It must, I think, be admitted, that, in a crowded population, the parochial system, as it generally stands at present, is utterly inadequate to meet the demand for interment—the demand, I mean, which would exist, if that system were universally acquiesced in, and all our parishioners were brought for interment to our parochial burial grounds. To say nothing of the inability of many parishes to provide adequate grounds, there could not be an adequate supply of clergymen or of churches. Indeed, it has always seemed to me, that, in practice, this has been admitted; for, in London, that considerable and important part of the burial service which is performed within the church, unless specially desired and paid for, has, from time almost immemorial, been left out; and I think that the highest ecclesiastical authorities could hardly have introduced or sanctioned such an anti-rubrical omission, had it not served some more popular or more necessary purpose than that of merely raising the fees of the church. From this consideration, added to the frequent inconvenience of my burial services, I have been led to regard the fees for the in-church service, like the payments for the erection of monuments and tablets in our churches, as a kind of necessary preventive duty. And certain it is, that unless our burial services were limited by some such restrictive system, they would be not only overwhelmingly laborious, but absolutely impracticable and incompatible with our other professional engagements. How, for instance, could the densely-built parish of Christchurch, Spitalfields, yielding a clerical income less than 380l. a-year, possessing one burial-ground, and one church attached to that burial-ground, accommodate, in any enlarged sense of the word, an interrable population of 23,642, with the addition of the many proprietors of our vaults and graves, who must always be resident at a distance? Even now, with our present very scanty demand for interment, I sometimes find, as I have intimated, extreme inconvenience from this part of my duties. For obvious reasons the working classes make choice of Sunday for their burials; the very day, above all others, when the clergy and the church are almost wholly pre-engaged for other purposes. No wonder, then, that one purpose should often clash with another—that burials in church should clash with burials out of it—that clergymen should be hurried, discomposed, and exhausted—and mourners kept waiting in a cold, damp burial-ground, so as to verify the old objection urged by the Puritans against our service there, that “in burying the dead we kill the living.” On other days, too, the clergy have other engagements, so as to render it necessary to appoint burials for a particular hour—an appointment, however, often more necessary to the clergy than agreeable to the undertakers and their employers. And yet, with every precaution, the clergyman is most seriously incommoded; for, however he may try to accommodate, by allowing parties to fix their own hour of burial, his time and patience are fearfully encroached upon. Burials are very seldom punctual. They arrive from 20 minutes up to an hour and a half after the hour fixed. Mourners linger at home over their cups. The undertaker pleads that he “couldn’t get them to move.” Sometimes he has another “job” in hand elsewhere—nay, an undertaker has had two “jobs” in my own burial ground—he has fixed them for the same hour; yet, after having, with my assistance, completed one of them, he has coolly left me to wait till he could fetch the other; so that, what with wasted time, exhausted patience, and trials of temper owing to incivility and other annoyances from such persons as a clergyman is thus brought into contact with, he has, to say the least, as much inconvenience as the public have to complain of.
Among the inconveniences which the necessities of our parochial system impose upon the working-classes, may be mentioned the practice just now alluded to, viz., the omission of the in-church service in all cases where it is not specially paid for. Looking at my parishioners in a religious light, and at a moment when all ranks and conditions are literally levelled in the dust, I feel this to be an invidious distinction between rich and poor; and I think it but natural that the poor should prefer burial in places where such a distinction is less strongly marked.
In another part of his highly important communication, he observes—
In the course of my remarks I have adverted to our inadequate parochial provision for the burial of the dead in populous places, and to the consequent inconvenience which has placed the churchyard in unfavourable contrast with the dissenting ground. There is another inconvenience, however, which attaches to both, and which is inseparable from the burial of the dead in a crowded population: I mean the impossibility of maintaining a due solemnity on such an occasion.
If the working-classes of a populous city are less awfully affected by the sight of death, from an unavoidable familiarity with it in their own homes, it is to be feared that they and others meet with much to prevent or impair a wholesome sensibility upon it in public; for there the touching associations of a burial, and the sublime spirituality of our burial office are broken in upon by the exhibition of the most vulgar and even ludicrous scenes of daily life.
