Respectable Burial: Montreal's Mount Royal Cemetery (review)

This volume (only available in hardback) measures eleven and a half by nine inches (landscape), so is an awkward shape for the average bookshelf. It is difficult to understand why it is that shape, as the material could easily have been arranged to fit a more convenient size of page. Illustrated with colour and black-and-white material, it covers the history of Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal from its foundation in 1852, including wearisome accounts of religious feuds between Roman Catholics and Protestants that are all too familiar, the difficulties of the Chinese communities in being permitted to carry out their customary rites, and other weighty matters that seemed to have caused endless problems in Montreal, as elsewhere. The book is really an encapsulation of the social history of death and disposal of the dead in Montreal, showing how that history evolved to the present day, with due regard to the Great and Good as well as the Great Unwashed and those at the bottom of the social pile.

It is true that during the nineteenth century the cemetery began to be regarded as essential, for no town or city could really function without it, so architects, engineers, and gardeners often rose to the challenge, creating some truly marvellous places that reward the visitor as well as the historian. Père-Lachaise, Montmartre, and Montparnasse in Paris, the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, the Staglieno in Genoa, Kensal Green in London, and many, many other examples throughout Europe and America attest to the importance of the cemetery as a type, capable of infinite variety, and embellished with fine buildings and monuments set against lush landscapes that, in their maturity, often more than met the occasion.

However, Respectable Burial, while dealing exhaustively with Mount Royal and the Montreal situation, is curiously provincial, and fails to connect with the wider subject that was so much a concern of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans. The thin bibliography shows that Brian Young's reading is not as wide as it should be, and he makes several mistakes (Rockwood instead of Rookwood is just one of them), quite apart from not making connections he ought to have been able to make had his study ranged somewhat further. The drawing he reproduces on page 94, for example, which he credits to a book of 1846, appeared earlier in J.C. Loudon's works, and was again published (1843) in Loudon's On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, which appeared in facsimile in 1981, and should be essential reading for anybody undertaking any research into the vast subject of the nineteenth-century cemetery. Young mentions Loudon's book on page 16, where he sloppily calls it The Layout, Planting and Management of Cemeteries in 1843, indicating a cavalier disregard for accuracy that is extremely off-putting.

Some illustrations passed the quality test, but others do not. What does Young mean on page 44 by 'an usual iron marker' (sic)? Why is the illustration on page 5 sinking to port? When distorted illustrations are passed as fit to be reproduced, and then no attempt is made to even try to make them passably straight, one has to wonder about quality control, and what author and editors were doing allowing such disasters to occur. Some other illustrations are uninformative and pointless, but some of the historical material is of interest, and has come out well.

It is important that nineteenth-century cemeteries are adequately recorded, researched, and written up with as much illustrative material as possible, because such places have, for the most part, been undervalued for the best part of a century. Thus Young's book is to be welcomed, albeit with reservations, for the job could have been better done and the subject more closely related to other works. The bibliography is very rudimentary, and includes a reference to the United Kingdon (sic), which really sums it all up. Historians who do not...