Beyond the Veil

<P><B>The visual history of how we deal with death – the grief and mourning, the funerals, symbols and ceremonies – is fascinatingly rich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and travelling from Victorian England across to the US, <I>Beyond the Veil</I> is a visual tour through this curious world, charting the often peculiar and at times macabre ways of how the living memorialise the dead.</B></P><P>Humans have always had ways of marking death, but in Victorian England death became a morbid obssession that went global – death was as much ‘celebrated’ as it was a source of fear and sadness. Queen Victoria herself became a figurehead of grief after the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861. Her ensuing fascination with death took many visual forms – from her ritualised embrace of black clothing to the building of ostentatious monuments – and massively influence