Beyond the Veil: The Victorian Obsession With Mourning and Death

(Hardback)

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The visual history of how we deal with death - the grief andmourning, the funerals, symbols and ceremonies - is fascinatinglyrich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,and travelling from Victorian England across to the US, Beyondthe Veil is a visual tour through this curious world, charting theoften peculiar and at times macabre ways of how the livingmemorialise the dead.Humans have always had ways of marking death, but in VictorianEngland death became a morbid obssession that went global - deathwas as much 'celebrated' as it was a source of fear and sadness.Queen Victoria herself became a figurehead of grief after the death ofher beloved Prince Albert in 1861. Her ensuing fascination with deathtook many visual forms - from her ritualised embrace of black clothingto the building of ostentatious monuments - and massively influencedcutlural norms in both the UK and further afield.The Victorians built complex cemeteries, collected precious momentomori, commissioned bizzare death portraits and obssesed over thecorrect mourning attire and funerary protocal, while turn-of-thecentury America saw reflections of many of these cultural phenomena.The bestsellers of the period were often about life and death (thinkFrankenstein and Dracula), while the art, architecture and style -with its often dark and heavy gothic overtones - revelled in theglamorisation of death. Beyond the Veil brings this extraordinarilly elaborate and stylised visual culture together while expertly explaining and elaborating on its most peculiar and fascinating aspects.

Author Bio

US-based Paul Gambino has been an avid collector of the bizarre for over 20 years with an extensive collection of Victorian memorial photographs, antique funeria, mug shots, and vintage religious items (including a life-sized St. Sebastian and Virgin Mary salvaged from a 19th-century church in Pennsylvania).