Victorian Secrecy

Economies of Knowledge and Concealment

Denise Tischler Millstein, Albert D. Pionke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002130
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Whether commercial, personal, political, professional, or spiritual, knowledge was capital for the Victorians in their ongoing project of constructing a modern information-based society. Victorian Secrecy explores the myriad ways in which knowledge was both zealously accumulated and jealously guarded by individuals, institutions, and government entities in Victorian Britain. Offering a wide variety of critical approaches and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors examine secretive actors with respect to a broad range of subjects, including the narrator in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, John Henry Newman's autobiographical novel Loss and Gain, Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, modes of detection in Bleak House, the secret history of Harriet Martineau's role in the repeal of the Corn Law, and Victorian stage magicians. Taken together, the essays provide a richly textured account of which modes of hiding and revealing articulate secrets in Victorian literature and culture; how social relations are formed and reformed in relationship to secrecy; and what was at stake individually, aesthetically, and culturally in the Victorians' clandestine activities.

Chapter 1
Hidden Agendas: The Secret to Early Nineteenth-Century British Burial Reform

Sarah Hoglund

And is it not most indecent, not to speak of frightful infection, that custom and cupidity should be permitted, without arousing public indignation, or being felt to violate the sanctity of some of the deepest and dearest principles of our nature, that the secrecy and silence of the grave should be disregarded.

—“London Grave-Yards,” Monthly Review (Feb. 1840)

By the time this censure was published burial grounds, in use for generations, had grown so saturated with the dead that they were unable, literally, to conceal what to many should have been the central secret of the graveyard—the dead body. Space for subsequent interments was secured by the removal of previous tenants whose dismembered bodies and bones were strewn wantonly about graveyards. With the physical and moral health of the nation at risk, physicians, theologians, landscape gardeners, urban planners, public health officials, and barristers of every political persuasion across Britain became increasingly convinced that the reformation of burial practices was a matter of grave significance. Many believed, as George Alfred Walker wrote, that “burial places in the neighborhood of the living” were a “national evil—the harbingers, if not the originators of pestilence; the cause, direct or indirect, of inhumanity, immorality, and irreligion.”1 Walker, and many like him, felt that the creation of new institutions of burial was an obligation “no less to the sacred ashes of the dead than to the health of the living” (4). They cited a litany of lurid details—the urban graveyards’ stench, rumors of partially decomposed bodies exhumed and burned by church sextons, coffins burned as firewood, human bones unearthed and ground into fertilizer—in an attempt to rally support for the cause of burial reform.2 While these authors worried over the effects of intramural burial on public health, others argued that the urban churchyards were simply unfit for the proper memorialization of their loved ones. In 1831, for example, John Strang wrote that the churchyard, “instead of proving … either the solemn and affecting shrine of devotion, or the resort and consolation of the weeping individuals, is little better than a disgusting charnel house avoided by general consent, as if infected with a pestilence, and calculated even when entered to call forth rather the feelings of aversion and disgust, than of sympathy and sorrow.”3 For both of these groups, British burial grounds had become a site of national crisis, the cause of “inhumanity, immorality, and irreligion.” They saw the various social ills that plagued the nation as the result of a failure to conceal the dead, to keep the corpse properly hidden. If only the dead body could be secreted away, concealed within the verdant acres of the new Victorian garden cemeteries or the proposed municipal cemeteries, these authors claimed, any number of problems could be rectified. While they spoke of the need to keep the process of physical decay secret, however, the desire that appears to have motivated these treatises lay elsewhere. In this essay, I look closely at the work of Walker to demonstrate that beneath his discussion of the implications of overcrowded inner city burial for matters of public health and social equilibrium lay another secret, namely a desire to reconfigure the relationship between nineteenth-century Britons and the history of Western culture.4

Walker’s Gatherings from Grave Yards attracted a great deal of attention soon after it was published in November 1839 and was favorably reviewed in publications ranging from medical and scientific journals, to cheap weeklies, popular monthlies and established quarterlies. But arguments against unsavory urban burial grounds had been raised long before his salacious exposé became something of a best seller. In a 1552 sermon, Bishop Hugh Latimer wondered why “London, being so rich a city, hath not a burying ground without”? After all, “many a man taketh his death in Paul’s church-yard,” and Latimer himself had “felt such an ill-favored unwholesome savour” when giving sermons. For Latimer, Londoners should follow the “good and laudable custom” of the citizens of Nain, whom Christ witnessed carrying a dead body on a funeral procession toward their extramural burial ground.5 John Evelyn took a similar stance in “Silva,” his 1664 essay on tree cultivation, when he suggested that burial should be moved north of the walls of the City of London. There, “a grated inclosure [sic], of competent breadth for a mile in length, might have served as a universal cemetery to all parishes … distinguished by like separations, and with ample walks of trees, the walks adorned with monuments, inscriptions, and titles, apt for the contemplation and memory of the defunct.”6 Not much had changed by 1672, when Evelyn described churchyards in Norwich with layers of bodies stacked so high around the perimeter that “the churches seemed to be built in pitts.”7 Just a few short years later, John Vanbrugh and Christopher Wren recommended the construction of extramural cemeteries following the Great Fire of 1666. When Vanbrugh, with Wren, submitted his plan for fifty new churches in London in 1712, he pressed that the new churches

… may be free’d from that Inhumane custome of being made Burial Places for the dead. a Custome in which there is something so very barbarous in itself besides the many ill consequences that attend it; that one cannot enough wonder how it ever has prevail’d amongst the civiliz’d part of mankind.8

Like Evelyn, of course, Vanbrugh believed Londoners could rectify the situation by establishing a series of cemeteries on the “outskirts of Town.”9

In 1721, London curate Thomas Lewis wrote of the need to end urban interment in Seasonable Considerations on the Indecent and Dangerous Custom of Burying in Churches and Churchyards. The custom of burying in churches and churchyards was both indecent to God, as “the Church is his House, and it is not to be prophaned, nor polluted,” as well as dangerous to man.10 Contemporary practice allowed “great Numbers [to be] buried promiscuously of all Sorts of Distempers; and many in Coffins as hardly hold together.”11 Compounding this threat to Londoners health and wellbeing, vaults and graves in congested crypts and churchyards were commonly left unsealed for days. As a result, visitors to the churchyards had on more than one occasion been exposed to the sight of decaying corpses. The conditions that Lewis decried as “an Act of Profanity, Indecency, and of most Pernicious Consequences to the Living,” had hardly improved by 1838 when a letter sent to the Morning Chronicle and Weekly Dispatch shamefully noted that “in this place of ‘Christian burial,’ you may see human heads, covered with hair, and here, in this ‘consecrated ground,’ are human bones with flesh still adhering to them.”12

Walker’s condemnation of urban burial was not, therefore, particularly novel by the time he published his text in 1839. Indeed, he appears to have been familiar with many of these earlier arguments, citing both Latimer and Thomas Pennant’s eighteenth-century observations of St. Giles’s churchyard, in which, for example, coffins were said to have been “piled one upon the other, all exposed to sight and smell.”13 Yet, given the number of authors who had addressed this issue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, why, one must ask, did these practices become such an important matter in the first half of the nineteenth century? Why did this debate gain such urgency more than 150 years after it had first been raised? In addition, by the time Walker’s Gatherings from Graveyards appeared in 1839, extramural burial was not uncommon. With the opening of Kensal Green cemetery in 1832, Norwood cemetery in 1837 and Highgate cemetery in 1839, great numbers of Londoners had begun to be interred in what was then the countryside. Walker’s treatise thus articulated an underlying sense of shame that Britain, one of the most successful and prosperous nations of the world, had failed the least of its citizens by neglecting to enact a thoroughgoing official reform of burial practices. Opening his text with a nationalistic cry for reform, he asked why London

the seat of science, the arena of inventions, the vast amphitheatre where all that is great, good and noble; all that is conducive to the comforts and pleasures of life—all that the mind can conceive for good or evil—that London, with its thousands of busy minds and observant eyes, anxiously exploring the dimly shadowed outline of the future, yet neglecting the awful monitors of the past;—should bear upon its breast those awful plague spots, the BURIAL GROUNDS, must appear to every reflecting mind, an anomaly not easily explained (1).

