Review of the ‘Death and the Working Class’ Exhibition at the
Manchester People’s History Museum
Julie Ellis and Jenny Hockey
(Exhibition runs 23 October 2010 to 2 May 2011)
Despite landslides across the Pennines, members of the Sheffield Death Group
traveled to the Manchester People’s History Museum where a range of materials shed
light on working class death in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What the
curators intended by ‘working class’ was initially unclear. Our first sight was photos
of an elaborate funeral procession and of two mutes clothed in complex garb, plus a
decorated mourning costume, all suggesting considerable financial resources. As the
literature relating to the era makes clear, however, how much families should invest in
a funeral was a contentious issue; the grand funeral procession and the decorated
mourning costume belonged, respectively, to a shopkeeper (deceased) and a farmer’s
wife.
This exhibition makes the history of death available to the general viewer – and a
‘death’ snakes and ladders game allowed children to navigate the wars, industrial
accidents and epidemics (snakes) and public health measures (ladders) of the time.
After that they could assemble a rubber jigsaw replica of a death mask which bore the
markedly shrunken cheeks of a cadaver. As more specialist viewers, we did, however,
gain new insights:
For example, we gained a somewhat ‘everyday’ sense of what it was like to live with
death during times when life expectancy was low and high rates of infant mortality
made dying – it seemed – a more anticipated and familiar experience. A memorable
painting from a private collection depicted a street scene where the coffins of a young
mother and her baby are being loaded onto a horse and cart as the busy street looks
on. Although personal testimony accompanying the piece indicates the individual’s
surprise at the death of this young woman, a striking ‘ordinariness’ about the scene –
one’s eye is drawn to a roaming dog for instance – is pervasive. This, and other items
in the exhibition – in particular the recreation of a domestic sitting room with chairs
borrowed from neighboring homes laid out to accommodate viewing of the deceased -
flesh out concepts like ‘death as a community event’ in rich and contextual detail.
Through exhibits like this sitting room the exhibition showed the domestic
counterparts of more public death. In Memoriam samplers stitched by young girls set
out the details of family deaths in ways that drew on the iconography and aesthetics of
the gravestone. However, death’s domestic implications themselves had marked
institutional impacts. Anticipated heavenly re-unification with loved ones, and the
underlining of In Memoriam cards for young children with biblical texts such as ‘Thy
will be done’, were the ideological framework within which industrial accidents were
encountered and experienced. This is not to assume passive acceptance of one’s
(tenuous) lot, and indeed the political struggles of the nineteenth century were evident
in exhibits showing the unionization of the workforce. Interestingly, however, much
of the financial support for union activity was generated from families’ awareness of
the likelihood of a fatal industrial accident and the resulting removal of the remaining
members to the workhouse. Thus the exhibition’s centerpiece, a union banner
depicting an official giving financial aid to a widow, made the importance of money
donated to unions for death benefits evident. Endorsed by the biblical text: ‘Bear one
another’s burdens’, unions were thus able to generate much-needed income. How
these institutional activities were actually pursued was also revealed; one example is
the account of ‘Help’, the National Union of Railwaymen’s collie, who went out
collecting charitable donations and raised £1,000 between 1882 and 1889, at which
point he died and was stuffed, his body remaining a draw for fund-raising.
The institutional framing of death was thus very evident, perhaps not surprisingly,
since employers and unions produced more durable public artifacts. For example,
brass and wooden Rolls of Honour were set up by companies such as the Co-operative
Society and the Gas Department, marking the names of those who died in times of
war, whether in action or on the home front. However, the names of people without
employment, who died in the workhouse, were also displayed, in this case on paper
tags with their name, age, religion, date of death and ward. These were pinned to
coffins - replacing the previous practice of chalking a number on the wood, in
recognition that the deceased may still have intimates who wished to view their
corpse. The 1832 Anatomy Act and its history is well-documented as key to the fate
of working class bodies and souls – and this exhibition appropriately displays the
words of reformer William Cobbett on dissection: ‘ ... they tell us it was necessary
for the purposes of science. Science? Why, who is science for? Not for poor people.
Then if it be necessary for the purposes of science, let them have the bodies of the
rich, for whose benefit science is cultivated’.
For those of us in the social sciences and humanities, the question of what it felt like
to live and die during this period hung in the air. There were some testimonies from
older people who could recall being taken to view a body; one woman described
being shocked not by the corpses of a mother and new-born baby laid out together,
but rather by the lack of wallpaper in the whitewashed room they were in, the absence
of stair carpet, her sense that people living nearby had nothing. For contemporary
western viewers, accounts of viewing the bodies of people who were not intimates –
and indeed of children knocking on doors or creeping away from adult company to
snatch a glimpse of corpse, are very much ‘death made strange’. Yet the inclusion of
Wordsworth’s 1798 poem, We Are Seven, reveals the materialities of continuing
bonds in a way that does resonate with us today. When asked how many siblings she
has, a little girl tells the poem’s narrator that ‘we are seven’, even though two of her
siblings have died. When the narrator insists that they are five, not seven, she
describes how she sustains continuing bonds in the churchyard near the family home:
My stockings there I often knit,/ My kerchief there I hem;/ And there upon the ground
I sit,/ And sing a song to them.// And often after sun-set, Sir,/ When it is light and
fair,/ I take my little porringer,/ And eat my supper there.
And so, providing insight into both the public and private aspects of working class
death culture, the exhibition offers a revealing collection of artifacts to enable the
viewer – irrespective of their prior knowledge - to contemplate human mortality as it
was understood and experienced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.