Representations of Death and

Burial in Victorian England

Literary Remains
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor

 Literary Remains
Representations of Death and Burial
in Victorian England

Mary Elizabeth Hotz

State University of New York Press

Cover photo: Copyright Andrea Sturm/iStockphoto

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hotz, Mary Elizabeth, 1954–

Literary remains : representations of death and burial in Victorian England /
Mary Elizabeth Hotz.
p. cm. — (Suny series, studies in the long nineteenth century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7914-7659-8 (alk. paper)
1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Death in literature.
3. Dead in literature. 4. Funeral rites and ceremonies in literature. 5. Burial laws—
Great Britain. I. Title.
PR878.D37H68 2009
823'.8093548—dc22
2008003240

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 For Helen V. McHugh

In Memoriam
Daniel McKim Hotz (1966–1989)
William Joseph Hotz (1917–1992)
Ellen McKim Wallace (1938–1995)
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 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Disinterring Death 1

Chapter 1 Down among the Dead: Edwin Chadwick’s

Burial Reform Discourse in Mid-Nineteenth-
Century England 13
Chapter 2 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be”:
Representations of Death in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton and North and South 37
Chapter 3 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead”: Dead-Body
Politics in Our Mutual Friend 67
Chapter 4 Death Eclipsed: The Contested Churchyard in
Thomas Hardy’s Novels 99
Chapter 5 “The Tonic of Fire”: Cremation in Late
Victorian England 137

Conclusion: Dracula’s Last Word 153

Epilogue: The Traffic in Bodies 169
Notes 175
Bibliography 199
Index 211

vii
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 Illustrations

Figure 1.1 South Metropolitan Cemetery, Norwood, Surrey. Planted

in the cemetery style. John Claudius Loudon, On the
Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on
the Improvement of Churchyards, with Sixty Engravings (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1843). Used with
the generous permission of the Missouri Botanical
Garden Library. 31

Figure 1.2 John Claudius Loudon’s design for a churchyard no longer

used for burial, with lines showing the direction in which
walks may be made without removing any headstones or
other monuments. John Claudius Loudon, On the Laying
Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the
Improvement of Churchyards, with Sixty Engravings (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1843). Used with
the generous permission of the Missouri Botanical
Garden Library. 33

ix
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 Acknowledgments

So many generous and thoughtful people kept this project from the grave. Elizabeth
Helsinger and Elaine Hadley, patient and perceptive readers both, gently insisted
that the idea was worth my best effort, even as they untangled reams of prose and
straightened many a crooked argument. For their belief that the project deserved its
many revisions, I owe them a deep debt of gratitude. I would also like to thank
James Peltz and Pamela K. Gilbert, my editors, and the readers at State University of
New York Press for their excellent advice for the manuscript. The Society of the
Sacred Heart and all of its members offered steadfast trust, warm encouragement,
and unfailing confidence, especially Helen McHugh, Marina Hernandez, and Eliza-
beth Walsh, whose belief in my frail capabilities never wavered through the years.
Amid intense teaching schedules and their own scholarly endeavors, colleagues at
the University of San Diego lent keen insight into ways the book could be improved
from start to finish. Molly McClain in particular read with care and a precise sense
of argument countless versions of the manuscript through the years. Students in the
seminar on death in Victorian literature, through their lively discussions of the texts,
generated considerable intellectual momentum for my revisions of the final manu-
script. Institutions, too, generously supported my endeavors. Faculty research grants
from the University of San Diego provided time for honing the arguments of the
early chapters, and the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s
University, Collegeville, Minnesota, graciously offered a community of scholars and
the space of a year for me to bring the book to its completion. Finally, I am most
grateful to my family, especially my mother, Elizabeth McKim Hotz Hartigan, whose
abiding faith in the face of death shaped this book in countless and untold ways.
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, copy-
right 2001 by Cambridge University Press and reprinted with permission. Earlier
versions of the material in chapter 2 were previously published as “‘A Grave with No
Name’: Representations of Death in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton” in Nineteenth
Century Studies 15 (2001): 37–56, published by the Nineteenth Century Studies
Association; and “‘Taught by Death What Life Should Be’: Representations of
Death in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South” in Studies in the Novel 32, no. 2 (Sum-
mer 2000): 165–84, copyright © 2000 by the University of North Texas Press and
reprinted by permission of the publisher.

xi
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 Introduction
Disinterring Death

In establishing the society of the dead, the society of the living regularly
recreates itself.1

While reading Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa—
in the same week, no less—I wondered about the cultural work of death. What
do representations of death reveal about a society and its values? The more I
read, the more I discovered that death, especially, was at the heart of the Victo-
rian novel. The body—buried under an ornate tombstone, dissected in a sur-
geon’s theater, tossed into a pauper’s grave, or purified by the cremationist’s
fire—provided novelists with the means by which to examine the nature of social
relations in nineteenth-century England. Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens,
Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, in particular, focused on the Victorian contest
for control of the corpse. They resisted the strictures of middle-class social re-
formers, praised the traditional practices of the working classes, and, in so doing,
asserted their own vision for England as a nation.
In Mary Barton (originally published in 1848), Elizabeth Gaskell includes a
lengthy description of a pauper funeral for Mr. Davenport, a destitute mill worker
who had died from fever in Manchester. Gaskell finds in Mr. Davenport’s funeral
the essential communal and familial values cherished by Victorian working classes
and attempts to portray the Davenports, poverty notwithstanding, as very much
a part of community life. Gaskell describes the funeral this way:

It was a simple walking funeral, with nothing to grate on the feelings of

any; far more in accordance with its purpose, to my mind, than the gor-
geous hearses, and nodding plumes, which form the grotesque funeral
pomp of respectable people. There was no “rattling the bones over the
stones” of the pauper’s funeral. Decently and patiently was he followed to
the grave by one determined to endure her woe meekly for his sake. The
only mark of pauperism attendant on the burial concerned the living and

1
2 Literary Remains

joyous, far more than the dead, or the sorrowful. When they arrived in the
churchyard, they halted before a raised and handsome tombstone; in re-
ality a wooden mockery of stone respectabilities which adorned the burial-
ground. It was easily raised in a very few minutes, and below was the grave
in which pauper bodies were piled until within a foot or two of the sur-
face; when the soil was shovelled over, and stamped down, and the
wooden cover went to do temporary duty over another hole. But little they
recked of this who now gave up their dead.2

In this passage, Gaskell reverses the terms of respectability for a proper fu-
neral that the Victorian middle class had established by mid-century by hinting
that truly “respectable” people bury their dead not with extravagant displays of fu-
nereal commodities increasingly characteristic of the times but with palpable man-
ifestations of community. Implicit in the description is Gaskell’s complaint about
contemporary discussions concerning death and burial—that they afford a very
limited understanding of the working class, since they attend only to the material
aspects of the pauper funeral. Gaskell shifts her readers’ attention away from the
specifically material aspects of burial toward the feelings of those gathered. Shift-
ing one’s perspective, Gaskell implies, has beneficial consequences: the walking
funeral manifests the dignity and fidelity of the mourners; “the wooden mockery
of stone respectabilities” becomes transfigured through the dignity of their
mourning into a “handsome tombstone”; and the common, crowded, potentially
putrefactious grave is ignored. She denies any notion that the parish should
change its procedures for the pauper funeral, implying instead that the responsi-
bility belongs to the family—here the widow—to mourn meekly for her loss, and to
the community, here represented by faithful neighbors, to comfort her.
I begin with Gaskell’s representation of a dignified pauper funeral, her lit-
erary remains, to suggest that Victorian novelists located corpses at the center of
a surprisingly extensive range of contemporary concerns: money and law, medi-
cine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national
identity. Literary Remains assumes, then, as Mary Poovey has theorized, that liter-
ary texts do not exist in isolation from the cultural context from which they
emerge at the moment of production; they are texts among other texts that to-
gether create a discursive “network of connotations and associations” and par-
ticipate in cultural production.3 Such an assumption serves to reposition literary
texts in the historically specific debates in which they participated, and it exposes
the dynamic role they play in the constitution and destabilization of social rela-
tions. Understood in this way, literature operates with poignant power not just
to create culture but to contest it as well. My aim here is to map the many and
varied representations of burial in Victorian culture to show how the arguments
over burial reform, strikingly evident in the novels under consideration, reflected
the larger sociopolitical and religious debates and processes taking place in the
nineteenth century.
 Introduction 3

To achieve this comprehensive and complex understanding of social

change, I shuttle among a variety of texts and practices in order to identify the
debate over burial, cemetery, and cremation reform and its position in the po-
litical and social reform debate that emerged around the time of the New Poor
Law of 1834, which radically redefined who exactly would receive assistance
from the local parishes and how that aid would be administered. For example,
I study parliamentary debates over the New Poor Law, burial, cemetery, and cre-
mation reform legislation, sanitary reform texts, mortality statistics, funeral, bur-
ial, and cremation handbooks, and newspaper accounts to uncover certain
strategies, rituals, narratives, and ideologies that govern Victorian culture. In ad-
dition to these primary sources, I turn to secondary social histories and anthro-
pological studies to identify the broader contours of these debates. For example,
histories of early Victorian labor relations elucidate the crucial impulse to pro-
tect laborers for work and the cultural anxieties about crowds, an important and
a necessary reality in the working-class funeral. Feminist studies focused on the
role of women in death practices help us read critically Gaskell’s heroines and
their contribution to an improved mid-Victorian society. Explorations of late
nineteenth-century preoccupations with degeneration offer insightful commen-
tary on the corpse and its decomposition. Finally, I offer close readings of Victo-
rian novels that both challenge the moral authority of reformers who sought to
reframe death and expose the dire consequences of neglecting the corpse’s power
to renew and change life for survivors and the communities in which they lived.
Literary critics, both the historicist and formalist kind, either frame the his-
torical debate and then turn sharply into rather formalist readings of the litera-
ture or ignore the debate completely by operating within unquestioned categories
of individualism and sentimentality. Certain literary studies of the representation
of death fail to extrapolate and reconstruct cultural forms that inform represen-
tations of burial and the meanings they bore for mid-Victorian society.4 Garrett
Stewart, from a deconstructivist perspective, argues that “the novelistic represen-
tation of death necessitates a specialized rhetoric of figural and grammatical de-
vices to approximate the evacuation of its very subject.”5 He is concerned with
death only as it takes shape within the novel’s content and form, and he seems
unaware that material conditions could influence the linguistic shape of the
“death sentence.” Elisabeth Bronfen, on the other hand, begins her book, Over
Her Dead Body, with a discussion of culture. That is, she acknowledges immedi-
ately that the nineteenth century seems obsessed with representations of dead
women, but she views these representations as “symptoms” of a culture that man-
ifests a profound ambivalence about death. For Bronfen, culture is a monolithic
bourgeois entity, and she refuses to recognize pluralities within and resistance to
the dominant culture. This bias precludes attention to class or nationality. For ex-
ample, in her summary of Philippe Ariès’s work, she accepts without question
conclusions about tombs and monuments as if everyone in the nineteenth cen-
tury, no matter what the country, had the desire and the wherewithal to provide
4 Literary Remains

memorials for family or friends. Furthermore, her discussion of the symbolic

implications of embalming, that it denies the power of mortality by creating a
symbolic double, overlooks the fact that many people in Victorian Britain were
denied or did not participate in this process of “doubling” through memory and
memorials. In her discursive analysis, she fashions the bourgeois subject/corpse
into a bourgeois “other.” But given life among the poor and working classes in
Victorian England, and the discursive strategies used by reformers to moralize
them, Bronfen’s blanket characterization of the middle-class corpse as other seems
inattentive to the period’s historical particulars. A more recent collection of essays
edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, Death and Representa-
tion, goes some way to rectify this isolated middle-class bias by including a section
on the interplay of history, power, and ideology vis-à-vis representations of death.
Nonetheless, Bronfen and Goodwin, in their introduction to the volume, call for
more precise historical readings of specific representations of death that would
admit to the circulation of power within culture, something I hope Literary
Remains achieves.6
New historicist critic Catherine Gallagher also tends to read texts that treat
death along a tightly argued paradoxical avenue in two important essays.7 For ex-
ample, in her work on the connections between the body and the body politic,
she focuses on a single contradiction: In nineteenth-century England, economic
value was related to bodily well-being, but—ironically—articulated in terms of
bodily illness, death, and apparent death. According to Gallagher, writers as dis-
tinct as Thomas Malthus and Charles Dickens occupy this singular paradoxical
territory. Gallagher points to a critical contradiction that operates in Victorian
thought, and her argument is appealing because she attempts to explain the mid-
Victorian tendency to reorganize economic investigations around the body.
However, her own tendency to read along a paradoxical line drawn, for the most
part, by middle-class men, overlooks others who are positioned differently in
society and who participate differently in changing forms of material culture.
Even Esther Schor’s Bearing the Dead, a historically sensitive study of the cul-
tural meanings of mourning and grief in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, seems reticent to explore the materiality of the corpse, choosing in-
stead to focus on elegaic texts and what they reveal about sentimentalism among
the living. Her epilogue, which describes briefly key changes in attitudes toward
mourning in Victorian England, gestures toward material conditions by men-
tioning Edwin Chadwick’s famed A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special
Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843), but her conclusions veer to-
ward decidedly upper-class concerns about mourning rituals and the rise of in-
dividualism and away from the rich historical particulars of the era, suggesting
that much more was at stake in the burial battles. Unable to unhinge her ro-
mantic perspective to assess the Victorian era on its own terms, she closes her
study with a reading of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man as an allegory for the fate of
Victorian attitudes toward death because it “figures aestheticism as the moral
 Introduction 5

heir to the Enlightenment culture of mourning.”8 Her conclusions about Victo-

rian death, then, are twice removed from the times, first because she fails to con-
sider directly the contentious history of death, and second because she relegates
the work of Victorian history to Romantic allegory.
To avoid swerving into more formalist discussions of novels that happen to
have within them abundant representations of death or veering into lengthy his-
torical analyses as ready contexts for those novels, I read with some care many
and varied sets of texts and practices in order to locate systems of details that con-
stitute the burial debate raging during the nineteenth century and to lay bare a
major framework for how the Victorians understood themselves and the world
in which they lived. Key dimensions of the traditional working-class funeral in
the first decades of the nineteenth century, for example, reveal the importance
of the local community to aid the future repose of the soul and to comfort the
mourners, the domestic location of many of these practices, and the powerful
need, among the lower ranks, to procure funds to enact a decent ritual.
Understandably, social historians of death who have so aptly delineated the
social and political contours of the dead body have not included literary repre-
sentations that often form a significant resistance to national remedies to solve
the burial reform crisis. Despite the fact that death loomed large in Victorian cul-
ture, its sentimental deathbed scenes, expensive funerals, and macabre inter-
ments have led, in early, specifically Victorian, studies, to distorted analysis of it
by social historians. James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death and
John Morley’s Death, Heaven and the Victorians, while providing scholars with ex-
cellent working bibliographies, outline with broad brushstrokes the environ-
ments and contexts for death but provide little by way of critique or analyses of
what these environments and practices suggest about Victorian culture. For ex-
ample, Morley’s assessment of the role of women in early to mid-nineteenth-
century British deathways seems misguided. He judges those women who pre-
pare the dead for burial as “incompetent, drunken, snuff-taking hired nurses,”
even though they were well respected in the communities they served.9 Morley’s
perspective reflects, actually, a later view among the wealthy, who by that time
were quick to banish death from their homes and to eschew those who were di-
rectly associated with it. Morley’s unqualified assessment of women as watchers
and wakers of death effectively reinforces this later upper-class distaste for it.
Later studies have rectified this unreflective critical stance. Superb scholarly
work on death in the early modern period by David Cressy, Clare Gittings, and
Ralph Houlbrooke painstakingly presents evidence to suggest that the seeds of the
Victorian burial crisis were planted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Post-reformation deathways reveal an ongoing “contested conversation” about re-
ligious and secular death rituals, from the elements of a good death and decent fu-
neral to the proper role of the minister and intramural burial.10 Building upon
and extending this critical work, historians of Victorian death have deepened and
widened our understanding of the multiple sociopolitical and religious matrices
6 Literary Remains

from which representations of death and burial emerge. Pat Jalland’s poignant
Death in the Victorian Family, a study of attitudes toward death in middle and
upper-class Victorian families, Ruth Richardson’s monumental study of the 1832
Anatomy Act, John Wolffe’s quite precise Great Deaths, an exploration of the
deaths of the famous, and Peter C. Jupp’s thorough study of cremation, From Dust
to Ashes, disinter crucial historical documents and practices to suggest that these
very processes and discourses informed national life and identity.11
Until rather recently death studies have failed to account for local resistance
to what is perceived as a stable, dominant, and shared understanding of death.
Previously, death was seen by some anthropologists and sociologists as a publicly
recognized problem demanding some sort of social, medical, political, or reli-
gious solution.12 But, as anthropoligist Lawrence Taylor argues, the event of
death should not pose so much a problem for analysts but an opportunity to po-
sition death as part of a “larger and compelling order” invested with a kind of
“ultimate reality derived from the deep emotional power and resonance of the
experience of death.”13 Thinking of death less as a problem and more as an op-
portunity to offer life meaning transforms death into what Zygmunt Bauman has
called “the primary building material for social institutions and behavioral pat-
terns crucial to the production of societies in their distinctive forms.”14 As a re-
sult, cultures develop what Bauman calls “life strategies” to face mortality,
strategies that take shape around the culture’s capacity to face death more di-
rectly or to avoid it by either taming or domesticating it or by reorganizing ener-
gies around health, such as the mid-nineteenth-century preoccupation with
diseases. These cultural processes serve as a major vehicle for social division and
stratification, because survival is perceived as a successful bid for immortality.
The fundamental social relation of death, its ability to inscribe subjectivity
onto the bodies of survivors, which novels so successfully portray, becomes a po-
tential source for political power, for the body, as Jean Comaroff and John Co-
maroff argue, can never be a struggle-free zone, as the Victorian Burial Acts
suggest, especially when major social reform movements are under way.15 Maurice
Bloch and Jonathan Parry, in their seminal anthropological study of death, Death
and the Regeneration of Life, have shown that in certain societies political authori-
ties and marginal social systems engage death’s emotional power to their advan-
tage by using it to shape their political identity.16 Death, then, its constitution,
control, and association with the political, becomes a source of potential conflict
and significant change within a culture. Robert Hertz’s influential Death and the
Right Hand broke much of the ground here as he argued for the unity of body and
soul after death and recognized the powerful potential of the corpse to define
social relations and to reshape the world of the living.
In contrast, historian Philippe Ariès attempts to account for death’s rela-
tionship to political power by highlighting, for example, the dominant role the
Catholic Church had in late medieval burial rituals.17 However, even though
Ariès begins to articulate the increasing importance of political power to the rep-
 Introduction 7

resentation of death, he eventually loses sight of what was happening outside the
lives of individuals and their bourgeois domestic circle and neglects a world be-
yond the shades drawn to protect the dying and their families from public
scrutiny. Moreover, his vast and in many ways admirable study of death, which
begins with the Middle Ages and concludes with the dawn of the twentieth cen-
tury, elides critical differences between one country and another, one era and an-
other. A solitary analysis of the Brontës, for example, bears much of the weight
for his interpretation of deathways in nineteenth-century England. David Can-
nadine strenuously disagrees with Ariès and Geoffrey Gorer’s Death, Grief and
Mourning in Contemporary Britain (1965), who both assert that Western society
was obsessed with death in decidedly nostalgic ways. Rightly so, Cannadine ar-
gues for a less romanticized and more historically nuanced study of death in the
nineteenth century that includes significant developments—both ceremonial and
demographic—throughout the century.18
Katherine Verdery’s The Political Lives of Dead Bodies appreciates the rich and
complex relationship between politics and corpses. In this recent and compelling
study of bones and corpses that have become political symbols in Eastern Europe
and the former Soviet Union since 1989, Verdery suggests that bodies, because
of their indisputable materiality, contribute to a symbolic efficacy crucial to po-
litical strategies occurring within cultural systems.19 A student of dead-body pol-
itics, then, attends to the connections between particular corpses and the wider
national and international contexts of their manipulation. Informed by these ar-
ticulations of the dynamics of dead-body politics, I hope to show how the politi-
cal work of Victorian dead bodies infers ideas about economy and morality,
domesticity and religion, and history and the future life of England.
My argument is that through the literary representation of a significant
human event such as death, authors resist social reformers’ interference into
death practices, or deathways. With national interests at heart, Elizabeth Gaskell,
Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, by their tenacious attention
to corporeality, reject the centralizing process by which the body is isolated from
its social and political contexts. Rather, by positioning the corpse as a locus for
collective action, the novels these authors wrote, and the reason they are in-
cluded here, assert the primacy of local communities and affirm the inseparabil-
ity of corporeal and social being in the world. The novelists assume, then, that
because of the Victorian contest for control of the corpse, the ministrations in-
volving the close proximity of the dead to the living in the preparation of the
corpse for burial and the interment itself served, in part, to mark and determine
the nature of social relations in nineteenth-century literature and society.20
Victorians, especially those in cities encountering massive urban growth, faced
a life in which widespread disease and death struck quickly and without warning.
Social reformers of the period, writing under the assumption that miasma spread
disease, often concentrated on the grisly conditions of churchyards, where effluvia
from decomposing bodies supposedly proved fatal to neighbors. Social reformers’
8 Literary Remains

discussions about dangerous burial practices and the need to reform them focused
attention on the problem of the working-class corpse more sharply than it had
been focused before. At stake in the representation of the corpse and attention to
its corporeality were certain ideologies and cultural constructs vigorously contested
throughout the nineteenth century. A newly enfranchised middle class, for exam-
ple, increasingly defined its interests in national and economic terms and claimed
the power to identify and classify the working classes according to those interests.
Discussing whether to use local medical officers to evacuate the working-class
home of a corpse became a polemic for national systems of inspection and regula-
tion, justified to meet society’s need to protect working-class survivors for the labor
market. Arguments over neighborhood churchyards quickly turned into a battle
between local vestries and centralized commissions who wanted, by national legis-
lation, control over cemeteries and funeral services by government contract, at the
expense of communal rituals perceived as meaningful by the working class, like the
Davenport interment. This series of burial laws, collectively known as the Burial
Acts, which will organize the chapters that follow, punctuates nineteenth-century
English life and society and reflects not only the apparent Victorian preoccupation
with death but reveals how England began to shape its national identity.
By the 1870s and 1880s, because of the success of the Burial Acts from 1852
to 1857 and the alleviation of physical problems with the churchyards, the battle
over the body and its burial was concerned less with sanitation and supervision
than with religion, especially in rural England, where public cemeteries were rel-
atively unknown. By law, anyone who died in the village had a right to be buried
in the parish churchyard, whether Anglican or Nonconformist. However, only
the Church of England clergy could preside and accept burial fees, even though
they may not have officiated at the service. Claiming a serious infringement upon
their religious liberty, many Nonconformists rejected the Anglican burial service,
and Nonconformist or Dissenting ministers did not accept lightly their exclusion
from the funerals of their parishioners. Throughout rural England, then, death
and burial were fraught with this fiercely religious debate about who could be
buried where and by whom. This debate finally expired with the 1880 Burial Act
and significant concessions offered to Dissenters by the Church of England.
In the late 1890s, the burial reform debate had turned its attention to crema-
tion and, ironically, circled back to issues of sanitation and economy that charac-
terized the debate in the 1830s and 1840s. Arguing that earthen burial threatened,
as it were, to contaminate England from the inside out, cremationists urged the
banishment of decay through incineration and offered a fresh opportunity for
people to be “progressive,” to think less about history and memorialization in
cemeteries and churchyards and more about the technological hallmarks of an
advanced civilization taking shape in the present and future. Throughout the
nineteenth century, reformers called for practices that in effect redefined domes-
tic space to exclude the dead by articulating that space’s relation to the health
of the nation.21 By illuminating the material and discursive conditions of the
 Introduction 9

burial reform debate, I draw attention to specific strategies reformers deployed to

conceptualize the problem they perceived. The novelists, in their literary counter-
moves, represent death as an opportunity to resist those seeking to claim national
power, by favorably representing in their novels “local”communities and individu-
als appropriating burial practices to new circumstances and new purposes.
By tracing the representations of burial in Edwin Chadwick’s A Supplemen-
tary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interments in Towns
(1843) and John Claudius Loudon’s On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing
of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards (1843), I contend that both
authors seek to redefine the features of working-class burial in order to solidify
England’s middle-class and national identity. Chadwick’s report primarily posits
the dead body as a site of problematic social practices and the pivot for all man-
ner of legal, social, political, and economic inquiry. The effect of such position-
ing is to demean traditional ways of disposing of the dead as practiced by the
poor and laboring classes and to idealize middle-class procedures that seek to san-
itize death, removing it from any opportunity for exchange with the living
through exhaustive administrative machinery. Loudon, a renowned landscape
architect and cemetery designer, enunciates the twin effects of successful ceme-
tery design in mid-Victorian England: the isolation and containment of death
and the reformation of the lower classes to serve the interests of the wealthy.
In contrast, Elizabeth Gaskell’s two industrial novels, Mary Barton (1848) and
North and South (1854–1855), challenge contemporary representations of tradi-
tional burial practices as problematic by portraying the issues of labor relations,
death, and domesticity as an opportunity to individuate women, who would, in
turn, transform mid-Victorian society. Outlining the essentially optimistic view of
Unitarianism, which Gaskell espoused, I demonstrate that Gaskell’s belief in the
Christian impulse to ameliorate social evil not only underwrites her two novels
but differs significantly from Chadwick’s idea that only national mechanisms can
solve the problem. Instead, by reinstituting the value of death’s proximity to life,
which burial reform discourse categorically denies, Gaskell acclaims the positive
effects of working-class contact with death because these situations are models for
collective and communal activities and, therefore, are possible sites for creating
community across class lines. From these representations of death, Gaskell con-
cludes that the middle class must incorporate into its considerations of political
economy the central strengths of working-class domesticity: a recognition of kin-
ship networks extending beyond immediate families where women are crucial to
meaningful social reform.
Having delineated Chadwick’s vision of the corpse as waste matter and Gas-
kell’s conception that the corpse provides a positive opportunity to create com-
munity and individuate women, I turn next to several Dickens novels. In brief
discussions of The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and a
longer analysis of Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), I consider the material con-
ditions of death that Dickens shapes to suggest a conservative reformation of
10 Literary Remains

Victorian society. Unlike earlier social reformers, who viewed death as waste and
therefore a problem to be disposed of by administrative order, Dickens perceives
death as an opportunity to rehabilitate a society addicted to money. In The Old Cu-
riosity Shop and the death of Little Nell, for example, Dickens highlights the spiri-
tual aspects of her death and emphasizes the potential of her funeral to gather a
community more interested in virtue than filthy lucre. In fact, in A Tale of Two
Cities, Dickens, through his representation of Jerry Cruncher, denounces the cul-
ture’s association of the corpse with market capitalism. Finally, in Our Mutual
Friend, Dickens challenges a new development in burial reform discourse, the pre-
occupation with monetary compensation for burial, and intervenes in the move-
ment to position the corpse as a locus of monetary value. Through an analysis of
new developments in the burial reform debate in the 1850s and 1860s, which em-
phasized not the sanitary and public health problems that had so dominated ear-
lier burial reform discourse but economic compensation for clergymen and
property owners whose churchyards were forced to close, I identify important is-
sues that Dickens utilizes in Our Mutual Friend. He rejects the propensity to indi-
vidualism inherent in the clergymen’s complaint about compensation and argues
that dead bodies mean something more than income to people, families, and com-
munities. Understanding the power of the corpse to mediate social change, Dick-
ens redefines forms of compensation inherent in the self-help philosophy and the
gentlemanly ideal as they circulate over corpses and their burials. In particular, I
argue that Dickens rejects the self-made man and recuperates the gentlemanly ideal
cleansed of its associations with class and social ambition.
Dickens’s distaste for the ready association of death with money is leavened,
in part, by Thomas Hardy’s affection for rural England and the silenced voices
of those resting in its churchyards. I first focus on the burial reform debate of the
1870s and 1880s, which centered on religious battles between Anglicans and
Nonconformists over the sacred space of the grave. The issues of nationhood, re-
ligious tolerance, and community that the debate discloses also mark Hardy’s
major novels. From Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) to Jude the Obscure (1895),
Hardy believes that rural burials and churchyards humanize the ground of his-
tory and memorialize for future generations individuals and communities whose
social relationships are characterized by virtue and loving kindness. Hardy takes
his Wessex universe seriously by becoming a waker of death, because he believes
that the apparently lost world of the dead teaches profound lessons to the
living—the power of the corpse to transform those who touch it and the capacity
of the churchyard to connect people across time and space. But even as Hardy’s
novels celebrate death as the arbiter of history, his later novels give way to an en-
croaching world distinguished by a growing complacency about the past and
a definitive reticence to stand near death, as if to suggest that doing so would
impede the progress of a developing nation.
The imminent approach of a technologically advanced society anticipated
by Hardy arrives emphatically with the introduction of cremation and Bram
 Introduction 11

Stoker’s Dracula (1897). I offer a historical account of cremation’s presence

among English deathways by analyzing the debate over the Cremation Act of
1902 and by a discussion of cremationist discourse, which claimed that earthen
burial contaminated England. Increasingly, at the turn of the century, distaste
for the existence of decomposing bodies unveiled a national fear of degenera-
tion, and cremation offered an efficient and expedient means to inoculate the
living from the dead. Stoker’s Dracula, however, gets the last word because it re-
sists the banishment of the dead from the worlds of the living that burial reform
and cremation represent. Through its harrowing representations of the undead,
the novel forces England to consider its fear of death. Doing so, suggests Dracula,
safeguards England’s future; not doing so puts future generations at stake.
What continues to be at stake, as I reflect in a brief epilogue, is the dignity
in death for which each of the novels uniquely argues. Early twenty-first-century
Americans seem as conflicted by the body in death as nineteenth-century Victo-
rians. The cavalier disregard of survivors’ sentiments evident in recent scandals
concerning cremation and body donation programs strangely mirrors the neglect
of families by nineteenth-century reformers in the heartless ways they treated the
bodies of the poor. The growing commodification of the corpse and the com-
mercialization of the funeral industry in booming economic times appear to be
the logical outcome of a Victorian culture that posited the dead body as a central
pivot for burgeoning capitalism. The denial of the body, its sheer disappearance
into the carnivorous body-parts industry or unkempt crematoria, tenaciously
refuses to recognize what many Victorian novels admit: that the corpse serves to
redefine existing notions of community and history.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 1
Down among the Dead
Edwin Chadwick’s Burial Reform Discourse
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England

In 1839, G. A. Walker, a London surgeon, published Gatherings from Graveyards,

Particularly Those in London. Three years later, Parliament appointed a House of
Commons Select Committee to investigate “the evils arising from the interment
of bodies” in large towns and to consider legislation to resolve the problem.1
Walker’s study opens with a comprehensive history of the modes of interment
among all nations, showing the wisdom of ancient practices that removed the
dead from the confines of the living. The second portion of the book describes
the pathological state of forty-three metropolitan graveyards in an effort to con-
vince the public of the need for legislative interference by the government to pro-
hibit burials in the vicinity of the living.2 Walker’s important work attracted the
attention of Parliament and social reformers because of his comprehensive rep-
resentation of the problem of graveyards, especially among the poor districts of
London, his rudimentary statistics that, in effect, isolated them from the rest of
the society, and his unbending insistence that national legislators solve the prob-
lem. These three impulses influenced the way that Edwin Chadwick, secretary to
the New Poor Law Commission from 1834 to 1842 and commissioner for the
Board of Health from 1848 to 1852, identified and represented the problem of
corpses and graveyards in his A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special
Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843).3
Walker’s study of the graveyards registered the effects of a surging population
and a concomitant concentration of people in the metropolitan areas of England.
The population of London more than doubled in fifty years from just under
1 million in 1801 to 2,360,000 in 1851. Furthermore, the increasing physical de-
terioration of towns surpassed the rate of improvement, causing the death rate to
rise sharply between 1831 and 1841.4 Because towns sustained growth in popu-
lation and suffered from higher death rates, conditions in the graveyards wors-
ened. Many of the churchyards were quite small, often with less than an acre of
ground, and had been in use for centuries. In public sites, the crowded conditions
persisted because owners, to turn a profit, preferred the common grave where

13
14 Literary Remains

they could bury more bodies, collect more fees, and use less space in the cemetery.
Bunhill Fields, originally a cemetery designed by and for Dissenters and one of
the first public burial sites in London (the first burial occurred in 1665), was re-
ported to have 100,000 bodies buried on four acres.5 In the metropolis alone,
52,000 bodies were added annually to the 203 acres available for burial. Bodies
were indeed cast about the ground, bones tossed into a charnel house, and coffins
chopped up for firewood—all to make room for more corpses.
It is against this backdrop that the House of Commons Select Committee
on the Improvement of the Health of Towns, Effect of Interment in Towns,
chaired by William Mackinnon, convened. The committee met from March 17
to May 5, 1842, on fifteen separate days, interviewing sixty-five witnesses. The re-
port filled 214 pages of testimony, including letters from physicians, clergymen,
and elected officials from other large towns in the United Kingdom.6 Recogniz-
ing that the present mode of burial had evolved under quite different economic
and social circumstances long before the emergence of congested towns and
cities, the committee acknowledged that the evidence given was overwhelming.
The practice of interment within large towns was a threat to public health: “The
evils of interments in towns and populous places have grown to such a height
that no time ought to be lost by the legislature in applying a remedy.”7 Thus they
recommended that, with few exceptions, burial in urban areas be prohibited, but
that future cemeteries be placed within two miles from the precincts of towns to
minimize the hardship on the poor who attend the funerals of their families and
friends. To best execute these measures, the committee agreed that the intro-
duction of a bill by the government would be necessary. “It appeared difficult,”
the committee suggested, “to carry into execution any of the provisions recom-
mended here without the assistance of some central and superintending author-
ity to be established for that purpose.”8
Mackinnon’s committee, anxious to overcome the governmental sluggish-
ness, helped establish the conditions of possibility for systems of regulation and
inspection. But the committee’s efforts were foiled by a struggle between private
and public interests that would plague burial reform throughout most of the
nineteenth century. The bill Mackinnon’s committee proposed was never in-
troduced to Parliament because Home Secretary Sir James Graham was not
fully convinced that the churchyards posed a health threat and was unwilling to
aggravate various special interests who would be most affected by a change
in burial law. Moreover, in 1832, to meet market demands, Kensal Green
Cemetery was opened on the outskirts of London. Begun as an answer to the
condition of the city’s graveyards, the cemetery was the first of many private en-
terprise cemeteries formed in the 1830s and 1840s. According to Deborah Wig-
gins, “Their presence profoundly changed the future of burials, for when the
national government proved itself unready and unwilling to solve the sanitary
issues surrounding the graveyards, private enterprise took the lead in providing
new burial grounds.”9
 Down among the Dead 15

But the way in which reformers conceptualized the problem of burial greatly
influenced the way the problem was identified and experienced in the 1840s. Be-
ginning in the late 1830s, the deteriorating conditions of the graveyards, the vig-
orous commentaries about the situation by social reformers, Edwin Chadwick in
particular, and the growing perception that the body and soul were no longer
considered a continuous entity allowed commentators to criticize traditional
working-class burial practices and to represent the working-class corpse not as a
site of dignity but as a source of disease to be expunged from society.

I
The significance of the human corpse in popular, working-class death culture in
the early nineteenth century seems to have been shaped by the belief in a strong
tie between body and soul for an undefined period of time after death.10 This be-
lief underwrote funerary practices and created ambiguity about the definition of
death (that is, the exact time of death) as well as the spiritual status of the corpse.
From this ambiguous relationship between body and soul came an emphasis on
the centrality of the corpse in death culture. Moreover, attachment to the corpse
was intensified by a belief that the time between death and burial of a person was
a time when the person was neither dead nor alive. Thus the care and attention
given to the body followed from a desire to give due respect to the dead in an ef-
fort to aid the future repose of the soul and to comfort the mourners. In this lim-
inal time, the successful death very much depended upon the presence and
agency of the living.
Women often were at the center of the preparation of the corpse, a posi-
tion, as we will see, that social reformers recognized and attempted to control.
According to the investigations of Mary Chamberlain and Ruth Richardson, a
female healer was charged with the laying out of dead bodies for the community.
Women were “agents of continuity, particularly in poor communities, handling
both new life as it came into the world and the sick, old and dying as it left.”11 In
the nineteenth century, laying out was important to the collective grief of the
community. These women performed a special service by closing the eyes, jaw,
and mouth of the corpse; by washing and plugging orifices; by straightening
limbs and trimming, shaving, and combing hair; and by dressing the body in its
grave clothes.12 For family and friends and for the future life of the soul, it was
important to enact correct observances. This meant keeping the body at home
for between five and ten days, as much “to give the dead person an opportunity
of coming to life again, if his soul has not quite left his body, as to prepare
mourning and the ceremonies of the funeral.”13 Family also needed the time to
secure funds for the services.14 If the laying out had been done correctly, then no
seepage from the decomposing body would occur. The role of the layer out,
then, did much to facilitate a decent burial in days when the corpse was the cen-
tral figure in the ritual.
16 Literary Remains

Once the body had been prepared, it was customary to keep it in a room
where friends and relatives were invited to come and see it. The close proximity
to the corpse, if not physical contact with it, conveyed religious as well as social
claims even if by mid-century the working class had difficulty sustaining these
claims, given the pressures to enact more “hygienic” burial procedures.
Other than the coffin and the religious service, according to Richardson,
most of the components of working-class burial were provided by the commu-
nity.15 Apart from the actual burial service conducted at the gravesite, the funeral
in popular culture included physical attention to the corpse, watching, waking,
and viewing the body, some form of refreshment, and a lay ceremonial sur-
rounding the transport of the coffin to church and grave.16 Chadwick challenged
these communal and domestic emphases in burial reform debates, which
emerged in the late 1830s and early 1840s, because these rituals assumed recip-
rocal relationships between the living and the dead and threatened class struc-
tures that reformers thought were necessary for industrialization.
In contrast, the middle and upper classes, with their improved spending
power, began to use the “respectable funeral” as an opportunity to make symbolic
statements about their social worth, which more often than not boiled down to
their monetary value.17 Given these exigencies, the upper classes made an even
greater use of the undertaker, someone outside the family or communal network,
to care for their dead in a manner commensurate with their rank. The develop-
ment of undertaking, as Ruth Richardson argues, presaged a fundamental shift of
meaning from the funerals that antiquarians and folklorists sometimes witnessed
and recorded. This shift “represented an invasion of commerce into a rite of pas-
sage; the substitution of cash for affective and older, more traditional social rela-
tions.”18 The working class, however, had little need for the undertaker’s services,
except to provide a coffin and, possibly, transportation. Otherwise, the family and
community struggled to provide for what they deemed a “proper” burial that
respected more traditional concepts of the dead body and its disposal.
Those people unfortunate enough to have died at the expense of the parish
sustained a radically different burial from the ones just described. I mention the
pauper funeral here because its specter motivated members of the working class
to avoid its ignominy at whatever cost.19 It represented to them the insensitivity
of the New Poor Law of 1834, which denied to them social status by exiling
them from necessary relationships in the community, especially at times of death
when the community of mourners was the central vehicle for the soul’s safe pas-
sage into the afterlife. The pauper funeral was something to be avoided because
it was a public manifestation of one’s failure to maintain a position in society,
however lowly.20 The covered hand cart, pushed by a hunched-up attendant,
with the undertaker striding out in front and the mourners hurrying along
behind, made a pathetic scene, as this refrain from a popular ballad testifies:

Rattle his bones over the stones;

He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns.
 Down among the Dead 17

The pauper funeral epitomized not the communal and familial values of the tra-
ditional funeral, nor the intimate relation between soul and body that deter-
mined the shape of traditional burial practices. Instead, it publicly symbolized a
person’s complete exclusion from the community:

Oh, where are the mourners? Alas! there are none;

He has left not a gap in the world now he’s gone;
Not a tear in the eye of child, woman, or man:—
To the grave with his carcass as fast as you can.21

The poor did whatever they could to avoid this disgraceful reality.
Key dimensions of the traditional working-class funeral in the first decades
of the nineteenth century emphasized the importance of the local community to
aid the future repose of the soul and to comfort the mourners, the domestic lo-
cation of many of these practices, and the powerful need, among the lower
ranks, to enact a decent ritual. Chadwick, on the other hand, called for practices
that in effect redefined domestic space to exclude the dead by articulating that
space’s relation to the health of the national economy.22

II
Replete with statistical tables, diagrams of mortuary houses, an overwhelming ac-
cumulation of eyewitness accounts, summaries of scientific theories, and com-
prehensive administrative recommendations, the Supplementary Report primarily
posits the dead body as a site of problematic social practices and the pivot for all
manner of legal, social, political, and economic inquiry.23 Most specifically, the ef-
fect of such positioning is to demean traditional ways of disposing of the dead as
practiced by the poor and laboring classes and to idealize middle-class procedures
that seek to sanitize death, removing it from any opportunity for exchange with
the living through exhaustive administrative machinery. The organization of the
report reveals this fluctuation between debasement and idealization. In alternat-
ing sections, Chadwick first presents, with deliberate horror, the baleful effects
of practices that place the living in proximity to the dead, followed by a “superior
economy of prevention,” emphasizing regulation and surveillance to serve the in-
terests of the state (SR, 73). At the heart of these maneuvers is Chadwick’s over-
arching preoccupation with domesticity and its relation to the national economy.
Of primary concern to Chadwick is the reconfiguration of home life and the
refinement of the “feelings” or the “sympathies” of those who live there. He begins
with the home and moves outward, because he believed the home to be the center
of his sanitary system, connected as it was to a whole network of sewers and water
supplies. For Chadwick, the health of one depended upon the health of the other.
Moreover, he underscores a predominant belief evident in burial reform discourse:
environmental conditions determine the subjectivity of those who inhabit them.
Upon such circumstances, wrote Walker, “depend the moral and social elevation or
18 Literary Remains

depression of all sorts and conditions of mankind in the mass. Let circumstances be
favorable, virtue and happiness will prevail,—let them be adverse,—vice and misery
will abound.”24 Within the first paragraph of the report, then, Chadwick seems
eager to draw attention to the relationship between home and burial by describing
his report as an examination of “the effects produced on public health, by the prac-
tice of interring the dead amidst the habitations of the town population” (SR, 1).
Confident that removing the corpse from the dwellings of survivors would be in
keeping with what he imagines to be the feelings of the laboring class, Chadwick
interviews everyone but those most affected by his proposal. Not once do we hear
from them directly, but only about their degraded state from clergymen, physicians,
and secretaries of burial and benefit clubs. Such a contradiction in Chadwick’s
method leaves the laboring class silent and makes him their primary spokesman. In
contrast, Walker presented evidence from the testimony of those ranked in the
lower orders and made concerted efforts to understand the complexity of burial re-
form for these people.25 Chadwick, though, seems more concerned with the effects
on the subjectivities of the laboring class if bodies are retained in their homes than
on other issues that might, in part, determine their rituals of waking the dead.
To justify this shift for the working class from traditional burial practices to
state burial procedures, Chadwick redeploys the miasma theory of disease to mark
the working class as especially dangerous unless subject to his plans for reform. By
the late 1830s and early 1840s, the miasma theory was presumed to have explained
definitively—for a time at least—the generation of epidemic diseases. As Frank Mort
so thoroughly defines it, “The theory held that under certain predictable circum-
stances the atmosphere became charded with an epidemic influence, which turned
malignant when combined with effluvia of organic decomposition from the earth.
The resulting miasma produced disease within the body.”26 Walker and the many
witnesses who appeared before the 1842 House of Commons Select Committee
on the Improvement of the Health of Towns testified to the deleterious effects
of miasma emanating from the overcrowded churchyards. Story after story, piled
as high as the bodies they describe, told of innocent bystanders, standing in grave-
yards and living in neighborhoods nearby, who succumbed: “[A]s if struck with a
cannon ball . . . [they] fell back . . . and appeared instantly to expire.”27
Ideologically, this theory of disease suited the scientific materialism of early
social medicine.28 At the level of public debate about intramural interment, mi-
asma’s disastrous and dangerous effects could be pointed to and graphically de-
picted as an argument against such practices. Previous to Chadwick, most
discussions of miasma in burial reform discourse focused on graveyards, where
the accumulation of decomposing bodies transformed the land into toxic waste
sites. In effect, burial reformers mapped the geography of death, especially in Lon-
don. In fact, Walker’s own map, represented in Gatherings from Graveyards, antici-
pated Henry Mayhew’s observation ten years later: “Indeed, so well known are the
localities of fever and disease, that London would almost admit of being mapped
out pathologically, and divided into its morbid districts and deadly cantons.”29
 Down among the Dead 19

Chadwick, however, focuses on the human agents of infection. By dismiss-

ing miasma from graveyards as “not an immediately appreciable evil,” claiming
instead that the deadliest miasma emanates from the body in the first two days
after death (SR, 41), he marks and makes ready for reform those among the
lower ranks living in their homes. Those in the middle class, to their credit, from
Chadwick’s perspective, were beyond the scope of his reform measures because,
increasingly, they took advantage of the undertaker who would remove the body
immediately from the home and arrange for burial either in a family vault or ex-
tramural cemetery. The very moment when working-class families and commu-
nities gathered to enact their burial rituals, Chadwick marks as the deadliest and
calls for the immediate removal of the body from the dwelling. In an early pas-
sage that delineates the dangers of death occurring in single-room dwellings,
Chadwick first begins with the most predictable argument about miasma—but
with measured shifts in emphasis:

When the dissolution has taken place under circumstances such as

those described, it is not a few minutes’ look after the last duties are
performed and the body is composed in death and left in repose, that
is given to this class of survivors, but the spectacle is protracted hour
after hour through the day and night, and day after day, and night after
night, thus aggravating the mental pains under varied circumstances,
and increasing the dangers of permanent bodily injury. The sufferings
of the survivors, especially of the widow of the labouring classes, are
often protracted to a fatal extent. (SR, 44)

For Chadwick, “permanent bodily injury” among younger children means

fatal disease. But for elder members of the family, the term’s definition shifts away
from the physical and slips into the moral: “Familiarity [with death] soon suc-
ceeds, and respect disappears” (SR, 44). Not surprisingly, then, given these defin-
itions, it is the extended spectacle, the excessive time and attention spent on the
dead, the increasing familiarity with death, and the commensurate mental an-
guish among the survivors that threaten the laboring classes, in the eyes of the
middle classes, not the physical effects of effluvia. Befriending death effaces re-
spect and demoralizes character. Quoting a clergyman who alleviated “the suffer-
ings in several hundred death bed scenes in the abodes of the labouring classes”
(SR, 45), Chadwick writes about the dangers of this proximity to the dead:

From familiarity it is a short step to desecration. . . . Viewed as an outrage

upon human feeling, this is bad enough; but who does not see that when
the respect for the dead, that is, for the human form in its most awful
state, is gone, the whole mass of social sympathies must be weakened—
perhaps blighted and destroyed? (SR, 46)
20 Literary Remains

Chadwick assumes that proximity to the corpse leads to disrespect, because

he perceives proximity to be a threat to social survival. “The whole mass of social
sympathies,” which governs human relations, he believes, depends upon break-
ing any unity between life and death, disrupting any exchange between the two,
and retaining “that wholesome fear of death which is the last hold upon a hard-
ened conscience” (SR, 46). A consequence of his assumption that the proximity
of the dead to the living threatens social survival, then, is that Chadwick must
figure the working class as “disrespectful” and even dangerous. In this same sec-
tion I have been analyzing, Chadwick associates these “disrespectful” burial prac-
tices among the working class with criminal behavior. Penal documents record
“the habits of savage brutality and carelessness of life among the labouring pop-
ulation; but crimes, like sores, will commonly be found to be the result of wider
influences than are externally manifest” (SR, 45). Apparently, in Chadwick’s
mind, familiarity with death, as enacted by the working class, threatens the fab-
ric of society and fosters criminal behavior. By concentrating on the indoor ef-
fects of miasma, Chadwick shifts the terms of burial reform discourse. As
Mackinnon’s committee had suggested, no longer is the retention of the body
simply a matter of health that must be assessed and solved by speedy extramural
interment. Instead, Chadwick transforms the debate into an ideological pivot for
social reform.
From Chadwick’s middle-class viewpoint, the presence of the dead also be-
comes an obstacle to the poor’s willingness to work. After all, he concludes, “a
known effect on uneducated survivors of the frequency of death amongst youth
or persons in the vigour of life is to create a reckless avidity for immediate en-
joyment” (SR, 45). In another instance, Chadwick cites testimony from Mr.
Thomas Porter, surgeon to St. Botolph’s Bishopsgate District, who, when asked
about the moral characteristics of the population parented by these depressing
physical circumstances (the presence of the dead among the living), responded
bluntly, “They have a decided unwillingness to labour. . . . They are more apt to
resort to subterfuge to gain their ends without labour. . . . They will avoid it if
they can. . . . The greatest part of them are mentally irritable and impatient
under moral restraint” (SR, 231). To counter this potential complacency toward
work, Chadwick, through the course of his report, appears to express a desire to
retain a fear of death, thus “stay[ing] the progress of this dreadful demoraliza-
tion” caused by miasma (SR, 46). Without the close presence of the corpse to re-
mind the working class of life’s inconsequence in the face of death, laborers
sustain the necessary level of production, without either realizing that their ef-
forts are futile or reflecting on the fact that they sacrifice themselves in other
quotidian ways. As the testimony from Porter suggests, reflection on life’s futil-
ity or work’s incapacity to improve one’s lot in life leads to irritability and impa-
tience under “moral restraint.” Chadwick seems to have understood that the
social order, so necessary to industrialization, depended upon the toil and labor
of workers who lived within the constraints imposed by masters.
 Down among the Dead 21

In contrast, Mayhew refuses to make the correlation between the immediately

harmful effects of miasma, when the body decomposes in domestic space peopled
by widows and children, and the proper disposition of the labor force. In his re-
ports in The Morning Chronicle, Mayhew interviews a dollmaker whose visage
showed the marks not of a cadaver, which is the conclusion Chadwick draws when
describing those who touch death, but of grinding poverty. Mayhew emphasizes
the plaintive quality of the man and the scene:

The man’s manner was meek and subdued, and he did not parade ei-
ther his grief or his poverty. He merely answered my questions, and to
them he said: “Ah, sir, the children of the people who will be happy
with my dolls little think under what circumstances they are made, nor
do their parents—I wish they did. Awful circumstances in my room.
Death there now (pointing to the coffin), and want here always.”30

The dollmaker’s self-conscious connection between death and “want” is exactly

what Chadwick hopes to preclude in the minds of “his” laboring class. He wants to
prevent interruption in production and forestall reflection on a vicious economic
cycle that leaves people poor despite their long hours of work. At one point, he
seems quite blatant about his complaints over corpses in the home: coffins use up
space required for work. When deaths occur among the handloom weavers, for ex-
ample, the corpse cannot be laid out without occupying the space where the family
must work (the father or mother weaving, and the children winding or rendering
other assistance).
Not only does the redeployment of miasma theory and its consequent focus
on the home serve to emphasize the appropriate dispositions of workers, but it
foregrounds gender in the complex network of death, home, and criminality.
Chadwick was not, however, the first to do so. His contemporary, George
Dorkin Lane, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, testified before Mac-
kinnon’s 1842 Select Committee. In answer to a question about the circum-
stances of effluvia in “extremely low” neighborhoods of London, where “the
people about are extremely dirty,” Lane succinctly articulated this nexus that
characterizes burial reform discussions:

I would not confine [miasma] to the burial-ground; it is of little use to

remove the burial-grounds unless you make them clean out the houses.
It is not only the poor people who sell those things there [oysters and
fish], but each of the apartments are let out to one or two girls, and they
have their men, many of whom are thieves.31

Lane makes the easy and, by now, predictable associations among dirt, refuse,
prostitution, and thievery with burial grounds, even though Mackinnon re-
minded Lane to confine his remarks to the effects of miasma.
22 Literary Remains

But Chadwick permitted a much more extensive and explicit connection

between prostitution and miasma than Mackinnon allowed in 1842. There runs
in Chadwick’s report an undercurrent of fear that widows, overcome with grief
caused by miasma and bereft of sensibility, would be forced to abandon the
home and work outdoors as prostitutes. Or, perhaps, as historical evidence sug-
gests, Chadwick feared that these women would contaminate the home by being
forced to live illicitly with a male laborer in order to earn enough income to feed
the children.32 No wonder, then, that Chadwick anchors women to the home
during times of death. Assuming that the dead remain at home only because the
family must raise enough funds for burial, Chadwick introduces the notion of a
medical officer and national funeral service to prepare the arrangements for her.
In effect, however, he confines the woman to a now-hygienic home and prevents
her from circulating through town or participating in the national economy by
having to negotiate with various parties for the burial of her husband.
In the microenvironment of the house, Chadwick wants to construct homes
as spaces without dead bodies, to remove the dead quickly, efficiently, and
anonymously by medical officers in order to free the home and its male occu-
pants for work in the national economy and female occupants for work in the
domestic economy. In the macroenvironment of the public sphere, Chadwick
extends the work of medical officers beyond the home to the workplace, to fur-
ther ensure behavior suitable to labor. Through the example discussed later of
the Sheffield workers, highly paid laborers who could afford time away from
work but who died at young ages, Chadwick argues that an officer of health who
would “bring large classes of people within one intelligent view” could present
clearly “common causes of evil” and suggest means of prevention (SR, 180). But
Chadwick’s discussion quickly slips from one concerned about physical defects
and early mortality among the workers to one preoccupied with their moral de-
fects, thus making the presence of the medical officer all the more essential. The
example of the Sheffield workers, moreover, serves to emphasize Chadwick’s de-
sire to suppress political gatherings that occur in graveyards, a space—not unlike
the home—he wants to liberate from communal expressions of working-class sol-
idarity. In their place, Chadwick, by quoting Wordsworth on the nature of
churchyards, recommends the individualization of death, a useful social practice
to curb volatile political unrest.
Buried in a section of the report praising the extreme advantages of medical
officers to discern “the indication of the certain means of prevention of disease”
(SR, 178), Chadwick cites Dr. Calvert Holland’s study of the physical and moral
condition of the cutlers’ dry grinders of Sheffield to justify his anxiety over
unsuitable behavior for laborers. The dry grinders, men who ground, polished,
and finished knives, suffered from early mortality, dying between the ages of
twenty-eight and thirty-two from lung disease. According to a critic for The West-
minster Review, they opposed any effort to modify the ravages of the trade.33
On one level, Chadwick simply argues for bringing these cases of early death
 Down among the Dead 23

before an officer of health who would mark patterns in the disease and suggest
means for its prevention. But neither the disease nor high mortality unnerves
Chadwick. What worries him is the causal relationship between high income lev-
els, which the grinders enjoyed, and their increased access to leisure. When trade
was good, they would only work part of the week. They spent the remainder of
the time in the rest and dissipation characteristic of soldiers:

Many of them each kept a hound, and had it trained by a master of the
hunt, and their several hounds formed a pack with which they hunted
lawlessly, and poached over any grounds within their reach. The
grinders pack is still kept up amongst them. They became reckless in
their marriages. (SR, 180)

The commentator for The Westminster Review reiterates the reproach. They de-
voted Mondays to drink and the amusement of the hunt “with a perfect knowl-
edge of their doomed lives; on Sundays one could meet group after group of
boys and young men playing at pitch-penny, fighting their bull dogs, and insult-
ing every decently dressed passenger.”34 The central tenet of Chadwick’s argu-
ment is economic: because the supply of labor is kept low, wages are kept high,
allowing the grinders to enjoy more leisure time to appropriate an activity that
rightfully belonged to the higher classes.
A major subtext to the example of the Sheffield workers involves the use of
public space. Already piqued by their “poaching over any grounds within their
reach,” Chadwick joins the battle to control territories previously available to the
working class. One of these territories is the space of the grave. What bothered
Chadwick and other reformers was the use the working class made of church-
yards, grounds hotly contested in the late 1830s in Sheffield. I believe this histor-
ical moment, which Eileen Yeo has investigated extensively, to be the referent for
Chadwick’s anxiety. Yeo maps the geography of Chartist struggles in Sheffield
and, in fact, claims that these demonstrations were dramatic battles for territory.35
In Sheffield, after two weeks of demonstrations in the summer of 1839, the An-
glican churchwardens posted notices against congregating in the churchyard
in answer to Chartist protests against the Anglican Church’s participation in the
enclosure of public property and the church’s dismissal of their concerns.
Over the course of two weeks, the Chartists staged silent demonstrations,
proceeding from Paradise Square to the church. On Wednesday, September 11,
1839, however, the magistrates issued placards declaring illegal any further meet-
ings, which had swelled to 8,000 earlier in the week. Nonetheless, 2,000 people
assembled in Paradise Square, which was that night in darkness because the gas
lighting had been extinguished. The cavalry came to clear the square and there
ensued a chase up and down the streets of Sheffield. Many of the Chartists took
refuge in the churchyard, although they were later driven out. In all, thirty-six
were arrested that night. On the following Sunday, September 15, the Chartists
24 Literary Remains

once again marched to the church to find the churchyard surrounded by armed
policemen at the gates. They prevented any person who looked poor from
entering the burial ground. A reporter for the Sheffield Iris wrote:

An extraordinary exhibition, in England, to see a dozen policemen

armed with cutlasses surrounding the churchyard gates on the outside,
a posse of constables inside, and special constables stationed about five
or six yards apart around the inside of the railings, admitting only those
who had good coats on their backs, and whose respectable external ap-
pearance would warrant the conclusion that they were not Chartists.
The “Poor Man’s Church” now calls in the aid of the civil power and
the military to prevent the poor from contaminating with their pres-
ence the cushioned pew and velvet hassocks of her more wealthy and
aristocratic sons.36

These political activities, perhaps instigated by men with too much time on their
hands, motivate the resistance by Chadwick and his own throng of witnesses to
any form of congregation in churchyards, especially amid the bustle of city life.
Naturally, within the logic of the discourse, the congregation turns into a mob
whose willful disturbances add to the usual uproar of a crowded thoroughfare
noisy with “whistling, calling, shouting, and the creaking and rattling of every
kind of vehicle” (SR, 83).
Such behavior, considered so foul by the reformers, actually constitutes a
form of resistance to the middle-class fashioning of communal space and its uses.
This opposition becomes apparent if one considers the context of the trade fu-
neral, which was suppressed in late 1834 because it was assumed to foster politi-
cal activity among the unions. In March 1834, The Pioneer reported that in
Tunbridge, before an extensive trade funeral, “Unions only initiated about four
or five members a week; but since the procession they have initiated in two nights
twenty-two, and expect a dozen or fifteen more next week. They nearly have tre-
bled their numbers by means of the ceremonial.”37 Among the shoemakers of
Northampton, M. J. Haynes attests, consolidation of their union activity and a
key turning point for them in the county occurred at the funeral of Henry Daw-
son, a local shoemaker.38 His funeral, which took place on a Monday evening at
the beginning of April, turned into a massive procession around Northampton,
organized by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU). Led by
some 100 women with nearly 800 unionists following in the cortege, the proces-
sion marched around town before Dawson was buried in the local churchyard.
According to Haynes, nearly 2,000 people, excluding those who actually marched,
witnessed the funeral and perceived it to be a first step toward a general strike.39
With the suppression of the trade funeral in late 1834, which prohibited a
form of collective action taken by the laboring class, workers seemed to resist the
individualizing thrust of more recent funerals, a thrust that Chadwick sponsors.
 Down among the Dead 25

Chadwick quotes the testimony of Rev. William Stone of Spitalfields in an effort

to show that dissatisfaction with intramural burial centers less on sanitary mea-
sures than on an aversion to “the profanation arising from interment amidst the
scenes of the crowd and bustle of everyday life” (SR, 84). Stone’s evidence also re-
veals his annoyance with the working-class desire to have the funeral remain a
collective action very much connected to the life of the community:

If, in such a case, the corpse is brought into my church, this sacred and
beautiful structure is desecrated and disfigured by the hurried intrusion
of a squalid and irreverent mob, and clergyman, corpse, and mourners
are jostled about and mixed up with the confused mass, by the uncon-
trollable pressure from without . . . for I believe that among the work-
ing classes they often congratulate themselves upon it. (SR, 84)

Amid this faceless mob and “reckless din of secular traffic,” Stone labors under
the “indescribable uneasiness” of feeling out of place: “I feel as if I were prostitut-
ing the spirituality of prayer, and profaning even the symbolical sanctity of my sur-
plice” (SR, 83). As a result of this tension between the curate’s desire for a quiet,
harmonious funeral emphasizing the individual life and its singular redemption
through the labor of the minister and the community’s insistence on respecting
collective values, in which political, social, and economic questions were not par-
titioned, burial reformers disallowed walking funerals and Sunday funerals, the
only day working-class families and friends could gather to bury their dead.
Instead, Chadwick evacuates the churchyard of any overt political and social
turmoil by citing a lengthy passage from Wordsworth’s “Essay upon Epitaphs,”
published by Coleridge in The Friend on February 22, 1810.40 In the excerpt that
Chadwick quotes, Wordsworth privileges the moral seclusion of the burial
ground, the monitory virtue of tombs, and, ultimately, the solitary traveler who
finds meaning in his or her life, not through social relations, but by reflection on
epitaphs. The place is meant to inspire people to connect with themselves, not
with the person who has passed nor with a community of mourners. The mon-
uments interpellate the Wordsworthian subject by asking him or her to pause
and reflect awhile on the analogies of life presented there. Beckoning the traveler
to consider life’s vicissitudes as naturalized, the gravestones, in effect, lure
the subject to construct a private, interior life through the use of imagination:
“Many tender similitudes must these objects have presented to the mind of the
traveller” (SR, 143). Wordsworth leaves only the single subject standing before
tombs figured as silent monitors, whose existence have value not because they
symbolize the span of a person’s life, but because they serve to fashion in the con-
templative subject an individual identity. For Wordsworth, and for Chadwick
who quotes him, death, “disarmed of its sting, and affliction unsubstantialised,”
is meant to be buried in an individual consciousness, there to give birth to a
singular subjectivity.41
26 Literary Remains

Karen Sanchez-Eppler notes the irony of early burial reformers citing

Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs to further their arguments for the improve-
ment of churchyards and gravestones.42 Wordsworth, according to Sanchez-
Eppler, insists on “the fluidity of the very dividing line that the burial reformers
wished to install when they made even graveyards places of ‘order, regularity, and
contrivance.’”43 For Wordsworth, visits to gravesites, their memorials and the
epitaphs written upon them, aim to disinter the contradictions concerning death
that Chadwick and others sought to resolve. One’s presence among the dead,
and the internalization of language written about them, unveils grief, a chief
source of poetic thought. In yet another ironic twist, Wordsworth, in speaking
of the relationship of death and language, “has used thought to replace the dead
body in need of flesh.”44 Wordsworth disregards the corpse in order to take com-
fort in meditation.45
Chadwick works Wordsworth to political advantage, because he creates
what he perceives to be a necessary link between the successfully contained inte-
rior subject and the properly compartmentalized public sphere. Invoking
Wordsworth, then, becomes a political response to the increasingly chaotic times
evidenced in Victorian deathways. Chadwick also anticipates later Victorian
strategies to develop a liberal subject, who, in Elaine Hadley’s poignant defini-
tion, “seeks out a private space of thoughtful emotion, of human intimacy,
where subjects alienated in mind or body can become fully authentic and inten-
tional in relation to themselves and to each other, in spite of the chaotic world
without.”46 In Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” for example, the speaker re-
duces what Sophocles heard as the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery” to a
long, melancholic thought in the face of a world bereft of joy, love, light, certi-
tude, and peace.47 Thomas Carlyle, too, expresses anxiety about whether his own
thoughtful endeavors in Past and Present will amount to anything, even though
his literary Captains of Industry seek to restore some salience of dignity and
morality to economic relations. He wonders plaintively: “Certainly it were a fond
imagination to expect that any preaching of mine could abate Mammonism; that
Bobus of Houndsditch will love his guineas less, or his poor soul more, for any
preaching of mine.”48 Carlyle struggles with whether writing will make a differ-
ence in the world or whether it too ultimately retreats from agency because it can
only represent social change rather than actually produce it.

