Beyond the Veil - The Victorian Obsession With Death and Mourning

The visual history of how we deal with death – the grief and mourning, the funerals, symbols and ceremonies – is fascinatingly rich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and travelling from Victorian England across to the US, Beyond the Veil is a visual tour through this curious world, charting the often peculiar and at times macabre ways of how the living memorialise the dead.

Humans have always had ways of marking death, but in Victorian England death became a morbid obssession that went global – death was as much ‘celebrated’ as it was a source of fear and sadness. Queen Victoria herself became a figurehead of grief after the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861. Her ensuing fascination with death took many visual forms – from her ritualised embrace of black clothing to the building of ostentatious monuments – and massively influence