Necropolis: London & it's Dead (30 page)

In order to achieve this effect, the choice of monument was vital. In 1878
The Builder
magazine decreed that: ‘The principles of proportion and of harmony and grace and form which are required by a well-dressed woman in her costume are equally applicable when she comes to choose a tombstone for her husband.’
²⁰

Given the appropriate funds, the widow was not spoiled for choice. Monumental masons offered pattern books of designs; Stephen Geary published
Cemetery Designs for Tombs and Monuments
in 1840, a year after his partner Bunning had produced
Designs for Tombs and Monuments
. These books, and the stonemasons who executed the designs within, were a feature of every high street. At Highgate, the official mason was Millward in
Swain’s Lane, and two statuary masons took over houses in South Grove there to meet the demand: Rebecca Bower in Russell House and Henry Daniel in Church House.
²¹

Monuments became progressively bigger over the decades. They were comparatively simple in the 1830s and 1840s, shaped at the top in a manner suggestive of Classical origins with a pediment, until Pugin’s Gothic Revival ushered in an era of crosses and pointed headstones. The Battle of the Styles raged on: not to be outdone, the Classicists began building entire temples.

Traditionally, materials consisted of Portland, Bath or York stone (Kensal Green was constructed from Portland stone). Granite became fashionable as the railway links made it possible to deliver the stone from remote areas of Britain. Although expensive, as it had to be polished and dressed, it was favoured for columns and obelisks. The most popular form–grey stone speckled with a ‘salt and pepper appearance’, came from Bodmin, Cornwall. Then there was pink Peterhead granite from Aberdeen, and Shap from Cumbria, which was red with large feldspar crystals. White Carrara marble, such as that used for the tomb of Julius Beer, was imported from Italy. Carrara is comparatively soft, and lends itself to figurative carving.

As well as the extraordinary diversity of shapes and styles, Victorian monuments possessed their own language of symbols, derived from religious imagery. Some are comparatively easy to decipher if we take into account the pervasive Christian iconography which inspired them. Three steps on a monument signify the three steps to heaven of the aspiring soul; trefoils indicate the Trinity; angels perform the role of guardian, and also that of mourner, harking back to the heraldic tradition of real people paid to weep at the tomb. Then there are the occupational symbols: anchors, scrolls, books. The Classical influence played its part, with broken columns signifying a life interrupted, and urns, derived from the funerary urn of Classical Antiquity. Urns draped with a cloth indicated that the deceased was head of the household, while
pyramids, inspired by the Egyptian craze, were said to prevent the devil from lying on one’s grave.

Monuments such as the four-poster bed of the Maple family and Tom Sayers’s dog Lion at Highgate, and the extraordinary Ducrow Tomb at Kensal Green, contribute to the eclectic appearance of London’s Victorian cemeteries, revealing a unique sense of the national character which has sadly been lost today. However, many nineteenth-century commentators were outraged by the flights of fancy to be found in the new cemeteries, considering them to be irreligious. Writing on Glasgow Necropolis in 1857, George Blair observed that the jumble of Doric, Corinthian, Egyptian and Italianate were elegant works of art, but had no religious significance. ‘Erect them in any other locality, and their object would be difficult to divine.’
²²
Pugin, champion of Gothic Revival in the Battle of the Styles, believed that such designs had no place in Christian burial: ‘Surely the Cross must be the most appropriate emblem on the tombs of those who profess to believe in God crucified for the redemption of man?’
²³
Pugin despised what he called ‘that vile and pagan upstart, sepulchral Baroque’, and was scathing on the subject of the new cemeteries, despite the fact that his chosen style had inspired so many of their architects:

Most people’s idea of a cemetery is something associated with great Egyptian lodges and little shabby flower-beds, joint stock companies and immortelles, dissent, infidelity, and speculation, the irreverences of Abney Park or the fripperies and frigidities of Père Lachaise.

The entrance gateway is usually selected for the grand display of the company’s enterprise and taste, as being well calculated from its position to induce persons to patronise the undertaking and by the purchase of shares or graves. This is generally Egyptian, probably from some association between the word catacombs, which occurs in the prospectus of the company, and the discoveries of Belzoni on the banks of the Nile; and nearly
opposite the Green Man and Dog public-house, in the centre of a dead wall (which serves as a cheap medium of advertisement for blacking and shaving-strop manufacturers); a cement caricature of the entrance to an Egyptian temple, 2½ inches to the foot, is erected, with convenient lodges for the policeman and his wife, and a neat pair of cast iron hieroglyphical gates, which would puzzle the most learned to decipher; while to prevent any mistake, some such words as ‘New Economical Compressed Grave Cemetery Company’ are inscribed in Grecian capitals along the frieze, interspersed with hawk-headed divinities, and surmounted by a huge representation of the winged Osiris bearing a gas lamp.
²⁴

Despite these criticisms, elaborate monuments proved enormously popular, and working-class families, who could least afford to, continued to lavish money on funerals and memorials. But, even at the height of the cult of Victorian mourning, other outlooks were beginning to emerge, which would eventually change attitudes to death, bereavement and burial.

In 1855, less than ten years after Laman Blanchard’s trip to Kensal Green and his invocation to ‘Let these dry bones live’, Henry Bowler exhibited a remarkable painting. It depicts a beautiful young woman brooding over a tombstone in a country graveyard. Behind her is a lych-gate; at her side, an ivy-covered church wall. At first glance the scene is idyllic; sunlight filters through the green chestnut leaves; she wears a bonnet trimmed with fresh flowers over her golden hair; only the black shawl covering her red dress gives some indication that she has, at some point, been in mourning. The tombstone reads:
Sacred to the Memory of John Faithful 1711–1791
and bears a quotation from the Burial Service in the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer
: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ And then the eye is drawn to the foot of the tombstone, the pile of horse chestnuts and the human skeletal remains among the clumps of soil. The title of the painting is:
Doubt–Can These Dry Bones Live? Can
, not
Let
.

