After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Victorian Death Photography: Postmortem Posers

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

The Victorians created the unsettling art of death photography - posing their deceased love ones in family portraits as if they were alive. How did they manage to make corpses strike poses? Why did they want to?Maddy and Anthony are joined by Brandy Schillace, author of Death’s Summer Coat - What Death and Dying Cal Tell Us about Life and Living to flick through the strangest, and most moving, of family photo albums.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit at historyhit.com/subscribe using code 'BLACKFRIDAYPOD' at checkout, for $1/£1 per month for 4 months and you’ll get nearly £30 off our normal monthly price over your first 4 months.

Hello and welcome to After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. I am Anthony Delaney. And I'm Dr Maddy Pelling. And we all know that the Victorians were obsessed with death. A lot of that comes from Queen Victoria and her loss of Prince Albert. You only need to step inside one of their cemeteries to see the extent of this devotion to the dead. I'm thinking of Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh particularly here where I often walk my dogs in the morning and see very dramatic scenes of women draped over headstones,

stone women draped over headstones or pain etched across faces that have been worked into the stone work. It's a really evocative place to dip into this Victorian obsession and idea of death. But the Victorian obsession with death did not end there, did it Anthony? Nor were their treatments and commemoration of the dead confined to graveyards. Death photography was a 19th century phenomenon and one that, as photographic studios popped up across towns and cities and more and more people trained in the use of cameras, transcended class and wealth. But the works that resulted were not necessarily the morbid, horrifying depictions of death that you might imagine. So here to tell us more about this unsettling and now largely forgotten tradition, actually,

is Brandy Scalace. Brandy is the author of Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher and Death's Summer Coat, what death and dying can tell us about life and living. Enjoy! Enjoy. What was it that drew you to this topic in the first place? Do you know? Is there something in you that you're kind of going, I think that might be where this comes from? I do. So I say a little bit about this in the book that I wrote, and I've said it some in public, but basically, I grew up in a relatively impoverished area of the country where, and I'm in the United States, so there wasn't healthcare in the way that you should have it.

And both of my parents had very close brushes with death early on. So my father had a massive heart attack. He subsequently had several more. My mother had cancer, which she did beat, but was a near thing. And I remember when I was around 12 years old, I would go to my parents' door at night to listen to make sure they were still breathing because I had an eight-year-old brother and I felt compelled that I would have to sort of take over somehow if I lost them. And there were a lot of other people who died in my family. So death wasn't one of those imaginary things. My partner, the first person who died, he was like 38.

But my family, I lost people from the age of seven on. I lost a young cousin to an inviolate way. I mean, so I knew what death was like. I'd been to many funerals. And so the reality that I might lose my parents when I was still a child was very, very real to me. And also the expense and the difficulty and the stress around trying to cover hospital bills was very real to me. So at a very and the difficulty and the stress around trying to cover hospital bills was very real to me. So at a very early age, I began being interested in things like the Black Death, for instance. I was a very big fan of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. And I lived in an underground house next to a cemetery, which I suppose also might have something to do with it. So sitting on a tombstone, reading about the Black Death,

thinking about how you might lose your parents is a really good way to turn you into a death researcher later in life. That's pretty formative. I'm loving that image, Brandy. That is a pretty incredible image. So talk to me about how this idea of Victorian death photography comes to be and talk to me a little bit about how this coincides with the birth of photography during this time period as well. It's a kind of a nice intersection of time, isn't it? It is. For all the, well, this is true of the Victorian period more generally, as you have advances in medicine and you have advances in technologies and these technologies begin for the first time to be available to more people.

So some of the first photography was daguerreotype photography, which is on a silver plate. And obviously not everybody can afford that kind of thing. So you weren't necessarily taking photographs the way we do today. We really take it for granted, right? I bet you have 200 photos or more on your phone. Probably every listener has. We have such an ability to quickly take images of our pets, our children, our family members, ourselves with the selfies. That just wasn't financially feasible. So you have this photography that is suddenly available and people are amazed by it. Like, wow, that's my image. But it's time consuming. You have to hold very still. It wasn't like our shutter speeds of today. So they would open up the plate. The

plate is going to receive the image using chemicals. And if you moved, you created a blurred image. You had to hold still for quite a long time. And that was an expensive process. It's very difficult to get your children dolled still for anything, right? But this photography allowed people to go, oh my gosh, look, I can have a true representation of what this person was like in life. And that was very exciting. But now imagine that you are a young mother

and your child of three or four has died, which happened a lot, actually. The infant mortality rate was very, very high in the Victorian period. And you want to remember this infant, but of course you don't have any images of them before they died because that would be expensive and difficult to do. You still want to remember them, the next best thing is to photograph them after they are dead. And at the very least, they will hold still for you. I find this absolutely remarkable, Brandy, that in an age where death is very visible across society, in the home, in the street sometimes, This process of making death visible by photographing it, or is it a very personal thing that's specific to each person who's having the photograph made?

Both. So actually, I would say it's more the second, because you're right, death was very visible. And this is partly because this idea of commodity culture, the Victorians also wore emblems of death. So for instance, black armbands, if you couldn't afford an entire morning suit, and there were stages. So for instance, you didn't just wear black, you wore black for a certain period of time that would not reflect light, like you wore black crepe. Then you could wear black satin, which did reflect light. Then you could wear gray, then you could wear blue. So there was actually, Then you could wear black satin, which did reflect light. Then you could wear gray. Then you could wear blue. So there was actually, if you could afford to have a wardrobe like that, there was a way to tell the entire world how long you had been mourning and perhaps how deep the mourning

was. And this was popularized by Queen Victoria, who actually wore mourning weeds after her husband died until her own death many years later. So you could see death everywhere. Death was already present, but you had no means of making that person present for you the way we think of today. We all have images of our grandparents or parents that we may have lost. They didn't have that. So with the advent of photography, you who couldn't afford to hire a painter, right, you could actually have a representation of this person that you loved in your home, not only as somebody you could remember, but also as a sort of tribute to them. It was like a celebration of the fact that you loved and cared for this person.

You mentioned Queen Victoria there, Brandy, and I think that was one of the images that was coming into my mind as you were speaking about this kind of turning mourning into an act of iconography almost. And I'm just wondering how fashionable mourning became so that it's influencing this act of death photography. Was it something that almost took on a new lease of life following the performance that Victoria was carrying out? So there were magazines that would literally have advertisements like, don't be caught in bad morning clothes. Show that you really loved your loved ones with expenses. And they were even fashion. So they would come out like, don't be caught dead in last year's morning wear. Great headline. Great headline. Just love it. And they are set up exactly the way you'd expect fashion ads to be set up, except it's for morning clothes or morning jewelry. So people who sold clothing, people who sold jewelry and art, and photographers themselves, they really took advantage of this. And then it became, I hate to say this, sort of a keeping up with the Joneses. How long did you mourn? Did you drape your mirrors in black? And so there was a funny way in which as it was visible, it was already visible, but now it's visible in a way that people can kind of judge how much you make even like, oh, they only have black armbands. Clearly they couldn't

afford an entire morning suit. I read letters where a woman was distressed that she couldn't afford morning gloves. She managed to get the other things together. So there's pressure to mourn correctly, which is something I think these days, the pressure to quote unquote mourn correctly tends to come from the medical community because we have a tendency to pathologize grief. But there was a pressure to what you were going to wear and how you were going to do it, how long you were going to mourn, how many people were going to be at the funeral, all of that. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr.

Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So let's come then Brandy to the photographs themselves or some of the photographs themselves I'm looking at one right now

so I'm going to describe it for you and then we'll talk a little bit more generally about what kind of poses might have been acceptable or expected so the image that I'm looking at now is in black and white, obviously enough. And I have a woman who has obviously enough passed away,

I guess it's more obvious that because we know it. She's sitting in what seems to be a rocking chair and behind her you can see some panelling and also some wallpaper on the wall. Her eyes are open and she is looking off to the left as I view the photograph. She's dressed in a high necked, probably black, but very dark coloured blouse and then a dark coloured skirt as well. One of her hands is in her lap and the other has been staged on one of the armrests of the chair. I said at the start of that description that it looks like it's obvious enough to me that she has passed. But actually, if I didn't know and I just came across that picture, maybe I wouldn't have known. So is that a typical pose? Is that a typical picture that you could expect in this genre?

I know that photo well, actually. The photo appears in my book and I know from whom it comes. So I worked with a collector of rare photography and mostly he collected daguerreotypes. That one is not a daguerreotype, though several of the ones that I've seen are. And he had something like 300, 400 of these, which have subsequently gone to a museum called the Dittrich Medical History Center and Museum. And I got to look over a table of just so many of these images, just all of them spread out. And it is absolutely typical. They frequently posed these persons as though they were alive, and they intended them to look as though they were alive. That one, you're right. But there is a wistful expression. I mean, you could almost imagine that she was deep in thought if you didn't know that she had passed on.

It's quite common to put them in settings that they would have been in life. So it's very possible that this was someone sitting in their own living room or parlor. If I'm thinking of the same one, there looks to be some embroidery or some sort of handicrafts about, and those could have been hers. And so it might be also a staging of here's this person, here's what they were up to, here's what they did as hobbies or handicrafts. These are representations of them. That was quite common as well. Posing of deceased children with their toys, for instance. But possibly for me, the most unusual are the photos that mix the dead children with living children or dead persons with living

people. And those are very strange because it becomes very difficult to tell which of the people, you know, it's a morning photograph. And so the one that most startled me, which I believe is in the Burns archive, is there's two elder parents seated and standing behind them with a hand on each shoulder is a teenage girl. And I, of course, assumed that one of the parents had died, but in fact, it's the standing figure who has died. How have they propped her up? They propped, yeah. So many of these, you asked me earlier about the practicalities. Yeah. So many of these, you asked me earlier about the practicalities. These photographers would have various props to hold people up, to pose their arms. In our age, we're very death phobic and we think, oh no, they start rotting right away. Oh dear. That's not true. Actually, a body takes a long time to start really decomposing. So you have three days, four days. And we think that rigor mortis happens immediately. Well, rigor mortis happens and then it relaxes again. So actually bodies are posable.

So they would have little sort of coat hook looking things to stand people up. Sometimes they would paint the eyes over the lids. I've heard of this. Yes. Well, one of the things you can't, there's a lot of things you can fake. And the reason that when you see a body in an open casket, the eyes are closed is the one thing that we just can't really fake are eyes. Your eyes shrink and shrivel. They're mostly water. So as the body dries out over a course of even hours to days, the eyes become not nice to look at. So the eyes are either closed, but in this case, they wanted her to seem like she was alive. And so they will sometimes paint over the lids and occasionally actually make changes to the photographs themselves afterwards. So there's a couple of different ways that it gets done.

But that one's very disturbing. I think I've seen an example of people who had painted the eyes onto the photograph over the picture. onto the photograph over the picture. And that's so interesting because that raises so many issues there about the sort of removal once again from the body and the layer of distance as well as commemoration that the photograph provides, I suppose because people would be then looking

at the photograph after the body has been removed, you know, and it's something to keep and kind of look back on. And there's something there about the intimacy of posing a body and then the non-intimacy the distance that a photograph can create really it's it's a strange a strange sort of compromise i don't know brandy i don't know what you think but like there's also something about the proximity to the dead right in terms of i know in ireland we still very much wake the dead. And so we, I mean, it's probably a bit of a strange example, but when my grandmother passed away,

