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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Death held an especial place in the Victorian psyche. The combination of sentimental literature, with its stressing of the more pathetic (in the sense of pathos) emotions and the evangelical revival ensured that death acquired a prominence in Victorian life that it did not before and has not since.
Notoriously, Victorian literature loved to dwell on death of the pure and helpless, from Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop to Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. The horror genre, typified by Stoker and Poe, dwelt lovingly on bodily decay and life after death, playing expertly on fears of being buried alive. The elegy grew to particular prominence with Tennyson's In Memoriam and Arnold's Thrysis, while such works as Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel and Wuthering Heights aestheticised death as a state of romantic longing. Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, noted the particular place tuberculosis held for the Victorian mind; it was a wasting disease founded on passion, a consumption of the life force. In painting, Ophelia was perhaps the most obsessive figure for the Pre-Raphaelite painter, perfectly unifying Thanatos and Eros and represented in her listless state by Watts, Rossetti, Millais, Hughes and Waterhouse. It is not for nothing for that Pre-Raphaelite angels grace most of the Victorian cemeteries. Much the same applied to children; throughout the likes of Dickens and Kingsley there is the sense that death is a blessed release that prevents children from ever falling from a primal state of innocence and being corrupted by the world (a rather palpable variant of which occurs in Hardy's Jude the Obscure). The work of Hans Christian Anderson (a house guest of Dickens) in particular can only be described as thanatophilic; the virtue of the little mermaid will be rewarded in heaven not through wedded bliss. Consider the mesmeric battles in Stoker's Lair of the White Worm and how they leave that novel's heroine drained of her vitality or the similar outcomes in Trilby. Spiritualism became increasingly popular, with Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger proceeding from exploring a lost world of dinosaurs in one story to exploring the other world in a later narrative; not for nothing is it said that the Victorians treated death as simply another territory to be conquered.
More empirically, as the population of nineteenth century London increased and social conditions deteriorated, the demands on London's cemeteries rapidly exceeded the available space. High property prices and the crowded condition of London’s churchyards led to incidents of bodysnatching and of older graves being emptied to make way for the new. The solution, for the upper and middle classes at least, was to build seven new cemeteries at a remove from the city, of which Kensal Green was the first. Funerals promptly went into fashion and came to cost far more than weddings, with both the ceremony and the tomb having to be as grandiose as possible. In short, the 'mighty seven' cemeteries represent a form of ritual, as much as photographs, death masks and portraits of the recently deceased produced by the Victorians or jewellery that utilised a locket of the dead person's hair, extravagant funerals and the wearing of black crepe.
Covering a considerable expanse, Kensal’s necropolis represents as formidable an example of Victorian engineering and architecture as the museums in Kensington or the Houses of Parliament. The tombs cover a bewildering range of styles, from obelisks and pyramids to mourning angels (often with a trumpet to herald the day of the resurrection), to funerary urns half covered with veils, broken pillars (symbolising a life cut short) as well as the vogue for Celtic crosses. The results remind me of Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial, wherein two profoundly different philosophies rest in uncomfortable proximity, namely Browne's faith in christ and the resurrection on the one hand and his antiquarian interest in such pagan habits as cremation and mummification on the other. The funerary urns are especially redolent of this, pointing as they do to Roman burial practices; in spite of cremation typically being considered pagan and unconscionable. One of the graves in Kensal Green is that of the judge who presided over a notorious case, whereby scandalised Welsh villagers realised that the self-proclaimed Archdruid William Price had taken the remains of his five month old son (rather inevitably named ‘Jesus Christ’) to a nearby hill in order to cremate the corpse. The villagers halted the ceremony and a court case followed, whereupon it was finally decided that cremation could be legalised.
Kensal Green was the first of the 'mighty seven' cemeteries to be constructed and perhaps the most impressive. While the trees were still leafless when I went to Highgate, Kensal had a perversely bucolic aspect in the sunshine with buttercups and daisies flowering as a Green Woodpecker perched on top of one of the graves and squirrels played between the tombs. Conrad mentions Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard and there seem little doubt that the design of these 'garden cemeteries' was an attempt to offer the dead a form of rest that was far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife. Kensal Green would certainly have been rural when it was built, but today the cemetery is dominated by the rusting skeletons of two gasometers and the louring presence of Erno Goldfinger's brutalist Trellick Tower. Where Highgate has a hermetic aspect to it that leaves it largely divorced from the surrounding world, Kensal’s ugly brick walls do comparatively little to insulate it from the world of the living.
Nonetheless, where a modern cemetery is orderly and utilitarian, Kensal Green is filled with the mythology of the underworld. The decaying monuments along the central avenue cover every conceivable architectural style, with sphinxes, angels, wyverns and atlantes guarding tombs designed in Neo-classical austerity, Gothic Revival intricacy and even in the Egyptian style that become fashionable after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Columns, pillars and caskets on one side of the central avenue compete with obelisks, spires and canopies on the other. The tomb of Sir William Casement is perhaps most striking in this respect. Egyptian tombs were often found to contain Shabti, funerary figures made of wood, stone or faience, that would serve as servants in the afterlife. Sir William Casement was a Victorian general who had served in India. This depiction of an Indian servant (allegedly), is one of four flanking each corner of his tomb's canopy and rather reminds me of a Shabti.
