(STRICTLY PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL.)
I address you, gentlemen, as an humble individual who is much concerned
about the body. This little joke is purely a professional one. It must
go no further. I am afraid the public thinks uncharitably of
undertakers, and would consider it a proof that Dr. Johnson was right
when he said that the man who would make a pun would pick a pocket.
Well; we all try to do the best we can for ourselves,—everybody else as
well as undertakers. Burials may be expensive, but so is legal redress.
So is spiritual provision; I mean the maintenance of all our reverends
and right reverends. I am quite sure that both lawyers’ charges and the
revenues of some of the chief clergy are very little, if any, more
reasonable than our own prices. Pluralities are as bad as crowded
gravepits, and I don’t see that there is a pin to choose between the
church and the churchyard. Sanitary revolutionists and incendiaries
accuse us of gorging rottenness, and battening on corruption. We don’t
do anything of the sort, that I see, to a greater extent than other
professions, which are allowed to be highly respectable. Political
military, naval, university, and clerical parties of great eminence
defend abuses in their several lines when profitable. We can’t do better
than follow such good examples. Let us stick up for business, and—I was
going to say—leave society to take care of itself. No; that is just what
we should endeavour to prevent society from doing. The world is growing
too wise for us, gentlemen. Accordingly, this Interments Bill, by which
our interests are so seriously threatened, has been brought into
Parliament. We must join heart and hand to defeat and crush it. Let us
nail our colours—which I should call the black flag—to the mast, and let
our war-cry be, “No surrender!” or else our motto will very soon be,
“Resurgam;” in other words, it will be all up with us. We stand in a
critical position in regard to public opinion. In order to determine
what steps to take for protecting business, we ought to see our danger.
I wish, therefore, to state the facts of our case clearly to you; and I
say let us face them boldly, and not blink them. Therefore, I am going
to speak plainly and plumply on this subject.
There is no doubt—between ourselves—that what makes our trade so
profitable is the superstition, weakness, and vanity of parties. We
can’t disguise this fact from ourselves, and I only wish we may be able
to conceal it much longer from others. As enlightened undertakers, we
must admit that we are of no more use on earth than scavengers. All the
good we do is to bury people’s dead out of their sight. Speaking as a
philosopher—which an undertaker surely ought to be—I should say that our
business is merely to shoot rubbish. However, the rubbish is human
rubbish, and bereaved parties have certain feelings which require that
it should be shot gingerly. I suppose such sentiments are natural, and
will always prevail. But I fear that people will by and by begin to
think that pomp, parade, and ceremony are unnecessary upon melancholy
occasions. And whenever this happens, Othello’s occupation will, in a
great measure, be gone.
I tremble to think of mourning relatives considering seriously what is
requisite—and all that is requisite—for decent interment, in a rational
point of view. Nothing more, I am afraid Common Sense would say, than to
carry the body in the simplest chest, and under the plainest covering,
only in a solemn and respectful manner, to the grave, and lay it in the
earth with proper religious ceremonies. I fear Common Sense would be of
opinion that mutes, scarfs, hatbands, plumes of feathers, black horses,
mourning coaches, and the like, can in no way benefit the defunct, or
comfort surviving friends, or gratify anybody but the mob, and the
street-boys. But happily, Common Sense has not yet acquired an influence
which would reduce every burial to a most low affair.
Still, people think now more than they did, and in proportion as they do
think, the worse it will be for business. I consider that we have a most
dangerous enemy in Science. That same Science pokes its nose into
everything—even vaults and churchyards. It has explained how grave-water
soaks into adjoining wells, and has shocked and disgusted people by
showing them that they are drinking their dead neighbours. It has taught
parties resident in large cities that the very air they live in reeks
with human remains, which steam up from graves; and which, of course,
they are continually breathing. So it makes out churchyards to be worse
haunted than they were formerly believed to be by ghosts, and, I may
add, vampyres, in consequence of the dead continually rising from them
in this unpleasant manner. Indeed, Science is likely to make people
dread them a great deal more than Superstition ever did, by showing that
their effluvia breed typhus and cholera; so that they are really and
truly very dangerous. I should not be surprised to hear some sanitary
lecturer say, that the fear of churchyards was a sort of instinct
implanted in the mind, to prevent ignorant people and children from
going near such unwholesome places.
It would be comparatively well if the mischief done us by
Science—Medicine and Chemistry, and all that sort of thing—stopped here.
The mere consideration that burial in the heart of cities is unhealthy,
would but lead to extramural interment, to which our only
objection—though even that is no very trifling one—is that it would
diminish mortality, and consequently our trade. But this
Science—confound it!—shows that the dead do not remain permanently in
their coffins, even when the sextons of metropolitan graveyards will let
them. It not only informs Londoners that they breathe and drink the
deceased; but it reveals how the whole of the defunct party is got rid
of, and turned into gases, liquids, and mould. It exposes the way in
which all animal matter—as it is called in chemical books—is dissolved,
evaporates, and disappears; and is ultimately, as I may say, eaten up by
Nature, and goes to form parts of plants, and of other living creatures.
So that, if gentlemen really wanted to be interred with the remains of
their ancestors, it would sometimes be possible to comply with their
wishes only by burying them with a quantity of mutton—not to say with
the residue of another quadruped than the sheep, which often grazes in
churchyards. Science, in short, is hammering into people’s heads truths
which they have been accustomed merely to gabble with their mouths—that
all flesh is indeed grass, or convertible into it; and not only that the
human frame does positively turn to dust, but into a great many things
besides. Now, I say, that when they become really and truly convinced of
all this; when they know and reflect that the body cannot remain any
long time in the grave which it is placed in; I am sadly afraid that
they will think twice before they will spend from thirty to several
hundred pounds in merely putting a corpse into the ground to decompose.
The only hope for us if these scientific views become general, is, that
embalming will be resorted to; but I question if the religious feeling
of the country will approve of a practice which certainly seems rather
like an attempt to arrest a decree of Providence; and would, besides, be
very expensive. Here I am reminded of another danger, to which our
prospects are exposed. It is that likely to arise from serious parties,
in consequence of growing more enlightened, thinking consistently with
their religious principles, instead of their religion being a mere
sentimental kind of thing which they never reason upon. We often, you
know, gentlemen, overhear the bereaved remarking that they trust the
departed is in a better place. Why, if this were not a mere customary
saying on mournful occasions—if the parties really believed this—do you
think they would attach any importance to the dead body which we bury
underground? No; to be sure: they would look upon it merely as a suit of
left-off clothes—with the difference of being unpleasant and offensive,
and not capable of being kept. They would see that a spirit could care
no more about the corpse it had quitted, than a man who had lost his
leg, would for the amputated limb. The truth is—don’t breathe it, don’t
whisper it, except to the trade—that the custom of burying the dead with
expensive furniture; of treating a corpse as if it were a sensible
being; arises from an impression—though parties won’t own it, even to
themselves—that what is buried, is the actual individual, the man
himself. The effect of thinking seriously, and at the same time
rationally, will be to destroy this notion, and with it to put an end to
all the splendour and magnificence of funerals, arising from it.
Moreover, religious parties, being particular as to their moral conduct,
would naturally consider it wrong and wicked to spend upon the dead an
amount of money which might be devoted to the benefit of the living; and
no doubt, when we come to look into it, such expenditure is much the
same thing with the practice of savages and heathens in burying bread,
and meat, and clothes, along with their deceased friends.
I have been suggesting considerations which are very discouraging, and
which afford but a poor look-out to us undertakers. But, gentlemen, we
have one great comfort still. It has become the fashion to inter bodies
with parade and display. Fashion is fashion; and the consequence is that
it is considered an insult to the memory of deceased parties not to bury
them in a certain style; which must be respectable at the very least,
and cost, on a very low average, twenty-five or thirty pounds. Many,
such as professional persons and tradespeople, who cannot afford so much
money, can still less afford to lose character and custom. That is where
we have a pull upon the widows and children, many of whom, if it were
not for the opinion of society, would be only too happy to save their
little money, and turn it into food and clothing, instead of funeral
furniture.
Now here the Metropolitan Interments Bill steps in, and aims at
destroying our only chance of keeping up business as heretofore. We have
generally to deal with parties whose feelings are not in a state to
admit of their making bargains with us—a circumstance, on their parts,
which is highly creditable to human nature; and favourable to trade.
Thus, in short, gentlemen, we have it all our own way with them. But
this Bill comes between the bereaved party and the undertaker. By the
twenty-seventh clause, it empowers the Board of Health to provide houses
and make arrangements for the reception and care of the dead previously
to, and until interment; in order, as it explains in a subsequent
clause, to the accommodation of persons having to provide the
funerals—supposing such persons to desire the accommodation. Clause the
twenty-eighth enacts “That the said Board shall make provision for the
management and conduct, by persons appointed by them, of the funerals of
persons whose bodies are to be interred in the Burial Grounds, to be
provided under this Act, where the representatives of the deceased, or
the persons having the care and direction of the funeral, desire to have
the same so conducted; and the said Board shall fix and publish a scale
of the sums to be payable for such funerals, inclusive of all matters
and services necessary for the same, such sums to be proportioned to the
description of the funeral, or the nature of the matter and services to
be furnished and rendered for the same; but so that in respect of the
lowest of such sums, the funerals may be conducted with decency and
solemnity.” Gentlemen, if this enactment becomes law, we shall lose all
the advantages which we derive from bereaved parties’ state of mind. The
Board of Health will take all trouble off their hands, at whatever sum
they may choose to name. Of course they will apply to the Board of
Health instead of coming to us. But what is beyond everything
prejudicial to our interests, is the proviso “that in respect of the
lowest of such sums, the funerals may be conducted with decency and
solemnity.” Hitherto it has been understood that so much respect could
not be paid in the case of what we call a low affair as in one of a
certain style. We have always considered that a funeral ought to cost so
much to be respectable at all. Therefore relations have gone to more
expense with us, than they would otherwise have been willing to incur,
in order to secure proper respect. But if proper respect is to be had at
a low figure, the strongest hold that we have upon sorrowing relatives,
will be taken away.
It is all very fine to say that we are a necessary class of tradesmen,
and if this Bill passes must continue to be employed. If this Bill does
pass we shall be employed simply as tradesmen, and shall obtain, like
other tradesmen, a mere market price for our articles, and common hire
for our labour. I am afraid that it will be impossible to persuade the
public that this would not be perfectly just and right. I think,
therefore, that we had better not attack the Bill on its merits, but try
to excite opposition against it on the ground of its accessary clauses.
Let us oppose it as a scheme of jobbery, devised with a view to the
establishment of offices and appointments. Let us complain as loudly as
we can of its creating a new rate to defray the expenses of its working,
and let us endeavour to get up a good howl against that clause of it
which provides for compensation to incumbents, clerks, and sextons. We
must cry out with all our might upon its centralising tendency, and of
course make the most we can out of the pretence that it violates the
sanctity of the house of mourning, and outrages the most fondly
cherished feelings of Englishmen. Urge these objections upon
church-wardens, overseers, and vestrymen; and especially din the
objection to a burial rate into their ears. Recollect, our two great
weapons—like those of all good old anti-reformers—are cant and clamour.
Keep up the same cry against the Bill perseveringly, no matter how
thoroughly it may be refuted or proved absurd. Literally, make the
greatest noise in opposition to it that you are able, especially at
public meetings. There, recollect a groan is a groan, and a hiss a hiss,
even though proceeding from a goose. On all such occasions do your
utmost to create a disturbance, to look like a popular demonstration
against the measure. In addition to shouting, yelling, and bawling, I
should say that another rush at another platform, another upsetting of
the reporters’ table, another terrifying of the ladies, and another
mobbing the chairman, would be advisable. Set to work with all your
united zeal and energy to carry out the suggestions of our Central
Committee for the defeat of a Bill which, if passed, will inflict a blow
on the undertaker as great as the boon it will confer on the widow and
orphan—whom we, of course, can only consider as customers. The
Metropolitan Interments Bill goes to dock us of every penny that we make
by taking advantage of the helplessness of afflicted families. And just
calculate what our loss would then be; for, in the beautiful language of
St. Demetrius, the silversmith, “Sirs, ye know that by this craft we
have our wealth.”