For many of us cocking a snook can be a genuinely cathartic experience, the liberation of some long suppressed frustrations. Usually it sufficient to press the tip of your nose with your thumb and spread your fingers but for some only some grand statement will suffice. Take this example culled from the pages of the Illustrated Police News volume 11, 1871, which ran as its headline “A Quebec Woman Creates a Sensation, Riding Through St. John Street in a Hearse, Reclining on the Coffin-Bed, and Smoking a Pipe”.
At the time it was customary for a widow to go into what was known as full mourning for a year. During this time she would wear a veil, the widow’s weed, derived from the Old English word “waed” meaning garment, over her face, was not permitted to attend social functions, or generally seen out in public. Then for between a further six months to a year, she would go into half-mourning, attending some social occasions and adding more texture to her black wardrobe. During her last six months of mourning, the widow could start adding more colour to her clothes including white, grey and light purples.
The Quebec woman’s actions could only be interpreted as a dramatic statement against the elaborate protocols and conventions that surrounded death and its aftermath. Indeed, the Illustrated Police News could barely contain its sense of outrage. “What will women do next to distinguish themselves, we wonder!”, it thundered. “A female in Quebec, the other day, perpetrated a ghastly joke, mocking death in his own domain, by lying down in a hearse and smoking a pipe in a funeral chariot was driven through the street. If this exhibition had been made in the United States, our neighbours at the North would have made it the subject of very strong animadversions”.
As wonderfully graphic as this statement pouring scorn on the fear of death and all its trappings as this was, there are some problems with the story. The woman is unnamed and surely such a cause célèbre would have elicited sufficient interest to persuade a member of the press to unearth her identity. Au contraire, the Quebec Historical Society confirming that no mention of the incident appeared in any contemporary Canadian newspaper, whether French or English-speaking.
The Illustrated Police News, which ran in weekly format from 1864 to 1938, even receiving an early namecheck in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, was one of the earliest British tabloids, specializing in sensational and melodramatic reports and illustrations of murders and hangings for the edification of the masses such as Mrs Higden. It is almost certainly the figment of the imagination of someone desperate to fill a blank space as the deadline approaches, knowing full well that it would not be checked and would elicit tuts over the looseness of foreign ways.
A shame but since the cutting has resurfaced, the image has captured the imagination, even prompting one blogger to speculate on the legality (seat belt laws and smoking regulations to name but two obstacles) and the cost of re-enacting the stunt!
windowthroughtime 