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Websites used
Early Eighteenth-Century Newspaper Reports: a Sourcebook compiled by Rictor Norton
Articles and Lectures
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1. St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate. Daniel Defoe, in his book A Journal of the Plague Year, describes a great burial pit at St Botolph’s Church: it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad ... they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface.
2. The Cross Bones Graveyard, Redcross Way, Southwark. A nearby notice reads: ‘The shrine on these gates honours up to 15,000 people’ buried in this graveyard. John Stow, in his Survey of London in 1603, described the burial site as being appointed to single women forbidden the rites of the church so long as they continued a sinful life.
3. The Suicide of Lord Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh by George Cruikshank (1822). So unpopular was Castlereagh that crowds followed his funeral procession through the London streets, cheering. Unlike other suicides who were buried at a crossroads, Castlereagh was given the pomp of a state funeral.
4. The Danse Macabre. An image from medieval times and used later by artists such as Thomas Rowlandson to show death as the great equalizer.
5. The Cenotaph in Whitehall designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It was first designed as a temporary wood and plaster sculpture for the Peace Day events of 19 July 1919. It proved so popular that it was recreated as a permanent work in Portland stone.
6. The tomb of King Henry III (r. 1216–1272) in Westminster Abbey. His gold effigy rests on top.
7. The Circle of Lebanon at Highgate Cemetery contains tombs, vaults and winding paths dug into hillsides.
8. Preserving an image of life after death. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) sits in University College, University of London. He willed his body to be preserved and displayed.
9. John Evelyn (1620–1706) bemoaned the state of the air and smoke that pervaded London: ‘inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour’ (1661, Fumifugium, or the Inconvenience of the Aer and the Smoak of London Dissipated).
10. The Monument. The site of a number of dramatic and well documented suicides, particularly in the nineteenth century.
11. The bullet that killed Nelson. Large sections of the public flocked for information and souvenirs in relation to the death of notable figures.
12. View from the inside and the top of the Monument as depicted by The Graphic (1891).
13. The strange but sinister looking plague doctor.
14. A Victorian depiction of suicide. The River Thames has been the recipient of many such deaths.
15. Effigies of Knights Templar in the nave of Temple Church in High Holborn. The Church was consecrated on 10 February 1185 in a ceremony conducted by Heraclius, the Crusader Patriarch of Jerusalem.
16. The grisly Tyburn gallows which used to be situated near to where the present Marble Arch stands. Tens of thousands went to their death at Tyburn until it was removed in 1783.
17. ‘The Victorian way of death’ (H. Peach Robinson, ‘Fading Away’, 1858).
18. The Duke of Wellington’s funeral procession passing through Trafalgar Square in 1852.
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