Society's Response To Death In The Victorian Era

Death is inevitable. It is something everyone has to experience at some point or another, yet everyone has a different relationship with it. Death can inflict varying emotions or reactions out of people. Society’s response to death has varied depending on the state of a country, technology advancements, human interaction and many other things. Society has been impacted by death as seen in the lead up to the French Revolution, the Victorian era, and the Holocaust. Before the French Revolution there was a lot of gruesome violence, particularly surrounding executions. In Renaissance Venice, the worst crimes committed by low-class criminals often had punishments of public humiliation, mutilation and execution. They would often be taken to the
By now a fairly prosperous middle class had been established and life expectancy improved. Due to the improved life expectancy, Victorians reasonably expected to live into old age, so death at a young age was tragic. With the death of Prince Consort Albert, Queen Victoria had set new standards for mourning. Going into a deep mourning herself, the people of her country followed. “Mourning periods were regulated, mourning dress was dictated, and funeral and burial arrangements became more extravagant” after Queen Victoria took mourning to the extreme. With a better life expectancy and a new, exaggerated reaction to death, the mass amount of death from disease could not have been anything short of tragic. Before and during this time there was a public health crisis. With the Industrial Revolution springing forward people were crowding cities looking for work. Houses were overcrowded, poorly built, and had no proper waste disposal. Diseases and epidemics were running high with four outbreaks of cholera between 1831 and 1857 in Britain. It was believed to be caused by the foul smell in the air from open sewers, and it took many years to discover that it was caused by the drinking water. 2000 people died weekly in England alone from the disease. Along with cholera, Typhoid, scarlet fever, and smallpox were the most common diseases. Diseases like typhus and influenza killed many people. Death during this
When the survivors returned home they could not find their families. They came home to their houses destroyed or taken over, their neighbours did not care about them, and they had nothing. Some were lucky if they found a few surviving relatives, but most were returning home to find that every Jewish person they knew was dead. While rebuilding their lives there were many hardships. Interesting and well-paying jobs were hard to come by, most found work in factory or office jobs, or in domestic work. Living conditions were cramped and poor, food was rationed, and few household goods were available. Even after escaping the horrible conditions of the Holocaust, many Jews left asking themselves if they wanted to remain Jewish. They were left questioning their identity, and whether or not to hide it for their own safety. A great deal of people lost friends, family, loved ones, only because they were Jewish or seen as inferior to the Nazis. Eleven million lives were lost in this fight. It almost feels impossible to imagine eleven million lives, after a few thousand it is hard to recognize just how many people are in a crowd. To fully grasp the impact these deaths had, imagine at least one loved one for every victim. For each person lost, a person who cared about them was left without