spend my Saturday afternoons lying on
the bed reading tragic tales by the
Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy in my
late teens it was Dickens and the
Manchester novelist Elizabeth Gaskell as
well as the Bronte sisters by the time I
was in my early 20s my best friend and I
used to spend our Saturday nights while
everyone else was out partying sitting
on the floor with a bowl of lentil soup
the bottle of wine
reading out long 19th century poems to
each other I’ve always understood
engaged with and sometimes escaped from
the world through novels and poems so
when in 2014 my husband Richard died
aged 45 it was two books that I turned
to help me find a narrative to make
sense of this unbearable loss and
because I’ve spent large chunks of my
life
reading writing about and teaching
Victorian literature it was to the
Victorians above all that I turned this
may seem surprising what do we know
about the Victorians after all they were
buttoned up covered up messed up they
couldn’t talk about sex and they were
obsessed with morbid ideas of death well
I’m not going to talk about sex although
I might note in passing that the
wonderful socialist poet Edward
Carpenter lived just outside Sheffield
and taught me in the 1880s and 1890s as
an openly gay man with his lover with
friends and and visitors coming through
discussing sexuality which Carpenter
himself wrote treatises and books about
so not perhaps as repressed as we might
think but what about death was it all
big funerals formality black clothes all
Queen Victoria laying out Albert’s
clothes day after day year after year
obsessively or was it sensation the poet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried his poems
with his wife Lizzie Siddall and then
dug her up again a few years later to
get them out or Sherlock Holmes writer
Arthur Conan Doyle hosted like many of
his contemporary seances in his home in
order to make contact with the dead well
these might be extreme examples of
expressions of grief but I want to
suggest that in fact the Victorians
understood death and dealt with
bereavement much better in many ways
than we do today and that their writings
show an intimate understand
of some of the processes of grief and
grieving that have only recently been
rediscovered in the psychology and
sociology of grief the Victorians
understood the need for physical
connections to the dead and physical
expressions of internal grief
so they made rings and necklaces and
brooches out of the hair of their dead
loved ones just as some organizations
just recently now starting to offer
people the opportunity to make brooches
or ornaments out of the ashes of their
dead loved ones they had set periods of
mourning where family members and
extending out to more distant relatives
had to wear black not some kind of
terrible adherence to rules and rituals
as that’s often been presented but a
culturally sanctioned space of exemption
from normal life and relationships a
recognition of the ongoing nature of
grief and the need to express it
externally not long after my husband
died I met a man I knew whose partner
had also died and this man had grown a
great big disheveled beard what I came
to call in my own mind
a grief beard I felt a visceral longing
to grow such a beard myself to have this
this vast physical expression of what
was going on inside it’s a far cry from
the stiff upper lip that external
visible sign of what’s going on inside
and the Victorians understood that but
for me what resonated most deeply with
my own experience was Victorian
literature in the first few weeks after
my husband died I sent out two friends
and I read and reread a poem by the
Victoria and Gerard Manley Hopkins which
begins no worst there is none and the
poem goes on to talk about that feeling
of falling off the edge of the world
which is the experience of early grief
oh the mind mind has mountains cliffs of
fall frightful sheer no man fathoms he
can’t imagine in other words that
experience until you fall off the edge
of that cliff and after that for the
first time probably since I was a young
child and learnt to read I didn’t read
anything at all for a couple of weeks
just a dreadful silent
and then I started to read everything I
could get my hands on about grief I
wanted to find some kind of narrative
that didn’t say it’s okay you’ll feel
better soon a narrative that didn’t say
it’s alright he’s gone to a better place
that maybe so but it doesn’t help me a
narrative that didn’t say as I’m sorry
to tell you the Victorian Henry Scott
Holland wrote and has been quoted on
many a funeral card death is nothing at
all death certainly was something so I
started to read novels and poems and
memoirs from the Victorians and from up
from our contemporaries I started to
read bereavement forums and online blogs
and eventually started to read self-help
books and then I came to reading some
psychological and sociological text
books really about grief and the
processes of grieving and it was there
that I came across the wonderful idea of
continuing bonds continuing bonds is the
title of a book published and academic
study published in 1996 and it works
against our dominant cultural Western
idea of grief as a kind of time limited
process so that in grieving you go up a
spiral staircase and through a door
eventually and you close the door behind
you moving on or getting over it which
people hope you’ll do and actually
continuing bonds and recognises that
what people who are grieving want is to
