When you think about the 1800s,

Gilded Age Aside, big fan here,

there's something a little eerie about the way they approached life.

And honestly, it was weirder than you think.

I'm Patty Steele.

Why don't you pop over to my house for a death party?

That's next on the backstory.

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Honestly, we look at the kind of cool but also kind of creepy way Victorian architecture,

interior design, and fashion looked, that intense, dark, gothic style, and their

literature, even love poems. It seemed really morbid. But stop and think about it. While the

world around them was getting modernized with things like trains, cameras, telegraph communications,

early cars, and, of course, most especially the light bulb,

medicine was still in its infancy. Because of that, death was a constant presence in most people's

lives. Disease, especially in cities, was rampant. Women frequently died in childbirth.

But here's a stat that, at least it blew me away, I think it'll blow you away too.

In the U.S. and Europe, 46% of children died before the age of five. So you kind of had to look death in the face and maybe even find a way to get comfortable with it.

Believe it or not, popular pastimes in the

1800s were death parties. If somebody died, folks would get together, drink wine or sherry

and plenty of it, and munch on little cakes wrapped in paper with poems that celebrated the dead

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