Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England

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 © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu

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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

Chapter 2

Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Down among the Dead: Edwin Chadwick’s Burial Reform Discourse in Mid-NineteenthCentury England

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“Taught by Death What Life Should Be”: Representations of Death in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South

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“To Profit Us When He Was Dead”: Dead-Body Politics in Our Mutual Friend

67

Death Eclipsed: The Contested Churchyard in Thomas Hardy’s Novels

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“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

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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.

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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.

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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 Elizabeth 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 manuscript. 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, copyright 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 (Summer 2000): 165–84, copyright © 2000 by the University of North Texas Press and reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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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 Victorian novel. The body—buried under an ornate tombstone, dissected in a surgeon’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 reformers, 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 gorgeous 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

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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 reality a wooden mockery of stone respectabilities which adorned the burialground. 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 surface; 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 funeral that the Victorian middle class had established by mid-century by hinting that truly “respectable” people bury their dead not with extravagant displays of funereal commodities increasingly characteristic of the times but with palpable manifestations 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. Shifting 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 responsibility 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 literary remains, to suggest that Victorian novelists located corpses at the center of a surprisingly extensive range of contemporary concerns: money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity. Literary Remains assumes, then, as Mary Poovey has theorized, that literary 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 together create a discursive “network of connotations and associations” and participate 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 relations. 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.

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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 political 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 cremation reform legislation, sanitary reform texts, mortality statistics, funeral, burial, and cremation handbooks, and newspaper accounts to uncover certain strategies, rituals, narratives, and ideologies that govern Victorian culture. In addition to these primary sources, I turn to secondary social histories and anthropological studies to identify the broader contours of these debates. For example, histories of early Victorian labor relations elucidate the crucial impulse to protect 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 commentary on the corpse and its decomposition. Finally, I offer close readings of Victorian 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 historical debate and then turn sharply into rather formalist readings of the literature 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 representations of burial and the meanings they bore for mid-Victorian society.4 Garrett Stewart, from a deconstructivist perspective, argues that “the novelistic representation of death necessitates a specialized rhetoric of figural and grammatical devices 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 immediately that the nineteenth century seems obsessed with representations of dead women, but she views these representations as “symptoms” of a culture that manifests 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 example, in her summary of Philippe Ariès’s work, she accepts without question conclusions about tombs and monuments as if everyone in the nineteenth century, no matter what the country, had the desire and the wherewithal to provide

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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 Representation, 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 example, 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 distinct 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 midVictorian 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 cultural meanings of mourning and grief in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, seems reticent to explore the materiality of the corpse, choosing instead 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 mentioning 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 toward decidedly upper-class concerns about mourning rituals and the rise of individualism 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 romantic 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

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heir to the Enlightenment culture of mourning.”8 Her conclusions about Victorian death, then, are twice removed from the times, first because she fails to consider 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 historical 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 constitute 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 representations that often form a significant resistance to national remedies to solve the burial reform crisis. Despite the fact that death loomed large in Victorian culture, its sentimental deathbed scenes, expensive funerals, and macabre interments 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 excellent working bibliographies, outline with broad brushstrokes the environments and contexts for death but provide little by way of critique or analyses of what these environments and practices suggest about Victorian culture. For example, Morley’s assessment of the role of women in early to mid-nineteenthcentury British deathways seems misguided. He judges those women who prepare 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 directly 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 religious and secular death rituals, from the elements of a good death and decent funeral 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

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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 religious 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 position 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 opportunity to offer life meaning transforms death into what Zygmunt Bauman has called “the primary building material for social institutions and behavioral patterns crucial to the production of societies in their distinctive forms.”14 As a result, cultures develop what Bauman calls “life strategies” to face mortality, strategies that take shape around the culture’s capacity to face death more directly or to avoid it by either taming or domesticating it or by reorganizing energies 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 potential source for political power, for the body, as Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff 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 authorities and marginal social systems engage death’s emotional power to their advantage 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 relationship 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-

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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 beyond 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 century, elides critical differences between one country and another, one era and another. A solitary analysis of the Brontës, for example, bears much of the weight for his interpretation of deathways in nineteenth-century England. David Cannadine 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 argues 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 political strategies occurring within cultural systems.19 A student of dead-body politics, then, attends to the connections between particular corpses and the wider national and international contexts of their manipulation. Informed by these articulations of the dynamics of dead-body politics, I hope to show how the political 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 included here, assert the primacy of local communities and affirm the inseparability 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 involving 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’

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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 example, 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 regulation, 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 legislation, 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 relatively 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 cremation and, ironically, circled back to issues of sanitation and economy that characterized 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 domestic 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

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burial reform debate, I draw attention to specific strategies reformers deployed to conceptualize the problem they perceived. The novelists, in their literary countermoves, represent death as an opportunity to resist those seeking to claim national power, by favorably representing in their novels “local”communities and individuals appropriating burial practices to new circumstances and new purposes. By tracing the representations of burial in Edwin Chadwick’s A Supplementary 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 manner of legal, social, political, and economic inquiry. The effect 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. Loudon, a renowned landscape architect and cemetery designer, enunciates the twin effects of successful cemetery 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 traditional 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 concludes that the middle class must incorporate into its considerations of political economy the central strengths of working-class domesticity: a recognition of kinship 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 Gaskell’s conception that the corpse provides a positive opportunity to create community 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 conditions of death that Dickens shapes to suggest a conservative reformation of

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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 Curiosity Shop and the death of Little Nell, for example, Dickens highlights the spiritual 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 culture’s association of the corpse with market capitalism. Finally, in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens challenges a new development in burial reform discourse, the preoccupation with monetary compensation for burial, and intervenes in the movement 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 emphasized not the sanitary and public health problems that had so dominated earlier burial reform discourse but economic compensation for clergymen and property owners whose churchyards were forced to close, I identify important issues that Dickens utilizes in Our Mutual Friend. He rejects the propensity to individualism inherent in the clergymen’s complaint about compensation and argues that dead bodies mean something more than income to people, families, and communities. Understanding the power of the corpse to mediate social change, Dickens 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, religious 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 history 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 encroaching 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

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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 degeneration, 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 resists 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 Victorians. 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 commercialization 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.

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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 convince the public of the need for legislative interference by the government to prohibit burials in the vicinity of the living.2 Walker’s important work attracted the attention of Parliament and social reformers because of his comprehensive representation 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 problem. 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 deterioration of towns surpassed the rate of improvement, causing the death rate to rise sharply between 1831 and 1841.4 Because towns sustained growth in population and suffered from higher death rates, conditions in the graveyards worsened. 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

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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 reported 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 report filled 214 pages of testimony, including letters from physicians, clergymen, and elected officials from other large towns in the United Kingdom.6 Recognizing 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 introduction of a bill by the government would be necessary. “It appeared difficult,” the committee suggested, “to carry into execution any of the provisions recommended here without the assistance of some central and superintending authority to be established for that purpose.”8 Mackinnon’s committee, anxious to overcome the governmental sluggishness, 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 introduced 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 enterprise cemeteries formed in the 1830s and 1840s. According to Deborah Wiggins, “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

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But the way in which reformers conceptualized the problem of burial greatly influenced the way the problem was identified and experienced in the 1840s. Beginning in the late 1830s, the deteriorating conditions of the graveyards, the vigorous 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 belief 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 effort to aid the future repose of the soul and to comfort the mourners. In this liminal 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 position, 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 central figure in the ritual.

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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 community.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 surrounding 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 reciprocal relationships between the living and the dead and threatened class structures 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 development 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 passage; the substitution of cash for affective and older, more traditional social relations.”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 passage 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.

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The pauper funeral epitomized not the communal and familial values of the traditional funeral, nor the intimate relation between soul and body that determined 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 location 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 accumulation of eyewitness accounts, summaries of scientific theories, and comprehensive 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 effect 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 alternating 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 interests of the state (SR, 73). At the heart of these maneuvers is Chadwick’s overarching 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

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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 practice 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 reform 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 circumstances 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 graveyards 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, miasma’s disastrous and dangerous effects could be pointed to and graphically depicted 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 London. In fact, Walker’s own map, represented in Gatherings from Graveyards, anticipated 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

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Chadwick, however, focuses on the human agents of infection. By dismissing 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 extramural cemetery. The very moment when working-class families and communities 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 passage 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 succeeds, and respect disappears” (SR, 44). Not surprisingly, then, given these definitions, it is the extended spectacle, the excessive time and attention spent on the dead, the increasing familiarity with death, and the commensurate mental anguish among the survivors that threaten the laboring classes, in the eyes of the middle classes, not the physical effects of effluvia. Befriending death effaces respect and demoralizes character. Quoting a clergyman who alleviated “the sufferings 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)

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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 breaking 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 hardened 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 section I have been analyzing, Chadwick associates these “disrespectful” burial practices among the working class with criminal behavior. Penal documents record “the habits of savage brutality and carelessness of life among the labouring population; 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 fabric of society and fosters criminal behavior. By concentrating on the indoor effects 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 becomes 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 enjoyment” (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 demoralization” caused by miasma (SR, 46). Without the close presence of the corpse to remind the working class of life’s inconsequence in the face of death, laborers sustain the necessary level of production, without either realizing that their efforts 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 futility or work’s incapacity to improve one’s lot in life leads to irritability and impatience 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.

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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 reports 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 either 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 example, 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 Mackinnon’s 1842 Select Committee. In answer to a question about the circumstances 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 reminded Lane to confine his remarks to the effects of miasma.

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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 suggests, 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 occupants 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 further 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 defects, thus making the presence of the medical officer all the more essential. The example of the Sheffield workers, moreover, serves to emphasize Chadwick’s desire to suppress political gatherings that occur in graveyards, a space—not unlike the home—he wants to liberate from communal expressions of working-class solidarity. 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 Westminster 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

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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 levels, 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 devoted Mondays to drink and the amusement of the hunt “with a perfect knowledge 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 insulting every decently dressed passenger.”34 The central tenet of Chadwick’s argument 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 churchyards, grounds hotly contested in the late 1830s in Sheffield. I believe this historical 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 Anglican 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 meetings, 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

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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 appearance 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 presence 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 funeral, which was suppressed in late 1834 because it was assumed to foster political 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 trebled 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 Dawson, 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 procession 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.

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Chadwick quotes the testimony of Rev. William Stone of Spitalfields in an effort to show that dissatisfaction with intramural burial centers less on sanitary measures 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 reveals 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 uncontrollable pressure from without . . . for I believe that among the working 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 prostituting the spirituality of prayer, and profaning even the symbolical sanctity of my surplice” (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 partitioned, 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 monuments 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 contemplative 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

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Karen Sanchez-Eppler notes the irony of early burial reformers citing Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs to further their arguments for the improvement of churchyards and gravestones.42 Wordsworth, according to SanchezEppler, 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 comfort in meditation.45 Chadwick works Wordsworth to political advantage, because he creates what he perceives to be a necessary link between the successfully contained interior 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 definition, “seeks out a private space of thoughtful emotion, of human intimacy, where subjects alienated in mind or body can become fully authentic and intentional 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 reduces 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, certitude, 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 difference 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 indeed 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

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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 Chadwick 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 national 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 relationship 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 formation 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 inspect 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 observing 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,”

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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 mortuary. 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 assistance. 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 traditional forms of community, and placed in a single-room dwelling, the working 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, Chadwick claims that the greater part of the means of honour and moral influence on the living 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 offensive 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 recovering 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 mortuary 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).

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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 infirmity, and the last picture on earth presented to his contemplation before dissolution.” (SR, 190) Chadwick seems panicked by grief and the concomitant depression, because he views psychological depression among workers as identical to economic depression. He, therefore, must transform the psychological dispositions of workingclass 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 spiritual 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 interests. 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 Chadwick shares with Loudon, editor of The Gardener’s Magazine and devoted landscape 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 attention 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 admits that this text underwrites his own principles for cemetery design, it is worthy 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.

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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 foreground, and thence up the hill, following the path in the center foreground toward 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 addition to the cemetery offices and caretaker’s residence, substantially demarcate the dead from the living. Once inside the cemetery, however, one’s view is directed 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 engraving makes the passage through death seem restful, natural, and almost desirable. 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 aerial 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 Chadwick, be separated from the others by concrete or wooden boundaries.57 The Victorian marriage of pragmatism with morality, so evident in Chadwick’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.

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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 Chadwick, 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 contained 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 beyond 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 cemeteries 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 contemplation 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 established. 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 furnished 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 monuments.”62 For each of these structures to have its full effect on the spectator, paupers’ 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 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.

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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 economic terms, that their bodies, living or dead, are the property of the master.

IV Chadwick’s Supplementary Report stymied parliamentary action for seven years because, his opponents complained, it proposed exceedingly complex and cumbersome 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 interments 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 cemeteries 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 attention 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 government interference? Would the laboring class and the poor submit to middleclass 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 underwrite it, Chadwick became the professional bureaucrat who understood that

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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 individual care, and their interment with propriety appeared to be a task which could only be accomplished by a superior executive service under unity of administration, of which there was no immediate prospect.”64 This was the sanitary reformer Chadwick: designer of centralized schemes for burial understood to reform 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 opportunities for individuals and communities to respond not from the ready oppositions 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.

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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 awakening consciousness as she deals directly with the dead and dying. Mary, daughter 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’ errands, 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 community and its welfare, which means that she must sacrifice her own personal desire 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 encourages her to reflect on the temptations presented by an increasingly materialistic 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

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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 understanding 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 burial in Mary Barton and North and South (1854–1855), Gaskell draws on an understanding of the social value of participating in the ministrations surrounding death. At every turn, she associates death with poverty in order to value workingclass 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 emotional ties across class lines. Death, then, becomes a mediator, diminishing differences and neutralizing working-class aggression. This strategy demands that Gaskell subvert depersonalized discussions of class and represent the power struggle in terms of individuals, such as John Barton and Nicholas Higgins, trade unionist 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 allowing 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 ability 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 debates 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 underwrites her novels but differs significantly from Chadwick’s idea that only national mechanisms can solve social problems. The version of Unitarianism that William,

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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 spiritual 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 behavior.”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 outward mark of the true Christian. The Unitarian espousal of freedom, reason, tolerance, and an essentially optimistic outlook on life and the afterlife motivated small Unitarian communities such as the Cross Street Chapel congregation in Manchester to contribute to social progress.5 For example, Unitarians advocated parliamentary 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 member 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 Manchester—, engaged in sanitary reform work. In 1832, he published the highly influential 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 ameliorated, 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. Unitarians became champions of the oppressed and advocates for education, religious tolerance, and women’s rights. But, as Donald Stone so succinctly states,

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“accompanying this reformist strain was an impulse that favored economic individualism, 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 vehemently against government intervention in factory hours and conditions.10 Elizabeth Gaskell participated in a religion that espoused the responsibilities 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 government should not intervene in the “natural” rhythms of the market economy, especially 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 economists in concert with model employers versus distressed employees. Specifically, Gaskell, through representations of death, negotiates these pressures by depicting 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 voluntary cooperation among individuals within a local rather than a national context. In North and South, for example, the informed Thornton suggests that “intercourse” between the classes “is the very breath of life.”11 He articulates an “evolution of understanding” one another based on common interests, “which invariably makes people find means and ways of seeing each other, and becoming acquainted with each others’ characters and persons, and even tricks of temper 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 specific cultural attitudes about sociopolitical life in mid-nineteenth century England. 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

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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 Chadwick, the status of the working-class corpse and the representation of peoples’ reactions 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 depoliticize, even as he secularizes their activity by removing any possibility for reflection 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 believe, 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 collaboration. 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 interests of society. Gaskell neutralizes the threat of the working-class death by arguing 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 threatened by England’s industrialization. Only by standing in the presence of workingclass 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.

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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 perspective, 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 laissezfaire 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 communal 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 middle 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 workingclass 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 numbers of each. Since a statistical approach allows for few differences among the people 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 belong 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

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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 picture. 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 Davenports (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 Davenport 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 accustomed 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 description 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).

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If Gaskell’s description of the Davenports rejects the material considerations 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 pleasure of helping others, Alice exhibits “invaluable qualities as a sick nurse,” gathering 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 struggles 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 nostalgia 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 accompaniment 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

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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 Margaret, 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, justifying the Unitarian commitment to ameliorate social evil and arguing for the need for the middle class to incorporate concepts of community into its considerations 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 Parliament. The government’s rejection of the Petition is described in apocalyptic language: 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. Wellnigh 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

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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 become 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 associated 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 revengeful 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, monetary 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 intermediating undertakers, and moved them to celebrate their financial, not their communal, 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. According 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 reconfigure their own relationships with one another as to make material declarations 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 isolation 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 circumstances of Mr. Ogden’s death and the preparations for his funeral. An extraordinary 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

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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 preparing 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 respect, 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 Carson 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 requirements 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 meaning 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, preoccupied 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 Carsons’ 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 relationships 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 indicate 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 another and to the working class, they cannot—not only because of the violent nature 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

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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 middle class—she means to shock her middle-class readers into realizing their desperate 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 luxury 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 extremity, 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 reminder that, from Gaskell’s viewpoint, the middle-class response to death destabilizes 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 century!” (MB, 266). Gaskell chooses the Christian model as the solution to the Carsons’ 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 calculating: 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 account 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

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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 suffering 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 heroine 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 transformation comes about as a result not only of this wife’s death and economic depression 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 before, 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 described, 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 precariousness of working-class life, turn to commodities in Mrs. Barton’s absence. She had

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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 equalizes 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 “character” 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 domesticity 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 inability 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 laborers’ self-sacrifice, often emerges from quite precise personal and individual experiences 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 fortunes, and build their great big houses, and we, why we’re just clemming, many

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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 classconscious 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 Esther (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 middleclass 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 revenge in favor of Christian discourse, while Carson still retains power over working-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 family 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

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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 indicates that these people existed outside of time and history. Their interment is marked only by a verse from Psalm 103, which expresses thanksgiving for recovery 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 abiding 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 position 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 doctrine 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 somehow 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 “without 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 understand that, like Chadwick, Gaskell reveals her working notions of political economy 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 misery 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 improved 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, according to Gaskell’s prejudice against violence, must realize the effect of his hatred on Carson, must hear the depth of Carson’s suffering, and must relinquish

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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 transformed, 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 economy 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 educated (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 participated 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 ministrations 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 antagonism. Instead, she elaborates on the domestic, familial, communal, and individual aspects of representing death, aspects that remained marginal but essential to

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representations in burial reform discourse. This shift of emphasis potentially undermines the ideological work that Chadwick’s images were designed to perform 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 articulation, Gaskell diminished class distinctions that Chadwick invoked to moralize and regulate class relations between them. The potential effect of Gaskell’s representation was to call attention both to the impotency of “facts” to represent accurately 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 communal 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 recognize 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 emotion 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 defined as public while women were increasingly engulfed by the private realm, bounded by physical, social and psychic partitions.”20 Men, because of their privileged 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 between the two forces by focusing her attention on the responses and rituals surrounding death, because it was a crucial site where women’s restriction to the private could be affirmed. While large funerals were increasingly used to demonstrate public status, records show that women had begun to stay away from funeral 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 renegotiation of traditional concepts and exercises of authority, and that her capacity

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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 Margaret’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 developing her own authority to act in the world. This empowerment depends upon her relinquishing the sleepy life in London, rejecting Mr. Lennox, who, in Margaret’s dream, falls from a tree to his death as he tries to reach for Margaret’s bonnet (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 suffered 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 selfsacrifice. 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 primary 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

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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 outside 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 provides 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 environments 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 realizes “she had learnt that not only to will, but also to pray was a necessary condition 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 contribution 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 observes, “As most ladies of good family in Cranford were elderly spinsters, or widows 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 control 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 suggests that emotionality is coded both as lower class and female. That is, selfcontrol 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.

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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 daughter 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 indicates 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 aristocratic mother and Bessy, who represents a deferential order in which the working 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. Instead, Gaskell argues, a woman like Margaret must intervene in the cycle of violence 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 redemptive 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 demands 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 effort 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

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her from struggling against these hardships. Bessy dies not only because she cannot manage the work physically, but because she cannot understand the problems 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 arguing 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 Margaret’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). Rejecting Bessy’s philosophy of death as an escape, for she “shrank from death herself 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 Margaret 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-

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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 changing her determination” (NS, 217). Margaret’s initial fear of the corpse indicates the middle-class preference for avoiding contact with the dead body and curtailing social interactions in its presence. Her decision to offer this mark of respect affirms 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 increases. 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 acknowledges 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 personal ties they establish through their treatment of others, a duty that emerges directly 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 Margaret has earned her authority over Bessy, even to her grave. Despite Bessy’s belief 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 Testament 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 dismissal of the self-help philosophy, Gaskell concludes that female authority is critical 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 suicide by lying face down in a shallow, dye-filled stream after being unable to find

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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 suggest Gaskell’s anxiety about groups of male laborers engaged in trade-union activity 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 middle-class influence breeds more responsible communal activity. Margaret’s regular 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 necessary 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 children 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 experience with the dead and dying among the working class, here she seems particularly 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 Margaret 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 encumbrances, 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 deserving 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 unreasonableness” (NS, 301).

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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 reinforces the notion that those poor people who refuse influence from the middle class are bitterly resented by them. Nonetheless, the scene must have been reassuring 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 middleclass 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 individuation 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 development and compels her to redefine herself bodily, rejecting the conventional Victorian 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 workers below (NS, 177, 178). Her initial excursion into the public arena is to draw attention 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 beyond” (NS, 179). Thornton insists that this arena is no place for a woman, but

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Margaret claims otherwise. Her move outdoors and her position between the strikers and Thornton suggest that she believes herself to be empowered to influence shifting labor relations, a position that has been anticipated by her growing 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 external surroundings but they have taught her, by default, that the body instantiates 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 description 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 moment, even as Margaret enters the outdoor world, her capacity to act in the public 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, recognizing 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 figures 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 becoming 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 removed 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 associate herself with working-class interests without losing her position in the social 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 industrial 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

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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 privilege 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 personal 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 England 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 policeman 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. Indeed, 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 reestablishment 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 capacity 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 singular twist that serves, in part, to undermine Chadwick: real working-class corpses were pivots for social and economic debate, but figurative middle-class corpses became 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

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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 depend 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 differently by being known at work and at home by middle-class persons who will actively 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 individuation 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 context, 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 gender. 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 influence. 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 instance, 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 instance, 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.

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However, Gaskell prepares us for Margaret’s resistance to the passivity, objectification, and “obedience to authority” of both choices in a way that emphasizes her particular association of death with the necessary power to resist confining Victorian 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 political 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, Margaret must face change squarely in her former home, the village of Helstone, the geographic 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 individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment” (NS, 400). The disillusionment, 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 perpetual 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 participation 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

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used to imagine the positive and powerful experiences in middle-class and workingclass 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 relinquishing the power invested in it by being members of the middle class. Nonetheless, because of Gaskell’s investment in discussions of political economy, 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 differentiated 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 suggest that a powerful machine such as England’s economy may be successfully operated 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 doornail. . . . There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, 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 misunderstanding 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 paragraphs 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.

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The culminating moment of Scrooge’s transformation occurs in the “worthy” 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 between life and death, suggesting that things deathly contain within them the potential 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 messages 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 psychological pathology or death. A Christmas Carol, for example, responds to the desperate 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 gradual 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 illustrates 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 undertaker have learned the lesson of laissez-faire capitalism all too well. Everything, it seems, including corpses and their accoutrements, is available for the market. Ultimately, 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 representation 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,

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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 scandalous 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 resurrects 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 hospitals, 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 recommendation 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 question 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 nature 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,

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James May, and John Head, all of the Bethnal Green bodysnatching gang, sent London into hysterics and accelerated the need for the Anatomy Act. Coincidentally and helpful to appreciating Dickens’s knowledge of corpses and their currency 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 parliamentary debate over the Select Committee on Anatomy’s report and the provisions 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 objectification of the dissection room.”6 Claiming that groups of bodysnatchers operated 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, contaminating 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 increased 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 Astley 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 whatever 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 bodies. 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

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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 dissection. 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 reasoning 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 present 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 “honest 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 economy, 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 system 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

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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 accurately 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 attempted to rob. This knowledge gives Sydney Carton significant leverage to manipulate 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. Dickens invokes bodysnatching to express his contempt for nations who claim progress while standing on the graves of the poor and vulnerable: French aristocrats 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 toward 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, England’s economy was dangerously dependent upon finance rather than on market 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 Elizabeth 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 representing 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 individual 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 midVictorian society.

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II The “worthy churchyard” Dickens describes in A Christmas Carol anticipates by seven years key concerns in burial reform legislation at mid-century. The Metropolitan Interment Act of 1850 mandated the General Board of Health to coordinate 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 fourteen 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 guarantee financing from banks that the Board of Health needed to fund its purchases of and development for cemeteries and churchyards. Moreover, the board, during its five-year mandate (1848–1853), made so many enemies in Parliament 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 approval 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 burial 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 businesses 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

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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 obtain 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 ingenuity to secure income from slight variations on a theme. The list of fees reflected 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 control 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 authorized. Lord Palmerston at the Home Office enforced the 1852 Burial Act efficiently, 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 interests, 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 petition 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 London 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

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burial grounds created under the Burial Acts legislated between 1852 and 1857. Kensal Green, for example, long considered one of the most successful private enterprises, 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 contributes 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 territory 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 income, and funerals are more than occasions to model the newest innovations in the “dismal trade.” They are, in fact, opportunities to “resurrect” society and social 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 entangled 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 compensation. 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 Foster, dated February 2, 1864, Dickens wrote: “And the idea of the Protestant establishment 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

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from the restrictions of consecrated ground, so that Dissenters and Nonconformists could be buried anywhere, with Dissenting ministers reading the burial service. Dissenting 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 living.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 cemeteries engaged in business, culling fees for a creative range of services meant to increase 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, inappropriately, the clergy’s performance of burial rituals, from the clergy’s need to mediate, 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 considerable 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 pastoral 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 harvest comes, when the profitable season commences, when the richness of the ground develops itself—just at the very point of interment—just then

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the spoiler steps in, takes away the prize they have been so ardently looking 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 provide 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 debate crucial to Dickens’s representations of death and burial. The first is the effect that money, and the struggle for income, has on the commodification of the body.25 Monetary desires seem to displace humanitarian values. The second aspect 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 appropriate avenues for social relations. Because Dickens understands that corpses, funerals, and burials are important ways in which the social order reproduces itself, 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 representation 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 Victorian world, and urban burial practices in particular.26 Eschewing contemporary concerns about miasma and the dangerous putrefactions emanating from decomposing 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 continuity between the living and the dead to protect the community from the pernicious 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,

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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 statements 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 intentions, 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 indicate 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 judgment. 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 determined by predation and greed. For the enlightened, benevolent characters in the novel, marriage reigns supreme: Mrs. Quilp makes money from her dead husband 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 children 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 funereal arrangements by arguing in more explicit terms for dignified rituals. In

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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 funerals.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 important 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 example in utter oblivion of responsibility.28 Arguing that a funeral performance is no compensation for death, Dickens proclaimed the virtue of a plain, solemn, dignified death ritual punctuated with symbols to impress upon the community the values of integrity, sincerity, generosity, 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 livelihood 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 humanitarian attempt to dislodge the connection between corpses and money. Gallagher’s argument is certainly appealing, because she explains the midVictorian 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 pollution. According to Bill Luckin, the apocalyptic language from the 1840s, which Chadwick utilized, in which the corpse was described as a source of miasma, disease, plague, pestilence, waste, and decay, had turned analytic by the 1860s, because the mortality rates had begun to decline, and “epidemiological and

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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 contemporary 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 described 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 factors that were alike in that, taken together, they all contributed to the river’s pollution. 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 detestable, 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 investigations 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 divided 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 economic principle that posits the corpse as a commodity by presenting it as an opportunity to rehabilitate society. Most specifically, the discovery of what is

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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 gentlemanly 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 demarcate 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 secure the corpse to the boat, Lizzie averts her attention from it and the river, stuttering 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 complication. 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 formation, 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 acquisitions 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 example, 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

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Dickens likens the circulation of money to miasma, the noxious fumes generated by decaying matter and circulated through the atmosphere. The body’s decomposition connects waste, money, and death and provides a fertile process for people 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 anticipated 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 businesses’” (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. Boffin’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

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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 because 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 Mystery 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 outside of the counting house their plans for marriage, Wilfer muses on the juxtaposition 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 delightful . . . 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, rendezvous 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 removes 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 between 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

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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 objections 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 unwittingly 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 eventually 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 criticism 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 psychological nuances of his characters.38 James asserted that Dickens created “figures” 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 discussions 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 separation 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

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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 attest that individual psychology rather than social forms of compensation or exchange 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 responsibilities. 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 themselves, 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 association 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 adaptation 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 cannot sooth his seething violence, as we watch him clutch at “respectable hairguards” of “respectable watches,” pull at seat chairs, and compulsively chafe his hands across the tombstones in the churchyard (OMF, 342). Headstone’s pathology 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, adequately 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 concern 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

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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 tendencies 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 knowledge 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 commensurate “right feeling” that comes from exercising one’s moral obligations toward 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 pathology and criminal conduct. In the terse exchange between Wrayburn and Headstone 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 desire 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 lowerclass upstart, by saying “‘your name cannot concern me’” (OMF, 345). But Headstone mistakenly believes that self-advancement redeems humble origins, thus his stern rebuke, “‘You reproach me with my origin’” (OMF, 345).

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For both Wrayburn and Headstone, who respectively ignore or deny origins, and who are unable to govern themselves morally, criminal conduct lurks just beneath 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 mechanical adaptation of middle-class values foster its darker characteristics: puritanism, self-righteousness, and repression. Given education’s emphasis on rote learning and the culture’s insistence upon “rising,” to the detriment of moral development, 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 educational 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 Wrayburn and Rogue Riderhood. Dickens positions Headstone in a churchyard to manifest his social dysfunction 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 attempt to successfully shape his own self-possessed identity. In his circuit around the churchyard with Lizzie, Headstone pleads with her to marry him, to domesticate 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 marriage, you could draw me to any good—every good—with equal force. My circumstances are quite easy, and you would want for nothing. My reputation 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).

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Dickens seriously questions whether mere rote education, which serves to deceive people into thinking they can honestly advance into the middle class, succeeds in developing a healthy individualism. Through his representation of Headstone, 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 underscores this attitude in Bleak House and the description of Nemo’s burial. The revenge 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 separated 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 central contribution of feelings to social reform. We have seen in Headstone the deleterious 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, because 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 community. Rather than living off of the parish, choosing to live by the self-help philosophy or stepping into a highly controlled educational system that distances people from their origins and kinship networks, Jenny makes a living by recycling waste material 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 moving through various stages of production and consumption. Jenny’s economic

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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 Dickens 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 bespeaks a moral independence without angling for complete economic independence. 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 bodily 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 experience 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 Headstone, 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 Wrayburn’s transformation and participates in the new society formed by John Harmon’s restoration to his own birthright.

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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 identities 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 summarize 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 almost 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 constructions, 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 considered 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,

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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 riverside 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 available 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 eventually 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 capacity 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 declines 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 acceptance 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 sympathy 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 compensation for one’s efforts, which in turn isolates the classes, Betty’s death and funeral 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

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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 Dickens’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), Dickens 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 connect 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, invokes the father as the key figure for social continuity, not because of supernatural influence but because, through patriarchy, he has the potential to instill and maintain a moral sense within political economy. In this particular scene, Dick-

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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, rescuing 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 education in conventional market culture terms, an advanced position in society far from the river, which otherwise positions him among the working-class community 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 Constable’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 carnival 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 Dickens 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 depends 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.

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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 according to her market functions in society: “a female waterman, turned factory girl” (OMF, 889). Mortimer Lightwood, on the other hand, describes Lizzie according to terms associated with moral character: virtuous, courageous, energetic, 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 redeems 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 indolent 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 announces Lizzie to be a “lady” and that, for Wrayburn’s marriage to her, he is entitled 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 contemporary 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.

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V As Harmon faces his mysterious circuit through London on the night of his disappearance, 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). Harmon’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 society 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 expropriates literal burial to articulate an alternative subject to Headstone, not the selfalienated 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 churchyard represents the fracture within the individual rent by an emphasis on an extreme 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 outside of himself—no family, no working-class community, no wife and, therefore, no morality, not unlike John Barton’s dilemma in Mary Barton. Because Headstone finds no compensation for his extensive work, he can only look to himself to create rewards by manipulating events and people and by excessive rumination. 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 simply must come, in time, to recognize it. Harmon returns to England deeply mistrustful, 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 insist that society must necessarily be formed around something other than purely economic terms. Inclined to reject the life of economic relations his father’s

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money represents, Harmon articulates the national implications that Dickens perceives. 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, “nothing 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 disinherits 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 possibility for money. The Lammles make amends for their miscalculation in marriage 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 inherited from his father a propensity to bargain for everything and to view marriage as an essentially economic transaction. Money, to say the least, complicates family matters because, as Mr. Boffin explained to Bella in an effort to curb her mercenary appetite, it corrupts character, spoils people, and breeds mistrust. In this economic environment, the suspicion that marks middle-class perceptions of the working class touches middle-class relations as well. The very defense that was to protect the middle class from tumbling into a working-class life fraught with suspicion instead makes them economically vulnerable. By representing 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 continuity between life and death. Birthright and inheritance, rather than money garnered 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 society from the threats of a volatile market. This birthright, moreover, while concentrated 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 intelligible 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

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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 latent 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 Harmon, Dickens reintroduces moral obligation to economic relationships that recent corporate law had erased. Our Mutual Friend explores the logic of compensation within the problematic 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 Harmon 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 commodification 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 competitiveness 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 patriarchy 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 waking 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 nationhood in the last third of the nineteenth century. Hardy captures this dynamic in an eloquent speech he gave after he received the Freedom of the Borough of Dorchester on November 16, 1910. After expressing his appreciation 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 anthropologist, 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 careful observer of death’s features, which, when brought into focus, convey significant issues about English life. With Hardy’s disinterment of Wessex, the novels

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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 example, to transform the lives of individuals and communities; the unique function 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 migrations 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 landscape is in turn a percipient body, and that the two bodies are in a mutually constitutive 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 effects 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 integrate 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 transgress social and moral boundaries and to men ambitious to succeed in urban economic centers. The rupture in social cohesion introduced by modern concerns 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 resuscitation 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-

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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 churchyards. 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 identity, 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. Unfortunately 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 Father George Drury, the incumbent at the Akenham parish church, to have their unbaptized child buried in consecrated ground in the Akenham parish churchyard.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 unconsecrated 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 intrusion 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

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passages. Suddenly, the situation turned painfully exciting. Mr. Drury roared out of the churchyard and confronted Mr. Tozer about the illegality of his actions. Observers feared that the two humble churchmen would come to blows as a tenminute 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 continued, Mr. Tozer accused Mr. Drury: “‘You have a very priestly garb, and I suppose 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 humanity 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 discussions, namely, authority over burials in predominantly Anglican churchyards in the countryside. As we know from earlier discussions, burial reform at midcentury 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 allowed 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

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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 available for use. By civil law, everyone who died in the village, Anglican or Nonconformist, 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 pressures.”10 For example, she remarks on the role of second-class curates, their ongoing 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 nation to the largest denomination among many, Anglican clergy evaluated parishioners 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 injustice 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 political change. In their advocacy of freedom of religious belief and practice, they challenged 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 consequences of being unbaptized concern everyone involved. For Anglicans, and for Drury in particular, the fact of unbaptism, despite the child’s membership in an

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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 another world because it had not been made a Christian, Drury refused to condemn 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 Durbeyfield, his active responsibilities ended there. As J. Carvell Williams, a Nonconformist 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 Resurrection to eternal life.’”13 Aware of these dreadful hypocrisies, Hardy exposes the condemnation that has occurred for the unbaptized and baptized alike and reveals, 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 considerably more freedom to ministrate to the Ramseys by choosing Scripture passages 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 service 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

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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 children 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 consecrated 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 unbaptized infants. In general, those shunned by society—murderers, prostitutes, excommunicates, 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 Anglian 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 publicity 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 churchyard 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

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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 “disestablishment,” a word first coined in 1860 to mean the withdrawal of state patronage 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 funerals of other people, in the Parish Churchyards any sort of service, or none; religious, 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 conditional right, not an absolute one, because to be buried in the churchyard people 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 England. Dissenters have excluded themselves and so ought not to ask for full communion with the Church of England by requesting access to the churchyard. In an effort to claim some common ground with the Dissenters, Chamberlain suggests 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 “complements” to the church and are, therefore, at risk.18 From Chamberlain’s perspective, 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 losing 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 privilege of the rural church and churchyard. The second point Chamberlain’s article makes about the proposed burial legislation is its appeal to a complex nexus of assumptions about English national-

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ism. If, as the Dissenters claim, the churchyards belong to the national church and, by implication, the nation, then the churchyard should indeed reflect England’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 “otherness.” To those who suggest that perhaps in instances where the deceased has objected to a burial service, none should take place, Chamberlain answers: “They demand that Dissenters of all religions, or of none; the Atheist, the Mahommedan, 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 “godless” 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 churchyard 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 Liberation 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, according 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 intransigence in 1860. At Hinderwell, near Guisborough, a woman gave birth to twins,

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but one infant died—unbaptized—a few minutes later. The doctor quickly baptized 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 Nonconformist, 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 religious 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 forcefully 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 appears 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 relationship 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 honest 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 allowed 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 question 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 maintain 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 renewed 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 extensive 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 attempts to state both sides of the case fairly—defuse Anglican defensiveness about the churchyard and, more importantly, allay the threat posed by changing

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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 Dissenting case has fallen on deaf ears. The burial debate, by the time Williams publishes his second pamphlet in 1876, was in full swing, with the agitation, according to Williams, having borne “perceptible fruit,” because the public became increasingly convinced by the repeated cases of hardship that the laws needed to be changed.28 The emphasis on repetition makes the Anglicans appear 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, because 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 cannot, 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 sympathy for the Dissenters’ predicament in an effort to diminish the distinctions between 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 concludes 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 Anglicans 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 prohibits 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.

