The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [83]
The newfangled invention of metal coffins in the nineteenth century did not go unchallenged. An admonition on the subject was delivered by Lord Stowell, judge of the Consistory Court of London, who in 1820 was called upon to decide a case felicitously titled Gilbert v. Buzzard. At issue was the right to bury a corpse in a newly patented iron coffin. The church wardens protested that if parishioners were to get into the habit of burying their dead in coffins made proof against normal decay, in a few generations there would be no burial space left.
Said Lord Stowell, “The rule of law which says that a man has a right to be buried in his own churchyard is to be found, most certainly, in many of our authoritative text writers; but it is not quite so easy to find the rule which gives him the rights of burying a large chest or trunk in company with himself.” He spoke approvingly of attempts to abolish use of sepulchral chests “on the physical ground that the dissolution of bodies would be accelerated, and the dangerous virulence of the fermentation disarmed by a speedy absorption of the noxious particles into the surrounding soil.”
The inexorable upward thrust towards perfection in metal caskets was not, however, destined to be halted by judicial logic. Just one hundred years after the decision in Gilbert v. Buzzard, a triumph of the first magnitude was recorded by the D. H. Hill Casket Company of Chicago, and described in their 1920 Catalogue of Funeral Merchandise: “A Study in Bronze: When Robert Fulton said he could propel a boat by steam his friends were sure he was mentally deranged—that it could not be done. When Benjamin Franklin said he could draw electricity from the clouds his acquaintances thought he was crazy—that it could not be done. When our designing and manufacturing departments said they could and would produce a CAST BRONZE CASKET that would be the peer of anything yet developed, their friends and associates shook their heads sympathetically, feeling that it would be a hopeless task. All three visions have come to be realities—the steamboat, electricity, and the Hilco Peerless Cast Bronze Burial Receptacle.”
The production of ever more solid and durable metal caskets has soared in this century; their long-lasting and even “eternal” qualities have become a matter of pride and self-congratulation throughout the industry—and this in one area of manufacture where built-in obsolescence might seem (as Lord Stowell pointed out) to present certain advantages. As we have seen, the sales of metal caskets now exceed sales of the old-fashioned wooden types. A brand-new tradition has been established; how deep are the roots, Messrs. Habenstein and Lamers?
Mourning symbols have run the gamut. In medieval England and in colonial America, the skull and crossbones was the favored symbol, making its appearance on everything connected with death, from tombstone to funeral pall to coffin maker’s sign. Funerary extravagance took the form of elaborate mourning clothes, the hiring of mutes (or paid mourners), tremendous feasting sometimes of many days’ duration, and gifts to the living, who were showered with rings, scarves, needlework, books, and, most customarily, gloves.
Funeral flowers, today the major mourning symbol and a huge item of national expenditure, did not make their appearance in England or America until after the middle of the nineteenth century, and only then over the opposition of church leaders.
From colonial days until the nineteenth century, the American funeral was almost exclusively a family affair, in the sense that the family and close friends performed most of the duties in connection with the dead body itself. It was they who washed and laid out the body, draped it in a winding sheet, and ordered the coffin from the local carpenter. It was they who carried the coffin on foot