The eastern end of my parish ground, for instance, abuts upon Brick-lane, one of our most crowded and noisy thoroughfares, and at one corner stands a public-house, which, of course, is not without its attraction to all orders of street minstrels. In performing the burial service, I have left the church, while the organ has been playing a beautiful and impressive requiem movement, and proceeded to the grave, where it was purely accidental if I did not hear the very inappropriate tune mentioned by my medical friend.
Indeed, as my church extends along one side of another crowded street, I have had most inappropriate musical accompaniments, even during that part of the burial service which is performed within the church. My burial ground is partially exposed to the street at the west end also; and there, as at the east, it is liable to be invaded by sounds and sights of the most incongruous description. Boys clamber up the outside of the wall, hang upon the railing, and, as if tempted by the effect of contrast, take a wanton delight in the noisy utterance of the most familiar, disrespectful, and offensive expressions;—of course, all attempts to put down this nuisance from within the burial ground serve only to aggravate it, and nothing could put it down but a police force ordered to the outside every time that a burial takes place. To this wilful disturbance is added the usual uproar of a crowded thoroughfare,—whistling, calling, shouting, street-cries, and the creaking and rattling of every kind of vehicle—the whole forming such a scene of noisy confusion as sometimes to make me inaudible. On all these occasions, indeed, I labour under the indescribable uneasiness of feeling myself out of place. Amidst such a reckless din of secular traffic, I feel as if I were prostituting the spirituality of prayer, and profaning even the symbolical sanctity of my surplice. And yet, the exposure of my burial-ground is but partial, and is little or nothing compared with that of many others. The ground is hardly less desecrated by the scenes within it; on Sundays, especially, it is the resort of the idle, who pass by the church and its services to lounge and gaze in the churchyard. It is made a play-ground by children of both sexes, who skip and scamper about it, and, if checked by our officers, will often retort with impertinence, abuse, obscenity, or profaneness. I generally have to force my way to a grave through a crowd of gossips, and as often to pause in the service, to intimate that the murmurs of some or the loud talk of others will not allow me to proceed. I hardly ever witness in any of these crowds any indication of a religious sentiment. I may sometimes chance to observe a serious shake of the head among them; but, with these rare exceptions, I see them impressed with no better feeling than the desire to while away their time in gratifying a vulgar curiosity. On the burial of any notorious character,—of a suicide, of a man who has perished by manslaughter, of a woman who has died in child-birth, or even of a child who has been killed by being run over in the street, this vulgar excitement rises to an insufferable height. If, in such a case, the corpse is brought into my church, this sacred and beautiful structure is desecrated and disfigured by the hurried intrusion of a squalid and irreverent mob, and clergyman, corpse, and mourners are jostled and mixed up with the confused mass, by the uncontrollable pressure from without. I will not, indeed, venture to say that, on these occasions, the mourners always feel and dislike this uproar, for I believe that among the working classes they often congratulate themselves upon it. There is an éclat about it which ministers to the love of petty distinction before alluded to; but, whether through the operation of this feeling or the many other abominable mischiefs attending the burial of the dead in populous places, there is much to counteract or impair the solemn and impressive effect of religious obsequies.
§ 89. The feeling of a large proportion of the population appears to be dissatisfaction with the intra-mural parochial interments, less on sanitary grounds than from an aversion to the profanation arising from interment amidst the scenes of the crowd and bustle of every-day life. This feeling is manifested in the increasing numbers who abandon the interments, even in parishes where the places of burial are neatly kept, where, if there be nothing to satisfy, there is nothing to offend the eye, where the service is solemnly and attentively performed, and where the amount of the burial fees cannot be supposed to influence the choice. The increasing feeling of aversion is indeed manifested by acts less liable to error than any verbal testimony, by the increasing abandonment of parochial family-vaults by the gentry and middle classes of the population, by payments from the labouring classes, even of increased burial dues for interments in places apart from the profanation of every-day life. The feeling manifested may be stated to be a national one, and to call for measures of a corresponding extent and character.
Means of diminishing the evil of the retention of the Remains of the Dead amidst the Living.
The most predominant of the physical, if not of the moral evils which follow the train of death, to the labouring classes, being the long retention of the corpse in their one room, the means of altering this practice claims priority in the consideration of remedies.