‘A distressing scene’? The corpse in the nineteenth-century working-class home

ABSTRACT

When Edwin Chadwick released his report into burial reform in 1843 he was highly critical of the working-class practice of keeping the dead body in the home for up to a week in the period between death and burial. Chadwick argued that the English working-classes kept the body for so long for economic reasons and that as a result of living in close quarters with a corpse they picked up negative associations with death and suffered moral decline. This paper overturns this assumption by using evidence from nineteenth-century folklore collections and working-class autobiography to argue that the long-standing tradition of keeping the body in the home and rallying round to prepare it for burial held a deep significance for rural working-class people. The gradual preparation of the body for burial engaged the senses and centred on the visual appearance of the corpse enabling rural folk to confirm social bonds through the formation of collective memories, demonstrate the respectability of both the deceased and their family, accept the reality of death, and begin the mourning process.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• nineteenth-century
• folklore
• rural
• working class
• corpse

The long tradition of managing the dead within the community in English society was disrupted by Chadwick’s (1843) inquiry into urban burial practices. His report reframed the working-class custom of keeping the dead body in the home between death and burial as a public health risk, problematising the corpse in the home and threatening to derail long-held customs. Chadwick argued that retained bodies represented:

a distressing scene, and moreover a case of peculiar danger and probably permanent injury to the survivors amongst whom it takes place. Great, however, as may be the physical evils to them, the evidence of the mental pain and moral evil generally attendant on the practice of the long retention of the body in the rooms in use and amidst the living, though only noticed incidentally, is deplorable. (Chadwick, 1843, p. 44)

Chadwick’s criticism of the practice characterised it as chaotic and contrary to common sense, and his word choice – ‘distressing’, ‘danger’, ‘evil’, ‘pain’ – leaves no doubt as to the strength of his feeling. The urban working classes were those singled out in Chadwick’s report but his arguments, exemplifying the growing criticism by sanitary campaigners of English burial practices, ultimately had far-reaching consequences for English death culture across all sectors of society – urban and rural, upper and lower class. Chadwick’s criticisms of living in close quarters with a corpse foreshadowed modern death culture in which the body has become frightening and unfamiliar, necessitating the need for professionals to take it away and prepare it for burial (Hotz, 2001). This article seeks to correct Chadwick’s assertion that the working-class practice of keeping the body in the home was harmful, and uses folkloric sources of rural customs, which reveal that customary treatment of the corpse continued far longer in the countryside than in cities, to argue for the significance of managing the dead within the community. Chadwick stated that the lower classes retained the body for so long for purely economic reasons: they did not have the space to keep a body in a separate room and they needed time to gather funds to pay for the funeral. But this is not why the dead body was the focus of rural working-class death customs in the period between death and burial. Instead the traditional folkloric rituals that were carried out during this period of transition provide evidence for the key claim of this article: that the gradual preparation of the body for burial engaged the senses and centred on the visual appearance of the corpse, and in doing so served an important psychological and emotional purpose.

During the 1870s in England there was a rising interest in folklore – customs, beliefs, rituals and superstitions that had been passed down through the generations. Urban, educated folklorists began collecting lore believing it to be remnants or ‘survivals’ of ancient beliefs, and published them in book and article form for the consumption of fellow middle- and upper-class urbanites. The rural working-class or ‘folk’ were believed to be the largely uneducated sector of society who still practised these traditional rituals and as modernity increasingly encroached on rural life the folklorists feared these traditional remains would soon be lost, hence their hurry to record and publish folklore collections before it was too late (Wingfield & Gosden, 2012). A large number of books and articles on folklore were published in England from the 1870s onwards and Frisby (2015) has ably argued that while the collection of folklore cannot be seen as objective or exhaustive, folklore can offer a valuable social insight into working-class culture and tradition. Scholarly attentions have largely focused on the extremes of Victorian death culture – either the ostentation of middle- and upper-class mourning (Richardson, 1989), or the degradation represented by the pauper’s burial (Hurren & King, 2005), although Strange (2005) has done much to overturn the idea that the working-classes were overfamiliar and desensitised to death due to the high mortality rate. This overlooks the very different experience of the rural working classes, a sector of Victorian society that is perhaps the least understood due to a lack of primary sources. The folklore found in nineteenth-century collections goes some way to mitigating this lack of material as the folklorists tended to dispassionately record ritual with little commentary and often recounted direct quotes from the folk they encountered, enabling the traditions and rituals of the rural working-classes to be read as expressive modes of behaviour. I have further supplemented the folklore evidence by utilising unpublished working-class autobiography from the Burnett Collection at Brunel University Library, focusing on the few that were living in an obviously rural location and who wrote about their experience of death. However, the limitations of autobiography should be taken into account such as the exceptional nature of these particular accounts, and their inherent nostalgia. There is always a danger when ascribing emotional resonance to an historic account that today’s sensibilities might be projected back on to the past, a tendency that Barbara Rosenwein (in Plamper, 2010) cautions against: ‘To assume that our emotions were also the emotions of the past is to be utterly unhistorical’ (p. 253). However, Rosenwein (in Plamper, 2010) also argues that emotions are a product of culture because they are shaped by society around us. Some insight into emotion therefore can be found by looking at the performance of folkloric ritual within a wider rural-working class death culture in which respectability, community and reciprocity are central to its proper enactment (Popp, 2021; Richardson, 2000; Strange, 2005).

