ABSTRACT
In its July-December volume for 1852, Punch published the following letter regarding ‘Speculative Sympathy’:
Signed by ‘Dolor,’ Punch’s comic account of these enterprising purveyors of mourning drapery continues the satiric campaign it had waged against commercial greed in the funeral industry since the late 1840s. The self-interested opposition of undertakers to proposals for government regulation and the closure of unsanitary city churchyards elicited verse parodies, such as ‘The Jolly Undertakers,’ ‘A Funeral After Sir John Moore’s (Furnished by an Undertaker),’ and ‘The Song of the Undertaker,’2 and cartoons such as ‘“Performers” after a Respectable Funeral,’
and ‘The Starved-Out Undertakers.’ Dickens shared Punch’s scorn for the elaborate customs associated with the ‘respectable’ Victorian funeral, so it is hardly surprising that, as a campaigning periodical, Household Words also devoted attention to the topical issue of funerary reform. Dickens filled his journal with articles about bodies, graveyards, monuments, epitaphs, and the like, many of which show an ambivalent response to the whole idea of trading in death and raise wider questions as to how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. In its consideration of the Victorian management of death, the journal takes a different direction from those accounts of commodity culture I have examined so far by revealing instances of conflict or tension concerning the commodity status of the goods and services involved. It gives attention to three areas of conflicted trade-the commercial development of the Victorian funeral, including both the state and the ‘respectable’ funeral; the growth of commercial cemeteries; and bodysnatching and the commodification of corpses-all of which represent, to use the term employed by property law theorist Margaret Jane Radin, ‘contested commodities.’4 All show evidence of the widening scope of the market in the nineteenth century, as an increasing range of objects and relationships came to be identified and treated as marketable goods and services.