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The competing concepts of nationhood shape the heart of this political and religious debate over burial. Nationhood, to Chamberlain and the Anglicans, presumes 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 distance, 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 conciliatory 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 disestablishment 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 privileges, and those of the clergy, as something separate from the interests of the nation, 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 insisting that none but Churchmen have a right to a voice in their management, 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 authority and resources.36

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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 archbishop of Canterbury, A. C. Tait, a pragmatic man who was sympathetic to Nonconformists, 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 churchyards.37 From 1877 to 1880, as protests on both sides intensified, Parliament attempted 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 Osborne 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 inequitable fee structures, added expenses for separate chapels in new or renovated cemeteries, and the persistent question of whether consecrated ground was required 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 standardized and would be paid only for actual services performed. Finally, the fortyeight-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 Nonconformists recognized the historical consequences of a disruption in time’s continuity 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

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a national church to protect the churchyards and thereby to become gatekeepers to a corner of English history, the Anglicans resisted the Nonconformist intrusion, wishing instead to relegate, symbolically, the burgeoning evangelical movement 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 enduring 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 indispensable conditions of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular 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 increased 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 together 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 inevitability of this change and argues that the movement offers freedom from oppressive 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

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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 Anglicans open their churchyards to them. At least in death, people secure permanent relationships with the land and family that their lives had to deny. The Weatherbury churchyard, and its central place in Hardy’s comprehensive 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 directions 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 rejects, accepting instead his offer of a shilling. As their palms touch in the exchange 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 prescient encounter between these two migratory workers near the churchyard, Hardy not only underscores Fanny’s wondrously tragic passion and Gabriel’s capacity 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 misunderstands 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 migrate 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 civilization 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 rendered, 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 marriage 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 restoration. 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

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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 appeared 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 selfish 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 journey 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 finally 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” status. 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 overbrimming 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 debate discussed earlier, their own particular religious affliations—Joseph a chapelgoing 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 grievously 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 society’s unequivocal condemnation of her. The conscious effort to restore Fanny to her home had begun when Mr. Boldwood offered to retrieve Fanny himself and bury her on his farm, since “she

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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 instructed Joseph to prepare the “pretty wagon” and to decorate the coffin with flowers 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’ responses. 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 apparently traumatic childhood, but he seems careful to suggest that her response to such early experiences has been to cultivate her vanity and her impulsive, selfrighteous independence. Unaware of the consequences of her rash emotional behavior, 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 relationship to the land, wearing a reminder of her uncle’s death in the past. Increasingly 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 experience a remarkable transformation through her contact with Fanny’s corpse. In Chapter 43, “Fanny’s Revenge,” Hardy refines the headstrong and selfcentered 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,

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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. Perhaps 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 connection 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 “patience 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 remained 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 leading 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. According to Hardy, he remains an unworthy facilitator of the past with the present. Hardy values Fanny’s revenge because she suggests that the itinerant life and the consequent breakdown in marital commitments, her own and Troy’s, damage families and communities and threaten the ability of the land to hold a people 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

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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 observing 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 magnanimity 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 relinquish further her perception that the world was made for her personal pleasure. 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. Neglecting 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 internalized, to a certain extent at least, the lessons that death teaches—an increased selflessness 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 visiting 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

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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 impulsiveness and creates emotional room for Gabriel. Their marriage and potential 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 situation 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 cemetery in Far from the Madding Crowd.44 To know a sense of history in both environments, 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

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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 forsake 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 bolster 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 walking upon the heath to the heavens above. The heath guards against a linear notion 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 nationhood, 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 lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention 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

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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 representations 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. Shadowy eye-sockets deep as those of a death’s head suddenly turned into pits of lustre: 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, “hovered round it two or three times, and flew into the flame” (RN, 271). Immediately 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 symbolize 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 parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, 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 Eustacia, he notices the “strangely homogeneous” scene in which Eustacia gives “a perfect, 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 narrator 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 carefully 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-

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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, because 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 spirits 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 vulnerable 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 calculated 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 collapses, 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 reconciliation 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 landscape: 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 “mouldered 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

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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 eradicating their physicality.” Eustacia’s death, according to Malton, provides evidence 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 narrator 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 socialism, Clym eventually becomes disgusted by its complacent cosmopolitanism and selfish affluence. A “product” of the heath, Clym returns home ready to improve 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 predicament 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 rectangular 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 cheerfulness 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.

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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 intimately 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 center by Eustacia’s alluring passion. Hardy’s design of Clym and Eustacia as opposing natures prevents easy excavation. He decides to marry Eustacia, whom his mother mistrusts, and thereby jeopardizes family relationships. Eustacia, by ignoring the knock of reconciliation 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 experiences the bitter disintegration of his marriage and the monotony of his new occupation, 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 inhabitants: forgotten Celtic tribes trod their tracks around him, and he could almost live among them, look in their faces, and see them standing 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)

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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 traditions, Clym preached “moral lectures or sermons on the mount” (RN, 411) to mixed reviews: some believed him, some did not, some agreed with his approach, 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 compellingly 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 unreserved 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 gentle acceptance of him, precisely because of his history, tell of the heath’s restorative 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 dissolves 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/ rzejewski 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 interpretation of Christianity.”49 Tess’s encounter with the parson at Marlott confirms 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-

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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 aristocratic 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 contagious, 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 vulnerable like Tess prevent her from knowing peace. Since her father rejects Tess’s request to have the parson visit them and baptize 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 suggested 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 customary sentences,” she speaks to Sorrow’s future fight against evil and his unwavering commitment to God (T, 99). Confident in the efficacy of the sacrament, 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 improvised 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 baptism 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 indignation when the parson hesitates, “finding that a job he should have been called

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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 century; 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 argument for Hardy. His maternal grandfather refused to have his children baptized. 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 secret baptisms in which the children seemingly conspired against their father fueled 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 conjured from her imagination but one that makes every attempt to follow the Anglican 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 anxious 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, rejected 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

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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 unconditional 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 progresses from the question of baptism to the issue of burial in consecrated ground, Tess becomes more confident in her resistance to doctrinal edict. According 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!”

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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 Talbothay’s dairy farm to Kingsbere Church. The juxtaposition of Tess’s relationship with Angel and her impotent ancestors proves contradictory. Tess reflects that her life will lapse as silently as those “grand dames and their powerful husbands” who rest in the great family vaults. As she views Kingsbere from a distance, she reminds herself that her “useless ancestors” deserve no admiration now (T, 108). Simultaneously, she wonders whether such proximity will engender 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 negative 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 indiscretions with a woman in London, he hypocritically berates Tess. To his claims that

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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 distinction to those untouched by the modern impulse. Tess confronts Angel with her shrewd insights about modern reality, but he invokes not high-minded philosophical ideals nor the romantic nostalgia that prompted him to arrange for a d’Urberville mansion for their honeymoon, but a rigid Christian morality, a perspective 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 better 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 belated seedling of an effete aristocracy. (T, 229–30) Incapable of reconciling himself to a reality that does not square with his idealized notion of Tess, Angel retreats to easy Victorian condemnations. Although unable to express his death wish for Tess consciously, Angel’s unconscious 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 condemns 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 Woodlanders 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

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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, appreciating 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 Durbeyfield’s question signifies, marks the death of English rural society as they understood 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 exclusion 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 betrays 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 worries 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 family 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

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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 unreasonable to think that Angel and Liza-Lu would emigrate, as happens in so many Victorian novels, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, discussed earlier. 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 churchyard in a grave with no name? Either way, Hardy effaces the possibility that someone 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 Fawley’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 erection 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 castiron crosses warranted to last five years” ( J, 6). Not only have the graves themselves 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.

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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 modern 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 instruction 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 ancestors. 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 memorials in addition to writing epitaphs and inscriptions. What Hardy came to deplore 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 society. 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 already 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 crucial mentoring of Phillotson, Jude believes that the grammar of the dead languages 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

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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 representations of death and burial in his final novel signify the end of life and bespeak 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 reiterated 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 ignoring 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, however, the juxtaposition of events only intensifies the oppressive sense that nothing 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 disruption, 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 husband’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 suggestion 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 historical continuity but to offer moral correction in much the same way John Claudius Loudon advises in his instructions for churchyard renovation and cemetery design, the improvement in moral sentiments. Sue, reinforcing the cemetery’s didactic 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

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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 punished her immorality with the death of the four children, Sue severs her relationship 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. Allegorically, 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” understands the import of Mrs. Edlin’s story for Jude and Sue and, in childlike fashion, 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 generations—the outcome of new views of life’” ( J, 355). Hardy testifies that a society without healthy, vibrant, historically sensitive relationships within its institutions, whether family, marriage, or education, will succumb to death, visiting first the most innocent. Father Time replaces the priests of the institutional church and announces not consolation borne from loving kindness but “a universal 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 children, 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 community reconstituted in national culture.”60 For Hardy, the local and the rural— represented in the decaying and crumbling churchyards, the lack of inheritance

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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 inexorable 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 appreciating 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 disinterment 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 narratives, 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 distract readers from attending to modern exigencies and the skills necessary to negotiate 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 chapter 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 suggested, 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 matter. 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 aspects 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

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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 inoculate the living from the dangers of death and decay.”2 In this chapter I contend 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 degeneration. 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 reform on the need for England to think seriously about a more dramatic separation 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 greatest civilizations practiced extramural burial or cremation for sanitary and religious 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 Romans, 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 nature 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 approximately 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 reunited 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 authority of Scripture, by highlighting the spiritual nature of the individual and the

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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 explanations for social behaviors, argues instead that burial rites, cremation in particular, 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 presented 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 decomposing corpse, we may assume that the original intention was to place a physical 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 protect 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 technological 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, advocated cremation. But it would take another 100 years and desperate overcrowding 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 cremation, and later, at the Vienna Exposition in 1873, Professor Bunetti of Padua exhibited 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 Exposition. 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

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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 cemeteries, solved much of the problem by prohibiting intramural interment and by providing the means for the establishment of extramural cemeteries. Rejecting Chadwick’s nationalizing efforts to open state cemeteries, the Burial Acts allowed for the establishment of local burial boards that were empowered to provide 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 Victorian 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 cremation in England. Finding no explicit law against cremation, the society procured 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 remains 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

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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 recognize and regulate cremation “with such precautions as would ensure its safety and decorum, prevent its abuse and render penal its unauthorized performance.”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 decision 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 approve 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 regulations 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 According to Peter Jupp, a leading historian of cremation in England, the 1902 act favored the churches in two ways: it supported clergy who opposed cremation and prevented crematoria from being built on consecrated ground. Perceiving the increasing 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 responsibility 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 custodian of corpses: it would discharge its responsibilities not according to transcendent 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 interests of boards, vestries, and guardians. The first local authority crematoria included 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 cremationist 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 associated with dignified funerals and earthen burials. As the decades passed, they too

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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. Accustomed 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 proximity 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 historian of death in Victorian families, has discussed the complicated and contradictory 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 leading medical journal and initial advocate for cremation, as “‘safe, speedy, wholesome and economical.’”26 Convinced by Thompson’s sanitary argument, the Lancet steadfastly ignored the 2,000-year-old tradition of Christian burial, summarily 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 outright 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 immorality. 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 resurrection of the body. Denouncing the Woking experiment and invoking Wordsworth’s earlier assessment, the Lancet proclaimed that “‘nothing so imbecile 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 support 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 supported 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-

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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. Nature acts as a vulture with a “keen scent” for animal decay, disturbing sentimental beliefs that death brings eternal rest: “Already a thousand changes have commenced. 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 second 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 neutralizes the repugnant aspects of decay through a description of precise chemical processes and raises the specter of horror through allusion to “the poisonous influence 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 nature 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, absorbed 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

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it so whether we like it or not” (Thompson, 323). Interestingly, the easy integration of the world’s economy, which justifies the “natural” advances of the empire, underwrites the cremationist’s argument and seems to suggest that cremation aims to cleanse waste and decay from global economic systems burgeoning at the end of the nineteenth century. Such a productive view of cremation 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 opportunity 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 cremation, 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 statistics 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,” heretofore 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.

