42 Quotes by Catharine Arnold

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, ‘the cult of sepulchral melancholy’ and ‘graveyard gothic’.

Grave clothes were part of a young woman’s trousseau. These grim garments were sewn in the knowledge that they might be needed. For the same reason, a potential bride habitually prepared at least one set of burial clothes for any child she might bear. Babies dying within a month of baptism were buried in their baptismal robes and swaddling bands. Children were often elaborately dressed.

Even in London, where space was at a premium, churchyards were traditionally filled with trees, evidence of a lasting pagan influence.

Despite the fact that England was nominally a Christian country, the church had no reservations about capital punishment, with St Paul and Thomas Aquinas enlisted in its defence.

Commoners’ bones may have been dug up again and slung into a charnel house: for royalty, burial was for ever.

Geoffrey Chaucer’s tender-hearted prioress, Madame Eglantyne, who was said to weep at the sight of a mouse caught in a trap, would nevertheless have had a gallows on her property, upon which, at the hands of her bailiff, she would have hanged thieves.

Bethlem became a byword for thieving, degeneracy and institutionalised corruption. One of the most notorious employees was Peter the Porter, who left his miserable charges to starve and shiver while he traded in their food and bedding.

In the same year, looking for a diversion from ill-health and overwork, Loudon reviewed a three-volume romance entitled The Mummy’s Tale – A Novel, for The Gardener’s magazine. Set in 2126, in an England that had reverted to absolute monarchy, this featured prototypes for espresso machines, air-conditioning and, most prophetically, ‘a communication system that permitted instant world dissemination of news’.

Another practice which also persisted for centuries was that of ‘telling the bees’ when a death had occurred in the family. If this was neglected, it was feared they would abandon their hives, never to return.