Whenever you find yourself thinking you’ve nothing to wear, and that to have some kind of uniform would be quite nice, it may be helpful to consider the plight of the Victorian widow. She had a uniform: it was black. But there, the simplicity ended. Mourning garb was traditionally made of crepe, a fabric whose chief virtue (like that of bombazine and parramatta, both later popular for the same purpose) was that it was non-reflective, any hint of shininess being thought far too cheerful for the grieving. It was highly disobliging stuff. A single drop of water marked it indelibly, leaving behind a rusty-looking stain.

Thanks to this, widows were housebound in rain, though stuck at home there was at least plenty to occupy the wealthier among them. In the days after a bereavement, there were mourning cards to be sent (women who’d lost a husband were entitled to use the thickest of the black borders the stationer produced) and mourning jewellery to commission (brooches, lockets and rings that rather creepily often incorporated the loved one’s hair). By the middle of the 19th century, death had become highly commercialised among the middle classes. In London, there were several so-called mourning warehouses, the fanciest of which styled themselves magasins de deuil: a kind of one-stop shop for death. If this sounds comical, it was: in 1844, Hood’s Magazine published a satire in which a man called Squire Hamper and his wife visit one, where an assistant shows them goods suitable for those moving from “a grief prononcé to the slightest nuance of regret”, the latter available in the Intermediate Sorrow Department. The best spoofs are always only a notch off reality. One Oxford Street emporium did indeed have a space devoted to half-mourning, an intermediate stage before normality finally resumed. It was called the Mitigated Affliction Department.

All this seems so far off now… Or does it? I devoured Judith Flanders’s Rites of Passage, a new book about Victorian death and its accoutrements in which all the details above appear. I think it’s masterly. So many amazing facts! If it were a soup, there’d be a crouton in every spoonful. But still, I’m not sure I fully agree with her that funeral rituals ended (more or less) with the arrival of the 20th century, death becoming more personal and inward, “shared only with family and close friends”. British people of my age – I’m 54 – will remember how their grandparents went on. The remnants of their Victorian parents’ behaviour could still be felt in my childhood: the curtains of the whole street closed on the day of a funeral; the undertaker walking slowly (and with a certain amount of relish) ahead of the hearse as it left the house, and again at the cemetery; strangers stopping, and removing their caps as the cortege passed. Relics of those times, moreover, are all about. The ghost signs of grand old undertakers may still be seen on gable walls. A black tie still hangs in many, if not most, male wardrobes. I own several pieces of Whitby jet (used for mourning jewellery), some bought and some inherited.

But all this only makes Rites of Passage the more fascinating, of course. I felt it as a kind of double haunting, its ghosts at once distant and close by. Flanders covers everything from mortality rates to the rise of garden cemeteries, coffin designs to the movement for cremation, and she does so with compassion and a droll wit. She acknowledges the very human ways in which Victorians were the same as us (a mother grieved terribly, even if the children’s deaths were horribly commonplace). But she understands, too, that our forebears were very different to us. “… the children didn’t stay… they went back again,” one parishioner said to the Rev Francis Kilvert of the twins lost by her bereft neighbour. As Kilvert noted, it was as if they’d just “come into a room and gone out again”. If the life of a parent in the time of cholera and typhoid was – as someone else puts it – the same as the life of a gambler, heaven and earth were also in close proximity: a matter of a door opening and closing. Cremation was initially opposed – a “barbarous” practice, said the church – on the grounds it would mean that at the Resurrection there would be no bodies lying ready to rise up for judgment.

It’s strange to write it, but there is such charm in this book, and all of it the result of Flanders’s indefatigable research. At one moment – I was reading then of corrupt and greedy undertakers – I found myself humming That’s Your Funeral, from the musical Oliver!. Charles Dickens, who was opposed to displays of ostentation when it came to death, is one of the book’s presiding spirits, but numerous other literary figures appear, too: poor Margaret Oliphant, the bestselling novelist who would lose all her children eventually; Thomas Hardy, who visited a Parisian morgue on honeymoon; Jane Carlyle, the wife of the great historian, who complained that watching the Duke of Wellington’s funeral procession from a house along the route “cost me a new black bonnet”.

Here are dodgy mediums with their ectoplasm and their rattling wooden cabinets; here are beekeepers tying black ribbons round their hives, having first notified their occupants of a death in the family (failure to do so might mean the bees would swarm and leave); and here is the most famous widow of them all, Queen Victoria, grieving for her husband, Albert, for 40 long years: a blackness that was at first so absolute, she wanted the entire British army to go into mourning. Yes, every page – every paragraph – of this brilliant book is interesting. But there’s something else, too. Like a good funeral, Rites of Passage does the reader some good as well. I worry, sometimes, about all the rituals we’ve lost and what this means for us, but I put down Flanders’s book with a rising sense of gratitude: for my unholy 21st-century life; for the beautiful accident of the time and place of my birth.

• Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain by Judith Flanders is published by Picador (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply