do you know anything about actual Victorian mortuary practices?
first of all, if you want to complain about people making bodies look asleep, youâll have to go all the way back to ancient Egypt and boy are you not going to like the lengths THEY went to to keep the body looking as alive as possible. they even hired people to do it! and yet thatâs different somehow?
yeah, embalming caught on among elite Americans in the mid-19th century because Lincoln was embalmed for his funerary tour. but for 99% of people, cleaning and dressing and preparing a body for burial remained part of the grieving process. the last thing you could do for a loved one; the last chance to touch them and see them before they disappeared forever. mortuaries did rise as houses became too small in urban areas to accomodate full wakes, but you cannot possibly believe that people who took post-mortem photographs and wore entire necklaces made from their late loved onesâ hair were trying to deny death
ye gods. either they were creepy and morbid for trying to hold onto memories in tangible ways or theyâre responsible for the entire damn modern funeral industry because they preferred terminology that implied their loved ones were still alive somewhere. but I guess consistency matters less than establishing how superior we are to those nasty people in the Bad Old Days
blame the Victorians for something they actually did, like watering down folklore or making up iron maidens or peddling arsenic skin treatments or perpetuating colonialism
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