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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 underestimated 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 “‘repulsive and abhorrent to the public,’” the proposal for the economic uses of cremation “‘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, claiming 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 cautious 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 cremation, 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. Thompson, 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 century 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

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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 discuss later, argues that because cremation destroys the evidence from poisoning, it becomes an incentive to crime, because murderers would go undetected. Quoting 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 cremation, 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 cremation 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

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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 associating 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 inordinate 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 emotions 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 community 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 eminent 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 represents human remains as burdensome. It comes as no surprise, then, that when Haden thinks about the possibility of cremation, he wonders in prescient fashion: “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 furniture, 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 Thompson represents nature as an ineluctable temptress beckoning the body to the vegetable 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

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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 carriers of that infection to the living.”47 Dirt, it seems, still preoccupies the late Victorians, 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 various 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 perspective espoused by Thompson and Haden would alienate the public. Burial, after all, “cannot be followed out in the imagination,” claims the Cremation Society 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 unpleasant reflection.”49 William Robinson, in God’s Acre Beautiful, or The Cemeteries 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 environment 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 funerals: “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,

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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 cemeteries; 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 foliage, Robinson makes claims on the future at the expense of the past by concealing 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, organized 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 affair 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 denies 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 Normand 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 Normand’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 sentimental 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

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carried into the chapel, placed on a raised bier, which is then lowered and conveyed by machinery into the center of the crematory (Haweis, 240). Friends and relatives 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 sentimental 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 unrequited. 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 simple 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 problem they hoped to solve with fire. To soothe late Victorian sensibilities unnerved by exact attention to bodily processes, Robinson and Haweis bathe the gory details in a romantic and sentimental light. Robinson hides death deep in abundant 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 responses 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 Victorians felt about both overpopulation and decomposing matter. Thompson, Holland, and Haden admit that the mid-century burial reforms succeeded for a time, but that England’s urban centers had surrounded the once extramural cemeteries, 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 frightening reality, Frazer reminds us—and the strict distinctions between the living and the dead fell away, tolerance for decomposition diminished. The expanding 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 slipping of skin away from bones and tissues all too vividly remind the national public of its own degeneration. Max Nordau would make a similar claim several years later with his particularly tenacious argument about the menacing and dangerous presence of degeneration in Western society in which bodily decay became synonymous with an intensifying social and urban crisis. Even today,

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transgression of normative boundaries and the dissolution of distinctions continue 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 perceived 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 celebration 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 reminds us, the development of the concept of degeneration sprang from perceived dangers from internal transgressions in addition to racialized others.2 Even as the novel hopes to externalize and kill off pressing internal contemporary 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 meditation on death and its inherently transformative nature, Stoker reverses Victorian 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, paradoxically, that despite enormous efforts to contain and confine the corpse, it remains, 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 imagining 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 necessity 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

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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, according to Van Helsing, for the most blessed thing of all: “‘[W]hen this now UnDead 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 little 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 treasure of a lifetime. In Dracula, Stoker offers a model about how to learn from death in unexpected ways. William Veeder and Stephen Arata have noticed that Dracula articulates 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, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law—all relating to England and English life and customs and manners” (27). Calling the books his “friends,” Dracula explains 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 issues that late Victorian English culture seems reticent to embrace, namely, overcrowding, rapid social change, and the problem of death. More precisely, from the discussion of cremation we know that the culture loathes the change incumbent upon the dead body and changes in women’s roles. Dracula steps fearlessly into the fray of English life, having learned its grammar 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

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England advice about how to infiltrate other cultures, but he also suggests that embracing change and death marks English national survival. What makes England vulnerable to Dracula’s own colonizing moves is an emerging denial about thanatological matters, making Dracula’s arrival in the center of London terrifying. 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. Suddenly, Harker, symbolically buried alive in a bedroom shaped like a coffin, invokes 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 religious doctrines concerning bodily resurrection and the unity of body and soul. Several pages later, Harker’s fears about his own mortality keep him from seeing 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 unselfconscious 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 unquestioningly accept their appropriate roles in society. In both instances the mirror offers 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.

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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 survivors, 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 proclaiming 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 churchyard. 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 society’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 fishing 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 encounter 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 disables her and leaves her open to participate with Dracula in his challenge to English 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 anticipated 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

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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 however that defies decay and decomposition associated with the corpse. By reversing 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 novels 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 penetrated 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 observes 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 cremationists 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

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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 ambivalent desire for/fear of sexuality but also the same ambivalence toward mortality with the theme of sexuality put forward to veil death.”7 While Bronfen focuses much of her discussion on the relationship between death and sexuality, which is clearly undeniable in the novel, I would like to highlight the remarkably 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 “instead 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 professionalization 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 undead 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

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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 cremation. 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 operating in a culture. Stoker suggests that not recognizing the fears through banishing 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 marriage. Dracula never allows Lucy to get that far, surely a plan to unnerve his opponents. 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 vigorous 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 staking 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 English femininity—the beautiful, wealthy woman willing to marry and merge properties, 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 wonderworker, also challenges England’s sense of itself as an imperial power. In an effort 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, ineffectual 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 knowing prove futile here. Seward fails to recognize national and racial otherness and

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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 contaminated 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 manifest a power to resist dominance. Recognition of this capability makes the British establishment nervous. Circumstances surrounding Lucy’s undead disposition fire Seward’s misguided 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: “Devotion 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 relationship to death when we learn that the maid has stolen the crucifix that Van Helsing 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 coffin, they wonder whether bodysnatchers have been at work, or whether the undertaker’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 autopsy. Stoker calls attention to the culture’s tendency to use dead bodies for its own economic or ideological purposes. Even the mortuary woman, who recognizes 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 burial 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 visions 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

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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 ourselves 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, understands 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 certainty of Lucy’s death lead us to question any assertion about her final disposition, 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 upperclass domesticity and femininity. As Christopher Craft nimbly quips, “A woman is better still than mobile, better dead than sexual.”10 Nonetheless, their domestic vision has simply gone underground, where it remains silent but influential in English domestic affairs. In decomposition, then, anxieties persist about womanly promiscuity and its effect on marriage and domesticity, even as men continue 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 consequences 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 liminal 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 wanting 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

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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 revealing 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 imported 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 intellectual efforts, Stoker has Mina equivocate to a certain degree, not unlike Margaret 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 discussion 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 consequences 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

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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 themselves 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 retribution.” Since vampires often appear in the wake of imperial decay, Stoker ingeniously 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 daylight hours, but he also plans to propagate, it would appear. Anticipating every contingency, 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 shortsightedness about history, Dracula works “age after age adding new victims and multiplying 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 belief 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 vociferous 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 landscaped 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 cannot 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 contaminating touches, as if to warn about the dangers of their devaluation as “superstition.”

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As Richard Wasson concludes, England’s technological progress cut “humanity off from the old superstitions, dark knowledge, and [made] itself increasingly vulnerable 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 argument, I would like to shed light on the strategy in terms of the burial and cremationist 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 appropriate the earth for their own purposes. Dracula secures places of rest for his vampires 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 symbol 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 empire, 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, ethereal 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 experience “cremation,” or an immediate return to ashes, are the ancient Others, those whose deaths and decay in Eastern Europe signal a final purification of worrisome 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 battle 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 centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill”

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(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 suggests, tentatively, that England had less need to rid itself of Dracula than to purify 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 principle 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 evidence. 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 effaced, 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 impossible to believe the things that had happened to them, it was still possible to believe 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

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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 reminiscences, 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 reducing 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 effacing 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 consummate 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 masterpiece insists, along with the other Victorian novels discussed earlier, that death has a rightful and necessary place in society because of its capacity to define 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 undermine England’s self-perception as a modern nation. In this sense, Dracula is remarkably prescient, because it cautions Victorians about the dangers of denying death, even as it introduces to the moderns and postmoderns a stunning obsession 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 alienation from society to make claims about new forms of government, and in the

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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 intensifying social and urban crisis. But certain Victorian novelists offer a powerful and significant resistance to the ready solutions offered by Chadwick and his colleagues by repositioning the corpse at the center of communal life, thereby creating 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 depersonalizing representations of the dead and their families and friends by social reformers. 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, Dickens’s novels elucidate the dire consequences of associating the corpse with money. Such a marriage begets social isolation and a diseased, self-absorbed individualism, which can only be ameliorated by the likes of John Harmon, who embodies a symbolic burial of personal selfishness in favor of benevolent patriarchy. Such generosity emerges when the boundaries between the living and the dead remain more porous than the present avaricious culture will allow. Returning 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

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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 understood intimately the complex power of the corpse to regenerate society. The literary remains examined here gesture to a necessary appreciation of this reality and suggest that failure to do so leaves England vulnerable to vampires—those disrespectful 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 unregulated network of independent operators,” Cheney pursues her investigation of the cadaver trade with an incisive sensitivity to the curious, if not macabre, juxtaposition of bodies with money. She opens her exposé with a report of her experience at Miami’s Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort, temporary home to a surgical seminar on laparoscopy sponsored by Innovations in Medical Education and Training. There, in the Ocean Room, on steel grey gurneys, lay the legless, 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 Dockers, honed their laparoscopic skills on the torsos placed before them. With the developing sophistication of surgical practices, the need for fresh body parts has intensified and, according to Cheney, there are an increasing number of “resurrection 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, particularly 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 income, 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 contagious.6 In the same month Cheney published her article in Harper’s, March 2004,

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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 cadavers 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 supply, raising prices and encouraging what John Broder calls “body-parts entrepreneurs.”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 Crematory 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, discovered 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 performed, 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 Georgia Army National Guard, whose grandmother was brought to Tri-State Crematory 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 northwest Georgia as descriptions of the scene became popular on the Internet and on

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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 photograph of a body being removed from the ground at Tri-State Crematory had been posted. Hundreds have purchased T-shirts, pins, and lighters commemorating the scandal.14 While mistreatment of the dead arouses morbid curiosity among spectators fascinated by such a taboo, others recognize the perilous consequences 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 community, 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 surrounding 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 deception 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 accepted 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.

