No place for the dead: The struggle for burial reform in mid-nineteenth-century London

Burial practices underwent significant change in mid-nineteenth-century London. At the beginning of the 1830s, Londoners were buried in their parish churchyards. These crowded burial places provided constant reminders of death and the dead. By the mid-1850s, burial within the urban area was prohibited and the dead were segregated from the living in extramural cemeteries. This dissertation examines this change.;My research addresses gaps in the historiography of London's burial reform and challenges received ideas on the subject. First, the role of religious groups in the conflict previously had not been fully examined. My analysis identifies the motivations and actions of individual religious groups, and explains the obstacles created by the conflict between the Established Church and non-Anglicans.;Second, though historians of public health have revised the idea that cholera created the sanitary movement, historians of burial reform have not absorbed this revision into their work. This dissertation extends this revision to burial reform. While cholera had a strong psychological influence, its impact varied widely, both geographically and among the visitations of the disease. Instead of playing a direct causal role in burial reform, cholera contributed to the fear of the corpse and anxiety about burial places.;Third, the concept of a Victorian "celebration of death" pervades writing on burial, yet this idea conflicts with the evidence on burial reform, which suggests instead a prevailing fear of the dead. This paper posits an alternative view of Victorian death culture in which the middle class used the new "garden" cemeteries and elaborate funeral ritual to distance themselves from the realities of death.;One of the most important legacies of burial reform was a change in the shape of public space-the removal of burial places from the city-which both reflected and reinforced fear of the dead. As London became more estranged from its dead, it became more important to physically separate the dead from the living. Eventually, Parliament passed legislation to relegate burial places to areas outside the daily lives of Londoners. Thus, the burial reform movement presaged the attempts to deny and hide death with are so predominant in our own day.