Post mortem

BY LIZ VON KLEMPERER To love someone is to want to give them your body. To love someone is to want to be given their body. No one illustrates this point more grotesquely and tenderly than The Victorians, who bundled the hair of their lovers and wove it into jewelry. Men, for e

In the nineteenth century, a morbid and curious custom has spread to various parts of the world: the photos were ”Post Mortem”. ”Post Mortem” comes from Latin, meaning after death. The...

Whenever a relative died when I was a child, we would gather around their body, sometimes laid out on a table, a coffin or slowly cooling under the bed sheets, and say five decades of the rosary for the repose of their soul. I attended at least half a dozen funerals before I was twelve: my father’s side of the family were descended from fertile Irish-Scottish Catholics. The dead always looked more peaceful before they were wheeled off to a funeral home, where make-up was applied, cheeks…

Fashion and life from 1900-1914. --> Edwardian Electronic Books --> Edwardian Period Films and TV

We see the still, worn body of old lady, prepared for burial by her family and laid out, most likely, upon her own bed. This photograph may have been both her first and her last. She was probably a child in the 1790s and a young wife and mother when Jane Austen wrote her literary oeuvre. It’s easy to imagine her in her prime, her story unfolding during the waning of one century and the child years of another. By the time this post-mortem image was taken, the patterns of life had been…

"Until the handkerchief of history covers us with its Times New Roman black and white post...