I acknowledge a hesitation in writing this chapter, because there are many people who feel very strongly upon the subject of the disposal of the dead, and whose feelings I wish in no way to appear to treat with anything but the greatest consideration.

The custom of burying the body has been in practice in England ever since Christianity was established here, and so completely did burial take the place of burning that the latter expedient has never been formally forbidden, or, until 1884, even referred to, in English law. It is well that this fact should be clearly understood, viz., that it is not illegal to dispose of a dead body by other means than by burial in earth (unless it should be proved a public nuisance at common law), nor has it been illegal in England in the past, but it has merely not been the custom, “inhumation” having been systematically practised for a thousand years.

It is natural that many beautiful thoughts should have been expressed by our greatest writers in connection with the burial of the dead; it has been a theme upon which poets have loved to dwell. The mourners, the lych-gate, the weather-worn stones, the solemn stillness, the yew-tree—they all furnish subjects for reflection and for verse. Tennyson refers in terms of tenderest meaning to the yew-tree in the churchyard in his “In Memoriam,” and even Tom Hood puts aside his joking mood when he thinks of it—

I confess I love these associations dearly, and it would be hard indeed to give them up. But will they ever cling around our cemeteries? I think not.

On the other hand, many very curious notions have arisen in connection with this subject—notions as groundless as they are quaint. I will mention three only, which are illustrated by the two following epitaphs, the first of which is from St. Olave’s, Jewry, and the second from Bermondsey, as quoted by Maitland:—

In the first we are told to weep because so good a man has gone, from the second we are led to believe that the gravestone protects the body of the departed, and both contain the idea that the grave or earth is anxious to receive the mortal remains, and is more comfortable for having done so. First there is the question of the weeping. It is very usual, on gravestones and monuments, to find the order given to the reader to “drop a tear.” And yet how impossible it is to carry it out. Imagine dropping a tear all along a line of graves of people of whom one has never heard, and who died 250 years ago! But happily there are quite as many injunctions to the contrary, and we are as often told not to weep:—

This epitaph to a poor overworked woman is, perhaps, flippant. Here is a more serious one, which was in the church of St. Martin Outwich:—

Secondly there is the question of the protecting gravestone. This is also not uncommonly met with. The poet Gray’s well-known “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” contains the following verse:—

But there could be few notions more false. Gravestones have often enough been “moved about to give more appearance of room,” and oftener still cleared away altogether, while the bodies beneath have been cast out almost as soon as they were buried; and unfortunately there are many country churchyards now which are terribly overcrowded. A short time after the death of Lawrence Sterne his admirers collected money to put a monument on his grave in St. George’s burial-ground, Bayswater Road. It was erected in what was supposed to be about the right position—no one could point to the exact spot where the body lay.

Thirdly we have the idea of the hungering grave, which is carried to a ridiculous point in this passage from “The Wonderful Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London lying sicke of the Plague.”—“Let us look forth, and try what consolation rises with the sun. Not any, not any; for, before the jewel of the morning be fully set in silver, hundred hungry graves stand gaping; and every one of them (as at a breakfast) hath swallowed downe ten or eleven lifeless carcases. Before dinner, in the same gulfe, are twice so many more devoured. And, before the Sun takes his rest, those numbers are doubled.”

Now the grave is not hungry, and the earth does not want dead bodies; it is better without them. Yet, strangely enough, there is a certain benefit to be derived from a moderate supply, and the most advanced cremationists advocate the use of the few remaining ashes as manure for some kinds of farm lands. Sir Henry Thompson, a cremationist worthy of every honour, has referred to the great increase there would be in the fish supply if burial at sea were generally practised, a plan approved of by some anti-cremationists. We have seen that churchyard water has been drunk for generations, and very bad it is. Churchyard poultry and churchyard mutton are also common enough, many a poor parson being glad to earn a few pounds in the year by allowing sheep to graze among the graves. This is all very well in some country places, but it used to be practised in London, and sheep have been actually killed by swallowing with the grass the poisonous products of the overfilled ground. In the Charterhouse graveyard there are some magnificent wall fruit trees, such as are seldom seen in crowded towns; one of the Stepney pest-fields became a market-garden; while breweries and burial-grounds seem to be closely associated with each other.

