Victorian Cult of the Dead: Mourning Practices, Garden Cemeteries and the Invention of the Murder Celebrity

Illustrated Lecture by Romany Reagan, PhD Candidate, Royal Holloway, University of London
Date:  Monday, June 30

Time: 8:00 PM

Admission: $8

Purchase tickets here

Presented by Morbid Anatomy

*** Offsite at the Morbid Anatomy Museum ( New Location ) : 424A 3rd Ave (Corner of 7th St), Brooklyn, NY 11215

Victorian mourning practices are famous for their lavish beauty: elaborate mourning costumes, plumed horses drawing luxurious funerary carriages, and lush garden cemeteries. These collective practices have been referred to as the ‘Victorian Cult of the Dead,’ but it could be argued that what seems to be an obsession with death has more to do with a lack of visible death practices in our own culture. Through analyzing the works of historians James Stevens Curl, Catherine Arnold and Judith Flanders, this talk will explore the ways in which the Victorians honored their dead through ritual and beauty — and how an intimacy with death coupled with the modern newspaper led to the invention of the murder celebrity.

Romany Reagan is a second year PhD candidate in the department of drama at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her practice explores theories of anachronistic space, grief symbolization and site-based performance through the medium of audio walks in Abney Park Cemetery. Areas of research encompass theater archaeology, heterotopias, liminal spaces, human geography, the uncanny and the Victorian ‘cult of the dead’.

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