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.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

11 October 2024

5 min read

Cartoon villains: who's the real baddie?

What kind of villain do we want?

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A cartoon chase sees a car driven by a cow escaping from a car of baddies under a giant poster of their villainous boss.

Jazz Cow vs. Dr Popp.

“Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy”. That’s a phrase I often use when helping people write situation comedies. It’s always useful to have a strong antagonist who gets in the way of our hero. But the villains tend not to consider themselves to be evil. In fact, they are offended at the suggestion.

The Batman universe has turned the interesting villain to new levels. The Penguin is Gotham’s latest production, a brand-new TV series on HBO. Colin Farrell plays a highly nuanced anti-hero, exploring The Penguin’s “awkwardness, and his strength, and his villainy, yes, his propensity for violence”. Farrell told Comicbook.com he was attracted to the role because “there's also a heartbroken man inside there you know, which just makes it really tasty.” Audiences are often invited to have sympathy for the devil. Should we be worried about the blurring of the lines between good and evil?

I’ve been asking myself this question as I’ve been writing a new animation which involves a villain called Dr Popp who is trying to take over a city. But what kind of villain do we want in 2024?

Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker back in 1989 feels like pop-culture ancient history. His Joker was an embittered agent of chaos without many redeeming qualities but mercifully lacked the nihilism of later versions. It was an old-fashioned story of cops and robbers which has its own simplistic charm. But have those days gone forever, having been shot in the head and dropped off a bridge into a river?

The problem is it is so easy to humanise evil. You just give it a human face. The arch-villains of the twentieth century – the Nazi members of the SS – are rather sweet when portrayed by comedians Mitchell and Webb. A nervous member of the SS Unit (Mitchell) waiting for an attack from the Russians looks at the skull on his cap and asks his fellow comrade-in-arms (Webb): “Hans, are we the baddies?”

Any student of World War Two will know that it’s never as simple as good versus evil. Many terrible things were done by people who felt justified in their behaviour. Moreover, ‘the goodies’ also felt compelled to do morally dubious things – like the bombing of civilians in cities – in order to defeat ‘the baddies. After all, they started it.’ The truth is always far more complicated than the war films suggest.

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission.

Ten years ago, I was researching real life baddies for my sitcom Bluestone 42 about a bomb disposal team set in Afghanistan. At times, I had to think like the Taliban who, in their own minds, were entirely justified in leaving bombs by the side of the road, to be triggered by British soldiers or Afghan children. They were pretty relaxed about the outcome. It’s hard to sympathise with this way of thinking, but it made sense to them.

My internet search history from that time probably put me on some sort of Home Office watchlist. Maybe a small dossier was started on me. More recently, that dossier would have become thicker as I’ve moved sideways from sitcom into murder mysteries, having recently worked on Death in Paradise and Shakespeare and Hathaway. To work on shows like these, you need to be thinking of good reasons for good people to commit murder. Someone would need a very strong motive to commit a murder on an idyllic Caribbean island where the local detective has a 100 per cent resolution rate. You also need to research ingenuous methods for murdering people in a way that escapes detection. I’m surprised I’ve not yet had a knock on my door, or enquiries made to the neighbours to call a number if they see anything suspicious.

But what about cartoon villains where nothing is real? The bold colours and the larger-than-life characters might suggest that there is more clarity about goodies and baddies. But there isn’t. Evil villains – that is, villains who realise they are evil – are extremely rare. Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comes to mind. This kind of demonic baddie can be entertaining with wit and charm, like Hades in the Disney movie, Hercules. This character had some brilliant one-liners and was superbly brought to life by the voice of James Woods. Overall, however, purely evil characters are hard to write.

Cartoon villains need proper motivation. This is either a character flaw or a backstory. In The Lion King, Scar is consumed with envy that his brother is king – and a good one at that. In The Incredibles, Syndrome is playing out his sense of injustice that he was not allowed to be Mr Incredible’s sidekick, Incrediboy. In The Simpsons, Mr Burns is essentially Mr Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s a Scrooge-type figure who doesn’t care about love and respect. He just wants to own the town.

The cartoon villain I’ve been thinking about is for a new animation project I’ve been working on called Jazz Cow. The eponymous hero is a saxophone-playing cow and a reluctant Bogart-style leader of a bohemian band of misfits. They are trying resist the advance of the all-consuming algorithm created by Dr Popp, the villain. But what’s his motivation?

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission. He’s trying to make the world better, easier, safer, cheaper, more efficient and convenient. Why would anyone want to refuse his technology, reject his software and keep away from his algorithm?

This is why Dr Popp has to silence Jazz Cow, literally, by stealing his saxophone. He simply cannot allow Jazz Cow to delight audiences at Connie Snott’s with live improvised music. There’s no need for this music! Dr Popp has all the music you could possibly need, want or imagine. Why improvise when we have artificial intelligence?

Dr Popp is a cartoon villain for today when relativism is still alive and well. ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ are still concepts or points of view rather than absolutes. However, there is good and evil in Jazz Cow. But the evil doesn’t come from Doctor Popp. It comes from the user or consumer. That would be us.

‘The Algorithm’ is always learning and always trying to give us our hearts’ desire. And that’s the problem: our hearts frequently desire that which they cannot – and should not – have. Dr Popp’s algorithm is like a mirror held up to our faces. In it, we see the real baddie: ourselves. Not even Jazz Cow can save us from that. But what this horn-playing cow can do is to make the world a more humane place.

For more information about Jazz Cow, and information on how you can make the show happen, take a look at our Kickstarter – and don’t worry. Jazz Cow would approve, as it’s the creative’s way of sticking IT to the man.