Death was everywhere for the Victorians, but it was never commonplace

Death’s great paradox is its inconstant constancy. Its forms and rituals change from generation to generation. In our own era, antibiotics have reduced the chance of a fatal infection, and average life expectancy has risen to our eighties. Direct cremation means we can even ship Auntie Maudie, when her time comes, to the crematorium sight unseen and have her ashes returned via DHL. Our existential encounter with death in society is muted to a murmur.

Unlike the Irish and their open-coffin wakes, the English almost never now see a corpse. So it is hard to imagine how our great-great-grandparents lived in a world where fatal fevers struck at random and the infant mortality rate was 50 per cent. Or how the most minor accident – an undressed wound or a broken arm – could swiftly turn fatally gangrenous.

For the Victorians, as Judith Flanders sometimes stomach-churningly shows in her splendid Rites of Passage, death was all around. Rivers stank with sewage; churchyards were stuffed with rotting corpses (it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that legislation sought to limit overcrowding burial sites) and streets were thronged with the spluttering, infectious poor. In the 1820s, a Revd Howse, intent on collecting burial fees, opened the cellar of his Baptist chapel near the Royal Courts of Justice in London’s Strand and, in the space of seven years, managed to cram 12,000 bodies into a plot the size of a small garden. The stench rose through the floorboards, mingling with hymns of resurrectional glory.

Above ground, typhus, cholera and tuberculosis raged, without their causes being understood. These diseases were still attributed to mysterious miasmas and ill balances of bodily humours. Laudanum was doled out as a pain suppressant.