Opinion | Friday, 15th May 2020

Coronavirus: What can we learn from Victorian attitudes to contagion?

19th century Gothic literature expert Dr Emma Liggins reflects on historic struggles with disease

Manchester's Southern Cemetery is a reminder of the very real fears of contagion in Victorian Britain, argues Dr Emma Liggins
Manchester's Southern Cemetery is a reminder of the very real fears of contagion in Victorian Britain, argues Dr Emma Liggins

by Dr Emma Liggins, Senior Lecturer in English in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University

This article is adapted from a piece written for Haunt Manchester, a University partnership with Visit Manchester that explores all things alternative, Gothic and goth from across Greater Manchester.

With its long vistas and lime avenue, its bluebells and air of tranquillity, Southern Cemetery in Manchester has been one of my favourite haunts during lockdown.

Open since 1879, it is the burial place of L.S. Lowry, Victorian philanthropist John Rylands and founder of Factory Records Tony Wilson, as well as thousands of mute inglorious Florences, Doreens and Elizas.

The almost alive Victorian angels adorning the tombstones beckon the viewer towards their half-legible inscriptions and a forgotten past. So many children taken before their time, ‘sleeping in eternity’, or wives separated from their husbands by early deaths. Contemplating tombstone inscriptions seems prescient in the time of COVID-19 when families are divided by the fear of infection, when illness haunts the home and public spaces seem to offer invisible dangers. 

For the Victorians, contagion was a very real fear. Before penicillin, widespread vaccination and the NHS, diseases such as scarlet fever, cholera and diphtheria were rife. The growth of hospitals for fever patients towards the end of the nineteenth century was a response to this.

Chung-jen Chen argues that: “Contagions are always affiliated with fear larger than death. During epidemics and pandemics, the fears of contagion reveal the tensions and disputes that lurk underneath the surface of harmony, the resentments present in all social relationships”.

Medical and political responses to Victorian cholera epidemics, for example, were inseparable from fears about filth and contamination, from perceptions of abnormality and cleanliness which mapped onto class differences in the cities. Media coverage of the testing and tracking of the Coronavirus is in some ways reminiscent of the nineteenth-century compulsion to trace the sources of infection back to wider social and economic problems.

Disease in literature

Many Victorian novels and autobiographical writings dwelt on the management of disease, the inadequacies of medical supplies and the difficulties of quarantining.

The sick-room became a significant space within the Victorian household. In the spirit of Florence Nightingale, women’s responsibilities as nurses and superintendents of the sick-room were celebrated.

Poets and novelists drew on direct experience of nursing the sick or of mourning dead children in an age of high infant mortality. The ghost stories of the lesser-known Victorian writer Margaret Oliphant, whose eleven-year-old daughter died of fever in Rome, linger on the untimely deaths and sickness of mothers and children.

The motherless Charlotte in The Lady’s Walk (1882-3) cares for her younger siblings and vividly remembers the anguish of being quarantined from her charges due to scarlet fever. Haunted by a female ancestor, who shares her anxieties about upholding the smooth running of the household, she is a Nightingale figure who wards off infection.

Many Victorian novels and autobiographical writings dwelt on the management of disease, the inadequacies of medical supplies and the difficulties of quarantining.

In a letter to Charles Dickens in 1850, the Manchester novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote that she had been crying all morning for the deaths from scarlet fever of three little cousins in Knutsford. She laments the empty nursery and the childless mother left to mourn, mindful of her own loss of her baby son Willie to the same fever in 1845. Partly written to assuage her grief, her novel Mary Barton: a Tale of Manchester Life (1848) draws on Gothic techniques to sensationalise the deaths of women and children, who succumb not only to the dirt and inadequate sanitation of the industrial city but also to infection within the family. She protests against protective measures which favour the rich: “The poor are fatalists with regard to infection … In their crowded dwellings no invalid can be isolated”.

Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's baby son Willie died of scarlet fever in 1845

In nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and medical texts, women were often identified as sources of infection. A poor Irish widow, unsuccessfully begging for charity as she dies of typhus, who then infects seventeen other people in her community is used as an example by the social commentator Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present (1843). His anti-capitalist point is that charity benefits public health and social cohesion; instead the widow “prove[s] her sisterhood by dying and infecting [others] with typhus”.

In a letter to Charles Dickens in 1850, the Manchester novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote that she had been crying all morning for the deaths from scarlet fever of three little cousins in Knutsford.

Tuberculosis, another deadly Victorian disease, proved fatal for most of the Brontë family, including the elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. Their deaths after studying at Cowan Bridge School were reimagined by Charlotte in the death of the young Helen Burns at Lowood in Jane Eyre (1848). The dangers of contamination and contagion clustering around women, the female body, the family and the crossing of class boundaries come to haunt Gothic narratives in the nineteenth century.

Intensified within the confines of the middle-class home, the fearful proximity of the sick and the dangers of contagion became part of the legacy of the Victorian age. In her biography of the Brontës published in 1912, the modernist novelist May Sinclair was struck by the ways in which the sickening family had been crammed into the small spaces of the Parsonage bedrooms at Haworth.

Tuberculosis, another deadly Victorian disease, proved fatal for most of the Brontë family, including the elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth. Their deaths after studying at Cowan Bridge School were reimagined by Charlotte in the death of the young Helen Burns at Lowood in Jane Eyre (1848)

Biographers of the Brontës and visitors to Haworth could not ignore the gloomy churchyard at the bottom of the Parsonage garden, its leaning tombstones a visual memento mori. On her visit in 1904 Virginia Woolf imaginatively connects ‘the three famous ghosts’ with their untimely deaths, the ‘dead names’ in the churchyard and the ‘invasion’ of the garden by graves. The proximity of death is an apt symbol of an era characterised by fatal diseases only slowly conquered by advances in medical science.

Modern parallels

To look back to Victorian fears about pandemics, quarantining and isolation is to recognise their resonances with our concerns about nursing the infected and spreading the virus in the twenty-first century. Gaskell writes of the ‘dark loneliness’ and ‘overwhelming anxiety’ of confronting disease.

“Feelings about contagion are contagions themselves”, suggests Chen, and the climate of fear is palpable: Boris Johnson talks of the disease as an invisible assailant, supermarkets now appear dangerous and unclean, statistics on the news terrify rather than reassure.

Yet it’s worth reflecting on struggles against disease in the past and the consolatory ways in which they were recorded, in the ghost stories, autobiographical laments, letters on mourning stationery, on the cryptic tombstone inscriptions and angels with averted eyes in shadowy cemeteries.

To look back to Victorian fears about pandemics, quarantining and isolation is to recognise their resonances with our concerns about nursing the infected and spreading the virus in the twenty-first century.

Creating new narratives of how to deal with a pandemic, embracing charity and community as well as isolation, reaching out to neighbours, has become the new normal.

Recording the eeriness of distancing, the terrors of disease and loss as well as the shifting domestic dynamics in our lock-downed homes, is also a necessary recognition of the undeniable strangeness of these strange times, a strangeness the Victorians knew only too well.

Dr Emma Liggins’ The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1940 will be published by Palgrave later in 2020.

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