# When did Victorian fashion come to be regarded as macabre? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 22, 2009, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567 "2009-06-22T11:57:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/1 "2009-06-22T11:57:12Z")
The classic haunted house is a big, badly-maintained Victorian mansion (specifically, some form of Gothic Revival), a giant architectural complexity filled with ghosts dressed like middle-class Britons circa 1880. The classic haunted cemetery is obviously one with elaborate Neoclassical tombs and headstones you could use in coffee tables. This has been the case at least since 1938, when Charles Addams introduced his then-unnamed family as a series of one-shot single panel cartoons in the _New Yorker_ and other magazines. The Gothic fashion of the 1970s and afterwards that sprang out of Punk obviously reinforced the ‘Victorian is creepy’ notion but it certainly did not originate it. In between, innumerable movies and cartoons all did their part to paint Victoriana as macabre. (Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion springs to mind, for example.) So, when was the Victorian era picked to be the creepy one? ---
**Author:** ![Zsofia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/7bcc69/32.png) [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/2 "2009-06-22T13:49:35Z")
Maybe because it’s the era you’re most likely to have photographs of “dead people” that are old enough to be alien to you from? Like, pictures of my grandmother aren’t weird, because I remember her - they’re sweetly old-fashioned, from the 30’s. Pictures of _her_ mother and _her_ mother are kinda creepy because you didn’t know them, and they wear clothes that are actively “weird”, plus the photographs don’t look like “normal” photographs. But they’re not so old as to not have photographs - other portraits wouldn’t seem as odd. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/3 "2009-06-22T14:07:41Z")
You answered it: because of Charles Addams. He used the Victorian settings to create macabre jokes and the image remained. Prior to Addams, macabre settings were usually castles (see the movies of **Frankenstein** and **Dracula**. ---
**Author:** ![Savannah](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b3f665/32.png) [@Savannah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Savannah)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/4 "2009-06-22T14:50:48Z")
The Victorians were a little macabre, themselves, no? Death portraits? Heavy emphasis on mourning protocol? Locks of one’s deceased beloved’s hair worn in lockets? ---
**Author:** ![Bill\_Door](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@Bill\_Door](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_Door)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/5 "2009-06-22T15:31:29Z")
I’d guess it came from Charles Dicken’s _Great Expectations_. You know, Miss Havisham quietly insane in that mouldering old house. ---
**Author:** ![Mahna\_Mahna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e47c2d/32.png) [@Mahna\_Mahna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahna_Mahna)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/6 "2009-06-22T15:41:07Z")
It’s also important to note that the late Victorian culture was pretty damn creepy even before Charles Addams came along, at least when you look at it from modern-day perspective. Since Queen Victoria spent the latter half of her reign in mourning, the idea of public mourning became highly ritualised. There was a very specific dress code designated for female relatives (especially widows), which dictated the clothing, accessories and fabrics to be worn for the length of their public mourning period. Beyond that, some of the more devoted would commission (or create) mementoes made from bones/teeth/hair of dead loved ones - rings containing or made from hair were very popular. Also, Victorian England was one of the major centres for the [Spiritualist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualism) movement. It was very fashionable in the middle and upper classes to invite friends over for a seance, and there was a great deal of enthusiasm for anything that involved spirits or ghosts. Don’t forget that this period also produced some of the most important classics in the gothic horror genre. Beyond \*Frankenstein \*and _Dracula_, you’ve also got the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe, _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, _Jane Eyre_ and _The Picture of Dorian Grey_, among others. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/7 "2009-06-22T15:44:50Z")
Mark Twain had [Huckleberry Finn satirize](http://www.classic-novels.com/author/twain/huckleberry_finn/huckleberryfinn022.shtml)Victorian literary trends toward the lachrymose: > [@](#): > > They had pictures hung on the walls – mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called “Signing the Declaration.” There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before – blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.” Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.” There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said “And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas.” These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/8 "2009-06-22T18:40:34Z")
> [@Mahna\_Mahna](#): > > Don’t forget that this period also produced some of the most important classics in the gothic horror genre. Beyond \*Frankenstein \*and _Dracula_, you’ve also got the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe, _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, _Jane Eyre_ and _The Picture of Dorian Grey_, among others. I think it’s this - not only the works themselves, but also their cinematic treatments draw on Victorian motifs, in their black-besuited protagonists and floaty-dress-wearing damsels in distress. The [Gothic literary genre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction) was also by no means confined to the Victorian era but is strongly associated with it, and in terms of costume, I doubt a lot of people actually could draw firm lines between late Georgian or Regency and early Victorian, or Late Victorian and Edwardian. So dark suits, capes, hansom cabs, foggy streets, the [American take](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_Gothic) on Gothic revival…these all spell “macabre” to us ---
**Author:** ![Don\_Draper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b2d939/32.png) [@Don\_Draper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_Draper)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/9 "2009-06-22T18:53:56Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > So, when was the Victorian era picked to be the creepy one? In the Victorian era itself pretty much. During that time period, there was a huge boom in interest (and exploiting that interest) in ‘supernaturalism’: tarot readings, ouija boards, mediums, table rappings, and a lot of the stuff that gets called ‘New Age’ nowadays. Holding seances and attempting to contact disembodied spirits was a popular past-time in middle class parlors. Also, many of the archetypal gothic horror stories were written in that time: “the Turn of the Screw”, “Dracula” and “Carmilla” are all Victorian stories. They typically had very sexual subtexts, and a lot of their popular appeal hinged on disguised erotic imagery, that gets lost in ‘modernized’ versions of the stories. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/10 "2009-06-22T22:49:08Z")
If I’m not mistaken, Victorian times were also when taxidermy came into its own. For a while having a variety of stuffed and mounted objects was the fashion, and now in 20/20 hindsight looks Norman Bates-ish. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2009, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/11 "2009-06-22T23:07:46Z")
Literature. _Dracula_ was written in Victoria’s reign. As was _Dr Jeckyl/Mr Hyde_. People think _A Chrstmas Carol_ is a holiday tale, but the novel is damn creepy. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2009, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/12 "2009-06-23T00:04:41Z")
Wasn’t _Rio_ penned in that era, by a certain Gentleman under the nom de plume of “Duran Duran?” ---
**Author:** ![NDP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ndp/32/55_2.png) [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2009, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/13 "2009-06-23T00:20:45Z")
> [@Mahna\_Mahna](#): > > It’s also important to note that the late Victorian culture was pretty damn creepy even before Charles Addams came along, at least when you look at it from modern-day perspective. > > Don’t forget that this period also produced some of the most important classics in the gothic horror genre. Beyond \*Frankenstein \*and _Dracula_, you’ve also got the collected works of Edgar Allen Poe, _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, _Jane Eyre_ and _The Picture of Dorian Grey_, among others. I wonder how much certain mind-altering substances that were then in vogue during the era (e.g., absinthe and opium) may have affected the macabre depictions in art and literature. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2009, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/14 "2009-06-23T00:32:14Z")
> [@Derleth](#): > > So, when was the Victorian era picked to be the creepy one? It kinda picked itself. A fascinating story, which actually begins in the 18th Century. From [_The City in Mind,_](http://www.amazon.com/City-Mind-Notes-Urban-Condition/dp/0684845911) by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on London: > [@](#): > > Lancelot Brown (1715-83),\* Kent’s successor, was called Capability not because he was conceited, but for his habit of exclaiming, when inspecting a client’s property for the first time, “It has capability!” (that is, of being composed by Brown into an Arcadian landscape). Brown called himself a “placemaker,” not a gardener. He was renowned for destroying formal gardens in order to build his lawns and serpentine pools – achieved by damming natural rivers and brooks. [Tom] Stoppard, again [in his play _Arcadia]_ captures it nicely: > > > [@](#): > > > > The whole Romantic sham. . . . It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigor turned on itself. . . . There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone – the topiary, polls and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes – the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. > > Stoppard is perhaps a little harsh. Most striking, though, is his observation that a severe reaction to the Enlightenment set in so early, while all the great figures of the age were hitting their stride – Voltaire, Burke, Jefferson, Frederick the Great, Catherine of Russia, and her gifted prime-minister-and-boyfriend-in-chief Potemkin – while Diderot had barely gotten started on the _Encyclopedie._ The world already was growing tired of reason, perhaps had been overly dazzled by it in the first place, and began to feel twinges of regret when it began to undermine the institutions that held civilized society together. One of the principal characters of the age, the odious Rousseau (1712-78), fomented diligently against reason and civilized institutions his whole career. In fact it _was_ his career – when not mistreating his family, dodging his imagined enemies, and welshing on his debts. Harold Nicolson writes of Rousseau: > > > [@](#): > > > > The fact remains that Rousseau and his doctrine of “natural” emotion and the equality of man succeeded in destroying the age of reason and in substituting a universe of fantasies that introduced much confusion, much unhappiness, much cruelty, and many illusions into the civilized and even into the uncivilized world. > > All this is curiously anticipated in English landscape as carried on by Capability Brown, Sir Humphrey Repton, and Henry Hoare, master of the exemplary Stourhead estate in Wiltshire. There came to be, as Nicolson puts it, “a growing preference for the element of surprise over the element of expectation.” And then absolutely coincident with the French Revolution – that triumph of inflamed popular emotion over reason – the English turned even further to an even more wild and spooky form of landscape composition, as though everyday life should be lived like a ghost story, full of delicious morbidity and plangent melancholia. Of course, it too was artifice, what we today would consider a form of show-biz. This was the landscape of William Gilpin, Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price, J.C. Loudon, and, eventually by association if not practice, John Ruskin, all gothic ghoulishness, sceneographic melodrama, the awesome and the sublime, emotion rampant – a world ready for Sigmund Freud. It was England trying hard to be someplace other than England. \*Not to be confused with [Bergholt Stuttley Johnson.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_of_the_Discworld#Bloody_Stupid_Johnson) ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2009, 9:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/15 "2009-06-23T09:27:08Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > Wasn’t _Rio_ penned in that era, by a certain Gentleman under the nom de plume of “Duran Duran?” \< SLAPS **Koxinga** , TWICE, WITH A WET TROUT\> ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2009, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/16 "2009-06-23T15:26:57Z")
The late Victorian Era was indeed creepy-widows wore black (and most men over 25 wore black as well), and the Victorian era had a lot od stories involving death, funerals, and moldering old mansions. I think it had a lo to do with the supression of sexuality (Victoria never remarried), and spend years building monuments to Prince Albert. Tlate Edward Gorey useda lot of creepy Victorian themes-what was his obsesion with those enormous pot-belied urns? ---
**Author:** ![maladroit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f475e1/32.png) [@maladroit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/maladroit)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2009, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/17 "2009-06-23T18:16:56Z")
Lots of grave robbing going on then, and also the time of Dr Jeckyll Mr Hyde and Jack the Ripper. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2009, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/18 "2009-06-24T03:42:20Z")
> [@maladroit](#): > > Lots of grave robbing going on then, and also the time of Dr Jeckyll Mr Hyde and Jack the Ripper. Well, heck, there’s lots of grave robbing going on **now!** Or is that just me? ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2009, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/19 "2009-06-24T04:10:28Z")
I prefer the term “resurrectionist”. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2009, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567/20 "2009-06-24T15:17:46Z")
I would trace it to tabloid coverage of the Whitechapel murders. Jack the Ripper was usually depicted as a shadowy guy in a top hat and fancy cane. Pretty creepy. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/when-did-victorian-fashion-come-to-be-regarded-as-macabre/500567.md?page=2)