Building the city of the dead: Bath and burial reforms, 1820–1860

Between the start of the cemetery movement in Liverpool and Manchester in the early 1820s, and the first wave of closures under the Burial Acts in the mid-1850s, Victorian cities underwent a profound change, as churchyards fell out of favour and were replaced as primary places of burial by secular, multi-confessional cemeteries with government-mandated rules and aesthetic innovations. Behind the scenes of this funereal transformation, entrepreneurs, public health reformers and the Anglican clergy fought over the conditions governing this change. The result was a series of compromises that shaped the cities of the dead. These were not merely physical structures, as ownership and control of human corpses were determined by complex sets of laws, privileges and countervailing authorities. The city of Bath, arguably the eighteenth century's most successful resort town, had by 1800 become an urban centre characterised by profound social and religious inequalities. The building of a series of burial grounds by Nonconformists, and the subsequent advent of private cemeteries funded and run by Anglican clergymen, diluted the role of parochial vestries, before the Burial Acts reasserted their role in the 1850s, structuring them into local democracies of the dead. Identifying the networks of stakeholders and breaking down their accounting and discourses can provide a valuable insight into the citizenship of the deceased, a secondary agency that influenced the outcome of Victorian social history.