ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to point out one important influence hitherto missed by historians of death. It argues that diat both the professionalization of undertaking and the development of the extramural cemeteries received strong impetus from public fear of grave-robbery for dissection. The chapter focuses on to suggest that one of the sources for the extraordinary energy directed towards the celebration of death in the Victorian era may have derived from the Georgian horror of bodysnatching. Modern perceptions of the Victorian celebration of death are probably broadly correct. Readers may have a mental picture of the Victorian funeral, with its glass hearses led by undertakers with hats festooned in black, their black horses attired in black velvet and nodding black plumes. Difficulty in defining and facing death perhaps underlay both uncertainty concerning the possibility of a tie between body and soul after death, and the body’s ambiguous spiritual status.