my husband came into the hospital to, you know, just see the family. But he didn't realise that her body was still in the bed. And he's English and he'd never been to a wake and he'd never seen a dead body. And so he was very much taken aback. Whereas we as children are slightly forced, I will say, into wake rooms where there is a dead body on display. And obviously this is happening in Victorian times too, where there is a proximity to death that is not so much taboo. Right. And I think what I would say about that, which also gets to your point about the combination of intimacy and distance, is that frequently people died at home. We have sort of sanitized, scrubbed death, so to speak,

especially here in the United States, which is where I'm located. So on one hand, we do have open caskets here, which is almost de rigueur, right? Everybody sort of has the open casket model typically in the United States, but it's so removed. So a person is ill, they leave the house and go to the hospital. And often you don't see them again, or if you see them in the hospital, it's sort of very sterile and there's white walls and there's people and it's clean and it's tidy and there's still this barrier of medicine in between you. And then you don't see them again until they are treated and preserved and dressed and in an open casket.

So there is a lack of reality that happens when we do that process. And I remember as a child, so part of my family is from West Virginia and my West Virginian side of the family are Scots-Irish. And so we did do wakes. My very first funeral had a wake, but then the next one didn't. And it was so, I didn't understand why. I was like, why didn't we do the thing? It felt very, because it felt so much more alien in a way to see someone when they were sick and then suddenly see this very propped up kind of posed body in a casket, you know, sometimes weeks later. it, you know, sometimes weeks later. Whereas when my grandfather had passed, similar to you, we had a wake for the body. And it was in an actual parlor of someone's home. So we weren't even in a hospital, you know, you're just there and there's granddad. And I think that that

intimacy is something I sort of took for granted. But in the Victorian period, you also died at home and your relatives washed your body and dressed your body and prepared your body. And that still happens cross-culturally, but not typically in the United States or England or Europe, et cetera. So I think that's a one level further. You've touched, handled, bathed. You're aware of sort of the messier, less nice things about bodies that typically we reserve for undertakers and, you know, funeral directors and people who work in morgues, etc. I think the domestic setting as well of the photographs in particular is so interesting, because looking at the same one that we've just been discussing of the woman sat in the, I think it's a rocking chair chair and she has some of her embroidery or some kind of craft work behind her that there is so much of that home

on display and the objects that she's associated with that we've got to remember as well that that setting would remain the same the seat would probably still be there her work might still be there and so the photograph kind of provides a link to that environment. And it's a way maybe, it's quite a ghostly way of placing that person back in the environment after they have left it, whether they died there or not, that you can kind of reinsert them into an objectscape that still exists. do that. And one of the things that I noticed, there was one particular image that stood out to me a lot in my research, which was a child had died and the family, they took a photograph with the infant while the infant was in its coffin. And that's a very different kind of image. This is an image that is not pretending that the child lived. This is an image that is actually preserving the fact that the child died. And there are a couple of those, which I think is very interesting and goes to, I mean, of course, it's the family's wishes, typically, that you're

seeing. One particularly upsetting photo that I saw was a photographer took a photo of an infant through a window in a quarantine house because it had been quarantined against contagious disease. So, you know, there's a vast array of the way these things were done. And only very occasionally do we know what the thoughts of the people are. But once in a while, one of those photos will have information on the back. So there was a set of two photos, one of a gentleman in a coffin, and then another picture of the same gentleman posed as though living. And the back of the photograph of him in a coffin and then another picture of the same gentleman posed as though living. And the back of the photograph of him in the coffin actually had notes, probably that the photographer wrote down, probably from the family, saying things like, you know, this is how he wears

his mustache. And, you know, and it does remind me a little bit of when you, if you're going to do an open casket in the US, you typically, you pick out the clothing or you say, this is how they would have worn their hair or et cetera. So that was also part of it. And every once in a while you get a glimpse of what the family sort of wanted from those photos. But usually we just have to guess. Can I ask as well, it just occurred to me, I don't know the answer to this, where were these photographs meant to be displayed? Was it something for private consumption that would have been maybe inserted into a Bible or was this framed framed and put on a mantelpiece hung on the wall? For the memento mori photos, the photos of the death that you were grieving,