III
Chadwick’s invocation of Wordsworth steadies his own reach into a self-reflective
professionalism. His enunciation of the waste problem caused by unregulated
burial practices also demands his solution. The professional bureaucrat will in-
deed have the last word in the Supplementary Report because, as Harold Perkin has
written, the pressure of intolerable facts led to a professional ideal of “efficient,
disinterested and, in the administrative solution of social problems, effective
 Down among the Dead 27

government.”49 Chadwick believed wholeheartedly in this ideal and so chose to

mitigate the waste problem with state intervention. On December 22, 1843, The
Times published a response to Chadwick’s Supplementary Report using terms Chad-
wick deploys throughout the course of his text: “That these [burial] practices
should be put down is abundantly clear; but the question is, what system is to be
substituted in their room?” Through systems of surveillance and classification,
Chadwick enters the “rooms” and, therefore, the lives of the poor and working
classes of England. His overarching conceptual scheme of comprehensive na-
tional solutions to the problem of intramural interment calls for medical officers,
mortuary houses, and cemeteries to monitor the daily patterns of working-class
people, whether dead or alive. Chadwick’s proposed structures, grounded as they
are in visual and spatial organization, inspire further reflection on the relation-
ship of these kinds of spatial entities to the written discourse of burial reform.
Specifically, his discussion of the regulatory powers of the medical officers, the for-
mation of reception houses for the dead, and the architecture of the cemetery
shapes as well class relations and the disposition of state power at mid-century.
Chadwick’s introduction of medical men into the cause of burial reform
provided access to various forms of knowledge the state thought essential to have
about the working and poorest classes. It would be the duty of these men to in-
spect the corpse and note the cause of death, to give proper instructions on the
immediate removal of the body to the reception house, and to inform the family
of the schedule of rates for funeral and burial services. “The ordinary service of
such an officer would consist of the verification of the fact and cause of death,
and its due civic registration” (SR, 159). Especially with respect to the poorest
classes, “those who stand most in need of verification,” the chief importance of
the medical officer is to bring into places rarely entered a person of education, a
“trustworthy” person, to provide counsel and direction to survivors and “guide a
change of the practice of interment” (SR, 165, 159).
In addition, because Chadwick viewed registration of the dead as a means to
prevent crime, he insists that registration would expose the criminal element
among these classes by discerning fraud and secret murder, namely, infanticide
from drug overdoses. “Proper securities are wanting for the protection of life in
this country, leav[ing] the widest openings for escape of the darkest crimes” (SR,
172, 171). Engaging the panoptic technology, the medical officer would dominate
the visual field of the body, the home and the neighborhood, exploring and
recording names, ages, addresses, occupations, marital status, social class, and sites
of death in the name of an invigorated system of government increasingly defined
by new forms of taxonomies. He would occupy a single vantage point from which
he could bring under one informed view all the causes of crime and disease by ob-
serving large populations, studying their responses to changed environments, and
furnishing an accurate diagnosis so that preventative action could take place.50
The medical officer not only stands guard over the space of the living but
keeps watch over the dead in the sanitized reception houses. These “houses,”
28 Literary Remains

models of which Chadwick culled from German mortuary practices, emphasized

security against premature burial. According to the Frankfurt regulations of
1829, found in the Appendix to Chadwick’s report, the house was to be under
the control of a cemetery inspector (SR, 205–17). The officer lived on the
premises and was not allowed to leave during the time any corpse lay in the mor-
tuary. The bodies were placed in separate rooms, and a bell was attached to each
corpse by a cord, in case the person was indeed alive and needed to summon as-
sistance. Ironically, given Chadwick’s insistence that miasma is most fatal in the
two or three days immediately following death, the medical officer nonetheless
had to keep constant watch over the body until definitive signs of decomposition
appeared. With Chadwick’s introduction of the reception house into English
burial reform, death was policed in ever-greater detail. Furthermore, the transfer
of a corpse from domestic space for the dead to a cleansed dwelling represents a
simultaneous transformation of English society. The reception house, devoid of
family and friends, patrolled by an officer of the state, demarcated by boundaries
heretofore nonexistent, becomes a metaphor for the developing perception of
the working class by middle-class reformers. Increasingly mistrusted (the body
only appears to be dead), subject to surveillance and regulation, isolated from tra-
ditional forms of community, and placed in a single-room dwelling, the work-
ing class subject takes its subordinate position in English life.
While mortuary houses represent the working class as subservient, national
cemeteries depict it as liberated in order to exert “a great moral force” on the
public (SR, 146). In Section XIV on the necessity of national cemeteries, Chad-
wick claims that

the greater part of the means of honour and moral influence on the liv-
ing generation derivable from the example of the meritorious dead of
all classes [especially those “who have risen from the wheelbarrow”] is
at present in the larger town cast away in obscure grave-yards and of-
fensive charnels. (SR, 146, 147)

He infers that the waste evident in unregulated burial grounds is an opportunity

to provide incentives for moral improvement. Nothing suits him more than re-
covering the lives—figured as “waste” in death—of those from the working class
who “had done honour to their country and individually gained public attention
from the ranks of the privates” (SR, 146).
Chadwick, in the Supplementary Report, moves from the establishment of mor-
tuary houses outward to a discussion of national cemeteries and the work of
Loudon, whose efforts Chadwick applauds.51 Of uppermost concern to Chadwick
is the visual impact these cemeteries will have on the population: “Careful visible
arrangements, of an agreeable nature, raise corresponding mental images and
associations which diminish the terrors incident to the aspect of death” (SR, 144).
 Down among the Dead 29

In mollifying a reality so familiar to certain segments of the population, Chadwick

hopes to soften the memory of an arduous life spent to improve the lot of the
higher orders and to offer comfort that is prohibited in life.

All the structural and decorative arrangements of the national cemetery

should be made . . . under the conviction that in rendering attractive
that place we are preparing the picture which is most frequently present
to the minds of the poorest, in the hours of mental and bodily infir-
mity, and the last picture on earth presented to his contemplation be-
fore dissolution.” (SR, 190)

Chadwick seems panicked by grief and the concomitant depression, because he

views psychological depression among workers as identical to economic depres-
sion. He, therefore, must transform the psychological dispositions of working-
class mourners. Because the cemetery is a national institution in Chadwick’s
mind, the state, the “we” of the passage just quoted, transforms the cemetery into
a vision of the afterlife internalized in the imaginations of the living, representing,
in effect, heaven on earth. He constructs, then, the promise of salvation, the spir-
itual compensation to be paid to those who sacrificed themselves while on earth.
The construction of the cemetery as a picture painted in public space that then is
translated into the minds of the sick serves to emphasize continuity between this
life and the next, a continuity that Chadwick has redefined according to state in-
terests. This vision transforms Chadwick’s anxiety over the public congregation
of working men, evident in his response to trade funerals, to enthusiasm for
an “association in sepulture,” in which those of particular trades could be buried
in the same precinct and the living could visit these illustrious dead, “giving to
them a wider sphere of attention, honour, and beneficent influence” (SR, 150).
Chadwick allows these sorts of associations because they take place within the
state-controlled space of the new cemeteries, and because they direct attention to
the dead and to imaginative images of another apolitical world.
The work of revising the role of the cemetery in the lives of survivors Chad-
wick shares with Loudon, editor of The Gardener’s Magazine and devoted land-
scape architect.52 Much of what Chadwick proposes—separate graves at least six
feet deep with adequate space between them and a safe and protected distance
from local habitations, morally uplifting visual arrangements, and careful atten-
tion to the cultivation of breathing spaces to disarm the effects of miasma—
Loudon explicates in his definitive text On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing
of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards (1843).53 Since Chadwick ad-
mits that this text underwrites his own principles for cemetery design, it is wor-
thy of some discussion here for its enunciation of the twin effects of mid-century
cemetery design: the isolation and containment of death and the reformation of
the lower class to serve the interests of the wealthy.
30 Literary Remains

Loudon’s engraving of the South Metropolitan Cemetery (Figure 1.1)—

which is not one of his own designs but is emblematic of so many engravings of
newly developed cemeteries at this time—presents a scene designed to turn the
viewer’s attention upright, away from death.54 The eye of the viewer is not drawn
mainly to the hearse in the lower left, which, along with its attendant mutes, is
marching inexorably from the city limits to some black hole of a grave. The eye
is drawn, rather, to the dark portal and dense vegetation in the middle fore-
ground, and thence up the hill, following the path in the center foreground to-
ward the two chapels on the brow of the hill, and finally beyond the chapels, into
the horizon. In the lower foreground, the fence, trees, and shrubbery, in addi-
tion to the cemetery offices and caretaker’s residence, substantially demarcate
the dead from the living. Once inside the cemetery, however, one’s view is di-
rected upward to the top of the hill—toward heaven—and away from individual
graves by the conical shapes of the trees planted systematically throughout the
grounds. The eye follows along the path, which curves upward from right to left,
promoting movement through the cemetery. The path seems fluid, moving the
imagined visitor quietly but deliberately from the boundary of the cemetery’s
main entrance to the chapels, Anglican and Nonconformist, where the visitor is
invited to reflect, with the aid of religious burial services, not on the horrors of
a grisly death but on the possibility of individual redemption, determined in
large measure by the quality of the moral life on earth.55 On the whole, the en-
graving makes the passage through death seem restful, natural, and almost de-
sirable. The viewer, seemingly the most active person in the scene, begins by
looking down on death from an aerial perspective but then moves quickly
through death’s center among the graves, returning ultimately to the same aer-
ial plane with the attention redirected, eyeing the sky.56
The graves in the scene—marked by monuments nearly indistinguishable from
the narrow, columnar trees, the combined effect of which is to draw the eye
upward—follow the curves of the path and show no visible signs of ever having
been dug. Presumably, according to Loudian principles, which were endorsed by
Chadwick and that author’s own emphasis on the necessary individuality of death,
each grave must contain only one body, or, if more than one body, coffins must be
stacked one on top of the other, separated by graveboards, protecting stones, and
at least six feet of dirt. In other words, while a family may be buried together in the
same deep and rather large plot, each individual member must, according to Chad-
wick, be separated from the others by concrete or wooden boundaries.57
The Victorian marriage of pragmatism with morality, so evident in Chad-
wick’s requirements, is manifested likewise in Loudon’s declaration of his two
purposes in cemetery designs: first, “the disposal of the remains of the dead in
such a manner as that their decomposition, and return to the earth from which
they sprung, shall not prove injurious to the living; either by affecting their
health, or shocking their feelings, opinions, or prejudices”; and second “is, or
ought to be, the improvement of the moral sentiments and general taste of all
Figure 1.1 South Metropolitan Cemetery, Norwood, Surrey. Planted in the cemetery style. John Claudius
Loudon, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards, with
Sixty Engravings (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1843). Used with the generous permission
of the Missouri Botanical Garden Library.
32 Literary Remains

classes, and more especially the great masses of society.”58 To achieve this advance
in morality, Loudon suggests that the monuments in a churchyard should act as
the conscience and monitor of human behavior. A well-designed cemetery,
Loudon claims, develops the value of mercy and portrays vice as ugly, virtue as
lovely, selfishness as a sin, and patriotism as a duty.59 Loudon’s emphasis on the
moral life also is apparent in his renovations of existing churchyards, which Chad-
wick, in his own report, wanted closed to further burials in order to make space
available for public leisure.
Figure 1.2 shows one of these renovation schemes, an extraordinarily con-
tained plan, considering the randomness with which the graves had been plotted
and the irregularity in the designs of the monuments. Loudon’s dark borders
framing the burial ground and the lines drawn to show where the walks may be
laid indicate a compulsion to order and control a reality that had developed be-
yond its proper borders and a desire to engender a taste for neatness and habits
of cleanliness, the bedrock of Victorian moral life.
Cemeteries are not only scenes calculated to segregate death from society and
to improve the morals and taste of the great masses, they shape the identity of the
masses in relation to the upper classes. In one instance, Loudon argues that ceme-
teries serve as historical records, with every grave a “page and every head-stone or
tomb a picture or engraving.”60 Just as Chadwick hopes to revise one’s contem-
plation of the afterlife, he wants to extend and improve the cemetery as a text for
national education since, as he points out, no effective system had yet been es-
tablished. As he describes it, a promenade through the burial ground is analogous
to the perusal of a pamphlet on local history. Despite “the progress of education
and refinement,” cemeteries can still serve “the poor man [as] a local history and
biography, though the means of more extended knowledge are now amply fur-
nished by the diffusion of cheap publications, which will . . . be rendered still
more effective by the establishment of a system of national education.”61 In
essence, however, a cemetery education teaches the history of class relations, since
only those who could afford a monument could be read, with all others, paupers
and those buried in common graves, remaining unread and outside of history.
In a second instance of using cemeteries to shape the identity of the masses
in relation to the upper classes, Loudon suggests that to sustain morally uplifting
environments in the burial ground families should erect “handsome monu-
ments.”62 For each of these structures to have its full effect on the spectator, pau-
pers’ graves should be interspersed among the grander plots, which would
achieve the desired aesthetic and moral dimensions. Upper-class monuments
would thus tower above lower-class plots. By this arrangement, the masses are
fractured into serviceable units, while the morally uplifting memorials to the
wealthy are enhanced.
Finally, in a plan for creating temporary cemeteries, Loudon establishes class
identities by transforming the bodies of paupers into the literal property of a
landowner. Land would be leased for twenty-one years and used as a burial ground
Figure 1.2 John Claudius Loudon’s design for a churchyard no longer used for
burial, with lines showing the direction in which walks may be made without re-
moving any headstones or other monuments. John Claudius Loudon, On the Laying
Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards, with
Sixty Engravings (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1843). Used with
the generous permission of the Missouri Botanical Garden Library.
34 Literary Remains

for the poor for fourteen of those years. At the end of seven more years, during
which there would be no burial activity, the land “may revert to the landlord, and
be cultivated, planted or laid down in grass, in any manner that may be thought
proper.”63 In all these instances, we see in the cemetery that the success of the
wealthier classes depends on the not so wealthy remembering their proper place in
the economy. Laborers are reminded of that place by their contemplation of the
master’s tomb; by their being made to enhance that tomb; and by their sacrifice of
their very bodies in order to reflect in physical terms what has been true in eco-
nomic terms, that their bodies, living or dead, are the property of the master.

IV
Chadwick’s Supplementary Report stymied parliamentary action for seven years be-
cause, his opponents complained, it proposed exceedingly complex and cum-
bersome mechanisms to achieve a rather simple goal, one put forward by
Mackinnon’s 1842 committee: to close the intramural graveyards beginning with
the worst ones. But Chadwick, with Benthamite vigor, thought this plan too
gradual and too incomplete in the face of such an evil, nauseating practice.
Chadwick’s solution, however, proved no less problematic, because he failed to
comprehend or appreciate the threat his plan posed to churchmen and other
profit-making interests. He forgot that by moving the cemeteries to the edge of
town, thus necessitating new means of transportation, funerals would increase,
not decrease, in cost. This situation would not only cause further delays in in-
terments while families raised enough funds to cover the cost of burial fees but
would agitate members of the working class because, given greater distances, they
would be unable to attend burial services. Meanwhile, private commercial ceme-
teries prospered on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas, even as the old
churchyards were still being used. It was not until the late 1840s, with the threat
of a second epidemic of cholera in 1848, that Parliament again turned its atten-
tion to the burial problem by passing the Metropolitan Interment Act of 1850.
At issue in the discussions of the 1850 act and the burial reform discourse I
have explored in this chapter is political and socioeconomic power. Would the
local vestries be clothed with the authority to regulate the churchyards, or would
power be invested in centralized structures to establish national cemeteries and
commission funerals by government contract? Would undertakers submit to gov-
ernment interference? Would the laboring class and the poor submit to middle-
class forms of intrusion, or would resistance reappear in shapes that those in
power would fail to recognize? Would the mid-nineteenth century reformer/
survivor perceive herself or himself to have ultimately conquered death and
waste? These burial reform texts show us that the power to organize the dead is
the power to constitute the political and social world that survives, making it
valuable territory. With the Supplementary Report and the other texts that under-
write it, Chadwick became the professional bureaucrat who understood that
 Down among the Dead 35

forms of power will have something of this smell of death about them. The texts
project an idea of the grave as one of the many spaces available for systems of
power to take hold in English society. “The proper removal of between one and
two thousand dead weekly from the midst of the living, their removal with indi-
vidual care, and their interment with propriety appeared to be a task which
could only be accomplished by a superior executive service under unity of ad-
ministration, of which there was no immediate prospect.”64 This was the sanitary
reformer Chadwick: designer of centralized schemes for burial understood to re-
form domesticity and hence improve the national economy. It is a view that
Chadwick, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century, avowed during
burial reform’s most contentious years: “‘All smell of decomposing matter may
be said to indicate loss of money.’”65 But Gaskell’s representations of death and
decomposition resist Chadwick’s impulse to compartmentalize and contain the
problem. For Gaskell, as we shall see in the next chapter, death offers untold op-
portunities for individuals and communities to respond not from the ready op-
positions of class and gender but from a reinvigorated morality that refuses to
make hard-and-fast judgments about people and the realities they must endure.
Gaskell’s novels put a human face to Chadwick’s solutions and suggest that the
consequences of such decisions are, perhaps, not so efficient or economical.
This page intentionally left blank.
 Chapter 2
“Taught by Death What Life Should Be”
Representations of Death in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton and North and South

The author has rather a hankering after death scenes.1

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel, Mary Barton (1848), which depicts the acute poverty
of unemployed mill hands in Manchester during “the hungry forties,” Gaskell
marks the development of her heroine, Mary Barton, by describing Mary’s awak-
ening consciousness as she deals directly with the dead and dying. Mary, daugh-
ter of an active and embittered trade unionist, John Barton, visits the desperately
poor Davenport home, where Mr. Davenport is dying. Here, in caring for the
body, Mary begins to come to her senses about what she needs to do to improve
conditions in her community. On arriving at Mr. Davenport’s deathbed, she
“did not know what to say, or how to comfort.” Soon, however, she “forgot all
purposed meeting with her gay lover, Harry Carson; forgot Miss Simmonds’ er-
rands, and her anger, in the anxious desire to comfort the poor lone woman
[Mrs. Davenport].”2 Mary is reminded that her responsibility lies with the com-
munity and its welfare, which means that she must sacrifice her own personal de-
sire for advancement through a grand marriage to Harry, son of the mill owner.
Several pages later, when Mary visits the Wilsons, Gaskell articulates her
heroine’s growing sense of commitment to her neighbors. When Mary heard the
news from Margaret, a friend and coworker, that the Wilson twins were seriously
ill, she “listened with saddened heart to the strange contrast which such woeful
tidings presented to the gay and loving words she had been hearing on her walk
home [with Harry Carson]. She blamed herself for being so much taken up with
visions of the golden future, that she had lately gone but seldom on Sunday
afternoons, or other leisure time, to see Mrs. Wilson, her mother’s friend”
(MB, 115). Mary’s contact with death roots her in the local community and en-
courages her to reflect on the temptations presented by an increasingly material-
istic society. These reflections motivate her to visit “the house of mourning,”
where at first she appears deeply confounded as to what to say to the twins’ Aunt

37
38 Literary Remains

Alice (MB, 115). But Mary gathers her strength to comfort the family, especially
the twins’ brother, Jem. Mary’s education in Jem’s virtues begins at this moment,
when he grieves for his two brothers. Hereafter, a succession of thoughts comes
over her, thoughts indicating a dawning awareness of what she needs to do to
make responsible choices and revealing to the reader that she has learned lessons
taught by death. Her encounters with the Davenports and the Wilsons spark our
sympathy for the working-class community, of which Mary is a member. Gaskell
makes detailed efforts to depict the despair and suffering as well as the close-knit
community life shared by working-class people, and she delineates the positive
transformation that occurs in Mary Barton as a result of her contact with death.
Thus while Gaskell’s description of workers’ living conditions closely resembles
Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, her un-
derstanding of working-class consciousness is more subtle and complex because
she visited and knew firsthand people like the Barton family.
In this chapter, I argue that in her poignant representations of death and bur-
ial in Mary Barton and North and South (1854–1855), Gaskell draws on an under-
standing of the social value of participating in the ministrations surrounding
death. At every turn, she associates death with poverty in order to value working-
class family and communal life and to suggest that because they are rooted in the
local community, working-class responses to death should serve as models for emo-
tional ties across class lines. Death, then, becomes a mediator, diminishing differ-
ences and neutralizing working-class aggression. This strategy demands that
Gaskell subvert depersonalized discussions of class and represent the power strug-
gle in terms of individuals, such as John Barton and Nicholas Higgins, trade union-
ist and mill worker, and Mr. Carson and Mr. Thornton, middle-class mill owners.
Both novels question the use of class-oriented terms which, according to Gaskell,
seem to fuel class antagonism, a matter of heated debate in the 1830s, voiced in
part by Carlyle’s Past and Present in 1843 and Disraeli’s Coningsby and Sybil in 1844
and 1845. Instead she argues for the ultimately greater economic wisdom of al-
lowing community-based death and burial practices to provide necessary social
healing within and between classes. She also favors increased direct exposure to the
bodies of the dead of all classes and by all classes, as a means of improving the abil-
ity of middle-class individuals, most especially middle-class women—as we shall see
in North and South—to meet the challenges of personal loss and of compassionate
social reform. To appreciate Gaskell’s remarkable solution to contentious social de-
bates about death and burial, we first need to explore her relation to Unitarianism,
which informs her solutions to the “condition of England” question.

I
Gaskell’s belief in the Christian impulse to ameliorate social evil not only under-
writes her novels but differs significantly from Chadwick’s idea that only national
mechanisms can solve social problems. The version of Unitarianism that William,
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 39

Gaskell’s husband, and she espoused was essentially optimistic.3 They believed in
a God who is merciful and trusted in the innate goodness of human nature,
even though human actions might become warped by material, emotional, or spiri-
tual deprivation. According to Jenny Uglow, “It was against social evil, not original
sin or the works of the devil, that the Gaskells took their stand. If such evil was
humanly created, it must, they felt, be open to human remedy through practical
measures and through the power of the Word to awaken conscience and modify be-
havior.”4 Given this belief in the merciful nature of God and the power of human
beings to counteract evil in the world, Unitarians rejected the concept of everlasting
punishment in favor of a future afterlife where there is discipline for the soul, where
even the guiltiest may be redeemed and the stained spirit may be cleansed by fire.
Reconciliation with God occurs through Christ, who offers a system of ethics on
which everyday morality should be based. Charity toward others becomes the out-
ward mark of the true Christian. The Unitarian espousal of freedom, reason, toler-
ance, and an essentially optimistic outlook on life and the afterlife motivated small
Unitarian communities such as the Cross Street Chapel congregation in Manches-
ter to contribute to social progress.5 For example, Unitarians advocated parliamen-
tary reform from the turn of the century. The Anti-Corn Law League was initiated
and supported by Manchester Unitarians such as Robert Hyde Greg, elected mem-
ber of Parliament (MP) for Manchester in 1839, and the most aggressive agitator
against the Corn Laws. Further, the Municipal Reform Act enabled Unitarians to
participate more fully in local government. Thomas Potter, a warehouse owner and
member of the Cross Street Chapel, headed the movement for Manchester to
become a corporation, which occurred in 1838.6
In addition to parliamentary reform, Manchester Unitarians became involved
in sanitary reform as well, since they discounted a belief in divine retribution that
absolved society of any responsibilities in times of epidemics. Rather, they stressed
that such conditions were caused by the filth and overcrowding in the cities. For
example, James P. Kay, a Unitarian doctor who took the post of medical officer at
the New Ardwick and Ancoats dispensary—particularly afflicted sections of Man-
chester—, engaged in sanitary reform work. In 1832, he published the highly influ-
ential The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton
Manufacturers of Manchester, which was underwritten by the assumption that since
epidemics were aggravated by men, they also could be eradicated, or at least ame-
liorated, by human endeavors. This attitude led Kay, along with brothers Samuel
and William Rathbone Greg and Benjamin Haywood, to found the Manchester
Statistical Society in 1833, a society designed to gather information that would
eventually engender reform. All four men were connected to the Cross Street
Chapel and were well known to the Gaskells, as were Edwin Chadwick and
Thomas Southwood Smith, who succeeded Chadwick at the Board of Health.7
These ideals of service played a dominant role in Unitarian thinking. Uni-
tarians became champions of the oppressed and advocates for education, religious
tolerance, and women’s rights. But, as Donald Stone so succinctly states,
40 Literary Remains

“accompanying this reformist strain was an impulse that favored economic indi-
vidualism, that saw in the industrialists—many of whom were Unitarians—a power
and a right deriving from natural law that was not to be interfered with.”8 A look
at the composition of the Cross Street Chapel will confirm Stone’s assessment,
for Cross Street was where the bourgeois of Manchester worshiped. Valentine
Cunningham claims that “the trustees and members were the millocracy, the
benefactors, the leaders of Manchester society: corn millers, silk manufacturers,
calico painters, patent-reed makers, engineers, bankers and barristers; founders of
hospitals, libraries, educational institutions, charitable funds and missions to the
poor.”9 The congregation, needless to say, did not take kindly to criticism of the
laissez-faire economy. Promoting an ideal of individualism rather than equality,
the ethic of the free market as well as the Gospel, Unitarian MPs spoke vehe-
mently against government intervention in factory hours and conditions.10
Elizabeth Gaskell participated in a religion that espoused the responsibili-
ties of the individual on behalf of local society: Unitarian chapels were full of
proponents of contemporary political economy and model self-employers who
believed, essentially, that self-help was the key to reform, and that the govern-
ment should not intervene in the “natural” rhythms of the market economy, es-
pecially with regard to free trade and tariff reform. Yet she could see for herself
that all was not well with the liberal-bourgeois-dissenting millocracy. It failed to
feed, clothe, and house adequately the poor of Manchester in the 1840s. In
other words, Gaskell faced two contending groups: Unitarian political econo-
mists in concert with model employers versus distressed employees. Specifically,
Gaskell, through representations of death, negotiates these pressures by depict-
ing in Mary Barton and North and South individuals acting according to the spirit
of Christ rather than to the rules of the state as the regulating law between the
middle and working classes. For example, she moves away from what I perceive
as Chadwickean proposals for impersonal state legislation and toward a volun-
tary cooperation among individuals within a local rather than a national context.
In North and South, for example, the informed Thornton suggests that “inter-
course” between the classes “is the very breath of life.”11 He articulates an “evo-
lution of understanding” one another based on common interests, “which
invariably makes people find means and ways of seeing each other, and becom-
ing acquainted with each others’ characters and persons, and even tricks of tem-
per and modes of speech. We should understand each other” (NS, 432).
The Unitarian rejection of everlasting punishment emphasized, in earthly
life, the need for social progress advanced by individual initiative. This emphasis
accounts, in part, for the fact that Gaskell, in representing death, articulated spe-
cific cultural attitudes about sociopolitical life in mid-nineteenth century En-
gland. But Gaskell’s strategy of relying on the individual Christian impulse to
ameliorate the living conditions of the poor differs significantly from Chadwick’s
idea that only national mechanisms can solve their problems. Gaskell’s emphasis
on the individual addresses distinctions in the assignation of power by the middle
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 41

class at a time when it was solidifying its own enfranchisement and defining itself
in relation to national bureaucratic structures. In the texts by Gaskell and Chad-
wick, the status of the working-class corpse and the representation of peoples’ re-
actions to it form different and conflicting strategies for middle-class survival and
power over the working class. In A Supplementary Report, Chadwick, by depicting
the working-class corpse as an agent of contagious disease and a lag on economic
productivity, implies a need for separating, confining, and ultimately neutralizing
its threat to survivors through sanitary measures. Such a construct defines the
middle class as survivors—as opposed to the sick and dead poor—and justifies state
apparatuses to police the working-class corpse and the family and community
to which it belonged. The state evacuates the meaning of death and displaces the
function of family and community by the efficient removal of the corpse from
the home by an officer of the state and by the replacement of communal rituals
with standardized procedures for burial. Both the corpse and the survivors in the
working-class community become nuisances to be contained and controlled by
centralized measures that limited what the working-class people could do for
themselves. In effect, Chadwick limits their power of association and seeks to de-
politicize, even as he secularizes their activity by removing any possibility for re-
flection on the causes of death among the poor because he believed that the social
order depended upon what Herbert Marcuse has described as the working class’s
“unfreedom, toil, hard work and resignation in the face of death.”12 To secure
this social stability, then, only the middle class had the power to assign meaning
to the working-class experience of death. The effect of Chadwick’s strategy, I be-
lieve, was to deny the existence of unique local communities and to define people
according to their labor functions.
Gaskell, while very much concerned with the same social conditions that
preoccupied Chadwick, considers the working-class corpse an opportunity for the
masters to understand the motivations of men. The corpse becomes an occasion to
fathom the causes of death among the poor, to seek remedies for their cure, and to
affirm local kinship networks and communities as entities that negotiate class col-
laboration. Thus the corpse draws a community of mourners from all ranks and
provides an instance in which individuals may be transformed to act in the best in-
terests of society. Gaskell neutralizes the threat of the working-class death by argu-
ing for its transformative potential to improve life for everyone. Individual contact
with death engenders an understanding of the human condition that transcends
class boundaries and provokes action to improve that human condition so threat-
ened by England’s industrialization. Only by standing in the presence of working-
class death, represented by the corpse and the activities of the mourners, will the
middle class be able to protect its interests through the collaboration—not conflict—
with the working class. But Gaskell’s emphasis on the individual’s ethical behavior
also depoliticizes—as did Chadwick’s—the working class by qualifying or removing
the possibility for collective political or economic associations that might emerge
as a result of death or reflection on the particular causes of death.
42 Literary Remains

These two different and conflicting approaches to the problem of death and
burial turn out to be a problem about the poor, how the middle class will relate to
them, and how they will be allowed to relate to themselves. From Chadwick’s per-
spective, given the enormous scale of the public health problem—which, he claims,
the working-class corpse embodies—individual efforts could never be enough; only
centralized measures could offer viable solutions to burial problems. From
Gaskell’s point of view, since the state can only be counted on to protect laissez-
faire liberalism, the middle-class individual must attend to the needs of society. It
is the middle-class individual, especially the individual female, who must not only
sustain a balance of interests between the two classes but render the economy more
productive. This critical dynamic, evident in both Mary Barton and North and South,
challenges predominant notions that assert the comprehensive hegemony of the
middle class over the working classes. What Gaskell achieves in her representations
of death and burial is a striking counterview that suggests that working-class com-
munal rituals and practices must necessarily shape middle-class subjectivity to solve
the knotty problem of England’s national economic health. As we shall discover in
the discussion of Mary Barton that follows, for this influence to take shape, the mid-
dle class must begin to see the poor and working classes with new eyes, ones that
perceive people in terms of their humanity, their joys and suffering, and not as
immoral, diseased others who undermine Victorian society.

II
By portraying the working-class funeral as a positive site for community in Mary
Barton, Gaskell potentially undermines Chadwick’s ready associations of working-
class death with filth and immorality. He would, for example, view the Davenport
household as demoralizing, saturated as it is with filth and fever, and overcrowded
as it is with children and neighbors. To support this perspective, he would employ
statistics to intensify anxieties about overpopulation of the living and among the
dead, thereby implying a need for national structures to control the surging num-
bers of each. Since a statistical approach allows for few differences among the peo-
ple it describes, what is true for the population in London is assumed to be true
also for the rest of England. Chadwick’s statistics, in other words, elide differences
in order to pave the way for national apparatuses to monitor all aspects of death.
Gaskell implicitly challenges Chadwick’s position through her representations
of the Davenports, Alice Wilson, and Job Legh. First, she claims that the impotent,
so often labeled as disconnected wanderers in mid-Victorian society, do in fact be-
long to families and communities, who would feel their deaths deeply. “[T]he aged,
the feeble, the children, when they die, are hardly noted by the world; and yet
to many hearts, their deaths make a blank which long years will never fill up”
(MB, 157, emphasis added). To make her point, Gaskell transforms the space of
the statistical table, a site where the marginalized “counted” in one sense, into a
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 43

psychological and spiritual blankness among the survivors who knew them, hence,
they “count” in another sense. Second, she describes the Davenport situation as
one that produces solidarity among the working-class community, namely, John
Barton, Mr. Wilson, and Mary. There is indeed another side to Chadwick’s pic-
ture. Both Wilson, who is unemployed, and Barton, who works short hours but
was extremely morose “and soured toward mankind as a body,” come to the aid
of the Davenports. Mr. Davenport, desperately ill from the fever, had been out of
work, and the family suffered from malnutrition. Barton offers what little food he
has from home and then pawns his better coat and a silk handkerchief in order to
buy food and coal and candles for the family. He also secures medicine from the
druggist. Wilson, who “longed to be once more in work so that he might help in
some of these material ways,” gave “heart-service and love-works” to the Daven-
ports (MB, 99). Wilson also visits Mr. Carson at his home to request an infirmary
order for Davenport. While Barton and Wilson are attending to these needs of the
family, Mary consoles Mrs. Davenport, despite her self-consciousness about how to
offer sympathy, and she remakes her own mourning dress to fit the widow, thereby
allowing her to appear at the funeral with a modicum of dignity. Drawn away from
their own selfish thoughts, all three characters appear to be better human beings
because of the assistance they give to the Davenports. Their close encounter with
the pollution of death has evoked compassion rather than exposing them to
depravity and contagion, as Chadwick so often suggests.
Gaskell’s depictions of the Davenports allow amply for differences within
the working-class community, which she utilizes as a central criterion by which
to evaluate a group’s solidarity. As Barton and Wilson wind their way to the Dav-
enport cellar, they pick their way around open sewers and stagnant pools. The
foul neighborhood, like the dank, tomblike cellar inhabited by the Davenports,
is foreign territory to Wilson and Barton. In fact, the smell in the cellar was “so
foetid as almost to knock the two men down” (MB, 98). As their eyes grow ac-
customed to the thick darkness of the place, they spy three or four children
“rolling on the damp, nay wet, brick floor, through which the stagnant, filthy
moisture of the street oozed up; the fire-place was empty and black; the wife sat
on her husband’s chair, and cried in the dank loneliness” (MB, 98). At first
glance, it might appear that Gaskell falls into the predictable trap of viewing the
most desperately poor as animals emerging from primitive slime within the hovel
they call a home. The encounter, however, bespeaks compassion. The descrip-
tion denies Chadwick’s forceful assertions about the demoralizing effects of filth
by having the scene give rise to immediate charity and understanding in Barton
and Wilson and to a recognition by the narrator that even though desperate
poverty reduces people to animals and nearly buries them alive, they remain
deeply human: “[I]t does not take much to reduce . . . [the poor] to worn, listless
diseased creatures, who thenceforward crawl through life with moody hearts and
pain-stricken bodies” (MB, 157).
44 Literary Remains

If Gaskell’s description of the Davenports rejects the material considera-

tions of poverty and death presented by Edwin Chadwick and John Claudius
Loudon and emphasizes the perseverance of the working-class community and
its positive response to death, then it is not just by strength in numbers but by
the generous activities of individuals such as Alice Wilson and Job Legh, who
sustain rural working-class values under siege in an economically depressed
urban environment. Gaskell’s characterization of Alice stresses her involvement
with aspects of death specifically as a means to highlighting her generosity, which
always promotes a sense of community among members of the working class,
and of showing her capacity to adapt successfully to the city. Cherishing the plea-
sure of helping others, Alice exhibits “invaluable qualities as a sick nurse,” gath-
ering wild herbs for drinks and medicine for her neighbors (MB, 51). When the
Wilson twins become ill, Alice brings her unique knowledge of the dynamics of
death to bear on the situation. Aware that the mother continued to “wish” them
alive, Alice explains to Mary:

“Ay; donno ye know what wishing means? There’s none can die in the
arms of those who are wishing them sore to stay on earth. The soul
o’them as holds them won’t let the dying soul go free; so it has a hard
struggle for the quiet of death. We mun get him away fra’ his mother,
or he’ll have a hard death, poor lile fellow.” (MB, 116)13

A moment later, Jane Wilson relinquishes the child to Alice and “[n]ature’s strug-
gles were soon exhausted, and he breathed his little life away in peace” (MB, 117).
Relying on her religious faith to supply comfort in the vicissitudes and pain in
life, Alice believes that the “Lord sends what he sees fit” (MB, 69). Therefore, she
must leave her “‘days in His hands’” (MB, 118).
Such a belief creates community, because Alice keeps herself available to help
others, such as the Wilson twins and their parents. Her faith in God supports her
ability to deal with the unexpected circumstances in her life. When her own
mother died, as she recalls to Mary and Margaret with more than a hint of nos-
talgia for her pastoral homeland, her faith enabled her to endure the suffering of
being forced to miss her mother’s funeral and of having to grieve quietly at night,
since her “‘missis was terrible strict’” (MB, 69). Even her own death, which draws
Mary to her bedside, just as Alice had gone to the deathbed of so many others in
the community, is marked by a sense of peace, accomplishment, and the accom-
paniment of many departed spirits who owe their own spiritual existence to her:
“The long dead were with her, fresh and blooming as in those bygone days. And
death came to her as a welcome blessing, like the evening comes to the weary
child. Her work here was finished, and faithfully done” (MB, 405).
While Alice Wilson’s activities characterize the working-class domestic
sphere, Job Legh acts in the political sphere to correct the corrupting influence
of economic depression on working-class responses to death, as in the case of
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 45

John Barton. To counteract Barton’s bitterness about Parliament’s rejection of

the Chartist Petition and the cruel death of his son, Tom, from starvation, Job
tells the story of his daughter and her husband (his granddaughter Margaret’s
parents), their deaths and burial in London, his rescue of granddaughter Mar-
garet, and his long trip with the baby back to Manchester together. To emphasize
again the importance of burial and its relation to the community, Gaskell makes
a point to convey the details of interment:

Well, we buried Margaret and her husband in a big crowded, lonely

churchyard in London. I were loath to leave them there, as I thought,
when they rose again, they’d feel so strange at first away fra Manchester,
and all old friends; but it couldna be helped. Well, God watches o’er
their grave there as well as here. That funeral cost a mint o’ money, but
Jennings and I wished to do th’ thing decent. (MB, 147)

In this case, as in the case of Alice Wilson’s death, community in heaven is

linked to community on earth through quite individualized presences, justify-
ing the Unitarian commitment to ameliorate social evil and arguing for the need
for the middle class to incorporate concepts of community into its considera-
tions of political economy.
Job’s story, so full of abiding family love and the quiet comfort it provides
people, acts as a counterpoint to John’s narrative about his trade union activity
in London and the abandonment of family and home that it implies. John has
just returned from helping his Chartist friends deliver the Petition to Parlia-
ment. The government’s rejection of the Petition is described in apocalyptic lan-
guage: Parliament refused to listen to their “untutored words” concerning their
distress, “which was riding, like the Conqueror on his Pale Horse, among the
people” (MB, 141).14 This hell on earth, portrayed as such by Gaskell in contrast
to the diffidence of the government, is intensified grotesquely by the corrupt use
of funeral plumes that upper-class women rent from undertakers to visit the
queen: “Well, them undertaker folk are driving a pretty trade in London. Well-
nigh every lady we saw in a carriage had hired one o’ them plumes for the day,
and had it niddle noddling on her head” (MB, 143).
Gaskell uses this image of death to unite the crowd and the bourgeoisie in
a scene suggesting ripeness for a revolution. The crowd, standing in the presence
of the funeral plumes, is reminded that it has literally been subjected to death
and disempowered by an aristocracy more interested in a life of privilege than
in the lives of the poor. The London ladies, for their part, also are represented as
subjected to death—by wearing the plumes. Driving through London crowned
with the symbolic plumes, the upper classes—with their ignorance, passivity, and
devotion to aristocratic values—render literal the threat in Revelation to “kill by
plague or famine.” Indeed, in the 1840s the government was particularly inept at
forestalling the spread of disease, cholera in particular. Moreover, the economic
46 Literary Remains

distress of the “hungry forties” left the poor without jobs and therefore unable to
feed themselves and their families. The procession, then, interrupts what has be-
come the life-and-death business of the Chartists, who are made to wait while the
line of carriages, decorated with accoutrements symbolically associated with
death, proceeds to the queen’s reception.
In this scene and elsewhere, corrupt rituals symbolically or actually associ-
ated with death are symptomatic of the middle-class and upper-class indifference
toward the material and physical suffering of the working class and also of their
growing mystification and distancing of death in their own lives. The upper
classes have turned these rituals into signs of privilege and exclusivity, making
a mockery of death’s power to create community. For the Ogdens and the
Carsons—estranged from feeling, shunning contact with the physical reality of
death by the commodified pomp of the funeral, exploiting the body to revenge-
ful purpose, and especially cut off from supportive communities—death is not a
transformative and potentially socially healing experience. We recognize in
Gaskell’s satiric depictions of middle-class funeral practices that the Victorian
“celebration” of death had more to do with conspicuous consumption, mone-
tary value, and status than simply providing a respectable funeral. In this denial
of death, the body, rather than attracting a community of mourners from across
the ranks, repelled middle-class survivors, compelled them to hire intermediat-
ing undertakers, and moved them to celebrate their financial, not their commu-
nal, ability to honor the dead in an acceptable way.15
This corruption of rituals into commodities is contingent upon a different
concept of the self from that implied in Gaskell’s working-class funerals. Ac-
cording to the middle-class concept, a sense of personal individuality, as distinct
from community, is affirmed in survivors. According to the concept implicit in
working-class funerals and burial practices, the community unites to appreciate
the individuality of the dead person while also renegotiating among themselves
life without this person. Moreover, the middle class resorts to rituals that seem
to deny mortality by coming together not so much to honor the dead or to re-
configure their own relationships with one another as to make material declara-
tions about themselves and their own individual capacity to survive.
Both the London ladies on their way to the queen’s reception and the
Ogdens deny the literal physical presence of the corpse as transformative in favor
of the ostentatious display of funeral appurtenances to reinforce class hierarchies.
In both situations, pomp is substituted for feeling, which indicates the further iso-
lation of the classes and the breakdown of the family. As Margaret Legh and Mary
Barton sew mourning clothes for the Ogden women, they talk about the circum-
stances of Mr. Ogden’s death and the preparations for his funeral. An extraordi-
nary contrast of fine cloth and little money marks this episode in the novel.
Because of the emphasis on appearances, the Ogden family desires to put on an
affair that resembles a wedding rather than a funeral. Mrs. Ogden has lost her will
to resist such temptations, and what grieving occurs comes from her attempts to
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 47

make up for lost times. The three Ogden girls, who are “very particular” (MB, 82),
cannot take the time to make their own dresses because they are so busy prepar-
ing the elaborate funeral for a father and a husband who drank himself to death.
The undertaker, moreover, simply takes advantage of Mrs. Ogden’s gullibility,
which has been well established in the scene: “‘[T]h’ undertakers urge her on you
see, and tell her this thing’s usual, and that thing’s only a common mark of re-
spect, and that every body has t’other thing, till the poor woman has no will o’ her
own’” (MB, 83). The funeral as a commodity replaces what does not happen in
life, namely, a strong middle-class family and the construction of a lasting female
identity in Mrs. Ogden, who then could resist the lure of consumer society. Even
the two younger Misses Ogden suggest that they value commodities over human
beings. Because Margaret’s work on their mourning was interrupted by the Car-
son mill fire, they “were in such grief [at not having proper clothes] for the loss of
their excellent father, that they were unable to appear before the little circle of
sympathizing friends gathered together to comfort the widow, and see the funeral
set off” (MB, 94).
Gaskell’s representation of the Ogden funeral preparations effects a social
commentary on how the middle class determines the market and therefore the re-
quirements for labor by the working class. Margaret and Mary are both able to
earn money from sewing mourning, although Margaret’s excessive workload
causes her blindness. Even so, Margaret admits that mourning does do good,
“‘though not as much as it costs,’” and Gaskell critiques the middle-class inability
to resist consumer capitalism and its decided incapacity to reflect upon the mean-
ing of death in terms more spiritual than economic (MB, 84). What is particularly
wasteful is the missed opportunity to discover the good buried in every sorrow.
Old Alice Wilson provides a corrective to the indolent Ogdens. At the conclusion
of Mary’s and Margaret’s conversation about the Ogdens, when Mary objects, “‘I
don’t think everyone would grieve a that way,’” as do the Ogden girls, preoccu-
pied with their finery—“‘Alice wouldn’t, for example—Margaret appeals to Alice’s
generous wisdom: “‘[S]he would say it were sent, and fall to trying to find out
what good it were to do. Every sorrow in her mind is sent for good’” (MB, 84).
The ostentatious expenditures of the Ogden funeral are absent in the Car-
sons’ response to young Harry’s death. Nonetheless, the Carsons use Harry’s
death not as an opportunity to honor him nor as a time to renegotiate relation-
ships within the family but as a means to express their power in the community.
In their case, in the place of commodities Gaskell has substituted revenge to in-
dicate a complete absence of the relationships that close proximity to the body
should invite. Even though the Carsons have the opportunity to relate to one an-
other and to the working class, they cannot—not only because of the violent na-
ture of the crime, but because of Mr. Carson’s desire for consuming revenge.
A paucity of relationships both within the Carson family and across class
boundaries undermines social and economic progress. Although Gaskell seems
to exaggerate the situation to show that the Carsons have lost touch with their
48 Literary Remains

working-class roots—for both Mr. and Mrs. Carson were members of the working
class before marriage, and success in business made them members of the mid-
dle class—she means to shock her middle-class readers into realizing their des-
perate state if they continue to neglect relationships with the working class. The
Carsons live in a state of mental and physical idleness. In Chapter 18, where we
read of Harry’s murder and its effect on the Carson family, we enter a world full
of torpor: Mr. Carson sleeps in his own very comfortable chair in the dining
room; the three girls in the living room fight their own sleepiness and wonder
what to do with themselves until tea time; and Mrs. Carson indulges in “the lux-
ury of a head-ache” (MB, 254). The family members are roused by the news of
Harry’s death and come out of their separate rooms only to respond with ex-
tremity, to the point of psychological breakdown and the reactionary use of
Harry’s corpse as currency for revenge. According to this economy, Harry cannot
be buried until his murderer has been tried and put to death. In fact, the family
never buries Harry during the narrative course of this novel. Thus the vindictive
cycle remains ultimately incomplete, and the seemingly unburied corpse is a re-
minder that, from Gaskell’s viewpoint, the middle-class response to death desta-
bilizes society because it does not respect a continuity between death and life.
Harry’s death, caused by class conflicts, affects everyone, from John Barton
to Mr. Carson. Gaskell suggests that responses to death must be changed if there
is to be any improvement in class relations, and so she neutralizes John Barton’s
resentment and rebukes Carson for his revenge: “Are we worshippers of Christ?
or of Alecto [one of the Furies who pursues Orestes in the Eumenides]. Oh!
Orestes! you would have made a very tolerable Christian of the nineteenth cen-
tury!” (MB, 266). Gaskell chooses the Christian model as the solution to the Car-
sons’ inability to accept Harry’s death. For Gaskell, it is the work of individuals
to rectify broken relationships.
To underscore her belief in the power of personal relationships, Gaskell
meant her middle-class readers to be shocked by Harry’s violent death at the
hands of a working-class operative.16 First, she intends to horrify by the graphic
description of his wound and the implication that the murder was cold and cal-
culating: the policeman “lifted up some of the thick chestnut curls, and showed
a blue spot (you could hardly call it a hole, the flesh had closed so much over
it) in the left temple. A deadly aim! And yet it was so dark a night!” (MB, 261).
Not only would her middle-class readers be horrified because of her detailed ac-
count of the body and by the family’s immediate reaction to it, but, as implied in
W. R. Greg’s review of the novel, they would be incensed by members of the
working class assuming that the masters had any responsibility for them and
seeking retribution if that responsibility remained unfulfilled. Second, she also
meant to shock her readers with the Carson family’s vindictive response to
death. Finally, through her depictions of the Carson family as isolated from one
another and from the larger community, Gaskell reveals that an overly private
domestic sphere corrupts moral virtue, or at least inscribes complacency. She
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 49

argues, instead, for a broader conception of domesticity, one that includes both
familial and communal networks.

III
While Gaskell makes serious attempts to represent precisely the despair and suf-
fering as well as the close-knit community life shared by working-class people,
there are limits to her efforts to praise working-class ways of dealing with death.
Just as she must convert Mr. Carson’s revenge to sympathy for the working class,
she needs to repudiate John Barton’s actions—resentment, revenge, and murder—
to create an avenue of understanding between the classes. By doing so, however,
Gaskell, in a move that replicates her earlier novel Ruth (1853), in which the hero-
ine must eventually die for her offense, ultimately relegates both Barton and
Esther, Mrs. Barton’s sister, and Mary’s aunt, who is forced into prostitution by
poverty, to lasting silence. Still, Gaskell is careful to expose an overwhelming fact:
it is the pressure of material and economic depression more than dispositions
intrinsic to the working class that provokes violent revenge in Barton and forces
Esther to turn to prostitution.
The Barton home, which was a model for a domestic and communal world,
comes to reflect, ultimately, John Barton’s impoverished moral world. This trans-
formation comes about as a result not only of this wife’s death and economic de-
pression but also of his moral reaction to these disasters—his impulse to evaluate
economic conditions in terms of class and his refusal to accept working-class
death as “natural.”17 Immediately after a neighborhood tea party, just one day
later, Mrs. Barton dies, and the consolation of home turns to desolation. We
enter death’s room and notice the details forced upon him. Recognizing “that
[t]he look of death was too clear upon her face,” John retreats downstairs, where
he hears “the stiff, unseasoned drawer, in which his wife kept her clothes, pulled
open” by a neighbor. His hands grope with the tea dishes left from the day be-
fore, and he is crushingly reminded that the comfort of domestic ritual has been
broken. The warmth of the tea party in Chapter 1 has given way to a hollow
chaos: “He saw the neighbor come down, and blunder about in search of soap
and water. He knew well what she wanted, and why she wanted them, but he did
not speak, nor offer to help” (MB, 56).
This death transforms John, because “[o]ne of the good influences over . . .
[his] life had departed that night. One of the ties which bound him down to the
gentle humanities of earth was loosened, and henceforward the neighbours all
remarked he was a changed man” (MB, 58). The possessions so lovingly de-
scribed, right down to the blankets from the beds, are sold to provide food for
him and Mary and coal for the fire. The possessions, rich in their connotations
concerning family rituals and relationships, and intimately connected to the
woman who had ordered Barton’s home and thus counteracted the precarious-
ness of working-class life, turn to commodities in Mrs. Barton’s absence. She had
50 Literary Remains

struggled to control her family’s destiny through material conditions within her
reach. Without her and this domestic ordering that held at bay the vicissitudes
of life, Barton loses control over his own life. In this dank place, he takes opium,
turns to violence against Mary, and attends trade-union meetings.
In this scene describing the changing appearance of the Barton home, Gaskell
directly challenges Chadwick’s representations and classifications of the working
class engaged in “the last attentions to the dead” (MB, 57). Refusing to classify
John Barton’s response to his wife’s death as part of a statistical category that equal-
izes all members of the working class and stresses the similarities in their responses
to death rather than the distinctions among them, Gaskell writes with idiosyncratic
precision. Chadwick, in his discussions of death in the working class, can perceive
people only in terms of their class identity—that is, in terms of their occupations as
laborers. Furthermore, his burial reform discourse seeks to protect those workers
for the labor market. Gaskell, in comparison, is careful to note in this scene the
specific influence Mrs. Barton had on the Barton family. She had the capacity to
make the home the center of life for the worker Barton. When Mrs. Barton dies,
a formative influence in Barton’s life has been severed and, therefore, his “charac-
ter” is vulnerable to political rather than domestic pressures.
Domesticity is meant to tame violent workers and link the individual
worker to his or her family rather than to political trade-union associations. In
Barton’s case, because control over the domestic environment has been broken
and Mary is too young to exert influence over her father, his allegiance shifts
from the family to the Chartist cause. Gaskell seems to suggest that while death,
economic depression, and Mary’s youth contribute to Barton’s moral decline, he
nonetheless bears responsibility for at least his subsequent actions and, possibly,
because of his trade-union activities, for the decay of the home too.
Gaskell deems Barton’s class consciousness a function of fractured domestic-
ity and of an inability to view working-class death as “natural,” as something to be
expected, given the living conditions of the poor. As he passes well-lit shops on his
way to the druggist to buy medicine for Davenport, Gaskell interjects: “Barton’s
was an errand of mercy; but the thoughts of his heart were touched by sin, by
bitter hatred of the happy, whom he, for the time, confounded with the selfish”
(MB, 102). Gaskell seeks to explain workers’ resentment through Barton’s inabil-
ity to read correctly the signs of the times. He makes the mistake of confusing “the
happy,” whose well-being is self-contained, and “the selfish,” whose advantage in
life has been at the expense of others, namely, the working class. Through Barton,
Gaskell argues that the characterization by the working class of public relationships
as antagonistic, in which mill owners’ property is regarded as derived from labor-
ers’ self-sacrifice, often emerges from quite precise personal and individual experi-
ences with death. Thus Barton wonders about the justice of the masters’ receiving
interest on their capital while the men, whose capital is labor, receive none.
“‘They’n screwed us down to th’ lowest peg, in order to make their great big for-
tunes, and build their great big houses, and we, why we’re just clemming, many
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 51

and many of us. Can you say there’s nought wrong in this?’” (MB, 104). Wilson
offers another perspective, pointing out that Carson, because of the mill fire,
would have to retrench and be careful of expenditure during these bad times. “‘So
you see th’ masters suffer too’” (MB, 105). In the end, however, it is the individual
experience of death that communicates the most pathos and sparks Barton’s
shrewd sense about class difference: “‘Han they ever seen a child o’their’n die for
want o’ food?’” (MB, 105). Yet Gaskell calls into question the effectiveness of
thinking about death in terms of class antagonism, preferring instead to articulate
the effects of death in terms of kinship communities, domesticity, and gender.
Not surprisingly, then, given Gaskell’s lack of sympathy with Barton’s class-
conscious way of thinking about death, the conversation among the trade-union
men foreshadows catastrophic death: the murder of Harry Carson and Barton’s
own grief-stricken end. So too does the description of Esther in Chapter 10.
Emerging from a meeting, John meets Esther, whose face grew “deadly pale
around the vivid circle of paint,” and who prophesies the possible death of Mary,
if seduced by Harry and forced into the streets (MB, 169). John Barton and Es-
ther (who was forced into prostitution to feed her own daughter) embody the
consequences of perceiving society and people in economic terms alone. Such an
emphasis, Gaskell suggests in her novel, eventually leads to the disintegration of
the family and kinship community.
At the very end of the novel, however, Gaskell cannot suppress her middle-
class and Unitarian views of certain kinds of working-class action and behavior as
a threat to the dominant middle-class culture. In the reconciliation scene between
John Barton and Mr. Carson, Barton relinquishes the language of power and re-
venge in favor of Christian discourse, while Carson still retains power over work-
ing-class men. In the description of John’s and Esther’s burial, we learn that
Esther failed to keep her covenant to middle-class notions of domesticity and fam-
ily life, and that John transgressed his duty to keep the peace among the workers
in their relations to the masters. Failure to keep the implicit covenant with the
middle class by breaking the rules of middle-class righteousness results in death
and burial in an unmarked grave without, necessarily, the promise of redemption.
Gaskell comments on the shared grave of Esther and John, that “they lie
without name, or initial, or date. Only this verse is inscribed upon the stone
which covers the remains of these two wanderers. Psalm ciii. v. 9—‘For He will
not always chide, neither will he keep his anger for ever’” (MB, 465). Gaskell’s
middle-class readers, well accustomed to the burial reform debate, would have
understood the judgment at work in the scene. Esther, who fell into prostitution
early in the novel, returns home—to the Barton home and Mary’s bed, which had
been her own—to die in a place of innocence and purity. John Barton dies aware
of his dangerously aberrant transgressions, his having entered the violent world
of social agitators. Yet despite their redeemed condition at death, both persons
are denied histories, effaced, buried in an unmarked grave without notice of
names or dates. Gaskell labels them “wanderers” because they deviated from the
52 Literary Remains

middle-class prescriptions for working-class men and women that were so much
debated at mid-century. If they did not live by the rules, then they must die by
them—repentant and buried in a single grave with no named plot. The grave in-
dicates that these people existed outside of time and history. Their interment is
marked only by a verse from Psalm 103, which expresses thanksgiving for recov-
ery from sickness. Esther and John, then, are recognized in death as having been
diseased in life, and the particular verse quoted by Gaskell recognizes God’s abid-
ing anger with them that will subside only in the far-distant future—at the Second
Coming, one assumes. The difficulty here is that because of the geographic po-
sition of the unmarked grave in the churchyard or cemetery, and because of the
deliberate omission of a funeral ritual for murderers and prostitutes, Esther and
John will lie in greater need of redemption.18 While Gaskell’s Unitarian beliefs
held that no one is punished forever in the afterlife, unlike the Anglican doc-
trine that allowed for eternal punishment in hell, her depiction of the material
conditions of John’s and Esther’s burial betrays an adversarial judgment of them.
On Carson’s part, his desire to change the nature of class relations some-
how seems halfhearted. Job Legh is the one who offers the clearest articulation
of the problem and what needs to be done about it, but Carson, still skeptical
about Jem’s role in the murder of his son, leaves Jem’s and Job’s company “with-
out a word” (MB, 459). We never hear again from Carson directly, learning only
through the narrator that Carson has been “taught by suffering” to acknowledge
the power of Christian ethics to regulate relations between the classes. Finally,
we learn of John’s burial with Esther in a grave with no name, and we under-
stand that, like Chadwick, Gaskell reveals her working notions of political econ-
omy and apportionment of justice most clearly in the representation of burial.
Ultimately, Esther and John, who deviate from middle-class expectations for the
working class, and who have spent themselves in courageous acts to engender
reconciliation, are fated to be forgotten, placed in a Unitarian purgatory—free
perhaps from eternal punishment but not totally forgiven by the middle class.
For mutual reconciliation to occur between Barton and Carson, and for
Gaskell to link middle-class with working-class interests, the men must share some
common characteristics: Mr. Carson was originally a member of the working class
himself—“[H]e had been accustomed to poverty,” if “not the grinding squalid mis-
ery he had remarked in every part of John Barton’s house” (MB, 439)—although
he has left behind his origins, having followed his own advice of self-help and im-
proved his lot in life. Both men too have forgotten how to read the Bible because
of the class warfare that cost them their sons. Barton once thought that the Bible
taught him to love the master, but that was before Tom starved to death; Carson,
years earlier, had used the Gospel as a task book in learning to read, but he had
failed “to comprehend the Spirit that made the Life” (MB, 439).
Despite what is ascribed in common to the two men, it is Barton who, ac-
cording to Gaskell’s prejudice against violence, must realize the effect of his ha-
tred on Carson, must hear the depth of Carson’s suffering, and must relinquish
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 53

the feelings of revenge against the masters. Barton begins his reflection on his
sins in the language of political economy: “Rich and poor, masters and men,
were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart. . . . The mourner before
him was no longer the employer . . . , but a very poor, and desolate old man”
(MB, 435). The conceptual framework for antagonistic class relations is trans-
formed, as revealed in this language, into a Christian paradigm that emphasizes
Gospel values: “‘God be merciful to us sinners.—Forgive us our trespasses as we
forgive them that trespass against us’” (MB, 441).
No such transformation in Carson’s discourse occurs. At the end of the novel,
in his discussions with Jem and Job, Carson utilizes a language of political econ-
omy that sustains the gap between masters and men: “‘I fear, Legh, neither you nor
I have convinced each other, as to the power, or want of power in the masters, to
remedy the evils the men complain of’” (MB, 458). In the end, men remain men,
and masters retain their power over them. Nonetheless, while the men may be ed-
ucated (they are “not mere machines”), they remain inextricably bound to their
employers in a much more filial manner than before—bound not merely by money
bargains, or by Carlyle’s “cash-nexus,” to which Gaskell refers, but by “the ties of
respect and affection” (MB, 460). In this ideological move, Gaskell links Carson’s
interests to Barton’s working-class interests without sacrificing Carson’s power
invested in him by his being a mill owner and a member of the middle class.
By its representations of death and burial, Gaskell’s Mary Barton par-
ticipated in the mid-Victorian contest over how to deal with the corpse of a
working-class person and over the social implications of participating in the min-
istrations surrounding death. Gaskell initially links the experience of death to
poverty, but she does so in such a way as to sanction working-class family and
communal life and to suggest that, because they are fundamentally rooted in
local community, working-class responses to death can become paradigms for
constituting community across class lines. Untroubled by the specter of miasma,
Gaskell is able to represent death as an arbiter, one that potentially diminishes
the effects of class differences, neutralizes the threat of working-class aggression,
and begins a necessary process for individuation. This move necessitates that she
subvert discussions of class, of masters, and of men as faceless groups of people
whose identity is determined by their functions in the market economy. Further,
she must articulate the power struggle in terms of individual personalities, such
as John Barton and Mr. Carson.
Gaskell understood that the nature of the working class, and its social roles,
was dictated by the market economy at mid-century, and that poor persons were
likely to understand their experience through the lens of class; this understanding
of themselves led them to view social relations through the same lens. However,
when Gaskell works through the representations of death, she calls into question
the deployment of these terms, which she considers the basis for class antago-
nism. Instead, she elaborates on the domestic, familial, communal, and individ-
ual aspects of representing death, aspects that remained marginal but essential to
54 Literary Remains

representations in burial reform discourse. This shift of emphasis potentially

undermines the ideological work that Chadwick’s images were designed to per-
form and reveals an individualist strain of resistance to Chadwick’s centralization
and bureaucracy. Insisting that the hidden woes of Manchester “pass unregarded
by all but the sufferers” (MB, 38), and that they are therefore in need of articula-
tion, Gaskell diminished class distinctions that Chadwick invoked to moralize
and regulate class relations between them. The potential effect of Gaskell’s repre-
sentation was to call attention both to the impotency of “facts” to represent accu-
rately the condition of England and to the ineffectiveness of state apparatuses to
reconcile class differences. Instead, by reinstituting the value of death’s proximity
to life, which burial reform discourse tends to deny, Gaskell acclaims the positive
effects of working-class contact with death—as a model for collective and commu-
nal activities and, therefore, as a possible site for creating community across class
lines. From these representations of death, Gaskell concludes that the middle
class must incorporate into its considerations of political economy the central
strengths of working-class domesticity. Political economy must be made to recog-
nize kinship networks that extend beyond immediate families and class lines to
where each person in the community is crucial to meaningful social reform.
By the 1850s, however, the distinction between the public world of politics
and market activity and the private world of domestic activity, morality, and emo-
tion became ever more crucial in mid-Victorian England.19 But these divisions, as
we shall see in North and South, were by no means fixed, although increasingly they
were solidified in rules for social interaction. Over time, separation between the
public and the private widened, and it had become identified with gender. As
Davidoff and Hall argue, “A masculine penumbra surrounded that which was de-
fined as public while women were increasingly engulfed by the private realm,
bounded by physical, social and psychic partitions.”20 Men, because of their priv-
ileged status, could move easily between both realms; women, however, were
increasingly confined to the private.
But none of these divisions were so set as not to be open to contestation and
negotiation. In this mercurial space, Gaskell wrote North and South (1854–1855)
to suggest that feminine identity is as much determined by public political action
as by private, interior moral development. She strikes an essential balance be-
tween the two forces by focusing her attention on the responses and rituals sur-
rounding death, because it was a crucial site where women’s restriction to the
private could be affirmed. While large funerals were increasingly used to demon-
strate public status, records show that women had begun to stay away from fu-
neral and burial services because it was becoming unacceptable for daughters or
widows to display their grief in public. Instead, the more genteel woman moved
away from a potentially undifferentiated public gathered for a funeral and was
drawn toward a more private experience of emotion in her own home.21
However, Gaskell believed that women’s identity depends upon the rene-
gotiation of traditional concepts and exercises of authority, and that her capacity
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 55

for reflection should lead her to an ever-widening idea of her traffic in the world
beyond the front door of the home. For Margaret Hale to fulfill her obligations
to reform society, she must learn to appreciate the continuity between life and
death and reject certain religious and social structures that seek to confine
women to restricting domestic roles.

