to wane, as vaccines and more effective medical care was introduced.
This decreased the need for mourning photography, as far fewer people, especially children, were dying of now preventable diseases. It does appear however that post-mortem photography continued in America up until World War II, among non-white, rural and working class families. One famous African-American photographer, James Van Der Zee, who worked in New York between 1917 and the mid-1940s, published a book of his mourning photographs called The Harlem Book of the Dead in 1978. Post-mortem photography is still around today, though most often it's found in the form of fine art or part of forensic photography.
Forensic photography had its first appearance in 1843 in Belgium when prisoners were documented with photographs. The mugshot prison photo became widespread in the 1870s in larger city prisons. Images of murder victims' faces were also taken for the purpose of identification. One of the first crime scenes to be photographed was the 1888 murder of Mary Kelly, one of Jack the Ripper's victims.
And yes, I will eventually do an episode on Jack the Ripper, don't you worry. Crime scene photography is still a large part of forensic investigation today. There are several artists who have photographed the dead. German photographer Rudolf Schaeffer published a collection of photographs of faces of dead people in 1989.
Barbara Norfleet published Looking at Death, a collection of photographs about death before modern medical advances in 1993. In 2017, Jeffrey Silverthorne published a collection of photographs he took in the Rhode Island State Morgue in 1973 and 74. Most of the photographs in these artists' collections are meant to show the stillness of death and remind people, just like the mental mori of the past, to remember that they will die. There are some modern examples of photography being used as a part of mourning.
The Colorado-based charity Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep offers a photography service to parents who have lost infants and mothers who deliver stillborn babies. The charity suggests that there is a healing power in remembrance and photographs of a lost child can aid in healing process. Some religious faiths today also value and circulate images of deceased holy people or saints lying in their coffins. As I said, photography advanced during a time when death was more common, thanks to disease, overcrowding, and a lack of modern medical care.
But at the same time, science was revealing that much of what humans had believed before was far more complicated. Fearing this new outlook on mortality, many people embraced photography as a way to almost cheat death, as well as commemorate individual human existence. A photograph could survive even if they did not. Confusion between photographic images and the afterlife haunted the Victorians and still haunts photography today.
People we know are deceased seem to stare out from historical photographs as if they still had intelligence and presence. Knowing the person in the image is dead, even if they're not looking at us, draws us in, makes us think about death and the unknown without getting too close to it. This is why Victorian post-mortem photography sparks our curiosity. The morbid curiosity podcast was produced by H.
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