they were frequently put right up in the house. They would have them prominently displayed. Sometimes they would also be draped with a kind of black fabric to kind of represent. When it comes to more personal, smaller memento mori, that was more private. Even if you wore it as a jewel, for instance, like a brooch or a ring, only you knew who that hair belonged to or that item belonged to. So braided hair in a locket, that's where that more personal side might be located, whereas the photographs were intended for public display, usually. I have seen a few very, very small ones that were clearly meant to either be sort of pocket versions, or it almost

reminds me of the small icons people would carry if they were in Orthodox faiths. They're about that size. But normally, people were intending to share these with other people. I guess an interest in showing bodies as being lively in some way, as being sort of reanimated, or, you know, even the Memento Mori pictures with the eyes open, there's an element of sort of trying to imitate life whilst making it very clear that these people are dead in most instances. So why? What's this fascination with post-mortem liveliness? What is that about? I think for most of the grief portraits that were taken, it was probably hoping that you could create an image you could display that people wouldn't necessarily know that the child had

already died. I'm saying child because I'm thinking of, it was an image of three children, two of them are alive and one of them is dead, posed together as though they are playing together. And I'm trying to imagine what that does to you as the other two children, you know, but they were more familiar and more intimate with death than we are. So perhaps it wasn't a big deal. just something that if you put that on a wall to share, there's a point at which it ceases to be a grief object and begins to be, you know, a family portrait. So for instance, I have photographs of my grandparents and I put them on display, but they were taken when they were alive and doing things that live people do. It would never occur to me to, even if I had one, to display a picture of them after they had gone, looking like they had gone. Because then you're stuck in that. Grief is a process and we never get through that process. It's a long process. I've often compared grieving for a loved one like an amputation of some part of your body.

You don't go back to the way you were before, but you learn to live with it. So I suspect that the living photographs that are meant to look living for people in that time period are photographs you can continue to look at after you've processed through that grief and come out in a different space. And now you can look at it with joy and remembrance in the way I look at the pictures taken of my grandparents when they were alive. I was trying to think if it's gone somewhere today and I was just thinking this isn't directly comparable but initially I was thinking you know some people put pictures of the person when they were alive on the tombstone but equally I just recalled that in the last few

years I will not be naming names in the last few years I was definitely at a wake where I saw somebody use their smartphone to take a picture of the body in the coffin as it was being waked. And I remember being quite shocked at that as well and thinking, what are they doing? But it's nothing got to do with me. But it's, you know, that's in a way, death photography, right? It certainly is. You know, you might have seen that there's a bit of a controversy happening right now over the display of human remains in the Mudra Museum and not just in the Mudra, it's the Hunterian. There's lots of other places that are facing this right now. It's whether or not you have consent to do such things.

And so memento mori photography was common in the Victorian period. If you were ill or dying, you would probably have a sense that, yes, this is something that they were going to do. Maybe you even spoke to your loved ones about it if it wasn't a sudden death because you might've had input. We live in a culture where no one photographs the, like that's not, you know, we know that's not appropriate. You don't do that. So it's very unlikely that anyone would die thinking that their body was going to be photographed later on, apart from say pathological or forensic reasons. So it's So some of that comes down to consent. Like, who gives consent for you to take a photograph of a body in a coffin? It's touchy, isn't it?

Yeah, totally. I mean, we're going to have to wrap up soon, which I could keep talking about this forever. But before we do, I do want to ask you one thing. What do you think, as a parting question, what do you think we can learn today about death from looking into death in the past? process our grief. And we have lost a lot of rituals, partly because we're a much less religious society than we once were, but you can't really grieve wrong. And so I always tell people, take a look at what works, what worked in your past, what worked in the past, look at other cultures, choose the things that allow you to process through grief in the best way for yourself, because you cannot grieve wrong unless you don't do it at all. Thanks for listening to After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal.

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