In England during the Victorian Era(1837-1901) people got their portrait painted only once or never in their life due to the high expense. The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made portraiture much more commonplace, as many of those who were unable to afford the commission of a painted portrait...
could afford to sit for a photography session. If someone died, his relatives wanted to remember him, so they put his body in a living-like position and took pictures of him. As macabre as it seems it was the only option for remembering the dead. Even though not all photographs include dead people because they also took pictures of the recently deceased who were about to die. This is the custom of Memento Mori. There are many infants in the pictures because the childhood mortality rates were high at the mid of the 19th century. Watch the slideshow.
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