Surveying forty-two public and private burial grounds in London, all situated in close proximity to private residences, Walker found them “overcrowded,” “disorderly” and “disgusting” places of interment. Even more alarming, there was no corner of the capital immune to the problem: Westminster, Southwark, Spitalfields, all, according to Walker, were home to burial spaces that were simply unsuitable to basic human decency. The intermingling of the living and the dead was, as noted, a “national evil” responsible for any number of physical and social ills. And these problems would only intensify as the population of Britain continued to grow and gather in metropolitan areas. The population of London alone had more than doubled between 1801 and 1841, from 958,000 to 1,948,000, but adequate accommodations had not been made for the burial of the city’s dead.14

For Blackwood’s, these “dead-pits,” were “admirable specimen[s] of the art of packing—of compressing the greatest possible quantity into the smallest possible space.”15 But for Walker, such carefully contrived configurations were the exception rather than the rule. The bulk of his 258-page opus cataloged in gory detail the many and varied abuses associated with burial in London. At a graveyard in Southwark, he tells his audience, “a body partly decomposed was dug up and placed on the surface, at the side slightly covered with earth.” Worse still, “a mourner stepped upon it, and the loosened skin peeled off, he slipped forward and had nearly fallen into the grave” (20–2). At Enon Chapel Walker was struck by “the total disregard of decency exhibited—numbers of coffins were piled in confusion—large quantities of bones were mixed with the earth, and lying upon the floor of this cellar (for vault it ought not to be called), lids of coffins might be trodden upon at almost every step” (157). As sensationalistic as these stories may sound, according to Walker experiences of this sort were all too common. Living and working in the Strand, he explained, had brought him into daily contact with the disrespectful practices of any number of unsanitary churchyards.

Walker’s understanding of the dangers posed by these unsanitary churchyards was undoubtedly influenced by continental European discussions of contagion. Of particular influence was the work of French physician and anatomist Félix Vicq d’Azyr. d’Azyr’s pioneering research in public health and epidemiology led him in the late-eighteenth century to challenge existing funerary practices and to advocate the construction of new burial grounds outside of French cities.16 He published influential tracts based on his investigations that detailed the dangers of burial in church vaults.17 Perhaps the most detailed of these examples, one which would be repeated by later burial reformers, concerned University of Montpellier professor, Dr. Henri Haguenot’s account of the churchyard and crypt at the parish church of Notre Dame in Montpellier. On the evening of 17 August 1744, the portefaix, in the process of partially exhuming a common grave, was overcome by mephitic exhalations and fell into a state of apoplexy. A horrified onlooker was lowered by rope to extract the motionless grave-digger, but scarcely reached the bottom of the pit before his body went limp and was quickly retrieved in a state close to death. Miraculously, the samaritan soon regained consciousness but languished in a debilitated state for some time thereafter. Less fortunate were the three subsequent men who attempted to withdraw the body—even the most robust constitution could not withstand the dangers of the grave, and all were said to have perished from the noxious effluvia.18

Also important in the development of Walker’s thinking was the work of Felix Pascalis. In 1823, Pascalis, a respected Italian-American physician, translated into English d’Azyr’s and Scipione Piattoli’s writings on the dangers of urban interment. In his Exposition of the Dangers of Interment in Cities, described by one reviewer as “partly translation, partly a compilation, and partly original,” Pascalis linked the outbreak of the 1822 yellow fever epidemic in New York to the surfeit of decaying corpses in the burial ground of Trinity Church.19 As Pascalis’s text had played an important role in the 1823 prohibition of burials in lower Manhattan, Walker lamented that it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Victorian Secrecy:An Introduction
• 1 Hidden Agendas:The Secret to Early Nineteenth-Century British Burial Reform
• 2 Harriet Martineau’s “only political plot”:Assassins, Duels, and Corn-Law Repeal
• 3 Secrecy and Reticence inJohn Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain
• 4 “What Connexion Can There Be?”:Secrecy and Detection in Dickens’s Bleak House
• 5 Concealing Minds and theCase of The Woman in White
• 6 A Victorian Picture Puzzle:Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke
• 7 Detecting Business Fraud at Home: White-Collar Crime and the Sensational Clergyman inVictorian Domestic Fiction
• 8 George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radicaland Byronic Secrets
• 9 The Perverse Secrets of Masculinity in Augusta Webster’s Dramatic Poetry
• 10 Victorian Conjuring Secrets
• 11 A Secret Censorship:The British Home Office v. Town Talk
• 12 Secrets, Silence, and the Fractured Self:Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• Bibliography
• Index