Necropolis: London & it's Dead (25 page)

With hindsight, it is possible to accuse Holmes of a patronizing and philistine attitude towards London’s graveyards. Holmes was certainly no admirer of funerary art or elaborate mausolea; she detested Kensal Green, for example:

There is a special interest attached to Kensal Green Cemetery from its having been the first, but I think it is also the worst. Mr Loftie describes it as ‘the bleakest, dampest, most melancholy of all the burial grounds of London’…Kensal Green Cemetery is truly awful, with its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones.
⁴¹

Mrs Holmes lamented the cost of ‘these massive monuments’. As a reformer, she believed the money would have been better spent on building schools and hospitals. ‘To what purpose is this waste? Can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money than by erecting costly tombstones?’
⁴²

But Holmes’s reforming zeal can be understood in the context of a rational attitude towards death and burial which emerged towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century, a response to the oppressive pomp of the Victorian funeral and the condition described by the historian of death, Philippe Ariès, as ‘hysterical mourning’.

9: THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED DEATH

The Victorian Funeral

In 1887, as French writers Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Léon Bloy were passing the flower-sellers, monumental masons and shops specializing in funeral accessories near the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Villiers exclaimed in fury: ‘Those are the people who invented death!’
¹

Villiers’s observation was just as true of the funeral industry this side of the Channel. By the 1880s, Victorian mourning showed manufacturers exploiting the commercial possibilities of an inevitable event, in a culture where death was just another excuse for merchandizing and black crape made the fortune of Courtaulds. James Stevens Curl has, rightly, referred to this phenomenon as ‘the Victorian celebration of death’.

By the standards of the twenty-first century, the High Victorian funeral possessed an air of pageantry which is quite alien to our culture, apart from notable exceptions such as the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Before we turn to the phenomenon of the Victorian funeral itself, we should first consider the Victorian attitude towards death. It seems obvious to us now that the Victorians had a different attitude
towards dying. Nothing in one’s life became one like the leaving of it. In cultural terms, a dichotomy existed between a ‘good’ death, and a ‘bad’ one.

Derived from the mediaeval concept of
ars moretori
, the Good Death refers to death as the right true end of a Christian life, with the promise of an Eternal one to follow. A Good Death meant dying peacefully in your own bed, surrounded by family and friends, with a clergyman on hand to administer the Last Rites and your children brought in to kiss you goodbye. Elaborate Victorian customs eased the transition from deathbed to the final resting-place of the grave, from natural sleep to the sleep of death. A Good Death meant the opportunity for famous last words. So compelling was this that anaesthesia was discouraged, to allow the patient enough lucidity for final pronouncements. The worst fate was to die alone.

The Victorian Good Death was enshrined in literature and the visual arts, from Dickens to children’s picture books. In
The Old Curiosity Shop
, the heroine, Nell, finds a group of children playing in a cemetery:

Some young children sported among the tombs, and hid from each other, with laughing faces. They had an infant with them, and had laid it down asleep upon a child’s grave, in a little bed of leaves…Nell drew near and asked them whose grave it was. The child answered that that was not its name; it was a garden–his brother’s. It was greener, he said, than all the other gardens, and the birds loved it better because he had been used to feed them.
²

Far from being a place of terror, this country churchyard is a sanctuary for children who have already accepted the certainty of death and have nothing to fear. Nell herself is later buried in the nearby church, after a perfect example of a Good Death:

Opening her eyes at last, from a very quiet sleep, she begged that they would kiss her once again. That done, she turned to the old
man with a lovely smile upon her face–such, they said, as they had never seen, and never could forget–and clung with both her arms about his neck. They did not know that she was dead, at first.
³

In the Good Death, the dead are depicted as at peace, continuing the Romantic perception of death which inspired Shelley: ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep!’
⁴
Tennyson’s Elaine hears death ‘like a friend’s voice from a distant field, approaching through the darkness’.
⁵
This idealized condition allowed no indication of corporeal decay. Just as Hawksmoor’s mausoleum at Castle Howard was enough to make Horace Walpole long to be buried alive, Little Nell’s demise is enough to make one want to die young and leave a beautiful corpse:

She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon…Her couch was dressed with here and there some winter berries and green leaves, gathered in a spot she had been used to favour. ‘When I die, put near me something that has loved the light, and had the sky above it always.’ Those were her words.
⁶

It was an age of high infant mortality. Even picture books prepared children for the melancholy realities. One by Dent featured the tale of ‘The Three Little Kittens’:

In the morn, full of pride–in the evening they died;

How sudden and shocking their fate!

The three little kittens, who still wore their mittens,

Were buried next morning in state!

The rhyme is illustrated by a tabby cat on a rooftop, witnessing the cortège winding off into the sunset, followed by a procession of weeping felines, all in deep mourning.
⁷
Regular visits to the
cemetery familiarized children with inscriptions such as that of
Dear Little Rosie
at Highgate:

Day by day we saw her fade

And quietly pass away

Though often in our hearts we prayed

That she might longer stay.

This awareness of mortality and vulnerability was inevitably reflected in the trappings of a child’s funeral. A trade catalogue of shroud designs contains one illustration of an infant’s grave clothes embroidered with the Biblical imperative:
Suffer Little Children To Come Unto Me
. On display at the Museum of London there is a little German doll dressed in pink, lying on her back in a box. The doll was presented to one Letitia Hawkins, aged eight, on 18 December 1852, the night before she died. Perhaps the style of packaging is coincidental, but the box looks exactly like a coffin.

Image not available

Reproductions of sentimental narrative paintings, hung in a million homes, reminded families that the Angel of Death was always hovering over London.
The Empty Cradle
depicted a mournful dog, head bowed over a vacant crib. Landseer’s
The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner
showed a grieving Border Collie, chin resting in devotion on his master’s coffin. In
The Old Master
, labourers gather in a farmhouse to view the open coffin of their master and pay their last respects, while the aged widow looks mutely on. All these images represent a form of the Good Victorian Death.

