Recd. a note this morning from Mr. Wright of Mattishall informing us of the death of his wife and requesting my attendance at her funeral…It much surprised us as we did not hear that she had been ill at all – it was indeed very suddenly on Monday night last after eating a very hearty supper and apparently very well – but going to bed about 10. o’clock, after she got into her chamber and sitting down on a chair, her maid Judith perceived her mistress suddenly to change in her countenance and immediately fall into a fit…in less than half an hour after she was dead, and great was the uneasiness and distress of the family on the occasion and at such a time of night. Mr. and Mrs. Bodham immediately on notice went thither – but found their sister dead. It shocked them much.2
Most deaths that did not result from a recognisable illness were assumed to be the natural close of ‘old age’. For those who survived childhood and for women who survived childbirth, there was every chance of living to beyond seventy years of age, and William Holland was perplexed by the distraught behaviour of one of his parishioners: ‘Old Kibby who was buried this day was 83 and yet his sister cried and seem’d half distracted. I could not forbear observing that she could not expect him to live for ever and therefore she might moderate her grief.’3 The question of life expectancy interested John Byng, and at Towcester in Northamptonshire in 1789 he was pleased to learn about one elderly man from a nearby village:
In all my walks and of all the clerks, who have shewn me churches, (and I have seen some few) I have allways asked, from hope and curiosity, ‘Have you any person of remarkable old age in your town?’ The answer being, for ever, no, has terrify’d me: but tonight, reading this in the county paper, had rather comforted me:– -
‘April 27th, 1789, Mr James French, of Fritwell, 90 years of age, walked from thence through Aynho to Banbury before breakfast, being about nine miles. He appears remarkably healthy for his age, has a fine bloom on his countenance, enjoys a good appetite, and seems likely to live many years. He…was for a good part of his life a servant in the Mr Child’s family…by whom his faithful service is rewarded with an annuity of 20£ during life. Not long since he walked to London in three days, and there, amidst the multitude observed, that he could not find an old man. He eats but two meals a day, and never drinks any strong liquors, nor very often ale, but generally mixed beer.’4
Byng was an impoverished aristocrat who well understood that life expectancy depended on a person’s wealth and way of life. At Sibsey in Lincolnshire two years later, he commented: ‘walking about the churchyard, and reading the grave stone epitaphs, made me to remark that poor people died early, for they must work when ill;…it is the rich man who lives longest, who has every comfort, a nice bed, and physicians at hand: look into the mausoleums of the great, and you’ll find that they outlive the parish.’5
This was of course a generalisation, because although Jane Austen was moderately well-off, like so many others she succumbed to an illness that could not be cured or even accurately identified.6 She was only forty-one years old when she died in the arms of her sister Cassandra – at Winchester on 18 July 1817. A few days later Cassandra was able to write to friends and relatives about Jane’s final moments:
She felt herself to be dying about half-an-hour before she became tranquil and apparently unconscious. During that half-hour was her struggle, poor soul! She said she could not tell us what she suffered, though she complained of little fixed pain. When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death, and some of her words were: ‘God grant me patience, pray for me, oh pray for me!’ Her voice was affected, but as long as she spoke she was intelligible.7
Most people, like Jane Austen, firmly believed in an afterlife, but the quality of that afterlife was thought to depend on how well someone had adhered to religion and how moral they had been during their lifetime. The duties of Church of England clergymen included trying to convert those who had no religion, as well as visiting the sick. A few weeks before Jane’s death, William Holland visited one of his poor Somerset parishioners:
under the Quantock hill I found old…[Thomas] Ware and his wife. He dying, he is past four score and has been a hard working man, this is his second wife, they formerly lived in the poor house. He scarce knows what religion means yet I have brought him to church at times. He lead in his younger days a reprobate kind of life, a mixture of immorality, irreligion and oddity there. He lay in his bed in a most miserable cottage or hut near the fire with pieces of linen wrapt round his head and much flushed in the face as if in a fever.8
Ware asked, ‘Have you seen my flowers?’, and Holland promised to look at them, later commenting: ‘He was always fond of gardening and what he pursued all his life time continued till death for he died the next day. A few polyanthus he had but not worth much anxiety of mind during his last moments.’9
Parson Woodforde frequently recorded deaths in his own diary and added wishes for their afterlife, such as ‘I hope he is happy’ for a boy who had drowned in a clay pit.10 Holland shared this attitude, as shown by his description of one funeral: ‘After the service I walked up to the grave to view the coffin and saw his age [on the coffin plate] 72. Poor Ben said I, and turning round to the people, This man has been a good and pious man. Let us endeavour to imitate him, for he is now in a state of happiness. Yes answered someone, I hope he is now happy. No doubt of it returned I, for he was a pious inoffensive man.’11
This was the professional stance of the clergyman, but clerics could be just as much affected by deaths within their own family. William Holland had suffered his own terrible tragedy, with four of his five young children dying of scarlet fever in the space of two weeks in 1795.12 Only his daughter Margaret was spared, and another son, William, was born later on, in 1797.
