Victorian Death Photography: Postmortem Posers
After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
History Hit
4.7 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Victorians created the unsettling art of death photography - posing their deceased love ones in family portraits as if they were alive. How did they manage to make corpses strike poses? Why did they want to?
Maddy and Anthony are joined by Brandy Schillace, author of Death’s Summer Coat - What Death and Dying Cal Tell Us about Life and Living to flick through the strangest, and most moving, of family photo albums.
Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is sponsored by Warner Brothers and Salem's Lot, the spine-tingling new horror film from the legendary Stephen King. |
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| 1:05.0 | Hello and welcome to After Dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal. I am Antonine Delaney. |
| 1:18.4 | And I'm Dr. Madi Pelling. And we all know that the Victorians were obsessed with death. |
| 1:24.3 | A lot of that comes from Queen Victoria and her loss of Prince Albert. |
| 1:28.3 | You only need to step inside one of their cemeteries to see the extent of this devotion to the dead. I'm thinking of Wariston Cemetery in Edinburgh particularly here where I often walk my dogs of a morning and see very dramatic scenes of women draped over headstones, stone women draped overhead stones or |
| 1:47.9 | pay etched across faces that have been worked into the stonework. It's a really evocative place to dip into this Victorian obsession and idea of death. |
| 1:57.4 | But the Victorian obsession with death did not end there, did it Anthony? |
| 2:01.6 | Nor were their treatments and commemoration of the dead confined to |
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