IV
In the first several chapters of the novel, narrow definitions of the home and Mar-
garet’s place in it begin to fall away for the heroine: “The one staid foundation of
her home, her idea of her beloved father, seemed reeling and rocking. What
could she say? What was to be done?” (NS, 34). Mr. Hale’s decision to leave the
Church forces her into action. She must make arrangements for the family’s
move to Milton, pack the furniture, and locate decent housing in their new city.
As the authority of the father breaks down in the face of his own uncertainty and
inability to live beyond his initial decision, Margaret faces the challenge of devel-
oping her own authority to act in the world. This empowerment depends upon
her relinquishing the sleepy life in London, rejecting Mr. Lennox, who, in Mar-
garet’s dream, falls from a tree to his death as he tries to reach for Margaret’s bon-
net (the symbol of a conventional life as a Victorian woman), and exercising her
capacity to read and interpret her new surroundings in Milton. Mr. Hale asks that
she think of his situation in terms of the early martyrs, “that the early martyrs suf-
fered for the truth” (NS, 35). The early martyrs crossed conventional boundaries,
walked into the desert alone there to shape prophetic roles for Christians in the
future. But, Gaskell suggests, Margaret must walk the same path. Gaskell deploys
the analogy with some precision here as she qualifies Mr. Hale’s theoretical self-
sacrifice. She too must step outside of the home and into the public arena,
though first she will need time and space to reflect on the world before her. This
move to contemplation, and the developing capacity to integrate risk in one’s life,
shapes the prophetic role women are to have in society.
A limited sense of continuity between mother and daughter determines the
prophetic role Gaskell envisions for women, because the strength of the heroine
is conditioned in large measure by her capacity to be influenced by her mother as
well as her ability to do what her mother could not do.22 Margaret must reject her
mother’s shallow attraction to the accoutrements of wealth and status in favor of
reflection and action in the world “outdoors,” in the world of Milton’s industrial
economy. Margaret’s behavior toward her dying mother must be considered in
broader terms than conventional domestic ones that posit the heroine as the pri-
mary caretaker and nurturer. Each contact with death propels Margaret into the
grimy world of Milton-Northern, where she begins to take notice of the loiterers
in the street, her first recognition that the economic depression affected not just
a faceless mass of people but individuals. Moreover, Gaskell defines a middle-class
woman’s domestic activities as work and equates that work to men’s work in the
56 Literary Remains

mill. Describing to her father her experience at Thornton’s party, Margaret

admits that she “‘felt like a great hypocrite to-night, sitting there in my white silk
gown, with my idle hands before me; when I remembered all the good, thorough,
house-work they had done today. They took me for a fine lady, I’m sure’”
(NS, 167). The experience with her dying mother forces Margaret to become “a
hand” herself as she must stand in the kitchen and do the ironing, and it provides
the opportunity for her to wake up to the working world of Milton and move out-
side of herself, taking notice of the consequences of economic depression.
But Gaskell qualifies this move by suggesting that a woman’s position in the
world also demands reflection upon its exigencies. Underwriting Gaskell’s vision
of a woman’s place in the world is her Unitarian belief that action in the world
is necessarily informed by Gospel values clarified by contemplation. Death pro-
vides occasions for this contemplation. In facing the deaths of her mother, her
working-class friend Bessy, her father, and finally her guardian, Margaret learns
what her mother could not learn—the need to adapt to constantly changing en-
vironments and, therefore, the need to enter into a dynamic tension between
prayer and action. In a thoughtful moment at the end of the novel, Margaret re-
alizes “she had learnt that not only to will, but also to pray was a necessary con-
dition of the truly heroic” (NS, 412). Gaskell argues that women bring particular
strength and stability to a society under stress at mid-century because their con-
tribution consists of the power to discern the proper course of action amid deep
change and to act from the strength of that discernment, not by rigid adherence
to inflexible, gendered cultural precepts. As Miss Pole from Cranford wryly ob-
serves, “As most ladies of good family in Cranford were elderly spinsters, or wid-
ows without children, if we do not learn to relax a little, and become less
exclusive by-and-by we should have no society at all.”23
This dynamic between action and reflection, as Gaskell articulates it first in
her description of Mrs. Hale’s funeral and Margaret’s participation in it, also
shares the terms but revises the conclusions of Chadwick’s attempts to articulate
relations of gender, class, and power over the space of the grave. First, Margaret
insists, over her father’s objections, that she attend the funeral with him because
his closest friend, Mr. Bell, could not come. To her father’s objection that women
do not generally go to funerals, Margaret responds: “‘No: because they can’t con-
trol themselves. Women of our class don’t go, because they have no power over
their emotions, and yet are ashamed of showing them. Poor women go, and don’t
care if they are seen overwhelmed with grief’” (NS, 266–67). This quotation sug-
gests that emotionality is coded both as lower class and female. That is, self-
control is valued especially by middle-class men and is a power attributed both by
and to them in a greater degree than to working-class men or women of any class.
Margaret marks her desire to embrace the value of self-control for herself, thus
identifying herself with the middle classes and with masculine power. In contrast,
Mr. Hale cannot control his emotions in this situation, thus femininizing himself,
but not presumably calling his class location into question.
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 57

Gaskell is careful to portray the positive effects of a middle-class woman’s entry

into the public territory of Mrs. Hale’s burial site. Also attending the funeral is
Nicholas Higgins, the working-class man whose daughter Margaret has befriended.

Margaret’s fortitude nearly gave way as Dixon, with a slight motion of

her hand, directed her notice to Nicholas Higgins and his daughter,
standing a little aloof, but deeply attentive to the ceremonial. Nicholas
wore his usual fustian clothes, but had a bit of black stuff sewn round
his hat—a mark of mourning which he had never shown to his daugh-
ter Bessy’s memory. (NS, 269)

Higgins’s “mark of mourning,” which is a decidedly middle-class practice at this

point in nineteenth-century England, differentiates him from the working class
and suggests his adoption of middle-class values and sensibility. The gesture in-
dicates Margaret’s capacity to influence members of the working class as she
leaves her home to seek contact with them.
Gaskell fashions a middle-class woman able eventually to influence the local
economy through her marriage to the industrialist Thornton, but only after she
has developed her courage through exposure to the dying. Margaret’s experience
of caring for the dying Bessy and her dying mother prepares her to intervene in
the strike at Thornton’s mill, Marlborough. Margaret shuttles between her aris-
tocratic mother and Bessy, who represents a deferential order in which the work-
ing classes pay tribute to the upper classes in return for personal care and
benevolence. But Margaret becomes increasingly aware of a new industrial order
represented by the strike. Neither her mother’s retreat to an older aristocratic
past nor Bessy’s deference can meet the demands of the present industrial crisis.
The unbending attitudes of masters like Thornton are equally ineffective. In-
stead, Gaskell argues, a woman like Margaret must intervene in the cycle of vio-
lence between masters and men because she sees what Thornton cannot see, and
her mother and Bessy do not have the will to change: the face of Boucher “with
starving children at home . . . and enraged beyond measure at discovering that
Irish men were to be brought in to rob [his] little ones of bread” (NS, 177).
In the novel’s juxtaposition of Margaret with Bessy, Gaskell unsettles,
through the depiction of feminine influence and action, conventional redemp-
tive paradigms available to the poor, namely, apocalyptic solutions to specifically
temporal problems. Margaret’s zeal for reform provides a striking contrast to
Bessy, who has no strength or spirit for life because she cannot adjust to the de-
mands of the work situation. She tells Margaret that she “‘began to work in a
carding-room soon after, and the fluff got into [her] lungs and poisoned [her]’”
(NS, 102). Certainly I think Gaskell means to portray Bessy’s hardship in an ef-
fort to disclose which measures are necessary to improve working conditions, in
much the same way she did in Mary Barton. But here she also is interested in the
way Bessy’s piety—her emotional anticipation of relief in the afterlife—may keep
58 Literary Remains

her from struggling against these hardships. Bessy dies not only because she can-
not manage the work physically, but because she cannot understand the prob-
lems in the industrial economy or find their solutions in human terms.
Similarly, in Mary Barton, even though John understood the dynamic of market
capitalism and its oppressive effect on laborers, he could only see violence as the
solution to the problem. Not surprisingly, then, he too died, while Mr. Carson
lived to improve employment conditions for workers. In both instances, Gaskell
seeks to apply the spiritual benefits of contact with the dead, which the working
class had traditionally reaped, to the preoccupying problems of the middle-class
temporal and material world of industrial England.
North and South offers Margaret and Higgins as models who together form
the solution for a new industrial order. They also reject Bessy’s tendency to rely
upon religion to provide consolation in another world for the social problems of
this one. From their perspective, this kind of continuity between life and death
is excessive and ineffective. Bessy’s desire, which is characterized as weariness, is
to move to some place Edenic: “the land of Beulah”; the country with trees; the
south of England where there are no strikes. Bessy longs to die, especially at
times when her father speaks of the need to strike: “‘What he says at times make
me long more than ever, for I want to know so many things and am so tossed
about wi’ wonder’” (NS, 91). Nicholas resists Bessy’s apocalyptic solutions by ar-
guing that the answers to industrial problems are to be found in this world, not
the next. “‘Hoo’s so full of th’ life to come, hoo cannot think of th’ present’”
(NS, 132). Further, Higgins claims that Northerners, except Bessy, who longs to
retreat to the South to avoid the strike and have peace and quiet at any price,
have “too much blood” to stand the injustice imposed by the masters. To Mar-
garet’s assertion that Southerners have too much sense to strike, Higgins claims,
“‘They’ve too little spirit’” (NS, 133).
Margaret, on the other hand, responds to Bessy from a religious model that
emphasizes society’s improvement through practical human solutions. To
Bessy’s allusions to the Book of Revelation, Margaret replies: “‘Don’t dwell so
much on the prophecies, but read the clearer parts of the Bible’” (NS, 137). Re-
jecting Bessy’s philosophy of death as an escape, for she “shrank from death her-
self with all the clinging to life so natural to the young and healthy” (NS, 89),
Margaret presses her to dwell on aspects of life on this earth: “‘Don’t let us talk
of what fancies come into your head when you are feverish. I would rather hear
something about what you used to do when you were well’” (NS, 102). For Mar-
garet and Higgins, social evil, since humanly created, must be open to human
remedy through practical measures and the power of the Gospel to modify
behavior—which means that social evil must first of all be seen and assessed by a
middle-class woman.
Gaskell takes up the representation of death, where the rituals surrounding
it were being plotted and codified according to gender, to suggest that contact
with it strengthens a woman’s resolve to spur social reform. The effect of Mar-
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 59

garet’s experience with Bessy is a positive one, one I claim impels her to intervene
in the strike. She feels her intensified interest in the crowded narrow streets “by
the simple fact of her having learnt to care for a dweller in them” (NS, 99), and
she feels stronger for having visited Bessy, for having heard how much Bessy has
had to bear through the years. After Bessy dies, her corpse provides Margaret with
yet another opportunity to develop her courage: Mary Higgins, Bessy’s sister, asks
Margaret if she would like to view Bessy, a gesture of respect for the departed that
the Hale servant Dixon must interpret for Margaret. Initially, Margaret rejects the
idea but immediately changes her mind. “‘No . . . I will go’ . . . and for fear of her
own cowardice, she went away, in order to take from herself any chance of chang-
ing her determination” (NS, 217). Margaret’s initial fear of the corpse indicates
the middle-class preference for avoiding contact with the dead body and curtail-
ing social interactions in its presence. Her decision to offer this mark of respect af-
firms her other actions that will further the social union and rejuvenation that
Gaskell envisions for England. As Margaret’s courage to act in the social sphere
increases, other people’s willingness to relinquish their power to her also in-
creases. In anticipation of Nicholas’s adoption of a middle-class practice at Mrs.
Hale’s funeral, he acquiesces to Margaret’s power over him when she suggests that
he come to her house to visit with Mr. Hale and to keep him from drinking.
“Margaret felt that he acknowledged her power” (NS, 220). Bessy also acknowl-
edges Margaret’s power over her. As Dixon reports to Margaret about Bessy,
“‘It seems the young woman who died had a fancy for being buried in something
of yours’” (NS, 216).
Gaskell attempts to connect social power in women—or justify it—to the per-
sonal ties they establish through their treatment of others, a duty that emerges di-
rectly from the New Testament, as Bessy’s allusion to the Crucifixion of Christ
reveals. By asking for a bit of Margaret’s clothing, Bessy reveals how much Mar-
garet has earned her authority over Bessy, even to her grave. Despite Bessy’s be-
lief that “‘some’s pre-elected to sumptuous feasts, and purple and fine linen . . .
others toil and moil all their lives long’” (NS, 150), she protested to Margaret
that “‘if yo’ ask me to cool your tongue wi’ th’ tip of my finger, I’ll come across
the great gulf to yo’ just for th’ thought o’ what you’ve been to me here’”
(NS, 150). Bessy perceives Margaret as a savior and compels her to reach across
the class divide. But Gaskell alludes to this defining moment in the New Testa-
ment to suggest that a middle-class woman’s experience with the dying poor,
based as it is on personal relationship, not only earns their loyalty but creates in
such women the responsibility to act for reform.
Deeply ambivalent about violent trade-union activity and working-class dis-
missal of the self-help philosophy, Gaskell concludes that female authority is crit-
ical to resuscitating the self-help philosophy in the working-class home. The
Boucher suicide episode, which occurs after the strike scene, endorses Gaskell’s
belief in the necessary exercise of female authority. John Boucher commits sui-
cide by lying face down in a shallow, dye-filled stream after being unable to find
60 Literary Remains

work because of his violent participation in union activity. The chapter in which
we read of the body’s discovery is entitled “Union Not Always Strength” to sug-
gest Gaskell’s anxiety about groups of male laborers engaged in trade-union ac-
tivity as opposed to her support of local community. Higgins had just
complained to Margaret and her father that “‘we had public opinion on our side,
till he and his sort began rioting and breaking laws’” (NS, 293). By pointing out
that Boucher’s violent behavior stemmed from being forced into the union by
Higgins, “‘driving him into the union against his will—without his heart going
along with it. You’ve made him what he is!’” (NS, 294), Margaret questions the
coercive nature of union activity. In contrast, Gaskell suggests, individual mid-
dle-class influence breeds more responsible communal activity. Margaret’s regu-
lar visits to the Higgins’ home, where her influence has been appreciated by
Nicholas, Bessy, and Mary, foster Higgins’ sense of responsibility to the Boucher
family, whose dire circumstances motivate him to seek work. “‘I set him off o’ th’
road, and so I mun answer for him’” (NS, 305). Eventually, the evidence that he
believes in self-help persuades Margaret to use her influence to bring together
Thornton and Higgins.
But Margaret seems significantly unsuccessful with Mrs. Boucher, not only
because of the nature of Boucher’s union activity but because of Margaret’s nec-
essary rejection of those who do not subscribe to the self-help philosophy—
particularly as it applies in the working-class home—and the sense of reciprocity
that her understanding of personal obligation demands. Margaret describes the
Boucher household in middle-class stereotypic terms about the poor: the chil-
dren are “ill-ordered” and the house “looked as if [it] had been untouched for
days by any effort at cleanliness” (NS, 295). Even though Margaret had some ex-
perience with the dead and dying among the working class, here she seems par-
ticularly eager to escape from the house. When a neighbor woman arrives to
help with the arrangements for the funeral, Margaret feels great relief, thinking
“that it would be better, perhaps, to set an example of clearing the house, which
was filled with idle, if sympathetic, gazers” (NS, 297, emphasis added). Finally,
Mrs. Boucher’s reaction to her husband’s suicide proves unacceptable to Mar-
garet and Mr. Hale: “Still it was unsatisfactory to see how completely her
thoughts were turned upon herself and her own position, and this selfishness
extended even to her relations with her children, whom she considered as en-
cumbrances, even in the midst of her somewhat animal affection for them”
(NS, 300). Denied the luxury of considering her own desperate state as a result
of her husband’s shameful death, Mrs. Boucher resembles an animal barely de-
serving Margaret’s attention. Even as Mr. Hale tries to rouse Mrs. Boucher into
some sympathy for her husband and what he might have felt at the moment of
his death, Mrs. Boucher looked upon all—the masters, the union, the children—
as one great army of personal enemies, “‘whose fault it was that she was now a
helpless widow’” (NS, 301). Margaret, for her part, “had heard enough of this un-
reasonableness” (NS, 301).
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 61

In contrast to Gaskell’s description of the Davenports in Mary Barton, where

a visit to their home in times of death prompts John Barton and Mr. Wilson to
act for the sake of the working-class community, a visit to the Bouchers only rein-
forces the notion that those poor people who refuse influence from the middle
class are bitterly resented by them. Nonetheless, the scene must have been reas-
suring to middle-class readers, because Margaret gains the perspective proper to
her station and gendered position in life. Gaskell places Margaret in the home of
very poor and marginal people to show just how in need they are of local middle-
class influence and just how hopeless they have become by rejecting it. But, as we
will see in the next section, Gaskell also insists that Margaret’s process of individ-
uation depends upon her ability to cross conventional domestic boundaries in
order to solve class conflict through direct participation in the industrial world.

V
When in the strike scene Margaret positions herself between the laborers and
Thornton, Gaskell suggests that a woman’s sympathy for others marks her devel-
opment and compels her to redefine herself bodily, rejecting the conventional Vic-
torian placement of women only in the home. Gaskell restructures women’s
identity by depicting Margaret’s “intense sympathy” (NS, 175) for the workers and
her use of bodily power to enter the public arena and contribute to new definitions
of class relations. When she first arrives at Thornton’s home, she is instructed to
remain indoors and shut down the windows. She cannot remain inside for long,
as her mother and Bessy must, but begins to move outdoors. The first indication
of this movement occurs when she “threw the window wide open,” “tore off her
bonnet and bent forward to hear” the exchange between Thornton and the work-
ers below (NS, 177, 178). Her initial excursion into the public arena is to draw at-
tention to the difference she sees in others. In what appears to be a rejection of
Thornton’s Malthusian indifference, she pleads with him to treat the strikers like
human beings, not the “demoniac mob” that yells “fiendlike noises,” as Thornton
characterizes them (NS, 176, 177). Finally, she rushes downstairs . . . “lifted the
great iron bar with an imperious force—had thrown the door open wide—and was
there, in the face of that angry sea of men . . . [standing] between them and their
enemy” (NS, 178).
The struggle for position in mediating class relations manifests itself here in
a very physical way: “Mr. Thornton stood a little on one side; he had moved away
from behind her, as if jealous of anything that should come between him and
danger” (NS, 178). Margaret speaks first, although she must hold her arms out
until she recovers her breath. She argues against the use of violence but fails to
pacify the workers. With Thornton’s refusal to back down on the use of Irish
scabs, the “storm broke” and Margaret, sensing an attack on Thornton, “threw
her arms around him and she made her body a shield from the fierce people be-
yond” (NS, 179). Thornton insists that this arena is no place for a woman, but
62 Literary Remains

Margaret claims otherwise. Her move outdoors and her position between the
strikers and Thornton suggest that she believes herself to be empowered to in-
fluence shifting labor relations, a position that has been anticipated by her grow-
ing consciousness of the world of Milton. The scene further suggests that
Margaret associates power with her body, an intriguing move because she has
just been shuttling between her dying mother and the consumptive Bessy. Both
Mrs. Hale and Bessy have not only taught Margaret to become aware of her ex-
ternal surroundings but they have taught her, by default, that the body instanti-
ates the lineaments of power and gender.
Barbara Leah Harman argues that Margaret “overestimates her power as
maiden to deflect assault,” for as the narrator remarks, ‘if she thought her sex
would be a protection . . . she was wrong.’”24 In one respect, Gaskell’s descrip-
tion of Margaret, once pummeled with a stone, as “one dead,” “cold,” “look[ing]
like a corpse,” underscores Harman’s point that Margaret overestimated her
power and failed (NS, 179, 181, 183). To rehearse Harman’s argument for a mo-
ment, even as Margaret enters the outdoor world, her capacity to act in the pub-
lic sphere as a woman is limited, which would explain her figurative death. She
fails to break up the riot with the rhetoric of political economy, but she succeeds
by becoming a woman assaulted. Even though she had done woman’s work, rec-
ognizing Thornton’s unfairness and the mob’s potential to do violence to him,
she fails ultimately because she falls into the Victorian gendered position that fig-
ures women as victims, nearly lifeless and passive. Arguing along these lines,
then, the strike scene suggests that a woman’s appearance in the public sphere is
complicated by the notion that these scenes cannot be represented without be-
coming even more complicated by sexuality. By figuring Margaret as dead and a
passive object of Thornton’s affection in a context in which she has been re-
moved from competition with him, Gaskell circumscribes Margaret’s power to
influence economy. She cannot achieve success by direct intervention but must
wait for the more conventional avenue of marriage.
But another turn of the kaleidoscope brings into view a startling emphasis
on the thanatological and the possibility that Margaret’s “failure” to influence
the economy may be considered more successful than Harman admits. Since the
scene devolves into Margaret’s symbolic death, Gaskell contests in explicit terms
a key principle of political economy instantiated by representations of death: the
division of the world into public and private spheres. Unlike Mr. and Mrs. Hale,
Bessy, and John Boucher, Margaret is only figured as dead so that she can asso-
ciate herself with working-class interests without losing her position in the so-
cial formation. This move allows her to sympathize with the workers, escape the
confines of the purely domestic, and cross its boundaries to effect social change.
Margaret’s deathlike disposition provokes Thornton’s spontaneous expression of
love for her and anticipates not only the conventional marriage but a renewed in-
dustrial economy. Now, according to Gaskell, women’s “work” means using
one’s own body as a means to enter the public and political arena. As Margaret
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 63

remarks to Thornton, hers was not “a personal act between you and me” but an
act natural to her womanly instinct: “‘It was only a natural instinct; any woman
would have done just the same. We all feel the sanctity of our sex as a high priv-
ilege when we see danger’” (NS, 195, 194). Because Margaret rejects the act as
personal, she makes it a political one of class and gender action.
Gaskell extends the reach of Margaret’s political action and deepens her per-
sonal authority when she has Margaret flatly deny to the policeman, an official
regulator of working-class bodies, her presence at the railway station the night
of Leonards’s death. He has threatened to reveal her brother’s presence in En-
gland to the authorities who have unjustly condemned him for supporting his
men in a mutiny against a tyrannical captain. Gaskell figures the consequences
of Margaret’s actions as deathly, just as she did in the strike scene. When the po-
liceman left the house, “she went into the study, paused—tottered forward—
paused again—swayed for an instant where she stood, and fell prone on the floor
in a dead swoon (NS, 275, emphasis added). She lay still, “white as death,” and
when she awoke she could not remember the details “which had thrown her into
such deadly fright” (NS, 276, 277). In fact, Dixon observes that she is “more dead
than alive” (NS, 281). At first glance it would appear again that the consequences
of stepping outside of the defined limits of influence—the domestic sphere for
the mid-Victorian woman—lead to an experience of death and degradation. In-
deed, Margaret’s faith in conventional rules for the exercise of authority has
given way (NS, 276).
But Gaskell’s strategy here resembles her work in the strike scene. Borrowing
from thanatological discourse, Gaskell again associates Margaret with death and
recalcitrance, which connects her to those corpses provoking the mid-Victorian
power struggle between the middle and working classes. And, indeed, her lie “to
save the son” (NS, 284) leaves her dependent upon Thornton and ultimately
opens the way for their psychological and economic reconciliation to take place,
a reconciliation that has practical benefits for the working class. Further, it is no
accident that as Margaret recovers from her grief over the loss of her innocence in
the strike scene, her father’s health worsens: “And almost in proportion to her re-
establishment in health, was her father’s relapse into his abstracted musing upon
the wife he had lost, and the past era in his life that was closed to him for ever”
(NS, 289). Margaret’s lie and recovery from the shock of it strengthen her capac-
ity to claim her own authority. Gaskell’s description of her as one dead reinforces
the idea that Gaskell understood the debate raging at mid-century but with a sin-
gular twist that serves, in part, to undermine Chadwick: real working-class corpses
were pivots for social and economic debate, but figurative middle-class corpses be-
came links to working-class interests without sacrificing the power invested in
them as members of the middle class.
Gaskell’s depiction of Margaret’s metaphoric death is significant because it
has class implications. When Gaskell envisions workers gathering at Thornton’s
mill and the Irish scabs cowering in a small room at the head of a back flight of
64 Literary Remains

stairs, she imagines them as material, embodied creatures and “amenable to

aggregation,” as individuals personally known to her, yet nonetheless as a group
of particular persons rather than the inchoate mass or mob.25 At the same time,
however, Gaskell conceptualizes Margaret Hale as an active participant in the
process to redefine social relations. In the strike, improved social relations de-
pend upon her sympathy and oneness with the working class and, paradoxically,
their being clearly different from her. For working-class conditions to improve
along with the industrial health of the nation, workers have to be treated differ-
ently by being known at work and at home by middle-class persons who will ac-
tively gather that knowledge. Margaret’s figurative death satisfies this necessary
paradox, because Gaskell depicts Margaret momentarily as a body like those of
the working-class crowd for whom she has just pleaded to Thornton. At the same
time, however, her figurative death at their hands clearly distinguishes her from
the crowd, eventually reinforcing her growing sense of her social responsibilities
as a middle-class individual, not as part of the working-class crowd.
Gaskell draws on the discourse of death to construct a version of individua-
tion that seems both to affirm and subvert gender and class positions. Even as
she depicts Margaret’s transgressions of gender and class lines to enter Milton’s
industrial complex, Gaskell seems unable to relinquish the concept that a
woman must enact some obedience to authority. In one sense, Margaret seems
to fulfill the messianic potential Bessy perceived in her: a woman crucified for
her public infringements. She secures a woman’s position of influence in the
public arena by foregrounding individual human qualities in the industrial con-
text, seemingly diminishing the importance of class and gender to effect social
change. But Gaskell writes the novel to solve a problem framed by class and gen-
der. Gaskell asks the most challenging question for middle-class women of her
time: “[H]ow much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how
much might be set apart for freedom in working?” (NS, 416).
The problem—how much to be merged with authority and how much to be
set apart—Gaskell again wrestles with in thanatological terms in the last sections
of the novel. When Mr. Hale dies, Gaskell describes Margaret not as a corpse,
as in previous moments when she confronts traditional authority and her own
position in it, but as “an altar-tomb and she the stone on it” (NS, 354), because
she is so devastated by the death of the father and the end of patriarchal influ-
ence. Her father’s death throws Margaret into a struggle between her Aunt
Shaw’s desire to restore her to the aristocratic Beresford family of her mother
and her guardian Mr. Bell’s desire to underwrite her in a life of private charity
at Oxford. The death of Mr. Hale turns Margaret into an object; in the first in-
stance, the text represents her as a monument, a tribute to history, and the
power of lineage so obviously suggested by the Beresford line. In the second in-
stance, Mr. Bell claims that Margaret, with no personal authority (outside of his
influence), should accept his help to avoid becoming an accoutrement in the
Shaw household but retreat to a different kind of private life.
 “Taught by Death What Life Should Be” 65

However, Gaskell prepares us for Margaret’s resistance to the passivity, objec-

tification, and “obedience to authority” of both choices in a way that emphasizes
her particular association of death with the necessary power to resist confining Vic-
torian ideologies. Before Margaret leaves Milton, she requests from Higgins a
memento of Bessy’s, which Mary supplies by giving Margaret Bessy’s drinking cup.
The cup, reminiscent of Christ’s acceptance of his ultimate mission in the garden
at Gethsemane, reminds Margaret of her own capacity to work, which means she
must cross the divide separating the private domestic sphere from the public polit-
ical one and resist the temptation to “become sleepily deadened into forgetfulness
of anything beyond the life which was lapping her round with luxury” (NS, 373).
Choosing the Beresford line, the ambition to sleep in luxury, means death in this
novel, death to women and to the progress of society. To resist this choice, Mar-
garet must face change squarely in her former home, the village of Helstone, the ge-
ographic symbol of England’s former rural order. She observes in her promenades
and conversations with Helstone residents that “here and there old trees had been
felled”; decaying cottages had disappeared, as had roots of trees where she talked
with Mr. Lennox; the old man and inhabitant of the ruinous cottage had died;
and even the language system had changed—the indefinite article had become the
absolute adjective (NS, 387, 388, 394). While Margaret grieves over these changes
“like old friends” (NS, 388), she prepares herself to confess her lie to Mr. Bell. She
stands poised between her former life, dying before her eyes, and her commitment
to an unpredictable future. In this moment she feels “a sense of change, of indi-
vidual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment” (NS, 400). The disillusion-
ment, begun so intensely with her father’s death, comes to fruition at Helstone.
The emptiness she feels, while painful, allows room for the present time to live in
her. Because of her shifts in perspective, Margaret recognizes the need for perpet-
ual change: “‘now this, now that—now disappointed and peevish because all is not
exactly as [she] had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that the reality is far
more beautiful than [she] had imagined it’” (NS, 401).
The death of Mr. Bell, the last of the six characters to die in the novel, brings
Margaret to the moment of self-understanding: “Now that she was afresh taught
by death what life should be . . . she prayed that she might have strength to speak
and act the truth for evermore” (NS, 412), not as maid and Lady Bountiful living
in Oxford, as Mr. Bell once suggested to Mr. Hale, but as a woman who struggles
for her place of influence in England’s economy. She resolves to take her life into
her own hands, to answer for herself and to negotiate with Thornton her position
somewhere between “obedience to authority” and “freedom in working.”

VI
Gaskell’s careful attention to death and burial as it was and could be—the participa-
tion of a kinship network, the Unitarian framework to initiate collaboration, and
the powerful effect that death has on the development of a woman’s identity—is
66 Literary Remains

used to imagine the positive and powerful experiences in middle-class and working-
class individuals. In calling attention to these realities, however, she makes her
own middle-class desires to reform class relations that much more visible. Gaskell’s
middle-class appropriations of working-class practices and beliefs concerning death
become effective links to working-class interests without the middle class relinquish-
ing the power invested in it by being members of the middle class.
Nonetheless, because of Gaskell’s investment in discussions of political econ-
omy, class relations, and death as a woman, author, and resident of Manchester,
she was not limited by a narrow bureaucratic perspective. Instead, she was able to
relate the facts, which saturate a report like Chadwick’s, to the experiences of dif-
ferentiated individuals of both the working and middle classes. In doing so, she
reverses the emphasis to give value and dignity to the lives of the poor and to sug-
gest that a powerful machine such as England’s economy may be successfully op-
erated by the hands of concerned working-class and middle-class men and
women. But Gaskell’s optimism about death’s ability to shape England’s economy
gives way to Charles Dickens’s skepticism about the culture’s ready pairing of
death with money. As we shall see in the next chapter, Dickens expresses grave
concerns about the commodification of the corpse and worries that such morbid
emphases will bring about the decomposition of the social body.
 Chapter 3
“To Profit Us When He Was Dead”
Dead-Body Politics in Our Mutual Friend

Marley was dead: to begin with . . . Old Marley was dead as a door-nail. . . .
You will therefore let me repeat, emphatically, that Marley was dead as a door-
nail. . . . There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly un-
derstood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The emphatic repetition in the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’s wildly

successful 1843 story A Christmas Carol announces, in staccato style, that misun-
derstanding or denying Marley’s death will seriously jeopardize the power of the
story to make a difference in people’s lives. But the lines also imply, ironically, that
Marley is not “dead, dead as a door-nail” because, several pages later, he visits
Scrooge, in ghostly fashion, to convince him to amend his ways. The opening para-
graphs convey an insistent need to accept death and, simultaneously, a need to be
open to death’s power to shape life in new ways. Later in the story, for example,
after encountering two groups of businessmen who barely remark upon Scrooge’s
death, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes Scrooge to the London slums
to visit an old beetling shop full of bottles, bones, fat, rags, and refuse of all kinds.
Here Scrooge discovers, to his horror, that his charwoman, his laundress, and his
undertaker all plundered his bedside, stealing a pencil case, several buttons, a
brooch of no value, sheets and towels, two silver spoons, a pair of sugar tongs, a few
boots, the bed curtains—“rings and all, with him lying there”—blankets, and shirts,
including the one right off his back (for why waste it by putting it in the grave?).1
As they sat grouped about their spoil, the laundress concludes: “This is the end of
it, you see! He frightened everyone away from him when he was alive, to profit us
when he was dead!” (CC, 64). Astonished by the callousness of what he witnessed,
particularly around his own deathways, Scrooge, suddenly presented with a vision
of his own corpse, declares his potential for a change of heart, a turn from a heart
of stone to a tender and warm heart, a heart much like Bob Cratchit’s or Scrooge’s
nephew, Fred’s, who both live from extraordinary kindness and generosity.

67
68 Literary Remains

The culminating moment of Scrooge’s transformation occurs in the “wor-

thy” churchyard, described as “walled in by houses, overrun by grass and weeds,
the growth of vegetation’s death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat
with repleted appetite” (CC, 69). In a scene marked by a paradoxical tension be-
tween life and death, suggesting that things deathly contain within them the po-
tential for life, Scrooge begs the question: “Am I that man who lay upon the
bed?” (CC, 70). As the ghost answers him by pointing to the grave and then to
Scrooge, Scrooge pleads, “Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you
have shown me, by an altered life” (CC, 70).
I begin with A Christmas Carol to initiate a critical and historical discussion on
representations of death and burial in the novels of Charles Dickens, a topic that
fascinated him throughout his career. From Oliver Twist’s Mr. Sowerberry and the
grand funeral of little Paul in Dombey and Son to the contrasts in death and burial
in Bleak House, Dickens reveals his vested interest in fictional deaths and the mes-
sages they convey to his contemporaries. Specifically, I argue that through the
course of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens proves that the commodification of the body
emerges from a market culture that exiles persons from families and communities
and causes a shift to excessive individuation, a move that eventually results in psy-
chological pathology or death. A Christmas Carol, for example, responds to the des-
perate condition of England in the 1840s, a period of high unemployment and
suffering among factory workers, by criticizing the brutality of Scrooge’s laissez-faire
capitalism, where profits reign supreme and employer-employee relationships are
described in terms of what Thomas Carlyle calls the “cash nexus.” Scrooge’s grad-
ual but dramatic awakening occurs, in part, because he sees others relating to him
in ways similar to his own ways of relating to them. On the one hand, Dickens il-
lustrates the devastating effects of doing business based on self-interest. After all,
death visits Scrooge sooner than he expected. On the other hand, the fact that his
servants and undertaker corrupt deathways by robbing the corpse, indeed, nearly
marketing the corpse, indicates the depth of corruption in the Victorian economic
practices that Dickens perceives. Further, what is appalling to him, in addition to
Scrooge’s miserly treatment of others, is that the laundress, charwoman, and un-
dertaker have learned the lesson of laissez-faire capitalism all too well. Everything,
it seems, including corpses and their accoutrements, is available for the market. Ul-
timately, Dickens holds Scrooge and those like him responsible for this appalling
state of socioeconomic affairs at mid-century, for Scrooge’s unchecked activities
eventually corrupt the working classes, because the widening economic inequalities
force them to steal, even from the dead.

I
To appreciate the depth of Dickens’s critique, we must turn to his bracing repre-
sentation of Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and his spectacular use
of the history of bodysnatching to denounce market capitalism.2 As we know,
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 69

Cruncher supplements his income from Tellson’s Bank by bodysnatching—in

effect, becoming a “resurrection man” or “resurrectionist,” much to the dismay of
his wife, who prays for him constantly, and to the consternation of Miss Pross,
who can barely bring herself, late in the novel, to acknowledge Cruncher’s scan-
dalous business. Mr. Lorry, too, anxious to protect the reputation of Tellson’s,
threatens to remove Cruncher from his position at the bank and to withdraw
from their friendship. To better understand how Dickens uses the bodysnatching
situation, a situation that had historically been resolved in 1832—but Dickens res-
urrects to make claims about his own dead-body politics—we first need to know
something of its spirited history.
Medical schools, especially from the last third of the eighteenth century to
the first third of the nineteenth century, placed sizable emphasis on the practical
study of anatomy, and dissection in particular.3 The law, however, granted the
surgeons only the bodies of those convicted and executed criminals, a number
woefully below what was needed to supply the Royal College of Surgeons and its
licensees at various hospitals and private schools. With time, not only did the
number of surgery colleges increase but so did the number of students. Martin
Fido reports a fivefold expansion in the teaching of anatomy at the London hos-
pitals, which meant that approximately 500 students were trying to share the
twelve or so bodies officially available annually, even as surgeon-professors began
to recommend that each student dissect at least two bodies before being licensed
to practice surgery.4 To meet the intense demand for bodies, resurrection men, or
bodysnatchers, robbed graves, nearly always those of the poor, whose graves were
shallow and unprotected either by guards or iron cages positioned over the grave
until decomposition had set in, thus making the body unmarketable. Finally, in
1828, the Select Committee on Anatomy in Parliament acknowledged that the
problem of bodysnatching had reached epidemic proportions, and it made a rec-
ommendation that unclaimed paupers would be available for dissection.
Two cases of egregious abuse prompted the passage of the Anatomy Act.
From 1827 to 1829, William Burke and William Hare, two laborers and cobblers
in Edinburgh, realizing what a lucrative business bodysnatching could be, set out
to entice with promises of food and shelter sixteen unsuspecting people, who
were then plied with whiskey, suffocated, and taken to Dr. Robert Knox’s
anatomy and surgery school, where he accepted them graciously, without ques-
tion as to the bodies’ freshness and appearances of never having been buried, and
paid Burke and Hare handsomely. According to Richardson, Burke and Hare
were finally caught in their scheme when neighbors, returning to Hare’s after a
party, discovered the body of Mary Docherty under the straw bed. Hare turned
King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged and, appropriately enough, given the na-
ture of his crime, publicly dissected. Richardson reports that nearly 2,000 people
rioted because they were not allowed to view the dissection, and that between
30,000 to 40,000 people viewed the partly dissected body the following day. The
second case occurred in London. At the end of 1831, the trial of John Bishop,
70 Literary Remains

James May, and John Head, all of the Bethnal Green bodysnatching gang, sent
London into hysterics and accelerated the need for the Anatomy Act. Coinci-
dentally and helpful to appreciating Dickens’s knowledge of corpses and their cur-
rency in the economy, Dickens worked for his uncle’s, Charles Barrow’s, Mirror of
Parliament, which recorded, with the assistance of Dickens’s transcription, the par-
liamentary debate over the Select Committee on Anatomy’s report and the pro-
visions of the Anatomy Act. As Ruth Richardson shrewdly concludes, the report
and eventual passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832 “effectively redefined poverty
from being a state of considerable misfortune to one of criminal activity.”5
Historians of bodysnatching are careful to elucidate the intensely capitalistic
dynamics of the business. After describing the treatment of corpses as food stuffs,
roped up and trussed, salted and pickled, and measured and sold by the inch or
pound, Richardson declares that human persons who were waked, buried, and
bereaved became “subjects” to the anatomists and “things” to the resurrectionists.
“No longer an object worthy of respect, the body of each of these people became
a token of exchange, subject to commercial dealing, and then to the final objecti-
fication of the dissection room.”6 Claiming that groups of bodysnatchers oper-
ated like modern street gangs, Fido outlines how the groups beat their
competition into submission by marking “ownership” of cemeteries and burial
grounds with the help of sextons and magistrates who had been bribed, contami-
nating graveyards of recalcitrant rivals by exposing buried bodies and vandalizing
cemeteries, and terrorizing surgeons unwilling to pay higher prices by shredding
bodies in the dissection theaters. One London anatomist, J. F. Smith, described
the famous Ben Crouch gang as a “joint-stock company.”7 The surgeons, too,
aware that they were at the mercy of the resurrectionists, complained that the in-
creased cost of cadavers ate into their own incomes, as they often had to subsidize
students who could ill afford the going rate for a corpse. Reducing the amount
of dissection, however, would lessen their income from teaching fees. Because of
the monopoly that men like Ben Crouch had on the surgeons, the likes of Sir Ast-
ley Cooper, London surgeon and professor of comparative anatomy to the Royal
College of Surgeons, and others began to complain about the high cost of doing
business and to agitate for the passage of the Anatomy Act.
Curiously, even though dead human beings were bought and sold at what-
ever price the market could bear, the dead body itself, according to the law, did
not constitute real property. As we know from people’s condemning reactions to
Cruncher’s night job, there was little or no prosecution of those who stole bod-
ies. Only if grave clothes or some other property buried with the body was stolen
was the incursion considered a felony. William Cobbett noted the anomaly with
some vigor: “To steal the body of a sheep, or pig, or calf, or ox, or fowl of any
sort, is a capital felony, punished with death; and . . . to receive any such body, or
to have it in your possession, knowing it to be stolen, is also a felony, punished
with transportation.”8 Cobbett’s notice of the aberrant situation concerning
corpses was anticipated forty-four years earlier, in 1788, when Mr. Lynn, a south
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 71

London anatomist and surgeon, was charged at the Court of King’s Bench with
taking a female body from St. Saviour’s churchyard for the purposes of dissec-
tion. His lawyer protested that there was no case, claiming that the corpse was
owned by no one, was not a subject of the Crown with duties, and so it had no
rights of its own. Furthermore, punishments for disinterments had always been
related in some way to the detriment of public order. In this case, so the reason-
ing went, “‘The purpose was the legitimate, laudable and necessary intention of
advancing the science of healing.’”9 Since there was no criminal foundation for
the prosecution of either purveyor or customer, goods became more expensive,
and more people like Cruncher were attracted to the hazardous and scandalous,
but imminently lucrative, business of supplying surgeons with dead bodies.
Returning to the exchange between Mr. Lorry and Cruncher, which occurs
just after we discover that Roger Cly, like Foulon, had staged a mock funeral to
escape punishment as a spy, we read of Mr. Lorry’s insistence that Tellson’s Bank
will not be imposed upon by Cruncher’s “unlawful occupation” (TTC, 318). The
“abashed” Cruncher responds by pointing out the hypocrisy involved in Mr.
Lorry’s harsh judgment of him:

There’d be two sides to it. There might be medical doctors at the pres-
ent hour, a picking up their guineas where a honest tradesman don’t
pick up his fardens—fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens—half fardens!
no, nor yet his quarter—a banking away like smoke at Tellson’s, and a
cocking their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a going in and
going out to their own carriages—ah! equally like smoke, if not more so.
Well, that ‘ud be imposing, too, on Tellson’s. For you cannot sarse the
goose and not the gander. (TTC, 318–19)

Cruncher reveals, of course, the inherent contradiction in Mr. Lorry’s concerns

about Tellson’s reputation and its possible contamination by resurrectionists. But
the bank, as Cruncher avers, has already been tainted by bodysnatchers through
the surgeons who deposit their incomes with Tellson’s, income garnered from the
exploitation of cadavers. Moreover, Cruncher challenges the class system inherent
in the scheme. While surgeons deposit their guineas, the resurrectionist, the “hon-
est tradesman,” participating fully in a “domestic economy” according to the rules
of market capitalism, receives less than half a farthing for his work (TTC, 159, 58).
Again, the peripatetic corpse, and its journey through England’s domestic econ-
omy, allows Dickens to elucidate the consequences when that economy runs
amuck, when, as the narrator quips, “bank-notes [have] a musty ordor, as if they
were fast decomposing into rags again” (TTC, 56). Cruncher understands the sys-
tem as it has been established by the surgeons anxious not only to advance science
but to increase their own incomes. He also understands how that system, deemed
“natural” by its proponents, perpetuates injustice. Laborers like Cruncher are
taught to work hard and contribute to the national economy, but becoming too
72 Literary Remains

successful at it, particularly if that success threatens the “rising” middle classes,
leads to charges of immorality.
But Dickens saves Cruncher from complete condemnation, for he accu-
rately tracks the dead bodies under his watch (if only to observe their absence),
unlike the Jacques, who were fooled by Foulon earlier in the novel. Because of his
honest trade, Cruncher knows that Roger Cly was not buried in the grave he at-
tempted to rob. This knowledge gives Sydney Carton significant leverage to ma-
nipulate Barsard into giving him access to the Bastille and thereby to effect the
switch necessary to save Darnay’s life and to ensure England’s prosperity. Dick-
ens invokes bodysnatching to express his contempt for nations who claim
progress while standing on the graves of the poor and vulnerable: French aristo-
crats who make provident deposits in Tellson’s, money made at the expense of
women who beg the Marquis for food and proper grave markers for their dead
husbands, and the “rising” professional class of surgeons profiting from bodies
snatched from vulnerable graves and then complaining about the exorbitant cost
of these “goods,” even as they escalate demand for them. These characters, who
envelop Tellson’s Bank like smoke, thwart advancement in a nation’s march to-
ward civilization, but not Cruncher, who knows the exact nature of his business,
given the ripe nature of the market, and has courage enough to admit the truth.
Indeed, he is the honest tradesman who saves the day in Dickens’s dead-body
politics. By the time Dickens writes Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), any positive
uses of the body’s association with money have fallen away. By the 1860s, En-
gland’s economy was dangerously dependent upon finance rather than on mar-
ket capitalism, and the combination of finance capitalism and potentially high
profits brought the likelihood of fraud, financial abuse, and an attitude that
moral considerations had no business in the economy. In his last completed
novel, which I will discuss in depth momentarily, Dickens argues, via the burial
problematic, for a moral sense free from mercenary economic compensation.
Unlike earlier social reformers who viewed death as waste and therefore
a problem to be disposed of by administrative order, Dickens transmutes the
terms evident in burial reform discussions and perceives death, not unlike Eliza-
beth Gaskell, as an opportunity to rehabilitate society. He represents death as
dire punishment for those morally unwilling to engage in society’s repurification
and demonstrates the need for social rather than monetary compensation by rep-
resenting as dangerous the corpse’s relationship to economic value. By deploying
death and burial to mark a diseased society, Dickens tropes the physical disease
once associated with dead bodies onto the industrial landscape and onto indi-
vidual psychological illness and criminal conduct—all symptoms, he claims, of
an amoral capitalism that will only be made worse by an exaggerated emphasis
on the self-help philosophy. To better understand how Dickens uses death
and burial to resuscitate a morally corrupt society, we first need to consider how
his representations intersect with death and burial issues preoccupying mid-
Victorian society.
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 73

II

The “worthy churchyard” Dickens describes in A Christmas Carol anticipates by

seven years key concerns in burial reform legislation at mid-century. The Metro-
politan Interment Act of 1850 mandated the General Board of Health to coor-
dinate efforts to close the worst burial grounds and to develop a new national
cemetery, activities that depended upon obtaining a city-wide monopoly on
cemeteries. Authority had been given to the board to purchase all of the privately
owned cemeteries serving London, which Chadwick estimated at £700,000, with
the purchase of joint-stock company cemeteries not to be more than £400,000.10
The board also began plans for a national cemetery, Abbey Wood, located four-
teen miles from London in a wooded area by the Thames, with good soil for
burials. In the face of these ambitious projects, however, the treasury expressed
its dislike for the board’s comprehensive and expensive plans by refusing to guar-
antee financing from banks that the Board of Health needed to fund its pur-
chases of and development for cemeteries and churchyards. Moreover, the
board, during its five-year mandate (1848–1853), made so many enemies in Par-
liament over the issue of centralization that banks remained unconvinced about
its viable future, thus refusing to make necessary loans to the board. In a final
strategic move to curb the Board of Health’s power, the treasury demanded ap-
proval for any expense over £100. In effect, it put an end to any negotiations for
the purchase of joint-stock cemeteries and for Abbey Wood.11
Parliament, too, contributed significantly to the board’s failure to solve the bur-
ial question. The Interment Act of 1850 had been passed on the heels of a cholera
epidemic in 1848, but as time and the disease waned, so too did the fervor to enact
measures to alleviate sanitary problems. As Lord Derby explained, one could speak
of the possibility of improving the population, “but it was not by Act of Parliament
that you could compel people to be moral, decent, or clean.”12 While Parliament
had to decide on sanitary measures to ensure the health of the nation, from Derby’s
conservative perspective, “beyond a certain point the Government could not go on,
and would not be permitted to interfere with the internal affairs of the people.”13
Underneath this growing complacency in Parliament was a desire to protect
vested interests: water companies, cemetery companies, and other private busi-
nesses had banked on competition in an open market, not nationalization, for
compensation in return for investment. These companies exerted intense
pressure on legislators to recognize that the measures in the 1850 Act were
radical and too centralizing for their parochial tastes, arguing that England must
consider all factions when planning sanitary reform and national cemeteries.
S. E. Finer urges the modern reader to appreciate the complex factions involved:

It is well to remember that London, in 1851, connoted 300 parishes,

improvement commissions and boards of trustees, operating under
250 local acts, each constituted differently, with different powers from
74 Literary Remains

its neighbors. Some were self-elected, some demanded a property qual-

ification from electors, some vestries were closed, some “select,” and
some representative.14

In 1852, the conservative Derby government introduced its own burial bill,
claiming that the 1850 measure had been completely unsatisfactory.
The 1852 bill, which repealed the 1850 Act, allowed the queen and her
Privy Council and local parochial authorities to close old burial grounds and ob-
tain new ones, buy land, and establish fees for burials, monuments, and the use
of chapels. Each local board formulated its own list of fees for burial services,
which reflected attention not only to English individuality but to English inge-
nuity to secure income from slight variations on a theme. The list of fees re-
flected differences in afternoon burial as opposed to morning, placement of flat
stones over graves, and fees for different kinds of persons buried in different
parts of the cemeteries, alone or with others, in shallow, deep, or extra-deep
graves. Julie Rigg concludes that the Burial Acts of 1852–1853, in handing con-
trol to burial boards, urged Parliament to acknowledge “the pioneering work of
cemetery companies in providing cemeteries both free from the domination of
the Church of England, and operating on sanitary principles.”15
While compensation to the local burial board was generous, depending on
its creativity and ability to generate income from burials, no compensation to
owners of private graveyards, which had to be closed for sanitary reasons, was au-
thorized. Lord Palmerston at the Home Office enforced the 1852 Burial Act ef-
ficiently, believing that free trade never extended to the area of public health,
and that government boards with extensive powers should control the sanitary
well-being of the population. Given his commitment to cleanse London from
the ill effects of decomposing corpses, Palmerston never acquiesced to private in-
terests, even though he sympathized with the predicaments of property owners
and clergymen who would suffer financial loss as a result of the law. Samuel
Sheen, for example, owner of a burial ground in Whitechapel, presented a peti-
tion to Lord Palmerston in 1853 asking for compensation. Sheen argued that he
had spent £1900 for construction of the burial ground and, furthermore, that
his property was not a nuisance but a benefit to the neighborhood. If the ground
closed, not only would he lose his investment and future income, but he would
be responsible for taxes and rent.16 Palmerston rejected his petition, in addition
to another presented by twenty-seven rectors whose income depended upon a
healthy number of burials in their parishes. The pernicious results of the law,
they claimed, compelled them to protest its enactment.17
Moreover, as Parliament fine-tuned the powers of local burial boards in Lon-
don and outside the metropolitan area, investors in private cemetery companies,
once promised steady, generous returns in the 1830s and 1840s, now watched
their stock plummet because of competition from the increased number of parish
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 75

burial grounds created under the Burial Acts legislated between 1852 and 1857.
Kensal Green, for example, long considered one of the most successful private en-
terprises, originally sold shares at £50 each and paid a steady 8 percent interest. In
1856, the stock traded at £30.18
In and through the corpse, then, money circulates with some vigor and con-
tributes to the understanding that Victorian society after the “hungry forties” had
begun to satiate itself with extraordinary money-making strategies, schemes that
Dickens thought were dangerous. The representations of decomposition, which
earlier had slid between moral and social domains as a way for the bourgeois to
protect itself from the contaminating poor, now slipped into economic terri-
tory and participated in what Christopher Herbert calls “the algebra of filth and
money in Victorian thinking,” an algebra that Dickens identifies as “central to the
imaginary of his moneymaking age.”19 Ironically, however, Dickens suggests that
this Victorian obsession with death and money becomes, ultimately, an equation
for society’s own decomposition. Dead bodies are more than mere sources of in-
come, and funerals are more than occasions to model the newest innovations in
the “dismal trade.” They are, in fact, opportunities to “resurrect” society and so-
cial relations marked by morality.20 But, sadly, the very people Dickens counts on
to reinvigorate society’s sense of itself as a moral body—the clergy—are also entan-
gled in this same pernicious calculus.
At the same time the Burial Act of 1852 began to solve some of the sanitary
issues, thanks to the judicious power of Lord Palmerston in the Home Office, it
simultaneously gave rise to an intense debate about monetary and religious com-
pensation. In particular, the act unearthed a bitter struggle between the Church
of England and the Nonconformists over which group would control the
churchyards and burial grounds of England. Reportedly, Dickens was disgusted
by the interdenominational squabbling among the clergy. In a letter to John Fos-
ter, dated February 2, 1864, Dickens wrote: “And the idea of the Protestant es-
tablishment in the face of its own history, seeking to trample out discussion and
private judgment, is an enormity so cool, that I wonder the Right Reverends,
Very Reverends, and all other Reverends, who commit it, can look in one
another’s faces without laughing.”21
The 1852 Act stipulated the parishioner’s legal right of burial, long established
at common law, as the same in burial grounds as in churchyards. But ecclesiastical
law allowed this burial only if the Church of England provided the burial service,
whether the person was Anglican or Nonconformist. In general, this situation
posed no problems in the larger towns, because there was enough unconsecrated
ground to handle the demand. In smaller towns and rural areas, however, there
were problems over burials, because most churchyards contained only consecrated
ground. Invoking their legal right, some Dissenters and Nonconformists wanted
to be buried alongside their ancestors but certainly detested the idea of having the
Anglican burial service read over them. They argued for open churchyards, free
76 Literary Remains

from the restrictions of consecrated ground, so that Dissenters and Nonconformists

could be buried anywhere, with Dissenting ministers reading the burial service. Dis-
senting ministers seethed because the act allowed parish incumbents to retain the
rights to collect fees for burials in their districts, whether or not they had performed
the service.22
In a series of articles on burial reform from 1855 to 1864, The Times,
attacking “the extreme value of dead parishioners” to clergy, exposed what was
to be a central problematic for Dickens: the relative value of the dead to the liv-
ing.23 The articles indicate a shift in the burial reform debate. Whereas in the
1840s and early 1850s, The Times concerned itself with the dangers of miasma
and the imminent need to sanitize the churchyards at local rather than national
expense, by the early 1860s the reports highlight the debate over compensation
to clergy for burial rites and closed churchyards. The Times criticizes the clergy’s
preoccupation with their precious incomes. Individual clergymen, rather than
focusing on the moral impact of death, attend to their own individual right to
compensation. This entrepreneurial ideal influenced as well the way new ceme-
teries engaged in business, culling fees for a creative range of services meant to in-
crease income at the expense of mourners who needed assistance from the
Church to transact an effective form of compensation, in the shape of comfort
and reflection on the moral life. Consistently throughout the decade, The Times
distinguished monetary compensation, which seemed to motivate, inappropri-
ately, the clergy’s performance of burial rituals, from the clergy’s need to medi-
ate, by means of these same rituals, social and moral change among the
survivors. While The Times generally recognizes the hardship the 1852 Interment
Act placed upon the clergy, the newspaper nonetheless satirizes at length the
pecuniary value the clergy attribute to the dead:

We have no doubt that a dead parishioner is a great treasure, and that he

is worth at least a dozen living ones. . . . [H]e wants to be buried. . . . It is
just at this critical juncture, however, that the new Interment Act steps
in, and deprives him of the last sad task and the parting fee. A consider-
able number of the clergy feel the grievance acutely, and come before the
House to say how inexpressibly dear their parishioners are to them just
at this moment—how deeply they value them. The Legislature robs them
of their flock at the very time when they feel the true worth of it—when
its graces are beginning to expand, and when the real charm of the pas-
toral relationship is commencing. What monstrous injustice, they say, is
this, that they should have the pain, loss, and affliction of the living
parishioner, and not the advantage and happiness of the dead one! They
are permitted, and welcome, to keep their flock all through the meager
and barren stage of its progress—i.e., through life—but just when the har-
vest comes, when the profitable season commences, when the richness of
the ground develops itself—just at the very point of interment—just then
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 77

the spoiler steps in, takes away the prize they have been so ardently look-
ing to, and robs them of their just and legitimate reward.24

According to this account, the clergy’s complaint about compensation

places them squarely in the speculative boom that characterized the late 1850s
and 1860s and that Dickens was to roundly criticize in his novels. By describing
their investment of time with the living as reaping dividends at death, The Times
reveals the comprehensive nature of the clergy’s speculation in dead bodies. In
terms of finance capitalism, human beings are valuable only insofar as they pro-
vide a return for the clergyman’s investment. In agricultural terms, bodies buried
become seeds that will eventually be harvested in what the clergy hope will be a
profitable season. In both economies, because money is the ultimate goal,
human beings become commodified.
The Times articles illustrate two important aspects of the burial reform de-
bate crucial to Dickens’s representations of death and burial. The first is the ef-
fect that money, and the struggle for income, has on the commodification of the
body.25 Monetary desires seem to displace humanitarian values. The second as-
pect is the need to redress the imbalance that speculation, the focus on money,
and the struggle for income create in the social structure. Burial reform discourse
and Dickens’s novels reveal contemporary struggles over the definition of ap-
propriate avenues for social relations. Because Dickens understands that corpses,
funerals, and burials are important ways in which the social order reproduces it-
self, he restores “the right feeling to death,” and through this he hopes to rescue
social relations from the overpowering cash nexus.
Twenty years earlier, in prescient fashion, Dickens appreciates, in his repre-
sentation of Little Nell’s funeral in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), the significance
of a proper burial free from contaminating financial concerns and the power of
this ritual to efface the social isolation that increasingly characterizes the Victo-
rian world, and urban burial practices in particular.26 Eschewing contemporary
concerns about miasma and the dangerous putrefactions emanating from de-
composing bodies—even though Nell had been dead for two days and her body
placed near the hearth—Dickens emphasizes instead the spiritual aspects of her
death and underscores, in his description of the funeral, the necessary continu-
ity between the living and the dead to protect the community from the perni-
cious effects of money, namely, exploitation and addiction:

And now the bell—the bell she had so often heard by night and day,
and listened to with solemn pleasure almost as a living voice—rung its
remorseless toll for her, so young, so beautiful, so good. Decrepit age,
and vigorous life, and blooming youth, and helpless infancy, poured
forth—on crutches, in the pride of strength and health, in the full flush
of promise, in the mere dawn of life—to gather round her tomb. Old
men were there, whose eyes were dim and sense failing—grandmothers,
78 Literary Remains

who might have died ten years ago, and still been old—the deaf, the
lame, the palsied, the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the
closing of that early grave. What was the death it would shut in, to that
which still could crawl and creep above it! (OCS, 657–58)

Surprisingly, the narrator turns our attention away from Nell’s quiet burial near
her favorite medieval effigies and asks readers to consider the living, those who
creep and crawl above her grave. Rejecting the use of the funeral to make state-
ments about one’s monetary worth, Dickens argues that the worth of Nell’s
graceful but untimely death and burial rests in the potential to gather an entire
community in all of its variety and in the virtues that emerge as a result of her
death: “a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, love, to walk the
world, and bless it” (OCS, 659).
In contrast, Daniel Quilp, who can think of nothing but money and how to
extort it from others, and even Nell’s grandfather, who, for all of his good inten-
tions, allowed thoughts of money to seep into his consciousness until he could
think of nothing else, embody the diseased, money-grabbing condition intrinsic
to England at the time. To assuage the contagious power of this reality, Dickens
has Quilp die a gruesome death by drowning. By the time he finishes with him,
the dwarf is a “deserted carcass,” a “blazing ruin,” someone whose remains indi-
cate to authorities that he had committed suicide and should be buried like
a vampire, with “a stake through his heart at the centre of four lonely roads”
(OCS, 620, 665). Dickens offers Quilp the most degrading of burials, “horrible
and barbarous,” to suggest that he deserved in death what he had wrought upon
others in life (OCS, 665). Neither can Nell’s grandfather escape Dickens’s judg-
ment. He dies alone, grief-stricken, and is buried next to Nell without the benefit
of a community to mourn him. Fred Trent, too, squandered his inheritance,
“rioted abroad,” and drowned in Paris, his body unclaimed (OCS, 669).
The virtues of love, mercy, and charity and the capacity of survivors to voice
their farewells allow for a reconsideration of social relations. The plot’s conclusions
manifest Dickens’s notion that society must reject its emphasis on individuals
thinking of themselves as isolated persons whose relationships with others are de-
termined by predation and greed. For the enlightened, benevolent characters in
the novel, marriage reigns supreme: Mrs. Quilp makes money from her dead hus-
band and remarries; Mr. Abel marries and has a family; and Mr. Swiveller marries
the Marchioness. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Kit, whose income is now
underwritten by the wealthy brother, marries Barbara and fathers a horde of chil-
dren who beg to hear stories of Nell. The promise of family signifies hope for the
future. Re-engaging the possibility for inheritance and patronage as the organizing
principles for society interrupts predatory behavior, serves to bury—literally—the
pathological selves, and brings all diverse characters to their own homes.
Nearly a decade later, Dickens remains tenacious in his assessments of fu-
nereal arrangements by arguing in more explicit terms for dignified rituals. In
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 79

the November 27, 1852, issue of Household Words, in an article entitled “Trading
in Death,” he launched an attack against the “theatrical trick” of ostentatious fu-
nerals.27 Dickens complained that the Duke of Wellington’s funeral, the high
noon of the Victorian celebration of death, was nothing but the state’s attempt
to promote the commodification of funerals, which, for Dickens, signaled an im-
portant shift in the way in which social relationships were expressed and social
obligations were fulfilled.

