Funerals
A glance at the Astor mansion at 840 Fifth Avenue on October 31, 1908, told passersby that Mrs. Astor had died. The window shades were down, as usual, for the grande dame of Society had long kept her windows draped to block impudent stares from the sidewalk and the street. Suddenly, however, black crêpe streamers were hung on the front entrance doorbell of the French Renaissance mansion. Fluttering in the light wind of a fair, warm day, the streamers announced the certainty of Mrs. Astor’s death. The lead story in the New York Times confirmed her passing at age seventy-eight. She “died yesterday at 7:30 in the evening,” the paper said, “in the presence of her daughter Mrs. Marshall Orme Wilson and doctors and nurses.” There was more. “Her son, Col. John Jacob Astor, and his wife, had been in the sick chamber almost unceasingly yesterday, and were with the sick woman during the early part of the evening. It chanced, however, that neither was present when the last sinking spell occurred.”
Funeral customs of the Gilded Age varied across regions, but those in the nation’s forefront city were adapting to modern times. No longer was a close family member required to sit with the body every minute of the day and night until burial. No longer were clocks stopped at the time of death and the mirrors draped. No longer was a widow to wear head-to-foot Victorian black “widow’s weeds” clothing for the rest of her days, as did Queen Victoria to signal her perpetual mourning for Prince Albert. Nor was a household to be forever funereal in furnishings and arrangements. Nor was jewelry fashioned from the hair of a deceased parent or child as a keepsake. Nor were park-like cemetery landscapes to be strolled as if they were picnic grounds on Sunday afternoons, as was New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery (from the Greek for “sleeping place”), which opened in 1863 in the Bronx.
The prevailing mood of a Gilded Age funeral was said to be “stiff formality overlaid with gloom,” a legacy of Victorian England. The site of mourning was to be the deceased’s home, where final good-byes could take place. (If not embalmed, the body was preserved with ice and displayed in a patented “cooling” viewing casket.) Expressions of beauty were also gaining favor, such as bountiful floral displays. A Gilded Age childhood moment of final respect in the late 1890s survives in Blanche (“Baby”) Oelrichs’s memoir, Who Tells Me True. At her favorite uncle’s “little cottage” in Newport, the little girl noticed the shades pulled down and was given a “bunch of flowers” at the threshold of the room in which “Uncle Harry” lay, his eyes closed and “absolutely still and very pale” and the floral scents overpowering. Laying her bouquet on his hands, she expected Uncle Harry to awake and speak. At length, in “spellbound bewilderment” came the realization that her favorite uncle was “dead.”
Solemnity prevailed, and a two-year mourning period was expected of widows and widowers. (Mrs. Astor had so mourned following the death of her husband in 1892.) For the funeral, closest family members and intimates were advised to wear “lusterless silks” or “all plain” woolens. Lest the specifics of etiquette slip the minds of friends or family or spark feuds, Gilded Age titles such as American Etiquette included “Funerals” among the many chapters on proper conduct. Upon a death, the window shades were drawn and crêpe ribbons, called door badges, hung from the bell: white for a child, black and white for a young adult, black for an older person. Gilded Age preferences sometimes extended to muted colors, perhaps lavender or a pale gray. The crêpe was not ornamental but a signal not to ring the bell unnecessarily. Inside, family members were bereaved and busy about the rituals that continue to this day. An undertaker was customarily employed to oversee arrangements. A casket must be chosen, flowers arranged, and a funeral guest list compiled. One manual advised that “those whose presence is desired at the funeral should be communicated with by letter upon mourning paper” that was edged in black. The invitations were delivered “by a private messenger.” Those who were asked to be pallbearers also received hand-delivered notes. (Telephones were regarded as vulgar, though telegrams to far-flung friends and relatives were both acceptable and necessary.) One etiquette manual offered a sample invitation:
Yourself and family are invited to
attend the funeral of
Mr. John D. Gordon
From his late residence,
No. 273 Madison Avenue
To proceed to Highland Cemetery
The etiquette guide advised that “on the mournful occasion when death takes place, the most proper course is to announce the decease in the newspaper.”
Thus the Times, November 1, reported without elaboration that Mrs. William Astor Jr. had died on October 30 and that her funeral would take place on November 2 at her home, a “simple service for relatives and intimate friends of the family,” after which her body would “be taken to Trinity Cemetery, Amsterdam and 153rd Street, for burial in the family plot, where William Astor and all the deceased members of the family are buried.” Two high-ranking Episcopalian priests were to officiate at the funeral service, doubtless offering prayers at first, then reading the Twenty-Third Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd . . .”), followed by observations on the mystery of life, of the promise of celestial eternity, and at last a personal reminiscence on the character of the deceased, either by a family member or a close friend. A closing prayer would be followed by a song or perhaps a verse. The service would last little longer than an hour.
