No. LVIII.
The late Archbishop of Bordeaux, when Bishop of Boston, Dr. Cheverus, told me, that he had very little influence with his people, in regard to their extravagance at funerals. It is very hard to persuade them to abate the tithe of a hair, in the cost of a birril.
This post-mortuary profligacy, this pride of death, is confined to no age or nation of the world. It has prevailed, ever since chaos was licked into shape, and throughout all Heathendom and Christendom, begetting a childish and preposterous competition, who should bear off the corpses of their relations, most showily, and cause them to rot, most expensively.
This amazing folly has often required, and received, the sumptuary curb of legislation. I have briefly referred, in a former number, to the restraining edicts of the law-givers of Greece, and the laws of the Twelve Tables at Rome.
Even here, and among the earlier records of our own country, evidences are not wanting, that the attention of our worthy ancestors had been attracted to the subject of funereal extravagance. At a meeting, held in Faneuil Hall, October 28, 1767, at which the Hon. James Otis was the Moderator, the following resolution was passed: “And we further agree strictly to adhere to the late regulations respecting funerals, and will not use any gloves but what are manufactured here, nor procure any new garments, upon such occasions, but what shall be absolutely necessary.” This resolution was passed, inter alia similia, with reference to the Stamp Act of 1765, and as part of the system of non-importation.
There is probably no place like England—no city like London, for funereal parade and extravagance. The Church, to use the fox-hunting phrase, must be in at the death; and how truly would a simple funeral, without pageantry, in some sort—a cold, unceremonious burial, without mutes, and streamers, and feathers—without bell, book, or candle—flout and scandalize the gorgeous Church of England! The Church and the State are connected, so intimately and indissolubly connected, that he, who dies in the arms of Mother Church, must permit that particular old lady, in the matter of his funeral, to indulge her ruling passion, for costly forms and ceremonies.
It is more than forty years, since, with infinite delight, I first read that effusion—outpouring—splendid little eruption, if you like—of Walter Scott’s, called Llewellyn. Apart from all context, a single stanza is to my present purpose; I give it from memory, where it has clung, for forty years:
When a prince to the fate of a peasant has yielded,
The tapestry waves dark, round the dim lighted pall,
With scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded,
And pages stand mute in the canopied hall.
Through the vault, at deep midnight, the torches are gleaming,
In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming,
Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming,
Lamenting a chief of the people should fall.
In all this, the nobility ape royalty, the gentry the nobility, the commonalty the gentry: and there is no estate so low, as not, in this particular, to account the death of a near relative a perfect justification of extravagance.
There is scarcely one in a thousand, I believe, who has any just idea of the amount, annually lavished upon funerals, in Great Britain; or of the extraordinary fact, that joint stock burial companies exist there, and declare excellent dividends.
In 1843, at the request of her Majesty’s principal Secretary of State, for the Home Department, Edwin Chadwick, Esquire, drew up “a report on the results of a special inquiry into the practice of interment, in towns.”
Mr. Chadwick states, that, upon a moderate calculation, the sum annually expended in funeral expenses, in England and Wales, is five millions of pounds sterling, and that four of these millions may be justly set down as expended on the mere fopperies of death.
Evelyn says, that his mother requested his father, on her death bed, to bestow upon the poor, whatever he had designed, for the expenses of her funeral.
Speaking of this abominable misapplication of money, a writer, in the London Quarterly Review, vol. 73, p. 466, exclaims—“To what does it go? To silk scarfs and brass nails—feathers for the horses—kid gloves and gin for the mutes—white satin and black cloth for the worms. And whom does it benefit? Not those, whose unfeigned sorrow makes them callous, at the moment, to its show, and almost to its mockery—not the cold spectator, who sees its dull magnificence give the lie to the preacher’s equality of death—but the lowest of all hypocrites, the hired mourner, &c.” It is calculated by Mr. Chadwick, that £60 to £100 are necessary to bury an upper tradesman—£250 for a gentleman—£500 to £1500 for a nobleman.