Chadwick’s report was motivated by his quest to reform urban burial practices to improve health and sanitation, and he was partially successful. A series of burial reform acts, most notably the Public Health Act of 1848, were passed which closed overcrowded urban burial grounds and ushered in the establishment of out-of-town cemeteries (Rugg, 2021). This legislation, however, had less effect in the countryside, where population scarcity meant that burial grounds were unlikely to be full and few undertakers plied their trade (Litten, 1998). A report on rural life published in 1891 reveals that by the end of the nineteenth century the urban – rural divide in dealing with the dead was obvious, the city having transformed customary behaviours through legislation, the medicalisation of death and the commercialisation of undertaking, while in rural areas death customs went largely unchanged. The unnamed reporter of this article on rural life visits a Buckinghamshire village and writes scathingly of the unsanitary conditions of the cottages and the negative impact of the continued practice of keeping the dead and dying in the house:

How is it possible for these people to isolate cases of infectious illness in such houses as theirs? A large proportion of the cottages in this village are ruinous and filthy and ought to be swept away. (Millin, 1891, p. 140)

The author goes on to bemoan:

They say that these people in Quainton are stupid and ignorant. Why, of course they are. How can modern ideas of infection, of germs and molecules, and the diffusion of gases, and that kind of knowledge, percolate down to these poor cottagers? (Millin, 1891, p. 144)

The reporter reveals a hierarchical mode of thought in which they imply that ‘knowledge’ starts with the higher classes and ‘percolates’ down to the lower orders. Modernity is aligned with the urban and rural deathways are dismissed as unhealthy, their social and emotional role discounted in the face of ‘science’. Even some fifty years after Chadwick’s report, when the practice of keeping the body at home for the urban middle and upper classes had largely ended, the rural working classes continued to keep the dead body as central to their death culture meaning that the appearance of the corpse maintained particular significance.

While many of the practices described in this article would have been familiar in both urban and rural working-class families, due to my reliance on folkloric sources I will be using the folklorists’ definition of ‘the folk’ as uneducated rural people. Building on Frisby’s contention that folklore acts as a largely untapped source for rural working-class death culture, this article reveals a counter-narrative that challenges Chadwick’s assumption that the working classes kept the body at home for solely economic reasons and overturns the idea that living in close proximity with a corpse dulled emotional responses and created negative associations with death. From close study of the nineteenth-century folklore record an alternative model emerges – one which reveals a set of rituals to be followed which makes the dead body an emotional focus and whose purpose is to stage-manage the gradual removal of the corpse from the home. Moreover, an important function was fulfilled by folkloric ritual in the period between death and burial by creating space, both physical and temporal, for family and friends to make farewells to the deceased, reaffirm social ties and create memories. The obvious visual and tactile transformation of their loved one from a living, breathing member of the household to a cold, lifeless body which was gradually covered from view as preparations for burial progressed, also encouraged an acceptance of death and facilitated the start of the mourning process.

Edwin Chadwick and the dead body as a public health risk

The rituals associated with the period between death and burial reveal a divide between urban and rural locations, upper and lower classes. The essential elements of these mortuary rituals remained the same – the body must be washed, dressed, and laid out and the final goodbyes made – but the manner in which these were carried out differed across the classes. For middle and upper classes the laying out of the body was generally carried out by the servants of the family who, Jalland (1996) argues, were often co-opted as nurses to tend to the sick and help prepare the dead. Towards the latter half of the nineteenth century in urban locations laying out was another responsibility taken on by undertakers who generally employed local women to carry out this task, thereby mediating and commodifying a role which in rural areas tended still to be regarded as a reciprocal arrangement (Chamberlain & Richardson, 1983; Litten, 1991). For middle- and upper-class households dealing with the body became an organisational task that was generally outsourced, keeping the family at one remove from physical involvement with their loved one. Frisby (2015) makes a convincing case that for rural people death was a significant community event and that folkloric death rituals formed an important part of the ‘moral economy’ (p. 121).¹ It was this ‘moral economy’ that became lost in urban locations, contends Kellehear (2007), as the transient, overcrowded population struggled to maintain meaningful connections with their neighbours. With close community bonds broken by the anonymity of the city many urban people became deskilled in dealing with the dead and were obliged to outsource tasks such as laying out to the increasing crowd of professionals, eager to cash in.

