Death, religion, and the Victorians

'No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilised countries...it was one of the most religious that the world has ever known.  Moreover, its particular type of Christianity laid a direct emphasis on conduct...'
(R.K. Endsor quoted in Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The public school phenomenon, 1977 p,70)

Queen Victoria as a Child, Martin Archer Shee,
(Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,
Culture Service, Leighton House Museum)

All well brought up Victorian children received religious instruction which in Britain mostly meant Protestant Christianity.  The discoveries of Darwin and the religious controversies of the 19th century led in most cases to the abandonment of literal interpretation of the Bible, and caused many adults to re-assess their beliefs, but on the whole they did so within the Christian faith.

The work of the Nonconformists among the working classes had given people a strong sense of religious duty by the beginning of Queen Victorian's reign. This was increasingly identified with social duty and care for people's bodily welfare; almost as important as caring for their souls.

 However, the attitude of parents of whatever sect towards their children's religious observance during the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain and America is shown typically by the Rev. Mr. Hawtrey's reaction to his son Stephen's casual remark, "Oh, I don't like sermons".
 Their gentle-tempered father, his voice trembling with emotion, said:-
' "If ever I hear one of my children saying a word showing want or respect towards the Word of God or religion, I will disinherit him!" and immediately left the room.  The children were awe-struck, and could not speak, but began to cry.  In a few minutes their father returned, and said, "If I have spoken too angrily, my children, it was because I could not hear a word said of disrespect towards religion", and he wept.'  (Florence Molesworth, The history of the Hawtrey family, Vol. 1, 1903, p. 154.  Internet archive version available)

The keynote here is 'respect'. The observance of religious faith differed from sect to sect and was expressed in different ways over the years, as religious conflicts were at least partly resolved.  The steady divorce of religion from politics and the growing respect for the Nonconformist social contribution much reduced anti-sectarian discrimination.  Although religion was still of prime importance in most middle class people's lives it began to find expression in work among the disadvantaged rather than in personal soul-searching and prayer. Children were encouraged to develop social consciences early and involve themselves in constructive work rather than continuing to practise the introspection of the early Puritans.  This religious and moral training, reinforced by public schools, formed the exceptionally honest and conscientious administrators who governed Britain and the Empire, and bred the many missionaries who felt called to take Christianity to far-flung countries and British slums.

Lord have mercy on us, Henry Baraud, c.1850
(Newstead Abbey)

In many households Sunday meant no books except the Bible or religious works, no toys, or only toys with Biblical significance such as Noah's Ark, positively no games, no music or singing except hymns, no running up and down.  The author of Vice Versa, F. Anstey as a child had a set of Scripture bricks showing biblical incidents with texts, Alison Uttley was allowed Noah's Ark.  The Anstey family read Ministering Children, a best-selling story about helping the poor, 'which always affected me with the profoundest melancholy.' and The Fairchild Family, which was rather less successful: 'But a spirit of such irreverence came over us and she (mother) and we laughed so much that I think the readings were given up.' (F. Anstey, A long retrospect, 1936 p. 12, 24, Alison Uttley, Ambush of young days, 1937 p. 123)

Children and adults went to church, often twice, perhaps because it provided one of the few possible diversions on Sundays.  The Ansteys went to St. Paul's in the morning and the Congregational chapel in the evening, enjoying the music at the first and the sermon at the second.
(F. Anstey, A long retrospect, 1936, p.23)
Younger children generally learned a Bible text, older children might teach Sunday school.  Few allowances were made for children, and they were usually expected to observe Sunday as rigorously as adults.  For those who had no deep religious conviction to sustain them it was often excruciatingly boring.

We praise thee o' Lord, Henry Barraud, c.1850
(Newstead Abbey)

So the popular American author Mrs. Lydia Child strongly recommended parents take care not to prejudice children against religion by too strict observance on Sunday.  She quotes the story of the little girl who on being told how God had come down to earth remarks, "Oh, what a good time the angels must have had, when God was gone away."
(The Mother's Book, 4th ed. 1832 p. 72)

Children traditionally began their religious instruction early, particularly in Nonconformist households like the Quaker Gurneys:
"We were very little children when he (their father, Joseph Gurney, brother of Elizabeth Fry the prison reformer) began to take us into his study for times of religious retirement and prayer.,..I think I shall never forget the very great solemnity, the holy, and, to me as a little child, the almost awful feeling of these occasions"
(Augustus Hare, The Gurneys of Earlham, 1895, Vol. 2, p. 17  Internet edition available)

Earlham Hall, East Anglia,
Childhood home of Elizabeth Fry, and the Gurney family.
 (Wikipedia: University of East Anglia)

This was also the rule in American Nonconformist households like the Swedenborgian Alcotts:
'On Sundays we had a simple service of Bible stories, hymns, and conversation about the state of our little consciences and the conduct of our childish lives.'
(Louisa May Alcott, her letters and journals,  ed. Ednah D. Cheney, 1889, p. 29.  Internet edition available Louisa May's famous children's story, Little Women was loosely based on her own childhood)

For others, like Samuel Butler, the experience was more unpleasant.  The semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh embodies the very image of a traditionally stern Victorian upbringing:
'Before Ernest could crawl he as taught to kneel; before he could well speak he was taught to lisp the Lord's Prayer, and the General Confession.  How was it possible that these things could be taught too early?  If his attention flagged, or his memory failed him here was an ill weed which would grow apace, unless it were plucked out immediately, and the only way to pluck it out was to whip it, or shup him in a cupboard, or dock him of some of the small pleasures of childhood.'
(Samuel Butler, Ernest Pontefex or The Way of All Flesh, 1903, Methuen ed. 1964 p.79.  Project Gutenberg internet edition available)

Saumeu Butler aged 23 (Wikipedia)

Augustus Hare received his first religious instruction as a similar early age but he was made of more resistant stuff than the unfortunate Ernest Pontefex:
'After dinner to-day, on being told to thank God for his good dinner, he would not do it...talked to him about his dinner, did not he love God for giving him so many good things, and I knelt by him and prayed God to forgive him for being so naughty....'The result was a tantrum; Augustus eventually consented to say grace, sitting under the table.
((Augustus Hare, The years with mother, ed. Malcolm Brown, 1952, p., 16.  Abridgement of
The story of my life, 1896.  Interent edition available).

Researching Augustus Hare I discovered that he included the story of The Vampire of Croglin Hall
in his Story of My Life, here's the cover of the Penny Dreadful based on his story (credit: Vaultofevilproboards)

Many such children could scarcely begin to grasp the concept of God and Heaven, and the results of this early instruction were sometimes rather comic.  The Unitarian preacher and social reformer W.J. Fox (1780-1864) had his first religious instruction at the age of four when his brother died:
'On this occasion my father ...made the first attempt to inform my mind as to the existence of a Heaven.  It was rather premature; years afterwards my deity was a huge old muscular man stretched out at full length on the upper side of a solid sky, and at this time it was with great difficulty that I attained such elevation of thought as to understand that little Charles was gone a long way above the height to which the smoke ascended from the tallest chimneys in our street.'
(R. & E. Garnett, The life of W.J. Fox, public teacher and social reformer, 1786-1864.  1910, p.6.  Internet edition available)

The children's writer Alison Uttley was equally literally-minded as a child.  One day of fitful bursts of brilliant sunshine she came running in, radiant, crying:
'"I've seen Jesus! I've seen Gentle Jesus peeping through the clouds!"'
(Ambush of young days, 1937 p.63)

One of Alison Uttley's well-known Little Grey Rabbit books
(Amazon internet)

Marianne Mordaunt's son John, aged seven, wanted to know all about God and Heaven in very precise detail. He demanded:
'"Do you think I shall think every thing in Heaven as beautiful when I have been there a good many years, as I shall the first year...Does God take part of the angels to make us?"'
(Elizabeth Hamilton, The Mordaunts, an eighteenth century family, 1965, p. 256  There is a bit of background on the book and family at mordauntfamilyhistory.com.)

Early and over-earnest religious instruction sometimes made children morbid.  The Puritan practise of driving adults and children alike through fear of hell-fire to self examination and searching of their consciences was, of course, continued into the 19th century by certain ~Nonconformist sects.  The  American writer Henry James, father of the more famous writer, describes his struggles:
'I am sure no childish sinews were ever more strained than mine were in wrestling with the subtle terror of his name.  This insane terror pervaded my consciousness more or less ...made me loath at night to lose myself in sleep, lest his dread hand should clip my thread of life without time for a parting sob of penitence...'
(Quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James, 1953, vol. 1, p.29  Henry James Sr was born in 1809)

The humorous writer Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) author of Three Men in a Boat, had a similar upbringing.  When he 'got' religion, he:
'gave up taking sugar in my tea, and gave the twopence a week to the Ragged School in Threecold Street.  On Sundays I used to pore over a great illustrated Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  This used to be a popular book in religious houses.'  He agonised over the state of his soul:
'How was I to be sure that I did believe sufficiently?'  His failure to move a mountain of rubbish by prayer alone convinced him that he was not a strong enough believer.  He was extremely miserable about this, and about the possibility of unknowingly committing something called, in his circle, the Unforgivable Sin:  'If only one knew what it was one might avoid it.'  One day in a fit of rage he called his deaf Aunt Fan a bloody fool, and was convinced that this was the unnamed sin.  He suffered in agonies of conscience until someone found out and reassured him.  Most probably the sin was masturbation, but unfortunately he does not go into further details.
(Jerome K Jerome,  My life and times, 1926 p. 21, 22.  Project Gutenberg internet edition available)

Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 1563
(British Library, internet ed.)

Edmund Gosse had the advantage of a father who firmly believed his son was born one of the Elect.  The central event of his childhood was his baptism into full communion at ten.  His father 'admitted the absence in my case of a sudden, apparent act of conversion resulting upon conviction of sin.  But he stated the grounds of his belief that I had, in still earlier infancy, been converted, and he declared that if so, I ought no longer to be excluded from the privileges of communion.'  Edmund Gosse was examined by two elders of the church, amazing them by his humility, knowledge of scripture, and other signs of divine grace.  Large numbers of Plymough Brethren came from all over the county to witness his baptism by total immersion.  (Edmund Gosse, Father and son, 1907, Penguin ed. p. 126-133 )

This famous account of Victorian childhood is well worth reading.  One of the interesting things about Gosse's account of his childhood is the contrast between his father's idealised image of his son and the fallible human reality.  The discrepancy between the two is particularly marked in Gosse's account of his baptism.  At this solemn and central moment which he wholeheartedly entered into, he betrays the very un-spiritual, natural bumptiousness of an over-praised ten year old:

'I would fain close this remarkable episode on a key of solemnity, but alas! if I am to be loyal to the truth, I must record that some of the other little boys present presently complained to Mary Grace that I put out my tongue at them in mockery, during the service in the Room, to remind them that I now broke bread as one of the Saints and that they did not.'

The extreme strictness of Gosse's upbringing as a member of the Plymouth Brethren imposed a considerable strain on him which, though unrecognised during his childhood, he was able to analyse on looking back as an adult. Part of his description of the feat of endurance that was his Sunday is worth quoting with Gosse's comment on it, as an illustration of this.  After breakfast the family and servants had a long sermon and prayers.  Then, in fine weather, they spent half an hour walking in the garden.  Afterwards they each sat in a separate room with Bible and commentary and prepared themselves for the morning service, two hours long, which they attended at 11am.  After Sunday dinner Edmund would go into the garden for a while, and later in the afternoon he and his stepmother went to Sunday school, where he taught a class of smaller boys.  After tea they all went to evening service, followed by the Believers' Prayer Meeting.  All this took Edmund long past his usual bedtime, and he was not only bored but exhausted by the end of the day:

'What made these Sundays, the observance of which was absolutely uniform, so peculiarly trying was that I was not permitted the indulgence of any secular respite.  I might not open a scientific book, nor make a drawing, nor examine a specimen.  I was not allowed to go into the road, except to proceed with my parents to the Room, no to discuss worldly subjects at meals, not to enter the little chamber where I kept my treasures.  I was hotly and tightly dressed in black, all day long, as though ready at any moment to attend a funeral with decorum.  Sometimes, towards evening, I used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position to be almost endurable, but at this time I was meek, and I bowed to what I supposed to be the order of the universe.  (Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, p, 166-7)

Like other children Gosse accepted his early religious instruction without question. His first doubts came when this parents' theories were tested against the directness of his childish logic.

When Gosse tried to obtain a splendid humming top through the power of prayer, justified by his mother's statement that 'no thing or circumstances are too insignificant to bring before the God of the whole earth '   his father, instead of taking the theological line that it was not His Will that Edmund should have the top, told him 'it was not right for me to pray for things like humming-tops, and that I must do it no more.' (Gosse, Father and Son, p.36-7)

Edmund's faith in his father's directives was shaken, and after an address on 'idolatory' he put them to a further test.  Idolatry, his father informed him, 'consisted in praying to any one or anything but God himself' and 'God would be very angry, and would signify his anger if anyone, in a Christian country, bowed down to wood and stone.'  In a spirit of scientific experiment Edmund Gosse tested this: 'With much labour, I hoisted a small chair onto the table close to the window.  My heart was now beating as if it would leap out of my side, but I pursued my experiment.  I knelt down on the carpet in front of the table and looking up I said my daily prayer in a loud voice, only substituting the address 'O Chair!' for the habitual one.  He then waited for God's reaction.  When nothing happened, he did not question the existence of God, but his father's omniscience: 'My father had said, positively, that if I worshipped a thing made of wood, God would manifest His anger.  I had then worshipped a chair, made (or partly made) of wood, and God had made no sign whatsoever.  My Father, therefore, was not really acquainted with the Divine practise in cases of idolatry.' (Gosse, Father and Son, p.38-9)

Gosse's experiment weakened his faith in his father, but not his faith in God, and few children at this time would have followed the lead of the independently-minded George Sitwell, who with an Archbishop for a guardian, was over-exposed to religious enthusiasm, and by his own account became an agnostic and later an atheist:
'When I was three or four, I came to the conclusion that I was too young to understand such things properly, and so had better reserve my judgement until I was old enough to form an opinion of my own'
(Osbert Sitwell, Left hand, Right hand, 1945, vol. 1, p.127)

Given the strong religious atmosphere of most Victorian households, and with life expectancy being much shorter than it is now in Modern Europe or America, it is not surprising that death was very much more part of daily life than it is now.  Children were made aware of it early.  Particularly in evangelical households it was quite usual to take children not only to pay their last respects to a dead relative but also to view their corpses, to remind them of their own mortality and so bring them closer to God.

This was no new custom but a longstanding tradition, late 18th and 19th century moral stories  contain many deathbed scenes like this in The History of the Fairchild Family, 1818:
 '"Should you like to see the corpse, my dear?" asked Mr. Fairchild "You never saw a corpse, I think?"
"No, Papa", answered Lucy: "We should like to see one."
"I tel you beforehand, my dear children, that death is very terrible.  A corpse is an awful sight."
"I know that, Papa," said Lucy, "but we should go."
(Mrs. Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family, 1818 p. 146.  Garland facsimile ed. 1977. Internet edition available)

In Victorian children's books, as in novels for adults, deathbed scenes provided emotional climaxes in the narrative.  The death of a major character in a 19th century children's story served to encourage moral and religious faith.  The Religious Tract Society, in fact, expected a Christian death bead scene to be included in the plot of books published by them.  This example is from Little Meg's Children, one of the most popular best-sellers by Hesba Stretton:

'It did not seem  possible to Little Meg that the baby could really be dead.  She chafed its puny limbs, as she had seen her mother do, and walked up and sown the room singing to it, now loudly, now softly, but no change came upon it, no warmth returned to its death-cold frame, no life to its calm face.  She laid it down at length upon the bed, and crossed its thin wee arms upon its breast, and then stretching herself beside it, with her face hidden from the light, little Meg gave herself up to a passion of sorrow.  "If I'd only asked God, for Christ's sake," she cried to herself, "maybe he'd have let baby wake..."'
(Hesba Stretton, Little Meg's Children, 1868, p.110-111, Facsimile ed. Johnson Reprint Corporation 1970)