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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, depending 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 bearing 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 obsessivecompulsive 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 regulation would have prevented this tragedy and the ensuing heartache among survivors. Under Georgia law, the Tri-State Crematory was exempt from inspection because it conducted business only with local funeral homes, did not deal directly 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 legislature 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 Families, 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 discarding 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

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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 workingclass 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. Finally, 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 embody 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, ignores 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 Representation (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: Sexuality 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 Gender, 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 assumptions 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

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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 Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Glennys 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 review 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 University Press, 1974). 13. Lawrence Taylor, “The Uses of Death in Europe,” Anthropological Quarterly 62 (1989): 149. 14. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies (Stanford, 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. Martin’s Press, 1981). 19. Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist 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, suicide, and the apparent Victorian preoccupation with sexuality and the death of

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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 general 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 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.

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 member 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 burying in towns.” See G. A. Walker, The Fourth of a Series of Lectures Delivered at the Mechanics’ 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 authority 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 Wiggins, “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 Inquiry 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

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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 Destitute, Chapter 1, “The Corpse and Popular Culture,” 3–29. She elaborates on traditional attitudes toward death and the corpse as the cultural context for the 1832 Anatomy Act. I, however, establish this milieu to better appreciate the social 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 England, 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 contributions 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 London: Routledge, 1989). 18. Richardson, Death, 4. 19. Elizabeth Hurren and Steve King, “‘Begging for a Burial’: Form, Function, 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 historical record, suggesting that some pauper funerals and burials were not always

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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,” Representations 1:1 (February 1983): 109; Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common 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 Sanitary 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 assumptions 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 considerable 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 Company, 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).

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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 Critical 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 developed discussions about Wordsworth and the formation of the Romantic subjectivity, see Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 81–92; Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 25–30. 42. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Decomposing: Wordsworth’s Poetry of Epitaph 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’ relationships 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 Fantasy of Agency,” Victorian Studies 48:1 (Autumn 2005): 93. Hadley, in her forthcoming book Living Liberalism, critiques the ultimate ineffectiveness of Victorian liberalism because of its “fantasy of an abstractly embodied agency” by a cultivated self who refuses to face directly the hundreds marching in the streets (99).

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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 public use; and the creation of national cemeteries on ground selected on scientific principles (prevention of miasma) with suitable decorations and vegetation, managed 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 journalist 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 Managing of Cemeteries, hereafter cited in the text as Loudon, followed by the page number. 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,” Journal 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 Cemetery Style” (234–35). I have selected Loudon’s variant to discuss here.

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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 number. Death was no stranger to Elizabeth Gaskell. Her brother, John Stevenson, mysteriously 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 themselves 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

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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. According 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 Scripture must submit to. The conservative wing, which included Elizabeth Gaskell and William Gaskell and John Robberds at the Cross Street Chapel, Joseph Ashton at the Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford, and William Turner, whom Elizabeth 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 Addressed 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 directly 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 Victorian 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

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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 discussion 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: Columbia 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 considered 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 notions 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 resignation 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 burial 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 Esther’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

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“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 Margaret’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,

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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 obstinacy 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,” Victorian 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 letters 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 Dickens is more comprehensive in his use of the theme than Hutter argues. He fashions 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 Victorian 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 increased very slowly, and, eventually, profits and wages became more unequal within and across classes. “This increasing inequality, at all levels of income distribution, 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 special 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

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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 number. 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 beneficence of nature within the cemetery or churchyard to counter fear and superstition often attached to death. Loudon’s attachment to memorials also counters the anonymity of death as manifested in the mass graves common in overcrowded 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 funeral, 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 Subject to History: Ideology, Class and Gender, ed. David Simpson, 53 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 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 University 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.

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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 number 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 Westminster 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 Century, 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.

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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 burial 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 certain 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 Millgate, 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 adulthood. 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

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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 accompanied 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 members 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 comprehensive 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 Victorian and Edwardian Cemetery (Exeter, Devon: Wheaton, 1989), 42. 10. Frances Knight, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society (Cambridge: 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 controversy, see 251–63. 24. Williams, A Plea, 15; Wiggins, “The Burial Acts,” 143.

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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 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). This important essay was written in 1883 and published 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 suffered a serious depression because of a significant drop in wheat prices. For example, 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 somewhat marred when he suggests that Fanny’s corpse be left overnight in the coach house of Weatherbury Farm, an idea Bathsheba considers “unkind and unChristian.” Nonetheless, Parson Thirdly is significantly more compassionate than the vicar in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

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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 Orthodoxy and Popular Faith, ed. Ellen Badone, 24 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 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 Memorialist,” 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).

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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 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1891), 1. 12. Sir Henry Thompson, “The Treatment of the Body after Death,” Contemporary 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: Cremation 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 Cremation?” 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.

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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 Thompson,” 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 Legislation (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). Hereafter 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.

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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 references 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 University Press, 1996), 107–32. I am especially grateful for Arata’s perceptive reading 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 inability 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 Embalmed Corpse,” Victorian Studies 40:1 (Autumn 1996): 1–30. Scandura draws illuminating 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 concerns 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 Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Margaret 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 recent, extensive investigation into the body parts procurement industry for a

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more comprehensive discussion: Body Brokers: Inside America’s Underground Trade in Human Remains (New York: Broadway Books, 2006). For a sensitive exploration of corpses’ lives, see Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (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, inadvertently, 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 eighteenth-century dissection practices and our own, see Ruth Richardson, “Afterword,” in Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 411–34. Richardson vigorously argues for the freely consented 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 betrayal 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 Cadavers,” 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.

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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. Evidently, 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 Bureau. 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.

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Index

Page numbers with an f indicate figures; those with a n indicate endnotes. Abbey Wood cemetery, 73 Altick, Richard, 146 Anatomy Act (1832), 6, 69–70, 160, 178n10 See also dissection Anglicans, 30, 52 baptism and, 101–105, 108, 126–128 Burial Acts and, 8, 74, 75, 103 cremation and, 138–141 Hardy and, 124–125, 132 nationalism and, 106–107 Oxford movement and, 109 See also Nonconformists animism, 121, 123–124 Anti-Corn Law League, 39 Arata, Stephen, 154, 162–163, 195n4 Ariès, Philippe, 3, 6–7 Armstrong, Tim, 127 Arnold, Matthew, 26 Ashes to Ashes (Haweis), 149–150, 159 Ashley, Lord, 177n1 Ashton, Joseph, 183n3 Augustine of Hippo (saint), 188n37 Autry, David, 171 Baernreither, J. M., 178n14 Bailey, James, 185n3 Bain, Alexander, 100 baptism, rite of, 101–105, 108, 125–128 Baptists, 101, 189n6 Barber, Paul, 158, 195n9 Barboza, David, 196n11 Barrineau, Nancy, 131 Barrow, Charles, 70

Bauman, Zygmunt, 6 Bedford, Duke of, 140 Bentham, Jeremy, 34 Bishop, John, 69–70 Bleak House (Dickens), 1, 68 Bloch, Maurice, 6 blood feuds, 48, 49 body-parts business modern, 11, 169–173, 195n1, 196n11 Victorian, 68–72, 80, 84, 160 See also corpse Bodyworlds exhibition, 196n11 Bramwell, Lord, 140 Bremer, Fredricka, 183n7 Broder, John, 170 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 3–4, 115, 158 Brontë sisters, 7 Browne, Thomas, 139 Burial Act(s), 8–9, 74–75, 75, 103 of 1880, 8, 111 of 1900, 111 cremation and, 138, 140, 145 See also funerals burial clubs, 178n14 Burial Laws Amendment Act (1880), 105, 111 Burke, William, 69 Cameron, Charles, 141 Cannadine, David, 7 capitalism, 17, 52–54, 61–66, 130 Carlyle’s views of, 26, 53, 68 Dickens’s views of, 10, 66, 75, 77–82 Gaskell’s views of, 39–42, 50–51

211

212

Index

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

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 dissection, 1, 69–72, 80, 84, 160, 169 See also Anatomy Act Dissenters. See Nonconformists Dodd, Chris, 172 “The Dorsetshire Labourer” (Hardy), 112, 191n39 double, symbolic, 4 Douce, F., 188n36 Douglas, Mary, 148 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 26 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 153 Dracula (Stoker), 11, 147, 149, 153–166 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 153 Druids, 119, 130, 140 Drury, George, 101–105, 108 Duffey, Mark, 137 Duncombe, Thomas, 177n1 education, public, 32, 153 Dickens on, 85–88 Gaskell on, 39–40 Hardy on, 132–133, 135 embalming, 4, 158–159, 195n8 Engels, Friedrich, 38 England, Church of. See Anglicans “Essay upon Epitaphs” (Wordsworth), 22, 25–26, 180n40 Far from the Madding Crowd (Hardy), 10, 100, 112–118, 134 fees, burial, 8, 10, 14, 27, 76–77, 103, 108 feminism, 3, 159–160, 184n22 Gaskell and, 39, 54–55, 58–65 male gaze and, 158 feuds, blood, 48, 49 Fido, Martin, 69, 185n3 Finer, S. E., 73–74, 185n10 Fletcher, Ronald, 105, 190n7 Fosso, Kurt, 180n42 Foster, John, 75 Frazer, James, 139 French Revolution, 139 friendly societies, 178n14 Fryckstedt, Monica, 183n3 funerals burial clubs for, 178n14 German practices and, 28

