At Home - Bill Bryson [182]
At all levels of society mourning rules were strict and exhaustingly comprehensive. Every possible permutation of relationship was considered and ruled on. If, for example, the dearly departed was an uncle by marriage, he was to be mourned for two months if his wife survived him, but for just one month if he was unmarried or widowed himself. So it went through the entire canon of relationships. One needn’t even have met the people being mourned. If one’s husband had been married before and widowed—a fairly common condition—and a close relative of his first wife’s died, the second wife was expected to engage in “complementary mourning”—a kind of proxy mourning on behalf of the deceased earlier partner.
Exactly how long and in what manner mourning clothes were worn was determined with equally meticulous precision by the degree of one’s bereavement. Widows, already swaddled in pounds of suffocating broadcloth, had additionally to drape themselves in black crape, a type of rustly crimped silk. Crape was scratchy, noisy, and maddeningly difficult to maintain. Raindrops on crape left whitish blotches wherever they touched it, and the crape in turn ran onto fabric or skin underneath. A crape stain ruined any fabric it touched and was nearly impossible to wash off skin. The amounts of crape worn were strictly dictated by the passage of time. One could tell at a glance how long a woman had been widowed by how much crape she had at each sleeve. After two years, a widow moved into a phase known as “half mourning” when she could begin to wear gray or pale lavender, so long as they weren’t introduced too abruptly.
Servants were required to mourn when their employers died, and a period of national mourning was decreed when a monarch died. Much consternation ensued when Queen Victoria expired in 1901, because it had been over sixty years since the last regal departure and no one could agree what level of mourning was appropriate to such a long-lasting monarch in such a new age.
As if Victorians didn’t have enough to worry about already, they developed some peculiar anxieties about death. Edgar Allan Poe exploited one particular fear to vivid effect in his story “The Premature Burial” in 1844. Catalepsy, a condition of paralysis in which the victim merely seemed dead while actually being fully conscious, became the dread disease of the day. Newspapers and popular magazines abounded with stories of people who suffered from its immobilizing effects.
One well-known case was that of Eleanor Markham of upstate New York, who was about to be buried in July 1894 when anxious noises were heard coming from her coffin. The lid was lifted and Miss Markham cried out: “My god, you are burying me alive!” She told her saviors: “I was conscious all the time you were making preparations to bury me. The horror of my situation is altogether beyond description. I could hear everything that was going on, even a whisper outside the door.” But no matter how much she willed herself to cry out, she said, she was powerless to utter a noise.
According to one report, of twelve hundred bodies exhumed in New York City for one reason or another between 1860 and 1880, six showed signs of thrashing or other postinterment distress. In London, when the naturalist Frank Buckland went looking for the coffin of the anatomist John Hunter at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, he reported coming upon three