A system of barbarous show and expense was found to have gradually

erected itself above the grave, which, while it possibly could do no
honor to the memory of the dead, did great dishonour to the living, as
inducing them to associate the most solemn of human occasions with
unmeaning mummeries, dishonest debt, profuse waste, and bad exam-
ple in utter oblivion of responsibility.28

Arguing that a funeral performance is no compensation for death, Dickens pro-

claimed the virtue of a plain, solemn, dignified death ritual punctuated with
symbols to impress upon the community the values of integrity, sincerity, gen-
erosity, self-control, and efficiency, themes of considerable importance in Our
Mutual Friend.

III
Dickens’s critique of corporeal economics in Our Mutual Friend begins with the
very obvious but disturbing opening scene where he tries to dislodge the easy
union of money and corpses.29 Here Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, to
earn a living wage, dredge the Thames in hopes of salvaging valuable garbage—
corpses included. This transformation of the corpse as the source of Gaffer’s liveli-
hood proves troubling in the novel. Catherine Gallagher, in her insightful work
on the “bioeconomics” at work in Our Mutual Friend, has argued that the opening
scene reveals how death might be exchanged for life as “the most primitive and
horrific of the biological economies presented in the novel.”30 Dickens, according
to her thesis, uses the John Harmon plot and the suspension of the body in a hu-
manitarian attempt to dislodge the connection between corpses and money.
Gallagher’s argument is certainly appealing, because she explains the mid-
Victorian tendency to reorganize economic investigations around the body.31
What she does not explain, however, is why exactly representations of the body
shifted from emphasizing waste to emphasizing the body’s value as a commodity.
Part of the shift can be identified by a change in the discourse on waste and pollu-
tion. According to Bill Luckin, the apocalyptic language from the 1840s, which
Chadwick utilized, in which the corpse was described as a source of miasma, dis-
ease, plague, pestilence, waste, and decay, had turned analytic by the 1860s, be-
cause the mortality rates had begun to decline, and “epidemiological and
80 Literary Remains

environmental crises became less acute and threatening to urban stability.”32 The
body, no longer described as a harbinger of imminent and decisive disaster,
became less direful and more available to be used rather than wasted in the con-
temporary economy. As Pamela Gilbert, in her thoughtful and thorough essay on
Our Mutual Friend, describes, a healthy body vulnerable to outside filth challenges
the previous model of a body made vulnerable by its own instabilities.33 The move
from apocalyptic, aggregate language to analytic, indirect language also can be de-
scribed as a move from the collective, which Chadwick’s statistical model assumed,
to the local and individual. Science and medical men increasingly identified the
river’s pollution by discrete factors, but this individualizing technology named fac-
tors that were alike in that, taken together, they all contributed to the river’s pol-
lution. This shift in perception proves favorable to Dickens in Our Mutual Friend
in two ways. First, it runs counter to the centralization that Dickens finds so de-
testable, and, second, it creates room for a local, benevolent patriarch—in place of
the bureaucrat—to manage social relations on the local level, because individuals
could not be trusted to regulate themselves.
Another part of the shift can be explained in more precise economic terms.
Because of the increased number of working-class people demanding investiga-
tions into the causes of death among workhouse inmates during the 1860s, there
was a dire shortage of corpses for anatomy.34 Gaffer’s work, then, is simply the
logical extreme of supply-and-demand economics practiced by Old John Harmon.
In this economy, waste material, everything from dust to corpses, is available for
monetary exchange, provided there is a demand for it in the marketplace. But
Dickens seeks to dislodge the body’s easy symmetrical relationship with money by
suspending it, as Gallagher suggests. For Dickens, the relationship between
money and corpses has a disjunctive effect, because it only serves to heighten the
difference between classes in a competitive, increasingly commercialized world di-
vided into winners and losers. By denying the symmetrical relationship between
corpses and economic value, Dickens envisions a union across the community
that will eventually restructure society.35
In Gaffer’s defensive exchange with Rogue Riderhood during the opening
scene, Gaffer attempts to remove the corpse from the world of money to justify
his taking it, but his fixation on money makes the body a commercial object:

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have
money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What
world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s?
Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don’t try to go
confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. (OMF, 47)

In the remainder of the novel, Dickens seeks to confound the contemporary eco-
nomic principle that posits the corpse as a commodity by presenting it as an op-
portunity to rehabilitate society. Most specifically, the discovery of what is
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 81

presumed to be John Harmon’s body acts as a catalyst for the eventual restoration
of more traditional, filial, and patriarchal ways of relating, which turn on the gen-
tlemanly ideal and its moral analytic.
The slippery pronoun antecedents in the opening chapter make it difficult
to determine whether “things of usage” are Gaffer and Lizzie or the parts of their
bodies: his steady gaze and her wrists. The fact that no clear boundaries demar-
cate personhood from economics underwrites Dickens’s desire to loosen the
firm connection between bodies and monetary value in Victorian society. Lizzie’s
unease in the opening scene also registers Dickens’s desire to restore social rather
than monetary forms of exchange and compensation. As she and her father se-
cure the corpse to the boat, Lizzie averts her attention from it and the river, stut-
tering her sense of shame at her father’s occupation and, therefore, at this
inextricable relation between bodies, waste, and livelihood. As Gaffer moves to
change places with Lizzie in the scull, she resists sitting so near the corpse: “‘No,
no, father! No! I can’t indeed. Father!—I cannot sit so near it!’” (OMF, 45).
Lizzie’s repulsion over the corpse—the river that disgorged it and the “meat and
drink” it provides—manifests Dickens’s disdain over what he perceives to be the
ill effects of market capitalism: that everything, including waste and bodies of
human beings, has a price, while, simultaneously, Victorian society congratulates
itself on its “high moralities” (OMF, 47).
But Dickens’s representation of Lizzie’s repulsion is not without complica-
tion. This scene reveals her middle-class desire to distance herself from the
corpse, a desire that is later redefined when she nurses and marries Wrayburn.
Like Gaskell, who qualifies Mary Barton’s working-class position in the social for-
mation, Dickens suggests that for Lizzie to marry Wrayburn, she must exhibit
some middle-class sensibilities.
Dickens intensifies the slippage between death, disease, and money when,
during the course of Mr. Boffin’s interview with Silas Wegg, Boffin misspeaks by
claiming that he and Mrs. Boffin live under the will of a “diseased governor”
(OMF, 95). When Wegg tries to clarify Boffin’s meaning by asking, “‘Gentleman
dead, sir?’” Boffin impatiently responds: “‘Man alive, don’t I tell you? A diseased
governor?’” (OMF, 95). Boffin’s mistake signals that Old Harmon’s ruthless acqui-
sitions of money and people are activities that leave him more diseased than dead.
More to the point, the confusion of “diseased” for “deceased” means that even
though Old Harmon has died, the symptoms of his greed still threaten society.
This disease that emanates from Old Harmon’s body, through his will, for exam-
ple, becomes Dickens’s version of Chadwick’s miasma theory. In other words, the
contemporary economic body in the late mid-Victorian period is as contagious as
the physical corpse was earlier imagined to be. In one remarkable passage, dust, the
material source of wealth in Our Mutual Friend, and money saturate London’s air:

The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust
whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit, and there were no
82 Literary Remains

top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust

blinding him and choking him.
That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when
the wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it
come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is
caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at
every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass,
seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. (OMF, 191)

Dickens likens the circulation of money to miasma, the noxious fumes generated
by decaying matter and circulated through the atmosphere. The body’s decom-
position connects waste, money, and death and provides a fertile process for peo-
ple to make a living from waste matter. But Dickens suggests that such activity is
highly contagious and deadly to society, because money, and the selfishness that
drives it, proves to be fatal. Dickens also indicates that if money is like miasma,
then it becomes potent when it is detached from substance, because it is readily
available to assign value “everywhere.” In the unregulated bank business in the
1860s, money, indeed, was without substance, because there was often not
enough gold reserve in a bank to underwrite loans for speculative projects. What
Dickens attempts to restore to the equation is an industrial world that allows for
a productive balance between work, money, and home, the kind of balance he
articulated when he described the meeting between Lizzie and Wrayburn and
will bring to fruition in Bella and John Harmon.
Gaffer, for example, lives in an old mill in the heart of industrial London. The
mill, marked by decomposition, suggests that production has yielded to an economy
based on speculation and fraud. In this reality, speculation deadens those areas that
traditionally produced and housed goods and materials, especially, in the landscape
of Our Mutual Friend, mills, wharves, and warehouses. The deadening landscape in
London preoccupies Dickens, as many critics have noticed, and had been antici-
pated as early as 1833 in Sketches by Boz, when he wrote that death’s hue had indeed
been imparted to the streets of London. When Wrayburn and Lightwood travel the
river in search of Gaffer, Eugene remarks that very little life was to be seen on the
river, since “‘windows and doors were shut, and the staring black and white letters
upon wharves and warehouses looked like inscriptions over the graves of dead busi-
nesses’” (OMF, 219). Old Harmon’s dust heaps, the quintessential symbol of an
economy now grounded in waste rather than production, command a panoptic
view of the city: “‘There’s a serpentining walk up each of the mounds, that gives you
the yard and neighbourhood changing every moment. When you get to the top,
there’s a view of the neighbouring premises, not to be surpassed’” (OMF, 101).
Not only do the external industrial structures have the look and feel of death
about them, but internal domestic frameworks seem marked by death as well. Bof-
fin’s Bower, because it was not “sufficiently imbued with life” (OMF, 231), looks as
if it had been denuded to the bone. The present economy seems to have taken the
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 83

flesh from family life and denied the possibilities of the lively domestic environment
for which Dickens hopes. The Lammles, who perhaps represent the most explicit
example of exploitation and fraud, unwittingly house a skeleton in their closet be-
cause of their conniving schemes, which seriously compromise domestic life and
marriage. No doubt, Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death, perhaps mediated by Thomas
Rowlandson’s series, shapes, in part, Dickens’s representations of skeletons here
and in several other novels, namely, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit, and The Mys-
tery of Edwin Drood.36 Given the extent of speculation and fraud in this society, the
heart of domestic culture is either woefully undernourished or deadened to the
core. In contrast, when Bella and Mr. Rokesmith announce to Rumpty Wilfer out-
side of the counting house their plans for marriage, Wilfer muses on the juxtaposi-
tion of the place with the happy domestic news:

The uncongenial oddity of its surroundings, with the two brass knobs
of the iron safe of Checksey, Veneering, and Stobbles staring from a
corner, like the eyes of some dull dragon, only made it the more de-
lightful . . . to think that anything of a tender nature should come off
here, is what tickles me. (OMF, 673–74)

Wilfer’s bemusement over the happy connection between money, marriage,

and domesticity points to other forms of social compensation that Dickens
brings to our attention in the novel. Comically presented but no less effective in
meaning, Dickens offers Mr. Venus as a means to describe the deathly economy
and its effects on social relations and domesticity. Mr. Venus, articulator of
human body parts, and Silas Wegg, a curmudgeon with one wooden leg, ren-
dezvous at Mr. Venus’s shop and home to eat muffins, drink tea among the
“human warious,” and negotiate to keep all of Wegg’s body parts together after
death, because he is a “genteel person” (OMF, 127). They eventually connive to
unearth valuables from the dust mounds, which they would use to extort money
from people who wanted them, especially Mr. Boffin. But Venus reneges on the
deal, claiming that to marry Pleasant Riderhood he must sacrifice the unsavory
portions of his livelihood, since she does not want to regard herself, “‘nor yet be
regarded, in that boney light’” (OMF, 128).
Dickens’s early agents for a renewed domesticity, Lizzie Hexam and Pleasant
Riderhood, resist the culture’s work to transform corpses into commodities. The
opposition of domestically minded women to this kind of commodification re-
moves economic motives from the home and bolsters personal morality within
the family framework. To emphasize morality, Dickens begins in the home,
where compensation turns not on money alone but on a specific continuity be-
tween life and death, not the spiritual connection to which Gaskell attests but an
earthly one of offspring who can inherit it. As Alexander Welsh has suggested,
“The family confers both biological and legal means of coping with death, in the
survival of one’s progeny and their title to one’s property.”37
84 Literary Remains

Dickens also makes a claim here about the relationship between production
and speculation. His assessment appears to be a circular argument but is, in fact,
an indication of his own anxiety about the situation. Lizzie’s and Pleasant’s ob-
jections to the culture’s efforts to expand commerce also reveal that the system of
productivity is dead—if we take literally the meaning of the dead body dredged
from the river and the dismembered body parts in Venus’s shop, which are then
sold for money. In a novel that seems worried about the shift from production to
speculation, Dickens both portrays the apparent slowdown of production and un-
wittingly undermines his desire for increased production by representing as dead
human beings who drive production. Dickens attempts to resolve this anxiety not
by turning to increased state measures to protect capital for production at home
from far-flung speculation abroad but by emphasizing family values. According to
this argument, the moral education that would occur in this sphere would even-
tually teach the value of the common good achieved by pursuing production over
and against the exploitation of others and fraud achieved by financial speculation.
Dickens also utilizes burial reform discourse to critique Victorian society’s
emerging emphasis on individual psychology and competitive individualism fueled
by market capitalism. As the novel developed in the 1860s as the place to explore
individual consciousness and emerging personal subjectivity, Dickens’s sharp crit-
icism in Our Mutual Friend runs upstream from the prevailing social currents. We
can put some perspective on the intensity of his countervailing critique if we turn
to contemporary reviews of Our Mutual Friend. Several early reviewers, including
Henry James, complained that Dickens sorely lacked the talent to explore the psy-
chological nuances of his characters.38 James asserted that Dickens created “fig-
ures” who contribute nothing “to our understanding of human character.”39
Without this psychology, avers George Sott in The Contemporary Review, “success in
the higher walks of idealization is unattainable.”40 As the century progressed, the
critical social issues that formed the core of novels in the 1840s, for example, were
seen as marginal to the development of the private subject. A reviewer from The
Westminster Review proclaims as valuable the movement away from using fiction to
delineate facts and the split of discourses into discrete disciplinary units:

Now art has nothing to do with such ephemeral and local affairs as
Poor Laws and Poor Law Boards. . . . A novel is not the place for dis-
cussions on the Poor Law. If Mr. Dickens has anything to say about the
Poor Law, let him say it in a Pamphlet, or go into Parliament. Who is
to separate in a novel fiction from fact, romance from reality?41

Our Mutual Friend protests the very thing these reviewers proclaim: the separa-
tion of public from private activity, and the seclusion of the private subject from
a society increasingly defined in economic terms. By his creation of Bradley
Headstone as someone who followed the Victorian recipe for self-help, Dickens
surely faults this emphasis on individualism and the competition that capitalism
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 85

breeds. To a reviewer who complained that because there was no psychology in

Our Mutual Friend, and thus no reward for reading the novel, Dickens might at-
test that individual psychology rather than social forms of compensation or ex-
change proves to be at the core of Victorian society’s ill health.42 In other words,
the self-help philosophy demanded that attention be focused on an individual’s
inner characteristics at the expense of her or his social or communal responsi-
bilities. This preoccupation with self-advancement displaces morality, because
the individual cannot be trusted to live and act from a set of moral principles.
What began as a philosophy based upon self-regulation in the 1840s had become
by the 1860s a justification to advance in society at any cost, but that, as we will
see with Bradley Headstone, left individuals morally unable to regulate them-
selves, a condition Gilbert smartly attributes to their lack of self-containment by
way of sexuality, greed, addiction, or obsession.
Dickens’s naming and initial description of Headstone emphasizes his asso-
ciation with burial and tombstones and the psychological pathology that the pun
on “head” and “stone” seems to suggest. Despite his hard work, Headstone is
dense about his emotional poverty and his inability to govern his passions.
Through him we see Dickens’s misgivings about denying birthright and rising in
society’s scale. Rising is a dangerous undertaking in this novel, and nowhere is
this endeavor more clearly articulated in all of its risks than in Headstone. He
wears his hard-won decency rather uncomfortably and mechanically. There is “a
certain stiffness in his manner of wearing this, as if there were a want of adapta-
tion between him and it, recalling some mechanics in their holiday clothes”
(OMF, 266). Headstone’s unease signals a deeper discrepancy that Dickens surely
wants his readers to notice—that despite Headstone’s attempts to improve himself
and his station in life, he can never quite shake those nagging pauper origins, no
matter how much education he has accrued. About his background, Headstone
was “proud, moody, and sullen, desiring it to be forgotten” (OMF, 266).
To compensate for these crude beginnings, Headstone, like Charley Hexam,
seeks an education and becomes a schoolmaster. But Headstone’s education can-
not sooth his seething violence, as we watch him clutch at “respectable hair-
guards” of “respectable watches,” pull at seat chairs, and compulsively chafe his
hands across the tombstones in the churchyard (OMF, 342). Headstone’s pathol-
ogy reveals that education had failed to “reform” him. Indeed, Dickens seems to
question whether national education reform of the 1860s, touted as the chief
means to reduce crime and enhance self-improvement among the poor, ade-
quately prepares members of the working class who want to advance in society.
We perceive Dickens’s anxiety about the effects of a national education, a con-
cern he explores at length in Hard Times, by reading closely his description of
Headstone’s acquisition of knowledge:

He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher’s knowledge. . . .

From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical
86 Literary Remains

stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might

always be ready to meet the demands of retail dealers—history here, geog-
raphy there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left . . . this
care had imparted to his countenance a look of care. (OMF, 266–67)

The warehouses Wrayburn had noticed have been internalized in Headstone to

the extent that his psychological pathology becomes associated with capitalist
economy. Headstone is linked to the social and intellectual system of which he
is a part, but it is a system that Dickens severely criticizes because it assimilates,
as Arnold Kettle has noted, the culture’s commercializing and mechanizing ten-
dencies and its division of knowledge and experience into discrete, unrelated
spheres.43 The shift suggests a serious discrepancy in the entrepreneurial ideal.
Even though real income declined in the 1850s and 1860s, working-class citizens
should be adequately compensated by increased opportunities for improving
their standard of living. Moreover, despite his education, Headstone’s knowl-
edge is simply another commodity in surplus storage in this culture, which now
relies more heavily on finance capitalism than on production.
Despite his attempts to fulfill the self-help philosophy, Headstone is betrayed
by the middle-class work ethic. No matter how much work Headstone does (and
it is a significant amount), he is denied the compensation he seeks—a wife and a
middle-class home. For Dickens, no compensation can be generated by one’s
work alone without the compensation of birthright, inheritance, and the com-
mensurate “right feeling” that comes from exercising one’s moral obligations to-
ward others, which is dependent upon birthright in the first place. The self-help
philosophy, however, insists upon the compensatory nature of hard work but
does not acknowledge its ultimate failure to compensate. Thus Headstone works
compulsively to overcome powerlessness and attempts to control the outcome of
events by trying to manipulate people. Ultimately, though, this activity, if left
unchecked by any moral regulating system of belief, leads to psychological pathol-
ogy and criminal conduct. In the terse exchange between Wrayburn and Head-
stone about Lizzie, Wrayburn insists on acknowledging Headstone’s achievement
in self-advancement by calling him “schoolmaster.” But Headstone rebukes him
by saying his own name and staking a claim to his birthright, which the use of his
name implies. By insisting to Wrayburn that he call him by his name, given the
punning significance I have just described, Headstone expresses an uncanny de-
sire to remain entrenched. Everything about Headstone points to death, and
whatever he does will have little bearing on the outcome.
These two characters enact the larger social battle being waged over claims
to certain kinds of identity, here specified as the self-helper and the gentleman.
Wrayburn, the upper-class, condescending sloth, dismisses Headstone, the lower-
class upstart, by saying “‘your name cannot concern me’” (OMF, 345). But Head-
stone mistakenly believes that self-advancement redeems humble origins, thus
his stern rebuke, “‘You reproach me with my origin’” (OMF, 345).
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 87

For both Wrayburn and Headstone, who respectively ignore or deny origins,
and who are unable to govern themselves morally, criminal conduct lurks just be-
neath the surface of their outward behavior. Wrayburn, for example, abandons
Lightwood to follow Lizzie around London and feels he has committed every
crime in the Newgate calendar. For Headstone’s part, his isolated life and me-
chanical adaptation of middle-class values foster its darker characteristics: puri-
tanism, self-righteousness, and repression. Given education’s emphasis on rote
learning and the culture’s insistence upon “rising,” to the detriment of moral de-
velopment, the society risks creating pathological personalities like Headstone,
who have little choice but to find their compensation in criminality. The narrator
pronounces the effect of this dynamic:

Under his daily restraint [the performance of his “routine of educa-

tional tricks”], it was his compensation, not his trouble to give a glance
towards his state at night, and to the freedom of it being indulged. If
great criminals told the truth—which being great criminals, they do
not—they would very rarely tell of their struggles against crime. Their
struggles are toward it. (OMF, 609)

Thus Headstone struggles toward the inevitable: the murder of Eugene Wray-
burn and Rogue Riderhood.
Dickens positions Headstone in a churchyard to manifest his social dys-
function and pathology. What had been a place for social union, as evidenced by
Betty Higden’s and Johnny’s interments, becomes a site for Headstone’s futile at-
tempt to successfully shape his own self-possessed identity. In his circuit around
the churchyard with Lizzie, Headstone pleads with her to marry him, to domes-
ticate his uncontrollable passion, and thus internalize the last of the middle-class
values he hopes to acquire.

But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in mar-

riage, you could draw me to any good—every good—with equal force. My
circumstances are quite easy, and you would want for nothing. My repu-
tation stands quite high, and would be a shield for yours. If you saw me
at my work, able to do it well and respected in it, you might even come to
take a sort of pride in me;—I would try hard that you should. (OMF, 455)

But because he has only mechanically adapted to middle-class ideals and because,
in the process, he has tried to bury his past, he fails to persuade Lizzie to marry
him. The failure stems from the undeniable fact that he was once a pauper, who
shed familial ties and, therefore, a clear social place that would check his passion:
“‘Yes! you are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources in myself, I
have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near
me or in my thoughts’” (OMF, 452).
88 Literary Remains

Dickens seriously questions whether mere rote education, which serves to

deceive people into thinking they can honestly advance into the middle class, suc-
ceeds in developing a healthy individualism. Through his representation of Head-
stone, Dickens concludes that such a delusion only forces people to deny their
history and their network of relationships, leaving them bereft of a moral analytic
with which to cope in a highly individualistic and competitive culture. Dickens un-
derscores this attitude in Bleak House and the description of Nemo’s burial. The re-
venge of the outcast poor will eventually contaminate the social body, those
complacent brothers and sisters who “hang about the official back stairs.”44 The
self-regulating market that, in turn, was to self-regulate men is turned upside down
in the finance speculative passion of booms and busts. As Headstone talks with
Lizzie, he repeatedly rubs one of the tombstones with his hand until it cracks under
his severe pressure. Dickens frames this scene in such a way as to appropriate a key
concept from the topography of graveyards I discussed earlier. Even though single
graves mark the success of an individual’s life, that person can never be fully sepa-
rated from others in the burial ground. In this emotional scene, Dickens suggests
that self-help fails to extricate completely the individual from the aggregate. Even
as Headstone works compulsively to remove himself from the aggregate, his efforts
succumb to the aggregate, as the crumbled pieces of the marker represent. Despite
Headstone’s earnest attempts to succeed beyond the expectations for his class, he
cannot, because self-help, combined with an overpowering speculative economy,
has failed to create a moral system that would hold Headstone’s passion in check.
Through the representation of death and burial Dickens recuperates the cen-
tral contribution of feelings to social reform. We have seen in Headstone the dele-
terious effects of repressing emotions. In contrast, Jenny Wren is able to control her
feelings, despite her anger about her father’s drunkenness, her deformed body, and
her sharp dislike of Eugene Wrayburn. She earns herself an invitation into the
wealthy Harmon circle, those who have a tremendous power of doing good for
others. The Harmons determine that Jenny has “a claim on their protection, be-
cause of her association with Mrs. Eugene Wrayburn” (OMF, 875). Both Jenny and
Lizzie, because their work as dollmaker and seamstress is connected to prostitution,
need Wrayburn’s and Harmon’s patriarchal protection at the end of the novel.
Meanwhile, however, Jenny engages herself directly with the working-class com-
munity. Rather than living off of the parish, choosing to live by the self-help philos-
ophy or stepping into a highly controlled educational system that distances people
from their origins and kinship networks, Jenny makes a living by recycling waste ma-
terial into dolls modeled from very stylish ladies she spies in her circuits through
London. By literally transforming human beings into precious commodities, Jenny
participates in the market economy, but with a stinging twist that elucidates the full
reach of capitalism. She literally turns the consumerist ladies into commodities.
When they purchase the dolls, then, they purchase themselves. The consumerism
cycle turns back on itself, necessarily feeds on itself, in order to keep the cycle mov-
ing through various stages of production and consumption. Jenny’s economic
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 89

activity, which Dickens privileges because it favors production over speculation,

positions her in the heart of working-class culture in the 1860s, because she turns
everything to her advantage to eke out an income. Unlike Gaffer and Mr. Venus,
who create an industry from the human corpse, Jenny makes her money by copying
the living, a key distinction in Dickens’s economic assessment.
Jenny not only finds economic compensation from her productive work, but
she also finds moral compensation in the flowers, birds, and visions from her
childhood. These forms of compensation involve humanitarian values that Dick-
ens believes have disappeared from society and political economy. Jenny’s visions
seek to restore the value of sympathy and pity for others in the community. By her
playful refrain, “‘Come up and be dead,’” which Jenny speaks to Fascination
Fledgeby, the premier predator in the novel, Dickens proposes that speculation
and fraud cease to exist in this culture. Because Jenny has not been corrupted by
the speculation mania, and because she has not lost her moral sense, she is able to
reintroduce humanitarian values into social relations. To Fledgeby’s question,
“‘What’s it like to be dead?” Jenny extols: “‘Oh, so peaceful and so thankful. And
you hear the people who are alive, crying, and working, and calling to one another
down in the close dark streets, and you seem to pity them so!’” (OMF, 334). The
expression of sympathy toward others in the community is crucial to Dickens’s
sense of what society should value. Unfortunately, at least on the metaphoric level,
the working-class girl must apparently die in order to achieve this social vision.
I do not mean to suggest that Jenny Wren is a redemptive figure in the novel,
as some critics have argued. But I do believe that Dickens makes her a model of
someone in the working-class community who understands her role as a participant
in a productive economy without being ambitious to move out of her class, who
convinces the gentleman to recognize his role and responsibilities, and who be-
speaks a moral independence without angling for complete economic indepen-
dence. During a conversation with Eugene Wrayburn about broken promises and
contracts, the stuff of his trade, Jenny shares a vision from her childhood. A host of
children takes pity on her, ignores her beaten, ragged look, acknowledges her bod-
ily pain, and invites her to play. Nowhere in the fancy does she ask to die, only to be
comforted in her poverty. Wrayburn remembers her vision on his own deathbed
and invites Jenny to join him there so that he may experience it before he too dies.
The vision invokes community and its capacity to console the person in pain; it is
not to be confused with death itself, especially of those who have abandoned their
familial responsibilities. Mr. Dolls’s death and burial seem to be an indifferent ex-
perience for his daughter. Jenny moves her workbench to make room for his corpse
in the parlor while she busies herself making dolls in order to bury him because she,
too, like Betty Higden, refuses to speculate on death. In striking contrast to Head-
stone, who has no friends, Jenny remains mindful of community and family and the
moral obligations they require of her. Because she does, she contributes to Wray-
burn’s transformation and participates in the new society formed by John Har-
mon’s restoration to his own birthright.
90 Literary Remains

IV
Dickens shifts the infrastructure of compensation by his use of the river in Our
Mutual Friend. When he represents the Thames as polluted, full of bodies that
earn men money, and he describes the site of Lizzie’s shame, Betty Higden’s
death and burial, and Lizzie’s rescue of Eugene Wrayburn, Dickens participates
in the effort to consolidate a more comprehensive new urban order, an order,
as Gilbert suggests, dependent upon the novel’s characters claiming their identi-
ties in the face of the river. As Luckin has demonstrated, anxiety about the foul
state of the Thames began in the 1820s and culminated in the crisis of 1858,
when Parliament was forced to remedy its polluted river by legislating direct state
intervention in the problem in the early 1860s.45 In an argument I can only sum-
marize here, what finally motivated the government to intervene, what finally
loosened the grip of bungling local parochial authorities who claimed that the
river was someone else’s responsibility, was a shift in discourse. In other words,
only when the river was described in national and imperial terms did the sense
of national helplessness fall away, replaced by the central government’s edict to
revamp London’s sewer system. To repurify the Thames, then, was to repurify
the nation. Luckin concludes:

London was perceived as the potentially rotten heart of the body politic:
and if London were to be fatally afflicted the rest of the country would al-
most certainly perish. All this had the effect, again, of unifying opinion
in defence of distinctly metropolitan values. The Empire without: decay
and rottenness within—these were the meanings and ideological rhetorics
which were generated and deployed in the interest of social stability. To
save the river was to consolidate the new urban-industrial order.46

Dickens’s representations of death and burial in or near the river, however, stress
that society’s ills were moral as well as physical and economic. By manipulating
the association of death, waste, and economic compensation to include moral
imperatives, Dickens shows that society’s repurification depends upon more
than mechanical or social engineering. For society to be repurified, both body
and soul must be taken into account.
Dickens’s representations of death and burial depict the body, personhood,
and mourners as agents in a complex collective consciousness at work in society.
Given the historical connotations of the Thames in the 1860s as emblematic of
a new industrial order, and given that the representations of death are social con-
structions, those scenes that locate death near the river are extremely important
to Dickens’s social vision, because he wants all aspects of life, even what is con-
sidered waste, to be subordinate to a predominant moral view. Dickens proposes
that those who have filial rather than economic relationships experience the
dead through visions or by claiming to hear their voices. The John Harmon plot,
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 91

for example, which depends upon his liminal position in the novel, allows for
Bella’s conversion from mercenary values and for a social reordering, namely,
the return of the rightful heir to the Harmon estate.
On one very explicit level, Dickens’s representation of Betty Higden’s river-
side death is an argument for the repeal of the New Poor Law and the return to a
way of life in which the poor would remain independent from the parish but avail-
able to accept the kindness of others in the community who want to care for them.
Once Betty leaves London, she wanders back to the rural countryside and eventu-
ally collapses near the river’s edge. There she sustains a vision of her dead children
waving to her from a barge passing by on the river, and then dies, “untouched by
workhouse hands,” with money for her burial sewn into her dress (OMF, 566).
Dickens not only critiques the failure of centralized government to ameliorate the
distress of the poor, but he also suggests that Betty’s death, because it has the ca-
pacity to interrupt and interfere with what a culture takes for granted, contributes
significantly to society’s redefinition. First, unlike the gentlemen at Kensal Green
Cemetery in London, who daily checked the progress of their tombs, Betty de-
clines burial insurance and the institutional means of speculating on “the acts of
Providence with money.”47 Because she has chosen not to belong to a burial club,
choosing instead to save money herself, Betty counters the speculative boom that,
as we have seen, touched matters of death. She refuses to spend money now so that
later she will profit by her investment with a proper, not pauper, funeral. Second,
Betty dies outdoors with her moral independence intact. Such independence, as
Arnold Kettle has argued, “is incompatible either with ‘rising’ or with the accep-
tance of charity which has bourgeois strings attached to it.”48 Third, because the
river is a dominant visual image of both the filthy effects of wanton accumulation
of wealth and power and the mainstream of corruption, Betty’s dignified death on
its banks challenges a society and its anti-humanitarian values that would allow
such filth and poverty to exist: “For, we turn up our eyes and say that we are all
alike in death, and we might turn them down and work the saying out in this
world, so far. It would be sentimental, perhaps?” (OMF, 578). Dickens wants to
rejuvenate sympathy in a society that has grown callous toward the poor. The sym-
pathy he invokes is meant to foster a reclamation of responsibility for the poor that
has, since 1834, been taken over by centralized government.
In contrast to the bourgeois attitude toward money as the sole means of com-
pensation for one’s efforts, which in turn isolates the classes, Betty’s death and fu-
neral have a pronounced collective payoff. The Milveys, Rokesmith (the disguised
John Harmon), Bella, Lizzie, and Sloppy intervene in Betty’s isolated death
to reintegrate her into social communion. Like Little Nell’s burial in The Old
Curiosity Shop, this action takes on special social significance for the survivors as
well. By dealing with Betty in common, they become conscious of the ties that
unite them to one another.49 Bella provides the best and most important example
of this heightened social consciousness, because Betty’s death provokes a process
of self-revelation and conversion in Bella, which begins with her conversation
92 Literary Remains

with Lizzie. Lizzie checks Bella’s mercenary patterns of thinking by asking whether
a woman really gains anything except through a belief in her own uncalculating
love. Her question shames Bella into recognizing her mercenary nature and
sparks a process of conversion essential to the restoration of a domesticity that
bolsters a more patriarchal society. Most immediately, the encounter with Lizzie
causes Bella to warm to Rokesmith’s affectionate gestures toward her on their
train ride home to London.
A more precise extension of the social union created by death that I have
just been describing occurs with Lizzie Hexam’s changing relationship with dead
bodies, buried bodies, and bodies on the verge of death. Dickens fashions Lizzie
after working-class women who prepared corpses for burial in local communities.
These women act as agents of social continuity, handling the sick and the old as
life left this world for the next.50 In the first instance, Lizzie accompanies Betty
to her death on the banks of the river and, presumably, negates the effects of the
New Poor Law that left people to die alone in the workhouse. Lizzie’s presence
at Betty’s death invokes a paradigm in which these two working-class women
model independence, mutuality, and working-class morality, not dependent
upon upward mobility or bourgeois charity.
In the second instance, Lizzie’s experience of hearing her father’s voice
while she waits anxiously for him to return from his work on the river and Dick-
ens’s echo of it several pages later expose the moral bankruptcy of contemporary
society. Without someone like Lizzie, who ensures the continuity of life and
death, the corpse can only be viewed as an object and not as someone, dead or
alive, who engenders relationships with family or community. At first, while
Lizzie awaits her father’s return, she tries to connect with him. She “opened the
door, and said in an alarmed tone, ‘Father, was that you calling me?’ And again,
‘Father!’ And once again, after listening, ‘Father! I thought I heard you call me
twice before!’” (OMF, 211). Once his body is discovered and “the form of the
bird of prey, dead some hours, lay stretched upon the shore” (OMF, 221), Dick-
ens takes the description of Gaffer to a logical extreme, given society’s predatory
nature and Lizzie’s absence from the scene. The wind cynically queries whether
such an object could ever have spoken, spiritlike, to its daughter: “The wind
sweeps jeeringly over Father, whips him with the frayed ends of his dress and his
jagged hair . . . then, in a rush, it cruelly taunts him. Father was that you calling
me? was it you, the voiceless and the dead?” (OMF, 222). Lizzie’s attempt to con-
nect with her dead father is reminiscent, in some respects, of Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Mary Barton, whose dead mother’s spirit returns to console her daughter. Both
authors seek to reestablish the continuity between life and death as a necessary
criterion for social rehabilitation. While Gaskell argues for the pivotal position
that women must occupy for society to be renewed, Dickens, through Lizzie, in-
vokes the father as the key figure for social continuity, not because of supernat-
ural influence but because, through patriarchy, he has the potential to instill and
maintain a moral sense within political economy. In this particular scene, Dick-
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 93

ens gets it both ways. He shows Lizzie’s tendency to incline toward the father,
which is necessary for Dickens’s restoration of a patriarchal form of life, and he
reveals that working-class fathers (not only Gaffer but Mr. Dolls as well) who
deny the values of their working-class community are not only not compensated
by the gentlemanly ideal, but they are left for dead.
Not uncoincidentally, Wrayburn, who must eventually come to accept his
birthright but whose prurient voyeuristic habits indicate just how far he is from the
gentlemanly ideal, lurks just outside of the Hexam home as if to indicate his own
need for Lizzie’s transformative and healing powers. In return, their marriage on
his deathbed transforms Lizzie by curtailing her threatening independence, rescu-
ing her from the precarious working-class life and destroying her sense of shame
and guilt, which emerged from her father’s mysterious death. Eugene’s marriage to
Lizzie, finally, according to the Voice of Society, makes a gentleman out of him.
In contrast, Charley insists to Lizzie, as they argue by the river’s edge, that
while he owes Lizzie his education, he will not tolerate her interference with his
social climbing. The river becomes the dominant metaphor between them as
they attempt to renegotiate restitution with one another and with their father’s
fateful occupation and death. To Lizzie’s claim that she could never be far from
the river, and, therefore, never far from her origins and working-class attitudes,
Charley retorts, “‘Nor could you be too far from it to please me’” (OMF, 278).
On the one hand, Charley wants to be compensated for his hard work and edu-
cation in conventional market culture terms, an advanced position in society far
from the river, which otherwise positions him among the working-class commu-
nity and its industrial, productive associations. On the other hand, Lizzie makes
amends for the shame and guilt that hovers over her father’s grave by denying
that bodies have only economic value and by claiming that she, because of her
position as mediator between life and death, can effect social union.
Dickens creates the critical moment when Lizzie rescues Eugene from the
river during a scene that surely suggests the imminent restructuring of society
across class lines. Opening the idealized rural scene reminiscent of John Con-
stable’s paintings, workers, all colorfully clad, leave the paper mill cheerfully and
wend their way home. Defacing the perfect rural setting, however, is a fair, which
Dickens describes ironically as a scene of depravity. According to Stallybrass and
White’s theory about the formation of social hierarchies, the presence of a car-
nival or fair indicates an instance of “a generalized economy of transgression and
of the recoding of high-low relations across the whole social structure.”51 Dick-
ens includes the fair to anticipate the social significance of Lizzie’s heroic rescue
of Wrayburn from the river and the brink of death, but by describing the fair as
a scene of “depravity,” Dickens again simultaneously shows two sides of the same
coin. He wants to show the need to recode society, but he by no means wants to
transgress high-low relations, because he has in mind a model that very much de-
pends upon a patriarchal hierarchy. Dickens again uses Lizzie positioned on the
threshold between life and death as a pivot for the recoding of class relations.
94 Literary Remains

Dickens’s desire for revitalized social relations is most evident in the final
chapter of the novel, when Lady Tippins and Mortimer Lightwood argue over
whether Eugene should have married Lizzie. Lady Tippins describes Lizzie ac-
cording to her market functions in society: “a female waterman, turned factory
girl” (OMF, 889). Mortimer Lightwood, on the other hand, describes Lizzie ac-
cording to terms associated with moral character: virtuous, courageous, ener-
getic, and beautiful. Lizzie, in her secret conversation with Eugene and her
rescue of him, enacts this shift away from describing people according to their
labor roles.52 If we were to compare her rescue of Wrayburn to the opening
scene in the novel in which the body is salvaged, we can see the shift Dickens has
in mind. First, that “old time” in which she could not bear to cast her eyes on the
corpse her father had salvaged from the river now enables her to steady the boat,
row against the stream, and fix her eyes on Wrayburn’s disfigured face, which
was “above and beyond disfigurement in her eyes” (OMF, 769). Now Lizzie re-
deems that “old time” by transforming what had been a corporeal commodity
into a person capable of love and eventual marriage and an occasion for the
expression of social values and obligations.53
Dickens describes in compensatory terms their marriage, which rescues
Lizzie from her working-class functions and home along the Thames and returns
her to a “naturally” gendered position as wife, saving Wrayburn from his indo-
lent and rascal lifestyle. At one point during Eugene’s precarious recovery, which
depends upon Lizzie’s presence, he begs Lightwood not to bring Headstone to
justice, so that “Lizzie’s and my reparation” will come before all. Several pages
later, when Lightwood wants to be sure he understands Eugene, he asks: “‘You
wish me to speak to her, and tell her so, and entreat her to be your wife. You ask
her to kneel at this bedside and be married to you, that your reparation may be
complete. Is that so?’” (OMF, 811). Not only does Dickens touch upon Eugene’s
personal amends to Lizzie, but he also has in mind a larger social reality that her
presence engenders; that is, the structure for social relations would be restored
to a more familial framework. Thus it comes as no surprise that Twemlow an-
nounces Lizzie to be a “lady” and that, for Wrayburn’s marriage to her, he is en-
titled to claim a paternal benediction and a marriage blessing “at the family
altar” (OMF, 884). Dickens figures Lizzie as a version of an idealized femininity
that looks death in the face. Through her relationships with the dead and the
dying, she assumes the task of repurifying society by restoring the gentlemanly
ideal and the moral system associated with it. Ironically, Dickens’s figuration of
Lizzie, drawn within the framework of domesticity, allows her to climb socially.
Both she and Wrayburn are rewarded with their lives and with the comfort that
comes with patronage and family. Dickens’s unflinching diagnosis of contem-
porary society’s disease demands that self-conscious individualism literally be
dead and buried, as Headstone’s name suggests. In its stead, Dickens brings to
life the ghostly John Harmon to propose that the gentlemanly ideal must insist
upon the burial of the self.
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 95

As Harmon faces his mysterious circuit through London on the night of his disap-
pearance, he compares the experience to narratives of escape from prison, “‘where
the little track of fugitives in the night always seem to take the shape of the great
round world, on which they wander; as if it were a secret law’” (OMF, 422). Har-
mon’s comparison reveals Dickens’s desire to break subjects free from the vicious
cycle of self-monitoring behavior best exemplified in Bradley Headstone. Rather
than affirm criminal behavior and pathological individuals who emerge from a so-
ciety driven by the self-help philosophy, this scene, reconfigured from Headstone’s
encounter with Lizzie in the churchyard, celebrates the burial of the self in favor of
a social system grounded in family, domesticity, and patriarchy. The novel thus ex-
propriates literal burial to articulate an alternative subject to Headstone, not the self-
alienated criminal but the benevolent patriarch who promotes harmony and whose
property and home become a manor house to an entire community.
Since Dickens positions both Headstone and Harmon in the churchyard,
and because both articulate a bald self-consciousness, some comparison between
the two will clarify Dickens’s expropriation of literal burial to the development
of John Harmon. In Headstone and his strict classification as a schoolmaster
without regard for family or class origins, we see the problem of the individual
who becomes wholly isolated, learns only individualistic middle-class values and
not social ones, and becomes, finally, an outlaw. The geography of the church-
yard represents the fracture within the individual rent by an emphasis on an ex-
treme version of self-help. Rather than affirming the continuity between life and
death, which assumes a relationship with members of a community or family,
the churchyard frames the alienated individual severed from a community and
from opportunities for social relations and a social union not determined by
class but by moral obligation. For Headstone, there is no point of reference out-
side of himself—no family, no working-class community, no wife and, therefore,
no morality, not unlike John Barton’s dilemma in Mary Barton. Because Head-
stone finds no compensation for his extensive work, he can only look to himself
to create rewards by manipulating events and people and by excessive rumina-
tion. Since he no longer has a larger frame of reference by which to evaluate his
desires and receive just rewards for work well done, he becomes an outlaw who
commits murder, an act Elaine Hadley describes as “the deepest expression of
antagonized social relationship.”54
For John Harmon, compensation inheres within his family system. He sim-
ply must come, in time, to recognize it. Harmon returns to England deeply mis-
trustful, shrinking from his father’s memory, fearing a mercenary wife, and
skeptical of money’s growing effect on him—a lack of gratitude for others and his
own developing avaricious character. The ideological work of this novel is to in-
sist that society must necessarily be formed around something other than purely
economic terms. Inclined to reject the life of economic relations his father’s
96 Literary Remains

money represents, Harmon articulates the national implications that Dickens per-
ceives. The whole country seems determined to have Harmon dead (OMF, 428).
The nation moves at breakneck speed against the kind of life Harmon represents,
turning instead to rampant speculation, empty forms of work, predation, “noth-
ing but the self for selfishness to see behind it” (OMF, 780).
In this novel, money is a symptom of the selfish “I.” In an iron-fisted form
of patriarchy that Dickens hopes to redefine with benevolence, Old Harmon dis-
inherits his daughter and later restricts his son’s inheritance should he not marry
according to his father’s wishes. Dickens further elaborates on this position with
a number of other marriages based upon money or what is perceived as the pos-
sibility for money. The Lammles make amends for their miscalculation in mar-
riage by hatching a conspiracy with Fascination Fledgeby, who will marry Miss
Podsnap, because it is “a partnership affair” (OMF, 476), a money speculation in
which she will be sold “into wretchedness for life” (OMF, 476). Fledgeby inher-
ited from his father a propensity to bargain for everything and to view marriage
as an essentially economic transaction. Money, to say the least, complicates fam-
ily matters because, as Mr. Boffin explained to Bella in an effort to curb her mer-
cenary appetite, it corrupts character, spoils people, and breeds mistrust.
In this economic environment, the suspicion that marks middle-class per-
ceptions of the working class touches middle-class relations as well. The very de-
fense that was to protect the middle class from tumbling into a working-class life
fraught with suspicion instead makes them economically vulnerable. By repre-
senting the extensive reach of mistrust that money motivates without reference
to class distinctions, Dickens complicates the ready assumption that money
earned in any fashion necessarily improves society. Quite the contrary, money
not only does not protect the middle class from charges of suspicion and fraud
but seriously endangers what Dickens considers to be the two central pillars of
society—marriage and family. For this novel to successfully restore these values
without denying the need for money, Dickens must construct a rightful conti-
nuity between life and death. Birthright and inheritance, rather than money gar-
nered from speculation and predation, position family and marriage at the
center of society, because organizing society around economic categories alone
has proven ineffective. Money slotted in a familial, patriarchal system protects so-
ciety from the threats of a volatile market. This birthright, moreover, while con-
centrated on the Harmon plot, is not limited to the upper classes. Dickens
redefines the possibility for inheritance even among the working class. Pleasant
Riderhood’s mother, for example, intended fifteen shillings she secreted away in
a pillow as inheritance for her daughter, and notice of it was “the last intelligi-
ble confidential communication made to her by the departed” (OMF, 406).
The continuity of life and death manifested in the form of inheritance and
birthright depends upon the “burial” of the “knowledge of I” long enough for
Harmon to erect a hierarchical “machine” that he will operate by the end of the
novel (OMF, 426, 430). According to the novel’s calculus, individuals must reject
 “To Profit Us When He Was Dead” 97

thinking of themselves as isolated persons whose relationships with others are

determined by predation and greed. Re-engaging inheritance and patronage as
the organizing principle for society interrupts predatory behavior, buries the la-
tent pathological self, and brings home all diverse characters to Harmon’s bower
by “a very broad and free construction” of association (OMF, 875). This home,
in turn, is anchored by Harmon’s wife, Bella, who reanimates a domestic vision
framed by “put[ting] perfect faith” in John Harmon as patriarch (OMF, 815).55 In
the novel’s conclusion, Dickens implicitly challenges contemporary economic
forms of incorporation, namely, joint-stock companies and limited liability. For
joint-stock companies to exist, for example, only a “memorandum of association”
with very little financial commitment on the part of corporate members had to be
registered. Limited liability broke the hold that the moral had on the economic,
because individual investors were no longer responsible for financial failure. With
the creation of the broad and free construction of association established by Har-
mon, Dickens reintroduces moral obligation to economic relationships that
recent corporate law had erased.
Our Mutual Friend explores the logic of compensation within the problem-
atic of burial and Dickens’s attempt to intervene in the movement to position
the corpse as a locus of monetary value. Recognizing that the representation of
more fluid, ambiguous boundaries between the living and the dead is a means to
social transformation, the novel expropriates literal burial to suggest John Har-
mon as an alternative subject to Headstone and to argue for the resurrection of
the gentlemanly ideal and the death and burial of self-help. Indeed, through the
course of the novels discussed here, Dickens demonstrates that the commodifi-
cation of the body proceeds from a market culture that isolates persons from
their social groups and fuels a move to radical individuation that takes people
to pathological and deathly extremes. Rather than affirm individual competi-
tiveness inherent in the self-help philosophy, Dickens argues for the burial of self
in favor of a conservative vision that would restore family, domesticity, and pa-
triarchy to the heart of social relations. Dickens, through his restoration of the
corpse to its social context, reworks the increasingly rigid, static, and primarily
economic avenues for social relations to transform Victorian society.
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 Chapter 4
Death Eclipsed
The Contested Churchyard
in Thomas Hardy’s Novels

To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker way than to watch—
to be a waker, as the country people call it.
—Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

Like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy writes unforgettably
of death: of men and women who “learn to take the universe seriously” by wak-
ing the dead and dying; that is, by remaining awake over the corpse or corpse in
waiting. Unlike Gaskell and Dickens, however, Hardy’s fiction reflects critically
not only on the rural past but on its potential to shape emerging forms of na-
tionhood in the last third of the nineteenth century. Hardy captures this dy-
namic in an eloquent speech he gave after he received the Freedom of the
Borough of Dorchester on November 16, 1910. After expressing his apprecia-
tion and gratitude for the award, Hardy’s remarks turned both on the need to
preserve the visible relics of the local past and on the sad realization that the
“human Dorchester” Hardy had once known could not be preserved.1 To find
the Dorchester he knew best, he had only to go to the cemetery, where “the
names on white stones, one after the other, recall the voices cheerful and sad,
anxious and indifferent, that are missing from the dwellings and pavements.”2
Hardy’s reflections reveal his desire to recover the truth of rural life through the
silenced voices of those resting in the churchyard. He becomes a kind of an-
thropologist, who believes that the contemplation of death and burial and the
commensurate conjuring of forgotten voices from the past teach us to take the
“universe seriously” and to become wakers ourselves, family members or friends
who sit with the dying, watching attentively for death’s arrival and then acting as
mediators between this life and the next by preparing the body for burial.
The details of death represented in the major novels show Hardy to be a care-
ful observer of death’s features, which, when brought into focus, convey signifi-
cant issues about English life. With Hardy’s disinterment of Wessex, the novels

99
100 Literary Remains

themselves become artifacts garnered from his own archeological dig in which he
recovers and rearticulates country life. Hardy surely sees his novels as a repository
for vanishing information, but he also believes that the apparently lost world of
the dead has profound lessons to teach the living: the power of the corpse, for ex-
ample, to transform the lives of individuals and communities; the unique func-
tion of the churchyard to unite people across space and time; and the ultimate
capacity of death itself to redefine national identity at a time when mass migra-
tions from villages to cities challenged England’s primary sense of itself as an
organic rural culture.
Hardy’s materialist account of human subjectivity, notes William Cohen,
belongs to a well-established nineteenth-century tradition about the body and its
capacity to influence less tangible realities such as consciousness and psychology,
notions of self and mind.3 Cohen reminds readers of efforts by Henry Maudsley,
Alexander Bain, William Carpenter, George Henry Lewes, and, most especially,
Herbert Spencer to correlate these human intangibles with somatic conditions.
This long-standing tradition explains, in part, why literary critics have tended to
elucidate the relative two-dimensional qualities to Hardy’s characters, who are
less motivated by psychological complexities than they are by a fluid dynamic of
sensations from within and outside the body. “These perceptually permeable
bodies,” according to Cohen, “are contiguous with the natural world, that land-
scape is in turn a percipient body, and that the two bodies are in a mutually con-
stitutive relation.”4 Cohen’s cogent account of the body’s relationship to the
land highlights my own appreciation of Hardy’s use of dead bodies and the
churchyards where they reside as mutually constitutive of individual, communal,
and national subjectivity.
But Hardy’s representations of death and burial and the commensurate ef-
fects on the subjectivity of survivors are not without complication. Even as he
makes a strong case for the need to appreciate England’s rural past and to inte-
grate it into contemporary definitions of nationhood, Hardy discloses his own
skepticism about the success of such a project.5 The pacific restoration of village
life occurs not without significant violence to outsiders, to women who trans-
gress social and moral boundaries and to men ambitious to succeed in urban
economic centers. The rupture in social cohesion introduced by modern con-
cerns wreaks havoc on English rural life to such an extent that it seems beyond
repair. By the time we come to the conclusion of Jude the Obscure (1895), the re-
suscitation of rural life Hardy promises in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) may
be in vain. Increasingly, over the course of Hardy’s novels, the celebratory vision
of death as an arbiter of history gives way to a growing complacency about the
past and an intensifying reticence to stand in death’s proximity, whether as
waker of the corpse or as watcher at the grave. Corpses disappear from view as if
to suggest that the lessons they teach impede the progress of a developing nation.
Given Hardy’s anthropological approach to death in order to chart evolving
notions of English identity, especially as expressed in its rural context, it is nec-
 Death Eclipsed 101

essary to survey at some length another institutional use of death that makes
claims about English history and identity, the burial debate staged in the 1870s
and 1880s between Anglicans and Nonconformists over access to rural church-
yards. At stake in the debate are competing definitions of nationhood. On the
one hand, the Church of England, because of its status as a national church, felt
that it must protect its rituals, which are indicative of England’s national iden-
tity, from the contaminating influences of other denominations. On the other
hand, Dissenters believed that the national church must take its role seriously by
embracing England’s increasing diversity both at home and abroad, especially
through its expectations and regulations of religious practices such as burial.