But the question of paramount importance is how to stop the increase of cemeteries. Are we ever to allow England to be divided like a chess-board into towns and burial-places? What we have to consider is how to dispose of the dead without taking so much valuable space from the living. In the metropolitan area alone we have almost filled (and in some places overfilled) twenty-four new cemeteries within sixty years, with an area of above six hundred acres; and this is as nothing compared with the huge extent of land used for interments just outside the limits of the metropolis. If the cemeteries are not to extend indefinitely they must in time be built upon, or they must be used for burial over and over again, or the ground must revert to its original state as agricultural land, or we must turn our parks and commons into cemeteries, and let our cemeteries be our only recreation grounds—which Heaven forbid!

I fail to understand how any serious-minded person can harbour the idea that burning the body can be any stumbling-block in the way of its resurrection, for the body returns “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” whether the process takes fifty years or fifty minutes. But many people have a horror of the notion—they know it is sanitary, but they think it irreverent. There are other alternatives, worthy of careful consideration. Some have advocated burial at sea; others, and among them Sir Seymour Haden, have pressed forward the advantages of using perishable coffins, wicker baskets, and the like—a suggestion as excellent as it is economical, for the sooner the earth and the body meet the better it is. Perhaps, in this scientific generation, some one may invent a totally new method of disposing of the dead, which will commend itself both to those who advocate cremation and to those who dislike it. He would indeed be a public benefactor, deserving of the Faraday medal. But that cremation is on the increase cannot be denied. Even Kensal Green Cemetery has now a “Columbarium,” which is an elegant name for pigeon-holes for cinerary urns, built in 1892, with forty-two little cupboards. Since the decision of Mr. Justice Stephen in the case of Dr. William Price, in February, 1884, it has been recognised as legal in England, and the crematoriums at Woking and elsewhere have been frequently used. But if the practice is to become at all general it must be advocated by a different set of people. It has, to a certain extent, happened hitherto that those who have been cremated have been more or less associated (I hope I may not be misunderstood here) with the advanced school—those that consider themselves “enlightened,” Radicals, or Socialists, or persons of little or no professed religious views. This was not the case with the promoters of cremation, but it has been so with some of their disciples, or at any rate many anti-cremationists think so. The Rev. H. R. Haweis is excellent in his way—I speak of him with the greatest respect—but I venture to think that cremation will not be taken up very largely until a few such men as the Archbishop of York, the Chief Rabbi, the Rev. Prebendary Webb Peploe, and Father Staunton pronounce in its favour. Then it would soon be necessary to have a crematorium in every cemetery.

It is morbid and useless to make previous preparation for death, except by life insurance, a proper will, and other business-like arrangements for the benefit of survivors. It is foolish to erect, as many have done, a tomb during lifetime (like the Miller’s tomb on Highdown Hill, Sussex), to keep a coffin under the bed, or to have a picture of a skeleton always on the wall. Such eccentric practices as that of the gentleman who died in a house by Hyde Park, and, at his wish, had his body kept in a coffin under a glass case on the roof of the house, are not to be admired. We can never forget that our life here will have its ending, our friends, companions, and neighbours are constantly leaving us, our daily paper has its daily obituary column, and surely no artificial method is needed to remind us of this fact. Cowper has said:

The utmost we need do, if we do not want our bodies to rest in the cemeteries, is to tell our friends that we wish them cremated, or buried in perishable coffins, or quietly laid in some far-off, rural spot. All else we may leave—it is in higher hands than ours; and already the Church on earth, imperfect, faulty, and divided though she be, has

A few words in closing about the future of the disused burial-grounds in London. I think they are tolerably safe now. I have attempted to show how many there still are, closed and idle, or being used for a totally wrong purpose, between Hampstead and Plumstead, Hammersmith and Bow; but they are surely, if but slowly, being reclaimed and changed, one by one, into places of rest and recreation for the living. The public mind has so far awaked to the necessity of securing all the breathing-spaces which may be had, that the smallest corner of land in which interments can have been said to have taken place now forms a subject of litigation if attempts are made to build upon it. Preservation is the first step upon the ladder, acquisition the next, while conversion crowns them all.