The lives of the lower classes were generally so wretched that clergymen felt a person’s death was to be welcomed as a gateway to a better afterlife, although sometimes their own faith was shaken. The prolonged suffering of a young girl with tuberculosis led Holland to observe: ‘we do not in general (whatever their wickedness may have been) find always that the misery and sufferings of this world bears a proportion to the magnitude of man’s sins…On the whole there is so much suffering in this world that I trust the next will be a world of happiness.’13 He clearly recognised society’s evils, yet was firmly against change and often railed against ‘democrats’ who wanted to improve society.14 To him, justice would only come in the afterlife.
When someone died, the burial took place shortly afterwards, usually within three or four days, because it was difficult to slow down the decomposition of a corpse, particularly in warm summer months, though not everybody appreciated this necessity. In the summer of 1810, seven years before Thomas Ware died, he and his wife lost a child, and Holland had noted: ‘Mrs Ware…came here about burying her child on Sunday next. She has kept the child already above a week, this very sultry weather. I told her that I insisted on bringing the child immediately. She answered she would bring it tomorrow. I told her she had no right to keep the child so long, to keep the dead to destroy the living.’15
For this reason, and because of the expense of transporting a corpse, most people were buried in the parish in which they died. If they died far from where they lived, the possibility of being buried in their own parish was not even considered, though when Woodforde was in Somerset in 1772, he recorded the unusual circumstance of a funeral for a boy who died outside the parish: ‘I…buried a child of Giles Francis by the name J. Francis – aged 5 years. The child died at Bath owing to a kick in the groin by another lad. Giles works at Bath and he and his son brought the child in a coffin upon their heads from Bath, they set out from Bath last night at 12.’16
The very wealthy proved the exception, because they could afford to transport their dead relatives to be buried in the family vault or burial plot, even if they had died abroad. In November 1810 Holland recorded that the body of one of the Acland family had come back to England:
‘He is brought I understand in a pipe of Madeira [wine] to preserve him through the voyage, the usual mode they tell me there being no lead coffin to be obtained.’17 This was a son of John Acland, the main landowner in the area, of whom Holland was not overly fond. ‘Mr. Acland has now lost six children,’ he commented, ‘and one only remains to preserve the family name if God preserve his life too. Their wealth is immense but what is wealth alone, it cannot keep them from the grave.’18
People were informed about a death as fast as possible in case they wanted to attend the funeral, and letters were sent to distant relatives. The etiquette was to use black wax instead of the usual red for the seal, so that people were warned of bad news before even opening the letter. On Christmas Eve 1792 Woodforde received two letters: ‘One letter was for me from my niece Pounsett sealed with black, which at first alarmed me but on my opening the letter found it was owing to the late death of Mrs. Donne of Bath, who had left a legacy of 100 pound to her.’19
The usual reason for delaying a burial was that there were suspicions about the cause of death. Such cases were referred to the coroner, who might decide to hold an inquest, with a jury. ‘A burial this morning, but the Coroner first is to have sight of the corpse,’ Holland noted in December 1799. ‘How this comes about or what suspicions there are I cannot tell.’20 A few months earlier, Silvester Treleaven in Devon had noted: ‘A young woman of Bridford [a village 8 miles south-west of Exeter] called Potter apprehended on suspicion of her having had child and destroyed it.’21 She revealed where the baby boy was buried, in a wood 3 miles away, and the next day a coroner’s inquest was held at Bridford: ‘Coroner – Hugo Gent. Mr Ponsford Surgeon attended and dissected the body, from whose deposition, and from a chain of circumstances, it evidently appeared that the child was strangled. The jury returned a verdict of murder by the hand of the mother.’22