One of the key drivers of this urban/rural divergence was Chadwick’s (1843) Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns which made the case for the quick and sanitary disposal of the body as a public health issue. Chadwick used ‘miasma theory’, the idea that disease was spread by bad air, to argue that the rotting corpse gave off dangerous fumes. He believed that the body was at its most toxic in the hours directly after death and urged that bodies should be swiftly removed by undertakers and taken to safe and sanitary ‘mortuary houses’ (Hotz, 2001). He was especially disturbed by the visibility of the working-class corpse:

By custom the corpse seldom remains unburied more than three or four days, but during that time it remains in the crowded rooms of the living of the labouring classes. Every day’s retention of the corpse is to be considered an aggravation of the evil; but the evidence is to be borne in mind that the miasma from the dead is more dangerous immediately after death, or during the first and second day, than towards the end of the week. (Chadwick, 1843, p. 41)

The mental image of miasma conjured by Chadwick’s words – as a sort of ethereal vapour, emanating from the dead body and enveloping those in close proximity with dangerous yet invisible fumes – is the stuff of horror stories. Germ theory had yet to emerge, but Chadwick’s words imply that the living could be harmed by breathing in the fumes of the dead, making the corpse itself a health risk and justifying his suggestion that bodies should be dealt with by professionals and removed from the home with some haste.

Chadwick’s report has received (valid) criticism for his failure to speak to any actual working-class people and instead using evidence submitted by largely middle-class witnesses such as clergy, burial club secretaries and doctors (Hotz, 2001). This resulted in Chadwick (1843) publishing some very partisan evidence, such as the following from a clergyman: ‘With the upper classes, a corpse excites feeling of awe and respect; with the lower order, in these districts, it is often treated with as little ceremony as the carcasse [sic] in a butcher’s shop’ (p. 45). The clergyman draws a sharp distinction between the lofty feelings of the upper classes and what he sees as the unfeeling lower classes before going on to criticise the lower classes for wanting a fancy funeral and yet treating the body with no regard, offering the following explanation: ‘the body is never absent from their sight – eating, drinking, or sleeping, it is still by their side; mixed up with all the functions of daily life, till it becomes as familiar to them as when it lived and moved in the family circle’ (p. 45). This, he claims, leads to a ‘desecration’ with children playing around the corpse and adults resting their gin bottles upon it (Chadwick, 1843 p. 46). The clergyman’s evidence implies that because the upper classes had the space to house the corpse of a loved one in a spare room, they were able to visit the body and look upon it in calm contemplation. But for the lower classes, close proximity to the body and the necessity that daily life continued around it made the corpse mundane. This argument against the practice of keeping the corpse at home centres on the cramped conditions of working-class homes and makes use of crass stereotypes that portray the lower classes as unfeeling and prone to drink.

The appearance of the corpse and the miasma emanating from it were central aspects of Chadwick’s argument and building on this McAllister (2018) links Chadwick’s push for burial reform, specifically the need to create pleasant out-of-town graveyards, with the emergence of associationist theory in the early nineteenth century. This theory placed sensory experiences as central to the development of the mind and argued that exposure to negative sights, smells and sounds could be deleterious to mental development. Negative associations with death became a particular concern for proponents of associationist theory, with some, such as Elizabeth Hamilton, arguing that children were especially vulnerable to encountering associations that forever linked death with feelings of terror (McAllister, 2018). McAllister (2018) argues that Chadwick saw burial reform as mainly a ‘moral’ and ‘psychological’ issue: ‘[Chadwick] suggests that the psychological damage caused by the funerary practices of the poor is more debilitating than the dangers posed to their bodies by miasma’ (p. 128). For proponents of associationist theory the working-class practice of keeping the body in the home until burial was especially pernicious because the sight and smell of a slowly decaying corpse would cause those living in close proximity to develop negative associations with death which, it was felt, could cause moral corruption. But Chadwick took this further, justifying his argument for reform by stating that keeping the body in the home caused the working classes to become work shy; the coffin taking up valuable space in cramped houses that could instead be used for work. This positions Chadwick’s argument as a reaction to modern capitalism: rather than providing a site for reflection and a focus for mourning, the body was instead viewed as a moral distraction and a barrier to getting the lower classes back to work. Chadwick urged that the body disappear from sight, while for the rural working classes its very presence was essential to their traditional deathways.

