At Home - Bill Bryson [147]
Many churches made most of their money from burials, and were loath to give up such lucrative business. At the Enon Baptist Chapel on Clement’s Lane in Holborn (now the site of the campus of the London School of Economics), the church authorities managed to cram a colossal twelve thousand bodies in the cellar in just nineteen years. Not surprisingly, such a volume of rotting flesh created odors that could not well be contained. It was a rare service in which several worshippers didn’t faint. Eventually, most stopped coming altogether, but still the chapel kept accepting bodies for interment. The parson needed the income.
Burial grounds grew so full that it was almost impossible to turn a spade of soil without bringing up some decaying limb or other organic relic. Bodies were buried in such shallow and cursory graves that often they were exposed by scavenging animals or rose spontaneously to the surface, the way rocks do in flowerbeds, and had to be redeposited. Mourners in cities almost never attended at graveside to witness a burial itself. The experience was simply too upsetting, and widely held to be dangerous in addition. Anecdotal reports abounded of graveyard visitors struck down by putrid emanations. A Dr. Walker testified to a parliamentary inquiry that graveyard workers, before disturbing a coffin, would drill a hole in the side, insert a tube, and burn off the escaping gases—a process that could take twenty minutes, he reported. He knew of one man who failed to observe the usual precautions and was felled instantly—“as if struck with a cannon-ball”—by the gases from a fresh grave. “To inhale this gas, undiluted with atmospheric air, is instant death,” confirmed the committee in its written report, “and even when much diluted it is productive of disease which commonly ends in death.” Till late in the century, the medical journal The Lancet ran occasional reports of people overcome by bad air while visiting graveyards.
The sensible solution to all this horrid foulness, it seemed to many, was to move cemeteries out of the cities altogether and make them more like parks. Joseph Paxton was an enthusiast for the idea, but the person principally behind the movement was the tireless and ubiquitous John Claudius Loudon. In 1843, Loudon wrote and published On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards—an unexpectedly timely book, as it happened, since he would need a cemetery himself before the year was out. One of the problems with London cemeteries, Loudon pointed out, was that they were mostly built on heavy clay soils, which didn’t drain well and thus promoted festering and stagnation. Suburban cemeteries, he suggested, could be sited on sandy or gravel soils where the bodies planted within them would become, in effect, wholesome compost. Liberal plantings of trees and shrubs would not only create a bucolic air but also soak up any miasmas that leaked out of the graves and replace foul airs with fresh ones. Loudon designed three of these new model cemeteries and made them practically indistinguishable from parks. Unfortunately, he was not able to rest eternally in one of his own creations, as he died, worn out by overwork, before they could be built. However, he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, in West London, which was founded on similar principles.
Cemeteries became, improbably, de facto parks. On Sunday afternoons, people went to them not just to pay their respects to the dear departed but also to stroll, take the air, and have picnics. Highgate Cemetery in North London, with its long views and imposing monuments, became a tourist attraction in its own right. People living nearby purchased gate keys so that they could let themselves in and out whenever it suited them. The largest of all was Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey,