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.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.