ABSTRACT
THERE has long been a minority of people who resented and even rejected the public
display of wealth and social snobbery attached to grand funerals. Confucius believed that,
‘In funeral rites, it is more important to have the real sentiment of sorrow than minute
St Swithin, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of
England, who died on 2 July 862 AD, shared these sentiments and left instructions that
his body was not to be buried in splendour inside the Cathedral, but outside in the
churchyard amongst the poor. This was duly done, but later the Cathedral authorities
decided that his body should be moved to a more suitable position beneath the High
Altar, accompanied by a gorgeous procession. The date was fixed for 15 July. The saint, so the legend goes, in fury at this scant regard for his views, sent heavy rain which lasted
for forty days and washed out all the plans for moving his corpse-hence the belief that
on 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, ‘if that day is fair or foul, it will be fair or foul for forty
In the nineteenth century the stranglehold of funeral and mourning ritual caused more
voices to speak out. Pleas for greater simplicity and sincerity were made, though few had
the courage to break away from the etiquette demanded by respectable society. In the
United States of America, in 1825, a tract was published by the New Bedford Book and
Tract Association denouncing ‘these trappings of grief’ as ‘indifferent and childish where
Thomas Moore, the poet, took part in Lord Byron’s funeral procession, which started
from Westminster Abbey, on its way to Newstead, on 12 July 1824. He was horrified to find that there were ‘few respectable persons amongst the crowd; and the whole ceremony…mixing with my recollections of him as was gone, produced a combination of disgust and sadness that was deeply painful to me.’ A year later, at his own father’s
funeral in Dublin, the same feelings of revulsion returned. The scene shocked and
afflicted me beyond anything,’ he wrote. ‘The vulgar apparatus of the ceremony seems
Thackeray, too, hated the hypocrisy. In a description of a country squire’s funeral, in
Vanity Fair, set in the 1820s, he wrote of
…the family in black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses, ready
for tears which did not come: the undertaker and his gentlemen in deep
tribulation: the select tenantry mourning out of compliment to the new landlord:
the neighbouring gentry’s carriage at three miles an hour, empty, and in
profound affliction: the parson speaking out the formula about ‘our dear dear brother departed’. As long as we have a man’s body, we play our Vanities upon
it, surrounding it with humbug and ceremonies, laying it in State, and packing it
up in gilt nails and velvet; and we finish our duty by placing over it a stone,
Charles Greville shared this disgust but explained the conformist attitude of most
mourners. After his sister-in-law’s funeral, in 1841, he was angry at the ‘decking us out in
the paraphernalia of woe, and then dragging us in mourning coaches through crowds of
curious people, by a circuitous route, that as much of us as possible might be exhibited to
vulgar curiosity. These things,’ he added, ‘are monstrous in themselves but to which all
Royal funerals were not free from criticism. Greville was shocked at the funeral of
William IV, in 1837, by ‘the host of persons of all ranks and stations…who loitered
through the lofty halls chattering and laughing and with nothing of woe about them but
their garb.’ Greville decided that he ‘would rather be quietly consigned to the grave by a
few who cared for me (if any such there be) than be the object of all this parade and
The Duke of Sussex, the late King’s brother, vowed, after attending this
ceremony, that he would not be buried at Windsor, and, accordingly, in 1843, he was
Dickens mocked at the snobbery and ingratiating insincerity of Victorian undertakers in
many of his novels. At the funeral of Pip’s sister, in Great Expectations, Joe Gargery,
surrounded by the seedy employees of Trabb and Co, the local undertakers, whispers
sadly to Pip, ‘I would in preference have carried her to the church myself, along with
three or four friendly ones wot come to it willingly harts and arms, but it were considered
wot the neighbours would look down on such and would be of opinions as it were
149 William Morris’s hearse-a hay-cart, painted yellow with bright red
wheels and wreathed in vine, alder and bulrushes, 6 October
1896. (Willliam Morris Gallery, Walthamstow)
attitudes. He left detailed instructions for his own funeral and when he died, in 1896, his
coffin was made of unpolished oak with wrought-iron handles. It was covered with a length of his own ‘Broussa’ brocade and laid in a hay-cart, painted with a yellow body
and bright red wheels. The wagon was wreathed in vine, alder and bulrushes, over a
carpet of moss. The wreath was made from bay leaves. Morris’s friend, W.R.Lethaby,
Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts, wrote afterwards, ‘It was the only
As a Socialist, Morris’s rejection of high Victorian society was total but others, whose
views were much less radical, had also begun to question the merits of funeral etiquette
and a gradual softening of the rules had started. The peak of elaboration was reached in
the 1850-85 period when respectable f amilies seem to have been virtually terrorised into
accepting all the expense and ritual. Finally the cult overreached itself and the tide began
to turn. In 1880 the Church of England Burial, Funeral and Mourning Reform
The reforms were
accepted slowly but eventually marked the definite downfall of the ‘dismal trade’. It was the terrible slaughter of the First World War that undoubtedly caused the major
breakdown in funeral and mourning etiquette. At first the conventions were maintained, especially in France-a largely Catholic country. ‘Lucile’, Lady Duff Gordon, who had
opened the Paris branch of her London couture business in 1911, remembered the
dramatic effect of the war. In 1914 she wrote: ‘In one week Paris was a changed city. The
streets were full of women dressed in black; the churches were crowded all day
long…The shops were almost deserted, everybody was too busy doing some sort of war
work to want to buy clothes and for the first time in a century the Parisienne was almost
Edna Woolman Chase, international editor of Vogue,
confirmed that in France ‘in a country where heavy mourning had long been a tradition’ mourning ‘seeped like a dark tide through the towns and countryside as the casualty lists
In Britain, too, mourning wear was widely worn, but it seems not so much as in
France. Geoffrey Gorer writes that his mother was widowed early in the war when his
father was drowned in the Lusitania disaster. ‘In the summer of 1915 and thereafter,
so that his mother no
longer stood out alone in her black weeds. In the summer of 1918, the private view of the
Royal Academy exhibition was reported in the Illustrated London News.