London also offered many examples of the Bad Death. Prisoners, the poor, the lonely and the socially excluded expired in dismal circumstances, unmourned and unloved, from unbaptized babies to criminal suicides.

Socially excluded women were virtually guaranteed a Bad Death. The journalist James Greenwood recorded the fate of ‘Poor Margaret’, a nineteen-year-old girl who died in the workhouse in 1883, without so much as a surname. Poor Margaret went to her grave ‘on the parish’ in a box so cheap it had no handles, her passing marked by nothing more than a pencil crossing her name off a list.

In September 1888, the writer George Gissing (1857–1903) was called to a seedy lodging-house in Lambeth where his ex-wife, Nell Harris, had been found dead in the first-floor back bedroom. This ‘wretched, wretched place’ was a room so small he could scarcely turn round. Among the heaps of rags and medicine bottles were numerous pawn tickets. Even the bedclothes had gone. A former prostitute who had returned to the streets, Nell had spent every penny on drink. After an absence of three years, she had changed horribly. Gissing scarcely recognized her.

Gissing organized a six-guineas funeral through a Mr Stevens of Lambeth, who also ran a pub, and gave Nell’s landlady three pounds to buy mourning clothes–a detail which illustrates the
pervasive nature of Victorian mourning culture. It is doubtful that the proprietor was genuinely bereft. When Gissing returned for the funeral, Nell, in her coffin, had lost her frightening aspect and seemed more familiar. But there was one final humiliation. The landlady’s daughter accompanied Gissing to the local pub, where they redeemed a pawned item for one shilling and ninepence–Nell’s wedding ring.

Gissing blamed himself for Nell’s death, although he had repeatedly tried to get treatment for her alcoholism. Theirs had been an unhappy marriage. However, her death also inspired him, in a strange kind of way, stirring his social conscience. ‘As I stood beside that bed, I felt that my life henceforth had a firmer purpose. Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind!’
⁸

The last category of Bad Death was, of course, suicide. No disgrace had attached to suicide in the Classical world. Indeed, to choose death before dishonour was regarded as perfectly acceptable. But the Church condemned suicide as a mortal sin, and it was illegal under English law, the act of suicide being referred to as
felo de se
.

As they had violated Christian morals, suicides were denied burial in consecrated ground and the usual observations of mourning. Instead, they were buried at night, often at a crossroads, their bodies ritually violated with a stake hammered through the heart, to anchor them down so that they could not return to haunt the living. The custom of burial at crossroads may have been to baffle the ghosts, as they would not know which direction to take. Another way to ‘maze’ or confuse the suicide’s spirit consisted of ensuring that the funeral procession returned from the graveside by a different route, in order to make it more difficult for the departed shade to return and haunt the relatives.
⁹
The tradition of burying suicides at a crossroads was still observed in the early nineteenth century.

The ‘funeral’ of John Williams on 31 December 1811 became one
of the most macabre spectacles in the history of London. Williams committed suicide after being accused of being ‘the London Monster’, perpetrator of the notorious Ratcliff Highway Murders of 1811, during which whole families had been bludgeoned to death. Williams’s corpse was drawn through the streets on a cart with his weapons by his side: the bloodstained chisel and maul (sledgehammer) with which he had battered and ripped his victims to pieces, his face ‘ghastly in the extreme’. The procession, which took place in daylight–presumably to up the attendance numbers–started at Coldbath Prison, Islington, where Williams had been found dead. Reinforced by several hundred police officers, it wound through the East End, pausing outside the victims’ houses, followed by a crowd ten thousand strong. At last, the cart reached the junction of Cannon Street and Cable Street, where the body was crammed into the ground, and a stake driven through the heart with the same maul Williams had used to kill his victims. ‘As the blood-stained maul thudded on the stake, the silence of the crowd was at last broken and the air became hideous with shouts and execrations.’
¹⁰
In 1866, remains thought to be those of Williams were discovered during excavations by a gas company. The skeleton came complete with stake.

Suicides were buried on the edge of town, far from the living, but, inevitably, many of these unhallowed spots have been swallowed up by the living. In St John’s Wood, a tiny triangle of green opposite Lord’s Cricket Ground marked the spot where John Mortland was buried with a stake through his heart in 1823, after murdering Sir Warwick Bampfylde, a poet, in Montague Square and then killing himself. This was probably the last case of crossroads burial. The tradition of burying suicides and murderers at a crossroads was abolished in 1823, when an Act was passed insisting that suicides should be buried in unconsecrated ground which was provided by law in all burial places, and specifying that burial take place between nine and twelve at night.

As well as being illegal, suicide was considered to bring the sur
viving family into disrepute. In Trollope’s
The Prime Minister
, Emily Lopez’s disreputable husband commits suicide by stepping into the path of the Euston to Inverness express and is ‘knocked into bloody atoms’.
¹¹
Emily’s father ensures that Lopez does not receive a verdict of
felo de se
at the Coroner’s Court, to preserve the family honour.

Victorian attitudes towards suicide demonstrate typical ambivalence, with the deed acceptably romantic in theory, as in Henry Wallis’s 1865 narrative painting
The Death of Chatterton
, which featured poet George Meredith posing as the doomed forger, but unforgivable in real life. An eccentric carpenter, who killed himself with his own guillotine was decreed ‘such a guilty wretch that he should be flung into a hole at night-time, with no more ceremony than attends the throwing a dead dog into a ditch’.
¹²
No wonder Dante Gabriel Rossetti was suspected of destroying a suicide note left by Lizzie Siddal.