Partially inspired by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer (the latter was buried at Highgate), the growth of religious doubt led the educated public to challenge the old strictures, including the concept of physical resurrection on Judgement Day. This, in its turn, led to a less reverential, although not irreverent, attitude towards the disposal of the dead. This appeared first among the nobility, who followed the trend for modest funerals set by Prince Albert. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli requested burial in the chapel of his country house, Hughenden, rather than the interment in Westminster Abbey to which he was entitled. His wishes were observed in 1881. The Anglican Church’s Campaign for Mourning Reform lobbied for a more enlightened approach to bereavement and the cost of burial.

In a letter to
The Times,
one member of the House of Lords demanded:

How long are we to be subjected to the tyranny of custom and undertakers? How long are we to be smothered with overflowing hatbands, scarves, and mourning cloaks, mobbed and overpowered by mutes, ostrich feathers, &c? How long are we to continue to see the remains of some quiet old gentleman or lady, who perhaps never in his or her life sat behind anything more exalted than a small pony, drawn to their last home by four long-tailed black horses, or someone who, having lived unloved, dies unmourned, and is yet attended to his grave by half a dozen hired mourners at 5s per day and beer? Truly, it is all vanity and vexation of spirit–a mere mockery of woe.
²⁵

Having developed suburban cemeteries, which were more like parks, and railway cemeteries, which helped solve the London burial problem, the Victorians were moving towards another solution to the overcrowded necropolis: cremation.

11: UP IN SMOKE

The Development of Cremation

The development of cremation almost completes the circle in the London experience of death. Just as their remote ancestors were immolated in pits outside the city walls, their cremains buried in urns, modern Londoners choose a similar method of burial. The United Kingdom has the sixth highest rate of cremation in the world–after Hong Kong, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Denmark. A number of factors contributed to the development and popularity of cremation, the foremost being the abiding shortage of burial space in and around London.

London’s older cemeteries, those little gardens ‘dotted as green spots all over the city’, which had been closed by the Burial Acts of the 1850s, were disappearing beneath the railway and new buildings.
¹
Extensions to the Bank of England, for example, swallowed up an entire parish. Within cemeteries, headstones were shuffled about like chess pieces, with monuments routinely smashed by contractors and the rubble used for foundations. Burial reformer William Robinson reported that broken pieces of monumental stones, some of them bearing names and dates, had been found scat
tered across a park in South Kensington in the 1860s, dumped by the Victorian equivalent of cowboy builders.

Despite the best efforts of reformers, many London cemeteries remained in a disgusting state. William Robinson, author of
God’s Acre Beautiful
, argued that, given the massive profits of certain suburban cemeteries, the temptation to continue burial in them longer than decency or sanitary reasons would allow created a health hazard. ‘At Highgate, for example, strong undertakers’ men have been made seriously ill while at work by the underflowing drainage from the higher parts of the burial ground.’
²
A letter to the
Lancet
alleged that ‘some of the cemeteries within the metropolitan district are rapidly becoming sources of peril not only to the neighbourhoods in which they are situated, but to the whole metropolis.’
³
Considering that the suburban cemeteries had been created to solve the problem of the overflowing city graveyards, the situation was somewhat ironic.

The development of secularism and the decline of organized religion was another important factor in the speed of cremation. Writing in 1896, Mrs Isabella Holmes demanded:

Are we ever to allow England to be divided like a chess-board into towns and burial-places? What we have to consider is how to dispose of the dead without taking so much valuable space from the living. In the metropolitan area alone we have almost filled (and in some places overfilled) twenty-four new cemeteries within sixty years, with an area of above six hundred acres; and this is nothing compared with the huge extent of land used for interments just outside the limits of the metropolis. If the cemeteries are not to expand indefinitely they must in time be built upon, or they must be used for burial over and over again, or the ground must revert to its original state as agricultural land, or we must turn our parks and commons into cemeteries, and let our cemeteries be our only recreation grounds–which Heaven forbid!
⁴

Mrs Holmes, an enthusiast for cremation as it freed up more land for her beloved public parks, did not find it impossible to reconcile the procedure with her religious beliefs:

I fail to understand how any serious-minded person can harbour the idea that burning the body can be any stumbling-block in the way of its resurrection, for the body returns ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ whether the process takes fifty years or fifty minutes.
⁵

Being a realist, Mrs Holmes knew that cremation would not gain real credibility until religious leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and the Head of the Roman Catholic Church in England gave it their blessing.

Ironically, although cremation was a controversial topic during the nineteenth century, the Roman practice of cremation had been well established in London by the first century
AD
; as we have already seen, Roman cremation practices were easily reconciled with existing British ones. Cremation eventually went out of favour under the influence of the Christian Church, and by
AD
500, it was obsolete in Britain. There was a brief revival of interest in the sixteenth century, with the discovery of a series of burial urns near the Roman fort of Brannodunnum in Norfolk. It was this discovery, at what is now Brancaster, which inspired Sir Thomas Browne to metaphysical contemplation. Reflecting that: ‘
Pyramids, Arches, Obelisks
, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity,’ Browne argues in favour of cremation, if only as an alternative to the disgusting consequences of putrefaction:

In an Hydropicall body ten years buried in a Church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivorous liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-soap.
⁶