Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914

by Julie-Marie Strange

Overview

It has been assumed that the poor in Victorian and Edwardian Britain did not mourn their dead because of high mortality rates. Contesting this approach, Julie-Marie Strange studies the expression of grief among the working class, demonstrating that poverty increased—rather than deadened—it. She illustrates the mourning practices of the working classes through chapters addressing care of the corpse, the funeral, the cemetery, commemoration, and high infant mortality rates. The book draws upon fiction, journalism, and official reports as well as personal testimony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521838573
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/25/2005
Series:	Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories , #6
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.42(w) x 9.29(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Julie-Marie Strange is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester.

Read an Excerpt

Cambridge University Press
0521838576 - Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 - by Julie-Marie Strange
Excerpt

1 Introduction: revisiting the Victorian and Edwardian celebration of death

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There's a grim one-horse hearse in a jolly round trot;
To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot:
The road is rough, and the hearse has no springs,
And hark to the dirge that the sad driver sings:-
Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns...

Poor pauper defunct! he has made some approach
To gentility, now that he's stretched in a coach;
He's taking a drive in his carriage at last,
But it will not be long if he goes on so fast!
Rattle his bones over the stones;
He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns...

But a truce to this strain! for my soul it is sad
To think that a heart in humanity clad
Should make, like the brutes, such a desolate end,
And depart from the light without leaving a friend.
Bear softly his bones over the stones,
Though a pauper, he's one whom his Maker yet owns.

(Thomas Noel, c. 1839¹)

At length the day of the funeral, pious and truthful ceremony that it was, arrived ... two mutes were at the house-door, looking as mournful as could be expected of men with such a thriving job in hand; the whole of Mr Mould's establishment were on duty within the house or without; feathers waved, horses snorted, silk and velvets fluttered; in a word, as Mr Mould emphatically said, 'everything that money could do was done'.

(Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844²)

The pauper grave and the lavish funeral are notorious symbols of the popular culture of death in the long nineteenth century. As the extracts above demonstrate, the two funerals are easily juxtaposed as binary opposites in a literal and metaphorical sense: burial in a private grave was the 'cornerstone' of respectability whilst to have a body buried on the parish was to bear 'a lifetime's stigma'. The pauper grave signified abject poverty and carried the taint of the workhouse; the pauper corpse was tossed unlovingly into a pit to rot in anonymity; and, should anyone mourn this creature, they were to be pitied. Conversely, giving the dead a 'good send off' epitomised respectability; it provided an excellent opportunity for revelry and display; and the funeral party were the object of jealousy and social rivalry. As stereotypes, the excerpts above are invariably linked to perceptions of the nineteenth century as a period of booming consumer culture, expanding life insurance schemes and punitive attitudes towards poverty. The poet Thomas Noel is well known for championing the cause of the poor but historical perceptions of the Victorian culture of death are largely derived from the journalism and novels of Charles Dickens. An ardent critic of the Victorian 'celebration of death', Dickens ridiculed the middle and working classes for aping the obsequious burial customs of the aristocracy. The tendency of the populace to equate extravagant funerals with respectable status did little more, he suggested, than render such spectacles absurd. That they were 'highly approved' by neighbours and friends reinforced the notion that the disposal of the dead was a theatrical display where any concept of grief was rooted in pride and snobbery rather than the personal expression of loss.³ Notably, when sincere cries of sorrow were manifest, they were deemed inappropriate and contrary to the idea of the 'genteel' burial.⁴ The facilitator of these exhibitions, the undertaker, was invariably cast as a parasite, growing fat on a morbid diet of death, extravagance and social jealousy.⁵ Critical of the putrid and overcrowded churchyard, where coffins and their contents spilled from the earth, Dickens was also suspicious of the commercialisation of burial space, embodied in profit-making joint-stock cemetery companies.⁶ A thriving trade in funeral dress and increasingly complex codes of mourning etiquette signified a fascination with the macabre and required yet more needless expenditure.⁷ In contrast, pitiful burials 'on the parish' testified to the punitive philosophy embedded in the New Poor Law.⁸ A champion of funeral reform, Dickens called for burial to return to a mythical pastoral idyll, as exemplified in the burial of Little Nell in a leafy, peaceful rural churchyard.

Dickens excelled in portraying the sordid and proselytising against social injustice and it is unsurprising that historians have fastened onto the more spectacular aspects of the death culture present in his works to conclude that bereavement in the nineteenth century was characterised by consumerism and a preoccupation with social status.⁹ Like many dichotomies, however, the juxtaposed images of the pauper and the respectable burial have lent themselves to oversimplification. Notably, there is a tendency to refer to the contrasting burials as the single defining feature of working-class attitudes towards death. This is not to suggest that all accounts of death and burial have been reduced to a crude dichotomy, but, rather, that such literature fails to grapple with the cathartic effects of the funeral and the use of ritual as a forum for the creation and expression of loss whilst overlooking the fluid meanings invested in notions of respectability and pauperism.

