Arrangements to the above effect would be much simplified in working, and their general adoption much promoted, if all disbursements for funeral tickets, and for such other facilitations of conveyance as I have adverted to, were made by your Burial-Board,—their cost to be included in an uniform Cemetery fee; so that the friends of the deceased, after paying for his grave, should, without further payment, be entitled, if they desired it, to claim conveyance for his coffin from home to the Cemetery, and for themselves (in stated number) by a funeral ticket, at least for the railway portion of their transit. Thus to have one single and inclusive price for all that belongs to the new system—for the extramural grave, namely, and for conveyance thereto, would enable your Burial-Board to maintain its total cost at a level within reach of the poorer classes, and probably below that of existing prices.
In addition to what I have here suggested, there are many other steps which might be taken, if unforeseen circumstances should render them necessary, to diminish the pressure of new burial-charges on the poor. Time will develop, better than one can foretell, the exact operation of our reformed system; and for such inconveniences as it may bring, you will have no difficulty, I think, in finding appropriate cures. Nor could it be otherwise than easy, if you thought it desirable, to extend to the comparatively few funerals of wealthier classes which occur from within the City of London, those same arrangements for facilitating conveyance, which I have here deemed it requisite to consider only in their relation to the poor.
For the latter, it has seemed indispensable that your scheme should provide assistance, equivalent at least to the difficulty which its adoption must occasion them. Beyond this, I believe you would wish to disturb as little as possible the ordinary routine of interment; and I have aimed, therefore, at suggesting assistance only in such kind, and in such degree, as may least interfere with any interests of trade, least derange any established habits, least offend any prejudices of the people.
III. There is no part of the subject which I have considered with more anxiety than that which relates to delays of interment, and to the prolonged keeping of dead bodies in the rooms of their living kindred.
Evils arising in this source are unknown to the rich. Soldered in its leaden coffin, on tressels in some separate and spacious room, a corpse may await the convenience of survivors with little detriment to their atmosphere.
Not so in the poor man’s dwelling. The sides of a wooden coffin, often imperfectly joined, are at best all that divide the decomposition of the dead from the respiration of the living. A room, tenanted night and day by the family of mourners, likewise contains the remains of the dead. For some days the coffin is unclosed. The bare corpse lies there amid the living; beside them in their sleep; before them at their meals.
The death perhaps has occurred on a Wednesday or Thursday; the next Sunday is thought too early for the funeral; the body remains unburied till the Sunday week. Summer or winter makes little difference to this detention: nor is there sufficient knowledge on the subject, among the poorer population, for alarm to be excited even by the concurrence of infectious disease in a room so hurtfully occupied.
I have no means of telling you, with statistical precision, in how many of your annual deaths the corpse is detained in dangerous proximity to the living. But I have already quoted an official classification of deaths, by which it would appear that more than two-thirds of your deaths are of the artisan class or below it. Among them at least, it would be exceptional for the corpse to have a room to itself. On an average, then, there would probably be lying within the City at any moment, from thirty to forty dead bodies in rooms tenanted by living persons.
This very serious evil is well known to all persons who have taken an interest in the sanitary advancement of the poor; and ineffectual endeavours have been made for its diminution. The law does indeed empower your Officer of Health, under certain circumstances, to order the removal of a corpse from any inhabited room. And, under the Nuisances Removal Act, the General Board of Health may be authorised, during times of epidemic disease, to issue directions and regulations for the speedy interment of the dead. Both laws have remained inoperative, and are likely to remain so.