Even that iconoclastic romp the Victorian favourite Holiday House ends with Harry and Laura reformed characters at the deathbed of their beloved, exemplary, brother Frank:
'All was changed within and around them, - sorrow had filled their hearts; and no longer merry, thoughtless young creatures, believing the world one scene of frolicksome enjoyment and careless ease, they had now witnessed its realities, - they had felt its trials,- they had experienced the importance of religion, -they had learned the frailty of all earthly joy, - and they had received, amidst tears and sorrow, the last injunction of a dying brother, to "call upon the Lord while He is near...."'
(Catherine Sinclair, Holiday House, 1839, Blackie ed. c. 1896 chapter 17)

Illustration from Holiday House, 1839
 (University of Roehampton internet edition)

In the American author Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women, Part II, published in Britain as Good Wives, the death of Beth has a similar uplifting effect on her tomboy sister Jo, which she expresses in a poem:

'Oh my sister, passing from me

Out of human care and strife,

Leave me, as a gift, those virtues

Which have beautified your life...'

   (Louisa M. Alcott, Good Wives, 1869, Dent ed. 1953 p.209)

Louisa May Alcott aged about 25 (Wikipedia)

Modern authors dispose of parents by sending them on archaeological digs, a lecture tour, or even to prison, and death normally seems only to occur in stories about personal adjustment to it.  In 19th century children's fiction, however, death is another convenient device for removing parents who are an impediment to the plot.

The emotionally shattering opening of The Secret Garden by an English emigrant to the USA, Frances Hodgson Burnett, has everyone but the heroine dying of cholera so that the before the story can get going:
'It was in this strange and sudden way that May found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of it, none of them even remembering that there was a Missie Sahib.  That was why the place was so quiet.  It was true that there was no one in the bungalow but herself and the little rustling snake.'
(Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911)

The Secret Garden, 1st American edition, 1911,
(Harvard University, Houghton Library)

The possible psychological impact on children was not apparent to the Victorians, although many must, like Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, have remembered the shock of the compulsory visit to a parent's deathbed all their lives:
'No she was lying straight in the middle of her pillows.  Her face looked immeasurably distant, hollow and stern.  When I kissed her, it was like kissing cold iron; the feeling comes back to me - the feeling of my mother's face, iron-cold and granular.
(Virginia Woolf, Moments of being, Sussex U.P. 1976, p.92)
.
This was a world where death was ever-present.  In Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1863-4, Julia Snow criticised the practise of taking children to view corpses, which she makes plain was as common in America as in Britain. (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1863-4, Vol. 28, p.693-7 internet copy available)

The famous scene in Mrs. Sherwood's History of the Fairchild Family, 1818, where the children are taken to see the corpse of a murderer hanging in chains to rot was omitted from late Victorian editions. (History of the Fairchild Family, 1818 ed., Vol. 1, p.57 internet edition available)   It was true to the time when it was written; public executions and leaving certain corpses on show as a public warning only ceased in 1868, and is still practised in some parts of the world (I wrote this in the 1970s, sadly this has in no way changed)

The History of the Fairchild Family, first published 1818,
 1902 ed.charmingly illustrated by Florence M. Rudland, 
showing how long the book remained popular.
(Project Gutenberg internet ed.)

Lilias Rider Haggard describes in her autobiography an old lady who had been a child in the 1840s telling her how, as a child, her father would tell her to pull the gig's rug over her head and not to look as they drove past Norwich Castle if there had been an execution, so that she should not see the corpses suspended from the bridge (Lilias Rider Haggard, Too late for Tears, 1969 p. 74).   Tess of the D'Urbervilles was inspired by the public execution or a murderess which Thomas Hardy saw as a teenager. (Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy, 1975 p. 32-3)

Although in the reign of Queen Victoria few middle, upper or respectable working class families failed to observe Sunday as a day of worship, by the late 19th century Sunday seems to have been observed with less rigour than in the mid 19th century, at least that is the observation of Edmund Gosse in Father and son, (Penguin ed. 1949 p. 166.  First pub. 1907.  Internet ed. available)

This may have been due to the influence of the Royal household, led by Prince Albert, who found the English Sunday, extremely trying in contrast to the more relaxed German Lutheran Sunday.  In the Royal household Sundays, though not neglected, were treated as holiday, with sailing, skating, battledore and shuttlecock, skittles and country walks.  (Daphne Bennett, Queen Victoria's children, 1980 p.30)

Thomas Younghusband and his Family met Queen Victoria and her Family at Crystal Palace.
C. Wells (Museum of London)