Mother with Child. Over painted photograph of grieving Mother with post mortem baby. Not uncommon in Victorian England, this type of image became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the sharpness of grief. Simultaneously unsettling and strangely poignant, families often posed with the dead relatives, infants appear asleep, and consumptive young ladies elegantly recline.
Victorian life was suffused with death. Epidemics such as diphtheria, typhus and cholera scarred the country, and from 1861 the bereaved Queen made mourning fashionable.
