Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (review)

In Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England, Mary Elizabeth Hotz aims “to map the many and varied representations of burial in Victorian culture to show how the arguments over burial reform, strikingly evident in the novels under consideration, reflected the larger sociopolitical and religious debates and processes taking place in the nineteenth century” (2). The well-chosen “novels under consideration” are perhaps too few to provide a comprehensive map, but Hotz effectively demonstrates and analyzes the concerns with burial reform issues in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855); Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) (with extended glances at A Christmas Carol [1843] and several other novels); Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895); an obscure novel by Reginald Haweis called Ashes to Ashes: A Cremation Prelude (1875); and, finally and inevitably, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Responding to a call for “more precise historical readings of specific representations of death that would admit to the circulation of power within culture,” Hotz not only contextualizes her readings within a historical framework surrounding the passage of the Burial Acts, the building of large public cemeteries in the suburbs, and the late-century introduction of cremation as a widespread social practice, but offers a perceptive and compelling rhetorical analysis of the sociological, political, and theological discourse about burial, with particularly detailed attention to Edwin Chadwick’s A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns (1843) and John Loudon’s On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, and on the Improvement of Churchyards (1843), as well as to more ephemeral writings, such as the coverage by the East Anglian Times of a scandalous dispute about the burial of a nonconformist in an Anglican churchyard.

The need for burial reform was obvious by the mid-nineteenth century, not least to Dickens, who lamented the “terrible consequences to the living, inevitably resulting from the practices of burying the dead in the midst of crowded towns” and deplored the “system of indecent horror, revolting to our nature and disgraceful to our age and nation, arising out of the confined limits of such burial-grounds, and the avarice of their proprietors” (“Trading in Death” in Household Words 27 [1852]). In her desire to cast Chadwick’s reform efforts in opposition both to the interests of the lower classes and to novelistic representations of these interests, Hotz neglects Dickens’s journalistic arguments for reform (made on much the same bases as Chadwick’s) and even ignores Dickens’s account in chapter 11 of Bleak House (1852–53) of Nemo’s gravesite in a “hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, where malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed” ([W. W. Norton, 1977], 137). Nevertheless, Dickens did dislike Chadwick’s centralizing tendencies and his attitudes toward the poor, and Hotz’s rhetorical analysis of the Supplementary Report convincingly shows that it was at the very least insensitive to the local, communal, and especially lower-class practices that seemed to threaten “class structures that reformers thought were necessary for industrialization” (16). More specifically, Chadwick is seen as consistently attempting to “demean the traditional ways of disposing of the dead as practiced by the poor and laboring classes and to idealize middle-class procedures that seek to sanitize death, removing it from any opportunity for exchange with the living through exhaustive administrative machinery” (17). Most strikingly, Chadwick argues that allowing proximity to the dead demoralizes the labor force, for whom the presence of the dead produces “a decided unwillingness to labour” (qtd. in Hotz 20).

Not surprisingly, the novelists discussed here resist such cynical economic arguments, offering much more sympathetic representations of...