Images of rampant commercialism and the horror of the pauper grave have attributed the Victorian celebration of death with a sense of uniqueness. To a point, of course, this is deserved. Victorian Britain witnessed funerals of unprecedented ostentation, such as that for the Duke of Wellington in 1852, a military spectacle which took three months to organise.¹⁰ Perhaps the most significant shift in burial practice lay in the rise of the joint-stock cemetery company, a phenomenon that moved the business of interment from the near-monopoly of the Anglican Church into a commercial and multi-denominational arena. According to James Curl, writing in the 1970s, the establishment of the commercial cemetery sprang from interest in Romanticism and the desire to civilise the populace. By the 1820s, however, the sanitary issues raised by reports on overcrowded graveyards, such as George Walker's Gatherings from Graveyards (1827), made the creation of extra-mural burial sites imperative.¹¹ Other studies have emphasised the complex and overlapping dynamics driving the establishment of commercial burial space: motives included Dissenters' protests concerning burial privilege, the need to protect corpses from body-snatchers, and the desire to use commercial space as a landscape for the expression of a secular identity.¹² More recently, Patrick Joyce has examined the cemetery in Foucaldian terms of liberal governmentality, suggesting that the organisation of the dead in commercial burial space was inextricable from conceptions of the city as a body needing careful regulation to maintain healthiness.¹³

Focusing exclusively on the commercialisation of burial, Thomas Laqueur's essay 'Religion and the Culture of Capitalism' explored the significance of the joint-stock cemetery company in shaping cultural attitudes towards death. The move from traditional burial in the Anglican parish churchyard to interment in the secular cemetery was, Laqueur suggested, 'a sign that the underlying cultural assumptions of capitalism had taken root'.¹⁴ The rise of the joint-stock cemetery company was tantamount to trading in death, hitherto an outrageous proposition. Founded on principles of profit, the cemetery represented 'a new kind of institution' that enabled the expression of 'new cultural formations'.¹⁵ This was especially evident in the distinction between the private and the common grave, 'an almost parodic equation' of the gulf between the respectable middle classes' retreat into suburban privacy and the poor who lived and died in public.¹⁶ Overall, the language of the commercial cemetery broke from a religious and reverential vocabulary to speak unashamedly in consumerist terms that not only reflected social change but 'embodied it, making it manifest, translating it into emotionally resonant forms'.¹⁷ In highlighting this new 'cultural pluralism', Laqueur possibly overplays his hand: the emphasis on change overlooks continuities in burial practice, not least the overwhelming tendency for most burial parties to request some form of religious burial service and expression of denominational affiliation. Nevertheless, Laqueur's thesis that concepts of death were imbued with meaning in a larger web of cultural transformation highlights the potential for shifting analysis of the cemetery to new ground.

The expansion of the commercial cemetery was mirrored by a burgeoning industry in funeral and mourning paraphernalia (clothing, jewellery, stationery, shrouds, plumes, hearses and so on). At the heart of this consumer market was the undertaker whose perceived greed is best encapsulated in comparisons with the Vampire.¹⁸ Much of the prejudice against the undertaker sprang from the supplementary report of sanitary commissioners into interment in towns in 1843. Authored by Edwin Chadwick, the report drew attention to the undertakers' marketing of heraldic burial customs to a popular clientele.¹⁹ With the expansion of credit facilities to the working classes, the canny undertaker could exploit the anxieties of the bereaved concerning their position within local social and economic hierarchies. As Paul Johnson notes, the persistent financial insecurity of most working-class families fostered a culture of saving for extraordinary expenditure (the funeral is typical - but clothes, day trips and ornaments are other examples). The items purchased subsequently acquired a symbolism beyond their intrinsic economic value. Thus, for people who owned very little, 'almost any possession and the display of this possession, was a way of broadcasting and establishing one's social worth'.²⁰ In this sense, expenditure became synonymous with a specifically working-class concept of 'respectability' and the celebration of death was 'as popular in the slums of the East End as in the royal household'.²¹ According to John Morley, the funeral thus epitomised the narrowness of working-class definitions of respectability, depending as it did on one payment of burial club money.²²