Woodforde also encountered suspicious or sudden deaths, recording one instance in September 1790:
The young woman Spincks (who lately had a bastard child by one Garthon of Norwich) called on me this morning to acquaint me that her child is dead, died last night, owing it is supposed to her [having] given him a sleeping pill which she had of her neighbour Nobbs whose husband is very ill and had some composing pills…one of which Nobbs wife advised her to give her child to put him to sleep whilst she was out. The child slept for about 5 hours, then he waked and fell into convulsion fits which continued for 4 hours and half and then died in great agonies.23
Two days later he wrote: ‘few farmers at Church this afternoon on account of an inquest being taken by a Coroner from Norwich on the body of Eliz. Spincks boy. They were from 1 till near 5 on the above business. The jury brought in their verdict – not intentionally given by the mother to her child. This evening between 6 and 7, I buried the child (by name Garthon Spincks) in the churchyard.’24
If the coroner was a physician, he might conduct the post-mortem examination himself, but otherwise a medical practitioner could be called in to examine or even dissect the body. When the Prime Minister, the Marquis of Rockingham, died suddenly in 1782, his body was dissected by the eminent surgeon John Hunter, not because murder was suspected, but through a desire to know the cause of death. Subsequently, thorough post-mortem examinations were gradually accepted by the upper classes, but not yet by the masses.
Usually, the corpse was kept at home in an open coffin until the funeral, so that relatives could say farewell to the deceased, and in October 1808 when Jane Austen was informed of the sudden death of Elizabeth, wife of her brother Edward, she wrote to Cassandra: ‘I suppose you see the corpse? How does it appear?’25 When Neast Grevile Prideaux, an articled law clerk at Ilchester in Somerset, learned that his aunt had died, he hurriedly travelled to Bristol, but was too late: ‘I had pleased myself, with the hope that, ere my departed relative was conveyed to the tomb, I should have had a last look at her in her coffin. But this melancholy pleasure I could not enjoy for in such a putrid state was the body, that…it was closed up before my arrival a day or two.’26
It was customary for someone to sit with the corpse day and night, something that was not just a spiritual vigil, but might be of practical benefit, as Nelly Weeton discovered at Dove Nest when the body of her pupil, who had died in a fire, was awaiting burial: ‘The house is so remarkably infested with rats, that whilst the body remained in it, people were obliged to sit constantly in the room, night and day, lest the body should be injured by them.’27 The preservation of bodies by embalming started to become popular during the eighteenth century, something that was brought to wider public attention when ancient Egyptian mummies began to be shipped to western Europe, but the expense of the process ruled it out for most people.
Nonconformists such as Quakers and Baptists might choose to be buried in one of the growing number of dissenters’ burial grounds, but most people were buried in churchyards. Everyone was buried – there was no cremation in England at this time. The only bodies that might not be buried were those of executed criminals, which could be dissected by anatomists or hung on a gibbet as a warning. Sometimes they were buried in unconsecrated ground, but unlike the bodies of suicides, there was rarely any ritual to stop their ghosts from haunting the living.
