History II
The idea of the burial of the dead into a purpose built, landscaped setting rather than a churchyard gained increasing favour in the nineteenth century and first found concrete expression in the Cemetery of Pere-Lachaise in Paris, begun in 1804. With its formal layout and extensive landscaping, Pere-Lachaise was very influential for proponents of the garden cemetery in the United Kingdom.
Thus currents in eighteenth-century literature, the influence of Classical antiquity and the concrete expression of these ideas in France, created the sensibility, within which the leading advocates of new approaches to the disposal of the departed could contemplate ‘the garden cemetery’ . However, England in the midst of the Industrial Revolution had less esoteric issues to deal with. A chronic lack of burial space in London and the large conurbations in the Midlands and the North was causing increasing concern. This will be discussed in more detail in the following section.
2. Public health factors
Added to literary and cultural factors were more practical reasons why the garden cemetery concept became increasingly attractive. The massive increase in population and high mortality rates had put a huge pressure on burial space in urban churchyards. It became increasingly difficult to bury the dead without disturbing the remains of the previously interred. Moreover, the dead were prey to grave robbers looking for cadavers for dissection, dogs and all manner of vermin. In Bleak House (1852-3), Charles Dickens paints an horrific picture of such an urban graveyard:
Then the active and intelligent, who has got into the morning papers as such, comes with his pauper company to Mr Krooks, and bears off the body of our dear brother here departed, to a hemmed-in church-yard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed … into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to received Christian burial (1890, p. 121).
It is easy to understand that by the dawn of the Victorian era the affluent and professional classes were looking at more fitting and hygienic places for the burial of the dead. For the key figures in the creation of Kensal Green; Carden, Loudon and their financial backers, their time had come. Click here to continue.