The relationship between expense, respectability and notions of decency has dominated historical discussion of the working-class culture of death. Yet respectability was (and is) a slippery concept. A term familiar to the Victorians, the conceptual fluidity of respectability gained increasing recognition among historians in the 1970s alongside growing interest in the divisions within the working classes which operated to create separate and conflicting identities and interests.²³ Even Geoffrey Best's 'brisk, conclusive and uncomplicated' notion of respectability (the aspiration to be a gentleman) acknowledged the adoption of the 'respectable front' by the working man.²⁴ Later studies located respectability as a specifically working-class concept rather than one invoking the absorption of middle-class values.²⁵ By 1979, Peter Bailey asserted that respectability had moved from being 'convenient and unfocused shorthand' for elite values to representing a notion 'invested with a new consequence and complexity'. Nonetheless, Bailey was critical of historians who continued to underestimate the dynamics of respectability, to overlook its relation to human geography and the behaviour patterns of the urban dweller and to portray it as a cultural absolute that pinned the 'working-class respectable' into a 'characterological strait-jacket'.²⁶ Rather, Bailey contested, respectability was a role adopted in particular situations and used as a 'calculative' or instrumental ploy in relations with members of other social groups. More recently, Ellen Ross criticised historians of respectability for their exclusive focus on male culture and the workplace at the expense of analysing female identity. Ross further suggested that the dichotomy between 'rough' and respectable, favoured by Victorian and Edwardian commentators, drew on standards of moral behaviour and material status. It was this link between the moral and material that made respectability such a 'mystifying word' and which continues to render the concept 'confusing' today. Pointing to the differing criteria for respectability according to social position, Ross was at pains to emphasise that working-class respectability was not 'a filtered-down version of its bourgeois forms'. Rather, respectability referred to a 'fluid and variable idea' which was constantly redefined. Those who adhered to fixed definitions of respectability often did so to their own cost: it meant fiercely defending privacy and prohibited borrowing money or goods whilst militating against participating in gossip and wider social networks of friendship and exchange.²⁷

If respectability was so fluid, is it not possible that the concept of the respectable funeral was also subject to multiple, diverse and highly individual interpretations? This is not to dismiss respectability from analyses of working-class culture, but, rather, to suggest that almost glib references to the funeral as the touchstone of working-class respectability need further exploration. Definitions of the 'respectable funeral' were usually set in opposition to the pauper burial. Passed by the Whig government in 1834, the New Poor Law inaugurated the era of the workhouse wherein the pauper grave came to represent the harshness and stigma of the new regime. Often referred to as a 'pit', the pauper grave was little more than a hole into which the bodies of the abject poor were packed in flimsy coffins, with little or no ceremony: it was the 'ultimate degradation' for the individual and the 'ultimate disgrace' for a Victorian worker's family.²⁸ Two years prior to the passage of the New Poor Law, the Anatomy Act legitimised the donation of the unclaimed pauper dead to anatomy schools for dissection. Previously reserved as a post-mortem punishment for hanged felons, the Act was perceived as a direct assault on the liberty and beliefs of the poor. Assessing popular response to the Anatomy Act, Ruth Richardson concluded that fears for the integrity of the corpse shaped the Victorian culture of death: the trappings of increasingly expensive funerals were indicative of a desire for a secure burial (with double and triple lead-lined coffins for instance) rather than a simple reflection of growing consumer markets.²⁹ To a point, this is a convincing thesis. It is worth noting, however, that the Anatomy Act only ever applied to unclaimed pauper corpses and that, by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, poor law guardians increasingly refused to co-operate with the demands of anatomical schools. Indeed, Richardson concedes that the principal 'sub-text' in antipathy to the pauper burial by the end of the period was 'respectability'.

Undoubtedly, antipathy to pauper burial found expression in the material culture of the funeral and it is not surprising that this neat correlation has shaped the questions asked about a working-class culture of death. What is surprising is that so few studies have examined the interpersonal dynamics of working-class responses to death, disposal and bereavement. In her study of gravestones in the Orkney Islands, Sarah Tarlow reflected that the omission of grief from explorations of the material culture of death was startling given that most contemporaries assume death and grief are inseparable.³⁰ Where grief has been the subject of analysis, it has been located in the culture of the social elite. Pat Jalland's Death in the Victorian Family (1996) is the most recent addition to this trend, resting on an interpretation of the 'Victorian family' as exclusively middle and upper class.³¹ Moving the discussion of Victorian cultures of death beyond a fixation with funeral rites, Jalland charts a complex history of grief where concepts of loss stretch from the onset of fatal illness to post-interment commemorative and memorial practices. Adopting the term 'Victorian' as a chronological tool, Jalland acknowledges that attitudes towards death among the elite were far from static in this period: changing demographic patterns, increasing secularisation and shifting medical paradigms (especially related to diagnostic practice and palliative care) wielded considerable influence on responses to terminal illness and expiration in the decades prior to the Great War. Nonetheless, Jalland posits a case for understanding cultures of grief in the Victorian period in terms of religion. In particular, she suggests that Victorian cultures of grief can best be characterised by the Evangelical ideal of the 'good death', characterised by persistent faith, humility and submission to the will of God in the face of loss. In this model, prolonged and agonising deaths were a spiritual test where suffering with fortitude was understood as a virtue (Christ's own suffering was held as the supreme example); alternatively, the drawn-out death provided time for the unbeliever to repent and turn to God. The positive psychology implicit in this model was undermined, however, by the 'bad death', that is, the sudden death that gave little or no time to reaffirm belief or denied the unbeliever the opportunity for conversion. Suicide represented the worst form of bad death as self-murder was held as a grievous sin against God. It is doubtful how far this single model is applicable beyond those within an Evangelical and High Anglican elite. Indeed, Jalland concedes that even the most committed Christian struggled to reconcile the trauma of the deathbed with the spiritual ideal. Rather, she urges us to appreciate the value of a 'good death' ideal as a strategy for coping with terminal illness and the deaths of the young.³²