High profits were obtained, by the joint stock burial companies in England, in 1843. The sale of graves in one cemetery was at the rate of £17,000 per acre, and a calculation, made for another, gave £45,375 per acre, not including fees for monuments, &c. One company, says Mr. Chadwick, has set forth an estimate, that seven acres, at the rate of ten coffins, in one grave, would accommodate 1,335,000—one million three hundred and thirty-five thousand—paupers. The following interrogatory was put, and repeated by members of the Parliamentary Committee, to the witnesses: “Do you think there would be any objection to burying bodies with a certain quantity of quick lime, sufficient to destroy the coffin and the whole thing in a given time?”
In 1843, Mr. J. C. Loudon published, in London, his work on the Managing of Cemeteries and the Improvement of Churchyards. The cool, philosophic style, in which Mr. Loudon handles this interesting subject, is rather remarkable. On page 50, he expatiates, as follows: “This temporary cemetery may be merely a field, rented on a twenty-one years’ lease, of such an extent, as to be filled with graves in fourteen years. At the end of seven years more it may revert to the landlord, and be cultivated, planted, or laid down in grass, or in any manner that may be thought proper. Nor does there appear to us any objection to union workhouses having a portion of their garden ground used as a cemetery, to be restored to cultivation, after a sufficient time had elapsed.”
This certainly is doing the utilitarian thing, with a vengeance. Quite a novel rotation of crops—cabbages following corpses. My long experience assures me, that the rapidity of decomposition depends, upon certain qualities in the subject and in the soil. Skeletons are sometimes found, in tolerably perfect condition, after an inhumation of two hundred years. Perhaps Mr. Loudon, in his eager festination for a crop, may have determined to bury in quicklime. Paupers and quicklime would make a capital compost, and scarcely require a top-dressing, of any kind, for years. What beets! what carrots, for the cockney market! Notwithstanding the quicklime, I should rather fear an occasional envelopment of some unlucky relic, in the guise of a lucky bone—a grinder, perhaps. And, when these vegetables shall again have been converted into animals, and these animals shall have served their day and generation, they shall again be converted into cabbages and carrots, as all their predecessors were. Well, this Mr. Loudon is a practical fellow; and his metastasis is admirable. Here are thousands of miserable wretches—nullorum fiilii, many of them—they have contributed scarcely anything to the common weal, while living; now let us put them in the way, with the assistance of a little quicklime, of doing something for their fellow-beings, after they are dead. The pauper squashes and cabbages must have been at a premium, in Leadenhall Market. Imagination is clearly worth something. After all my reason can accord, in the way of respect, for these utilitarian notions, I solemnly protest against marrowfats, cultivated in Mr. Loudon’s pauper hotbeds. No doubt they would be larger, and the flavor richer and more peculiar—nevertheless, Mr. Loudon must excuse me—I say I protest. He gives an alternative permission, to lay down his mixture of dead bodies and quicklime to grass, or for the pasture of cows. Even then the milk would have a suspicious flavor, or post-mortem smell, I apprehend; it would be the same thing, by second intention, as the surgeons say.
The explanation of Mr. Loudon’s monstrous proposition can be found nowhere, but in his concentrated interest in agriculture, to which he would have the living and the dead alike contribute. When contemplating the corpse of a portly pauper, he seems to think of nothing, but the readiest mode of converting it into cabbages.
I have heard of a cutaneous fellow, who had an irresistible fancy, for skinning animals—it had become a passion. Nothing came amiss to him. He sought with avidity, for every four-footed and creeping thing, that died within five miles of his dwelling, for the pleasure of skinning it. The insides of his apartments were covered with the expanded skins, not only of beasts and the lesser vermin, but of birds, serpents and fishes. His house was an exuvial museum. He had a little son, a mere child, who assisted his father, on these occasions, in a small way. He had the misfortune to lose his grandmother—a fine old lady—and the following brief colloquy occurred, between the father and the child, the day before she was buried: “I say, father.” “What, Peter?” “When are you going to skin Granny?”