I
In late August 1878, in the tiny hamlet of Akenham, Suffolk, England, two-year
old Joseph Ramsey, son of Baptist parents Edward and Sarah Ramsey, died. Un-
fortunately for the Ramseys, the closest town with a cemetery or chapel graveyard
was Ipswich, four miles away and too far to walk. So they made application to Fa-
ther George Drury, the incumbent at the Akenham parish church, to have their
unbaptized child buried in consecrated ground in the Akenham parish church-
yard.6 Mr. Drury, later described by the Suffolk Chronicle as “Firm Father
George,” positively denied the request because the child had not been baptized,
but he gave permission for the child to be buried behind the church in uncon-
secrated ground reserved for stillborn infants, on the condition that no religious
service would be performed within the graveyard.7 Naturally the parents did not
want their child to be “buried like a dog” (East Anglian Daily Times, August 26,
1878, in Fletcher, 24) and so arranged, through the kindness of Mr. Ramsey’s
employer, to have an Independent Congregationalist minister from Ipswich, Mr.
Wickham Tozer, officiate at a service for the child to take place immediately in
front of the church gate.
When the funeral procession arrived—late—the sexton, who had prepared the
grave and been primed by “Firm Father George” about the special circumstances,
met the family and minister and suggested that they take the child immediately to
the gravesite to be buried and then proceed to the outlying meadow to enact the
service, since the child was unbaptized and it would be a sin to provide it with a
Christian burial. Meanwhile, both ministers paced in their respective lanes, each
silently fuming at the presence of the other. According to the newspaper account,
they resembled “two game birds pluming themselves for a brush” (East Anglian
Daily Times, August 26, 1878, in Fletcher, 24). Mr. Drury believed that since the
child was unbaptized, absolutely no Christian funeral service of any sort should
be read over the body. Mr. Tozer resented the Anglican clergyman’s grievous in-
trusion on the sad proceedings. Ignoring the sexton and the instructions from Mr.
Drury, Mr. Tozer, with the coffin of the child set down in the middle of the path
just outside of the churchyard gate, began his service by reading several Scripture
102 Literary Remains

passages. Suddenly, the situation turned painfully exciting. Mr. Drury roared out
of the churchyard and confronted Mr. Tozer about the illegality of his actions. Ob-
servers feared that the two humble churchmen would come to blows as a ten-
minute heated verbal altercation ensued. As Mr. Drury vociferously complained
that the funeral was late and incited Mr. Tozer to bury the body at once and to
hold the service after, Mr. Tozer, in a steady and commanding voice, continued
with the prayers. Finally, irritated with Mr. Drury’s insensitive insistence on the
rules, Mr. Tozer appealed to his Christian manhood: “‘I appeal to your manhood,
and beg you not to torture the feelings of these poor people at a time like this’”
(East Anglian Daily Times, August 26, 1878, in Fletcher, 26). Mr. Drury retorted
that manhood had nothing to do with it, but that he must teach his parishioners
(few as they were) that he could not sanction the proceedings. As the debate con-
tinued, Mr. Tozer accused Mr. Drury: “‘You have a very priestly garb, and I sup-
pose you take that as equivalent to being one, but you are destitute of the spirit of
your Master, and you have not even a spark of humanity in you, or you could not
be capable of this conduct.’” Mr. Drury quickly countered, “‘I don’t see what hu-
manity has to do with it. That child (pointing to the coffin on the ground with his
umbrella) has not been baptized, and it is therefore, not a Christian, and I object
to its being buried as such’” (East Anglian Daily Times, August 26, 1878, in Fletcher,
27). After calling Mr. Drury a “disgrace to humanity,” Mr Tozer proceeded with
the service, while Mr. Drury locked the gate to the churchyard and went home.
After this sad episode, the service concluded, the child was buried in the graveyard,
and the congregation returned to the public lane to read the burial service and to
conclude the ceremony.
But the debate initiated by the contentious burial at Akenham festered in
the press along with extensive coverage about the libel charges brought by Drury
against Frederick Wilson, editor of the East Anglian Daily Times. Drury claimed
that he was misrepresented in the story about the burial at Akenham—a story
written, as it turns out, by Tozer, the Congregationalist minister who presided at
the burial.8 Tozer felt, given the egregious nature of the encounter, that it was
important to make the story public, and so with the help of Ramsey’s employer
and the local churchwarden, he wrote the story and submitted it to Wilson, who
then published the unsigned report. Evidence from the trial record outlines
what seems to have been at stake in late-nineteenth-century burial reform dis-
cussions, namely, authority over burials in predominantly Anglican churchyards
in the countryside. As we know from earlier discussions, burial reform at mid-
century focused largely on sanitation, a movement spearheaded in large measure
by Edwin Chadwick, who argued vigorously for national regulations to achieve
more hygienic churchyards and cemeteries, especially in urban areas, where the
problems were perceived as most fierce. The Cemeteries Clauses Act of 1847 al-
lowed for the development of extramural cemeteries in which space would be
provided for both Anglican and Nonconformist graves, and where services could
be performed “‘according to the rites of any church or congregation other than
 Death Eclipsed 103

the Church of England.’”9 In 1852, the wide-ranging Burial Act made it possible
for the Board of Health to acquire and manage new cemeteries, and it restricted
and finally discontinued burial in London.
In the greater part of rural England, however, public cemeteries were relatively
unknown. Only the old parish churchyards, such as Akenham’s, remained avail-
able for use. By civil law, everyone who died in the village, Anglican or Noncon-
formist, had a legal right to be buried in the parish churchyard, but only Church
of England clergy could preside and collect the requisite burial fees, whether or not
they had actually officiated, or read the burial service. As we have seen with the
Ramseys, not everyone wished for the Anglican burial service, nor did Dissenting
ministers appreciate being excluded from performing burial services for their
parishioners in their time of need. From their point of view, the situation involved
a serious infringement on religious liberty. Furthermore, some Dissenters and
Nonconformists really wanted to be buried in the churchyard so that they could be
near their ancestors until Judgement Day. Throughout rural England, then, death
and burial were fraught with this intensely religious debate about who, exactly,
could be buried in the parish churchyard, what religious service, literally, could be
read over the body, and where, precisely, the body would be buried.
Furthermore, Anglican clergymen were mired in certain religious contexts
that made many, especially in the rural areas, feel embattled. Frances Knight,
who has studied this situation extensively, admits that “Anglican clergymen were
torn between the attempt to maintain what they believed to be their traditional
role in society, and the need to respond and adjust to a myriad of new pres-
sures.”10 For example, she remarks on the role of second-class curates, their on-
going efforts to make a living, and their increasing sense of isolation, especially
as the Dissenting population sharply increased, and new Nonconformist chapels
sprang up all around them. Amid this time of transformation, when the Church
of England had been changed, in the space of a century, from a church of the na-
tion to the largest denomination among many, Anglican clergy evaluated parish-
ioners according to their commitment to Anglicanism and, most significantly for
this discussion, thought of the church as a place for the devout rather than as a
site for community.11
The Dissenters, for their part, gained significant headway after the 1830s, when
the Methodists provided a new framework by which to view the world. According
to Alun Howkins, Methodists, “[c]onvinced by their own experiences of the injus-
tice of rural life, armed with the rhetoric of the Bible and trained in . . . [the] ‘school
of eloquence’, the lay preachers . . . became powerful advocates of social and politi-
cal change. In their advocacy of freedom of religious belief and practice, they chal-
lenged the dominance of the Church of England in the countryside.”12
In particular, the Akenham case brings into sharp relief the contours of the
late-nineteenth-century religious landscape concerning burial. First, the conse-
quences of being unbaptized concern everyone involved. For Anglicans, and for
Drury in particular, the fact of unbaptism, despite the child’s membership in an
104 Literary Remains

active Baptist family, excludes the child from membership in the larger Christian
family. During the trial, when pressed about the condition of the child in an-
other world because it had not been made a Christian, Drury refused to con-
demn the child but only reiterated that it was not a viable member of the
Christian community. Similarly, in Tess, the vicar refuses to condemn the child,
but he, like Drury, does not overextend himself to help Tess with funeral
arrangements. Ironically, Hardy is careful to note that the vicar tried to visit Tess
and, undoubtedly, baptize Sorrow, but since he was rebuffed by John Durbey-
field, his active responsibilities ended there. As J. Carvell Williams, a Noncon-
formist political organizer, remarks in his A Plea for a Free Churchyard (1870),
“The same clergyman who is compelled to refrain from reading the Service over
the remains of the innocent and the virtuous, is also compelled to read it over
the reprobate and the godless. He may not use words of hope and thankfulness
in regard to the helpless infant: he must commit to the ground the body of the
drunkard, the adulterer and the thief in ‘sure and certain hope of the Resurrec-
tion to eternal life.’”13 Aware of these dreadful hypocrisies, Hardy exposes the
condemnation that has occurred for the unbaptized and baptized alike and re-
veals, just as the Akenham burial case does, how the church fails in its vocation
to serve others.
Much of this failure occurs in the Anglican refusal to allow the burial service
to be read at funerals for the unbaptized. For Drury, as he states for the record,
the Church of England orders that the burial service should not be used in the
case of unbaptized persons because the child, since unbaptized and not a viable
member of the Christian community, would not benefit from the service (in
Fletcher, 115). Bound by the guidelines presented in the Book of Common
Prayer, Drury prohibited any service being read over the body, even though
Joseph Ramsey rested outside of the boundaries of the churchyard and therefore
beyond Drury’s jurisdiction. Tozer, as a Congregationalist minister, had consid-
erably more freedom to ministrate to the Ramseys by choosing Scripture pas-
sages that would suit the occasion and console the living. In the words of
Williams, “It is the friend, and not the stranger, whose touch is most tender, and
voice is most assuring.”14 Because of his own familial connections with the
Church of England, Tozer was careful about abiding by its rules: he reads the
prayers over the body outside of the churchyard; buries the child simply, silently,
and reverently; and conducts a final reading of the usual Anglican order of ser-
vice after interment. But what stung Tozer more than anything else was Drury’s
audacious declaration, in the face of grieving parents, that their poor child was
not Christian: “‘I have lost half a dozen children myself, and to hear it said in the
face of weeping parents that the child was not a Christian, was more than I could
stand as a father’” (in Fletcher, 172). Informed by his own experience, Tozer
risks the wrath of Drury in order to ministrate to heartsick parents. Astounded
by obstinate clericalism evident in the case, an editorial in the Daily Telegraph
concludes: “‘It would seem as if a long course of narrow clericalism hardened the
 Death Eclipsed 105

heart, as if a minute attention to forms and ceremonies and ornaments drove

out the spirit of the Founder of Christianity, who, when he gathered little chil-
dren to Himself, certainly made no distinction in favour of those who had been
baptized’” (March 13, 1879, in Fletcher, 210).
These contestants enact their battle on consecrated or unconsecrated
ground, “that shabby corner of God’s allotment,” as Hardy reminds us. Ancient
custom created the idea of consecrated ground, ground ritually dedicated for
burial by a diocesan official of the Church of England (and before that the
Roman Catholic Church). Over time, the practice entered common law. Joseph
Ramsey was buried on the north side of the church but, as Drury argues in court,
the entire churchyard had been consecrated, so there can be no disgrace, as the
defendant claims. While it is true that ancient churchyards contained only con-
secrated ground, other subtle differentiations existed. Traditionally, the south
side of the church was highly desirable because of its access to light. The north
side was less desirable because it lacked the warmth and comfort that the
south side provided. The area behind the church was reserved for stillborn or un-
baptized infants. In general, those shunned by society—murderers, prostitutes, ex-
communicates, and suicides—would be buried on the north side of the church.
Even though Mrs. Ramsey had chosen a lovely spot on the south side of the
church, a place near Mr. Rowland, someone whose memory she respected, the
sexton plainly told her that her son would likely be buried on the north side,
“‘like a dog’” (in Fletcher, 181). While the issue of consecrated ground may be in
question, we do know that since the burial was silent, no second blessing of the
grave, a blessing that occurs during the Anglican burial service, took place.15
Technically, the child may be buried in consecrated ground, but actually, to
those who have been so forcefully excluded, the grounds remain, as they did for
Tess and Sorrow, “untoward.”
Firm Father George Drury won his case against the editor of the East An-
glian Daily Times, but the jury awarded him only forty shillings “‘to express their
sense of the moral wrong to which he had been subject’” (in Fletcher, 199).
While the settlement between the plaintiff and defendant was paltry, the pub-
licity about the case, and its contribution to the ongoing parliamentary debates
in the 1870s, was far from meager. Ronald Fletcher credits the Akenham burial
case for drawing important public attention to injustices occurring in the rural
churchyards and for the eventual passage of the 1880 Burial Laws Amendment
Act sponsored by Osborne Morgan of Denbighshire, Wales (in Fletcher, 16).
While Thomas Hardy began composing his early novels and disinterring the
rural and preindustrial world of Wessex, the vicissitudes of the English church-
yard inspired numerous pamphlets and articles in all kinds of periodicals and
newspapers. Among these were several long treatments of the burial mania, one
by Walter Chamberlain, vicar at St. John’s, Bolton, who argued against Morgan’s
Burial Bill, and two by J. Carvell Williams on the need for freedom in the
churchyard and religious liberty. Chamberlain’s work in particular deals with the
106 Literary Remains

national ambiguities that were entwined with England’s potentially dangerous

burial arrangements. Chamberlain’s pamphlet, for example, worries about the
secularization of the churchyard and, ultimately, the Church of England’s “dis-
establishment,” a word first coined in 1860 to mean the withdrawal of state pa-
tronage and control from the church: “In short, it is clear as sunlight that the
Nonconformists mean the secularization of our Churchyards: that is, at the fu-
nerals of other people, in the Parish Churchyards any sort of service, or none; re-
ligious, Christian, or otherwise; shall be performed by anybody: and that the
acquisition of our Churchyards, with this profane design, shall be an installment
of what they are pleased to call their rights as citizens.”16
Chamberlain’s article illustrates two aspects of the problematic inherent in
the burial mania and, as I hope to show later in the chapter, Hardy’s novels as
well. The first is the importance of sacred space. One form this argument took
was legal. While Dissenters claimed that the churchyard was public property—
since each English man and English woman has a right to interment in the parish
churchyard, no matter the faith—staunch Anglicans believed that this was a con-
ditional right, not an absolute one, because to be buried in the churchyard peo-
ple must agree to the terms and conditions established by the Church of England,
including the rubric for who may be buried in consecrated ground. The idea of
conditions, argues Chamberlain, is not new to the civil right of burial, for “it
dates from time immemorial; even long before Dissenters of the present sorts, in
whose interests the Bill is proposed.”17 The difficulty arises when Dissenters give
up their right of parish burial by refusing the ministrations of the Church of En-
gland. Dissenters have excluded themselves and so ought not to ask for full com-
munion with the Church of England by requesting access to the churchyard. In
an effort to claim some common ground with the Dissenters, Chamberlain sug-
gests that Anglican clergy also must adhere to conditions, most particularly those
defined by the Book of Common Prayer. Another form of the argument is fearful
speculation. If the Dissenters make a claim to the churchyard as public property
and therefore belonging to the nation, then what will prevent them from making
a claim on the churches themselves? After all, the logic ran, churchyards are “com-
plements” to the church and are, therefore, at risk.18 From Chamberlain’s per-
spective, joint ownership of the churches, which the Burial Bill implies, threatens
Anglican authority and leaves the church vulnerable to disestablishment.
Obviously, Chamberlain’s speculations capitalize on the anxiety generated
by the 1851 census, which showed that half of the church-going population in
England and Wales attended Dissenting chapels.19 Clearly, the church was los-
ing its influence over the now-various religious population in Great Britain. In
the face of waning power, it clung tightly to what it perceived to be the beams of
its identity, the integrity of the Book of Common Prayer, and the place and priv-
ilege of the rural church and churchyard.
The second point Chamberlain’s article makes about the proposed burial leg-
islation is its appeal to a complex nexus of assumptions about English national-
 Death Eclipsed 107

ism. If, as the Dissenters claim, the churchyards belong to the national church
and, by implication, the nation, then the churchyard should indeed reflect En-
gland’s diversity wrought by the burgeoning Nonconformist population at home
and the expanding empire abroad. Just at the moment Britain gained controlling
interest in the Suez Canal, aggressively annexed portions of Africa, and solidified
its presence in India, the Dissenters clamored for legitimacy, citing the urgent
need for religious freedom. But this advent of diversity, both at home and abroad,
creates in Chamberlain’s discourse anxiety about national and religious “other-
ness.” To those who suggest that perhaps in instances where the deceased has ob-
jected to a burial service, none should take place, Chamberlain answers: “They
demand that Dissenters of all religions, or of none; the Atheist, the Ma-
hommedan, the Deist, the Socinian, the Papist, the Socialist—they demand that
all these people shall have conceded the right of burial in the Parish Churchyards
of England with any religious service they please, or with none; and with whatever
funeral orations, bands, processions, streamers, the godless and eccentric party
of the deceased may choose.”20 What begins as a response to the possibility of no
burial service ends with apparently irrational forebodings about noisy and “god-
less” eccentricities. With an emphatic statement about the need of everyone to
recognize the terms of the Anglican burial service, Chamberlain delineates the
dire consequences of relinquishing the conditions for burial: “Once let this wise
restriction be removed, and Dissenters of all kinds be permitted to use their own
services by their own Ministers or agents, and the Churchyard is thrown open to
every desecration, every form of false doctrine, even to blasphemy.”21 The Church
of England dare not consent to the possibility of having all sorts of religionists,
“from the Cardinal of Rome to the Parsee of India,” performing whatever burial
services they wish in “our” churchyards.22 The enemy is indeed at the gate—again.
As in Sheffield, in the late 1830s, where churchwardens closed the churchyards
to Chartists protesting the Anglican Church’s participation in the enclosure of
public property and the church’s dismissal of their concerns, so too in the 1870s
do Anglican clergy want to exclude those people who threaten England’s national
and religious identity. High, doctrinally minded clergy called the bill “an Act of
burial for the Church of England.”23
The Church of England viewed Dissenters and their pleas for a free church-
yard as a threat to its own authority and status as a national religion. The Society
for the Liberation of Religion from State-Patronage and Control, or the Libera-
tion Society, as it was commonly known, an amalgam of various Dissenting and
Nonconformist groups, countered with pamphlets of its own detailing the many
injustices Nonconformists were made to suffer at the hands of zealous Anglican
clergy. To be sure, many clergy turned a blind and benevolent eye on those who,
for whatever reasons, lived and died beyond the church’s pale. But others, ac-
cording to the Liberation Society, seemed to go out of their way to antagonize
or insult the families of the dead. Williams tells of a vicar’s particular intransi-
gence in 1860. At Hinderwell, near Guisborough, a woman gave birth to twins,
108 Literary Remains

but one infant died—unbaptized—a few minutes later. The doctor quickly bap-
tized the second infant before it too died. When the vicar discovered the details
of the deaths, he insisted upon two coffins so that the children could be buried
apart, one to enjoy the full communion with the church, the other to remain in
“theological limbo.”24
Led by Edward Miall, a Dissenting clergyman, the editor of the Noncon-
formist, and a liberal member of Parliament, the Liberation Society desired if not
disestablishment of the Church of England as a way to reflect the various reli-
gious and irreligious population of Great Britain then at least a lessening of its
controlling grip on national religious affairs. By the early 1870s, two of their
grievances had been addressed by Parliament: the abolition in 1868 of church
rates, which relieved Nonconformists of their financial responsibilities to the
church and churchyard, and the abolition of university religious tests in 1871. A
third grievance, unfettered access to the churchyard, was not so easily resolved,
because the debate seemed to shake the very foundation of the church’s identity.
In the public response to the Drury libel case, for example, the Examiner force-
fully remarked that Tozer and the Akenham Nonconformists “‘have shown that
the existing laws of burial authorize an intolerable outrage, and they have been
the means of exposing a deplorable scandal in the Church, and one which ap-
pears to defy treatment so long as the Establishment is protected by its present
Constitution’” (in Fletcher, 215).
In 1870, Osborne Morgan, an Anglican and the son of a Welsh clergyman,
took up the cause of Dissenter entry into the churchyard and disestablishment.
An effective advocate for the Dissenting platform because of his own relation-
ship with the Church of England, Morgan introduced burial bills every year
from 1870 to 1873, claiming that “‘it was not a perfect Bill,’” but “‘it was an hon-
est attempt to settle a vexed question upon a just basis.’”25 Opposition to the bill
was fierce, a debate fueled by a desire to delay any final decision on the subject.
Morgan’s bill provided that services other than the Church of England be al-
lowed in the churchyard, and that these services include a prayer, hymns, and
Scripture readings. Opponents to the bill argued that the issue “‘was not a ques-
tion of intolerance, or of grievances by individuals, or of whether a clergyman
has acted in an unfeeling and unkind manner; but of whether we are to main-
tain the position in which we stand with regard to the National Church, and to
the privileges and rights of Churchmen.’”26 Because of the intense opposition to
the bill, Morgan withdrew the measure on July 23, 1873, but not without re-
newed efforts by the Liberation Society to seek its passage in 1875 and 1876.27
One of those efforts to effect change in burial law came in the form of an ex-
tensive pamphlet entitled Religious Liberty in the Churchyard, written by J. Carvell
Williams, chief of staff for the Liberation Society. The formal features of the
essay—its history of burial legislation, grievances, proposed remedies, and at-
tempts to state both sides of the case fairly—defuse Anglican defensiveness about
the churchyard and, more importantly, allay the threat posed by changing
 Death Eclipsed 109

national and local communities. To achieve this balance in rhetoric, Williams

first states in his preface that, alas, his first pamphlet on the subject, A Plea for a
Free Churchyard, had gone out of print and so much of the material would be a
repetition of the argument. This repetition gives the impression that the Dis-
senting case has fallen on deaf ears. The burial debate, by the time Williams pub-
lishes his second pamphlet in 1876, was in full swing, with the agitation,
according to Williams, having borne “perceptible fruit,” because the public be-
came increasingly convinced by the repeated cases of hardship that the laws
needed to be changed.28 The emphasis on repetition makes the Anglicans ap-
pear at best indifferent and at worst obstinate in their opposition not only to the
Burial Bill but to God’s people as well.
Second, in a remarkable turnaround from earlier forms of persuasion refined
by social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Williams rejects the outright use of
statistics to prove the need for Nonconformist access to the churchyard. Up until
this point, both sides had invoked numerical representation to suggest the equity
or inequity of available burial grounds. For Williams, “The question is not settled
by statistics. It is a question of justice . . . [a] justice [that] should be done to all
classes of the people, whether they be few, or whether they may be many.”29
Williams rejects the authority of the statistic to represent the burial problem, be-
cause it fails to capture the serious conceptual issues at the heart of the debate—
full religious liberty and equality: “All these figures, however, whether pro or con,
do not alter the fact that Dissenters who have graves in parish churchyards can-
not, in using them, have any burial service other than that of the Church from
which they dissent.”30 Since the statistic cannot convey the oppression Dissenters
feel by being excluded from the churchyard, Williams invokes an experiential
model that asks Anglicans to put themselves in the shoes of the Nonconformist.
Williams quotes at length members of the Established Church who express sym-
pathy for the Dissenters’ predicament in an effort to diminish the distinctions be-
tween them, differences fanned by the Oxford movement, which aimed to defend
the Church of England as a divine institution, restore its High Church traditions
from the seventeenth century, and abate increasing subordination to the state. As
early as 1863, in a speech in the House of Commons, William Gladstone con-
cludes that the situation “is not a state of law that is consistent with the principles
of civil and religious freedom.”31 Not only does Williams quote sympathetic An-
glicans to bridge the yawning political divide between the Church of England and
Nonconformists, but he suggests that Anglicans too are trapped by rigid doctrines
that also prevent them from ministering effectively to their parishioners. Williams
recognizes, for example, that the law for burying the unbaptized “is a two-edged
sword, since it not only fortifies the clergyman who objects to officiate, but pro-
hibits any one else who may not have no such objection.”32 By positioning both
sides as caught in a doctrinal trap, Williams can then offer the Burial Bill as the
spring that sets both sides free: the Anglicans to officiate in unconsecrated
ground, and the Nonconformists to conduct funerals on consecrated ground.
110 Literary Remains

The competing concepts of nationhood shape the heart of this political and
religious debate over burial. Nationhood, to Chamberlain and the Anglicans, pre-
sumes an English core that must be protected from contaminating influences
from abroad, that is, from outside the church to outside the country. Since the
Church of England is the national church, then it must preserve its rituals and
practices as markers of England’s national identity. As Elizabeth Helsinger, in her
study of rural scenes and national identity, smartly observes, “Contiguity or dis-
tance, political status, genealogy, and race organize or reinforce economic, social
and cultural relations of dominance and subordination . . . to create degrees of
difference on a spectrum from national citizenship to national subjection.”33
Chamberlain’s argument, for example, emphasizes the exclusion of “others” from
the churchyard in order to make claims about who constitutes a national people.
The Dissenters, however, have another approach to defining nationhood,
one that does not assume a single, static definition of what it means to be English.
Instead, the Dissenting argument runs, the national church must take its position
more seriously by embracing England’s diverse population both at home and
abroad, and by recognizing that other countries, such as Scotland and Ireland
within the United Kingdom, have been effectively ecumenical in their regulations
for the churchyards. Moreover, the Dissenters encourage opponents to the Burial
Bill to think of England in international contexts as a way of measuring its
progress toward civilization. Civilized nations promote inclusive and just burial
practices. To wit, Williams quotes the archbishop of Canterbury, who, in a con-
ciliatory moment, admitted, “‘It will never do for England to appear to be more
bigoted than the Austrian and Russian Empires.’”34 This contest over practices
and rituals, consecrated and unconsecrated ground, and establishment or dis-
establishment constitutes a form of nationhood, one that develops around burial
grounds, which are sites of struggle between differently empowered social groups
to control the terms of a nation’s identity and power. For the Dissenters, the
struggle to participate in an evolving national consciousness remains at the core
of their understanding of English identity. Anything that constricts this dynamic
proves problematic. So Williams argues that by insisting on its rights and privi-
leges, and those of the clergy, as something separate from the interests of the na-
tion, the church hastens its disestablishment.35 Highlighting the consequences of
such exclusive definitions of nationalism, Williams concludes:

In claiming the churchyards as the property of “the Church,” and insist-

ing that none but Churchmen have a right to a voice in their manage-
ment, they are, in fact, denationalising the Church, and placing it in the
position of a sect. They are deliberately trying to drive out of the national
burying-places half the nation; and the arguments by which they justify
the attempt are arguments quite incompatible with the lofty claims of the
Church, as an institution deserving to be supported by national author-
ity and resources.36
 Death Eclipsed 111

The Dissenters clamor for a stake in the country, a chance to claim and express,
over the space of the grave, more inclusive forms of Englishness.
Conservatives, anxious to move on to other issues, convinced the arch-
bishop of Canterbury, A. C. Tait, a pragmatic man who was sympathetic to Non-
conformists, that continued resistance to the bill was unwise. Even though
Archbishop Tait appreciated the Nonconformist dilemma, his clergy did not.
Approximately 15,000, or three fourths of the clergy from across the spectrum—
high, broad, and low—signed petitions declaring their opposition to the Burial
Bill, which only accelerated Dissenting desire to gain access to the rural church-
yards.37 From 1877 to 1880, as protests on both sides intensified, Parliament at-
tempted to resolve the debate by suggesting silent burials as an alternative burial
service. Dissenters, however, would not be silenced. With the astounding defeat
of Disraeli and his conservative government in 1880 and the appointment of Os-
borne Morgan as judge advocate general, his Burial Bill became a government
measure and passed, finally, on September 7, 1880.
Under the new law, notice would be given within forty-eight hours that a
burial would take place in the churchyard without the Anglican burial service.
Burial fees were reserved for Anglican clergy, and the burial services were to be
conducted in a decent, orderly fashion. Those who behaved in a “riotous, violent
or indecent manner” were guilty of a misdemeanor.38 Registration of burials was
required, and Church of England clergy could conduct burial services, which
could now include other prayers and Scripture readings on unconsecrated
ground without penalty. With the passage of the 1880 Burial Laws Amendment
Act, the cry for disestablishment faded in Parliament. Ironically, by humbly
acquiescing to the Dissenters on the Burial Bill, the church saved itself.
Eventually, with the passage of the Burial Act of 1900, issues concerning in-
equitable fee structures, added expenses for separate chapels in new or renovated
cemeteries, and the persistent question of whether consecrated ground was re-
quired in churchyards were resolved. Local rather than national authorities
could decide whether they wanted consecrated ground. New chapels were not to
be consecrated so that they would be available to everyone. Fees were standard-
ized and would be paid only for actual services performed. Finally, the forty-
eight-hour provision was repealed. No doubt as the authority for burials
exercised by the Home Secretary shifted to local government boards, Edwin
Chadwick, a determined proponent of a system of national improvement in the
early part of the nineteenth century, spun in his grave.
The burial debate of the 1870s and 1880s teaches us that the Noncon-
formists recognized the historical consequences of a disruption in time’s conti-
nuity as it was enacted in the churchyard. The opportunity to be buried with
ancestors meant a chance to participate in time in a fresh way, to ground their
identity in the connection they felt with their foremothers and forefathers to give
life to the present and future. Anglicans, understandably, felt threatened by the
Dissenters’ redefinition of history. Because they thought it their intrinsic right as
112 Literary Remains

a national church to protect the churchyards and thereby to become gatekeepers

to a corner of English history, the Anglicans resisted the Nonconformist intru-
sion, wishing instead to relegate, symbolically, the burgeoning evangelical move-
ment to unconsecrated ground behind the church, neatly out of sight and
beyond the notice of history. In Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the
Native, Hardy hopes to restore this continuity in history by calling upon the en-
during framework of death to thread together time’s dimensions so that once
again people recognize that the ancient past and the near past have the power to
shape the present and future worlds.

II
In these two early novels, Hardy uncovers a vanishing world and accounts for its
rapid disappearance with some precision. In the preface to Far from the Madding
Crowd, he explains the change taking place in the countryside:

The change at the root of this [loss of local traditions] has been the recent
supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers, who carried on the local
traditions and humours, by a population of more or less migratory
labourers, which has led to a break of continuity in local history, more
fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close
inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. For these the indis-
pensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one partic-
ular spot by generation after generation. (Far from the Madding Crowd, 6)

The cataclysmic disruption in the continuity of local history, a break caused by

the migration of laborers looking both for more lucrative work and more secure
housing, threatens an entire culture, from its legends and folklore to its lively
social relationships.
Hardy’s essay “The Dorsetshire Labourer” articulates the consequences of in-
creased migration on English identity, especially as it was defined in local terms:
“[I]t is only natural that, now different districts of them [laborers] are shaken to-
gether once a year and redistributed, like a shuffled pack of cards, they have
ceased to be so local in feeling or manner as formerly, and have entered on the
condition of inter-social citizens, whose city stretches the whole county over.”39
Aware of his own desires to have workers remain at home, Hardy admits to the in-
evitability of this change and argues that the movement offers freedom from op-
pressive employers and greater economic opportunity. Nonetheless, the “nomadic
habit” threatens the intimate and kindly relationship with the land and leaves the
worker vulnerable to the strictly commercial interests of the landlord.40 In The
Woodlanders, for example, Giles, bereft of his lifehold, ekes out a living but hardly
benefits from the promised financial success that the new system claims. Death
becomes the only guarantor of his fixed relationship to the land. Migration
 Death Eclipsed 113

having ceased, he will ultimately rest in the churchyard, buried in earth he so

lovingly tilled. Given the movement of workers traveling through the countryside,
one can appreciate to a greater degree the Nonconformist insistence that the An-
glicans open their churchyards to them. At least in death, people secure perma-
nent relationships with the land and family that their lives had to deny.
The Weatherbury churchyard, and its central place in Hardy’s comprehen-
sive ideas about time and history, appears early in the novel. Gabriel chances
upon Fanny just outside of its gates, “under the wall where several ancient trees
grew” (FMC, 43). Gabriel, relatively new to the territory, asks Fanny for direc-
tions to Warren’s Malthouse. In her modulating voice so appealing to Gabriel,
she tells him the way and begs him to keep their encounter silent from the other
villagers. As she shivers in the cold night, Gabriel offers his cloak, which she re-
jects, accepting instead his offer of a shilling. As their palms touch in the ex-
change of money, Gabriel feels “a throb of tragic intensity. . . . He felt himself in
the penumbra of a very deep sadness” (FMC, 44). By situating the brief but pre-
scient encounter between these two migratory workers near the churchyard,
Hardy not only underscores Fanny’s wondrously tragic passion and Gabriel’s ca-
pacity to feel it, but he also highlights the crucial part Fanny has in mending the
historical continuity in the novel. The arc of her life brings this message home to
readers. At this point in the novel, she secretly leaves Bathsheba’s employment
to rush to her beau, the troublesome but dashing Sergeant Troy. When she mis-
understands where to meet him to be married, and he punishes her for ruining
his reputation and pride by not appearing at the wedding, she is forced to mi-
grate again, first to work as a seamstress in Melchester, then, eventually, to seek
refuge in the Casterbridge workhouse, where she dies an untimely death during
her delivery of Troy’s child. Ironically, Troy, hardly the embodiment of civiliza-
tion here, lures Fanny from her home and, by his rejection of her, sends her on
an extended journey that eventually effects a powerful homecoming, one ren-
dered, however, by the potency of her corpse to transform Bathsheba and to
shame him into his own exile. In this early scene, Gabriel too is associated with
historical longevity symbolized in the churchyard. Given his last name, Oak, and
his proximity to the ancient trees growing adjacent to the churchyard, Gabriel
becomes inextricably linked to the proper resuscitation of history and culture
that Hardy aims for in the novel.
Fanny’s disappearance, of course, opens up the possibility of Bathsheba’s mar-
riage to Troy, a union that occurs with treacherous speed and not without Hardy’s
ominous references to death, signaling a crumbling world order in need of restora-
tion. When Boldwood hears of the nuptial, he attempts to blackmail Troy, only to
be rebuffed arrogantly and described balefully: “Throughout the whole of that night
Boldwood’s dark form might have been seen walking about the hills and downs
of Weatherbury like an unhappy Shade in the Mournful Fields of Acheron”
(FMC, 182). When Gabriel hears the news about Bathsheba’s marriage, he turns
white, “like a corpse” (FMC, 183). Several pages later, the infuriated universe
114 Literary Remains

answers with a lightning storm that threatens the future of the farm: “It sprang from
east, west, north, south and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons ap-
peared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones-dancing, leaping, striding, racing
around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion” (FMC, 193–94).41
Bathsheba’s marriage to Troy presages both the potential failure of her farm, as he
takes precious little interest in it, only using its proceeds to underwrite his gambling
habit, and the failure of the family, both Fanny’s and Bathsheba’s.
Paradoxically, death not only marks a disordering of the Weatherbury world
but signifies an invitation to individuals to cross a threshold, stepping from a self-
ish individualism to a more generous participation in a collective community life.
A closer look at Fanny’s “funeral procession” reveals Hardy’s special emphasis on
the capacity of the marginal character to effect change in the community. The jour-
ney that Fanny and her child follow takes her from the ignoble workhouse, which
earlier in the nineteenth century would have been the most shameful of departure
points for one’s funeral, through a landscape that seems to weep for her loss, to a
long wait at the inn while Joseph cavorts with his drinking partner, Coggan, and fi-
nally to a tardy arrival at the churchyard that allows readers to see the kind Parson
Thirdly welcome her home as a sister in the congregation, despite her “fallen” sta-
tus. Joseph’s lonely task of driving Fanny home to her grave is intensified by the
landscape’s tearful reaction to her death. Amid deep silence, “The fog had by this
time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the over-
brimming leaves. The hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of
the grim Leveller” (FMC, 217). The loneliness of death compels Joseph to seek
companionship at the old, dilapidated inn. Despite the “sad burden” of the body
waiting to be taken to the cemetery, Joseph and Coggan discuss easily the details of
Fanny’s funeral arrangements and, predictably, given the tenor of burial reform de-
bate discussed earlier, their own particular religious affliations—Joseph a chapel-
going Methodist and Coggan a staunch Anglican (FMC, 217). At Gabriel’s urging,
Joseph resumes his journey, only to have missed the appointment for burial with
Parson Thirdly. Here Hardy represents a more positive and consoling parson than
in his later novel Tess. He is positively concerned about the decency of the funeral,
given the late hour, and suggests that the body be placed in the church or left at the
farm until morning: “‘We must remember that though she may have erred griev-
ously in leaving her home, she is still our sister; and it is to be believed that God’s
uncovenanted mercies are extended towards her, and that she is a member of the
flock of Christ’” (FMC, 223).42 Interestingly, in this early novel, Hardy claims,
through the benevolent parson, that Fanny’s sin has not been a sexual one as
much as a domestic one—she left home. Her return repositions her back into the
heart of the family and secures her place in the Christian community, unlike Tess,
who experiences equivocation from the vicar about her son’s salvation and soci-
ety’s unequivocal condemnation of her.
The conscious effort to restore Fanny to her home had begun when Mr. Bold-
wood offered to retrieve Fanny himself and bury her on his farm, since “she
 Death Eclipsed 115

belongs by law to the parish” (FMC, 213). Bathsheba, though, beginning “to know
what suffering was,” insisted, since Fanny worked as a servant for Bathsheba’s
uncle, that she make arrangements for Fanny’s funeral (FMC, 213). But her initial
impulse to care for Fanny had its limits at this point in the novel. While she in-
structed Joseph to prepare the “pretty wagon” and to decorate the coffin with flow-
ers and evergreens, as was the rural custom, she made no arrangements to attend
the funeral herself, as if to resist the psychological work of death. She appreciates
the importance of restoring Fanny’s connection to home and land, but she seems
unwilling to touch death just yet.
The delay in Fanny’s arrival and the postponed funeral prompt Bathsheba
to welcome Fanny’s corpse into her home to work against her baser instincts to
which she is prone. Elisabeth Bronfen is especially helpful here in her reading of
Fanny’s corpse. She suggests that Fanny functions as a register to others’ re-
sponses. Bathsheba, then, in the face of Fanny’s corpse, is no longer original or
superior.43 In one of the most transparent moments in the novel, Bathsheba, in
an effort to deflect Boldwood’s romantic assertions, declares: “‘You overrode my
capacity for love. I don’t possess half the warmth of nature you believe me to
have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten the gentleness out of
me’” (FMC, 159). Hardy remains unclear about the details of Bathsheba’s ap-
parently traumatic childhood, but he seems careful to suggest that her response
to such early experiences has been to cultivate her vanity and her impulsive, self-
righteous independence. Unaware of the consequences of her rash emotional be-
havior, she initially misleads Gabriel about her feelings for him when he asks to
marry her, and she teases a vulnerable Boldwood with a hastily sent valentine.
Her professional life as owner and manager of the farm, however, provides
a striking contrast to the vainglorious coquette. Conducting her business in
mourning wear, which she wears throughout most of the novel—given the death
of her uncle and the death of Sergeant Troy—she makes a point of learning her
workers’ names. Acting the servant, she says with “pretty dignity”: “‘I don’t know
my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if you serve me
well, so I shall serve you’” (FMC, 68). By clothing her in mourning wear, Hardy
strikes a complex chord of continuity and history through her relationship to the
land. Not only does she reverence her uncle, but she sustains the family’s rela-
tionship to the land, wearing a reminder of her uncle’s death in the past. In-
creasingly aware of the need for interdependence on the farm, Bathsheba slowly
recognizes a desire for her own stability and steadfastness amid the rapid changes
that can occur in rural life. Despite her infatuation with and hurried marriage to
Troy, the farm goes some way to grounding her identity enough to have her ex-
perience a remarkable transformation through her contact with Fanny’s corpse.
In Chapter 43, “Fanny’s Revenge,” Hardy refines the headstrong and self-
centered heroine, and returns, if you will, some gentleness and loving kindness to
her character. Like Elizabeth Gaskell, who educates her heroines Mary Barton
and Margaret Hale to sympathy for others through their close proximity to death,
116 Literary Remains

Hardy educates Bathsheba to the important role she has in cultivating the past to
reshape the future. But this seamless historical continuity does not occur easily.
Bathsheba must sustain her gaze on Fanny’s corpse and endure the consequences
of such a look in order to achieve peace and the recuperation of order. When
Bathsheba welcomes Fanny into her home at the beginning of the chapter, Hardy
anticipates the clash about to take place between the living and the dead: “Her
wayward sentiment that evening concerning Fanny’s temporary resting-place had
been the result of a strange complication of impulses in Bathsheba’s bosom. Per-
haps it would be more accurately described as a determined rebellion against her
prejudices, a revulsion from a lower instinct of uncharitableness, which would
have withheld all sympathy from the dead woman” (FMC, 225). Sensing a con-
nection between her own history and Fanny’s death, she expresses her longing
to speak to someone with greater strength, and she recognizes her need for “pa-
tience and suspension of judgment,” enduring qualities characteristic of Gabriel
(FMC, 226). After her foray to Oak’s cottage, however, Bathsheba returns to her
own parlor unable to quell her curiosity about Fanny’s life and death. She deftly
opens the coffin and realizes that, indeed, Fanny’s child accompanied her in
death, and that the locket of hair in Troy’s watch matched Fanny’s blonde curls.
Recoiled by her anger and cruelty directed toward a dead woman, Bathsheba,
desirous for atonement, began to put flowers around Fanny’s head and to pray
as Gabriel had done earlier in the evening: “She knew not how long she re-
mained engaged thus. She forgot time, life, where she was, what she was doing”
(FMC, 229). For Hardy, the dead have a way of purifying toxic emotions and lead-
ing people to prayer and virtuous emulation.
At first glance, Bathsheba’s reaction confirms the chapter’s title. Fanny
achieves revenge by turning Bathsheba’s success into failure, her humiliation
into triumph, her “lucklessness to ascendancy,” and casting a “garish light of
mockery” upon all things (FMC, 228). But read another way, the scene manifests
Fanny’s revenge on Troy, who now must admit the truth—that their marriage
means nothing to him, and that Fanny dead is more valuable than Bathsheba
alive. Death for both Troy and Bathsheba brings them to the brink of truth, but
the effects of the experience mark the distinctions between them. For Troy,
Fanny’s death shames him into leaving the village, but not without attempting to
memorialize Fanny with a grand carved tombstone and extensive flowers planted
around her grave. But the torrential rainstorm that washes away all of his hard
funereal work suggests that Troy’s attempts to reconcile his past are futile. Ac-
cording to Hardy, he remains an unworthy facilitator of the past with the pres-
ent. Hardy values Fanny’s revenge because she suggests that the itinerant life and
the consequent breakdown in marital commitments, her own and Troy’s, dam-
age families and communities and threaten the ability of the land to hold a peo-
ple together in a common culture.
Gabriel and Bathsheba carefully mend the disheveled grave and begin to
reestablish themselves as proper facilitators of the past with the present, a task
 Death Eclipsed 117

denied to Troy. Bathsheba, for her part, initially sustains a liminal rite of passage.
Shocked into prayer by the emotional impact of seeing Fanny and then observ-
ing her husband relish her corpse, she retreats first to the nearby swamp and
eventually to the attic of her house to read eighteenth-century tales of maiden
tragedy and to recover partially from the trauma of the event. As Bathsheba
helps Gabriel landscape Fanny’s grave, we learn that “with superfluous magna-
nimity of a woman whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness upon
her instead of love, she wiped the mud spots from the tomb as if she rather liked
its words [“‘Erected by Francis Troy in Beloved Memory of Fanny Robin’”] than
otherwise, and went home again” (FMC, 246). Over the next three years, as she
struggles with Troy’s disappearance and presumed death, Bathsheba indulges in
a historical review, as if she too had already died: “She looked back upon that
past over a great gulf, as if she were now a dead person, having the faculty of
meditation still left in her, by means of which, like the mouldering gentlefolk of
the poet’s story, she could sit and ponder what a gift life used to be” (FMC, 253).
Hardy presents death’s work as unfinished in Bathsheba. While she recognizes
the gift of her past, she has yet to embrace fully its power to shape the future.
Once Troy returns to Weatherbury and is shot by Boldwood, Bathsheba
again has another opportunity to deepen her understanding of herself and to re-
linquish further her perception that the world was made for her personal plea-
sure. Pulling out of her second “coma”—the trauma of Troy’s murder—Bathsheba
resembles Michelangelo’s Pietà as she holds Troy’s body in her lap and directs
Gabriel, with consummate efficiency, to find the surgeon at Casterbridge. Ne-
glecting the law by removing the body to her own home, she prepares the body
for burial, not with the “nerve of a stoic,” as the surgeon observes, but with “the
heart of a wife,” as Bathsheba retorts (FMC, 293). While we do not read of the
funeral directly, as with Fanny, we learn that Troy is buried in the same grave
with Fanny and their child in the “reprobates quarter of the graveyard, called in
the parish ‘behind the church,’ which was invisible to the road” (FMC, 246). In
the time between Fanny’s death and Troy’s, Bathsheba has apparently internal-
ized, to a certain extent at least, the lessons that death teaches—an increased self-
lessness and sympathy for others. Here, for example, amid horrific violence, she
ministrates confidently to her dead husband. But Hardy is also careful to note
the limits of her capacities. Once her ministrations are complete, she collapses
under the weight of responsibility, thinking the tragic events were her fault. And
later, when Bathsheba meets Gabriel in the churchyard just after choir practice
and he informs her of his plans to leave England, she responds, “‘Yet now that I
am more helpless than ever you go away!’” (FMC, 299). Struck by her own lack
of control in the situation, she is bewildered by the thought of having to rely
upon her own resources again, but not enough, notice, to keep her from visit-
ing Gabriel and admitting, “‘[I]t seems exactly as if I had come courting you’”
(FMC, 303). Hardy, on the one hand, seems reluctant to admit to her unqualfied
development, implying that she will always live with a touch of rashness. On the
118 Literary Remains

other hand, he is careful to note her friendship with Gabriel, a rare friendship
forged amid the “interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality” and a love “which
is as strong as death” (FMC, 303).
Hardy’s careful attention to Bathsheba’s encounters with death and burial
recasts the world of Weatherbury. Touching death lessens her self-centered im-
pulsiveness and creates emotional room for Gabriel. Their marriage and poten-
tial family too signify a lasting commitment to the land, which each brings to the
wedding by virtue of their status as landowners, thereby restoring continuity and
security to the village workers and gesturing toward a restoration of the culture
that will succeed into the future. In calling attention to the potential of death to
realign an appreciation of history, however, Hardy also makes more visible his
own reservations about his project. If, as I have suggested, he believes that the
churchyard acts as a key pivot for history, then he also must accept the enduring
influence of those, like Fanny and Troy, on the lives of the living. We cannot
help but wonder, then, if they become less models for virtue than object lessons
meant to warn those who dream of a better life beyond Weatherbury. Further, as
many critics have argued, the role of women in this culture seems ambiguous at
best. Fanny gains her identity and power only in death, as a corpse, and
Bathsheba achieves happiness by succumbing, finally, to Gabriel and his requests
to have her look more like the girl from Norcombe Hill, the place where they
first met at the beginning of the novel. Hardy’s effort, then, to underscore the
value of history is, perhaps, nothing but a nostalgic attempt to record folklore.
Finally, for all of Hardy’s considerations of death, it is strange that we rarely read
of an actual funeral. Not surprisingly, knowing the contentious debate by church
authorities around issues of burial services, he may have wanted to avoid the sit-
uation in his novels. But Hardy was hardly a shy novelist, and knotty issues of
the day unravel at length in his work. His dismissal of the funeral, I would argue,
touches upon the heart of his understanding of history. Life does indeed move
on, but not without considerable pause over the grave in the churchyard, even
if that grave is “behind the church” and invisible from the road. Despite these
qualifications, however, Hardy insists that death contains the energy and power
to change the natures of those who are receptive to it.

III
The formidable Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native is not unlike the ceme-
tery in Far from the Madding Crowd.44 To know a sense of history in both envi-
ronments, one must stand in the company of previous generations and be
refreshed for the future. Egdon Heath is timeless, eternal in its life in Wessex:
“Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus,
unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that
it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final Overthrow” (RN, 4).
Like the cemetery, then, it stands at the center of the community unmoved by
 Death Eclipsed 119

the vestiges of time. Unlike the cemetery, however, the heath here seems rooted
in a much more ancient past than the one Hardy imagines in Far from the
Madding Crowd and in later novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge and The
Woodlanders. The heath enfolds its inhabitants and teaches them its ways—to for-
sake civilization, for “Civilization was its enemy”—and to recognize that only its
power will protect them from the ravages of change:

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between

afternoon and night as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heath—land which filled
the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything
around and underneath had been from pre-historic times as unaltered
as the stars overhead gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and
harassed by the irrepressible New. (RN, 6)

Just as the demise of Troy and the dark qualities of modern life he embodies bol-
ster a life and culture rooted in the appreciation of one’s ancestors and the land,
Egdon Heath, in Hardy’s provocative opening description, anchors the world
adrift on change and suggests that the cosmos is a seamless entity, unbroken in
the connection of artifacts and bodies buried deep in the earth to the lives walk-
ing upon the heath to the heavens above. The heath guards against a linear no-
tion of progress because its exacting consequences fracture a world that Hardy
hopes to recover in the novel.
Hardy reminds England of an important type of nationalism in danger of
being lost in the ambitious late-nineteenth-century society. His precise attention to
the very local but all-encompassing world of Edgon Heath and Blackbarrow, “the
pole and axis of this heathery world,” presents another version of English nation-
hood, one not dependent necessarily on the expansion of empire or unchecked
capitalism but one tied to local traditions and kinship rooted in the local soil
(RN, 11). As Hardy argued before the Wessex Society of Manchester in January
1902, “‘Whatever strengthens local attachments strengthens both individual and
national character.’”45 At the heart of the heath stands a burial ground where the
funeral piles from long ago looked remarkably like the flames glowing now in the
distance. As the villagers celebrate Guy Fawkes Day, the narrator underscores not
the “modern” eighteenth-century source for the celebration but its relationship to
ancient mythology: “The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had
shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Indeed, it is pretty well
known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lin-
eal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the in-
vention of popular feeling about the Gunpowder Plot” (RN, 15). Notice Hardy’s
careful attention to ancestral traces still evident in the landscape and the villagers’
ready participation in these ancient rites. The heath and its barrow anchor their
life and rituals, forming among them powerful expressions of a culture that, as the
120 Literary Remains

novel reveals, appear not only capable of managing the forces of good and evil but
of protecting itself from false notions of progress.
The novel’s entire environment seems permeated with various representa-
tions of death, each with its own logic. For example, moths nest everywhere on
the heath, anticipating, metaphorically, both untimely death and ultimate union
with the landscape. As the narrator describes the men standing around the fires,
he notes that “all was unstable; quivering as leaves, evanescent as lightning. Shad-
owy eye-sockets deep as those of a death’s head suddenly turned into pits of lus-
tre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining: wrinkles were emphasized
to ravines, or obliterated entirely by a changed ray” (RN, 15). The association of
the heathmen with the death’s head moths, which make their home on the
heath, communicates the villagers’ unfurrowed connection to the land. Later in
the novel, as if to presage the dreadful deaths of Wildeve and Eustacia, even as
they signal one another to a passionate but disturbing reunion, Wildeve lets
loose a moth that makes its way toward the candle upon Eustacia’s table, “hov-
ered round it two or three times, and flew into the flame” (RN, 271). Immedi-
ately following Wildeve’s signal, when Clym proposes a reconciliation with his
mother, Eustacia remains distracted by “‘that moth whose skeleton is getting
burnt up in the wick of the candle’” (RN, 276). Not only do the moths symbol-
ize the doomed futures for Eustacia and Wildeve—that they will burn themselves
out with their desire to leave the heath—but they also seem to characterize the
heath’s and its inhabitants’ inherent natures. When Mrs. Yeobright walks to
Clym’s at Alderworth, she spots him cutting furze. He “appeared as a mere par-
asite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a gar-
ment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in
the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss” (RN, 278–79). The figure in
the landscape, like the moth, lacks self-consciousness about the world. The
moth, for Clym, represents his unity with the world of the heath, while the moth
for Eustacia forebodes her tragic demise.
Initially, Eustacia Vye has the potential to become a genuine heroine because
of her special unity with the heath and the barrow. As Diggory Venn spies Eusta-
cia, he notices the “strangely homogeneous” scene in which Eustacia gives “a per-
fect, delicate, and necessary finish” to the dark pile of hills: “The vale, the upland,
the barrow, and the figure above it, all of these amounted only to unity” (RN, 11).
Several chapters later, as Eustacia approaches the top of the barrow, again the nar-
rator notices her profound connection to the soil: “She ascended to old position
at the top, where the red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in
the corpse of day ” (RN, 50). She stands “dead still as the pivot of this circle of
heath-country was just as obscure” (RN, 50). Eustacia here is described by the care-
fully observant narrator as profoundly tied to the land, placing her in a seamless
continuity of time and space. But the description just quoted ominously alludes
to the heath and its environs as a corpse, compromising Eustacia’s potentially
heroic status by associating her with ill-fated death, not the life-giving death rep-
 Death Eclipsed 121

resented by the remains of Blackbarrow. Within several pages we discover why—

she has been meeting Damon Wildeve on the sly, even as he courts Thomasin
Yeobright. We also learn early in the novel that Eustacia, who spent her formative
years in Budmouth, a town of considerable fashion and sophistication, now lives
with her grandfather at Egdon Heath. While she detests the heath—“‘Tis my cross,
my misery, and will be my death’”—her grandfather leaves her free to wander
among its paths and to learn its primitive contours (RN, 82). Nonetheless, be-
cause of her restless refusal to learn the language of the heath, searching instead
for the “abstraction called passionate love,” she remains a rebellious outsider
whose presence threatens the community (RN, 66). As she admits to Clym, “‘I am
managing to exist in a wilderness, but I cannot drink from a pond” (RN, 185).
Eustacia’s desire for love, “to be loved to madness,” betrays her rejection of
what Jane Schneider describes as the spirit of animism, or a belief in earth spir-
its or spirits of the dead (RN, 66). Animism reveals a “philosophical concern
with the cosmos—its forces for good and evil—and with equity—the reciprocity of
give and take in spiritual as well as actual social relations.”46 Because Eustacia
thinks only of herself, ignoring the predicaments of others, she becomes vulner-
able to Susan Nunsuch’s animistic judgment of her. Believing that Eustacia has
bewitched her children, Susan first stabs her with a long stocking needle during
church services, pricking her so deep that she faints. Later, when recalling the
incident to Clym, she says that she wishes she had been “dead for hours after”
(RN, 187). Later, in what Hardy calls a “ghastly invention of superstition calcu-
lated to bring powerlessness, atrophy and annihilation on any human being
against whom it was directed” (RN, 359), Susan shapes Eustacia’s effigy from
beeswax, thrusts as many as fifty pins into it, and throws it into the fire, just at
the moment Eustacia herself stands on Blackbarrow about to succumb to death.
To suggest that Eustacia must beg forgiveness for upsetting the cosmic world of
Egdon Heath, Susan iterates backwards the Lord’s Prayer as Eustacia’s effigy col-
lapses, dissolves, and decomposes into nothing, so unlike the charnel bones that
constitute Blackbarrow. Susan effectively relegates Eustacia to a world without
history or time, a land where she will be remembered by no one but Clym. For
her transgressions—her dalliance with Wildeve, her interference in Clym’s rec-
onciliation with his mother (which causes her death from a snakebite), and her
refusal later to acknowledge the truth to him about what happened with Mrs.
Yeobright—Susan enacts Egdon Heath’s judgment of her by symbolically making
her invisible and exiling her from time itself, restoring to Egdon Heath a crucial
historical continuity and equitable balance that Eustacia tragically disorders. As
she actually stands on Blackbarrow, in her attempted escape from the heath with
Wildeve, the narrator describes her perfect but aberrant unison with the land-
scape: the chaos of her mind matches the chaos of the world without, where a
hand seems to emerge from the barrow to pull her into its company of “moul-
dered remains” (RN, 358). After her death by drowning, she is taken to Clym’s
house, where Hardy describes her form as cold and insensible, without a whiff of
122 Literary Remains

life. Ironically, though, Eustacia, in death, appears nearly resurrected, her face
translucent and light: “Her black hair was looser now than either of them had
ever seen it before, and surrounded her brow like a forest. The stateliness of look
which had been almost too marked for a dweller in a country domicile had at
last found an artistically happy background” (RN, 381). Eustacia’s uncontrollable
passion appears tamed in death by her authentic symbiotic relationship with the
forest, not the oppressive heath that she ignored at her peril. Sara Malton rightly
concludes that Egdon Heath’s “disciplinary strength is so pervasive, its control so
absolute, that those individuals who resist its authority will ultimately acquiesce
to it, even if to do so they must eliminate their conscious resistance to it by erad-
icating their physicality.” Eustacia’s death, according to Malton, provides evi-
dence of her guilt and necessary punishment while simultaneously transforming
her corpse into “a vision of submissive beauty.”47
Paradoxically, the heath’s force that drives Eustacia to near madness and
eventual death draws Clym irresistibly back home to its landscape. As the narra-
tor shrewdly observes: “Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards
the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym”
(RN, 175–76). Lured to Paris by the promise of fiscal prosperity and alluring so-
cialism, Clym eventually becomes disgusted by its complacent cosmopolitanism
and selfish affluence. A “product” of the heath, Clym returns home ready to im-
prove life by becoming a schoolmaster “to the poor and ignorant—to teach them
what nobody else will” (RN, 174, 177). Imbued with a sensitivity to the predica-
ment of those who are pushed aside or marginalized, Clym claims his desire to
do some worthy thing before he dies (RN, 177).
Through Clym, Hardy makes a case for the right progress of civilization, an
advancement that appears to the unknowing like a journey backward in time. As
Clym walks home to his mother’s house at Blooms-End, the narrator remarks
upon “his barbarous satisfaction” that the heath has resisted the cultivation of the
land “into square fields, plashed hedges, and meadows watered on a plan so rec-
tangular that on a fine day they look like silver gridirons” (RN, 176). His mother
too believes that his plan to become a schoolmaster testifies to a backwardness
fueled by his own free will—an unreconcilable paradox in her mind. But to those
who live in rhythm with the heath, civilization means remaining attached to the
land and caring for those ignored or dismissed by others. In this culture, progress
is measured by a very tangible and material affinity for ancestors, more precisely
by one’s capacity to relate to Blackbarrow and the ancestors buried there.
But Clym’s simple return home does not seem to heal the inner strenuousness
he expects to disappear. The time away from the heath, his partial memory of it
while in Paris, has not been without consequences: “There was a natural cheerful-
ness striving against depression from without, and not quite succeeding” (RN, 139).
Further, at a moment when one might expect Clym to be completely relaxed and
unself-conscious in the landscape, he admits, at least in this early moment of his
return, that the world of Egdon Heath has failed to meet his expectations.
 Death Eclipsed 123

As Clym attends the disinterring of the pots of charnel bones by the heathmen,
a pot promised to his mother for her home but given to Eustacia—because “she has
a cannibal taste for such churchyard furniture seemingly”—he thinks, “In returning
to labour in this sequestered spot he had anticipated an escape from the chafing of
social necessities; yet behold they were here also. More than ever he longed to be in
some world where personal ambition was not the only recognized form of progress”
(RN, 191). The novel groans for the disinterring of Clym’s true nature, one so inti-
mately shaped by the heath. Unfortunately, he not only meets opposition from his
mother, who marvels at his ability to regress professionally, but he is swept off cen-
ter by Eustacia’s alluring passion.
Hardy’s design of Clym and Eustacia as opposing natures prevents easy ex-
cavation. He decides to marry Eustacia, whom his mother mistrusts, and thereby
jeopardizes family relationships. Eustacia, by ignoring the knock of reconcilia-
tion on the cottage door when Mrs. Yeobright visits Clym, causes not only Mrs.
Yeobright’s unfortunate death but the eventual dissolution of their marriage.
The fabric of the family disintegrates as if the moths from the heath had nested
there too. Simultaneously, though, Hardy fashions a kind of blind seer out of
Clym, who arrives home eager for studies but gradually loses his eyesight and so
is forced to cut furze for a living. In the swing of labor we notice his cheerful and
calm demeanor. The narrator describes him as one on intimate terms with the
lively creatures of the heath invisible to most people. Amber-colored butterflies
quiver near his lips, emerald-green grasshoppers hover about his feet, and bright
yellow and green snakes slither from bush to bush. Strangely, while he experi-
ences the bitter disintegration of his marriage and the monotony of his new oc-
cupation, the narrator conveys a luminescent world saturated with color, color
unseen by Clym until he met the heath up close in his furze cutting.
Throughout the novel—Mrs. Yeobright’s unnecessary death, the necessary
deaths of Eustacia and Wildeve, and Thomasin’s marriage to Diggory Venn—
Clym decays bodily, even as his spirits revive. Nonetheless, though his physical
features are marked with decay, his new avocation as itinerant preacher revivifies
his spirit as it divines its way in a world tempered by a long association with
Blackbarrow’s ancients. When he frequently walks the heath alone, the past
seizes him, forcing him to listen to its story:

His imagination would then people the spot with its ancient inhab-
itants: forgotten Celtic tribes trod their tracks around him, and he
could almost live among them, look in their faces, and see them stand-
ing beside the barrows which swelled around, untouched and perfect
as at the time of their erection. . . . Their records had perished long ago
by the plough, while the works of these remained. Yet they all had lived
and died unconscious of the different fates awaiting their works. It
reminded him that unforseen factors operate in the production of
immortality. (RN, 387)
124 Literary Remains

Attentive to both the Celtic spirits who inhabit the heath and the spirits present
at his wife’s and mother’s graves, places he visits daily, Clym finds himself at
home among the immortals. Just as Christ seems to visit Eustacia at her death,
Clym experiences his association with Him through his new work. Speaking at
Blackbarrow, standing as an embodiment of both ancient and Christian tradi-
tions, Clym preached “moral lectures or sermons on the mount” (RN, 411) to
mixed reviews: some believed him, some did not, some agreed with his ap-
proach, some wanted more spiritual doctrine. But everywhere he traveled, he
was kindly received, because the story of his life had become generally known.
The return of the native is not without complication, as Hardy so com-
pellingly reveals in the novel. The complication stems in part from losing sight
of Egdon Heath’s powerful energy to substantially anchor individuals within the
community and the landscape they inhabit. Eustacia, so gifted to live and move
and have her being on Egdon Heath, betrays her nature with ambition and un-
reserved passion. The heath, then, becomes “her Hades” (RN, 64), because she is
unable to reconcile herself to its transformative forces. Her willful break from
the heath’s unbroken run of history, still so evident in the community, destroys
families, Hardy’s central force for cohesion and focus of loyalty in the novel.
Clym loses sight of Egdon Heath at his peril by leaving its confines for a lucrative
profession as a diamond merchant in Paris and his infatuation with Eustacia,
thereby risking his ability to reconnect with his ancestors. His return home heals
some of the pain caused by the breach as we read in the descriptive passages of
Clym’s relationship with the heath. But Hardy ends the novel with slight but
telling qualifications. Perhaps Clym’s initial departure from Egdon Heath and
his marriage to Eustacia has marred him for life, something from which he will
never fully recover. Thus there will always be that look of death about him. Yet
his energy for preaching on an expansive range of moral precepts, particularly
the value of loving kindness in personal relationships, and the community’s gen-
tle acceptance of him, precisely because of his history, tell of the heath’s restora-
tive energies in the lives of those who never ultimately abandon it.

