One of New Zealand’s most successful historical fiction authors, Deborah Challinor, a historian by trade who completed her PhD in history at Waikato University, brings the same rigorous research standards to her bestselling novels as she does to her academic work. Her latest series is set in Sydney in the 1860s, about a young woman who becomes an undertaker. While the character is fictious, writing Black Silk and Sympathy led to Challinor exploring Victorian funeral customs.
Stressing that it is fiction and doesn’t set out to deliberately examine or educate regarding any specific topic, she says certain themes popped up during her research that might be interesting - or horrifying - to readers. Challinor explains.
The status of married women
You may or may not have heard the term “coverture” (sometimes spelt couverture), which was a legal doctrine evidently brought to England during the Norman Conquest. Coverture held that married women had no legal identity and therefore no rights (including to their children or over their own bodies), couldn’t own property or earn their own money and usually couldn’t inherit anything useful like land or a business. Later, the doctrine spread in law to England’s colonies, including North America, Australia and New Zealand.
The principles of the doctrine have eroded over time, but it can be argued that echoes can still be seen today in sexist behaviour, domestic abuse, and the lack of pay parity.
Anthropological trophies
Collecting the remains of what scientists and anthropologists considered to be inferior and/or vanishing races for private and public museums and collections was definitely a thing in the colonial era and earlier.
Many will be aware of the historical trade in mokomokai (the preserved heads of indigenous people). In Black Silk and Sympathy, the example arises of William Lanne, allegedly the last “full-blooded” Tasmanian Aboriginal man. After Mr Lanne died in 1869 his remains were literally hacked apart and mutilated by local physicians hoping to supply exhibits to the Royal Society of Tasmania and to the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
One of the butchers, Dr William Crowther, was later awarded a gold medal and a fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons (presumably they received a portion of Mr Lanne, whose skull has never been united with his body). Dr Crowther also served as Tasmania’s premier from 1878 to 1879. A bronze statue of the doctor in Hobart is currently causing embarrassment to Hobart City Council.
Victorian funeral traditions
Here are some interesting ones: the deceased should be carried from the house feet first to prevent them from enticing others into the grave, and mirrors and windows must be covered to prevent the deceased’s image from becoming trapped. But surely the corpse shouldn’t be moving around?
Post-mortem photography was very popular from the 1850s. It sounds creepy now, but it was probably a comfort to a family who may not otherwise have photos of the deceased. Special biscuits were made to give out at funerals, stamped with a cross, wrapped in black-edged paper and sealed with black wax – sort of a funeral goody bag.
What I observed while researching and writing this book
The Victorians might have staged ostentatious funerals if they could afford to, but they definitely didn’t shy away from death. They laid out their dead themselves (or the women did), the deceased were kept at home until it was time to bury them, and the concept of “beauty in death” was venerated.
However, things changed with the world wars and the 1918 influenza epidemic, a separation subsequently developed between the bereaved and the deceased, and undertakers became much more involved with managing the body. I’m referring to western-style funerals here; there are many cultures whose burial traditions have hardly changed for hundreds of years.
But I think the pendulum is swinging the other way again, with the rise in natural/green burials, build-it-yourself caskets, and wakes and services held at home (though usually not the burial). And that, I feel, is for the better.
Black Silk and Sympathy by Deborah Challinor (HarperCollins Publishers, $37.99) is out now.
