The Victorian tradition of post-mortem photography

Somewhat haunting, those images of the sleeping passed child.

R1 when you look at the history of these photos and the ones that have been preserved, it really does paint a picture just how often children died in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It seems that most of these photos that were taken were of children and infants. Child death and mothers dying during birth were both a sad normality. The development of medicine, sanitation, access to clean water, etc. really did change things.

Post-mortem photography was a major plot point in that Nicole Kidman film, “The Others.”

R2 here, meant late 19th through early 20th—obviously children dying was common before that too, but photography did not exist so it wasn't documented in images.

Personally, I don't find it strange or morbid at all. My own family did. I've seen many photos of my dead relatives in their casket.

Here's the one of Queen Victoria. Did they take one of Elizabeth?

In the mid 80s I was helping my grandmother clean out her apartment. In a drawer we found a small book of photos - the roll of shots had been bound after processing, with a perforated edge - so you could remove individual photos.

All the pictures were of her mother, laid out in her casket, that had been taken in 1954. My grandmother said “We used to do that, I don’t know why,” as she threw the pictures in the trash.

I've seen photographs of children posed after they died. They looked so eerily alive and dead at the same time. Their eyes were open, too. Yes, that movie The Others captured the mood of that time. I'll never forget realizing that they were dead.