A newer funeral protocol included a procession to a church for the main ceremony and service. Funds permitting, the church would be festooned with flowers, and as the service concluded, mourners might file in silence by the coffin, moving upward from the foot to the head before quietly recessing and stepping outside. The hearse and carriages awaited at the church door, for the procession to the cemetery now followed. The coachmen were liveried in black broadcloth with coats and vests buttoned to the neck. Their shirts were linen and the ties black silk, as were the top hats. The cortege would slowly make its way to the cemetery, the hearse elegantly decorated with such classical symbols of bereavement as the willow. Atop the hearse were plumes that indicated social status, from two plumes that marked modest circumstance to eight waving plumes that proclaimed great wealth. The proliferation of flowers sometimes required a separate coach, with the flowers preceding the pallbearers’ carriage. The cortege itself was meant to be imposing, and the hearse a great symbol of dignity in honor of the life lived and concluded. As the cortege passed, bystanders paused and stood still. Men doffed their hats in respect.
The Astor family decided against the newer funeral, perhaps because other ones came to mind, especially Ward McAllister’s. Mrs. Astor’s former close companion and social guide had died thirteen years earlier, his funeral taking place on February 5, 1895, at Grace Church on Broadway at East Tenth Street. His death, like his patron’s, was a lead story on the front pages of the New York Times, the Herald, and the World. Bystanders crowded the sidewalks on the day of his funeral and were held back by police when the funeral cortege passed, the hearse followed by five carriages that proceeded from McAllister’s home along Fifth Avenue to the church. Men of high standing served as honorary pallbearers, including Bradley Martin and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was McAllister’s friend to the end. The newspapers had reported that McAllister’s church pew was brimming with wreaths and flowers, and the service included a small orchestra in addition to somber organ music.
As the coffin was carried from the church for the journey to Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, however, ladies lunged for souvenir flowers from the McAllister pew. Dignity gave way to a scuffle for mementoes, and this scene, too, became grist for the newspapers. (Reported the Herald, “The crowd at times was most unruly. Attempts were made to steal flowers and even whole floral pieces, and so great was the clamor for good places that the late comers crowded right in on the heels of the mourners and had to be forced back by the police.”)
Mrs. Astor’s abhorrence of being photographed, together with her cooled relation to McAllister, may have shielded her from depiction in the newspaper gossip columns. The sole Astor to attend McAllister’s funeral was John Jacob IV, whose report on the scene might have refreshed family memories when the time came to plan Mrs. Astor’s funeral. There would be no sidewalk crowds, no police barricades, no unseemly scramble for souvenirs.
Like much else in the Gilded Age, money was a prime concern. Funeral expenses could mount precipitously, warned Emily Post, when undertakers’ temptations as businessmen overrode their ethics. “Let it be borne in mind,” warned one etiquette guide, “that nothing can excuse an extravagance and display at a funeral which must be indulged in at the expense of privation afterward.” Along with advice on the care and feeding of the bereaved (“sympathy, . . . a little food on a tray, . . . a poached egg, . . . milk toast”), Post’s Etiquette offered abundant warnings about “bad taste in mourning.” “Patent leather and satin shoes are not mourning,” she insisted, and distracting “extreme fashion” was flat-out “bad taste.” Her dictum spoke for all: “The necessity for dignity cannot be overemphasized.”
Gilded Age etiquette manuals omitted a crucial postfuneral ritual: the reading of the will. A reliable chronicler of the era, Edith Wharton turned to fiction to provide that scenario, showing a family assembled in the deceased’s drawing room for the reading of a will that exhibits, by turns, hypocrisy, greed, and violations of the mourners’ dress code. In her story, Wharton’s Miss Lily Bart, the protagonist of The House of Mirth, seems on the verge of inheriting a great deal of money to support the elegant life that is slipping from her grasp. Since the financial collapse and death of her parents, she has depended on her niggardly but wealthy Aunt Peniston and the largesse of rich hostesses. Along the way, she has blundered into scandals that tarnish her reputation and put her in debt. The death of her aunt promises a bright financial future at last, since it had been “‘always understood’ that Mrs. Peniston was to provide handsomely for her niece.”
Unknown to Lily, however, a conniving cousin has wormed her way into Mrs. Peniston’s favor and filled the aunt’s ear with malicious rumors about her niece. The aunt’s will, we learn, has recently been revised. Wharton’s words ring with irony as she sets the scene: “The blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room were drawn against the oppressive June heat, and in the sultry twilight the faces of her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement.” Close and distant relatives are in place and in suspense about the “extent” of Aunt Peniston’s “private fortune.” In turn, her heirs show their feigned grief, their greed, and clothing that flouts the occasion (“a sepulchral gesture,” “an eager twitch” of the lips, a “frivolous gown”). Lily arrives, “tall and noble in her black dress,” only to hear the crushing news that Mrs. Peniston has willed the bulk of her fortune to the conniving niece, leaving a paltry $10,000 to Lily—just enough to pay her debts. She is gracious, passing Wharton’s test of honorable civility. But the scene exposes fault lines in family unity when the dispersal of serious money is at stake. It is likely that similar scenes played out in the reading of wills of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. Edith Wharton, one such member of that exclusive coterie, was positioned to know—and to tell.