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^^^^^ A ^ Sol - Of. 2, Copyright 1991, Deborah Elaine Wiggins ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The many people who were generous in their assistance made this project much easier. Foremost, I must thank Dr. Brian L. Blakeley for his guidance and assistance during the entire dissertation process. He has suffered both nobly and gallantly and has always been most helpful and supportive. The strengths of this work are largely due to him. I am grateful to Dr. Alwyn Barr, Dr. James Harper, Dr. Briggs Twyman, Dr. Idris Rhea Traylor, Jr., and Dr. David Murrah for their gracious assistance and unfailing encouragement. I am grateful to the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives for permission to include extracts from the Palmerston Papers. I must also thank my office partner, Niler Pyeatt, who has always been willing to listen. Once again, I thank Gary and Lara for their continued help and indulgence. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE EMERGENCE OF THE GRAVEYARD AS A POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUE 14 III. GARDEN CEMETERIES: THE RESPONSE OF PRIVATE ENTERPRISE 48 IV. THE BURIAL ACT OF 1850: CHADWICK AND THE UTILITARIAN APPROACH 83 V. THE BURIAL ACT OF 1852: THE TRIUMPH OF DECENTRALIZATION Ill VI. THE BURIAL ACT OF 1880: OSBORNE MORGAN AND THE LIBERATION SOCIETY. 138 VII. THE BURIAL ACT OF 1900: THE TRIUMPH OF NON-SECTARIANISM 166 VIII. THE CREMATION ACT OF 1902: SCIENCE, "EFFICIENCY," AND MODERN INTERMENT . , . 188 IX. CONCLUSION 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY 218 111 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The old Duke died quietly on 14 September 1852. His passing shocked and saddened the people of Great Britain, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert decided that his funeral had to be postponed until November, to allow the nation time to prepare itself for a State funeral of grand proportions. Wellington's body lay in state at Walmer on 10 and 11 November before being taken to London for the lying- in-state at Chelsea Hospital. There the Great Hall was layered with black cloth, the coffin was draped with red velvet, placed on a black bier, and surrounded by heraldic banners, under the aegis of a silver-lined black canopy. On the day of the funeral, 18 November, approximately a million and a half mourners lined the procession's route.^ The funeral car was a tremendous vehicle, 21 feet long, 12 feet wide, weighing 18 tons, and supported by three great axles and huge wheels. Work horses were borrowed from a London brewery to pull the car, and they were appropriately draped with black crape and adorned with black plumes. After the procession finally arrived at St. Paul's Cathedral, the funeral service was conducted with great solemnity. The ^The Times devoted a lengthy editorial to warn of the possible dangers at the funeral. They advised using carriages only if absolutely necessary, sensible warm clothing for the ladies as the weather had been rather cold, and above all, "Let no man give way to a panic this day under any circumstances whatsoever." 18 November 1852, 4c. Dead March from Handel's Saul played as the coffin was placed into the vault; the music concluded with Mendelssohn's Sleepers Awake!. followed by the firing of the Tower guns, to signify that the funeral ceremony had concluded.2 The Duke of Wellington's burial was the high point for Victorian funeral ritual. Even at that time, in 1852, some critics felt that the solemnities were a bit overblown. Charles Greville commented in his diary that the funeral car was "tawdry, cumbrous and vulgar."^ But William Ewart Gladstone could find only that "the spectacle was magnificent in the highest degree; the Mendelssohn Anthem at the end sublime in effect almost beyond anything I ever heard."^ Great Britain and the Royal Family genuinely mourned the Duke of Wellington's death, for he embodied the British triumph of 1815 and symbolized the power and splendid confidence of the Victorian age. In 1815, Great Britain was an extremely powerful nation. Outwardly, she was the leader of Europe and the world, and her economy was growing ever more powerful. ^The description of the funeral comes from Elizabeth Longford's Wellington. Pillar of State (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), pp. 399-404, and The Times, 18 November 1852, 5. "^Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford, eds.. The Greville Memoirs, 1814-1860 (London: MacmiUan & Co., 1938), VI: 370 ^M.R. D. Foot and H. C. G. Matthew, eds.. The Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974), IV: 469. Internally, her local government institutions had changed little since medieval times. The intoxicating and radical ideas of the French Revolution along with the increased wealth of the middle class led to demands for more political power, and reform became a powerful rallying cry for those who would change society. These forces led to the Reform Act of 1832, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Reform Act of 1867, and a myriad of other changes. Hand in hand with the increased power of the middle class went the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Smiles, and Herbert Spencer, with their insistence on efficient government for the people, personal liberty, self-improvement and individualism. Reform, all kinds and aspects of reform, became a part of British life and thereby affected all facets of British life. Death and interment, central events in human life and experience, have seldom received their due from historians. This is particularly true of government's attempts to regulate both the ritual of death and the impact of death on the living. Nevertheless, the series of burial laws, collectively known as the Burial Acts, is not an incon sequential facet of British history, but rather, one deserving of study. In their proper context, the Burial Acts become an integral part of a much larger picture. Collaterally, they reflect the Victorian preoccupation with death and illustrate the process by which Great Britain transformed itself from a nation ruled by local governments to a country with national governmental policies for local issues. This was a definite break with tradition. These changes did not happen quickly and often they did not occur pleasantly. But, by the beginning of the twentieth century. Great Britain was a nation with a matrix of national regulations and policies for all areas of local government, public health, and sanitation. From the 1830s to shortly after the turn of the century, the legislation regulating cemeteries and the Burial Acts formulated by parliament were implemented decade by decade in an effort to solve the various problems of Great Britain's cemeteries. Invariably, the problems that confronted the rest of the nation surfaced first in London, and the solutions were first tried in London. With the population increase of the nineteenth century, London experienced tremendous growth. In this process she developed all the symptoms of a city in the throes of a fever of over-rapid expansion, with overcrowded housing, overwhelmed sewers and overflowing privies, intermittent supplies of impure water, polluted air, stinking rivers, filthy streets, and ultimately, overcrowded cemeteries. As England's "First City," London was used as the testing ground for many reforms, including the Burial Acts. The city was the focal point for problems with graveyards; for while she was not the only location suffering the ills of crowded graveyards, London's increasing population made her case more critical and her difficulties more compelling. The cemeteries of Great Britain, and most especially those of London, are the subject of this dissertation. The problems of the cemeteries that led to both government regulation and speculation by private investors, were a short-lived phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Before that time, burials were carried on as they had been for centuries—in the local churchyard or perhaps under the church. When a sexton and gravedigger encountered crowded conditions in the churchyard, they dug up bones and placed them in the bone house, thereby freeing up space in the cemetery. The rituals of death were practiced as they had been for centuries. But the rapid increase in population and therefore the increase in burials caused a series of problems that would bedevil nineteenth century city- dwellers, for there seemed to be no easy solution. The city graveyards were full and yet burials continued, causing both hygienic and aesthetic difficulties. But to secure new graveyards in already densely populated parishes was difficult if not impossible. Cemeteries outside the parish were both inconvenient for the parishioners and unwise economically, for the parish incumbent was not assured his burial fees outside of his own churchyard. Tradition, powerful and unyielding, stood firm. Burials continued in graveyards where common sense decreed they should have been discontinued decades earlier. What was the government's role to be in the reform and regulation of the cemeteries? That was a question that politicians and reformers continued to ask throughout the nineteenth century. Should the problem be solved by the national government with total bureaucratic control and regulation of burials, as the French government had done? Edwin Chadwick thought so, and he was not alone. Through well-intentioned parliamentary legislation appearing in 1850, for a few brief moments Chadwick and the Board of Health (which served as the centralized control over sanitary matters) controlled London's burials, at least on paper. But after that burst of parliamentary passion for national control of London's graveyards and a tempestuous six-year affair with the Board of Health, parliament turned its back on that sort of dangerous liaison. During the mid- Victorian period, most members of parliament had very firm ideas about the role of national government. Government was to oversee defense, diplomacy, and trade.