IV
Whatever memory of rural life and its emphasis on the organic relationship to
nature, history, and community we read about in Hardy’s early novels later dis-
solves in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.48 Tess’s attempts to catch
the threads of history and reattach them to her life end in disaster. Jan Jed/ rze-
jewski argues persuasively that the novel’s preoccupation with death and decay
reveals Hardy’s harshest criticism to date of the Church of England and its
“rigid, formalistic ethical system based on a dogmatic and narrow-minded inter-
pretation of Christianity.”49 Tess’s encounter with the parson at Marlott con-
firms Jed/ rzejewski’s claims and underscores Hardy’s realistic vision that the
world has reached the end of history. No longer does contact with one’s ances-
 Death Eclipsed 125

tors bring hope and renewal to family and community. Instead, touching the
graves of ancestors uncovers, for a moment, Tess’s true aristocratic nature but
ultimately sentences her to death.
Throughout the novel, just as one set of moral sorrows lessens its burden
in Tess’s heart, a fresh one appears to impede her progress toward happiness.
When Tess returns pregnant from her encounter with Alec d’Urberville—“bogus
kinfolk” who purchased the decayed d’Urberville name to assuage their own aris-
tocratic ambitions—she is welcomed by her school friends, who remark on her
beauty and flattering frock (T, 89). Amid pressures from the cold, judgmental
world of strict moral codes, the tender Marlott villagers want to ease her return
to them. With the eventual birth of her son and her return to the fields, she
meets again sympathetic workers who help her feel independent and useful once
more. She hopes that time will close over the wound from the past: “Their
friendliness won her still further away from herself, their lively spirits were con-
tagious, and she became almost gay” (T, 97). But the illness of her son and her
unfortunate encounter with a local parson hesitant to ministrate to those vul-
nerable like Tess prevent her from knowing peace.
Since her father rejects Tess’s request to have the parson visit them and bap-
tize the baby because he believes Tess irrevocably tarnished the antique nobility
of his family, Tess is forced to rely on her own spiritual resources. Fearing her
child’s double doom—the lack of both baptism and legitimacy—Tess gathers her
brothers and sisters and performs the baptism herself. Invoking a name sug-
gested by both a phrase from the book of Genesis and the unfortunate terms of
her own life, Tess pronounces: “‘SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost’” (T, 99). She dipped her hand
into the basin and fervently drew a cross on the baby and, “continuing with cus-
tomary sentences,” she speaks to Sorrow’s future fight against evil and his un-
wavering commitment to God (T, 99). Confident in the efficacy of the sacra-
ment, Tess utters a heartfelt thanksgiving prayer amid “an ecstasy of faith which
almost apotheosized her” (T, 99).
Hardy’s representation of the baptism reveals a careful attention to the
rubrics of the ritual. Tess prompts the children to say “Amen” at the appointed
places, and she seems to know and abide by the various sections of the ritual:
prefatory prayers, the signing with water, the “customary sentences” about how
baptism shapes one’s mission in the world and, finally, a profound declaration
of thanksgiving at the conclusion of the rite. Hardy suggests, clearly, that this im-
provised baptism “has counted,” and that its efficacy is felt not only in Sorrow
but in Tess and the rest of her family, for “what she said will never be forgotten
by those who knew her” (T, 99).
So when Tess, in a moment of self-doubt, asks the parson whether the bap-
tism was doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial (will it be “‘just the
same for him as if you had baptized him?’”), she can scarcely contain her indig-
nation when the parson hesitates, “finding that a job he should have been called
126 Literary Remains

in for had been unskillfully botched by his customers among themselves”

(T, 100). Hardy portrays the parson as an ecclesiastic, one who views his role in
the church not as a servant who offers loving kindness to the vulnerable but as a
skilled professional specializing in the rubrics of rituals. The scene uncovers a
dilemma faced by the Anglican Church in the last third of the nineteenth cen-
tury; that is, the tension between the technical rules that the Church, to solidify
its national identity, unwaveringly adhered to despite the ambiguities found in
the human condition, and the Christian impulse to respond freely to people in
spiritual pain. Luckily for Tess—and this is the lesson Hardy wishes to enjoin
upon his readers—the “man” wins out over the cleric: “The dignity of the girl, the
strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect his nobler impulses—or
rather those that he had left in him after ten years of endeavor to graft technical
belief on actual skepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and
the victory fell to the man. ‘My dear girl, it will be just the same’” (T, 100–101).
The debate concerning infant baptism was not some abstract theological ar-
gument for Hardy. His maternal grandfather refused to have his children bap-
tized. To spite him, on the day of his funeral in 1822, while his coffin sat in the
church awaiting burial, his two youngest children were baptized. Jemima Hardy,
the author’s mother, had been privately baptized, and her memories of these se-
cret baptisms in which the children seemingly conspired against their father fu-
eled her son’s imagination in his rendering of the midnight baptism scene in
Tess.50 In fact, Hardy’s mother had a rather canny view of baptism—“that it could
do no harm, and she wouldn’t want her children to blame her in another life for
failing in some duty in this one.”51
Hardy’s exploration of this issue in Tess, however, is not so much utilitarian as
it is spiritual. Compelled by his compassionate identification with the suffering,
Hardy highlights Tess’s desire, as a Christian, churchgoing parent, to effect, in
part, her child’s salvation through her own impromptu baptism, a ritual not con-
jured from her imagination but one that makes every attempt to follow the Angli-
can Book of Common Prayer. But the Book of Common Prayer had been a source
of difficulty for some evangelical Anglicans since the 1840s and 1850s, especially
its wording around the sacraments, baptism in particular. The evangelical was anx-
ious to emphasize the need for conversion, for moral regeneration, and was afraid
that once this regeneration occurred at baptism, there would be no further need
for conversion through the course of one’s life. High churchmen, however, re-
jected the evangelical anxiety by adhering to their understanding that at baptism
the infant achieved regeneration and, consequently, in case of death, would attain
salvation. The argument sharpened in the late 1840s and early 1850s with the case
of George Cornelius Gorham, an evangelical minister who held the evangelical
view of baptism.52 In the course of his being assigned to a new parish, his bishop,
Henry Phillpots, before he would approve Gorham’s transfer, examined him at
considerable length (over fifty-two hours total) solely on the doctrine of baptism.
Phillpots declared Gorham’s doctrine unsound and refused to instate him at
 Death Eclipsed 127

Brampford-Speke. In a public letter, Gorham complained that his treatment by

“the cruel exercise of episcopal power stretched beyond the boundaries of reason
and decency.”53 The Gorham case, then, raised questions of heresy and the power
of an authority to declare someone a heretic. Gorham refused to allow for uncon-
ditional regeneration at baptism, while Phillpots and the traditional wing of the
Church of England argued that at baptism the child was regenerated. When
Gorham appealed the ruling to a church committee, his plea was denied, which, as
Owen Chadwick informs us, would have disturbing consequences for the Church
of England. On March 9, 1850, Gorham successfully appealed the decision to the
judicial committee of the privy council, a governmentally constituted body. This
decision thrust the Church of England into a serious identity crisis because, as
Archbishop Manning poignantly asked, “‘How can a priest, twice judged unfit for
cure of souls by the Church, be put in charge of souls at the sentence of a civil
power without overthrowing the divine office of the Church?’”54 The case lit a
firestorm of controversy between evangelicals, who wanted the church to be more
inclusive of the population, varied as it was in its religious and irreligious views,
and high churchmen, who feared that if the church was too broad it would lose
its national identity and its grip on established doctrine and discipline.
Hardy’s work in this scene is valuable because it registers the still small voice
of humanity that refuses to be silenced in the face of the institutional church.
In a sense, as Tim Armstrong has argued persuasively in his discussion of
Hardy’s poems, history repeats itself in this scene because its ghosts cannot be
laid to rest and because the illusion that time is progress, and that the new year
brings development, has been disproved by Tess’s experience.55 As the scene pro-
gresses from the question of baptism to the issue of burial in consecrated
ground, Tess becomes more confident in her resistance to doctrinal edict. Ac-
cording to Tess’s logic, if the baptism is “just the same,” then Sorrow is entitled
to a Christian burial. With that, the vicar was cornered:

“Ah—that’s another matter,” he said.

“Another matter—why?” asked Tess rather warmly.
“Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I
must not—for certain reasons.”
“Just for once, sir!”
“Really I must not.”
“O sir!” She seized his hand as she spoke.
He withdrew it, shaking his head.
“Then I don’t like you!” she burst out, “and I’ll never come to your
church no more!”
“Don’t talk so rashly.”
“Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don’t? . . . Will it be
just the same? Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you
yourself to me myself—poor me!”
128 Literary Remains

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he sup-
posed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman’s power
to tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case
also—“It will be just the same.” (T, 101)

Even though Sorrow is buried in “that shabby corner of God’s allotment

where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptised infants, notorious
drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid,” Tess,
through her resistance to the vicar (notice: parson no more) claims herself not as
a victim of the church’s heartless judgment but as a person who deserves another
human being’s time and attention: “‘Don’t for God’s sake speak to me as saint
to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself’” (T, 101). In the face of her challenge
to the vicar, grounded as it is in the human condition, he capitulates a second
time and admits that Sorrow’s nightly burial in unconsecrated ground will aid
his speedy progress to heaven and salvation: “‘It will be just the same’” (T, 101).
Following the death of Sorrow, Tess is struck with the modern realization that
the anniversary of her own death would pass without singularity, without the
benefit of historical memory. Such a thought, Hardy writes, marks her change
“from a simple girl to complex woman” (T, 102).
This complexity no doubt attracts Angel Clare, who, like Edred Fitzpiers in
The Woodlanders, replaces material reality with his own idealized abstractions.
Angel loves the idea of Tess and dislikes her aristocratic ancestry, except when it
serves him to win favor with his family as he approaches them about the prospect
of his marriage to her. Set against this abstract affair is the proximity of Tal-
bothay’s dairy farm to Kingsbere Church. The juxtaposition of Tess’s relation-
ship with Angel and her impotent ancestors proves contradictory. Tess reflects
that her life will lapse as silently as those “grand dames and their powerful hus-
bands” who rest in the great family vaults. As she views Kingsbere from a dis-
tance, she reminds herself that her “useless ancestors” deserve no admiration
now (T, 108). Simultaneously, she wonders whether such proximity will engen-
der good, a thought that raises her spirits “as the sap in twigs” (T, 104). Knowing
the profound value to life and community of one’s tangible relationship to the
dead, Hardy hopes that such an encounter with history will revive Tess and alter
her fortunes, namely, in her relationship with Angel. In the end, Hardy seems
convinced, more than he was at the conclusion of The Woodlanders, that the value
and power of historical continuity have been subverted by those who buy their
aristocratic identity and by hypocrites who delude themselves into thinking that
they understand rural England by abstracting its positive characteristics from the
people who enact them, and by simultaneously judging them according to nega-
tive stereotypes formed in modern urban society.
We can see this contradictory and demeaning process in Angel’s response to
Tess’s experience with Alec and Sorrow. After Angel admits to his own indiscre-
tions with a woman in London, he hypocritically berates Tess. To his claims that
 Death Eclipsed 129

Tess is an “unapprehending peasant woman” who has not been initiated into
the “proportions of social things,” Tess argues, “‘I am only a peasant by position,
not by nature’” (T, 229). Tess rejects Angel’s glib stereotype of rural women as
promiscuous and implies that her true nature is aristocratic. The impulse of
modern society expressed most immediately in Angel’s disaffection for Tess
forces her to make the distinction between identity and work, a foreign distinc-
tion to those untouched by the modern impulse. Tess confronts Angel with her
shrewd insights about modern reality, but he invokes not high-minded philo-
sophical ideals nor the romantic nostalgia that prompted him to arrange for a
d’Urberville mansion for their honeymoon, but a rigid Christian morality, a per-
spective he claims to have denounced. Angel aligns the survival of the fittest to a
set of strict moral codes:

I think that parson who unearthed your pedigree would have done bet-
ter if he had held his tongue. I cannot help associating your decline as
a family with this other fact—of your want of firmness. Decrepit families
imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a
handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent! Here
was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the be-
lated seedling of an effete aristocracy. (T, 229–30)

Incapable of reconciling himself to a reality that does not square with his ideal-
ized notion of Tess, Angel retreats to easy Victorian condemnations.
Although unable to express his death wish for Tess consciously, Angel’s un-
conscious erupts in the sleepwalking scene when he murmurs, “‘Dead! dead!
dead! My wife—dead, dead,’” carries Tess to the ruined choir of the Abbey
church and places her in the empty stone coffin of an abbot (T, 242). Tess,
though, symbolically rejecting Angel’s desired end for her, sits up in the coffin
and persuades Angel to return to the house. Angel enacts his severe Christian
moral judgment of her by placing her in the abbot’s empty tomb. Even as he con-
demns her to death for her moral failure, he fails to recognize that both the tomb
and the Abbey choir are ruined, symbolically powerless to render judgement
upon Tess, a fact she appreciates.
The next time Tess sits near a tomb occurs at the church in “the half-dead”
town of Kingsbere, “the spot of all spots in the world which could be the
d’Urberville home, since they had resided there for full five hundred years”
(T, 348). Forced to migrate because of John Durbeyfield’s death, the family lost
its lifehold and had to sever its long attachment to the land. Previously, because
of their stability, families like the Durbeyfields and the Souths from The Wood-
landers formed the backbone of village life, becoming “the depositories of village
traditions” (T, 339). As these families lost their leases, they had to seek refuge in
larger urban centers. Unfortunately, the Durbeyfields arrive too late to secure
lodging and are forced to take shelter in the churchyard. As Joan Durbeyfield
130 Literary Remains

shrewdly observes, “‘Isn’t your family vault your own freehold?’” (T, 349). She
articulates the fundamental Nonconformist argument that each person has a
right to a burial plot in the parish churchyard, which preserves, at least in death,
her or his particular stake in English identity. The Nonconformists, then, ap-
preciating the Church of England’s long relationship to property, make claims
to a piece of the churchyard for their members, many of whom have lost their
lifeholds and are forced to migrate, much like the Durbeyfields.
In contrast, Joan Durbeyfield’s question offers a difficult commentary on
the state of rural England. The property that once had held together families and
villagers has devolved into a churchyard plot. The loss of the freehold ruptures
villagers’ relationship to the land, depletes their capacity to live unself-conscious,
instinctual lives that do not separate identity from work, and, as Joan Durbey-
field’s question signifies, marks the death of English rural society as they under-
stood it. Metaphorically, what binds the Durbeyfield family to the land and,
therefore, to English national identity is the promise of death and burial in the
family vault, or, more likely, in the parish churchyard.
Tess instinctively recognizes her family’s extinction and, therefore, their ex-
clusion from English national life. She wanders into the open church and to the
tombs of her family. Defaced and broken, “their brasses torn from the matrices,
the rivet-holes remaining like martin-holes in a sand-cliff. Of all the reminders that
she had ever received that her people were socially extinct there was none so
forcible as this spoliation” (T, 350). Tess’s presence among her ancestors’ tombs be-
trays her potentially aristocratic nature, one begun with the arrival of the Normans
and Sir Pagan d’Urberville. But their decayed state testifies to their extinct place in
her life and the pointless nostalgia of seeking their resurrection. The final touch of
irony in the scene involves the emergence of Alec from among the effigies. From
among the ruins, he proclaims a doctrine of the modern age, to which Tess must
succumb to save her family from desperate poverty: “‘The little finger of the sham
d’Urberville can do more for you than the whole dynasty of the real underneath’”
(T, 351). The power of real history has evaporated, and what has taken its place is
the illusion of history, one tethered to capitalism and self-interest. Hardy both wor-
ries about this sham and its effects on English society and identity and suggests its
inevitability, as inevitable as Tess’s return to Alec for his financial protection.
In our last view of Tess, we see her reclined on the ancient druid rocks of
Stonehenge, a place where she feels at home and where her mother’s family were
shepherds. In the face of late Victorian justice, however, the allusions to her fam-
ily in a place known for its sacrificial rites reinforce her tragic end. She is arrested
and executed at Wintoncester, a town that embodies in its architecture the
whole of English history: the Norman cathedral with the Gothic buildings
around it and the utilitarian prison with its “level grey roofs, and rows of short
barred windows bespeaking captivity” (T, 384).56 In an effort to secure some
hope for the future, Hardy offers a potential union between Angel and Liza-Lu,
Tess’s sister—a less “flawed” woman, and the promise of d’Urberville progeny. As
 Death Eclipsed 131

the d’Urberville knights and dames slept unknowingly in their tombs, Tess is
executed, and Angel and Liza-Lu join hands and walk together into the future.
But the ending is not so neat as it initially appears. Nancy Barrineau’s notes
to the Oxford edition of Tess explain that because the Deceased Wife’s Marriage
Act was not passed until 1907, Angel and Liza-Lu could not be legally married.
Judith Weissman, however, contends that people of Tess’s class were untouched
by the 1835 law that made marriage between certain relations automatically void
(T, 410). Therefore, Angel and Liza-Lu may marry, but not without calling into
question the marriage’s legitimacy, another signal of the end of history. To further
speculate, because both had been associated with a murderer, it would not be un-
reasonable to think that Angel and Liza-Lu would emigrate, as happens in so
many Victorian novels, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, discussed ear-
lier. Finally, there is a third challenge to hope. What happens to Tess’s corpse?
Does she come under the knife of someone like Fitzpiers, a surgeon pursuing an
anatomizing impulse, or is she buried on the north side of some forgotten church-
yard in a grave with no name? Either way, Hardy effaces the possibility that some-
one in later generations will stand over her grave, much as Marty did with Giles,
and remember her tragic life. The last bits of history kept alive in memory and
imagination give way in the cataclysmic turn toward modernity.

V
Whatever slight bit of hope about the relationship of death to life one may eke
out of Tess’s conclusion is totally obliterated in the opening pages of Jude the
Obscure, Hardy’s last novel.57 In his opening description of Marygreen, Jude Faw-
ley’s home village—a place he finds ugly—Hardy makes clear that history has been
erased from the village’s topography and architecture. Careful to note that
houses have been demolished and trees felled, Hardy complains about the erec-
tion of a new church landscaped to dismantle the churchyard: “The site whereon
so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even
recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the
churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteenpenny cast-
iron crosses warranted to last five years” ( J, 6). Not only have the graves them-
selves disappeared, but Hardy charges that the new markers do not even bother
to record names. The “new improvements” efface local and individual history
and underscore instead the financial advantage in memorials. Later, in Shaston,
Hardy notes that the churchyard is now noted for its freakish qualities (it slopes
up as steeply as the church roof ), which make Shaston a “breezy and whimsical
spot” ( J, 211). Shaston seems remarkable for its three consolations to man: “It
was a place where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church steeple,
where beer was more plentiful than water, and where there were more wanton
women than honest wives and maids” ( J, 210). Associated with drunkenness and
prostitution, the churchyard, satirically, promises redemption from sin.
132 Literary Remains

Later, at Stoke-Barehills, Hardy acknowledges that the local churchyard, the

site of significant family and village history, has been replaced by “cemeteries,” a
word he uses deliberately to convey an efficient and impersonal resting place for
the dead: “The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery,
standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway; the mod-
ern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs, having a look of intrusiveness
amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient walls” ( J, 304). The
modern age of the cemetery, first introduced by Edwin Chadwick and John
Claudius Loudon, who argued for extramural cemeteries that would not only
serve to bury the dead efficiently and hygienically but would offer moral instruc-
tion to those who walks their paths, has finally arrived in rural England. Here
Hardy highlights the decaying past amid the intrusive modern improvements in
cemeteries, changes that neglect people’s relationships with their families and an-
cestors. Later, as we will see, Hardy suggests that the churchyard’s emphasis on
relationships with kin crumbles under the weight of the cemetery’s power to
judge people for their moral transgressions.
We know that Hardy was actively engaged in both church restoration and
the design of many memorials and tombstones.58 He devoted much time and
trouble to making sketches and detailed working drawings for tombs and memo-
rials in addition to writing epitaphs and inscriptions. What Hardy came to de-
plore in the sweeping church restorations, like the ones that had taken place in
Marygreen and Stoke-Barehills, was the interruption in ancient continuities:
“‘Life, after all, is more than art, and that which appealed to us in the maybe
clumsy outlines of some structure which had been looked at and entered by a
dozen generations of ancestors outweighs the more subtle recognition, if any, of
architectural qualities.’”59 Favoring the idiosyncratic over the regular, Hardy
mourns the loss of particular memorials in the name of a regularizing modernity.
The potential for relationships that death engenders has disappeared from
the world of this novel. The very institutions of inheritance, of life after death,
Hardy argues, are fatally diseased by self-serving values promulgated by modern so-
ciety. In contrast, we can briefly consider Hardy’s treatment of education as a way
of showing the devastating consequences of life without relationships. Richard
Phillotson’s departure for Christminster devastates Jude, and he spends the rest
of the novel thinking that education is a self-taught enterprise. He is left to pursue
the solitary study of “dead languages” from books whose “ancient pages had al-
ready been thumbed by hands possibly in the grave, digging out the thoughts of
these minds so remote yet so near” ( J, 29). The archeology of Roman remains in
The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, has transmogrified into a disinterment of
ancient knowledge that Jude cannot comprehend successfully. Without the cru-
cial mentoring of Phillotson, Jude believes that the grammar of the dead lan-
guages would contain, simplistically, “a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature
of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him by merely applying it”
( J, 26). Further, he is unable to sustain his studies, distracted first by Arabella
 Death Eclipsed 133

Donn and later by Sue Bridehead. Jude’s desires for entrance to Christminster are
finally dashed by the university’s rejection of him, a rejection he later hopes will
be redeemed with his son’s pursuit of a university education.
My purpose in highlighting threads of Jude’s educational experience is to
gesture toward the heart of the subject I am about to address; that is, Hardy’s rep-
resentations of death and burial in his final novel signify the end of life and be-
speak a nihilism promulgated unwittingly by modernity. As Mrs. Edlin says once
Sue has returned to Phillotson, “‘Ah! Poor soul! Weddings be funerals ‘a b’lieve
nowadays’” ( J, 420). The only remaining link to Jude’s past, Mrs. Edlin, also re-
iterated the warning that Jude and Sue should not marry by repeating the
doomed history of their ancestors, who separated and then suffered the death of
their child. The husband wanted the body “to bury it where his people lay, but
[the wife] wouldn’t give it up” ( J, 296). Desperate, he broke into the house to
steal the coffin but was caught and hanged for the offense. The wife, for her part,
went mad. The story unnerves those who hear it, including Father Time, Jude’s
son, who warns against the marriage, and presages the dire consequences of ig-
noring ancestral education, not for the first time, however. When Aunt Drusilla
dies, a symbolic moment when Sue and Jude reunite, despite her warning about
imminent disaster if he married Sue, we learn that she is buried in new ground
away from her ancestors and family. In the novels of Dickens, Gaskell, or early
Hardy, such a moment would have indicated the promise of new life. Here, how-
ever, the juxtaposition of events only intensifies the oppressive sense that noth-
ing good can come from death.
As I mentioned earlier, the very places where death gives life in earlier novels—
graves and churchyards—have been transformed into cemeteries, sites of social dis-
ruption, and places to correct the morally wayward. Arabella, for example, when
overcome with thoughts of Jude, is advised by her friend Anny to visit her hus-
band’s grave: “‘You must fight valiant against the feeling, since he’s another’s. And
I’ve heard that another good thing for it, when it afflicts volupshious widows, is to
go to your husband’s grave in the dusk of evening, and stand a long while a-bowed
down’” ( J, 332). Arabella swiftly rejects this idea, refusing to acquiesce to any sug-
gestion that would serve to curb her appetite for Jude. The gravesite represents the
potential to correct Arabella’s voluptuousness and to honor her husband, neither
of which interests her.
Later in the novel, after the death of the children and Jude and Sue have
separated, Sue visits Jude and requests that they visit the cemetery together so
that she can tell him of her decision to return to Phillotson. Again, the purpose
of the cemetery is not to reunite the family and strengthen the bonds of histori-
cal continuity but to offer moral correction in much the same way John Claudius
Loudon advises in his instructions for churchyard renovation and cemetery de-
sign, the improvement in moral sentiments. Sue, reinforcing the cemetery’s di-
dactic mission, admits to Jude: “‘Jude, I must say good-bye. But I wanted you to
go to the cemetery with me. Let our farewell be there—beside the graves of those
134 Literary Remains

who died to bring home to me the errors of my views. . . . It is here—I should like
to part’” ( J, 381). Overwhelmed by enormous guilt and convinced that God pun-
ished her immorality with the death of the four children, Sue severs her rela-
tionship with Jude in the presence of those whose lives have been sacrificed for
her moral redemption. But her use of the children rings hollow, because even
in the face of horrific death, she remains selfishly attached to her own scruples.
Superficially, it appears that the tragedy restores rightful lineage. Sue returns to
her first husband, ending the immoral relationship with Jude, who returns to
Arabella. Ironically, the divorces make their returns suspect, and the prospects
for children in either marriage are dashed by Jude’s untimely death and Sue’s
continued revulsion for Phillotson, to say nothing of her sexual squeamishness.
Hardy’s bracing representation of Little Father Time’s death, the deaths of
his half brother and sister, and the stillbirth of another child slams the coffin lid
on the future, not just in the world of the novel but in terms of a society able to
integrate into English national consciousness the rural mode of life. Allegori-
cally, the death of Little Father Time marks the death of historical time and its
positive contribution to shaping society’s future, particularly its appreciation of
local, familial relationships. Abandoned by his mother and forced to live with
his father and stepmother, Father Time suffers from the disjointed, migratory
life that Hardy worries about in his novels. This “too reflective child” under-
stands the import of Mrs. Edlin’s story for Jude and Sue and, in childlike fash-
ion, internalizes their difficulties, blaming himself and the other children for
their grinding poverty ( J, 352). His discovery that Sue is pregnant with a fourth
child drives him to murder and suicide, “‘because we are too menny’” ( J, 355).
Jude claims that it was in his nature to commit such an act: “‘The doctor says
there are such boys spring up amongst us—boys of a sort unknown in the last gen-
erations—the outcome of new views of life’” ( J, 355). Hardy testifies that a soci-
ety without healthy, vibrant, historically sensitive relationships within its
institutions, whether family, marriage, or education, will succumb to death, vis-
iting first the most innocent. Father Time replaces the priests of the institutional
church and announces not consolation borne from loving kindness but “a uni-
versal wish not to live” ( J, 355). As a result, Jude and Sue suffer a barrenness of
biblical proportions. To underscore this deepening alienation in society and the
family’s inability to reconcile themselves to the destructive and judgmental forces
of society, Hardy positions Sue in the half-filled common grave dug for her chil-
dren, creating a scene slightly reminiscent of Bathsheba with Fanny’s coffin in
Far from the Madding Crowd. Here, though, the actual connection of the living to
the dead through direct contact with the body is aborted by Jude, who coaxes her
home where she gives birth to a stillborn child.
Hardy’s last novel of his career acts as a memorial to English rural life, a
lonely and desperate reminder of what Helsinger calls “the myth of lost local com-
munity reconstituted in national culture.”60 For Hardy, the local and the rural—
represented in the decaying and crumbling churchyards, the lack of inheritance
 Death Eclipsed 135

and progeny, the dearth of unself-conscious relationships—are forced to acquiesce

to an encroaching modernism, which quickly loses sight of the personal cost to
those who must make this transition. In the end, Sue, Jude, and their children
cannot negotiate the past’s complicated relationship to the present. Arabella and
Phillotson, to a certain extent, survive because they move more easily between
time zones and more deftly among the traps set by moral conventions. The inex-
orable march of progress, Hardy argues, ignores history at its peril, but clinging to
this history may also be the death of you.
Hardy’s fiction offers a treacherous picture of late-nineteenth-century
Britain, where the struggle to integrate local rural society into emerging notions
of nationhood may be futile but is nonetheless important to memorialize.
Hardy’s novels, in conjunction with the Dissenters, assert the importance of ap-
preciating the past by devotion to one’s ancestors and the territory they inhabit,
and they argue for an anthropology of death, one that acts as “a ballast for the
mind adrift on change” (RN, 6). But Hardy also recognizes that his literary dis-
interment of Wessex may not be without complication. By the time he writes
Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, he vilifies readers through the narra-
tives, constantly warning them against the deception that a nostalgic longing for
the past may engender. Even the rural world of Egdon Heath betrays a violent
coerciveness powerful enough to scare away many a reader from an uncritical
over-identification with its mysterious ways. The novels insist, as does the burial
debate from the 1870s, on two contradictory claims: the dead continue to haunt
the living, and to ignore them is to do so at one’s peril; and the past must not dis-
tract readers from attending to modern exigencies and the skills necessary to ne-
gotiate them. Hardy reconciles this contradiction through his representations of
a vanishing world, compelling us to answer for ourselves a probative question he
poses in The Woodlanders: “‘But life, what [is] it after all?’”61
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 Chapter 5
“The Tonic of Fire”
Cremation in Late Victorian England

If the body doesn’t have to be there, it frees us up to do what we want.

—Mark Duffey, Owner, Everest Funeral Package

The story of Thomas Hardy’s burial offers a stunning transition into this chap-
ter on cremation. Acknowledging Hardy’s tremendous literary contribution to
English culture and respecting his lifelong love of home in Dorsetshire, Hardy’s
wife, Florence, had his heart removed from his body to be buried at Stinsford.
His corpse was cremated so that his ashes could be buried in Poet’s Corner at
Westminster Abbey. Both the national and local burials occurred simultaneously
on Monday, January 16, 1928. Hardy’s burials reflect, as many critics have sug-
gested, his deeply transitional position in English literary studies. He was master
of both novels and poetry, chronicler of nineteenth-century rural life and
prophet of twentieth-century urban social pressures. But Hardy’s interments also
epitomize significant shifts in society’s attitudes toward death, especially with the
introduction of cremation at the close of the nineteenth century. Just as Hardy’s
partial earthen burial appreciates and extends his relationship to rural Dorset, so
too his cremation attests to the demands of a rapidly changing nation, where the
ashes of a fallen novelist and poet define national culture.
Stephen Prothero, leading historian of cremation in America, articulates
the difference between burial and cremation in terms of society’s orientation to
the world it inhabits: “Whether to bury or to burn is, therefore, no trivial mat-
ter. It touches on issues as important as perceptions of the self, attitudes toward
the body, views of history, styles of rituals, and belief in God and the afterlife.”1
Specifically, Prothero argues, as Hardy does before him, that earthen burial
maintains significant ties with the living through prayers and memorials, visits to
cemeteries and elaborate funeral rites. On the other hand, because cremation
banishes decay through incineration, the spiritual rather than the material as-
pects of death become important, and survivors turn not to the past through
memorials and care of cemetery plots but to the present, the future, and notions

137
138 Literary Remains

of progress. The land, after all, is meant for the living, not the dead. “By
destroying the dead through the tonic of fire,” Prothero writes, “cremationists in-
oculate the living from the dangers of death and decay.”2 In this chapter I con-
tend that the late Victorian move to cremation, the final act in the Burial Bills
drama of the nineteenth century, was an effort to cope with anxieties about a
swiftly changing culture and society. Distaste for decomposing bodies conveyed
a national preoccupation with society’s loss of distinctions and the fear of de-
generation. Cremation offered a technologically advanced solution to contain
the corpse and to inoculate the living from the dead.
Cremation was not a new idea to Victorians. G. A. Walker, in Gatherings
from Graveyards (1839), spends the first half of his polemic for serious burial re-
form on the need for England to think seriously about a more dramatic separa-
tion between the living and the dead if it was to be considered among the most
civilized of nations.3 In a review of ancient history, Walker notes that the great-
est civilizations practiced extramural burial or cremation for sanitary and reli-
gious reasons.4 The ancient Greeks preferred cremation to burial, because they
believed fire freed the soul from the body to ascend to the heavens. The Ro-
mans, too, gave up burial for cremation, although its popularity gave cremation
the ineradicable taint of paganism, which would not be completely cleansed in
England until after World War II, when cremation became increasingly popular.
The domination of cremation in the West came to an end in the early Christian
era when because of a belief in the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost and the
entombment of Jesus before his Resurrection burial supplanted cremation as the
chief means of disposing of the dead.5 While the Greeks understood that the na-
ture of personhood rested in the soul liberated from the body at cremation, the
Christians believed that the integrity of the person, fragmented by sin and death,
would be fulfilled by the miracle of bodily resurrection. Fulfillment for the
Greeks occurred at cremation, while the Christians postponed redemption until
the Second Coming of Christ when he would beckon corpses from their graves.
The Christian perspective prevailed, and burial was practiced for approxi-
mately 1,500 years. Prothero, though, suggests that there were tensions within
Christianity that ultimately made room for cremation as a legitimate deathway
practice. To solve the “cognitive dissonance” between the official theology,
which stated that the Second Coming was imminent and that souls would be re-
united with their bodies, and the pervasive folk belief that the saints rested, body
and soul, in the lap of the Lord, the doctrine of purgatory was officially declared
in 1274. Purgatory provided a place for souls to go between personal death and
the end time.6 In the sixteenth century, however, reformers such as Martin
Luther rejected not only the doctrine of purgatory but most Roman Catholic
deathways, such as last rites, prayers to the saints, devotion to relics, and prayers
for the dead.7 Prothero concludes that by emphasizing the individual soul over
the collective rising of bodies, by replacing the authority of tradition with the au-
thority of Scripture, by highlighting the spiritual nature of the individual and the
 “The Tonic of Fire” 139

importance of conscience, “Protestant reformers contributed, albeit unwittingly,

to the legitimization of cremation in modern times.”8
Victorian anthropologist James Frazer, ever reluctant to accept religious ex-
planations for social behaviors, argues instead that burial rites, cremation in par-
ticular, emerge as a result of survivors’ fear of ghosts. In the paper “On Certain
Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul,” first pre-
sented before the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in
1885, Frazer claims that the ultimate point of burial rites is to erect a barrier
against the disembodied spirit, which appears at the time of death. Whenever we
find purification by fire from pollution contracted by close proximity to the de-
composing corpse, we may assume that the original intention was to place a phys-
ical barrier between the living and the dead. This strategy seems particularly apt,
since we know from earlier discussions that people expressed in a variety of ways
significant fear of carrying the corpse through the central part of the city.9
Frazer’s theories explain, in part, Victorian anxieties about the presence of the
corpse among the living and the strategies that cremationists conceived to quell
them. Rather than perceiving cremation as a progressive or civilizing invention,
Frazer suggests that the practice actually emerges from a primitive impulse to pro-
tect survivors and cities from ghosts wreaking havoc on their lives. Like Bram
Stoker, who recognized the power of the undead to disrupt arrogant notions of
progress and civilization, Frazer challenges as well ready modern or technologi-
cal explanations for cremation’s necessity in late Victorian society.

I
The reintroduction of cremation into Western culture occurred in England and
the continent in the seventeenth century. English physician Sir Thomas Browne
wrote the first modern book on cremation, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall in 1658, and
a century later the French Republic, in efforts to de-Christianize funeral rites, ad-
vocated cremation. But it would take another 100 years and desperate overcrowd-
ing in European churchyards for the cremation movement to gain momentum. In
1869, an international congress of medical experts denounced burial as unhygienic
and championed cremation “in the name of public health and of civilization.”10 As
early as 1866, Italian scientists published papers extolling the benefits of crema-
tion, and later, at the Vienna Exposition in 1873, Professor Bunetti of Padua ex-
hibited the results of his experiments—a glass box containing approximately four
pounds of human ashes—and a model of his furnace.11 Word of the experiments
and the possibility of cremation spread quickly to England, because Sir Henry
Thompson, Queen Victoria’s private surgeon, had attended the Vienna Exposi-
tion. He ventured to bring the subject before the English people in what has been
called the most influential pro-cremation treatise of the century, “The Treatment
of the Body after Death,” which appeared in the Contemporary Review in January
1874 and will be discussed momentarily.12
140 Literary Remains

English cremationists, to make a case for fire over earthen burial, invoked
the sanitary argument already well established from mid-century. To review
briefly what I discussed at length in my analysis of Edwin Chadwick’s work on
burial reform, the graveyards registered the effects of a surging urban population
and, increasingly, burial grounds were unable to accommodate so many corpses.
Churchyard management, however, inconsiderate of the major public health
problems posed by so many decaying bodies, reopened common graves, tossed
bones into charnel houses, and dismantled coffins to be sold for firewood or
“coffin furniture” to increase its income. The Burial Acts introduced in the
1850s, after long and contentious debates about the nationalization of cemeter-
ies, solved much of the problem by prohibiting intramural interment and by pro-
viding the means for the establishment of extramural cemeteries. Rejecting
Chadwick’s nationalizing efforts to open state cemeteries, the Burial Acts al-
lowed for the establishment of local burial boards that were empowered to pro-
vide cemeteries financed with money raised on the poor rate. According to Julie
Rigg, “The passage of the Burial Acts in the 1850s, in handing control to burial
boards, signaled acknowledgment of the pioneering work of cemetery companies
in providing cemeteries both free from the domination of the Church of
England, and operating on sanitary principles.”13
Shortly after the publication of Thompson’s article in January 1874, the
Cremation Society of England was formed and counted among its members
such prominent individuals as the Dukes of Westminster and Bedford, the
Lords Bramwell and Playfair, and Sir T. Spencer Wells, in addition to the Vic-
torian scientific and literary elite.14 By 1878, Sir Henry Thompson had become
president of the newly formed society, which sought to test the legality of cre-
mation in England. Finding no explicit law against cremation, the society pro-
cured property at the Woking Cemetery, twenty-five miles southwest of London,
and built a crematorium. To demonstrate the advantages of cremation and the
efficacy of the furnace, Thompson cremated a horse, but the plans to experiment
next with a human being incited tremendous public outrage, an outrage so fierce
that Home Secretary Sir Richard Cross threatened to prosecute the Cremation
Society if it continued with its “indecent” practice.15
The crematorium at Woking probably would have remained closed had it not
been for a case involving cremation in 1884, promulgated by Dr. William Price
of Llantrissant, Glamorganshire, Wales. An eccentric Welsh physician who
claimed to be a representative of the ancient Druids disposed of his infant son’s re-
mains in Druidic manner—incineration. First apprehended by neighbors, Dr. Price
was later arrested and tried before Justice James Stephen. Arguing that nothing is
a crime unless explicitly stated as such in English law, Stephen ruled that “a person
who burns instead of burying a dead body does not commit a criminal act unless
he does it in such a manner as to amount to a public nuisance at common law,”
and “that to burn a body decently and inoffensively is lawful, or at the very least
not criminal.”16
 “The Tonic of Fire” 141

To reconcile the differences of opinion produced by Stephen’s judgment and

the ruling of the home secretary, Mr. Charles Cameron introduced the Disposal
of the Dead Regulation Bill to the House of Commons, which proposed to rec-
ognize and regulate cremation “with such precautions as would ensure its safety
and decorum, prevent its abuse and render penal its unauthorized perfor-
mance.”17 Although defeated on the second reading, there was enough support to
warrant the Cremation Society to open Woking. Between March 26, 1885, and
May 1887, eighteen bodies were cremated. In 1889, fifty-three cremations were
performed, and by 1908 the rate was up to 795 a year.18 Following Stephen’s de-
cision and Woking’s successful inauguration, other crematoria were established
in Scotland in 1891 and Manchester in 1892. Eventually, the Cremation Act was
passed in 1902, legalizing and regulating the practice in England.19
Specifically, the Cremation Act of 1902 codified the process whereby the local
burial boards might provide a crematorium to the public by allowing them to ap-
prove the plans and site for the facility. In efforts to keep the facilities from public
view, the act calls for crematoria to be no closer than 200 yards to a dwelling and
500 yards to public highways. While the secretary of state would establish regula-
tions for inspectors, local burial boards would decide upon cremation fees.
Churchmen, for their part, were not compelled by law to perform any service for
a parishioner who was cremated, although they could if he or she wished.20 Ac-
cording to Peter Jupp, a leading historian of cremation in England, the 1902 act fa-
vored the churches in two ways: it supported clergy who opposed cremation and
prevented crematoria from being built on consecrated ground. Perceiving the in-
creasing acceptance of cremation in the twentieth century as a direct result of the
burial laws in the 1850s, Jupp concludes: “When the Church surrendered its re-
sponsibility for provision of burial land, it also lost the grounds for its controlling
interests in the interpretation of death. Secular, local government was now the cus-
todian of corpses: it would discharge its responsibilities not according to transcen-
dent but to rational criteria, funded by the living as ratepayers.”21
Jupp notes other political realities that promoted cremation’s success. The
1880s decade was one in which “the avenues for the expression of democracy
were being restructured and advanced.”22 In 1888, the Local Government Act
transferred the administrative powers of the justices of the peace to elected county
councils, providing a system of local elected officials to override the competing in-
terests of boards, vestries, and guardians. The first local authority crematoria in-
cluded Hull (1901) and Leicester (1902), followed by the City of London at
Ilford, Leeds, Bradford, and Sheffield in 1905, and Liverpool in 1908.23
At first glance, the expansion of crematoria seems to indicate that the cre-
mationist propaganda proved successful as it effectively argued for cremation on
sanitary, economic, and aesthetic grounds. Nonetheless, resistance came from the
working classes, long the target of burial reformers since the 1830s. As we know
from earlier discussions, the working classes valued the communal rituals associ-
ated with dignified funerals and earthen burials. As the decades passed, they too
142 Literary Remains

desired, like the middle and upper classes, more elaborate funerals to mark their
growing success in this life, even though reformers claimed that such extravagance
was a waste of money. Further, as Jennifer Leaney has concluded, the working
classes had a widely different understanding of privacy and individual space from
the middle and upper classes, which increasingly privatized human activity. Ac-
customed to living in close quarters, which anxious sanitary reformers labeled
“overcrowding,” members of the working classes lived their lives—eating, sleeping,
childbearing and child rearing, and dying—in public view. Living in close proxim-
ity to death through their contact with corpses, familiarity with churchyards, and
tenacious belief in the important relationship between the living and the dead,
they rejected the privatization of death through cremation.24
The middle and upper classes, for their part, quietly resisted cremation until
1914 because of Christian tradition and “emotional distaste” for the practice,
even among those who no longer attended church services. Pat Jalland, a histo-
rian of death in Victorian families, has discussed the complicated and contra-
dictory history of cremation, and she has found that “a diffuse and residual
religious sentiment led to passive resistance to cremation.”25 To understand the
slow acceptance of cremation, Jalland studies the debate in the Lancet, the lead-
ing medical journal and initial advocate for cremation, as “‘safe, speedy, whole-
some and economical.’”26 Convinced by Thompson’s sanitary argument, the
Lancet steadfastly ignored the 2,000-year-old tradition of Christian burial, sum-
marily dismissing objections to cremation based upon sentiment for the burial
service, the resurrection of the body, and biblical claims that we shall return to
the ground from whence we came. More significantly, the Lancet rejected out-
right the position offered by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, bishop of Lincoln,
who stressed that the heathenish practices of cremation would undermine faith
in the resurrection of the body, leading to widespread social unrest and im-
morality. To the Lancet editor, since resurrection of the body from bones or
ashes was equally difficult, the bishop’s claims were irrelevant.27
But in 1879, after the public outcry over the incident at Woking, the Lancet
changed sides, arguing instead that the sanitary problem caused by crowded
graveyards could be solved with slow, steady reform of earthen burial practices.
Cremation was now seen as an insult to Christianity and its doctrine of the res-
urrection of the body. Denouncing the Woking experiment and invoking
Wordsworth’s earlier assessment, the Lancet proclaimed that “‘nothing so imbe-
cile as an adoption of the heathen practice of burying the dead will be tolerated
in England.’”28 The Lancet’s about-face, suggests Jalland, testifies to the power
of popular religious sentiment to sway the medical establishment prone to sup-
port the sanitary case and explains middle- and upper-class hostility to cremation.
In fact, Jalland’s research shows that little mention is made of cremation in the
family papers of middle- and upper-class families, in part because families sup-
ported traditional burial and because they may have felt the subject was taboo.29
The cremationists, however, resurrected the worst of the horror stories from ear-
 “The Tonic of Fire” 143

lier in the century to challenge Victorian England’s love affair with the cemetery
and to debunk the myth about the body resting peacefully in the grave. The
future, then, not the past, compelled the cremationists to make their case.30

II
In particular, Sir Henry Thompson shocks readers by opening his article on the
treatment of the body after death with grim reminders of decay’s putrescence. Na-
ture acts as a vulture with a “keen scent” for animal decay, disturbing sentimental
beliefs that death brings eternal rest: “Already a thousand changes have com-
menced. Forces innumerable have attacked the dead. The rapidity of the vulture,
with its keen scent for animal decay, is nothing to that of Nature’s ceaseless agents
now at full work before us.”31 Likening nature to a “marvelously complex machine,”
Thompson then describes in chemical detail the decay of the body, which has been
transformed in Thompson’s discourse to “dead animal matter”: “The animal must
be resolved into carbonic acid . . . water . . . ammonia . . . mineral constituents more
or less oxidised, elements of the earth’s structure: Lime, Phosphorus, Iron, Sulphur
and Magnesia. The first group, gaseous in form, go into the atmosphere. The sec-
ond group, ponderous and solid, remain where the body lies, until dissolved and
washed into the earth by rain” (Thompson, 320).
Unlike the early reformers, who wrote at length and in great detail about
what they perceived to be the putrefactious effects of miasma, Thompson neu-
tralizes the repugnant aspects of decay through a description of precise chemical
processes and raises the specter of horror through allusion to “the poisonous in-
fluence of buried victims” (Thompson, 321). Claiming that painting the “ghastly
picture” of decay would stain the page too deeply for publication, Thompson
withdraws quickly into the scientific to suggest that cremation merely hastens
what nature begins (Thompson, 326). As a careful observer of nature’s laws,
Thompson concludes that burning the body efficiently merely resolves what na-
ture has so relentlessly begun at death. This process, because it focuses on the
sentiments of survivors to remove the dead from the sight of the living, serves the
interest of the body politic—“nature does nothing without an object desirable in
the interests of the body politic” (Thompson, 319).
Thompson’s facile connections among the decaying corpse—now animal
matter—and the inexorable machinations of nature that run in the interests of
the nation allow him to invoke economic metaphors to gesture toward a global
market. In a revelatory example of just how interdependent England is with
its African empire, Thompson presents the shocking case of “Negroes” who,
through their decomposition in the earth, have nourished mahogany to be used
as tables in a London home, which will, in turn, be broken up and burned, ab-
sorbed as fertilizer in the garden, and returned again to the London market as
produce. According to Thompson, “The question remains strictly a question of
prime necessity in the economic system of a crowded country. Nature will have
144 Literary Remains

it so whether we like it or not” (Thompson, 323). Interestingly, the easy integra-

tion of the world’s economy, which justifies the “natural” advances of the em-
pire, underwrites the cremationist’s argument and seems to suggest that
cremation aims to cleanse waste and decay from global economic systems bur-
geoning at the end of the nineteenth century. Such a productive view of crema-
tion reinforces what Christopher Hamlin perceives as the body’s atoms doing
some good, making significant contributions to society’s welfare.32
By the 1870s, Thompson has taken Edwin Chadwick’s early anxieties about
the relationship of decomposing matter and economic loss to its logical extreme.
For Chadwick, all smell of decomposition indicated a waste of money, not only
because of the exorbitant costs of funerals, but because it was a missed opportu-
nity for the state to regulate burial practices. By the last third of the nineteenth
century, the corpse itself had become nature’s capital meant to circulate through
the English economy, “intended to bear good interest and yield quick return”
(Thompson, 323). Thompson asks, “Shall her riches be hid in earth to corrupt
and bear no present fruit; or be utilised, without loss of time, value and interest,
for the benefit of starving survivors?” (Thompson, 323). Nature, in reclaiming
her atoms, has become an efficient corporation whose directives our bodies
seemed destined to obey.
Nature’s process, for Thompson, is seductive, not unlike the effect Dracula
has on his victims: “She [Nature] destines the material elements of my body to
enter the vegetable world on purpose to supply another animal organism which
takes my place. She wants me, and I must go. There is no help for it. When shall
I follow—with quick obedience, or unwillingly, truant-like, traitor-like, to her and
her grand designs?” (Thompson, 323). Thompson’s description of nature’s call
to participate in the national economy seems irresistible and suggests that cre-
mation, and the commensurate use of ashes as fertilizer, is nearly a sexual act—
a “consummation of her will”—giving life to mother England: “To tread our dead
after this fashion would return millions of capital without delay to the bosom of
mother earth, who would give us back large returns at compound interest for the
deposit” (Thompson, 323, 325–26).
Whereas Chadwick underwrites his solution to the burial problem with sta-
tistics emphasizing overcrowded living conditions and excessive burial expenses,
Thompson transforms the corpse into a market commodity sold by the pound.
Speculating that just over 80,000 people died in London in 1871, Thompson
calculates that, collectively, after cremation, these dead would weigh about
207,000 pounds. Multiply this number by nine or ten and one has the total
number of pounds for the entire country—“valuable economic material,” hereto-
fore diverted from the national economy (Thompson, 324). While Chadwick’s
statistics are meant to convince readers of the need for national bureaucratic
structures to resolve burial issues, Thompson’s statistics shock readers with the
enormity of lost commercial opportunities. Regulation is not so much the point
as speculation.
 “The Tonic of Fire” 145

Thompson’s unabashed suggestion, that human ashes be used to cultivate

the national countryside, caused dismay and horror among some readers. In his
confident application of cremation to commercial interests, Thompson under-
estimated the public’s reticence to relinquish religious and sentimental attitudes
toward death. H. Hart, for example, avers: “‘To burn or cremate the fair form we
have just kissed, and whose voice has just whispered the last fond good-bye,
seems utterly repulsive to the serious and meditative Christian.’”33 Jennifer
Leaney reports that both the Medical Times and Gazette and the Medical Press and
Circular regretted Thompson’s tactical error, claiming that the idea was “‘repul-
sive and abhorrent to the public,’” the proposal for the economic uses of crema-
tion “‘distasteful and ridiculous.’”34
The swiftest counterattack, however, came from P. H. Holland, the medical
inspector of burials, who challenged Thompson on his definition of waste, claim-
ing that it was a glaring abuse of language to say that land is wasted with earthen
burial.35 In the February 1874 Contemporary Review, Holland suggests that once
burial grounds have been filled, they can be used as gardens or parks, outdoor
space so necessary in crowded urban environments. Furthermore, Holland takes
umbrage at Thompson’s dismal depiction of English cemeteries, arguing that
significant improvements had been made since G. A. Walker catalogued the
wretched state of graveyards in London in 1843. Through the implementation of
the Burial Acts and the steady improvement in sanitary measures, the present and
future cemeteries pose no imminent threat, as Thompson suggests. Taking the cau-
tious and incremental approach, Holland argues for constant modification of the
system in order to respect the graves and to sanctify those who sleep in them.
Finally, Holland, tapping into the heart of much of the debate against cre-
mation, registers concern about premature burial and the possible destruction of
evidence from murder by poisoning. Thompson had suggested, with regard to
premature burial, that cremation would end the life of persons sooner than if
they wrangled and struggled to free themselves from a coffin buried deep in the
earth. In other words, cremation would hasten death. Not much comfort here.
Holland, however, claims that often burial is postponed for a variety of reasons,
which, in the end, offers time to ascertain the absolute death of a person. Thomp-
son, in his reply to Holland published the next month in the Contemporary Review,
claims that cremation would provide an opportunity for greater certification by
the medical community. Again, picking up an argument waged earlier in the cen-
tury about the need to register death, Thompson makes a case for two certificates
of death, one by a medical doctor or coroner, and the second, pronounced just
before cremation, made by someone not associated with the deceased.36
To the argument that cremation would destroy evidence, Thompson again
invokes statistics to prove that the number of people exhumed is so negligible
that there is no need to worry. If there are cases where the death is suspect, then
a coroner could extract samples from the body before cremation or relegate the
body to earthen burial in case it needs to be exhumed. Nonetheless, given that
146 Literary Remains

murder had captured the Victorian imagination to an extent that was, according
to Richard Altick, “far out of proportion to its actual incidence,” the argument
about cremation and murder was tenacious.37 Noted gynecological surgeon and
lithographer, Francis Seymour Haden, in a series of articles and pamphlets I dis-
cuss later, argues that because cremation destroys the evidence from poisoning,
it becomes an incentive to crime, because murderers would go undetected. Quot-
ing a letter from a consulting analyst for Westminster Hospital, Haden reports,
“‘[There is] no doubt that many persons skilled in the use of poisons would more
frequently resort to them if it were not for the knowledge that their operations
were liable to be handicapped by exhumation.’”38
Haden, a prominent physician involved in the thirty-year debate over crema-
tion, proved a worthy opponent to Thompson. Both men focused on the sanitary
issues, the unnecessary waste involved in present modes of burial, and the role of
nature in decomposition. While Thompson perceived fire as a means to purify
human remains, Haden believed that soil itself would disinfect the corrupt body;
it was only a matter of exposing the body to the earth. He proposed banning the
use of “hermetically sealed” coffins, brick graves, and lead vaults, for the earth,
after all, provides its own antiseptic, making “that which was offensive, inoffensive;
that which was decay, a process of transmutation.”39 Instead, Haden suggested
wicker coffins lined with layers of ferns and mosses, or simply burying the body in
a woolen shroud directly into the earth to accelerate the decomposition process.
But the soil in Haden’s discourse has more national significance than one
might expect. In addition to its purifying qualities, it becomes, in Haden’s hands,
emblematic of changing notions of property. Rejecting the idea that the grave is a
freehold, as we have seen in Hardy’s novels, Haden shifts the focus of ownership of
the grave by the dead who occupy it to a common ownership by the living. In other
words, and this describes Haden’s overall rhetorical strategy, the disposal of the
dead should promote the welfare of the living. In his “Ethics of Cremation,” Haden
quotes at length Lord Stowell: “‘[F]or surely there can be no inextinguishable title,
no perpetuity of possession, belonging to a subject which is perishable. . . . The time
must come when posthumous remains must mingle with, and compose a part of,
that soil in which they have been deposited.’”40 The dead, according to Haden’s
logic, no longer have a stake in the country through their claims to graves. Rather,
even as the dead lose ownership of themselves in decomposition—indeed, their very
identities—they resolve collectively into the English landscape and English national
identity. Haden, in another moment, suggests that England could raise and reclaim
lost land in Kent and Essex through the “earth to earth” system. Decaying bodies
could potentially extend England’s coastline.
By wresting from the dead their claims to a grave in an English churchyard,
Haden opens the door to speculation, the very thing he detests about the cre-
mation movement. By removing individual property value from gravesites,
Haden encourages people to find national value in deathways and retreats to the
ideas of Edwin Chadwick by decrying the failure to enact national legislation
 “The Tonic of Fire” 147

concerning the timeliness and methods of burial. He denounces the exploitative

undertaker and calls for a radical change in the law in all matters related to the
disposal of the dead. Such change could only be safeguarded by national, legal
prescription.41 Such measures are necessary, in Haden’s view, to avoid associat-
ing a great nation and the burial of the dead with “speculative associations . . .
animated by no higher impulses than such as arise out of a spirit of trade,” and
to reassert the need for national funerals and state-run cemeteries.42 Even
though Haden, like Chadwick before him, argues for national structures to enact
burial reform, he simultaneously promotes speculation on death because he
devalues the grave as freehold property.
From Haden’s perspective, state regulations also would prevent the inordi-
nate retention of the body in the dwellings of the living. Such a practice requires
the use of the coffin to contain the decomposing corpse and the “unreasoning
sentiments” of family and friends.43 At death, the focus should not be so much
on mourning the dead as on protecting the living. Underneath Haden’s disdain
for excessive mourning and burial rituals is a desire to contain not so much the
putrefactious corpse as the irrational emotions expressed by survivors. In an age
of science, progress, and rationality, uncontrolled, unpredictable human emo-
tions have no place in society, as Max Nordau’s Degeneration later insists in
1892.44 Unlike Thomas Hardy, who valued death’s capacity to unite a commu-
nity over time, Haden apparently wants to sever quickly and efficiently ties to the
past embodied in the dead.
Ironically, like Thompson, in his “Treatment of the Body after Death,” and
Van Helsing, in Dracula, Haden views death as a problem to be solved by an em-
inent surgeon trained in the rigors of science and stalwart against messy human
responses to death. Such a view denies life’s continuity through death and rep-
resents human remains as burdensome. It comes as no surprise, then, that when
Haden thinks about the possibility of cremation, he wonders in prescient fash-
ion: “What are we to do with these urns: Are we to take them into our houses
and move them with our furniture with every change of abode? How will our
sons’ sons, who have lost all interest in us, feel disposed to treat them? Will it not
come to pass that they will one day want to get rid of them?”45 Haden likens the
urns containing the ashes of loved ones to chattel, part of one’s household fur-
niture, items that may have had significance once because given by a friend or
relative but now useless because the bonds of value have been forgotten.
Despite their vigorous attempts to distinguish themselves from one another
in their debate over cremation, both surgeons claim that nature, not religion, must
be understood rightly to achieve effective reform of the dead. Recall that Thomp-
son represents nature as an ineluctable temptress beckoning the body to the veg-
etable world, beseeching it to participate, through its very destruction and
circulation in the soil, in the market economy. Haden too compares nature to a
Siren, who makes herself heard at last, “and by the penalties she imposes upon us
for our abuse of her gifts compel us not only to bury our dead but to bury them
148 Literary Remains

properly.”46 But each views the earth, nature’s medium, as either the source or
the solution to the problem. Haden summarizes the distinction this way: “While
Nature, up to now, has assured me that the great and universal disintegrator and
destroyer of all forms of death and decay is the earth, Sir H. Thompson tells me
that . . . the earth is a very hot-bed of infection, and its watersprings special carri-
ers of that infection to the living.”47 Dirt, it seems, still preoccupies the late Victo-
rians, although it is less something to be rid of—as Chadwick argued—than
something to be recognized for its relationship to purity. Either way, partisans of
cremation insisted that the progress of society must depend upon a fixation with
the filthy corpse.
Surely certain early Victorian social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick
began this process of reformation through its attention to dirt and their desire to
moralize English society with cleanliness. But late Victorian cremationists meant
to solidify social order, a social order they feared was crumbling because of vari-
ous transgressions of culture, empire, and sexuality, a social order they feared
slumped toward decline and decay. Considered in light of Mary Douglas’s work
on how and why cultures label realities “polluted,” dwelling on purity allows
them to clarify crucial distinctions in Victorian England and to reestablish some
semblance of social and national order.48 Thompson and Haden, in their care
for the dead, whether by earth or by fire, respond to the threat of social decay by
banishing the body from society.
Perhaps the clearest articulation of this banishment proceeds from aesthetic
arguments made by cremationists, who worried that the profitable utilitarian per-
spective espoused by Thompson and Haden would alienate the public. Burial,
after all, “cannot be followed out in the imagination,” claims the Cremation So-
ciety of England: “[C]remation, the rapid transfer of material body to the ultimate
state as part of Mother Earth, etherialised and purified, gives no food for un-
pleasant reflection.”49 William Robinson, in God’s Acre Beautiful, or The Cemeter-
ies of the Future (1880), invokes Gothic language to describe the unpleasant burial
practices of the day and emphasizes the need to view cemeteries as resting places,
less for the dead than for the living.50 In other words, he displaces onto the envi-
ronment the images of sleep and rest traditionally associated with corpses in the
grave. Describing the cemetery of the future as “an arranged garden . . . with its
carpet of turf and walls of musical-leaved trees, wholly free from the long-lasting
and many-staged horror of decomposition,” Robinson rejects the “hideous vistas”
that marked earlier cemetery design and the terrifying specters of Victorian fu-
nerals: “What a gain it would be to get rid of much of this Monster Funeral, the
most impudent of ghouls that haunt the path of progress!” (Robinson, 6, 44, 20).
Displacing anxiety about bodily decay onto the many forgotten monuments
that litter unkempt churchyards, Robinson pleas that monies spent wastefully on
coffins that “rot unseen in the earth” be spent on urns, “which do not decay, and
which might be placed in the light of day, and perhaps teach a lesson in art as well
as bear a record” (Robinson, 19). Extolling the virtues of hygienic deathways,
 “The Tonic of Fire” 149