Jalland is committed to 'experiential history'. She believes the people of the past 'must first speak to us in their own words' to reveal 'their innermost lives'.³³ She locates this subjective experience in the diaries, correspondence, wills and memorial literature of fifty-five families, spanning the period from 1830 to 1920. Referring to the 'immense obstacles' in the path of experiential history, Jalland notes the assumption that private experience is impossible to research. Yet she interprets these problems in terms of source material rather than more substantive issues associated with the construction of experience. Enthusing that 'rich experiential source material certainly does exist', Jalland slips between reading this material as evidence of grief and acknowledging that it is a representation of grief.³⁴ She is, moreover, reticent concerning her involvement in such texts or her re-creation of these narratives in a different context.³⁵ This is not to suggest that we cannot write about grief, but, rather, to note that the words and deeds of those in the past are not inevitably a reflection of an innermost life, as the inner life is only accessible when mediated through multiple linguistic and symbolic representations. Indeed, Jalland is concerned with the ways in which the external customs associated with death and burial were appropriated to assuage personal grief: mourning rites drew on communal networks of support whilst offering consolation through the affirmation of religious belief and the articulation of private and social memory.³⁶ Post-interment 'rituals of sorrow' (such as indulgence in consolation literature and memento mori) provided long-term strategies for dealing with the onslaught of grief. The use of mourning rites and paraphernalia in this way did not, surely, depend on Evangelicalism or social class. Why, then, has this approach not been extended to include the working classes?

Of course, historians must be sensitive to the danger of assuming cultural trends percolate down the social strata. As David Cannadine notes, the assumption that the attitudes of a 'much biographied elite' were representative of a working-class culture of death is 'easier to assert than it is to prove'.³⁷ Jalland also recognises that cultures of death in Victorian Britain were class-bound and warns of the pitfalls in 'assuming that the behaviour and beliefs about death of the middle and upper classes automatically filtered down to the working classes'.³⁸ Acknowledging that working-class attitudes towards death were obscure, both Cannadine and Jalland focused exclusively on elite cultures. The reasons for this are, perhaps, twofold. First, the working classes left little correspondence or memoir. Secondly, there appears to be an assumption within Victorian death scholarship that high mortality rates, poor living conditions and persistent poverty fostered fatalism and resilience towards personal loss. The lavish funeral, in this context, was not only an exercise in snobbery and an excuse for a party, but it also provided an adequate forum for the expression of mourning: grief was contained within the rituals surrounding death. Once those rituals were complete, a family could take stock of the financial outcome of death and burial and return - recovered - to daily life.

The exception to this trend, David Vincent's essay 'Love and Death and the Nineteenth-Century Working Class', was published in 1980.³⁹ Whilst other historians have touched upon issues of sensibility, notably Ellen Ross in her splendid Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (1993) and more recently Trevor Griffiths's The Lancashire Working Classes (2001), Vincent's essay remains the most comprehensive analysis of love and death. Engaging with the difficulties inherent in locating 'feeling' among the labouring population, Vincent observed that 'bereavement is everywhere' in working-class autobiography. Yet life stories were not dominated by death. For Vincent, this indicated a capacity to survive experiences which, in the late twentieth century, would have a 'shattering effect' on the personality and life of the bereaved. Vincent's analysis starts, therefore, from an assumption that death was not a shattering experience for the majority of working-class families in nineteenth-century England. Unlike Jalland, however, Vincent readily engages with the difficulties of reading autobiography as a text on experience, not least because most working-class autobiographies seemed to omit discussion of private and emotional feelings. Where such details are

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction: revisiting the Victorian and Edwardian celebration of death; 2. Life, sickness and death; 3. Caring for the corpse; 4. The funeral; 5. Only a pauper whom nobody owns: reassessing the pauper burial; 6. Remembering the dead: the cemetery as a landscape for grief; 7. Loss, memory and the management of feeling; 8. Grieving for dead children; 9. Epilogue: death, grief and the Great War; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Julia Marie-Strange presents a wonderful sourcebook as well as a highly critical set of arguments about the death, dying, and loss experiences of the British working classes during the late Victorian period."
Allan Kellehear, University of Bath, Victorian Studies

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