A history of the invisible: exploring the overlooked details of everyday life

I did not set out to become a historian of invisible things. In fact, I didn’t know that was what I was until I had been uncovering the invisible for some time. It started slowly, like all addictions do. I read something interesting and thought, ‘Wow, I never knew that.’ And it was a gateway drug. The more I read, the more I realized the past was not only a foreign country, it was one that had barely been described.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘invisible’. I started with invisible furniture. I realized that when I looked at photographs of houses for sale, I never saw any wastebaskets, or toothbrushes, or loo brushes. So I wondered, what things were there in the past that were not depicted or described? One answer I found right away – spittoons. These were bowl-like objects that sat on the floor, or in a cupboard, which people, well, spat into. They were extraordinarily common: they abound in household inventories, and I have found instructions on how often spittoons should be cleaned on trains as late as the 1940s. Yet who has ever read a novel in which they feature? Or seen one in a painting? They are ghosts in our history.

‘Let me explain what I mean by ‘invisible’. I started with invisible furniture. I realized that when I looked at photographs of houses for sale, I never saw any wastebaskets, or toothbrushes, or loo brushes. So I wondered, what things were there in the past that were not depicted or described?’

A book about the history of Wikipedia pushed me to think about printed reference books, which nearly always order their content alphabetically (well, except the thesaurus, and every time I use that I silently scream, ‘Why? Why would you do this to us?’). But why do we use alphabetical order, I wondered. Why not chronological, or geographical, or by subject – all of which, I quickly discovered, had once been as popular as sorting methods as alphabetical order was for us. More invisibility – who ever heard of keeping tax records hierarchically, with the richest, most important people first? I mean, who apart from the thousands of tax-collectors who did just that for centuries?

And so I turned around one day and discovered that I was a historian of invisible things. And what could be more invisible than death itself? In Peter Pan, Peter is a bringer of death. He flies into children’s bedrooms and takes them to Neverland, a place where children never grow up. The only children who never grow up are children who die, children whose parents wake to empty beds and cots, their babies lost to them forever. 

For Peter, death is ‘an awfully big adventure’, something that happens to all of us, at any point in time, but something that today we barely talk about, even less so the rituals and practices that surround dying, death and mourning.

The nineteenth century seemed the perfect place to explore the subject. It began with customs that, in some cases, hadn’t changed for centuries, where families laid out their dead themselves, in their own beds, and watched over their bodies until burial, often wrapped only in a shroud, with no coffin, no grave-marker, nothing. The same century ended with a shift to cremation, where the dead disappeared in a puff of smoke, as quickly as they fly to Neverland in Peter Pan. 

‘The dead, I learned, were not invisible in the nineteenth century. They were as present as the living, spoken of, remembered, valued, in a way that today we have forgotten. We watch plenty of films where people die, read novels, see the dying on television. But they no longer live among us in our daily lives.’

And in between was a raft of things that today have been forgotten: the Duke of Wellington’s vast extravaganza of a funeral, with a funeral carriage so heavy an entire regiment of soldiers marched behind it with ropes tied to their waists, to act as human brakes; or the funeral of Tom Sayers, a bare-knuckle fighter, which had bands, parades and his mastiff, Lion, riding in his carriage as chief mourner. There was Queen Victoria and her ostentatious, lifelong mourning for Albert, so ostentatious, and so long-lasting, that many (her doctors included) thought she might have actually gone insane from grief, while others, like the novelist Mrs Oliphant, wondered sourly why she couldn’t enjoy what she had – surviving children and an income to sustain them all without worry, which was more than most widows could say. 

There were resurrection men, men who dug up dead bodies to sell to medical schools for students to train on. (Burke and Hare, it should be noted, were not resurrectionists – they tried an easier, quicker route, manufacturing the dead by murdering people.) There were spiritualists, who talked to the dead, and their followers, who took photographs of spirits visiting their left-behind families, including a famous picture that showed the deceased Abraham Lincoln hovering behind his widow Mary. One believer in spiritualism, I discovered, was also involved in the largest financial fraud ever perpetrated in the City of London – it would seem that if you believe in the astral plane, it’s just as easy to believe in non-existent bank accounts.

The dead, I learned, were not invisible in the nineteenth century. They were as present as the living, spoken of, remembered, valued, in a way that today we have forgotten. We watch plenty of films where people die, read novels, see the dying on television. But they no longer live among us in our daily lives. So as a historian of the invisible, I wanted to say to the dead, ‘Join us. Come and live among us once again. You can make that return from Neverland. Welcome.’

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Why was Victorian Britain so obsessed with death? And what impact did this have on ordinary people’s lives? In her new book, Rites of Passage, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders answers these questions and more. From mourning protocols to the bizarre customs which honoured those no longer living, Flanders offers a witty and insightful look at the cultural and social customs of a historical period we can’t help but be fascinated by. 

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^{Image: edited cover art from the MCL edition of Peter Pan by J M Barrie}