No Place for the Dead: The Struggle for Burial Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London (2006)
Kee, Tara White (Author)
University of Delaware
Callahan, Raymond A.
Edition Details: Advisor: Callahan, Raymond A.
Physical Details: 320 pp.
Language: English
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.
...MoreDescription Examines the change from the 1830s to the 1850s during which burials were prohibited within urban areas. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/12 (2006): 4495. UMI pub. no. 3200544.
Similar Citations
Article
Karen R. Jones;
(2018)
'The Lungs of the City': Green Space, Public Health and Bodily Metaphor in the Landscape of Urban Park History
(/isis/citation/CBB661966874/)
Chapter
Colleen Milligan;
(2015)
Health of Urban American Civilians, Children, Women, and Old Men in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB270049846/)
Article
Hilary Buxton;
(2018)
Health by Design: Teaching Cleanliness and Assembling Hygiene at the Nineteenth-Century Sanitation Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB804490571/)
Thesis
Nair, Aparna;
(2010)
Between Asclepius and Mammon: Disease, Death, Medicine and Public Health In Madras, 1786-1815
(/isis/citation/CBB323949784/)
Article
Costa, Maria Clélia Lustosa;
(2004)
Teorias médicas e gestão urbana: a seca de 1877--79 em Fortaleza
(/isis/citation/CBB000640141/)
Book
Kristin Hussey;
(2021)
Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB460048744/)
Article
Emily Webster;
(2020)
Tubercular landscape: Land use change and Mycobacterium in Melbourne, Australia, 1837–1900
(/isis/citation/CBB457785853/)
Article
Wanda S. Henry;
(2016)
Women Searchers of the Dead in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century London
(/isis/citation/CBB658996745/)
Book
Levin, Miriam R.;
(2010)
Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001031314/)
Chapter
Lightman, Bernard;
(2011)
Refashioning the Spaces of London Science: Elite Epistemes in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001231554/)
Book
Dennis, Richard;
(2008)
Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB000953908/)
Thesis
Kirsten James;
(2019)
The Science of Scent and Business of Perfume in Paris and London, 1650–1815
(/isis/citation/CBB140299766/)
Book
Jim Clifford;
(2017)
West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London's Industrialized Marshland, 1839-1914
(/isis/citation/CBB970353601/)
Article
Assael, Brenda;
(2013)
Gastro-Cosmopolitanism and the Restaurant in Late Victorian and Edwardian London
(/isis/citation/CBB001201192/)
Book
Phillips, Derek L.;
(2008)
Well-Being in Amsterdam's Golden Age
(/isis/citation/CBB001031608/)
Book
Honigsbaum, Mark;
(2014)
A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001550988/)
Article
Curtis, Stephan;
(2005)
Midwives and Their Role in the Reduction of Direct Obstetric Deaths during the Late Nineteenth Century: The Sundsvall Region of Sweden (1860--1890)
(/isis/citation/CBB000773940/)
Article
Joël Coste;
(2018)
La «Mort de Vieillesse» dans les statistiques de mortalité (XVIIe siècle - XXIe siècle): une catégorie problématique
(/isis/citation/CBB020277954/)
Article
Jenner, Mark;
(2005)
Death, Decomposition and Dechristianisation? Public Health and Church Burial in Eighteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB000660018/)
Article
Searcy, Elizabeth;
(2014)
The Dead Belong to the Living: Disinterment and Custody of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America
(/isis/citation/CBB001451695/)
Be the first to comment!