On the bodies of the poor: English representations of death rituals, 1835--1865

On the Bodies of the Poor: English Representations of Death Rituals, 1835-1865 argues that ministrations surrounding death--the preparation of the corpse for burial and the interment itself--served, in part, to mark and determine the nature of social relations in nineteenth-century literature and society. The representations of these last attentions to the dead participated in the identification and classification of the working classes that was fast becoming pervasive in England at mid-century.; In an introductory chapter, I analyze parliamentary debates over the New Poor Law, burial and cemetery reform legislation, sanitary reform texts, mortality statistics, funeral and burial handbooks and newspaper accounts to uncover certain ideologies and cultural constructs vigorously contested at mid-century. In my second chapter, by tracing representations of burial in Edwin Chadwick's Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interments in Towns (1843) and John Claudius Loudon's On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries and on the Improvement of Churchyards (1843), I contend that both authors seek to redefine the features of working-class burial in order to solidify England's middle-class and national identity. Through an analysis of Elizabeth Gaskell's two industrial novels, Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854-55) in my third chapter, I show how literary representations of burial challenge contemporary burial reform discourse's picture of traditional burial practices as problematic. By reinstituting the value of death's proximity to life which Chadwick and Loudon deny, Gaskell acclaims the positive effects of working-class contact with death because they are possible sites for creating community across class lines. The middle class must incorporate into its considerations of political economy the central strengths of working-class domesticity: a recognition of kinship networks that extend beyond immediate families where women are crucial to meaningful social reform. I turn in my fourth chapter to a late mid-Victorian novel, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865). In this novel, Dickens, understanding the power of the corpse to mediate social change, expropriates literal burial to argue for the resurrection of the gentlemanly ideal and the death and burial of the self-help philosophy.