213 middle-class, 2–4, 8–9, 16, 34, 40–41, 46–48, 142 Nonconformist, 14, 75–76, 101–112 pauper, 1–2, 16–17, 32–34, 60–61, 91, 178n14, 178n19 prostitute, 52, 105, 131, 184 for unbaptized children, 101–105, 108, 127–128 undertakers and, 16–17, 34, 45, 158 upper-class, 2, 16, 79, 142, 160 working-class, 1–4, 8–9, 15–17, 20–21, 24–25, 40–41, 44–51, 142 See also cemeteries; corpse

Gallagher, Catherine, 4, 79, 80, 187n35 Gann, Curt, 170 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 7, 35, 37–66, 115–116 Chadwick and, 39–42, 52, 63, 183n7 Cranford, 56 Dickens and, 91–92 funerals in, 1–2, 44–47 Hardy and, 99 Mary Barton, 1–3, 9, 37–39, 42–55, 57–58, 131, 167 North and South, 9, 39, 40, 42, 54–65, 162 Ruth, 49 Unitarian views of, 9, 38–42, 51, 56, 65–66 Gaskell, William, 38–39, 183n3 Gatherings from Graveyards (Walker), 13, 17–18, 138, 179n25 gaze, male, 158 gender, 58–65, 159–160 healers and, 14–15, 188n52 See also feminism German mortuary practices, 28 Gilbert, Pamela, 80, 85, 90 Gittings, Clare, 5 Gladstone, William, 109 God’s Acre Beautiful (Robinson), 148–149 Goodwin, Sarah Webster, 4 Gorer, Geoffrey, 7 Gorham, George Cornelius, 126–127 Gosden, P. H. J. H., 178n14 Graham, James, 14

214 Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, 24 gravestones, 2, 32, 33f, 85, 132, 156 epitaphs for, 22, 25–26, 180n40 Greg, Robert Hyde, 39 Greg, Samuel, 39 Greg, William Rathbone, 39, 48 grief. See mourning grinders, 22–23 Haden, Francis Seymour, 146–148, 150, 158 Hadley, Elaine, 26, 180n46 Hagens, Gunther von, 196n11 Hall, Catherine, 54, 184n19 Hamlin, Christopher, 144 Hardy, Jemima, 126 Hardy, Thomas, 1, 7, 99–135, 147, 155 burial of, 137 “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” 112, 191n39 Far from the Madding Crowd, 10, 100, 112–118, 134 Jude the Obscure, 10, 100, 124, 131–135, 167–168 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 99, 119, 132 Return of the Native, 112, 118–124, 135 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 104, 124–131, 135, 167–168 The Woodlanders, 112, 119, 128, 129, 135 Hare, William, 69 Harmon, Barbara Leah, 62 Hart, H., 145 Haweis, Hugh Reginald, 149–150, 159 Haynes, M. J., 24 Haywood, Benjamin, 39 Head, John, 70 healers, female, 15, 188n52 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 110, 134 Herbert, Christopher, 75 Hertz, Robert, 6 Holbein, Hans, 83, 188n36 Holland, Calvert, 22 Holland, P. H., 145, 150 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 5

Index Howkins, Alun, 103, 191n39 Hurren, Elizabeth, 178n19 Hutter, Albert D., 186n20 hygienic concerns. See public health identity individual, 25, 96–97 national, 9, 101, 110–112, 119, 163–164 imperialism, 107, 160 fears of, 163, 164, 195n4 See also nationalism India, 107, 160, 164 Interment Act. See Metropolitan Interment Act Jed/ rzejewski, Jan, 124–125, 191n42 Jalland, Pat, 6, 142 James, Henry, 84 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 10, 100, 124, 131–135, 167–168 Jupp, Peter, 6, 141, 189n6 Kay, James P., 39 Kensal Green Cemetery, 14, 75, 91 Kettle, Arnold, 86, 91, 188n48 King, Steve, 178n19 knife grinders, 22–23 Knight, Frances, 103 Laderman, Gary, 151 Lancet (journal), 142, 187n34 Lane, George Dorkin, 21 The Last Man (Shelley), 4–5 Leaney, Jennifer, 142 Lewes, George Henry, 100 Liberation Society. See Society for the Liberation of Religion from StatePatronage and Control Little Dorrit (Dickens), 83 Local Government Act (1888), 141 Loudon, John Claudius, 9, 156, 181n52, 181n53 cemetery designs of, 28–34, 31f, 33f, 132, 133 Luckin, Bill, 79–80, 90 Luther, Martin, 138

Index Mackinnon, William, 14, 20–22, 34 Malthus, Thomas, 4 Manning, Archbishop, 127 Marcuse, Herbert, 41 Marsh, Ray Brent, 170–173, 197n19 Martineau, James, 183n3 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 1–3, 9, 37–39, 42–55, 57–58, 131, 167 Mason, Neva, 171 Maudsley, Henry, 100 Mayhew, Henry, 18, 21, 175n7, 179n32 May, James, 70 The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy), 99, 119, 132 McDermott, Gerald R., 192n52 medical officers, 27–28, 34–35, 41 Metropolitan Interment Act of 1850, 34, 73, 74, 185n10 of 1852, 74, 76 Metropolitan Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns, 177n1 Miall, Edward, 108 miasma theory, 7 Chadwick’s views of, 18–22, 28, 79 Loudon’s views of, 29 Morgan, Osborne, 105, 108, 111 Morley, John, 5 Mort, Frank, 18 mourning, 4, 15–17, 47 depression and, 29 wakes and, 16, 99 Municipal Reform Act, 39 The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens), 83 nationalism, 9, 101, 110–112, 119, 163–164 See also imperialism Nelson, Ernest V., 170 New Poor Law (1834), 3, 16–17, 91 See also Poor Laws New Poor Law Commission, 13 Nonconformists, 8, 14, 75–76, 101–112, 130 See also Anglicans; Unitarians Nordau, Max, 147, 150 North and South (Gaskell), 9, 39, 40, 42, 54–65, 162

215

obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 172 officers, medical, 27–28, 34–35, 41 The Old Curiosity Shop (Dickens), 10, 77–78, 91 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 68 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 10, 68, 72, 79–97, 167, 187n35, 189n53 Oxford movement, 109 Palmerston, Lord, 74, 75 panopticon, 27 Parry, Jonathan, 6 Past and Present (Carlyle), 26, 38 Pearson, Michael, 171 Perkin, Harold, 26–27, 186n25 Perna, Augie, 169 Phillpots, Henry, 126–127 Pick, Daniel, 153 Playfair, Lord, 140 A Plea for a Free Churchyard (Williams), 104, 107–109 Poor Laws, 84 See also New Poor Law Poovey, Mary, 2, 177n21, 179n22, 185n25 Porter, Thomas, 20 Potter, Thomas, 39 prostitutes, 21–22, 49, 51, 88, 131 burial of, 52, 105, 131, 184 Prothero, Stephen, 137–139, 192n1 public health, 39 cemeteries and, 7–8, 11, 14–23, 27–28, 74, 79–80, 102 cholera and, 34, 46, 73, 183n7 Gaskell and, 43–44 Puckle, Bertram S., 184n18 purgatory, 52, 138 Quigley, Christine, 177n20 race, 153, 159–160 Ramsey, Edward, 101–105 Reid, Henry, 170 Religious Liberty in the Churchyard (Williams), 108–110 “resurrectionists,” 68–72, 169

216

Index

Return of the Native (Hardy), 112, 118–124, 135 Revelation, Book of, 58, 184n14 Richardson, Ruth on Anatomy Act, 6, 70, 178n10 on dissection, 185n3, 187n34, 196n11 on preparation of the corpse, 15–16, 188n52 Rigg, Julie, 74, 140 rites, burial, 3–5, 15–17, 58, 76, 139 baptism and, 101–105, 108, 125–128 Robberds, John, 183n3 Robinson, William, 148–149 Romanticism, 5, 180n41 Rowlandson, Thomas, 83 Ruth (Gaskell), 49 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 26 Sanders, Andrew, 185n3 Scandura, Jani, 158, 195n8 Schneider, Jane, 121 Schor, Esther, 4–5 Select Committee on Anatomy, 69, 70 Select Committee on the Improvement of Health of Towns, 13–14, 18, 21 Sheen, Samuel, 74 Shelley, Mary, 4–5 Sherlock Holmes (Doyle), 153 Sketches by Boz (Dickens), 82 Smith, Adam, 185n25 Smith, Thomas Southwood, 39 Society for the Liberation of Religion from State-Patronage and Control, 107–108 Sophocles, 26 Sott, George, 84 South Metropolitan Cemetery, 30, 31f Spencer, Herbert, 100 Stallybrass, Peter, 93 Stephen, James, 140–141 Stevenson, John, 182n2 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 153 Stewart, Garrett, 3 stillborn infants, 101, 105, 134 Stoker, Bram, 1, 7, 139 Dracula, 11, 147, 149, 153–166 See also vampires Stone, Donald, 39–40

Stone, William, 25 Stowell, Lord, 146 Suez Canal, 107 A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (Chadwick), 4, 9, 13, 15, 17–35, 41 Tait, A. C., 111 Taylor, Lawrence, 6 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), 104, 124–131, 135, 167–168 Thompson, Henry, 139–148, 150, 158, 159, 160 Tite, William, 181n54 Tofig, Dana, 171 Tomalin, Claire, 189n1 tombstones. See gravestones Tozer, Wickham, 101–105, 108 trade unions, 3, 24, 45, 52–54, 59–66, 179n19 Tri-State Crematory (Georgia), 170–173 Turner, William, 183n3 Uglow, Jenny, 39 undertakers, 16–17, 34, 45, 158 unions. See trade unions Unitarians, 39–40, 45, 183n3 afterlife beliefs of, 39, 52 Gaskell’s views of, 9, 38–42, 51–52, 56, 65–66 See also Nonconformists University of California, Los Angeles, 170 urbanization, 7–8, 14, 134–135, 137, 164 Vadall, Frank, 172 vampires, 11, 78, 144, 147, 153–168 See also Stoker, Bram van Dijck, José, 196n11 Van Zandt, Clint, 172 Veeder, William, 154 Verdery, Katherine, 7 Vienna Exposition (1873), 139 wakes, 16, 99 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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