Viva el Muerte!

Having recently become rather fascinated with the whole concept of Victorian mourning traditions, I've lately been doing a good bit of research at the Penn State Library into these fascinating--if completely crackheaded--customs. One thing I've noticed, however, in my search is that only a few sources really note the fact that an entire industry of death and mourning evolved from poor old Queen Victoria's neverending mourning for Prince Albert (who, upon death, finally did end up in a can) and the copycat rules of proper etiquette that the old buzzard's perpetual sadness spun off like shadows. Basically, all of Victorian society was, between the 1850s and the late 1910s, composed of Goths. And not cool, bouncy Goths like Walpole and Beckford and those folks...but boring-ass, mopey, hand-stapled-to-forehead Goths--because, really, in the Victorian age, nearly half of all children never made it to one year of age, women died in childbirth everytime a pigeon farted, a simple staph infection could kill the stoutest man...and between your kids, your husbands and wives, your relatives, neighbors, vague acquaintances, and pets dying at the rate of two to twelve per year, folks were almost never "out of mourning." I mean, hell...as a Victorian woman, first your newborn dies, so out come the black frocks for the next few months. Then your husband dies, so it's time to break out the widow's weeds for the next two years--at least--during which time Old Pater kicks the can, then Cousin Hermione, then Sister Alice....Hell, for the most part, Victorian people were perpetually in mourning!

So. Why not write something about this?

I am currently developing a big ol' Dickensian barn-burner of a plot to take advantage of some of this uber-Gothity freshness. So here it is:

First of all, it's either going to be called Momento Mori (note spelling), or, more likely, The Tragickal Comedy (or Comickal Tragedy) of Mort d'Eth. And it will follow the fortunes of the very aptly-named Mortimer (Mort) d'Eth from the day Prince Albert croaks up until 1917, as good old Mort founds a funeral home to take advantage of the Age's growing fascination with ol' Mister Black Armband. You will marvel at Maitre d'Eth's adventures as he:

Makes bank from and encourages the galloping morbidity of a filthy, disease-ridden city (that is, London)!
Falls in love with a recently-deceased maiden whose father demands that she be preserved until Judgment Day using those newfangled "embalming" methods!
Encounters a jolly coterie of cemetery-haunting ghouls who gnaw upon the bones of the dead while lustily singing popular penny-ballads of the day such as "My Reflection, Lucrezia" and "Oh, Friday, I am in Love!"
Revels in the Opening of the Magnificent Seven!
Befriends a notable slayer of Whitechapel prostitutes and confronts a mad, syphillitic Lord intent on enforcing proper mourning protocol with knives and torches!
Hangs out with a famously-morbid (and drunken) poet and his gang of Gothic-novel devotees!
Encounters the Author of Carmilla and helps him vanquish an Authentic Vampiress!
Celebrates the Turn of the Century with Bram Stoker and the revenant of Lord Byron!
Makes a summary fortune from the Sinking of the Titanic!
Goes broke thanks to the growing popularity of cremation and columbariums and, of course, the crush of bodies coming in from the Fields of Flanders during WWI!
And finally...must dance the final dance with Mister Bones himself in the hilariously horrible conclusion to a long, vicious, and silly life!

All this in under 300 pages. No way in fucking hell am I gonna sit down at churn out 900 pages a la Dickens. I am far to ADD-afflicted to even consider more than 300 pages of this crap.

Amidst those pages, though, expect to find entire armies of Goths, dead babies, daguerrotypists and photographers, hair-plaiters, jet-miners and -carvers, mutes, carriagemen, embalmists who carry their supplies in wooden trunks sculpted to resemble Anubis, mad surgeons, mad Parliamentarians, mad hookers, bone-chomping ghouls, consumptive lovelies, drunken poets, penny-dreadfuls, Cassel's Guide, gaslight and underground tunnels, crematoriums, columbariums, urns, gravediggers, monument sculptors, mass pauper's graves, huge mausolea haunted by swanky revenants, Highgate Cemetery, Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, an opium-addled angel, Death Himself and his entire entourage, Charon the Train-man, the coffin-worm, the Sisters of Mercy (the actual conventical order), the balladeers Eldritch and Smythe, authors, authoresses, and flower-presses....You name it, the entire panoply of Victorian weepin' and wailin' will be represented!

It's fun just researching this thing. I can't even imagine how much fun it's going to be to tie all this shite together into one big Frankenstein of a pseudo-Gothic novel that will wrench the heart, titillate the morbid fancy, and poke fun at death and dying in all its myriad manifestations.

Expected finishing date: 2095.

BRILLIANT!

Sheep poetry.

This is one of the best ideas I have ever encountered. I'm sure Jeff Noon has something to do with it.

Just lovely!

From the wonderful journal Punch, October the 17th, 1857:

PERFORMERS IN "THE GRAVE SCENE."

SOME "Funeral contractors " (that is the new term) advertise to "perform funerals" with a due regard to the feelings of the bereaved, and the solemnity of the occasion. The regard that is due is mainly proportioned, we suppose, to the amount of ready money that is paid? They have different qualities of grief, you may be sure, according to the price you pay. For £2 10s., the regard is very small. For £5, the sighs are deep and audible. For £7 10s. the woe is profound, only properly controlled; but for £10, the despair bursts through all restraint, and the mourners water the ground, no doubt, with their tears. We wonder these black crocodiles do not openly advertise the sale of their lachrymae? We dare say that the luxury would be every drop as expensive as early peas, or anything else that was forced. We wonder what is the market-price of "tears per pint?"-and we are, also curious to know, whether these funeral pantomimists make up so small a quantityof mitigated grief as "one tear," and what is the lowest price they charge for the same? We notice, in the same grinning advertisement, that "The Gothic Stale Hearse is used for every class funeral above £5." It seems, then, that there are as many classes of funerals as there are of railway trains. There are, apparently, First Class, Second Class, and Third Class Funerals. We hope, for the sake of the poor, that there are no Parliamentary funerals that stop on their dreary-way as often as a Parliamantary train. But who, we ask, could possibly forego the above inducement when offered at so contemptible a price? Is there anybody, in possession of so small a sum as £5, who would not gladly put it aside for the unutterable luxury of being buried in a "Gothic State Hearse!" Put another sovereign to it, and we should not be surprised if a "Gothic State Coachman" wasn't also thrown in.

I know what business I would've been in back then!