SOURCE: Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. “Down among the Dead: Edwin Chadwick's Burial Reform Discourse in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 1 (2001): 21-38.

In the following essay, Hotz interprets the power struggles within the movement for burial reform, including local versus national power and the power of the poor to devise their own funeral practices. Hotz thus sees Chadwick's report on burial reform as an effort to contain that power within the government.

In 1839, G. A. Walker, a London surgeon, published Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly Those in London. Three years later Parliament appointed a House of Commons select committee to investigate “the evils arising from the interment of bodies” in large towns and to consider legislation to resolve the problem.¹ Walker's study opens with a comprehensive history of the modes of interment among all nations, showing the wisdom of ancient practices that removed the dead from the confines of...