Victorian Spiritualism & the Death-Positive Movement¶

Overview¶

The Victorian era saw two parallel obsessions: an elaborate culture of death (mourning dress, memento mori photography, hair jewellery, grand funerals) and a surge of interest in spiritualism -- the belief that the living could communicate with the dead through seances, mediums, and spirit photography.

These were not separate movements. They fed each other. A society saturated in death ritual was naturally drawn to the possibility that death was not final.

Victorian Death Culture¶

The Victorians lived with death in a way that is difficult to imagine today. Epidemics of diphtheria, typhus, and cholera swept through cities with no effective treatment. Child mortality was devastating -- roughly half of all children died before the age of five. Death was not something that happened elsewhere, in hospitals, behind closed doors. It happened at home, repeatedly, and to everyone.

Out of this intimacy with death grew an extraordinary culture of mourning and memorialisation.

Mourning Customs¶

After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Queen Victoria entered a period of mourning so prolonged and public that it reshaped social expectations across the country. Strict codes governed what the bereaved could wear and for how long: widows were expected to wear full black crepe for at least a year, followed by graduated stages of half-mourning in muted greys and lavenders. Men wore black armbands. Mourning stationery, bordered in black, was used for correspondence. Social engagements were curtailed according to a rigid timetable that varied depending on the relationship to the deceased.

These were not merely performative gestures. They served a function that modern Western culture has largely abandoned: they made grief visible. A person in mourning dress was immediately legible as someone moving through loss, and the community was expected to respond accordingly.

Memento Mori¶

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Victorian death culture to modern eyes is memento mori photography -- portraits taken of the recently deceased, often posed as though sleeping or even standing, sometimes with painted-open eyes and rosy cheeks added to the print. These were not considered macabre. In many cases, especially for infants and children, the post-mortem photograph was the only image the family would ever have.

The practice extended beyond photography. Hair from the deceased was woven into intricate jewellery -- brooches, lockets, bracelets, rings -- and worn as keepsakes. Death masks were cast in plaster. Mourning rings inscribed with the name and dates of the dead were exchanged. All of these objects served the same purpose: to keep the dead present in the world of the living, to resist the finality of loss through material remembrance.

The "Beautiful Death"¶

The Victorians idealised what they called a "good death": a peaceful, dignified passing at home, surrounded by family, with time to settle both material and spiritual affairs. The deathbed scene was understood as a moment of transition rather than termination, and the manner of one's dying was taken as a reflection of one's spiritual state. The body was washed and laid out at home -- often by the same women described in The Village Wise Woman -- and the wake was held in the family parlour.

Garden Cemeteries¶

The Victorian era also invented the cemetery as we know it. Before the nineteenth century, the dead were buried in overcrowded churchyards. The Victorians created garden cemeteries -- Highgate, Kensal Green, Père Lachaise -- designed as public parks and places of reflection, with elaborate monuments, landscaped paths, and seating for visitors. They were places for the living as much as the dead, and they remain some of the most atmospheric spaces in any city.

The Spiritualist Movement¶

The Fox Sisters¶

On the evening of 31 March 1848, in a small house in Hydesville, New York, two sisters -- Kate (eleven) and Margaretta (fifteen) Fox -- claimed to hear mysterious rapping sounds on the walls and furniture. The sounds appeared to respond to questions. Their mother asked how many children she had; the raps gave the correct number. Neighbours were summoned, and word spread that the Fox family's house was haunted by the spirit of a murdered peddler.

What followed was remarkable. The girls were taken in by their older sister Leah, who -- recognising an opportunity -- began managing their career as mediums. In November 1849, the Fox sisters held the first public demonstration of spiritualism at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, before a paying audience. They soon moved to New York City, where their seances attracted prominent figures including Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Within a few years, spiritualism had swept across America and into Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were thousands of spiritualist societies and circles worldwide. The practice of the seance -- sitting around a table in a darkened room, hands joined, waiting for the dead to speak -- became a fixture of drawing-room culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Queen Victoria herself held seances in Buckingham Palace after Albert's death.

In 1888, Margaretta publicly confessed that the rappings had been a fraud from the beginning -- the sisters had produced the sounds by cracking their knuckles, toes, and other joints. She demonstrated the technique before an audience of two thousand at the New York Academy of Music. Kate was in the audience, lending silent support. Margaretta recanted a year later, but by then both sisters were struggling with poverty and alcoholism. Kate died in 1892; Margaretta followed eight months later.

