Post-Mortem pictures

[Tsarfan]

I love this Victorian custom, actually. The Victorians had a different attitutude towards death than the one that prevails today, because death was much closer to them, mortality was higher. So they were realistic about death, and memorialized the dead. Victorian mourning customs might seem strange to us now, but they were regarded as normal by society back then. Post mortem pictures, hair wreaths of the dead and mourning clothing and jewelry were commonplace.

Yes.  In an age when death was always close at hand people were served up constant reminders that death comes to us all and that it is but a phase of life.

Some years ago I was at a New England museum and saw there a 19th-century hearse with glass sides that contained a skeleton.  It was drawn at the end of parades and placed prominently at fairs with a sign that read, "As you are now, so once was I.  As I am now, so shall you be."

[Robert_Hall]

To some extent, the death rituals are still used today in  England. London at least.  the  featherd horsed and the glass hearse. Some  times a dirge.  One of the Kray brothers had a big one, with a band in the procession and hundreds of followers. That was in the East End and we went to watch.  Others do the same  thing but on a smaller scale. I imagine even the smaller ones are expensive. I think this goes goes on all over the UK, of  the families can afford it.
 I just pay for cremations and be done with it.
 Oh, mourning jewelry and such are very collectable but not used much in modern times. They were usuall jet, amethyst and hair.  Not always the deceased, BTW.  Women wore their hair long in those days and used their own hair receivers to collect the material to make everything from picture frames to  rings and pins of the dead.

[Kalafrana]

Nowadays in England, there is a class dimension to funerals. 'Big' funerals are quite common in the East End and similar, but middle-class funerals tend to be much quieter affairs, though a crowded church is regarded as very much a good thing (we had a full church for my mother's funeral).

Ann

[monsull]

The Prince Consort
http://s1149.photobucket.com/albums/o596/monsull/

[Carolath Habsburg]

And here a portrait of Queen Victoria in her deathbed.