At Home - Bill Bryson [146]
The operation of digging, as performed by a gardener, consists of thrusting the iron part of the spade, which acts as a wedge, perpendicularly into the ground by the application of the foot, and then using the long handle as a lever, to raise up the loosened earth and turn it over.
The whole book is like that, describing in almost painful detail the most mundane and obvious actions. It is practically unreadable now and it probably wasn’t greatly read then. The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn’t what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something. It came at exactly the right moment to catch the nation’s fancy. In 1841, middle-class women everywhere were bored out of their skulls by the rigidities of life and grateful for any suggestion of diversion. Gardening for Ladies remained lucratively in print for the rest of the century. And it really did encourage them to get their hands dirty. The whole of the second chapter was devoted to manure.
Apart from its appeal as a recreation, there was a second, rather more unexpected impetus behind the rise of the garden movement in the nineteenth century, and one in which John Claudius Loudon also played a central role. The age was vividly marked by epidemics of cholera and other contagions, which killed vast numbers. This didn’t make people want to garden exactly, but it did lead to a general longing for fresh air and open spaces, particularly as it became inescapably evident that urban graveyards were on the whole squalid, overcrowded, and unhealthy.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, London had just 218 acres of burial grounds. People were packed into them in densities almost beyond imagining. When the poet William Blake died in 1827, he was buried, at Bunhill Fields, on top of three others; later, four more were placed on top of him. By such means London’s burial places absorbed staggering heaps of dead flesh. St. Marylebone Parish Church packed an estimated one hundred thousand bodies into a burial ground of just over an acre. Where the National Gallery now stands on Trafalgar Square was the modest burial ground of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church. It held seventy thousand bodies in an area about the size of a modern bowling green, and uncounted thousands more were interred in the crypts inside.
In 1859, when St. Martin’s announced its intention to clear out the crypts, the naturalist Frank Buckland decided to find the coffin of the great surgeon and anatomist John Hunter so that his remains could be reinterred at Westminster Abbey, and Buckland left a riveting account of what he found inside: “Mr Burstall having unlocked the ponderous oak door of the vault No. 3, we threw the light of our bull’s eye lantern into the vault, and then I beheld a sight I shall never forget.” In the shadowy gloom before him were thousands upon thousands of jumbled and broken coffins, crammed everywhere, as if deposited by a tsunami. It took Buckland sixteen days of dedicated searching to find his quarry.
Unfortunately, no one took similar pains with any of the other coffins, which were roughly carted off to unmarked graves in other cemeteries. In consequence the whereabouts of the mortal remains of quite a number of worthies—the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale,