How the Victorians could help us to die well

Victorians welcomed the angel of death, rather than fearing it. Ian Bradley explores their changing attitudes towards death. Part of the How to Die Well series.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

When it comes to dying well, there is much that we can learn from our Victorian forebears. Experiencing death more frequently and directly than most of us do, they were not frightened by it but regarded it rather as part of the natural order and, thanks to the pervasive influence of the Christian faith, as the gateway to eternal life.

In his widely read epic poem, ‘In Memoriam’, inspired by the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22 and published in 1851, Alfred Tennyson posed the rhetorical question: ‘How fares it with the happy dead?’. It struck a deep chord with his readers, as did his answer that they are ‘the breathers of an ampler day for ever nobler ends’.

The Victorians thought, wrote, preached, and sang about death and what follows it far more than we do today. Novels were judged by the power and pathos of their death bed scenes. Ninety hymns in the 1889 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern deal primarily with the experience of death and dying. By contrast, there is not a single hymn on this subject in its current successor, the 2013 Ancient & Modern: Hymns and Songs for Refreshing Worship. Death and heaven featured prominently in popular poems, none more so than those by Adelaide Procter, a devout Catholic and the second most read Victorian poet after Tennyson. For her, ‘the beautiful angel, Death, waiting at the portals of the skies’ is to be welcomed rather than dreaded. Her verses about a ‘lost chord’ that an organist realises he may only hear again in heaven, set to music by Arthur Sullivan, who also had no fear of death, became the best-selling song in Britain throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

To our modern taste, such sentiments may seem maudlin and morbid. We have done our best to sweep death under the carpet and we think little about what may follow it.

For most Victorian Christians death was something to be looked forward to rather than dreaded. Frederick William Faber, who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, was typical in his enthusiastic evocation of its joyful and liberating character:

O grave and pleasant cheer of death! How it softens our hearts and without pain kills the spirit of the world within our hearts! It draws us towards God, filling us with strength and banishing our fears, and sanctifying us by the pathos of its sweetness. When we are weary and hemmed in by life, close and hot and crowded, when we are in strife and self-dissatisfied, we have only to look out in our imagination over wood and hill, and sunny earth and starlit mountains, and the broad seas whose blue waters are jewelled with bright islands, and rest ourselves on the sweet thought of the diligent, ubiquitous benignity of death.

To our modern taste, such sentiments may seem maudlin and morbid. We have done our best to sweep death under the carpet and we think little about what may follow it. For the Victorians, by contrast, it was an ever-present reality, mostly happening at home rather than out of sight in a curtained-off hospital bed or care home, and directly affecting the young as well as the old. The average life expectancy of someone born in Britain in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession, was just 39 years, less than half the current figure of 81. Infant mortality stood at 150 per 1,000 births and actually rose through the century, reaching 160 per 1,000 births in 1899 – the current level is just over three per 1,000.

It was in this context that Victorian clergy sought to dispel anxious fears about death and help people to die well by expounding the Christian doctrine of eternal life. There was a pastoral imperative to do so when seeking to minister to so many who were dying or grieving.

Their focus was on the promise of heaven rather than the fear of hell. There was still a continuing adherence within the churches to the doctrine of eternal punishment for the wicked in the aftermath of a final and terrible Day of Judgment. However, the latter half of the nineteenth century saw a marked decline of belief in hell, prompted partly by the impact of the new German school of biblical criticism which challenged Biblical literalism and by moral revulsion at the idea that a basically benevolent and good God could consign people who had not led particularly bad lives to eternal torment.

Increasing missionary endeavour and contact with those of other faiths, or of no faith, also made many Christians uneasy with the idea that a large proportion of the human race were condemned to everlasting punishment simply because they had never encountered the Christian Gospel.

As fear of hell subsided, so hope of heaven came to occupy a much more prominent place in Victorian thought and imagination. This can be clearly seen in the language of hymns. Heaven receives over 100 explicit mentions in the seminal 1889 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and there are a further 43 references to Paradise. Hell is mentioned in just 15 of the 638 hymns and only in four of those is it conceived of primarily as a place of pain and punishment.

Hymns are, indeed, a good place to gain an insight into Victorian views of death and heaven. Two popular ones written at the very beginning of Victoria’s reign set the tone for those that followed. ‘I’m but a stranger here, heaven is my home’ by Thomas Taylor, a Bradford Congregational minister, and ‘There is a happy land, far, far away’ by Edinburgh schoolmaster Andrew Young, emphasize the idea of death as a home-coming and reinforce the conviction, increasingly common among Victorian clergy, that friends and family will be reunited in heaven.

As mortality rates rise in the wake of Covid and as a consequence of an ever-older population and death comes out of the closet, we are at last beginning to talk and think about it more. Through their poems and hymns, the Victorians can help us to be less fearful and to die well.

Ian's new book Breathers of an Ampler Day: Victorian Views of Heaven is published by Sacristy Press.

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17 October 2024

6 min read

Bled dry: some red flags for those who hope to date a vampire

A philosopher's guide to undying love.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A modern vampire stairs at the face of his girlfried.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in Twilight.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s undying passion for all things gothic. In the first of a two-part series, he asks what is so irresistible about vampires, what do we want from them, and what’s the deal with the armadillos?

Historians point to John Polidori’s The Vampyre as that vital moment in Western vampire lore when the grisly undead creature becomes instead a Casanova. London, 1819. Lord Ruthven, the suave vampire in question, seduces young women and orchestrates chaos in the lives of others—all for his own carnal pleasure. Importantly, he does this by way of persuasion, not rote coercion, which illustrates a key aspect of the modern vampires’ modus operandi. They prefer romance to compulsion, seduction to force. They prefer thrall, almost to the end, at which point the monster fully emerges and the victims fully grasp that their good senses have been compromised. But by then it is too late.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,” Goethe once observed. Similarly, none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who believe themselves to be dating vampires.