Robinson attests, “God’s acre [is] beautiful, a blessing instead of a danger to its
neighborhood; by its means we may have memorials preserved from decay;
ground from sacrilege; soil and water from impurity; art not worthy of its aim;
Church-burial for all who desire it; space for gardens and groves in our cemeter-
ies; the mindfulness and care of each successive generation . . . quiet places where
the ashes of the dead should never be dishonoured, but might find unpolluted
rest” (Robinson, 57–58). Through cremation and urn burial deep in abundant fo-
liage, Robinson makes claims on the future at the expense of the past by conceal-
ing and purifying physical decomposition, destroying superstition, and restoring
a sense of the immortality of the dead through their long-lasting memorials.
Hugh Reginald Haweis’s Ashes to Ashes: A Cremation Prelude (1875) intensifies
Robinson’s romantic celebration of urn burial by presenting both a polemic and
a love story extolling the virtues of cremation.51 The narrator, Mr. Pomeroy, and
his companion, Mr. Le Normand, a French-trained physician living in England,
vacation in a rural seaside town as guests of the local rector, Mr. Morant. During
their vacation together, Pomeroy listens to the lectures given by Le Normand, or-
ganized in such a way as to “disenchant the world with burial” by repeating the
horror stories connected to burial in overcrowded urban churchyards catalogued
by G. A. Walker, Edwin Chadwick, and The Times of London (Haweis, 11). But this
book is distinct from other tracts on cremation because of the triangular love af-
fair Haweis has interlarded into the narrative. In their visit with Morant, both
Pomeroy and Le Normand have the opportunity to meet the rector’s daughter,
Ellen Morant. She captures the attention of both, with “her profusion of dark
hair gathered in loose folds at the back of her head” and “those red lips ready at
any moment to break into laughter” or “be firm and serious enough on occasion”
(Haweis, 66). Soon enough, Le Normand absorbs Ellen’s passionate attention,
and Pomeroy is forced to “play the dummy” (Haweis, 71). Pomeroy repeatedly de-
nies his love for Ellen by claiming that “‘a girl can’t be in love with two men at the
same time; at least she ought not to be’” (Haweis, 119).
But Pomeroy wreaks a startling revenge by the narrative’s conclusion. Le Nor-
mand contracts typhoid through his work at the hospital and beckons Pomeroy in
terms that echo Dracula’s invective to the three ladies who threaten Harker at the
beginning of the novel. Le Normand sends Pomeroy a telegram: “Come up, if you
can: I want you” (Haweis, 185). Despite Pomeroy’s selfless care for his friend, Le
Normand eventually dies and, ironically, is buried rather than cremated. Le Nor-
mand’s death frees Ellen to marry Pomeroy. Curiously, though, several days after
Le Normand’s funeral, as Pomeroy walks the Strand in London, he imagines a
scene in which he, Ellen, and Le Normand have a boating accident and Ellen
drowns. After waiting four days to certify Ellen’s death, she is tenderly cremated.
The dream becomes a kind of wish fulfillment in which Pomeroy’s relationship
with Le Normand survives Ellen’s threat of love. Her reward, it seems, is a senti-
mental rendition of her cremation. Beckoned by a “musical cadence of bells”
to “the Field of Rest,” Ellen, wrapped in a snow-white pall strewn with flowers, is
150 Literary Remains

carried into the chapel, placed on a raised bier, which is then lowered and con-
veyed by machinery into the center of the crematory (Haweis, 240). Friends and rel-
atives eventually gather up the ashes and deposit them in an alabaster urn, which
is then buried in a shallow grave planted with the seeds of her favorite flowers.
In his dream Pomeroy extols the capacity of cremation to render a senti-
mental and dignified death and burial, even as he protects his friendship with Le
Normand and seeks imaginary revenge on Ellen who left his love for her unre-
quited. In the real time of the novel, however, Le Normand’s earthen burial
presages his disappearance from his grave because of cemetery mismanagement
but leaves Pomeroy free to marry Ellen. Thus the argument for “the pure and sim-
ple disinfectant of Fire, the reign of Cremation, and the Field of Rest” comes at
the expense of women, who are the only ones, in the logic of this story, to evoke
the most sentimental responses to cremation. Pomeroy’s rival in love and premier
spokesman for the utilitarian perspective regarding cremation is condemned to “a
spectacle of unparalleled corruption and desecration” (Haweis, 255).
The cremationists, in their efforts to conceal death and decay, brought the
loathsome topic to the fore by their overemphasis on putrefaction, the very prob-
lem they hoped to solve with fire. To soothe late Victorian sensibilities unnerved
by exact attention to bodily processes, Robinson and Haweis bathe the gory de-
tails in a romantic and sentimental light. Robinson hides death deep in abun-
dant vegetation to suggest that death need not block one’s view of life and
progress. Haweis proffers that women make the most effective ambassadors for
cremation by their ability to evoke from readers and observers romantic re-
sponses to death. Over feminine bodies, it seems, death takes its pure form free
from complicating degenerative processes, etherialized to spiritual dimensions,
neatly contained and controlled in aesthetically pleasing urns, decorated with
favorite flora and fauna.
The aesthetic arguments for cremation soothe the anxieties that late Victo-
rians felt about both overpopulation and decomposing matter. Thompson, Hol-
land, and Haden admit that the mid-century burial reforms succeeded for a time,
but that England’s urban centers had surrounded the once extramural cemeter-
ies, threatening to contaminate the nation from the inside out, from the center
to the periphery. As dead bodies were perceived to move closer to home—a fright-
ening reality, Frazer reminds us—and the strict distinctions between the living
and the dead fell away, tolerance for decomposition diminished. The expand-
ing pallor on the face of the corpse, its increasing self-digestion and bloating, its
oozing of bodily fluids from disintegrating organs and blood vessels, and its slip-
ping of skin away from bones and tissues all too vividly remind the national pub-
lic of its own degeneration. Max Nordau would make a similar claim several
years later with his particularly tenacious argument about the menacing and dan-
gerous presence of degeneration in Western society in which bodily decay be-
came synonymous with an intensifying social and urban crisis. Even today,
 “The Tonic of Fire” 151

transgression of normative boundaries and the dissolution of distinctions con-

tinue to trouble contemporary society. As Gary Laderman recounts in his recent
study of death in America, in the face of decomposition, “Distinctions between
inside and outside, form and substance, even life and death, no longer make
much sense.”52 Victorian fear about decomposing bodies signals the culture’s
anxieties about the loss of distinctions in society. As the culture faced the per-
ceived threat of degeneration and decay, the cremationists worked exceedingly
hard to contain the dead body neatly, permanently, in efficient bundles of ash
placed discretely in decorative urns.
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 Conclusion
Dracula’s Last Word

Bram Stoker, in his masterfully corporeal novel Dracula (1897), restores to sight
the very corpses Victorian burial reformers and cremationists hope to occlude.1
Along with Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes, Stoker brings to light, in what—ironically—seems to be a celebra-
tion of degeneration and morbidity, the underbelly of fin de siècle progressivism,
especially as it is defined through the body and the corpse. As Daniel Pick re-
minds us, the development of the concept of degeneration sprang from per-
ceived dangers from internal transgressions in addition to racialized others.2
Even as the novel hopes to externalize and kill off pressing internal contempo-
rary fears and concerns, it also, as Pick and many other critics have explained,
recognizes its own failure to accomplish the task. Anxieties about the process of
decomposition, then, are at once apparently contained with the count’s stake
through the heart, but there lingers a “remorseless morbid accumulation,” death
passed from body to body, generation to generation.3 Through a sustained med-
itation on death and its inherently transformative nature, Stoker reverses Victo-
rian deathways, like Gaskell, Dickens, and Hardy before him. He collapses the
boundaries between the living and the dead in order to problematize England’s
sense of itself as a civilized, rational, and progressive nation; and he insists, para-
doxically, that despite enormous efforts to contain and confine the corpse, it re-
mains, ultimately, restless in Victorian culture to remind society of its essential
and educative role in modernity. It is, indeed, a national treasure.
In the course of the novel’s breathtaking and terrifying adventure, Stoker
revalues the dead body and its capacity to reveal national anxieties by first imag-
ining the corpse as a buried treasure. In the early pages of the novel, for example,
as Harker and Dracula make their way to the castle, blue flames light the way for
mortals in search of bodies and valuables. Dracula steps out of the carriage to
pursue the treasure chests, while Harker later dreams of the incident, a dream
that is “repeated endlessly,” as if he needed to be forcefully convinced of the ne-
cessity to face and value death (18). In a second instance, mention of the blue
flame appears in Lucy’s memo written just before her death: “The air seems full

153
154 Literary Remains

of specks, floating and circling in the draught from the window, and the lights
burn blue and dim” (184). The flame here marks Lucy as a treasure for Dracula,
not necessarily a body to be disposed of. Still later, in a pragmatic use of the
flame, but nonetheless in keeping with the idea of the body as buried treasure,
Van Helsing creates a blue flame with a small oil lamp he positions in the corner
of Lucy’s tomb just before Arthur beheads her and stakes her heart to the earth.
The ability to face the undead Lucy in order to stabilize her condition allows, ac-
cording to Van Helsing, for the most blessed thing of all: “‘[W]hen this now Un-
Dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love
shall again be free’” (261). Dracula robs graves to accrue riches for himself and
gluts himself on Lucy, who in turn jeopardizes England’s future by preying on lit-
tle children. Van Helsing and his Army of Light punish Lucy for her pernicious
ability to love several men at once by decapitating her and driving a stake
through her heart. Stoker understands the value of death to uncover a culture’s
capacities for exploitation, greed, and control. Learning these lessons, Stoker
seems to argue—albeit in rather backhanded and contradictory ways—is the trea-
sure of a lifetime.
In Dracula, Stoker offers a model about how to learn from death in unex-
pected ways. William Veeder and Stephen Arata have noticed that Dracula artic-
ulates a reverse colonization in which “the more primitive Carpathian culture
overtakes the most highly developed technocracy in Western Europe,” especially,
I would add, along deathways.4 We see a glimmer of this process in moments
when Dracula speaks explicitly about how he learns, hinting perhaps that the
West would be wise to take up similar procedures if it seeks to survive. As Harker
peruses the shelves of the library, he notices books on “history, geography, poli-
tics, political economy, botany, geology, law—all relating to England and English
life and customs and manners” (27). Calling the books his “friends,” Dracula ex-
plains to Harker his process of coming to know England: “‘Through them I have
come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go
through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the
whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that
makes it what it is’” (28). Dracula manifests an energy for exploring the very is-
sues that late Victorian English culture seems reticent to embrace, namely, over-
crowding, rapid social change, and the problem of death. More precisely, from
the discussion of cremation we know that the culture loathes the change incum-
bent upon the dead body and changes in women’s roles.
Dracula steps fearlessly into the fray of English life, having learned its gram-
mar and words but aware that he yet knows how to speak them (28). Aware of
the precarious position of the foreigner, Dracula expresses a desire to immerse
himself in English culture to such an extent that no one will notice him—that is,
as an undead corpse. Such an anonymous position allows him to remain master:
“‘I have been so long master that I would be master still—or at least that none
other should be master of me’” (28). Certainly Stoker, through Dracula, offers
 Conclusion 155

England advice about how to infiltrate other cultures, but he also suggests that
embracing change and death marks English national survival. What makes En-
gland vulnerable to Dracula’s own colonizing moves is an emerging denial about
thanatological matters, making Dracula’s arrival in the center of London terrify-
ing. In a way, he gives Harker and the Army of Light clues about how to oppose
him—to remain supple and to be open to the lessons that death teaches. From
the heart of death, “a ruined tomb in a forgotten land,” Van Helsing reminds
Mina, Dracula successfully negotiates the past with the present by studying the
“new social life,” the “new environment of old ways,” allowing him to “smile
at death” and flourish in the midst of diseases that kill off whole peoples”
(379–80). Van Helsing, of course, perceives Dracula’s powers as forces of evil
from which the world must be set free. What he remains blind to, however, is
Dracula’s invitation, not unlike Hardy’s, to value history amid an evolving world.
Appreciating tradition’s role in the technocratic world and acknowledging
death’s central role in the culture of the novel will set the world free from the
threats that Dracula seems to pose to an increasingly modern England.
The difficulty, of course, is that England too remains blind to the possibility
of such freedom. Stoker presents the opportunity of looking death squarely in
the face not only by placing Harker in Castle Dracula but in a bedroom shaped
like a nineteenth-century coffin. Within the coffined bedroom, Harker finds
himself in “a sea of wonders” (26). He doubts, fears, and thinks strange things
that he dare not confess to his own soul (26). One step into death’s room and
Harker’s fears erupt, prompting him to beg for God’s protective mercy. Sud-
denly, Harker, symbolically buried alive in a bedroom shaped like a coffin, in-
vokes the most heartfelt prayer for safety. Stoker reminds his readers that
religious beliefs cannot so easily be dismissed from people’s lexicons, even
though, for example, the burial reformers ignored and cremationists rejected re-
ligious doctrines concerning bodily resurrection and the unity of body and soul.
Several pages later, Harker’s fears about his own mortality keep him from see-
ing Dracula in the mirror. Death and decay have effectively been removed from
the reflection. What fills the mirror, however, as Dracula shouts, is “man’s vanity,”
not his ability to reflect on the exigencies of death (35).5 In contrast, Lucy’s unself-
conscious transparency with Mina also becomes apparent with a mirror. While she
studies her face in the mirror, she is reticent to reveal herself to others. She writes
to Mina: “Do you ever try to read your own face: I do, and I can tell you it is not a
bad study, and gives you more trouble than you can well fancy if you have never
tried it. He [Arthur] says that I afford him a curious psychological study, and I
humbly think I do” (73). While Lucy recognizes her own psychological complexity,
her self-absorption proves troublesome in a culture that asks women to unques-
tioningly accept their appropriate roles in society. In both instances the mirror of-
fers opportunities for Westerners to see beyond themselves and their own
self-absorbed isolation into a world marked by change and death, but each time
they fail to do so, both Harker and Lucy remain vulnerable to Dracula’s advances.
156 Literary Remains

Unlike Harker and Lucy, Mr. Swales, in his conversations with Mina and
Lucy in the Whitby churchyard, indicts the culture’s inability to face the truth
about death. Because Dracula relies on people’s inability to face death directly,
Mr. Swales’s incisive critique of culture proves threatening to Dracula. First, he
recognizes that clergy, by invoking the return of ghosts and spirits to haunt sur-
vivors, have used death to coerce family and friends. Second, he challenges the
integrity of the tomb, the very thing Van Helsing and his Army of Light hope to
restore by the end of the novel. Claiming that the tombstones tell lies when they
admit “here lies a body,” Swales testifies to the hollowness of the pieties by pro-
claiming that the bodies of so many drowned men remain somewhere at sea.
They will hardly be rushing back to Whitby on Judgment Day to claim their
tombstones on the way to heaven. In other words, despite Loudon’s claims to
the contrary, the tombstones will hardly announce their virtue in the afterlife,
nor will memories of them be held sacred by such a deception.
Finally, in what is perhaps the harshest critique of the tombstones, Swales
reveals the truth about the suicide grave Mina and Lucy sit above in the church-
yard. According to the tombstone for George Canon, the marker was erected by
his sorrowing mother for her only child. What Swales tells us is that the poor
widow hated her son because he was crippled, and she hoped to collect a large life
insurance payment at the time of his death. To prevent her from collecting the
payment and to avoid meeting his mother in a “glorious resurrection,” the son
committed suicide and fell off the rocks (90). Swales remains indignant at soci-
ety’s use of death to cover up the truth. In the first instance it is used to promote
coercion by a patriarchal church. Then it is manipulated to cover up the fact that
the corpses of drowned men remain at sea, dangerous reminders of offshore fish-
ing expeditions. Finally, death occludes the abusive relationship between mother
and son, one made so, perhaps, by an absent father. For his perspicacity, Swales,
who admits to his fearlessness about death, is rewarded with a visit from Dracula,
who breaks his neck, leaving him with a look of “fear and horror” on his face and
a sense that “he had seen Death with his dying eyes” (115). Dracula’s power, it
seems, depends upon a denial of death, something Swales refuses to accept.
By association, Lucy is connected to Swales because she too sits on the seat
that covers George Canon’s grave marker, the eventual site of Dracula’s en-
counter with her. But there is more to this contiguity than meets the eye. Lucy’s
marginal behavior links her to Canon, who also has fallen out of favor with his
mother because of his disabled status. Lucy’s veiled promiscuity eventually dis-
ables her and leaves her open to participate with Dracula in his challenge to En-
glish society. Like George, Lucy too suffers from difficult family associations. We
know, for instance, that Mrs. Westenra has excluded Lucy from her will, choosing
instead to leave everything to Lord Galdalming. Of course, Mrs. Westenra had an-
ticipated her daughter’s marriage to Arthur, leaving it unnecessary to include her
separately in the will. But underneath this decision there is a sense that she does
not completely trust her daughter, even though her lawyers had cautioned her
 Conclusion 157

about the exclusion. Lucy remains untrustworthy because of her transgressive

qualities, especially in the area of love. She admits to Mina her regret at not being
able to marry all three men she loves: “‘Why can’t they let a girl marry three men,
or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?’” (78).
Like Swales, Lucy exhibits an extraordinary sensitivity to death, one how-
ever that defies decay and decomposition associated with the corpse. By revers-
ing death’s process in both Lucy and Dracula (they both tend to grow younger
and more beautiful in death), Stoker seems to resurrect from Hardy’s early nov-
els another set of values to “civilize” England, that of mystery and the rightful
power of “superstition” to articulate deeply held beliefs about death. As Arata
has so superbly argued, Dracula forces England to admit its own decline and
decay, especially along racial, political, and empiric lines: “The Count has pene-
trated the heart of modern Europe’s largest empire, and his very presence seems
to presage its doom.”6 To neutralize Dracula’s intrusion and purify the social
order by containing the transgressive Lucy, Van Helsing and his Army of Light
hope to banish from their midst Dracula and the past he represents.
But Lucy proves recalcitrant indeed. After she has been visited by Dracula
on two occasions in the unconsecrated space of Whitby cemetery, Mina notices
that “she looks so sweet as she sleeps; but she is paler than is her wont, and there
is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes” (127). Unable to distinguish rest from
approaching death, Mina notices that the tiny wound on Lucy’s neck is still open
and unhealed, a sign of life waning, leaving Lucy not unlike Christ, whose
wound never healed because of his Crucifixion and death. Even as Mina ob-
serves the signs of death, she fails to notice its imminence. Lucy, on the other
hand, remains sensitive to the paradoxical dynamics involved with death. She
speaks of her near-death experience in bittersweet terms, ones that acknowledge
the pain of return to earthly life in the face of an increasingly buoyant freedom:

Then I had a vague memory of something long and dark with red eyes,
just as we saw in the sunset, and something very sweet and very bitter
all around me at once; and then I seemed sinking into deep green
water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have heard there is to
drowning men; and then everything seemed passing away from me; my
soul seemed to go out from my body and float about the air. I seem to
remember that once the West Lighthouse was right under me, and
then there was a sort of agonising feeling, as if I were in an earthquake,
and I came back and found you shaking my body. (130)

Lucy’s experience of her soul’s departure from her body reinforces what cre-
mationists have been denying—a definition of the self that recognizes the harmony
of body and soul. Interestingly, Van Helsing repeatedly argues in cosmic terms of
good and evil that the efforts to contain Lucy and disarm Dracula are essentially
battles for souls. But his mention of souls reintroduces the necessary connection
158 Literary Remains

between body and soul, especially at times of death, which Chadwick, Thompson,
and Haden had summarily denied, arguing in favor of sanitation over spirituality.
Lucy’s articulation of her own experiences and Van Helsing’s anxiety over the
souls’ nocturnal adventures register a firm belief in the self as psychosomatic. Until
the Army of Light is convinced of this body-soul unity, Lucy will remain at large.
Fortunately, Dracula’s work forces the gang to gaze intensively at Lucy’s
body. Elisabeth Bronfen writes eloquently about women’s bodies as objects of
male gazes, arguing specifically that Stoker’s text “represents not only an am-
bivalent desire for/fear of sexuality but also the same ambivalence toward mor-
tality with the theme of sexuality put forward to veil death.”7 While Bronfen
focuses much of her discussion on the relationship between death and sexual-
ity, which is clearly undeniable in the novel, I would like to highlight the re-
markably corporeal nature of the descriptions of Lucy’s body, dead or undead.
As I mentioned earlier, nature’s reversal in Lucy pronounces other values that
England seems to have forgotten, overlooked, or banished from sight. To
counter the culture’s squeamishness about decomposition, Stoker describes Lucy
just before her death as “ghastly, chalkily pale,” with the bones protruding
prominently from her face. . . . Even the lips were white, and the gums seemed
to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a corpse after a
prolonged illness” (158, 165). Once dead, however, Lucy’s loveliness returns “in-
stead of leaving traces of ‘decay’s effacing fingers’” (206–207). Just as Ellen
Morant is romanticized in her death, so too is Lucy, whom Seward describes as
“more radiantly beautiful than ever” (245). In a fascinating essay on the role of
embalming in Dracula, Jani Scandura suggests that the novel concerns the pro-
fessionalization of undertaking and embalming in particular, which prevents the
body’s disintegration to dust.8 While she argues that Dracula ultimately favors
the preeminence of medicine in its manipulation of the corpse, her work also
gestures toward the ultimate effect of embalming, to give the corpse an undead
appearance, particularly in Lucy’s case. By becoming exquisite in death, then,
thanks to the vampiric embalmer Dracula, Lucy seems to console readers who
are fearful of the body’s capacity to ooze fluids and to pull flesh away from its
bones. She apparently, if momentarily, becomes her true self, for “her loveliness
had come back to her in death” (206).
But notice what happens once Van Helsing pronounces to Seward that Lucy
differs from the other undead because she grows more lovely in death. Lucy is
transformed into a thing, an it, which Seward from that moment begins to loathe.
As long as Lucy is contained in her eternal beauty, she remains the object of men’s
affections. But once Seward discovers that her beauty is dependent upon her un-
dead energy, he must detest it and seek what Paul Barber has called the “second
killing,” a propitiation in which the wandering dead are successfully put to rest.9 In
doing so, then, the threat the dead pose to the living is ultimately laid to rest. In
this case, we can argue that Lucy’s promiscuity and increasing voluptuousness
threaten Victorian men. Seward’s premature conclusion that Lucy has found rest
 Conclusion 159

and peace in death—“‘it is the end’”—is quickly countered with Van Helsing’s far
more realistic—“‘It is only the beginning’” (203). What seems most threatening is
the prospect of change, as Thompson had worried about in his treatises on crema-
tion. The dead female body, cremated or embalmed, attracts male admirers. Once
they discover that there lives an energy that keeps her unstable—if more beautiful—
the threat deepens, and she becomes an object of their loathing.
As we have seen before, death has a wonderful capacity to reveal fears oper-
ating in a culture. Stoker suggests that not recognizing the fears through banish-
ing death from sight will put future generations at stake. Lucy uncovers the
troubled gender relations and more serious class and domestic issues that plague
society. Her flirtations signal trouble for men who think, even as they prowl, that
women should love only one man, preferably a love expressed in proper mar-
riage. Dracula never allows Lucy to get that far, surely a plan to unnerve his op-
ponents. If, as Haweis writes in his polemical novella, women love more than
one man, “they shouldn’t.” But what Lucy reveals is the British man’s inability
to attract and hold Lucy in marriage. There resides in her a vulnerability to a
stronger force the British men cannot protect her from, despite their various vig-
orous qualities as aristocrat, frontiersman, and professional doctor. Just as
Haweis must stabilize Ellen Morant through her cremation, so too must the
British men stake Lucy to English soil and English definitions of womanhood.
As Arthur does the deed on orders from Van Helsing: “‘Strike in God’s name,
that so all may be well with the dead that we love, and that the Un-Dead pass
away’” (262), Van Helsing promises Arthur a kind of resurrection from his stak-
ing of Lucy. After completing the painful ordeal, “‘from this grim tomb you will
emerge as though you tread on air’” (262). Ironically, mooring Lucy’s body to the
ground, safely secured in the tomb, frees the English aristocrat from fears of her
potential infidelities. And what he secures for England’s future is a vision of En-
glish femininity—the beautiful, wealthy woman willing to marry and merge prop-
erties, acceptable only if she remains faithful to the domestic and economic
marital arrangements. The potential we saw in Gaskell’s heroines to transform
English society gives way here to a conservative domestic subservience.
Lucy’s association with the Indian fakir, a Hindu aesthete and wonder-
worker, also challenges England’s sense of itself as an imperial power. In an ef-
fort to convince Seward to study nature from another perspective, Van Helsing
offers the example of the Indian fakir as someone who apparently belies the
truth but who speaks the truth on a level not perceived by Westerners. He wants
Seward to recognize the fact that Lucy had made the wounds in the children. As
Van Helsing crowds Seward’s mind with nature’s eccentricities about how the
fakir could die and after several harvests of corn his grave could be opened and
he could rise up and walk among people as before, Seward resorts to old, inef-
fectual ways of learning. He laments to Van Helsing, “Tell me the thesis, so that
I may apply your knowledge as you go on” (237). Clearly, Western ways of know-
ing prove futile here. Seward fails to recognize national and racial otherness and
160 Literary Remains

gender anxiety issues that the association of Lucy with the Indian fakir seems
to make. Both Lucy and the Indian fakir threaten home and empire by their
ability to appear from the grave and bewilder Western men. It is all the more
dangerous not only because Lucy is a woman but because she has been contam-
inated by Dracula’s kiss and “purified” with blood transfusions from British men
that fail to save her life. The Indian fakir resonates with the power of Others to
defy nature (read empire), refusing to be controlled by colonizers. In their shared
ability to rise from the grave and walk the earth, Lucy and the Indian fakir man-
ifest a power to resist dominance. Recognition of this capability makes the
British establishment nervous.
Circumstances surrounding Lucy’s undead disposition fire Seward’s mis-
guided imagination about lower-class responses to her death. After bidding Van
Helsing good night following Lucy’s first death, Seward eyes the maid entering
Lucy’s bedroom and concludes that her gesture is one of selfless devotion: “De-
votion is so rare, and we are so grateful to those who show it unasked to those we
love. Here was a poor girl putting aside the terrors which she naturally had of
death to go watch alone by the bier of the mistress whom she loved, so that the
poor clay might not be lonely till laid to eternal rest” (209). What strikes me as
interesting here are the paradoxical values Seward unwittingly articulates—the
idea that without question the working-class universe revolves around those they
so faithfully serve, and the notion that they are “naturally” averse to death.
Stoker discloses Seward’s blind assumptions about the working class’s relation-
ship to death when we learn that the maid has stolen the crucifix that Van Hel-
sing placed upon Lucy’s mouth to prevent Dracula’s postmortem plans for her.
In another instance, when Van Helsing and Seward discover Lucy’s empty cof-
fin, they wonder whether bodysnatchers have been at work, or whether the un-
dertaker’s people have stolen it (243). The medical men assume that the lower
classes supplement their income by stealing from the dead, or by stealing the
dead themselves. In other words, if they are drawn to the dead, then it must be
for criminal reasons. But these are old stereotypes at work, since bodysnatching
had decreased dramatically with the institution of the Anatomy Act in 1832.
Ironically enough, the maid’s theft of the crucifix prevents Van Helsing’s au-
topsy. Stoker calls attention to the culture’s tendency to use dead bodies for its
own economic or ideological purposes. Even the mortuary woman, who recog-
nizes Seward in a “brother-professional sort of way”—as if to say that Seward too
exploits Lucy for his own benefits—admits that Lucy’s beauty in death “‘will do
much credit to our establishment’” (205).
As Arthur stakes Lucy’s heart and beheads her, and as the others read the bur-
ial service over her—the burial service, Van Helsing reminds us, King Laugh, or the
Dance of Death, mocked at Lucy’s first funeral—they kill and bury threatening vi-
sions of femininity. In death, Lucy is transformed into a conventional, truthful
corpse with its visible “traces of care and pain and waste” (264). Arthur claims that
Van Helsing has given back her soul: “‘She is now God’s true dead, whose soul is
 Conclusion 161

with Him!’” (264). With Lucy’s true death, all of nature is “tuned to a different
pitch. There was gladness and mirth and peace everywhere, for we were at rest our-
selves on one account, and we were glad, though it was a tempered joy” (264).
The tempered joy may be due to the fact that Stoker presents readers with a
double helix, one strand representing Lucy’s physical condition and the gang’s
sense that they have, finally, stabilized her, and the second strand representing
domestic issues roped under their control. Stoker, like King Laugh, bespeaks the
comic nature of this deathly enterprise, for he, like the cremationists, under-
stands that Lucy may not leave the coffin, but she still manifests a restlessness in
decomposition. At the conclusion of Lucy’s first funeral, Van Helsing, reporting
on King Laugh’s observations, says, “‘[T]he holy men, with the white garments of
the angel, pretending to read books, and yet all the time their eyes never on the
page; and all of us with the bowed head. And all for what? She is dead; so! Is it
not?’” (219). The inattentive mourners and the tentative question about the cer-
tainty of Lucy’s death lead us to question any assertion about her final disposi-
tion, whether physical or ideological. To return to Sir Henry Thompson, nature
does nothing without hoping to achieve a goal in the body politic. The men
think that they have stabilized Lucy and, therefore, English notions of upper-
class domesticity and femininity. As Christopher Craft nimbly quips, “A woman
is better still than mobile, better dead than sexual.”10 Nonetheless, their domes-
tic vision has simply gone underground, where it remains silent but influential
in English domestic affairs. In decomposition, then, anxieties persist about wom-
anly promiscuity and its effect on marriage and domesticity, even as men con-
tinue to live under an illusion of security and control.
Nowhere is this illusion made more explicit than in Stoker’s representation of
Mina’s relationship with the Army of Light. She had been a faithful friend to Lucy,
ministering to her in the early stages of her trials with Dracula; a devoted wife to
Harker as he too recovered from his traumatic experience at Castle Dracula; and an
observant and meticulous recorder and compiler of documents relating Dracula’s
machinations. She knows, at a more profound level than the others, the conse-
quences of letting Dracula slip from their narrowing noose. Even though Dracula’s
visits begin to have an effect on her, she retains a self-consciousness about her limi-
nal state in such a way that she sustains her ability to direct their efforts to disarm
him. She readily admits that she is “‘deeper in death at this moment than if the
weight of an earthly grave lay heavy upon [her]’” (392). Having heard the experience
of Lucy, she realizes that her soul too is in danger and encourages the men to drive
a stake through her heart and cut off her head, “‘or do whatever else may be want-
ing to give [her] rest’” when she is dead in the flesh (391).
But her unswerving commitment to the cause, which produces a mountain
of helpful evidence for the Army of Light to consider, is dismissed by men who
must assert themselves and their knowledge at her expense, as if to suggest that
they need protection from the dangers her information poses, even as they claim
to exclude her from deliberations in order to protect her. In a way, because of
162 Literary Remains

Mina’s careful transcriptions, she has an intuitive understanding of their

dilemma with Dracula. Van Helsing, on the other hand, may realize the scope of
his project with Dracula but only trusts the others with piecemeal information.
Because Mina’s intuitive nature threatens Van Helsing’s epistemology, she too
must be controlled. Stoker unmasks the danger of this attitude through a re-
vealing juxtaposition of events. Just at the moment when Van Helsing and the
Army of Light decide they need to trace each of the coffins that Dracula has im-
ported to England and Quincey Morris had taken aim at the bat at the window,
endangering the lives of those within the room, Van Helsing instructs Mina:
“‘And now for you, Madam Mina, this night is the end until all be well. You are
too precious to us to have such risk. When we part to-night, you no more must
question. We shall tell you in good time. We are men and are able to bear; but
you must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all the more free that you are
not in the danger, such as we are’” (293). Van Helsing, oblivious to Dracula’s
presence, wants to quell her curious mind, implying that having to deal with her
puts them at risk. Mina, however, is left vulnerable by the men who claim her
safety as their priority. Further, to problematize manly indifference to Mina’s in-
tellectual efforts, Stoker has Mina equivocate to a certain degree, not unlike Mar-
garet Hale at the conclusion of North and South. While it is a “bitter pill” to
swallow, she could do nothing save accept their “chivalrous care” of her (293).
Not only does her intellect put the men in danger, but so does her capacity
to love them. While her affection is not nearly so explicitly sexual as Lucy’s, she
admits to its possibility when she reflects upon the instructions she has just been
given: “Manlike, they told me to go to bed and sleep; as if a woman can sleep
when those she loves are in danger!” (294). In the end, as we shall see in a dis-
cussion of Harker’s “Note,” which concludes the novel, Mina’s sexual prowess
is tamed to conventional proportions, but not without a provocative encounter
with Dracula that marks her and future generations. After Renfield’s admission
that Dracula had befriended him, the men rush upstairs to Harker’s room.
Crashing through the locked door, they discover Harker unconscious on the bed
and Mina sucking blood from the open wound on Dracula’s chest. Dracula faces
the intruders with a “devilish passion” but is rebuffed by Van Helsing and his
presentation of a Communion wafer (337). When Mina realizes the conse-
quences of her encounter with Dracula—her suddenly unclean nature—she cries
out, “‘God pity me! Look down on a poor soul in worse than mortal peril’”
(344). Dracula accomplishes with Mina what the other men have thwarted. He
recognizes her strength and so, oddly, he begets a “mutual” exchange with her,
even as he engenders her death and their continuing immortality—a more perfect
exploitation of Mina than the one enacted by the Westerners.
As we have seen with Lucy and Mina, encounters with the undead provide
an opportunity to explore complicated and contradictory relationships among
women, men, and their families. In Dracula we have an opportunity to consider
the challenges the empire poses to England. As I indicated earlier, Stephen Arata
 Conclusion 163

suggests that Dracula manifests the fear of reverse colonization. In Arata’s reading,
the count travels west and replicates England’s colonizing strategies from within
the motherland. In other words, the apparently civilized world is on “the verge of
being overrun by ‘primitive’ forces, which are linked to perceived problems—
racial, moral and spiritual—within Great Britain itself.”11 Reverse colonization
narratives respond to cultural guilt about colonizing activities such as exploitation
and appropriation. Fear erupts when, for example, the British recognize them-
selves in the forces, like Dracula, who colonize them. The colonized Other returns
“to haunt the culture for its sins and threatens its destruction as a form of retri-
bution.” Since vampires often appear in the wake of imperial decay, Stoker inge-
niously transforms the myth to make it bear the weight of cultural anxiety over
the empire’s rapidly declining status.12
Arata’s insights about appropriation and exploitation elucidate the connection
I would like to make between the Victorian impulse to view dirt as something that
needs purification or eradication and Dracula’s coffins of dirt, which he brings from
home to London. In the novel, Dracula appropriates the very material that burial
reformers see as dangerous to challenge their notions of purity and certainty about
death. Dracula, on one level, imports the soil to provide for his own rest during day-
light hours, but he also plans to propagate, it would appear. Anticipating every con-
tingency, he brings with him places of rest for the undead bodies he hopes not to
destroy, notice, but to appropriate for his vampiric purposes. Defying British short-
sightedness about history, Dracula works “age after age adding new victims and mul-
tiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead
become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever
widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water” (261). In addition to
Dracula’s use of dirt as places of rest, the very idea reformers challenge, because they
too perceive earthen burial as primitive, he literally colonizes England with his own
national earth. Dracula’s use of a form of earthen burial displaces the English be-
lief that because each English citizen has a right to burial in the parish churchyard,
she or he has a stake in England’s national identity. More particularly, it is as if every
time he takes a rest in one of his imported coffins filled with Transylvanian earth,
he encroaches upon England’s sense of itself as a country that effectively manages
death. By positioning the coffins at Carfax and Piccadilly, Dracula parodies the vo-
ciferous debates about intramural and extramural burial, the relationship of the
body to the soul, and the certitude of death. He reveals to the English public that
death is everywhere, if one only looks, and attempts to efface it in romantically land-
scaped gardens or freshly transformed churchyards and cemeteries or attempts to
destroy it altogether through fire are futile. Dracula proves, much to the dismay of
the burial partisans and cremationists, that death is a continuous process that can-
not be hampered completely by strategies for purity.
Simultaneously, of course, Stoker invokes the Christian and specifically
Catholic symbol of Communion to sterilize the earth from Dracula’s contaminat-
ing touches, as if to warn about the dangers of their devaluation as “superstition.”
164 Literary Remains

As Richard Wasson concludes, England’s technological progress cut “humanity off

from the old superstitions, dark knowledge, and [made] itself increasingly vulnera-
ble to the demonic powers like the vampire, for having written them off as unreal,
civilized man has no defense against them.”13 Remarking on the place of the holy
in Dracula’s earth in Carfax, Van Helsing says: “‘We must sterilise this earth, so
sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant land for such fell
use. He has chosen this earth because it is holy. Thus we defeat him with his own
weapon, for we make it more holy still’” (354). Many critics interpret this strategy
as a cosmic battle between God and the Devil. While certainly this is a worthy ar-
gument, I would like to shed light on the strategy in terms of the burial and cre-
mationist discourses discussed earlier. Stoker emphasizes not only the battle
between cosmic forces but also the need to rethink the importance of consecrated
ground and earthen burial to England’s sense of itself. Both sides seek to appro-
priate the earth for their own purposes. Dracula secures places of rest for his vam-
pires and introduces, quite literally, Eastern European land into the heart of
London. The Army of Light respects Dracula’s holy enterprise by its use of a sym-
bol that purifies the earth and, ironically, offers its own version of immortality, that
of Christ’s death and Resurrection. Given the potential for the earth to hold
sacred memories and to embody national history, it comes as no surprise that
earthen burial sets the terms in the struggle for England’s identity. Moreover, what
remains, notice, is the purified earth. When Van Helsing beheads and stakes the
three women, they crumble into “native dust, as though the death that should have
come centuries agone had at last assert himself and say at once and loud ‘I am
here!’” (438). Dracula too, once killed and beheaded with the instruments of em-
pire, Harker’s “great Kukri knife,” symbol of British imperial power in India, and
Morris’s bowie knife, symbol of American westward expansion, crumbles to dust,
but not without an unimaginable look of peace, as if to suggest that his final, ethe-
real end marks a special entry into his spiritual immortality (443). Quincey Morris,
in his last salvific gesture before his own death, notices Mina, “bathed in rosy
light,” cleansed of Dracula’s curse upon her forehead (444). The people who ex-
perience “cremation,” or an immediate return to ashes, are the ancient Others,
those whose deaths and decay in Eastern Europe signal a final purification of wor-
risome and contaminating influences that so threaten England. The more modern
Other, the American who symbolically undermines Britain’s dominance in the
world, dies gallantly but nonetheless surely from knife wounds sustained in the bat-
tle with the gypsies.
However, the empty coffins and sterilized dirt within them, the cremated
but unburied remains of Dracula and his mistresses, and the unburied corpse
of Quincey Morris and Mina’s purification belie the sense of peace and stability
that seem to mark the novel’s conclusion. As Jonathan Harker unwittingly warns
readers early on in his description of Castle Dracula, “It is nineteenth century
up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old cen-
turies had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill”
 Conclusion 165

(49–50). Harker’s “Note” begins with an unnerving allusion to purification by

fire: “Seven years ago we all went through flames; and the happiness of some of
us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured” (444). Harker sug-
gests, tentatively, that England had less need to rid itself of Dracula than to pu-
rify itself by its encounter with him. But according to Harker’s qualifications, not
all seem convinced that the pain of these traumatic adventures was worth it.
“Some of us” may have thought so, but by no means does he report unanimity.
Even among those who might venture to say that the happiness they feel now
outlasts the pain they endured during those harrowing months seven years ago,
there remains some reticence among them. “We think” qualifies their gratitude
for the experiences.
And with good reason. Jonathan and Mina’s son, Quincey, named for the
cowboy from Texas, was born on the anniversary of his and Dracula’s death. His
life, then, will always be associated with the deaths of the very men who taught his
parents the painful lessons about the impossibility of living by easy oppositions—
life and death, civilized and uncivilized, colonizer and colonized, aggressor and
victim. Young Quincey, conceived after Mina’s encounter with Dracula, is born
with mixed heritage. He not only lives with blood from Jonathan and Mina but
from Dracula too. If the spirit of his namesake and the power of Quincey’s blood
Dracula garnered from Lucy have the power to influence young Quincey—for
Mina believes that “some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him”—then,
one assumes, blood would have an even greater influence (444). Invoking a prin-
ciple from biology that tells us we are born with the very bacteria and enzymes
that eventually cause our decay, Stoker reminds his readers that the seeds of death
and decay are planted within us, and that not to recognize them or to deny them
is to put ourselves at risk.
The “Note” extends a second serious qualification concerning questions of evi-
dence. Suddenly the experiences of the past and their record in writing turn to a
kind of figurative ash in which the distinctions between the past and present are ef-
faced, even as he attempts to allay the anxieties that the initial experiences caused:

In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and

went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and
terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things
which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears
were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The
castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation. (444)

Harker cannot successfully put the past to rest. At once, the old ground was
and still is full of vivid and terrible memories. And while it was almost impossi-
ble to believe the things that had happened to them, it was still possible to be-
lieve the living truths they had experienced. Even though the traces of all that
had been were blotted out, the castle stands distinct, high above ground that
166 Literary Remains

now has become not alive with vivid memories but “a waste of desolation.”
Indeed, Harker reveals in this most contradictory of codas, that the old centuries
had, and have, powers of their own that modernity cannot kill. Harker bespeaks
his longing to put these deathly experiences behind him but finds that he cannot
dismiss history out of hand. Not until his return home and the marriage of
Seward and Godalming is the despair assuaged.
But within the next paragraph another despair is introduced. In their remi-
niscences, they “were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of
which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing
but a mass of type-writing, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and
myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did
we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story” (444–45). What had been
distinct entries—diaries, journals, memoranda, newspaper clippings, letters—have
become but a mass of stuff that suddenly fails to meet the standards of evidence
that had been, thanks to Mina, so crucial to their destruction of Dracula. In re-
ducing the primary evidence—the record of people’s lives and experiences—to a
“mass,” Harker effectively destroys their history, leaving no proof of the past and
therefore no advice to future generations about how to encounter the undead.
Van Helsing underscores Harker’s desire: “‘We want no proofs; we ask none to
believe us!’” (445). But even as Harker and Van Helsing erase the past by effac-
ing the traces of history and labeling their documentation an indistinct mass, the
energy of the undead circulates through future generations. No matter how hard
the gang tries to defuse the threat of death, ultimately, the novel suggests, their
efforts are futile, because in this heyday of the dead, the corpse remains the con-
summate teacher, disinterring anxieties about nationhood and modernity.
Because the horrors of degeneration and decomposition are never quite
fully confined or contained in Dracula—despite its best conservative efforts—and
because the novel refuses to shun death to the margins of society, Stoker’s mas-
terpiece insists, along with the other Victorian novels discussed earlier, that
death has a rightful and necessary place in society because of its capacity to de-
fine English nationhood and, as a result, to make claims about certain forms of
subjectivity. To claim rigid distinctions between the living and the dead is to un-
dermine England’s self-perception as a modern nation. In this sense, Dracula is
remarkably prescient, because it cautions Victorians about the dangers of deny-
ing death, even as it introduces to the moderns and postmoderns a stunning ob-
session with death. From its ghastly immortality on the screen to its reach into
mall-Goth culture, Dracula never lets us forget how much life comes from the
dead. What kind of life depends upon the times.
The dead will not be denied in Victorian England, and as the living treat
their deaths, they treat their own lives in a myriad of ways. Burial reformers at
mid-century, concerned with the effects of miasma, use the corpse and its alien-
ation from society to make claims about new forms of government, and in the
 Conclusion 167

process they shape a public more suited for labor than local communities meant
to accompany the dead to their graves. Indeed, over the space of the grave and
decomposing corpses, the living rehearse bureaucratic solutions to the intensify-
ing social and urban crisis. But certain Victorian novelists offer a powerful and
significant resistance to the ready solutions offered by Chadwick and his col-
leagues by repositioning the corpse at the center of communal life, thereby cre-
ating a nexus for a whole range of pressing issues, from class relations and the
role of women to the dangerous commodification of the body and the special
importance of history in England’s sense of itself as a nation.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s appreciation of death and burial bespeaks her desire for
the working and middle classes to understand and collaborate with one another,
a relationship mediated by women who have been transformed into agents for
change by their direct contact with the dead. But Gaskell’s use of working-class
burial practices as effective links to larger working-class interests at mid-century
leaves middle-class power intact. Mr. Carson survives as mill owner while John
Barton rests in a grave with no name. Nonetheless, Gaskell refutes the deper-
sonalizing representations of the dead and their families and friends by social re-
formers. As her portrayal of Mr. Davenport’s funeral reveals, she offers dignity
and decency to the lives of the poor and claims that such respect must become,
again, a characteristic English virtue.
Charles Dickens, though, remains skeptical that English society could really
be that virtuous in its treatment of the dead, although by the time he concludes
Our Mutual Friend, a specter of hope lingers. Writing in a time not unlike our
own, in which financial speculation governs political and social relations, Dick-
ens’s novels elucidate the dire consequences of associating the corpse with
money. Such a marriage begets social isolation and a diseased, self-absorbed in-
dividualism, which can only be ameliorated by the likes of John Harmon, who
embodies a symbolic burial of personal selfishness in favor of benevolent patri-
archy. Such generosity emerges when the boundaries between the living and the
dead remain more porous than the present avaricious culture will allow. Re-
turning the corpse home to its social context among the living, thereby severing
its malicious connections to economy, will engender right relations in a society
so besieged by greed.
In Thomas Hardy’s novels, bodies act as a ballast for a society adrift on change.
Their earthen burial in the local rural churchyard mediates history for survivors and
provides a ground of continuity upon which to stand amid social upheaval. In
a time when rural workers could count on no land of their own, owing in part to
the increased number of migrants in England in the latter third of the nineteenth
century, the churchyard, Hardy hopes, will offer solace and an important tether to
previous generations, a dynamic contiguity that identifies folk as English. The
churchyard, and the memorials that shape it, is paradigmatic of the best of rural life,
but a life, as Tess and Jude attest, about to be lost to ruthless modernity. Tess and
168 Literary Remains

Jude ignore history at their peril, and clinging to nostalgic sensibilities about the
past only brings their ruin, as if to remind readers that the dead will haunt us if we
choose to ignore the lessons they teach about how to negotiate the pressures of
modern life. The Victorians were more than sentimental about death, for they un-
derstood intimately the complex power of the corpse to regenerate society. The lit-
erary remains examined here gesture to a necessary appreciation of this reality and
suggest that failure to do so leaves England vulnerable to vampires—those disre-
spectful of the poor; greedy, self-serving individuals; women made subservient by
conventional notions of domesticity; and technocrats who efface history and the
value of community—“the undead,” who thrive on rigid Victorian dispositions that
deny the contiguous and invaluable relationship of the dead with the living.
 Epilogue
The Traffic in Bodies

“‘Human body parts are an industry, and business is booming,’” writes Annie
Cheney in her bracing essay, “The Resurrection Men: Scenes from the Cadaver
Trade,” published in the March 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine.1 Tipped off by
an anatomist who suggested to her that she investigate surgical training seminars
“that featured human body parts, obtained through a little known and largely un-
regulated network of independent operators,” Cheney pursues her investigation
of the cadaver trade with an incisive sensitivity to the curious, if not macabre, jux-
taposition of bodies with money. She opens her exposé with a report of her expe-
rience at Miami’s Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort, temporary home to
a surgical seminar on laparoscopy sponsored by Innovations in Medical Educa-
tion and Training. There, in the Ocean Room, on steel grey gurneys, lay the leg-
less, armless, and headless remains of six dead men.2 Surgeons, who paid up to
$2,395 each and clad in operating gowns donned over their golf shirts and Dock-
ers, honed their laparoscopic skills on the torsos placed before them. With the de-
veloping sophistication of surgical practices, the need for fresh body parts has
intensified and, according to Cheney, there are an increasing number of “resur-
rection men,” or body brokers, who would be happy to supply the industry.
Indeed, business is booming, especially in the nontransplant tissue banks,
which send representatives to hospitals, funeral homes, morgues, and hospices
“to entice families of corpses or corpses in waiting to donate.”3 As Augie Perna,
founder of Surgical Body Forms, perceives it, “There are plenty of people who
would like to make something of themselves in death, if not in life.”4 Arguing
for more straight talk and less “prudish squeamishness” about real medical
needs, Perna, with qualmless assurance, sees a bright future in corpses, particu-
larly if a company were willing to pay $20,000 for a corpse and then sell the
pieces for $200,000. “This way, poor families would enjoy a new source of in-
come, companies would make a large profit, and the market place would finally
be provided precisely the parts it desired.”5
Perna’s optimism about the lively trade in body parts seems to have been con-
tagious.6 In the same month Cheney published her article in Harper’s, March 2004,

169
170 Literary Remains

the Los Angeles Times published a series of articles on the emerging scandal at
UCLA’s Willed Body Program.7 The university suspended its program, whereby
people will their bodies to science in a dignified effort to advance knowledge of
human anatomy and unveil the secrets of tenacious disease. In fact, the program
director, Henry Reid, was arrested for stealing corpses and selling them to Ernest V.
Nelson, the accused middleman who cut up and carted away nearly 800 cadavers
over a six-year period. Allegedly, with Reid’s permission, Nelson would arrive at the
walk-in refrigerator at UCLA’s medical school, “toting a gray case filled with gloves,
specimen bags and a power saw.”8 Nelson, who unabashedly asserts that he cuts ca-
davers for a living, boasts, “‘I’m the best in the business.’”9 Though it is illegal to
profit from the sale of body parts, brokers like Nelson and Perna may charge fees for
handling and transportation. The demand for bodies, however, far exceeds the sup-
ply, raising prices and encouraging what John Broder calls “body-parts entrepre-
neurs.”10 Like the dead bodies in the nineteenth century, corpses—their organs and
tissues—remain valuable, highly marketable commodities.11 Relatives and friends of
those who freely donated their bodies to UCLA’s program, believing that they
would be used as cadavers in the dissection labs of the medical school, have
protested vigorously against the damage done to their loved ones in the name of
medicine, to their own sense of grieving, and to their special understanding about
the indwelling of the dead in the worlds of the living.
The relatives of those who were to have been cremated at the Tri-State Cre-
matory in Noble, Georgia, were outraged over disrespect shown to their dead. In
the early spring of 2002, Walker County authorities, acting on an anonymous
tip phoned into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Atlanta, discov-
ered 339 bodies on the sixteen-acre site in rural northwest Georgia. In a scene
reminiscent of Dracula, bodies were found packed in coffins, cast aside in pits in
the backyard, piled high in six vaults found in one of the storage buildings, and
submerged in the adjacent pond. Ray Brent Marsh, owner and operator of the
family business, which he inherited from his father, was arrested on 787 counts
of theft by deception; that is, accepting money for cremations he never per-
formed, instead apparently stacking, storing, and dumping bodies throughout
his property. Metal scrapings, dirt, cement dust, and burned wood chips were
substituted for the cremains of loved ones. Walker County Coroner Dewayne
Wilson remarked, “The worst horror movie you’ve ever seen—imagine that ten
times worse. That is what I’m dealing with.”12 Curt Gann, a major in the Geor-
gia Army National Guard, whose grandmother was brought to Tri-State Crema-
tory in 1998 but was never cremated, compared the scene to “Tales from the
Crypt”: “incomprehensible, almost surreal. I never thought anything like that
would happen to anyone I knew or any of my family members.”13
Like Dracula and its unrelenting fascination with morbidity, the Tri-State
Crematory case has drawn intense interest in the media. When the case first
broke, reporters from across the United States and Europe descended on north-
west Georgia as descriptions of the scene became popular on the Internet and on
 Epilogue 171

talk radio. Michael Pearson, a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, notes
that as many as 150,000 people a day were visiting the Web site, where the pho-
tograph of a body being removed from the ground at Tri-State Crematory had
been posted. Hundreds have purchased T-shirts, pins, and lighters commemo-
rating the scandal.14 While mistreatment of the dead arouses morbid curiosity
among spectators fascinated by such a taboo, others recognize the perilous con-
sequences of distancing themselves from the dead, the inability, for example, to
detect serious abuses that have recently plagued the death-care industry.
Like the Victorian corpse, the postmodern, uncremated corpse exists at the
center of a surprising range of contemporary concerns: family and community,
law and psychology, religion and technology. The series of articles in The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution on the scandal at the Tri-State Crematory reveals a nexus of
issues strikingly similar to nineteenth-century burial practices. The local com-
munity, for example, registers sheer disbelief about the situation. How could no
one in this small community in northwest Georgia not notice what was taking
place on the Marsh property? How could such civic-minded people such as the
Marshes neglect the dead? As Dana Tofig writes, “Noble is not some sprawling
metro Atlanta suburb, where you’re not supposed to know your neighbors—or
their business. It’s a community of about 1,500 people. Not exactly Mayberry,
but closer than one might imagine.”15 Yet even as people speak respectfully of
the Marshes and wonder how such a horror could visit their hometown, they
also remark on their distance from the family. Few people recall actually being
on the property, if ever. Not their neighbors, not their pastor, not their funeral
home directors, not their politicians. If people had been present and alert to the
business of death, the articles suggest, then this tragedy would not have occurred.
Marsh’s transgression of respect due to the dead deeply angered relatives,
because bodies were treated like trash, like the abandoned cars stuffed with debris,
old refrigerators, rusted tools, and broken folding chairs that also littered the sur-
rounding woods. They expressed outrage that their wishes and the wishes of their
now-deceased loved ones had been so cavalierly dismissed. News of the unfinished
business forced mourners to relive the deaths and sustain once again the grief and
depression that often accompany such a loss: “I don’t know which is worse, him
dying or this,” said Luther Mason’s daughter-in-law Neva Mason.16 Marsh’s fraud
touches upon theological issues as well. When family members realized the decep-
tion at work with regard to the cremains, some questioned whether the soul had
found its proper resting place, given an undignified disposal of the body. Rev.
David Autry, pastor of First Methodist Church in LaFayette, Georgia, explains that
from a Christian perspective, the body is God’s temple, and so “there’s a certain ac-
cepted and appropriate manner for dealing with the physical remains. To deviate
from that norm, such as in the case here, brings the outcry of a horrible injustice
not just against the body, but against the spirit.”17 A number of pastors from
churches in Walker County prayed with and counseled family members who felt
caught in rage and uncertainty about the status of their deceased relatives.
172 Literary Remains

Curiously, money seems to have been less of an issue than psychology. Money
could have been made, for it costs about $25 to cremate a body, and Ray Brent
Marsh could have charged anywhere from $200 to $1,500 for each cremation, de-
pending on the cost of the urn and the current market price. But according to the
FBI profilers and psychologists interviewed, some kind of psychological malady
provides the best explanation for Marsh’s stockpiling of 339 bodies. The profound
chaos and confusion discovered at the crematory, from bills and paperwork strewn
about his office to the hearse in the front yard, sitting on four flat tires—still bear-
ing the coffin, replete with body, and the now-shriveled flower arrangement—to
the bodies cast about in the backyard, reveal a person with a particular obsessive-
compulsive disorder. Identified as a hoarding condition, the disease causes one to
keep things one does not need and then prevents one from making a decision
about what to do with these things. So according to Clint Van Zandt, a former
FBI profiler who has followed the case closely, Marsh could have rationalized his
behavior because it involved dead people. “He probably thought, ‘People don’t
care about them. I was going to burn them anyway. Someday I’ll burn them and
get it done, and [in the meantime] I’ll give these people some ashes to keep them
happy. If these people want a jar of ashes, what difference does it make if it’s
cement or ash? I’ve met their emotional needs.’”18 Marsh’s social isolation and his
increasing inability to make a decision about what to do with the accumulating
corpses hearken back to Charles Dickens’s representation of Bradley Headstone.
A certain compulsiveness marks both situations, as if to suggest that the ways in
which people treat death bespeak something of being ill at ease in the world.
What remains certain, however, is that a more thorough system of state reg-
ulation would have prevented this tragedy and the ensuing heartache among sur-
vivors. Under Georgia law, the Tri-State Crematory was exempt from inspection
because it conducted business only with local funeral homes, did not deal di-
rectly with the public, and did not have a licensed funeral director in charge.
Within a month of the initial investigation into the crematory, the Georgia leg-
islature voted to make all crematories subject to inspection and clearly defined
the felony crime of “abuse of a dead body.” On the federal level, Senator Chris
Dodd (D-Conn), who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Fami-
lies, called a hearing in response to news accounts of abuses at cemeteries and
crematoria. Those who testified at the hearing agreed that the funeral industry
needs more comprehensive federal regulation to prevent such abuses evident in
the Georgia case. Meanwhile, families have filed class action suits, accusing the
particular funeral homes and their insurance companies who did business with
Tri-State Crematory for failure to cremate bodies as contracted and for discard-
ing the bodies in violation of the law and human dignity. Frank Vadall, Emory
University law professor, claimed that the key to the success of the class action
suits will depend upon “the preciousness of a dead body.”19
Given these contemporary corporeal scandals, the inestimable value of the
corpse to the living continues to remain at stake. The commodification of the
 Epilogue 173

body, now in the sum of its parts, echoes Victorian concerns about lavish funerals
and the corpse used as currency for an increasingly vigorous market economy. The
dismissal of religious and spiritual sentiments of survivors in favor of greed or, in
the case of Ray Brent Marsh, psychological dysfunction, reflects a similar disregard
for families’ wishes for the dead in favor of efficiency and control of the working-
class corpse by Victorian social reformers. Ironically, Chadwick’s trope of the body
as waste and therefore in need of reform and legislation seems to have materialized
in Tri-State Crematory’s treatment of the dead as worse than trash. Then and now,
both cases argue for state regulation to rectify what is perceived as rather gruesome
realities, and both cases enact a battle over the body, a contest for identity, for the
definition of the person in relationship to family, kinship networks, and society. Fi-
nally, the commensurate fraud that results from these scandals, the deception with
regard to cremains especially, denies to the person, even in death, the power to em-
body history across time and space, to participate in a family’s and a community’s
ongoing and ever-changing definition of itself in life. The denial of the body, the
refusal to position the dead in necessary and pressing proximity to the living, ig-
nores worthy lessons taught by many Victorian novels—that is, the society of the
dead regularly recreates the society of the living.
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 Notes

Introduction: Disinterring Death

1. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney Needham and
Claudia Needham (London: Cohen and West, 1960), 72.
2. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1985), 112–13.
3. Mary Poovey, “Reading History in Literature: Speculation and Virtue
in Our Mutual Friend, in Historical Criticism and the Challenge of Theory, ed. Janet
Levarie Smarr, 43 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
4. Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (London
and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Elisabeth Bronfen, Over
Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992).
5. Stewart, Death Sentences, 7.
6. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, eds., Death and Repre-
sentation (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
7. Catherine Gallagher, “The Body versus the Social Body in the Works
of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sex-
uality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas
Laqueur, 83–106 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and “The
Bioeconomics of Our Mutual Friend,” in Subject to History: Ideology, Class and Gen-
der, ed. David Simpson, 47–64 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
8. Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the
Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 12.
9. John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London: Studio Vista,
1971), 24–25. See also Mary Chamberlain and Ruth Richardson, “Life and
Death,” Oral History 11 (Spring 1983): 39–40, for a fuller critique of Morley’s as-
sumptions about the role of women in nineteenth-century death practices. See
also James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: David and
Charles, 1972).
10. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle
in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 379. I also
am endebted to Ralph Houlbrooke, “The Age of Decency: 1660–1760,” in Death

175
176 Notes to Introduction

in England, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings, 174–201 (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2000), and Death, Religion, and the Family in England,
1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the
Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
11. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996); Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London and
New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving,
Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Great Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press for the British Academy, 2000); Peter C. Jupp, From Dust to Ashes:
Cremation and the British Way of Death (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
12. See Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom and
G. L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Geoffrey Gorer,
Death, Grief, and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1965); Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthro-
pology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Glen-
nys Howarth and Peter C. Jupp, eds., Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death,
Dying, and Disposal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). For a comprehensive re-
view of death in Western culture, see the groundbreaking work by Philippe
Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1981), and his Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present,
trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1974).
13. Lawrence Taylor, “The Uses of Death in Europe,” Anthropological Quar-
terly 62 (1989): 149.
14. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 9.
15. For more on bodily reform and historical practice, see Jean Comaroff
and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1992), 69–91.
16. See Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration
of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Mike Parker Pearson,
The Archeology of Death and Burial (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,
1999), 171–92.
17. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death.
18. David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern
Britain,” in Mirrors of Mortality, ed. Joachim Whaley, 188–89 (New York: St. Mar-
tin’s Press, 1981).
19. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-
socialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 25, 27.
20. Other social historians and literary critics have more than adequately
described other thanatological issues of the age: deathbed scenes, last wills and
testaments, the role of the undertaker, the dynamics of grief and mourning, sui-
cide, and the apparent Victorian preoccupation with sexuality and the death of
 Notes to Chapter 1 177

women. While I touch on some of these aspects in this book, I do so in ways that
relate to my primary concern—burial and the disposal of dead bodies. For a gen-
eral introduction to this particular field of inquiry, see Christine Quigley, The
Corpse: A History (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company, 1996).
21. For a fine discussion of domesticity, the nation, and public health in
Chadwick’s Sanitary Report, see Mary Poovey, “Domesticity and Class Formation:
Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary Report,” in Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed.
David Simpson, 65–83 (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press,
1991). Poovey, p. 66, argues that Chadwick, in his Report on the Sanitary Condition
of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), deploys assumptions about do-
mesticity as a way to outline the part the laboring class would play in the forma-
tion of the state. In A Supplementary Report, Chadwick’s specific agenda concerns
working-class habits and their relation to the well-being of the English economy.

