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?”