I can foresee no better fate for the disused graveyards than that they should become gardens or playgrounds. The churchyards must be gardens, as green and bright and neat as they can be made, for the older people; and the unconsecrated grounds, detached from places of worship, will serve as playgrounds, many of them having to be reclaimed from their present use as builders’ yards, cooperages, &c. Spa Fields, Clerkenwell, a burial-ground to the history of which I have already referred, is a typical London playground, in the very centre of the town, although surrounded by courts and streets with such rural names as Rosoman Street, Wood Street, Pear-tree Court and Vineyard Walk—grim reminders of what the district was like a hundred years or more ago. Exmouth Street, behind which this open space is situated, is worth a visit. I was there recently, one Monday afternoon. Trucks and stalls with wares of all kinds lined the narrow road, and there seemed scarcely a square yard without a person on it. One woman was selling old garments, of which she had only about six, and these were spread out on the road itself—in the mud. A little farther on I noticed a stall, where two women were making purchases of “freshly-boiled horse-flesh at 2d. a lb.” This was not cut up as for cat’s meat, but was in large, dark brown, shapeless-looking joints. In the middle of the street is the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a huge structure in imitation of an Italian church. It stands on the site of the Spa Fields Chapel, an old round building, removed a few years ago, belonging to the Lady Huntingdon Connexion, which had a stone obelisk in front of it to the memory of Lady Huntingdon, who lived in a neighbouring house. Behind the church is the open space, which is nearly two acres in extent. Originally taken for a tea-garden the speculation failed, and the ground was used as a burial-ground, slightly lower fees being charged than in the neighbouring churchyards. After being grossly overcrowded it was closed for interments in 1853. For several years the space has been used as a drill-ground by the 3rd Middlesex Artillery and the 39th Middlesex Rifles; and in 1885 the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association entered into negotiations with the owner, the Marquis of Northampton, and he generously handed it over at a nominal rental for the purposes of a children’s playground, and subsequently added to it half an acre of adjoining land. The association drained it and carted a large amount of soil and gravel into it, and put up some gymnastic apparatus in the additional piece, which was not a part of the burial-ground. The entrance is from Vineyard Walk, Farringdon Road. When I last visited the playground, although it was a chilly afternoon, a great many children were enjoying themselves, and some women were swinging their little ones. But after or between school-hours is the proper time to see it. Then it is crowded, and every swing, rope, pole, bar, ladder, and skipping-rope is in use, and children are running about all over the open part of the ground.

It is a strange-looking place. On the north-west side is the unfinished apse of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, and on the south side is the parish mortuary, the presence of which does not seem to have any sobering effect upon the children. I watched four boys on the giant’s stride, and when they had vacated it a little girl of about eight years, who had been sitting on a seat with a baby on her lap, and was knitting a long strip with odd bits of coloured wools, beckoned to another sad-looking little girl sitting on my seat, and off they went to take the boys’ places. The baby was deposited on yet another seat, and it wept copiously. But the children did not heed its cries; they had a silent and vigorous turn at the giant’s stride, each holding on to two ropes. They neither spoke nor smiled, and, when they had finished, the one returned to her baby and her knitting and the other clambered on to the back of the long-suffering and well-worn vaulting-horse. They are very strong, some of these poor children, and it is wonderful what they can do. The shabbiest often seem the most active. I noticed one little lad, whose clothes were literally dropping to pieces—shoes, stockings, knickerbockers, and blouse all in tatters—and he twisted himself about on the handle swings, putting his toes through the handles, and performing all sorts of gyrations which many a well-fed boy, clad in the best of flannels, would have given his all to be able to accomplish.

A playground such as Spa Fields is about as different from an ordinary village green, where country boys and girls romp and shout, as two things with the same purpose can well be. For the soft, green grass, you have gritty gravel; for the cackling geese who waddle into the pond, you have a few stray cats walking on the walls; for the picturesque cottages overgrown with roses and honeysuckle, you have the backs of little houses, monotonous in structure, in colour, and in dirt; and instead of resting “underneath the shadow vast of patriarchal tree,” you must be content with a wooden bench close to the wall, bearing on its back the name of the association which laid out the ground. But it is only necessary to have once seen the joy with which the children of our crowded cities hail the formation of such a playground, and the use to which they put it, to be convinced that the trouble of acquiring it, or the cost of laying it out, is amply repaid. They are so crowded at home, so crowded at school, so crowded in the roads, that it seems hard to lose one opportunity of securing a piece of ground, however small, where they can be free to stretch their arms, their legs, and their lungs, away from the dangers and the sad sights of the streets, under the charge of a kindly caretaker,

And can the dead beneath the soil object to the little feet above them? I am sure they cannot. Even Gray, in describing Stoke Pogis Churchyard, which is surrounded by meadows, rejoiced to see the “little footsteps lightly print the ground.” Such a space as Spa Fields may never have been consecrated for the use of the dead, but perchance the omission is in part redeemed by its dedication to the living.