Chapter 1: Down among the Dead

1. Members of the committee included Lord Ashley, an active evangelical
reformer, and Thomas Duncombe, who, with G. A. Walker, was a founding mem-
ber of the Metropolitan Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns. Begun in
1845, the society was established to demonstrate to the public “the necessity of
speedily abolishing or restricting . . . the immoral and pernicious custom of bury-
ing in towns.” See G. A. Walker, The Fourth of a Series of Lectures Delivered at the Me-
chanics’ Institution on the Actual Condition of Metropolitan Grave-Yards, August 13,
1847 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1847), 30; G. A. Walker,
Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those in London (1839; rep., New York: Arno
Press, 1977).
2. Definitions of terms may prove useful here: a churchyard is under the
control of religious authorities; a cemetery may be managed by either a local au-
thority or private company; a burial ground is the province of an elected burial
board; and a graveyard is a more generic and descriptive term. See Deborah Wig-
gins, “The Burial Acts: Cemetery Reform in Great Britain, 1815–1914” (PhD
diss., Texas Tech University, 1991), 12. Wiggins studies the voluminous Burial
Acts in the nineteenth century, an archive not unlike the churchyards that the
acts were meant to rectify: bodies buried over the decades one on top of another,
in desperate need of organization and management.
3. Sir Edwin Chadwick, A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special In-
quiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1843).
Hereafter cited in the text parenthetically as SR, followed by the page number.
4. S. E. Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen,
1952); Ann Hardy, “Parish Pump to Private Pipes: London’s Water Supply in the
Nineteenth Century,” Medical History, Suppl. no. 11 (1991): 77. Finer, p. 213, for
example, cites that Birmingham’s death rate per thousand shot up from 14.6 to
27.2; of Leeds, from 20.7 to 27.2; of Bristol, from 16.9 to 31; of Manchester, from
178 Notes to Chapter 1

30.2 to 33.8; and of Liverpool, from 21 to 34.8. The average for all five towns
showed an increase in mortality from 20.69 to 30.8.
5. Dissenters recoiled at the idea of paying burial fees to the Church of
England, and they had no intention of being buried on consecrated ground.
Burial reformers complained that Dissenting ministers gained more money from
the dead than the living.
6. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 33.
7. Great Britain, House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, X, 1842, Select
Committee on the Improvement of the Health of Towns, “Report on Effect of
Interment of Bodies in Towns,” 352.
8. Ibid., 354.
9. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 47.
10. I am especially indebted to Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Desti-
tute, Chapter 1, “The Corpse and Popular Culture,” 3–29. She elaborates on tra-
ditional attitudes toward death and the corpse as the cultural context for the
1832 Anatomy Act. I, however, establish this milieu to better appreciate the so-
cial meaning of burial reform discussion, which emerged after the Anatomy Act.
11. Ibid., 40.
12. Ibid., 38.
13. Maximilien Misson, Memoires and Observations of His Travels over En-
gland, trans. J. Ozell (London: D. Browne, 1719), 90. A Swiss visitor to England
in 1719, Misson writes, “It must be remembered that I always speak of middling
people, among whom the customs of a nation are most truly to be learn’d” (215).
14. In their efforts to accommodate tradition to the demands of modern
society, to avoid the ignominy of the pauper funeral, and to deal with growing
economic pressures, the poor began to save money through burial clubs and
friendly societies. These societies were established and sustained by weekly con-
tributions to defray the expenses of burial. Both Gosden and Baernreither agree
that the more local burial societies proved successful—that is, free from fraud.
See P. H. J. H. Gosden, Friendly Societies in England, 1815–1875 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1961), and J. M. Baernreither, English Associations
of Working Men (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Company, 1893).
15. Richardson, Death, 17.
16. Ibid.
17. Ruth Richardson, “Why Was Death So Big in Victorian Britain?” in
Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke, 114 (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, 1989).
18. Richardson, Death, 4.
19. Elizabeth Hurren and Steve King, “‘Begging for a Burial’: Form, Func-
tion, and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Pauper Burial,” Social History 30:3
(August 2005): 321–41, challenge earlier historiographic representations of the
pauper burial. They argue for more nuanced local and regional readings of the his-
torical record, suggesting that some pauper funerals and burials were not always
 Notes to Chapter 1 179

so stark, and that people within the unions negotiated with overseers to provide
for decent practices. Nonetheless, the desire to secure a proper burial, privately or
at parish expense, and the involvement of the community and family in these
death rituals manifest a certain measure of repulsion at having loved ones buried
unceremoniously in a common grave.
20. Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals,” Representa-
tions 1:1 (February 1983): 109; Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Com-
mon Funeral since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 1992), 165.
21. Quoted in Sir Arnold Wilson and Hermann Levy, Burial Reform and
Funeral Costs (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 56.
22. Mary Poovey, “Domesticity and Class Formation: Chadwick’s 1842 San-
itary Report,” in Subject to History: Ideology, Class, Gender, ed. David Simpson, 66
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), argues that Chadwick, in his Report
on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, deploys as-
sumptions about domesticity as a way to outline the part the laboring class would
play in the formation of the state. In A Supplementary Report Chadwick’s specific
agenda concerns working-class habits and their relation to the well-being of the
English economy.
23. Lindsay Prior, The Social Organization of Death: Medical Discourse and
Social Practices in Belfast (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 20.
24. Walker, Gatherings, 254.
25. Walker writes in Gatherings from Graveyards that if the price of coal was
within grasp, certain people would not be compelled to disinter and chop up
coffins to use as fuel: “Their poverty and not their wills consent . . . and a con-
siderable reduction in the price of coal will destroy one of the temptations to
violate the tomb” (201).
26. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since
1830 (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 28.
27. G. A. Walker, Interment and Disinterment (London: Longman and Com-
pany, 1843), 24.
28. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, 30.
29. Henry Mayhew, “A Visit to the Cholera District of Bermondsey,” The
Morning Chronicle, September 24, 1849, 4.
30. Mayhew, “Letter XXXIX,” The Morning Chronicle, February 28, 1850.
31. Great Britain, House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers X, 1842. Select
Committee on Improvement of the Health of Towns, “Report on Effect of
Interment of Bodies in Towns,” 486–87.
32. Mayhew, in his letters to The Morning Chronicle, interviewed numerous
women who were compelled to live with another male wage earner: “I was left a
widow with two children, and could get no work to keep me. I picked up with this
child’s father, and thought, with the little help that he could give me, I might be
able to keep my children; but after all I was forced by want and distress, and the
trouble of child-bed to sell all I had to get a bit of victuals” (November 23, 1849).
180 Notes to Chapter 1

33. “The Working Classes of Sheffield,” Westminster Review 40 (1843): 464.

34. Ibid., 463–65.
35. Eileen Yeo, “Culture and Constraint in Working-Class Movements,
1830–1855,” in Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the
History of Labour and Leisure, ed. Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, 155–60 (Sussex:
Harvester Press, 1981).
36. Quoted in Yeo, “Culture and Constraint,” 159.
37. Clive Behagg, “Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the
Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Popular Culture and
Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Robert D. Storch, 161 (London and
New York: Croom Helm and St. Martin’s Press, 1982).
38. M. J. Haynes, “Class and Conflict in the Early Nineteenth Century:
Northampton Shoemakers and the Grand National Consolidated Trades’
Union,” Literature and History 5 (Spring 1977): 116–17.
39. Ibid., 86.
40. “Essay upon Epitaphs” was first published in Coleridge’s journal The Friend
on February 22, 1810. It was printed as a note to The Excursion, Book V, in 1814.
Wordsworth wrote two other essays on this subject for The Friend, but they were not
printed before the journal ceased publication: “The Country Churchyard, and Crit-
ical Examination of Ancient Epitaphs,” and “Celebrated Epitaphs Considered.” All
three essays may be found in William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William
Wordsworth, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Grosart, 27–75 (London: Edward Moxson, 1876).
41. Wordsworth, The Prose Works, 39, emphasis in original. For more de-
veloped discussions about Wordsworth and the formation of the Romantic sub-
jectivity, see Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 81–92; Elaine Hadley, Melodra-
matic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 25–30.
42. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Decomposing: Wordsworth’s Poetry of Epi-
taph and English Burial Reform,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 42:4 (March
1988): 415–31. See also Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the
Bonds of Mourning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). Fosso
reads the Essays on Epitaphs as expressions of Wordsworth’s belief in the value of
community, one that includes both the living and the dead. The survivors’ rela-
tionships to the dead and to each other in mourning lead to community.
43. Sanchez-Eppler, “Decomposing,” 419.
44. Ibid., 431.
45. Ibid.
46. Elaine Hadley, “On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fan-
tasy of Agency,” Victorian Studies 48:1 (Autumn 2005): 93. Hadley, in her forth-
coming book Living Liberalism, critiques the ultimate ineffectiveness of Victorian
liberalism because of its “fantasy of an abstractly embodied agency” by a culti-
vated self who refuses to face directly the hundreds marching in the streets (99).
 Notes to Chapter 1 181

47. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew

Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler, 161–62 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961).
48. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: New York University
Press, 1965), 290.
49. Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London and New York:
Routledge, 1991), 333.
50. R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, 1832–1854
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1952), 80.
51. Chadwick claimed that the private enterprise cemeteries failed in their
mission to provide a dignified burial. They were as overcrowded and ill equipped
to manage bodies as the churchyards. Chadwick’s plan called for prohibition of
all intramural interments; the takeover of joint stock company cemeteries and
private grounds; the closure of all churchyards, with the sites kept open for pub-
lic use; and the creation of national cemeteries on ground selected on scientific
principles (prevention of miasma) with suitable decorations and vegetation, man-
aged by officers with appropriate qualifications (SR, 187–202).
52. John Claudius Loudon, preface to The Gardener’s Magazine 1 (1826),
wrote that the purpose of this magazine, begun in 1826, was “to disseminate new
and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to
raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.” In his lifetime
Loudon was responsible for three cemeteries: Cambridge Cemetery at Histon,
Abbey Cemetery near Prior Park at Bath, and the Cemetery at Southampton.
53. John Claudius Loudon, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of
Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards, with Sixty Engravings (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1843). Scottish landscape gardener and
architect John Claudius Loudon was the most influential horticultural journal-
ist of his time, and his writings helped shape Victorian taste in gardens, public
parks, domestic architecture, and cemeteries. While serving as the editor of the
Gardener’s Magazine, Loudon wrote numerous articles on the conditions of
churchyards that were later collected in On the Laying Out, Planting, and Manag-
ing of Cemeteries, hereafter cited in the text as Loudon, followed by the page num-
ber. For a detailed study of Loudon’s life and work, see Melanie Louise Simo,
Loudon and Landscape: From Country Seat to Metropolis, 1783–1843 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
54. James Stevens Curl, “The Design of the Early British Cemeteries,” Jour-
nal of Garden History 4:3 (1984): 223–54, reports that the South Metropolitan
Cemetery, situated on forty acres in the Norwood hamlet in south London, was
designed by Sir William Tite in 1837. According to Curl, Tite designed the
Tudor Gothic Revival chapels “set at the top of a rise, like a country house and
its outbuildings in an informal park, with clumps of trees placed in what Loudon
called the ‘Pleasure-Ground Style.’ Loudon published a variant of this view with
his own idea of planting superimposed,” which he called “Planted in the Ceme-
tery Style” (234–35). I have selected Loudon’s variant to discuss here.
182 Notes to Chapter 2

55. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 68–69, notes that “there were two chapels,
one for the Church of England parishioners and one for Dissenters. . . . The larger
Anglican chapel resembled King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Consecrated by the
Bishop of Winchester, the first burial took place on 12 December 1837.” I will
elaborate on these distinctions between chapels and burial services in Chapter 4.
56. The static quality of the engraving is reinforced by Loudon’s rules for
the cemetery: “No dogs or improper persons [Sheffield workers, for example]; no
smoking, drinking or even eating; no running or jumping, laughing, whistling,
or singing, or other practice that might indicate a want of reverence for the place,
should be permitted. No person should be allowed to walk in the graves, or to
cross from one walk or green path to another in places where the ground was
filled with graves” (39).
57. Chadwick, A Supplementary Report, 127–33; Loudon, On the Laying Out,
Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, 31.
58. Loudon, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, 1.
59. Ibid., 11.
60. Ibid., 13.
61. Ibid., 13.
62. Ibid., 38.
63. Ibid., 49.
64. Benjamin Ward Richardson, The Health of Nations: A Review of the Works
of Edwin Chadwick, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1887), 164.
65. Quoted in Finer, The Life and Times, 300.

Chapter 2: “Taught by Death What Life Should Be”

1. From a review of Mary Barton in the British Quarterly Review 9 (February
1, 1849): 131.
2. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1970). Hereafter cited in the text as MB, followed by the page num-
ber. Death was no stranger to Elizabeth Gaskell. Her brother, John Stevenson, mys-
teriously vanished at sea on a voyage to India in 1828; her mother died when she
was eleven months old; she gave birth to a stillborn child in 1833, and her son,
Willie, died of scarlet fever in 1845. On the subject of Gaskell’s experience of her
son’s death and its relationship to writing Mary Barton, she writes to Mrs. Greg, wife
of W. R. Greg: “The tale was formed, and the greater part of the first volume was
written when I was obliged to lie down constantly on the sofa, when I took refuge
in the invention to exclude the memory of painful scenes which would force them-
selves upon my remembrance. It is no wonder then that the whole book seems to
be written in the minor key; indeed, the very design seems to me to require this
treatment. I acknowledge the fault of there being too heavy a shadow over the book,
but I doubt if the story could have been deeply realized without these shadows.” See
 Notes to Chapter 2 183

J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, eds., The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 74–75, Letter 42.
3. Elizabeth Gaskell’s husband William was a Unitarian minister at the
Cross Street Chapel in Manchester from 1828 until his death in 1884. Accord-
ing to Monica Fryckstedt, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Ruth: A Challenge to
Christian England (Stockholm: Uppsala, 1982), 64–65, there were two wings of
Unitarianism active at mid-century. The liberal wing, led by James Martineau
and others, contended that the seat of authority lies in reason, a test even Scrip-
ture must submit to. The conservative wing, which included Elizabeth Gaskell
and William Gaskell and John Robberds at the Cross Street Chapel, Joseph Ash-
ton at the Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford, and William Turner, whom Eliza-
beth visited at Newcastle as a young woman, believed that authority is derived
from Scripture rather than reason.
4. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1993), 73.
5. Raymond V. Holt, The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), 277.
6. Fryckstedt, Elizabeth Gaskell’s . . . , 67.
7. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 89. In fact, Ross D. Waller, ed., “Letters Ad-
dressed to Mrs. Gaskell by Celebrated Contemporaries Now in the Possession of
the John Rylands Library,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 19 (1935): 165,
shows that Edwin Chadwick corresponded with Elizabeth Gaskell on October 3,
1851. Chadwick offered to show Swedish novelist Fredricka Bremer new model
houses in London. Included with the letter was a copy of a recent report on the
origin and spread of cholera. According to Gaskell’s biographer, Jenny Uglow,
Gaskell seemed to have a historical relationship with Chadwick, one that gave
her a glimpse into bureaucratic representations of disease at mid-century (89).
Their disagreements, as I discuss them in this chapter, concern their markedly
different representations of death and burial. Whether Gaskell was writing to di-
rectly counter Chadwick is difficult to prove conclusively, but the evidence in the
novel strongly suggests such a possibility.
8. Donald Stone, The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 140.
9. Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victo-
rian Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 132.
10. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, 75; Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken, 133–34.
11. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973). Hereafter cited in the text as NS, followed by the page number.
12. Herbert Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” in The Meaning of Death, ed.
Herman Feifel, 74 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).
13. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London and New
York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 14, reports that in the popular culture
184 Notes to Chapter 2

of Victorian England, “The dying could be cared for by the living in such a way
as to ensure the speedy release and future well-being of the departed spirit.”
14. The allusion is to Rev. 6:8: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and
his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power
was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and
with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” For a full discus-
sion of biblical allusion in Mary Barton, see Michael Wheeler, The Art of Allusion
in Victorian Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), 44–60.
15. See Ruth Richardson, “Why Was Death So Big in Victorian Britain?”
in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke, 105–17 (New York and
London: Routledge, 1989).
16. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1983), 90, calls the murder “an imaginative working out
of the fear, and of reactions to it, rather than any kind of observed and consid-
ered experience.”
17. By moral, I mean performing to a standard of right behavior, conformity
to sanctioned codes of conduct established, in Barton’s case, by middle-class no-
tions of what is considered right and wrong behavior for the working class. By
way of reminder, Barton rejects a key middle-class ideology at work in Victorian
England: Social order depends upon his hard work, lack of freedom and resig-
nation in the face of death. See Marcuse, “The Ideology of Death,” 64–76.
18. Traditionally, according to Bertram S. Puckle, Funeral Customs: Their
Origin and Development (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1926; reprint, Detroit, MI:
Singing Tree Press, 1968), 150, the north side of church graveyards was the bur-
ial location of outcasts, murderers, and prostitutes, for example. This graveyard
geography originates from the fact that inside the church the north, or left-hand
side, is the Gospel side; the south, the Epistle side. The Gospel was preached “to
call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.” Thus those who committed
crimes and were buried on the north side of the graveyard were in greater need
of salvation. Gaskell offers no precise indication of where, exactly, John’s and Es-
ther’s grave was situated in the cemetery. But in keeping with historical practice,
Gaskell suggests in her novel that they were buried without much ceremony. See
also Sylvia Barnard, To Prove I’m Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victorian City
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 157–76.
19. I am indebted to Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes:
Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 32–34, 319, 419–49, for their discussions
of what constituted the public and the private at mid-century.
20. Ibid., 319.
21. Ibid., 408–409. To recall the Ogdens from Mary Barton, neither the
widow nor the daughters attended Mr. Ogden’s funeral or burial.
22. Deanna L. Davis, “Feminist Critics and Literary Mothers: Daughters
Reading Elizabeth Gaskell,” Signs 17:3 (Spring 1992): 507–32, contends that
 Notes to Chapter 3 185

“the complicated interrelatedness of motherhood and daughterhood has shaped

the way feminist critics analyze both the mother/daughter relationship and
Gaskell’s presentation of feminine nurturance” (509).
23. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford/Cousin Phyllis (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1986), 109.
24. See Barbara Leah Harman, “In Promiscuous Company: Female Public
Appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South,” Victorian Studies 31:3 (Spring
1988): 367.
25. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–37, delineates this
paradox and its relation to abstract space in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I
find her analysis of Smith’s work particularly helpful in my own analysis of Mar-
garet’s position in the strike scene and the paradox of her metaphorical death. See
Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New
York: Modern Library, 1937).

Chapter 3: “To Profit Us When He Was Dead”

1. Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol,” in Christmas Books, ed. Eleanor
Farjeon, 63 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), hereafter cited in the text
as CC, followed by the page number.
2. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 2000). Hereafter cited in the text as TTC, followed by the page number.
3. For this brief history of the resurrectionists and the contexts that gave
birth to them, I am especially indebted to Martin Fido, Bodysnatchers: A History of
the Resurrectionists, 1742–1832 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), 10–69;
Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London and New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 131–58; Andrew Sanders, A Companion to A
Tale of Two Cities (London and Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 35–36; James
Bailey, The Diary of a Resurrectionist, 1811–1812 (London: Swan Sonnenschein
and Company, 1896), 13–123.
4. Fido, Bodysnatchers, 33.
5. Richardson, Death, 143, 145. See also Albert D. Hutter, “The Novelist
as Resurrectionist: Dickens and the Dilemma of Death,” Dickens Studies Annual
12 (1983): 6.
6. Richardson, Death, 72.
7. Fido, Bodysnatchers, 47.
8. Qtd. in Richardson, Death, 58–59; emphasis in original.
9. Fido, Bodysnatchers, 10–11.
10. Great Britain. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers, XXI 1850,
“Report on General Schemes for Extra-Mural Sepulture,” 557. This account of
the battle over the two Metropolitan Interment Bills also relies upon S. E. Finer,
The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952), 381–403,
186 Notes to Chapter 3

412–20, and Deborah Wiggins, “The Burial Acts: Cemetery Reform in Great
Britain, 1815–1914” (PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 1991), 111–37.
11. Only Brompton Cemetery was purchased by the government in 1851.
12. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 116.
13. Ibid., 117.
14. Finer, The Life and Times, 306. For an account of Chadwick’s severe obsti-
nacy in the battles over the Interment Acts of 1850 and 1852, see ibid., 381–403,
412–20.
15. Julie Rigg, “The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in
Britain,” in The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal, ed.
Peter C. Jupp, 117 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
16. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 128.
17. Ibid., 129.
18. Ibid., 134.
19. Christopher Herbert, “Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas of Money,” Victo-
rian Studies 44:2 (Winter 2002): 203, 211.
20. Hutter illuminates the resurrectionist theme as a major subtext to A Tale
of Two Cities, suggesting that its aim is “to give meaning to death or to the past, to
disinter the historical moment and make it come alive, to recover bodies and let-
ters and everything that may presumably have disappeared and to resurrect them,
to give them meaning” (25). He claims that the meaning concerns the culture’s
contradictory view of death, one positive and religious, represented by Carton,
the other subversive and nihilistic, represented by Cruncher. But I think Dick-
ens is more comprehensive in his use of the theme than Hutter argues. He fash-
ions his resurrectionist theme to make political claims about England’s future.
21. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, vol. 2 (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 1016.
22. See Sylvia Barnard, To Prove I’m Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victo-
rian City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 40–58. The religious
battles over burial grounds peak during the 1870s, a situation I will discuss at
length in the next chapter.
23. The Times, July 4, 1861, 8.
24. The Times, July 4, 1861, 8, emphasis added.
25. Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London and New York:
Routledge, 1991), 417, concludes that real income in the 1850s and 1860s in-
creased very slowly, and, eventually, profits and wages became more unequal
within and across classes. “This increasing inequality, at all levels of income dis-
tribution, is what we should expect in a free-for-all society rapidly increasing in
wealth and population, in which the few possessed of valuable resources or spe-
cial talents, skills, or energy enjoyed unprecedented opportunities for increasing
their incomes, while the many were forced by their lack of these and by their
own increasing numbers to sell their services in a buyer’s market.” Given these
 Notes to Chapter 3 187

conditions, everything, including what was once considered waste from more
prosperous times, became available in this economy.
26. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1985), 652. Hereafter cited in the text as OCS, followed by the page num-
ber. Alan Shelston, “Dickens and the Burial of the Dead,” in Babylon or New
Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature, ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani, 77–86
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), remarks that the burial of Little Nell
endorses the principles of John Claudius Loudon, who emphasizes the benefi-
cence of nature within the cemetery or churchyard to counter fear and supersti-
tion often attached to death. Loudon’s attachment to memorials also counters
the anonymity of death as manifested in the mass graves common in over-
crowded urban churchyards, a reality of which Dickens was keenly aware as he
described the death and funeral of Little Nell.
27. [Charles Dickens], “Trading in Death,” Household Words 6 (November
27, 1852): 241–45. For a comprehensive historical discussion of the Duke’s fu-
neral, see John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian
and Edwardian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy,
2000), 28–55. See also Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, “Burying the Duke: Victorian
Mourning and the Funeral of the Duke of Wellington,” Victorian Literature and
Culture 27:2 (1999): 365–93.
28. Ibid., 240.
29. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1985). Hereafter cited in the text as OMF, followed by the page number.
30. Catherine Gallagher, “The Bioeconomics of Our Mutual Friend,” in Sub-
ject to History: Ideology, Class and Gender, ed. David Simpson, 53 (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1991).
31. Ibid., 49.
32. Bill Luckin, Pollution and Control: A Social History of the Thames in the
Nineteenth Century (Bristol, England, and Boston, MA: Adam Hilger, 1986), 20.
33. Pamela K. Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Albany: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 2004), 111.
34. Richardson, Death, 279. Richardson cites specific investigations that
interrupted the flow of corpses to anatomy schools. Thomas Wakley, founder
of The Lancet, “embarked upon a long campaign to expose workhouse mortality
to coroners’ scrutiny” (279). In addition, The Lancet Sanitary Commission’s
inquiry of 1866 into workhouse infirmaries and the Royal Sanitary Commission
of 1868–1869 contributed to the reduced number of corpses available for
dissection (279).
35. Clearly I am indebted to Gallagher’s carefully reasoned argument in
which she outlines the progress of how, exactly, death may be exchanged for life
in Our Mutual Friend. My emphasis here, however, is on the kind of life Dickens
has in mind for his late mid-Victorian society.
188 Notes to Chapter 3

36. Among his many books and pamphlets on death in his library, Dickens
owned a copy of The Dance of Death by F. Douce (1833), which included a num-
ber of engravings by Holbein.
37. Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971),
147. Welsh, on pp. 141–63, positions his discussion of the hearth and home as
an antithesis to Dickens’s sense of the city as a site of decay, degeneration, and
corruption. In particular, he describes this antithesis in Christian terms taken
from St. Augustine, namely, the heavenly city and the earthly city.
38. [Henry James], “Review of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens,” The
Nation, December 21, 1865, 786–87.
39. Ibid., 787.
40. George Sott, “Charles Dickens,” Contemporary Review 10 (January
1869): 205.
41. [ ], “Review of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens,” The West-
minster Review, n.s. 29 (April 1866): 585.
42. [ ], “Review of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens,” London
Review, October 28, 1865, 467.
43. Arnold Kettle, “Our Mutual Friend,” in Dickens and the Twentieth Cen-
tury, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson, 217 (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1962).
44. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1985), 202.
45. Luckin, Pollution and Control, 11–34.
46. Ibid., 20.
47. Welsh, The City of Dickens, 71.
48. Kettle, “Our Mutual Friend,” 218–19. In his discussion of the river’s
significance to Our Mutual Friend, Kettle, 221–22, argues that the river does not
have any symbolic value but claims it embodies a “rightness” in relation to the
dust heaps and to the environmental condition of London.
49. Johnny’s burial has a similar effect. During his interment, the Reverend
Frank Milvey “thought of his own six children, but not of his poverty . . . and
very seriously did he and his bright little wife . . . look down into the small grave
and walk home arm-in-arm” (OMF, 386).
50. See Mary Chamberlain and Ruth Richardson, “Life and Death,” Oral
History 11 (Spring 1983): 31–43.
51. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19.
52. According to Chamberlain and Richardson, “Life and Death,” 41, the
nineteenth-century healers they discuss acquired their skills and knowledge from
others who practiced similar activities. “Such skills were not subject to control
and had therefore no market value.” Lizzie, then, is strategically positioned to
renegotiate social relations because she is not bound by her own labor function.
 Notes to Chapter 4 189

53. Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and
Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 302, reports that
Lizzie, during her rescue of Wrayburn, echoes the prayer of committal in the bur-
ial service, but with reference to her own past rather than the drowning man’s
present danger. Compare, “Now, merciful Heaven be thanked for that old time,
and grant, O Blessed Lord, that through thy wonderful workings it may turn to
good at last! To whomsoever the drifting face belongs, be it man’s or woman’s,
help my humble hands, Lord God, to raise it from death and restore it to some
one to whom it must be dear,” from Our Mutual Friend (769), to “in sure and cer-
tain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who
shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according
to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself” from
the burial service.
54. Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English
Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 123.
55. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation,
1830–1864 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 157. For
a discussion of limited liability and corporate law in England during the 1850s
and 1860s, see especially 157–60.

Chapter 4: Death Eclipsed

1. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York: Random
House, 1982), 471. For the most recent, eloquent biography of Thomas Hardy,
see Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy (New York: Penguin Press, 2007).
2. Thomas Hardy, “On Receiving the Freedom of the Borough,” in Thomas
Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Michael Mill-
gate, 322 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
3. William A. Cohen, “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s Return of the
Native,” PMLA 121:2 (March 2006): 437–52.
4. Ibid., 440.
5. Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London
and New York: Routledge, 1989), 61, has suggested, more broadly, that English
literary culture and Thomas Hardy in particular reveal “a complex relationship
between forms of romanticism with patriotism, and the formation of a pastoral
myth of rural England—often recalling a past, more glorious heritage—which is
the true ‘essential England’ of national identity.” Hardy, in his later fiction
especially, qualifies Widdowson’s nostalgic view of history.
6. Baptists do not believe in infant baptism, believing instead that baptism is
a rite of conscious discipleship only undertaken by those who have reached adult-
hood. Peter C. Jupp, “Enon Chapel: No Way for the Dead,” in The Changing Face of
Death, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth, 93–94 (New York: St. Martin’s
190 Notes to Chapter 4

Press, 1997), comments that when Baptist babies died before undergoing “believers’
baptism,” and if the Baptist congregation had no separate burying ground, then the
child would be buried by Anglican clergy in a section of the churchyard reserved for
the “unbaptised, suicides and infidels.” “The Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth
century began to weaken this tradition, suggesting that access to Heaven was open
to anyone who believed in Christ” (94). “This shift in belief,” writes Jupp, “was ac-
companied by the rise, first of a new understanding of Heaven as a location for the
reunion of family members, and, second, of a sentiment towards children as mem-
bers of families whose loss was to be mourned more seriously than heretofore” (94).
7. Suffolk Chronicle, August 27, 1878, in Ronald Fletcher, The Akenham
Burial Case (London: Wildwood House, 1974), 29. Fletcher’s book is a compre-
hensive collection of newspaper articles related to the Akenham burial case.
Hereafter, the name of the newspaper, the date, and the page number will be
cited parenthetically.
8. The trial account records the definition of libel: “In the case of words
published by writing, it is only necessary, in order to make them libel, that they
should be calculated to degrade or disparage the plaintiff, and hold him up to
hatred, ridicule, or contempt, to make them actionable” (Fletcher, The Akenham,
200).
9. Chris Brooks, Mortal Remains: The History and Present State of the Victo-
rian and Edwardian Cemetery (Exeter, Devon: Wheaton, 1989), 42.
10. Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 106.
11. Ibid., 202.
12. Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History, 1850–1925
(London: HarperCollins, 1991), 185.
13. J. Carvell Williams, A Plea for a Free Churchyard (London: Society for the
Liberation of Religion from State-Patronage and Control, 1870), 12.
14. Ibid., 27.
15. I am grateful to Charlotte Caron for pointing out this fact.
16. Walter Chamberlain, The Case against the Burials Bill (Manchester:
T. Roworth, 1875), 26.
17. Ibid., 9.
18. Ibid., 5.
19. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part 2, 1860–1901 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966–1970), vol. 2, 363–69.
20. Chamberlain, The Case, 13.
21. Ibid., 14.
22. Ibid.
23. P. T. Marsh, The Victorian Church in Decline (Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 259. For a fuller discussion of the Burial Bill contro-
versy, see 251–63.
24. Williams, A Plea, 15; Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 143.
 Notes to Chapter 4 191

25. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 152.

26. Ibid., 155.
27. Ibid., 156.
28. J. Carvell Williams, Religious Liberty in the Churchyard (London: Elliot
Stock, 1876), 5.
29. Ibid., 32.
30. Ibid., 33. See also Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of
Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1998), 308–17.
31. Williams, Religious Liberty, 27.
32. Ibid., 18.
33. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain,
1815–1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10.
34. Williams, Religious Liberty, 11.
35. Ibid., 66.
36. Ibid.
37. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 158.
38. Ibid., 163.
39. Thomas Hardy, “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” in Thomas Hardy’s Public
Voice: The Essays, Speeches and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Michael Millgate, 49 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 2001). This important essay was written in 1883 and pub-
lished in Longman’s Magazine 2 (July 1883): 252–69. Alun Howkins, Reshaping
Rural England, 8, 11, reports significant declines in the numbers of landowners
and laborers in the last third of the nineteenth century, a time when England suf-
fered a serious depression because of a significant drop in wheat prices. For ex-
ample, in 1851, of the total employed population, 21.5 percent were engaged in
agriculture. By 1881, this had dropped to 12.8 percent. Between 1861 and 1871,
the number of landowners dropped from 30,766 to 14,191. Similarly, between
1871 and 1881, the number of farmers dropped from 605,589 to 325,104. For
my discussion of Far from the Madding Crowd, please see Thomas Hardy, Far from
the Madding Crowd (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), hereafter cited in the text
as FMC, followed by the page number.
40. Ibid., 49–50.
41. For a discussion of Hardy’s use of the dance of death motif in his
poetry, see Sarah Webster Goodwin, Kitsch and Culture: The Dance of Death in
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Graphic Arts (New York and London: Garland,
1988).
42. Jan Jed/ rzejewski, Thomas Hardy and the Church (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1996), 192, claims that the parson’s goodly and generous image is some-
what marred when he suggests that Fanny’s corpse be left overnight in the coach
house of Weatherbury Farm, an idea Bathsheba considers “unkind and un-
Christian.” Nonetheless, Parson Thirdly is significantly more compassionate
than the vicar in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
192 Notes to Chapter 5

43. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 231–32.
44. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), hereafter cited in the text as RN, followed by the page number.
45. Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 422.
46. Jane Schneider, “Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Religious Or-
thodoxy and Popular Faith, ed. Ellen Badone, 24 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1990).
47. Sara A. Malton, “The Woman Shall Bear Her Iniquity: Death as Social
Discipline in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” Studies in the Novel 32:2
(Summer 2000): 160, 162.
48. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998). Hereafter cited in the text as T, followed by the page number.
49. Je/drzejewski, Thomas Hardy, 101.
50. Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 12–13.
51. Ibid., 42.
52. I am grateful to Gerald R. McDermott for suggesting this link to the
Gorham case.
53. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2: 252.
54. Ibid., 2: 253–54.
55. Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, and Memory (New York:
Palgrave, 2000), 107.
56. Shannon Rogers, “Medievalism in the Last Novels of Thomas Hardy:
New Wine in Old Bottles,” English Literature in Translation 43:3 (1999): 308.
57. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998). Hereafter cited in the text as J, followed by the page number.
58. For a fuller discussion of this theme, see Millgate, “Hardy as Memorial-
ist,” in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice, 475–82.
59. Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 56–57.
60. Helsinger, Rural Scenes, 215.
61. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 257.

Chapter 5: “The Tonic of Fire”

1. Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 5. I am very grateful for
Prothero’s extensive and cogent research into the history of cremation, which I
rely upon in this opening section. For a full discussion of Hardy’s burial and its
many complications, see Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, 70–80.
2. Prothero, Purified by Fire, 5.
3. George Alfred Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards (1839; repr., New York:
Arno Press, 1977).
 Notes to Chapter 5 193

4. Ibid., 27–34.
5. Prothero, Purified by Fire, 6–7.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. James Frazer, “On Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive
Theory of the Soul,” in Garnered Sheaves, ed. James Frazer, 22 (London: Macmillan,
1931).
10. Qtd. in Prothero, Purified by Fire, 9, who quotes Augustus G. Cobb,
Earth-Burial and Cremation (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 126. For a
most informative and thorough history of cremation in England from 1820 to
2000, please see Peter C. Jupp, From Dust to Ashes: Cremation and the British Way
of Death (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
11. Sir Henry Thompson, Modern Cremation: Its History and Practice (Lon-
don: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1891), 1.
12. Sir Henry Thompson, “The Treatment of the Body after Death,” Con-
temporary Review 23 (January 1874): 319–28.
13. Julie Rigg, “The Origins and Progress of Cemetery Establishment in
Britain,” in The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal,
ed. Peter C. Jupp, 117 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
14. Jennifer Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes: Cremation and the Celebration of
Death in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed.
Ralph Houlbrooke, 127 (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).
15. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 205; Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes,” 127.
16. “Mr. Justice Stephen on Cremation,” The Times of London, February 14,
1884, 3.
17. Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes,” 128.
18. Cremation Society of England, Cremation in Great Britain (London: Cre-
mation Society of England, 1909), 5; Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes,” 128–29.
19. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 205.
20. Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 194–97.
21. Peter C. Jupp, “Why Was England the First Country to Popularize Cre-
mation?” in The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain, and the USA, ed.
Kathy Charmaz and Glennys Howarth, 149 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).
22. Ibid., 144.
23. Ibid.
24. Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes,” 130–31.
25. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 206.
26. Ibid., 205.
27. Ibid., 206.
28. Qtd. in Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 206.
29. Ibid., 207.
194 Notes to Chapter 5

30. Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes,” 123.

31. Thompson, “The Treatment,” 319. Hereafter cited parenthetically in
the text by author, followed by the page number.
32. Christopher Hamlin, “Good and Intimate Filth,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust,
and Modern Life, ed. William Cohen and Ryan Johnson, 14–15 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
33. H. Hart, Burning or Burial! Shall Christian England Cremate? (London:
Robert and Newton, 1892) 43; qtd. in Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 191.
34. Leaney, “Ashes to Ashes,” 121–22.
35. P. H. Holland, “Burial or Cremation? A Reply to Sir Henry Thomp-
son,” Contemporary Review 23 (February 1874): 483.
36. Sir Henry Thompson, “Cremation: A Reply to Critics,” Contemporary
Review 23 (March 1874): 553–71.
37. Richard Altick, Victorian Studies in Scarlet (New York: Norton, 1970), 281.
38. Francis Seymour Haden, Cremation: An Incentive to Crime: A Plea for Leg-
islation (London: Edward Stanford, 1892), 16. This material Haden presented
as a paper at the Society of Arts, November 23, 1892.
39. Francis Seymour Haden, “Earth to Earth,” The Times of London, May 20,
1875, 9–10.
40. Francis Seymour Haden, “The Ethics of Cremation,” The Quarterly
Review 192 (July 1900): 47.
41. Francis Seymour Haden, The Disposal of the Dead: A Plea for Legislation,
and a Protest against Cremation (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1888), 7. This work
originally was presented as a paper at the Church Congress at Manchester,
October 3, 1888.
42. Francis Seymour Haden, “Earth to Earth,” The Times of London, May 20,
1875, 10.
43. Haden, The Disposal, 16.
44. Max Nordau, Degeneration, 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1895).
45. Haden, “Earth to Earth,” The Times of London, May 20, 1875.
46. Ibid.
47. Haden, Cremation: An Incentive, 9.
48. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo (1966; repr., London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
49. Cremation Society of England, Cremation in Great Britain, 16.
50. William Robinson, God’s Acre Beautiful, or The Cemeteries of the Future
(London: The Garden Office; New York: Scribner and Welford, 1880). Here-
after cited parenthetically in the text by author, followed by the page number.
51. Hugh Reginald Haweis, Ashes to Ashes: A Cremation Prelude (London:
Daldy, Isbister and Company, 1875). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text
by author, followed by the page number.
52. Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral
Home in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xvi.
 Notes to Conclusion and Epilogue 195

Conclusion: Dracula’s Last Word

1. Bram Stoker, The Essential Dracula: The Definitive Annotated Edition of
Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel, ed. Leonard Wolf (New York: Plume, 1993). All ref-
erences from Dracula are taken from this edition and will be cited parenthetically
by page number.
2. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 39.
3. Ibid., 167–68.
4. William Veeder, “Forward,” in Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, ed.
Margaret L. Carter (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), xvii. Stephen
Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 107–32. I am especially grateful for Arata’s perceptive read-
ing of Dracula as evidence of England’s anxiety about empire.
5. Carol A. Senf suggests that the situation reveals Harker’s lack of moral
vision. “Harker’s inability to ‘see’ Dracula is a manifestation of moral blindness
which reveals his insensitivity to others and (as will become evident later) his in-
ability to perceive certain traits within himself.” See Carol A. Senf, “Dracula: The
Unseen Face in the Mirror,” in Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Margaret
L. Carter (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), 97.
6. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 115.
7. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 313.
8. Jani Scandura, “Deadly Professions: Dracula, Undertakers, and the Em-
balmed Corpse,” Victorian Studies 40:1 (Autumn 1996): 1–30. Scandura draws il-
luminating connections between Dracula, the process of embalming, and the
role of undertakers as a professional class in the late nineteenth century.
9. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New
Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 3. Barber’s book con-
cerns how people in preindustrial societies consider processes associated with
death and the decomposition of the body.
10. Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inver-
sion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Mar-
garet L. Carter, 182 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988).
11. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 108.
12. Ibid., 109, 115.
13. Richard Wasson, “The Politics of Dracula,” in Dracula: The Vampire and
the Critics, ed. Margaret L. Carter, 21 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988).

Epilogue: The Traffic in Bodies

1. Annie Cheney, “The Resurrection Men: Scenes from the Cadaver
Trade,” Harper’s Magazine 308:1846 (March 2004): 46. See Cheney’s most re-
cent, extensive investigation into the body parts procurement industry for a
196 Notes to Epilogue

more comprehensive discussion: Body Brokers: Inside America’s Underground Trade

in Human Remains (New York: Broadway Books, 2006). For a sensitive explo-
ration of corpses’ lives, see Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadav-
ers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003).
2. Cheney, “The Resurrection Men,” 45.
3. Ibid., 48.
4. Ibid., 54.
5. Ibid.
6. The body seems to be on the collective brain of American culture. Here
I would like to note the unparalleled success of several television series, namely,
HBO’s Six Feet Under, A&E’s Family Plots, programs that feature morticians and
their work with the dead and their loved ones, and Tim Burton’s The Corpse
Bride, an animated feature about a nineteenth-century groom who marries, in-
advertently, an undead woman.
7. See the Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2004, March 8, 2004, March 9,
2004, March 10, 2004, March 11, 2004.
8. Richard Marosi, “Funeral-Home Kid Lands at Center of Scandal,” Los
Angeles Times, March 10, 2004, http://www.latimes.com.
9. Ibid.
10. John Broder, “In Science’s Name, Lucrative Trade in Body Parts,” New
York Times, March 12, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com.
11. For a stunning comparison of the remarkable parallels between eigh-
teenth-century dissection practices and our own, see Ruth Richardson, “After-
word,” in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 411–34. Richardson vigorously argues for the freely con-
sented donation of bodies, parts or whole, and the dismantling of profit-making
schemes from this form of medical practice: “Converting a freely given gift of
human body parts to profit making is to me also the basest form of plunder: a be-
trayal of human philanthropy, a perversion and a travesty of the gift. No society
should permit it, and no doctor or medical assistant should be party to it” (426).
Further, in a recent New York Times article (August 8, 2006), “China Turns Out
Mummified Bodies for Displays,” David Barboza exposes the questionable trade
in bodies and body parts used for museum exhibitions and displays, specifically
those preserved for Gunther von Hagens’s enormously successful Bodyworlds,
which exhibits preserved, skinless human corpses, often posed doing lifelike
things. In the United States, Bodyworlds has appeared in Chicago, Los Angeles,
Houston, and San Diego. For a full-length analysis of Bodyworlds and its place in
postmodern culture, see José van Dijck, “Bodyworlds: The Art of Plastinated Ca-
davers,” Configurations 9 (2001): 99–126. Van Dijck concludes that “[C]adavers
have become amalgams of flesh and technology, bodies that are endlessly pliable
and forever manipulable, even after death” (125).
12. Michael Pearson, “Crematory Corpses Discarded Like Trash,” The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 17, 2002, http://www.lexis-nexis.com.
 Notes to Epilogue 197

13. Larry Hartstein, “Crematory Scandal ‘Almost Surreal’ to Kin,” The

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 4, 2002, http://www.lexis-nexis.com.
14. Michael Pearson, “Crematory Case Tells Noble Truths about Death,”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 13, 2002, http://www.lexis-nexis.com.
15. Dana Tofig, “Crematory Owners: Everyone Knew the Marshes, or So
They Thought,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 22, 2002, http://www.
lexis-nexis.com.
16. Pearson, “Crematory Corpses Discarded Like Trash.”
17. Gayle White, “Last Sacred Rite,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February
23, 2002, http://www.lexis-nexis.com.
18. Norman Arey, “Crematory Scandal: Sloppiness behind the Piles
of Corpses,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 7, 2002, http://www.
lexis-nexis.com.
19. Duane D. Stanford, “Lawyers Target Funeral Homes, not Crematory,”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 3, 2002, http://www.lexis-nexis.com. Ev-
idently, a federal judge, in October 2004, appreciated the preciousness of a dead
body and approved an $80 million class-action settlement that allowed lawyers
for family members whose loved ones were sent to Tri-State Crematory to seek a
judgment from Marsh’s home owner’s insurance company, Georgia Farm Bu-
reau. As for the owner himself, Ray Brent Marsh pleaded guilty in November
2004 in exchange for serving twelve years of a seventy-five-year prison sentence,
with the remaining time to be spent in unsupervised probation.
This page intentionally left blank.
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 Index

Page numbers with an f indicate figures; those with a n indicate endnotes.

Abbey Wood cemetery, 73 Bauman, Zygmunt, 6

Altick, Richard, 146 Bedford, Duke of, 140
Anatomy Act (1832), 6, 69–70, 160, Bentham, Jeremy, 34
178n10 Bishop, John, 69–70
See also dissection Bleak House (Dickens), 1, 68
Anglicans, 30, 52 Bloch, Maurice, 6
baptism and, 101–105, 108, 126–128 blood feuds, 48, 49
Burial Acts and, 8, 74, 75, 103 body-parts business
cremation and, 138–141 modern, 11, 169–173, 195n1, 196n11
Hardy and, 124–125, 132 Victorian, 68–72, 80, 84, 160
nationalism and, 106–107 See also corpse
Oxford movement and, 109 Bodyworlds exhibition, 196n11
See also Nonconformists Bramwell, Lord, 140
animism, 121, 123–124 Bremer, Fredricka, 183n7
Anti-Corn Law League, 39 Broder, John, 170
Arata, Stephen, 154, 162–163, 195n4 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 3–4, 115, 158
Ariès, Philippe, 3, 6–7 Brontë sisters, 7
Armstrong, Tim, 127 Browne, Thomas, 139
Arnold, Matthew, 26 Burial Act(s), 8–9, 74–75, 75, 103
Ashes to Ashes (Haweis), 149–150, 159 of 1880, 8, 111
Ashley, Lord, 177n1 of 1900, 111
Ashton, Joseph, 183n3 cremation and, 138, 140, 145
Augustine of Hippo (saint), 188n37 See also funerals
Autry, David, 171 burial clubs, 178n14
Burial Laws Amendment Act (1880), 105,
Baernreither, J. M., 178n14 111
Bailey, James, 185n3 Burke, William, 69
Bain, Alexander, 100
baptism, rite of, 101–105, 108, 125–128 Cameron, Charles, 141
Baptists, 101, 189n6 Cannadine, David, 7
Barber, Paul, 158, 195n9 capitalism, 17, 52–54, 61–66, 130
Barboza, David, 196n11 Carlyle’s views of, 26, 53, 68
Barrineau, Nancy, 131 Dickens’s views of, 10, 66, 75, 77–82
Barrow, Charles, 70 Gaskell’s views of, 39–42, 50–51
211
212
Carlyle, Thomas, 26, 38, 53, 68
Carpenter, William, 100
cemeteries
design of, 28–34, 31f, 33f, 132, 133
hygienic concerns with, 7–8, 11,
14–23, 27–28, 74, 79–80, 102
overcrowding of, 13–14, 149, 177n1
See also Burial Acts; funerals
Cemeteries Clauses Act (1847), 102–103
Chadwick, Edwin, 16, 102, 132, 158
cremation and, 140
funeral costs and, 144
Gaskell and, 39–42, 52, 63, 183n7
Poovey on, 177n21, 179n22
reforms of, 73, 146–149, 167, 173,
181n51
A Supplementary Report, 4, 9, 13, 15,
17–35, 41
Wordsworth and, 25–26
Chadwick, Owen, 127
Chamberlain, Mary, 15, 188n52
Chamberlain, Walter, 105–107, 110
Chartism, 23–24, 45–46, 50, 107
Cheney, Annie, 169, 195n1
cholera, 34, 46, 73, 183n7
A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 67–68, 73
class. See under funerals
Cobbett, William, 70
Cohen, William A., 100
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 25
colonialism. See imperialism
Comaroff, Jean, 6
Comaroff, John, 6
Committee on the Improvement of the
Health of Towns, 14, 18, 20–22, 34
The Condition of the Working Class in
England (Engels), 38
Constable, John, 93
Corn Laws, 39
corpse, 7–8
blood feuds and, 48, 49
commodification of, 10, 79–81, 169,
172–173, 196n11
decay of, 143–144, 150, 153, 161
dissection of, 1, 69–72, 80, 84, 160, 169
donation of, 169–170
embalming of, 4, 158–159, 195n8
Index
Gaskell’s view of, 41
Hardy’s view of, 115
hygienic concerns with, 7–8, 11,
14–23, 27–28, 74, 79–80, 102
preparation of, 5, 7, 15–16, 188n52
spirit and, 15, 138–139, 160–161
Wordsworth’s view of, 26
See also body-parts business; funerals
Craft, Christopher, 161
Cranford (Gaskell), 56
cremation, 8, 10–11, 137–151
Burial Acts and, 138, 140, 145
criminal evidence and, 145–146
regulation of, 11, 141
Cremation Society of England, 140–142,
148
Cressy, David, 5
Cross, Richard, 140
Crouch, Ben, 70
Cunningham, Valentine, 40
Curl, James Stevens, 5, 181n54
Dance of Death, 83, 161–162, 188n36,
191n41
Davidoff, Lenore, 54, 184n19
death certificates, 27
Deceased Wife’s Marriage Act (1907),
131
depression, mourning and, 29
Derby, Lord, 73, 74
Dickens, Charles, 7, 66–97, 172
Bleak House, 1, 68
A Christmas Carol, 67–68, 73
Gallagher on, 4
Gaskell and, 91–92
Hardy and, 99
Henry James on, 84
Little Dorrit, 83
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 83
The Old Curiosity Shop, 10, 77–78, 91
Oliver Twist, 68
Our Mutual Friend, 10, 68, 72, 79–97,
167, 187n35, 189n53
Sketches by Boz, 82
A Tale of Two Cities, 10, 68–72, 186n20
Disposal of the Dead Regulation Bill, 141
Disraeli, Benjamin, 38, 111
 Index 213

dissection, 1, 69–72, 80, 84, 160, 169 middle-class, 2–4, 8–9, 16, 34, 40–41,
See also Anatomy Act 46–48, 142
Dissenters. See Nonconformists Nonconformist, 14, 75–76, 101–112
Dodd, Chris, 172 pauper, 1–2, 16–17, 32–34, 60–61, 91,
“The Dorsetshire Labourer” (Hardy), 112, 178n14, 178n19
191n39 prostitute, 52, 105, 131, 184
double, symbolic, 4 for unbaptized children, 101–105, 108,
Douce, F., 188n36 127–128
Douglas, Mary, 148 undertakers and, 16–17, 34, 45, 158
“Dover Beach” (Arnold), 26 upper-class, 2, 16, 79, 142, 160
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 153 working-class, 1–4, 8–9, 15–17, 20–21,
Dracula (Stoker), 11, 147, 149, 153–166 24–25, 40–41, 44–51, 142
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 153 See also cemeteries; corpse
Druids, 119, 130, 140
Drury, George, 101–105, 108 Gallagher, Catherine, 4, 79, 80, 187n35
Duffey, Mark, 137 Gann, Curt, 170
Duncombe, Thomas, 177n1 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 7, 35, 37–66,
115–116
education, public, 32, 153 Chadwick and, 39–42, 52, 63, 183n7
Dickens on, 85–88 Cranford, 56
Gaskell on, 39–40 Dickens and, 91–92
Hardy on, 132–133, 135 funerals in, 1–2, 44–47
embalming, 4, 158–159, 195n8 Hardy and, 99
Engels, Friedrich, 38 Mary Barton, 1–3, 9, 37–39, 42–55,
England, Church of. See Anglicans 57–58, 131, 167
“Essay upon Epitaphs” (Wordsworth), 22, North and South, 9, 39, 40, 42, 54–65,
25–26, 180n40 162
Ruth, 49
Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy), 10, Unitarian views of, 9, 38–42, 51, 56,
100, 112–118, 134 65–66
fees, burial, 8, 10, 14, 27, 76–77, 103, 108 Gaskell, William, 38–39, 183n3
feminism, 3, 159–160, 184n22 Gatherings from Graveyards (Walker), 13,
Gaskell and, 39, 54–55, 58–65 17–18, 138, 179n25
male gaze and, 158 gaze, male, 158
feuds, blood, 48, 49 gender, 58–65, 159–160
Fido, Martin, 69, 185n3 healers and, 14–15, 188n52
Finer, S. E., 73–74, 185n10 See also feminism
Fletcher, Ronald, 105, 190n7 German mortuary practices, 28
Fosso, Kurt, 180n42 Gilbert, Pamela, 80, 85, 90
Foster, John, 75 Gittings, Clare, 5
Frazer, James, 139 Gladstone, William, 109
French Revolution, 139 God’s Acre Beautiful (Robinson), 148–149
friendly societies, 178n14 Goodwin, Sarah Webster, 4
Fryckstedt, Monica, 183n3 Gorer, Geoffrey, 7
funerals Gorham, George Cornelius, 126–127
burial clubs for, 178n14 Gosden, P. H. J. H., 178n14
German practices and, 28 Graham, James, 14
214 Index

Grand National Consolidated Trades Howkins, Alun, 103, 191n39

Union, 24 Hurren, Elizabeth, 178n19
gravestones, 2, 32, 33f, 85, 132, 156 Hutter, Albert D., 186n20
epitaphs for, 22, 25–26, 180n40 hygienic concerns. See public health
Greg, Robert Hyde, 39
Greg, Samuel, 39 identity
Greg, William Rathbone, 39, 48 individual, 25, 96–97
grief. See mourning national, 9, 101, 110–112, 119,
grinders, 22–23 163–164
imperialism, 107, 160
Haden, Francis Seymour, 146–148, 150, fears of, 163, 164, 195n4
158 See also nationalism
Hadley, Elaine, 26, 180n46 India, 107, 160, 164
Hagens, Gunther von, 196n11 Interment Act. See Metropolitan Interment
Hall, Catherine, 54, 184n19 Act
Hamlin, Christopher, 144
Hardy, Jemima, 126 Jed/ rzejewski, Jan, 124–125, 191n42
Hardy, Thomas, 1, 7, 99–135, 147, 155 Jalland, Pat, 6, 142
burial of, 137 James, Henry, 84
“The Dorsetshire Labourer,” 112, Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 10, 100, 124,
191n39 131–135, 167–168
Far from the Madding Crowd, 10, 100, Jupp, Peter, 6, 141, 189n6
112–118, 134
Jude the Obscure, 10, 100, 124, Kay, James P., 39
131–135, 167–168 Kensal Green Cemetery, 14, 75, 91
The Mayor of Casterbridge, 99, 119, 132 Kettle, Arnold, 86, 91, 188n48
Return of the Native, 112, 118–124, King, Steve, 178n19
135 knife grinders, 22–23
Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 104, 124–131, Knight, Frances, 103
135, 167–168
The Woodlanders, 112, 119, 128, 129, Laderman, Gary, 151
135 Lancet (journal), 142, 187n34
Hare, William, 69 Lane, George Dorkin, 21
Harmon, Barbara Leah, 62 The Last Man (Shelley), 4–5
Hart, H., 145 Leaney, Jennifer, 142
Haweis, Hugh Reginald, 149–150, 159 Lewes, George Henry, 100
Haynes, M. J., 24 Liberation Society. See Society for the
Haywood, Benjamin, 39 Liberation of Religion from State-
Head, John, 70 Patronage and Control
healers, female, 15, 188n52 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 83
Helsinger, Elizabeth, 110, 134 Local Government Act (1888), 141
Herbert, Christopher, 75 Loudon, John Claudius, 9, 156, 181n52,
Hertz, Robert, 6 181n53
Holbein, Hans, 83, 188n36 cemetery designs of, 28–34, 31f, 33f,
Holland, Calvert, 22 132, 133
Holland, P. H., 145, 150 Luckin, Bill, 79–80, 90
Houlbrooke, Ralph, 5 Luther, Martin, 138
 Index 215

Mackinnon, William, 14, 20–22, 34 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),

Malthus, Thomas, 4 172
Manning, Archbishop, 127 officers, medical, 27–28, 34–35, 41
Marcuse, Herbert, 41 The Old Curiosity Shop (Dickens), 10,
Marsh, Ray Brent, 170–173, 197n19 77–78, 91
Martineau, James, 183n3 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 68
Mary Barton (Gaskell), 1–3, 9, 37–39, Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 10, 68, 72,
42–55, 57–58, 131, 167 79–97, 167, 187n35, 189n53
Mason, Neva, 171 Oxford movement, 109
Maudsley, Henry, 100
Mayhew, Henry, 18, 21, 175n7, 179n32 Palmerston, Lord, 74, 75
May, James, 70 panopticon, 27
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy), 99, 119, Parry, Jonathan, 6
132 Past and Present (Carlyle), 26, 38
McDermott, Gerald R., 192n52 Pearson, Michael, 171
medical officers, 27–28, 34–35, 41 Perkin, Harold, 26–27, 186n25
Metropolitan Interment Act Perna, Augie, 169
of 1850, 34, 73, 74, 185n10 Phillpots, Henry, 126–127
of 1852, 74, 76 Pick, Daniel, 153
Metropolitan Society for the Abolition of Playfair, Lord, 140
Burials in Towns, 177n1 A Plea for a Free Churchyard (Williams),
Miall, Edward, 108 104, 107–109
miasma theory, 7 Poor Laws, 84
Chadwick’s views of, 18–22, 28, 79 See also New Poor Law
Loudon’s views of, 29 Poovey, Mary, 2, 177n21, 179n22,
Morgan, Osborne, 105, 108, 111 185n25
Morley, John, 5 Porter, Thomas, 20
Mort, Frank, 18 Potter, Thomas, 39
mourning, 4, 15–17, 47 prostitutes, 21–22, 49, 51, 88, 131
depression and, 29 burial of, 52, 105, 131, 184
wakes and, 16, 99 Prothero, Stephen, 137–139, 192n1
Municipal Reform Act, 39 public health, 39
The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens), 83 cemeteries and, 7–8, 11, 14–23, 27–28,
74, 79–80, 102
nationalism, 9, 101, 110–112, 119, cholera and, 34, 46, 73, 183n7
163–164 Gaskell and, 43–44
See also imperialism Puckle, Bertram S., 184n18
Nelson, Ernest V., 170 purgatory, 52, 138
New Poor Law (1834), 3, 16–17, 91
See also Poor Laws Quigley, Christine, 177n20
New Poor Law Commission, 13
Nonconformists, 8, 14, 75–76, 101–112, race, 153, 159–160
130 Ramsey, Edward, 101–105
See also Anglicans; Unitarians Reid, Henry, 170
Nordau, Max, 147, 150 Religious Liberty in the Churchyard
North and South (Gaskell), 9, 39, 40, 42, (Williams), 108–110
54–65, 162 “resurrectionists,” 68–72, 169
216 Index

Return of the Native (Hardy), 112, Stone, William, 25

118–124, 135 Stowell, Lord, 146
Revelation, Book of, 58, 184n14 Suez Canal, 107
Richardson, Ruth A Supplementary Report on the Results of a
on Anatomy Act, 6, 70, 178n10 Special Inquiry into the Practice of Inter-
on dissection, 185n3, 187n34, 196n11 ment in Towns (Chadwick), 4, 9, 13,
on preparation of the corpse, 15–16, 15, 17–35, 41
188n52
Rigg, Julie, 74, 140 Tait, A. C., 111
rites, burial, 3–5, 15–17, 58, 76, 139 Taylor, Lawrence, 6
baptism and, 101–105, 108, 125–128 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), 104,
Robberds, John, 183n3 124–131, 135, 167–168
Robinson, William, 148–149 Thompson, Henry, 139–148, 150, 158,
Romanticism, 5, 180n41 159, 160
Rowlandson, Thomas, 83 Tite, William, 181n54
Ruth (Gaskell), 49 Tofig, Dana, 171
Tomalin, Claire, 189n1
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 26 tombstones. See gravestones
Sanders, Andrew, 185n3 Tozer, Wickham, 101–105, 108
Scandura, Jani, 158, 195n8 trade unions, 3, 24, 45, 52–54, 59–66,
Schneider, Jane, 121 179n19
Schor, Esther, 4–5 Tri-State Crematory (Georgia), 170–173
Select Committee on Anatomy, 69, 70 Turner, William, 183n3
Select Committee on the Improvement of
Health of Towns, 13–14, 18, 21 Uglow, Jenny, 39
Sheen, Samuel, 74 undertakers, 16–17, 34, 45, 158
Shelley, Mary, 4–5 unions. See trade unions
Sherlock Holmes (Doyle), 153 Unitarians, 39–40, 45, 183n3
Sketches by Boz (Dickens), 82 afterlife beliefs of, 39, 52
Smith, Adam, 185n25 Gaskell’s views of, 9, 38–42, 51–52, 56,
Smith, Thomas Southwood, 39 65–66
Society for the Liberation of Religion from See also Nonconformists
State-Patronage and Control, 107–108 University of California, Los Angeles,
Sophocles, 26 170
Sott, George, 84 urbanization, 7–8, 14, 134–135, 137, 164
South Metropolitan Cemetery, 30, 31f
Spencer, Herbert, 100 Vadall, Frank, 172
Stallybrass, Peter, 93 vampires, 11, 78, 144, 147, 153–168
Stephen, James, 140–141 See also Stoker, Bram
Stevenson, John, 182n2 van Dijck, José, 196n11
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 153 Van Zandt, Clint, 172
Stewart, Garrett, 3 Veeder, William, 154
stillborn infants, 101, 105, 134 Verdery, Katherine, 7
Stoker, Bram, 1, 7, 139 Vienna Exposition (1873), 139
Dracula, 11, 147, 149, 153–166
See also vampires wakes, 16, 99
Stone, Donald, 39–40 See also mourning
 Index
Wakley, Thomas, 187n34
Walker, G. A., 17–18, 138, 145, 179n25
cemetery overcrowding and, 13–14,
149, 177n1
Wasson, Richard, 164
Wealth of Nations (Smith), 185n25
Weissman, Judith, 131
Wellington, Duke of, 79
Wells, T. Spencer, 140
Welsh, Alexander, 83, 188n37
Westminster, Duke of, 140
Westminster Review, 22–23
Wheeler, Michael, 189n53
White, Allon, 93
Wiggins, Deborah, 14, 177n2, 186n10
Willed Body Program at UCLA, 170
217
Williams, J. Carvell, 105
A Plea for a Free Churchyard, 104, 107–109
Religious Liberty in the Churchyard,
108–110
Williams, Raymond, 184n16
Wilson, Dewayne, 170
Wilson, Frederick, 102
Woking Cemetery, 140–142
Wolffe, John, 6
women’s rights. See feminism
The Woodlanders (Hardy), 112, 119, 128,
129, 135
Wordsworth, William, 22, 25–26,
180n40
Yeo, Eileen, 23
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