While the wealthy had ostentatious funerals and elaborate tomb monuments, paupers were buried in unmarked graves, and the parish authorities paid the cost of burial – and sometimes the cost of a priest to lead a service over the corpse. In the Lake District a pauper burial was witnessed by Dorothy Wordsworth in September 1800:
About 10 men and 4 women. Bread, cheese and ale [for the mourners]. They talked sensibly and cheerfully about common things. The dead person, 56 years of age, buried by the parish. The coffin was neatly lettered and painted black and covered with a decent cloth. They set the corpse down at the door and, while we stood within the threshold, the men with their hats off, sang, with decent and solemn countenances a verse of a funeral psalm. The corpse was then born down the hill, and they sang till they had passed the Town-End. I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children…When we came to the bridge they began to sing again and stopped…before they entered the churchyard.28
Holland reflected on one pauper’s funeral that was paid for by a relative: ‘They brought a corps from Spaxton a pauper and yet it is astonishing what a number of people attended, the brother…was at the expence, which indeed was generous, the coffin was very handsome indeed.’29 For working-class people who could afford regular contributions, many places had burial clubs that operated as friendly societies. Contributions to the club were used to fund the funeral costs of any members who died, and the club provided a group of similarly minded people who could support each other in difficult times. Poor people were starting to imitate the more costly and ostentatious funerals of the upper classes, and Frederick Eden commented on Anne Hurst of Witley in Surrey, a poor farm labourer’s wife, who wanted to give her husband a respectable burial:
people in affluence thought her haughty; and the Paupers of the parish, seeing, as they could not help seeing, that her life was a reproach to theirs, aggravated [exaggerated] all her little failings. Yet, the worst thing they had to say of her was, that she was proud; which, they said, was manifested by the manner in which she buried her husband. Resolute, as she owned she was, to have the funeral, and everything that related to it, what she called decent, nothing could dissuade her from having handles to his coffin, and a plate on it, mentioning his age.30
Even for poor people funerals in rural communities were solemn, respectful ceremonies, but they might be more rushed in towns and cities, especially London, as Carl Moritz observed in 1782:
A few dirty-looking men, who bear the coffin, endeavour to make their way through the crowd as well as they can, and some mourners follow. The people seem to pay as little serious attention to such a procession as if a hay cart were driving past. The funerals of people of distinction are, howev
er, differently regarded. These funerals always appear to me the more indecent in a populous city, from the total indifference of the beholders, and the perfect unconcern with which they are beheld. The body of a fellow-creature is carried to his long home, as though it had been utterly unconnected with the rest of mankind. Whereas, in a small town or village, every one knows every one, and no one can be so insignificant as not to be missed when he is taken away.31
Particularly in the countryside, local funeral customs might seem strange to outsiders. In parts of northern England, according to William Wordsworth, ‘a bason full of Sprigs of Box-wood is placed at the door of the house from which the Coffin is taken up, and each person who attends the funeral ordinarily takes a Sprig of this Box-wood, and throws it into the grave of the deceased’.32 At Porlock in Somerset, the traveller and writer Richard Ayton witnessed a quite different custom:
Before the procession moved to the church all the mourners met before the house of the deceased, and there chanted a hymn, assisted by a most incongruous accompaniment from the belfry, in which a merry and vigorous peal was ringing the whole time. The sobs and cries and singing of the people, heard only at intervals, and indistinctly, through the deafening clangor of the bells, had a strange and most mournful effect.33
Ayton initially assumed this was a special kind of funeral, but was informed that it ‘was and had always been considered as a simple part of the ceremony’.34
For the middle classes funerals could be quite elaborate events, already showing signs of being the displays of status and wealth that would be common in the later nineteenth century. When Catherine Howes (wife of the Reverend George Howes) died in February 1782, Parson Woodforde was impressed by her funeral at Hockering in Norfolk: ‘Before we went to Church there was chocolate and toast and cake with red wine and white. At half past 11 o’clock we went to Church with the corpse in the following procession – The corpse first in an hearse and pair of horses, then followed the chaises’.35 There were six chaises in all, carrying family, fellow clergymen, the undertaker and ‘Mrs Howes two servant maid[s] in deep mourning’.36 At the rear, on foot, ‘servants all in hatbands black closed the procession and a handsome appearance the whole procession made’.37 Woodforde had himself conducted many funerals, and in his view this ‘was as decent, neat, handsome funeral as I ever saw and every thing conducted in the best manner…After our return from Church we had cake and wine and chocolate and dried toast carried round.’38
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