Beyond the Veil : The Victorian Obsession With Death and Mourning

The visual history of how we deal with death – the grief and mourning, the funerals, symbols and ceremonies – is fascinatingly rich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and travelling from Victorian England across to the US, Beyond the Veil is a visual tour through this curious world, charting the often peculiar and at times macabre ways of how the living memorialise the dead. Humans have always had ways of marking death, but in Victorian England death became a morbid obsession that went global – death was as much ‘celebrated’ as it was a source of fear and sadness.