The confession barely dented the movement. Spiritualism continued to grow throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whatever the Fox sisters had started -- whether by fraud, by accident, or by tapping into something genuine in the culture's need -- it had taken on a life of its own.

Spirit Photography¶

If the seance claimed to let the living hear the dead, spirit photography claimed to let them see them. Pioneered in the 1860s by William Mumler in Boston, spirit photographs showed ghostly, translucent figures hovering behind or beside the living sitter. Mumler's most famous image showed Mary Todd Lincoln with the spectral figure of her assassinated husband standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders.

The technique was almost certainly double exposure, and Mumler was eventually tried for fraud (though acquitted). But the practice persisted and found a wide audience, particularly among the bereaved. The desire to see a dead loved one again -- even in a blurred, translucent print -- was powerful enough to sustain an entire industry of spirit photographers, despite repeated exposures of their methods.

Women and Mediumship¶

One of the most significant aspects of Victorian spiritualism was the unusual public authority it gave to women. At a time when women were excluded from the pulpit, the lecture hall, and most professions, the seance room was one of the few spaces where a woman could claim spiritual authority and be taken seriously -- even paid -- for it.

The medium's role had echoes of the village wise woman: a female figure who claimed access to the unseen world, who mediated between the living and the dead, who operated outside institutional structures. The spiritualist movement was closely linked from its earliest days with radical causes, including abolition, temperance, and women's suffrage. The same Quaker circles that embraced the Fox sisters were also at the forefront of these reform movements.

This was not coincidental. Spiritualism offered a framework in which women's voices were not merely permitted but required. The dead, it seemed, preferred to speak through women.

The Death-Positive Movement¶

From Victorian Mourning to Modern Silence¶

The open, ritualised, community-centred relationship with death that defined the Victorian era did not survive the twentieth century. Two world wars, the professionalisation of medicine, the rise of the hospital as the default place of dying, and the growth of the commercial funeral industry combined to push death behind closed doors. By the mid-twentieth century, the dying happened out of sight, the body was handled by strangers, and grief was expected to be private and brief.

The modern death-positive movement is, in part, an attempt to reverse this. It seeks to reclaim the openness about death that the Victorians practised -- though without the rigid social codes -- and to challenge the industrial model of deathcare that replaced it.

The Order of the Good Death¶

In 2011, Caitlin Doughty -- a young funeral director in Los Angeles -- founded The Order of the Good Death after witnessing firsthand how the funeral industry set families up for failure, both financially and emotionally. The organisation advocates for death acceptance, natural burial, home funerals, and the right of families to be involved in the care of their own dead.

Doughty's YouTube series Ask a Mortician brings dark humour and genuine warmth to subjects that most people find unbearable: cremation, decomposition, embalming, coffin birth, the history of famous corpses. Her books -- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2014) and From Here to Eternity (2017) -- have been widely read and are listed in this wiki's Directory.

The term "death positive" was coined by Doughty in 2013. It does not mean being cheerful about death. It means believing that open, honest conversation about mortality is healthier than silence; that the dying and the bereaved deserve better than they currently get; and that a funeral should not require a second mortgage.

The Movement Today¶

The death-positive movement has grown well beyond the Order. Death Cafes -- informal gatherings where people discuss death over tea and cake -- now take place in cities around the world. Death doulas (also called end-of-life doulas) offer non-medical support to the dying and their families, echoing the role of the laying-out woman. The home funeral movement encourages families to wash, dress, and sit with their dead at home rather than handing them immediately to a funeral director. Green burial -- interment without embalming, in a biodegradable shroud or coffin -- is growing in popularity as an alternative to the chemical-intensive, resource-heavy conventional burial.

There is an interesting gender thread running through all of this. The wise women who cared for the dead in their communities were largely displaced by a male-dominated, professionalised funeral industry. The Victorian mediums who claimed authority over the dead were mostly women. And the modern death-positive movement is, again, led predominantly by women. Doughty has noted this pattern herself.

Connections¶

See The Village Wise Woman -- the pre-industrial tradition that the death-positive movement echoes
See Psychopomps in Pagan Traditions -- the medium as a modern psychopomp figure
See Samhain & the Thinning Veil -- the Wiccan festival most concerned with communication between the living and the dead
See Death Folklore of the British Isles -- the mirrors, clocks, lyke wakes, and mourning customs that the Victorians elaborated
See Divination -- scrying and spirit communication as divination practices
See The Directory for recommended reading on these topics