Yes, this is another story about those wacky Victorians and the bizarre things they did for fun. If they weren’t picnicking with the dead, they were taking photos of their dead loved ones and making jewelry out of their hair… or maybe playing potentially fatal games at Christmas parties.
Europeans had been buying mummies since Shakespeare’s times to use them as medicine, pigments, or even magical charms; but in the 19th century, the Napoleonic wars and England’s colonial expansion had created a renewed interest in Egypt’s past. Demand for mummies was so high that the fledgling tourist industry in Egypt transported them from the least visited places of the country to place in their more popular ruins in order to satisfy foreign visitors.
In addition to the “Egyptomania” that was sweeping England at that time, there was also an obsession with the supernatural and the macabre. Fun-loving upper-class Victorians really loved to party, so if you were able to get your hands on an ancient Egyptian mummy, you were totally going to invite your friends over to help unwrap it. (Somehow the same people who thought it vulgar to take off their gloves in mixed company delighted in having a millennia-old corpse desecrated in front of them.)
Please… no. The Victorians were so strange.