have an ongoing connection with the
person they’ve loved who has died a way
of remembering them in ritual and
imagination and in the way they live
their life that people want to continue
to hold on to something of the identity
they had in relation to the dead person
even as they go out into the world and
make their own new identity so for me I
like the term widow even though it
conjures up a peculiarly Victorian idea
of elderly women in black but it’s a
continuing bond with the man I chose to
marry and nowhere in Victorian
literature is this idea of continuing
bonds more beautifully evoked than in
Alfred Tennyson’s long poem in memoriam
it’s a lament for his friend Arthur
Hallam who died aged 22 in 1833 the poem
took
17 years to write and it’s full of
Tennyson’s memories of Hallam extolling
his character remembering the times they
had together it’s full of his own
expressions of grief and also his
understanding of the world as he now
knew it in the light of his loss and
Tennyson talks beautifully about that
moment in early grief when you feel as
though your own life is going to be at
an end and he describes that feeling
that life will end and he goes on saying
it ends not but injurers with pain and
slowly forms the firmer mind treasuring
the look it cannot find the words that
are not heard again that must be an
experience of so many people who’ve
grieved for somebody the sense that you
will never hear the words they spoke the
jokes they made the things they said
about the newspaper the comments they
pass to you in private you’ll never hear
those words again and for me also the
sense that that look of love that I saw
for twenty-one years will never look at
me again is a huge part of my loss but
at the same time I treasure the look I
cannot find and it’s a continuing bond
my memory of that look so Tennyson
explores very beautifully and very
extensively not with morbid obsession I
would argue but with an utter commitment
to the processes of grief that absence
and presence that runs through
experiences of grief and in the early
days of grief absence is the most
terrible thing of all and many of us ask
questions in that early experience of
absence
where is the one who has died where is
my beloved and I want to suggest that
when we ask that question we’re asking
it in the way that my daughter used to
ask where I left her at nursery and she
didn’t like it was mommy and it didn’t
help her that the nursery staff would
say mummys gone home and she’ll be back
in a few hours she didn’t want
information about where I was really
that cry of where’s mummy meant I want
her here and I want her now and really
that’s what most of us mean
when we’re asking where is the person
who’s died and we might imagine that the
Victorians particularly religious as
they were would have had some Pat
answers about heaven to give to people
asking those questions but they want to
just turn now to a much less well-known
Victorian than Tennyson and that’s the
wonderful socialist feminist anti-war
writer olive Shriner who was South
African but spent large chunks of her
adult life in Britain and in fact in
1893 came to Sheffield and visited
Edward carpenter out at Mill for an
Olive shriners most well-known book is
called the story of an African farm it
tells the tale among other things of two
children a boy Waldo and a girl Lindell
who grew up together the story follows
their lives as they go out into the
world and it finishes spoilers here I’m
afraid
just after the death of Lindell as a
young woman
Waldo hears of her death and he’s
stricken with grief he’s loved her from
when he was a child and as he tries to
cope with his grief he imagines the
narratives that are available to him
from his society and he thinks
particularly of the kind of prevailing
idea that actually all is well with
Lindell now because she’s an angel in
heaven with God and Waldo cries out I
want no angel only she with all her sins
upon her so give her me or give me
nothing and he goes on to think a little
bit more about the way in which people
would say in some ways she’s always with
him because she’s not in her body
anymore she’s now only in spirit and he
cries out again give me back what I have
lost or give me nothing Aldo comes to
his own understanding of what’s happened
to Lindell as all of us come to our own
understanding of what’s happened to
those who’ve died as I come to my own
understanding as a person of faith but I
can think a few expressions more true
more honest or more raw of the early
sense of abandonment that comes with
grief than those words that Olive
Shriner gives to Aldo any comfort
offered at that stage is no comfort at
we’ve got lots of cultural legacies from
the Victorians not least the rampant
individualist capitalism that runs most
of our society as well as Marxism and
well developed anarchism and good drains
and public museums and organized
anti-war protests all those are legacies
from the Victorians but we might want to
revisit they’re incredibly emotionally
intelligent understandings of grief and
I’m going to give the last word to
Alfred Tennyson and in memoriam Tennyson
explores the way in which those who die
become strange to us gone forever and no
longer part of our everyday world and
yet at the same time through that
continuing bond that he expresses in his
poetry and other others of us Express in
different ways they are in some way with
strange friend past present and to be
loved deep clear dark Lear understood
behold I dream a dream of good and mingle all the world with thee