Most poignant is the tomb of Mary Gibson, a neo-classical canopy supported by two pillars at each corner and surmounted by four stone angels. Built in the ostentatious but less than durable choice of marble, the tomb has weathered badly, with the wreath previously held by the angels having already crumbed to dust. The pillars have already weakened badly and the collapse of the entire edifice will not be long delayed. My feelings about this are decidedly ambivalent; I am saddened to see so many of the tombs being slowly corroded into nothingness but am equally conscious that I am enough of a Romantic to be fascinated by decay and ruin (Conrad notes the disturbingly carious aspect assumed by many of the broken tombstones). Had I seen many of these tombs before they had been weathered and eroded I would doubtless have thought them the pretentious product of an over-moneyed middle class (lacking the need to gain a place in history through their monuments, the likes of Brunel, Babbage or Thackeray all have more restrained tombs).
Walking round it feels like discovering the ruins of an ancient city, a London Angkor Wat. Nonetheless, this remains a cemetery of the bourgeois and the excluded. The most impressive tombs belong to enterprising charlatans who had got rich through such fields as circus equestrianism or by selling quack patent remedies that they refused to take on their own death beds, while the other extreme is represented by writers like Trollope and Hood who were not considered worthy of being embraced by Westminster Abbey and by disgraced royals who had either committed indiscretions with Equerries or who had contracted morganatic marriages in contravention of the Royal Marriage Act, which states that permission for Royal offspring under a certain age to marry must be granted by the sovereign. These tombs only serve to reinforce the impression of Kensal Green as a city of the dead, with the list of characters residing there bearing a marked resemblance to the sort of caricature a Trollope or Thackeray novel would be filled with (though perhaps not a Dickens novel; internment here being sufficiently expensive to exclude the working classes). For example, there is Dr James Barry, a successful army doctor who worked tirelessly to improve Cape Town's water system, performed one of the first known successful Caesarean sections, sought to improve the conditions of the common soldier and fought several duels whenever he felt himself slighted. He was only unmasked as a woman after her death, having concealed the fact (as well as the signs of pregnancy) from even her closest associates, a feat worthy of a Wilkie Collins heroine (or possibly a Sherlock Holmes story: The Strange Case of Dr James Miranda Barry perhaps).
For a further plot that could only have been contrived by a Braddon or Collins sensation novel, there is the tomb of the Duke of Portland. The Duke was an eccentric recluse, who permitted no-one except his valet to see him in person in his quarters and had double letterboxes built into his rooms; one for ingoing mail and another for outgoing mail. It was in short, inevitable that he became a source of gossip, ranging from suspicions of disfigurement, madness or wild orgies. These Lerouxesque rumours were only further fuelled by the fact that the Duke had built an underground labyrinth of passages beneath his estate. Built by a veritable army of workmen, the labyrinth had contained a ballroom, a library, a billiards room and an observatory with a glass roof. The ballroom had a hydraulic lift (admittedly not that uncommon; Kensal’s Greek revival Chapel comes equipped with hydraulic catafalque that leads down into the catacombs) that could carry 20 guests from the surface and a ceiling that was painted as a giant sunset, all of which seems somewhat excessive, given that the Duke was far too reclusive to hold any balls in it. The tunnels were alleged to have emerged at Worksop railway station and were wide enough at several points for two carriages to pass by one another. However, if the Duke had business in London, it seems that in practice he took his hearse to Worksop and had the whole carriage loaded onto a railway truck. Upon his arrival to his London residence in Cavendish Square, all the household staff was ordered out of sight when he hurried into his study through the front hall.
Upon his death the tunnels became the locus of a claim by a certain Anna Maria Druce that her husband and the Duke were one and the same, thereby entitling her son to inherit the Duke’s Portland estate. Her contention was that her husband had faked his death in order to return to a secluded existence on his estate, having previously used the tunnels and the railway to move between his two lives unobserved. A legal case of a similar order of magnitude to Jarndyce and Jarndyce ensued and was only resolved when the cadaver of Mr Druce was exhumed from Highgate Cemetery and found to be present and correct, in spite of the claim from Mrs Druce that the coffin contained only lead weights. Two witnesses were tried for perjury while Anna Maria was confined to an asylum.
Kensal Green does have one important characteristic that I have entirely elided from this account; it is still a working cemetery that is still run by the same company that established it. Though ostensibly Anglican, the presence of Cyrillic and Hebrew on many of the modern tombs suggests a more ecumenical approach. As graves here are every bit as expensive today as they were for the Victorians, it is notable that Chinese appears a popular lingua franca across many recent tombs, presumably representing one of the city’s more enterprising communities. It’s interesting to think of what future visitors will make of these once they are as worn and decayed as their Victorian forebears. It seems to me that the differences of language and style for the modern graves seem slight when set againt the Victorian profusion of imagery and its babel-like quality.
Labels: Architecture, Culture, Decay, History, London, Macabre
posted by Richard 7:58 pm
