Neo-Victorian Cities of the Dead: Contemporary Fictions of the Victorian Cemetery

Susan K. Martin

Abstract: Much neo-Victorian fiction depicts the living cohabiting with the dead, nowhere more self-consciously than in the space of nineteenth-century cemeteries that feature in so many novels. Several neo-Victorian and related fictions take as their main focus and impetus the great Victorian cemeteries. Lee Jackson’s The Welfare of the Dead (2005) explores the mid-Victorian city as part of an industry of death and a market for mourning paraphernalia. Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001), strictly Edwardian, but opening, literally, with the dying moments of the Victorian era, is set in Highgate Cemetery. The cemetery stands in for the order, elaborate capitalist ritual and display of the Victorian era, which is both lively and dead within it. Falling Angels maps the decline of this ghost city. Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009) projects an entire underworld – “Undertown” in the novel – which is entered through a version of Dickens’s St Ghastly Grim’s cemetery. Lyn Shepherd’s Tom-All-Alone’s (2012) opens with a scene in the ghastly overcrowded urban cemetery at the heart of a re-imagined Dickensian slum. These cemeteries and their miasmic disease compelled the creation of the Garden Cemeteries/Cities of the Dead on the fringes of the metropolis. Shepherd’s novel takes the Bleak House (1853) view of the city and the slum within the city, aligning both with death. The neo-Victorian novels about death culture and cemeteries explore the taboo and abjection of Victorian death and introduce an erotics of death in the city, much as earlier neo-Victorian novels ‘uncovered’ sex.

Keywords: Abney Park, Bleak House, cemetery, funeral rites, Highgate Cemetery, memorialisation, mourning, sanitation, The Welfare of the Dead, Tom-All-Alone’s.

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If neo-Victorian fiction produces a textual site where the dead co-exist with the living, then the most archetypal of these fictions must be those which circulate around what James Stevens Curl and others have called the great Victorian “cities of the dead” – the cemeteries (Curl 1978). Neo-Victorian fiction provides the imaginative possibility of 202 Susan K. Martin ______re-walking the Victorian streets. When the modern citizen wishes to literally stroll through the streets of a Victorian city the experience is likely to be marred by the jar of contemporary technology. To walk in the spaces of Victorian life as a reader does virtually in a Victorian or neo-Victorian novel, to live that life, it may be that ironically the paths of a mid-Victorian cemetery such as Highgate are the closest such a flaneur can get to the original experience. This chapter examines neo- Victorian works which depict Victorian cemeteries, and in particular the great cemeteries of London. It considers the variety of ways in which the cemeteries and the Victorian culture of death circulate in these fictions. In particular it looks at the way the site of death has in some cases taken the place of the site of sex as neo-Victorianism’s predominant source of fascination and frisson. A number of contemporary fictions have Victorian cemeteries, literally or metaphorically, at their heart. Lynn Shepherd’s Tom-All-Alone’s (2012) is a complex novel which plays with plots (both burial plots and narrative plots) mostly of Bleak House (1853), but also of other Victorian classics, particularly The Woman in White (1860). In Tom-All-Alone’s, as in a number of the other novels, the cemetery is London, or is used synechdochally, because London is depicted as a place of death, mourning and disease, haunted and inscribed with memories. This might be said, for instance, of Lee Jackson’s The Welfare of the Dead (2005), although it focuses more specifically on the Victorian funeral and its paraphernalia, setting a detective plot around a mourning warehouse and its proprietor, funeral directors, and Abney Park Cemetery. In this novel the spaces of the cemetery and the city are mapped onto one another through the way the zones and even ‘streets’ of respectability and display in the cemetery echo those of the city, while the respectable city streets and their structures barely conceal buried secrets. Similarly Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009) projects an entire underworld – “Undertown” in the novel – which is entered through a version of Dickens’s St Ghastly Grim’s cemetery from The Uncommercial Traveller (1861). Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) traces the demise of the Victorian era through, on, and against the fortunes and uses of Highgate Cemetery. Like Anne Perry’s Highgate Rise (1991) it is set in and around the cemetery, so that the psychological closeness of death in the Victorian era is stressed by the physical proximity of death to the city and its surrounds. Perry’s Highgate