Victorian Death Pictures

You’ve probably seen them: photographs of the dead posed among the living in Victorian clothing. Sometimes, they look just slightly off, but sometimes, the difference between them and the living is almost imperceptible; the only hint that something is wrong is that uncanny sense tingling in the back of your mind.

Victorian death photography is one of the most creepy, fascinating fads of the era, and considering how chock-full of mourning rituals the Victorian period was, that’s really saying something. But what were these photographs, and how did they even start in the first place?

What are Victorian Death Photographs?

Primarily, the answer is simple: Victorian Death Photographs were final reminders of lost loved ones that could be kept long after their memories had faded. Photography was a brand-new process; daguerreotypes were invented in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839. As time passed, daguerreotypes became more and more popular, but they were still expensive, and the long exposure time made them more akin to painted portraits than modern photography. Subjects had to sit still in front of the camera for ten to fifteen minutes at the shortest; at the longest, it sometimes took seventy minutes to capture a photograph.

It wasn’t practical for a family to take regular portraits, which meant that often, the first photographs they took of their young children were after they had already died.

Death brings an urgency to our lives that few other things do, and faced with fading memories and a long future without their child ahead of them, parents would often invite photographers into their home to capture their deceased children for the first and last time to ensure they’d always have a visual reminder of how they looked in life (or, at least, as close to it as possible). Photographs were taken of adults after they died, too, but of course, the older a person was, the harder they often were to prop up; sometimes, a mother’s children would be used to hold up her body rather than a chair or bed to include them in the process, too.

So how can you tell they’re dead?

Sometimes, the answer is obvious: the person just looks "wrong." Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell, so here are a few things to look for.

If the eyes look a little off, they may have been painted on the photo after it was taken. Sometimes, eyelids were propped open, too, and you can tell from the look of them that the person is deceased.

On the reverse side, living people would sometimes have their cheeks rouged in post-production, as it were; the dead, by comparison, would be left pale-cheeked, so the viewer could tell who was living and who wasn’t.

The deceased subjects of death photographs, when photographed as though they were living, are often propped against something or held in place by hooks or clamps (which were also used to keep living children still for the duration of the daguerreotype). Otherwise, they’d be photographed as though they were sleeping peacefully, and they’d often be surrounded by their favorite or most expensive items.

Finally, a secret lies in the production of the daguerreotype itself: Because of the long exposure time, living people often come out blurry around the edges in photos because they can’t hold completely still; the dead, however, don’t have that problem, so their edges are much sharper, especially when compared directly against the living in the same photograph.

But why did all this start?

The Victorians had a very different outlook on mourning than we do, thanks in no small part to Queen Victoria herself. When her husband Albert died in 1861, she entered a permanent state of deep mourning, wearing black for the rest of her life and largely removing herself from the public eye. As a result, mourning became “fashionable”, and widows especially were expected to enter mourning for up to two and a half years after their husbands’ deaths. (Men, of course, were only supposed to mourn for around six months, and it was far more appropriate for them to “move on” with their lives).

The Victorian Era also saw the birth of the spirituality movement, so death was at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Daguerreotypes weren’t the only way they’d mourn; they created wax death masks, turned locks of human hair into necklaces, rings, or brooches, and had very strict (and expensive) views on the clothes worn after a death. Mourning was broken down into deep mourning, ordinary mourning, and half-mourning depending on the person’s relationship to the deceased and how long their loved one had been dead. Deep mourning required only dull black fabrics; ordinary mourning allowed black silk, simple jewelry, and decorations and adornments on the clothing. Half-mourning let people expand their wardrobe slightly into colors like grey, purple, and lilac, and allowed white trim on black clothing as well.

Children, though, were expected to be protected from mourning as much as possible; in fact, parents were told to shorten their mourning periods to protect their children’s spirits as much as possible... which makes sense because children were the most likely to die. Any perceived damage to their psyche only lessened their chances of survival, which were already at a dismal 46%. 463 out of every 1000 children born didn’t make it past five years old thanks to diseases like cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, measles, and scarlet fever, and the lack of vaccines certainly didn’t help, either. That’s why just so many of these death portraits are of children: Death photography was a Victorian parent’s last, desperate attempt to preserve the memory of their deceased children permanently, and it quickly became a full-family affair.