To resist, however, is easier said than done. Even Buffy the vampire slayer succumbs to thrall, so much so that she invites Dracula to bite her. And he happily obliges, if “happily” is possible in the mind of a vampire. Later, having sobered up from the ordeal, Buffy stakes the villain, but we are nonetheless left with an uneasy feeling. Despite all her experience, despite all her kung-fu knowhow, Buffy still crumbles in the wake of thrall, at least temporarily, putting herself in grave danger and eliciting from us a pressing set of questions. How could this have happened so easily? Will this happen again? Are women attracted to men in capes?

Much like kryptonite, vampire magic also affects Superman. Two vampires have so far succeeded in hypnotizing him. Crucifer, not fortunate in name, enthralls our protagonist and sends him on several errands, until the Man of Steel has a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics call it, at which point he punches the ancient vampire through the heart. Dracula, too, disguised as an aristocrat named Rominoff, charms our superhero rather easily and then bites him on the neck, only to explode—hilariously—on the premise that Superman’s blood is tinged with sunlight. A moment of dream logic used to subvert the expectation that superblood might somehow benefit the Count.

Lord Ruthven of Polidori fame also wanders into the DC Comic Book Universe and, per usual, charms his way through problems, until he inadvertently skewers himself on a war memorial. Before this happens, however, we get the strong impression that Ruthven could beguile Superman with ease, if given the chance: that pens are mightier than swords and always have been.

On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves.

Psychoanalysts observe that to empathize with sociopaths is to negate the self most dangerously. They are right, I think, and right—too—that self-erasure proves difficult to recognize at times, because it feels like love. Such is the predicament of those who hope to rendezvous with vampires. Perhaps they have a death wish, some will say, or maybe a savior syndrome, as if they are to save the brooding scoundrels. As if they can. Regardless, the monsters have another plan entirely. As an early church father once explained, those who dine with the devils should bring long spoons.

Not that vampires are particularly good at banquets. They inevitably exaggerate, like the Macbeths as they welcome King Duncan to the castle: “All our service,” the lady says, “in every point twice done and then done double.”

Or recall the embroidered hospitality of Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula, caught between silent film and sound: “I bid you welcome,” he says, acting out the part as if the audience must see the motive on his face. A perfect moment when the silent cinema and talking pictures conspire to produce the quintessential vampire ethos, an overstated affectation framed for the modern age. The bow of pretended humility, the elongated gesture, the monumental gravity. The outfit.

Some speculate that if vampires were able to see themselves in mirrors, they would reconsider their wardrobes. We have reason to think otherwise. Of course, the true gothic is not the vampire aesthetic, because the true gothic always points to Heaven, as in Notre Dame Cathedral, for instance, or Westminster Abbey. On the contrary, vampires have a long history of not pointing to Heaven. Instead, they gild the lily. In their attempt to out-gothic the gothic, they turn their style inwardly upon themselves, incurvatus in se, which signals not grandeur but rather self-apotheosis. In essence, vampires are their own cathedrals, and with this premise proceed accordingly, candelabras in tow.

Longinus, in On the Sublime, uses the term “frigidity” to describe the emotional effect produced by such false grandeur. He means to convey both rhetorical and metaphysical coldness, as does Dante, who places the Devil in a block of ice at the Inferno’s gaudy center. As does Stanley Kubrick, too, who freezes the possessed Jack in the maze at the end of The Shining. And somewhere near the frozen middle of Hell we find the vampires, those who betrayed the strangers in their midst and preyed upon the lonely and the desperate. But now they only devour themselves. We are punished by our sins, not for them.

On a side note, and concerning the vampire’s many choristers, the opening scene of Lugosi’s Dracula features three armadillos. They wander about the castle and mind their own business, it seems, as wolves howl and spiders weave their webs. On how they got there we do not know, but the armadillos further confirm Longinus’s additional point that the ridiculous and the sublime bear a family resemblance.

What, then, are we to make of the vampires who sparkle and the vampires with souls? Or, if not in the direction of the dreamy, then in the theater of the absurd: Count Chocula, the mascot for a popular breakfast cereal, or the puppet Count von Count from the children’s program Sesame Street, who teaches viewers how to add and subtract—hitting all the numbers with his heavy Transylvanian accent. We might deem these manifestations too unserious to be taken seriously, but in fairness to the spirit of Count Chocula, perhaps something else happens here. Namely, we find more variations upon the culture-making effort to rehabilitate the demonic, and the almost demonic, as the case might be.

If the vampire could only find pleasure in chocolate, if he could laugh with children, if he could be loved like Bella loves Edward in The Twilight Saga, then maybe there is hope enough in the world for all of us. Indeed, maybe some vampires have grown tired of being vampires. That said, we do well to heed the old Transylvanian proverb, lest we over-empathize with the villains: the sane would do no good if they made themselves monsters to help the monsters.

A recent meme depicts the real Dracula in the company of Count Chocula, Count von Count, The Twilight Saga’s Edward, and several other less-than-scary princes of darkness, at which point Dracula laments that the vampires have lost their edge.

And, true, I have yet to comment on psychic vampires and flaming extroverts, which is an oversight to be sure. As a corrective, and by way of conclusion, I observe the following: for twenty-seven dollars, one can buy a beaker of psychic vampire repellent from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Store in Beverly Hills, California. The Paper Crane Apothecary makes the product, which—with an essential blend of rosemary, lavender, and juniper—protects against the fiends who corner people at parties. At present, however, shipping will be difficult: the website tells me “This item is sold out.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.