A presentable body

In death, ‘respectability’ and ‘dignity’ became key concerns, especially in the rural working-class home where the corpse would remain in close quarters with the living until burial. The visual appearance of the dead therefore took on great significance because a peaceful, properly laid out corpse showed that the body had been well-cared for, communicating to all who visited that the dead was a respected person from a respectable family. Hallam and Hockey (2001) have made the case for the importance of material culture in memory-making, grieving and memorialising the dead. This same process can also be encountered in mourning ritual, whereby intense memory-making occurs when traditional acts such as laying out the corpse or visiting the body take place. Writing about the role of theatre in memorialising culture, Colin Counsell and Mock (2009) has argued that the majority of our behaviours are ‘culturally-constructed’, and that ‘they constitute embodiments of memory, and a memory that is collective’ (p. 1). The rural working-class custom of watching over and visiting the dead created plenty of space for similarly theatrical memory-making and, as Ruth Richardson states, the ‘dignified’ presentation of the body was an important part of creating a lasting positive impression of the departed (Chamberlain & Richardson, 1983). Experiencing an emotion collectively can be cathartic as the feelings can be shared and grief can be publicly acknowledged (Davison et al., 2018). Death for the rural working classes was a community event, not one sequestered behind closed doors; the home was opened up for visiting friends and family, ensuring all who had connections with the dead had an opportunity to say their goodbye and show their support for the grieving family. This is what made the appearance of the corpse so crucial, because a well laid-out body communicated respectability and enabled effective memory-making for visiting family and friends.

Taking into account both the culture of close habitation and the slower rhythms of rural life, it becomes possible to reinterpret the sequence of events leading to a traditional rural burial. Following this process sequentially allows us to see the ways in which the embodied practice of preparing the body for burial and making final farewells reflects Hallam and Hockey’s (2001) argument about the importance of collective ritual in memory-making and confirms the centrality of the body in working-class deathways: the corpse is slowly removed from sight as it is washed, dressed and laid in its coffin – each action marking the gradual transformation of the body, its slow retreat from view preparing the family for the finality of burial.

Just as it had been for generations, a typical rural working-class family in the nineteenth century took responsibility for seeing their loved one’s body respectfully and properly disposed of after death. Traditionally the corpse would be washed and laid out by a family friend or neighbour soon after death. Folklorist Fletcher Moss (1898) confirms the durability of the tradition, writing in 1898 that: ‘The custom of neighbours assisting one another in their turns, at the last sad rites on the burial of the dead, is doubtless one of the oldest of all customs’ (p. 18). Evidence from unpublished working-class autobiographies from the Burnett collection confirm that the ‘layer out’ was an important, skilled community role often taken on by the same women who would also help with childbirth or nursing the sick and she would be assisted in her role by the family or neighbours of the deceased. Norah Elliott (n.d.) wrote that her aunt, who was born in 1864, went out to work after the death of her husband; she undertook papering and cleaning, nursing during the birth of a child and laying out the dead. Like childbirth, laying out was a job that could not wait, and so it was accepted that the layer out could be called in at any time of day or night, reflecting the willingness of the community to pitch in and help out at these transitional moments. Chamberlain and Richardson (1983) use evidence from a woman living in rural Suffolk in the 1980s who still carried out the task of laying out the dead for families in her community to show that the best time to wash and lay out of the body was two hours after death. This would be before any stiffness entered the limbs making it more difficult to arrange and dress the corpse. The practical details of how the corpse is laid out are largely missing from the folkloric record however Chamberlain and Richardson describe the process:

The eyes are closed, and held closed, usually with pennies. The jaw is held up so that the mouth, too, remains closed – sometimes this was accomplished by a chinstrap or a bible or prayerbook propped up against the jaw. The body is washed, its orifices plugged, limbs straightened, nails trimmed, hair brushed, and in the case of men, the chin shaved. The corpse would be dressed in its grave clothes. (p. 38)

The ritual of laying out served many purposes and held a number of meanings but the main intention was to make the body presentable (Butler, 2008; Hotz, 2001). Strange (2002) suggests that although the smell and waxy pallor of the dead made them unmistakeably dead, the efforts to wash and dress the corpse neatly allowed the family to present the dead in good order and ensure that those visiting the corpse could recognise their loved one and associate them with memories of them alive. Tarlow (2002) argues that during the nineteenth century the euphemism of ‘sleep’ for death was increasingly used and that this meant that when preparing the body it became more important that any sense of ‘deadness’ was mitigated – the eyes were closed, the jaw tied shut – in order to enable the dead to look as if they were merely sleeping. The purpose of carefully laying out the dead was not only an act of care and respect towards the dead themselves but also served as an aid to memory-making for the friends and family of the deceased who would continue to look upon their loved one in the lead up to burial. Dead bodies decompose: they seep liquid and they smell bad. Laying out was a way of ensuring that a body looked peaceful and at rest. Death was not denied by this sanitising of the corpse, but rather it made it easier for friends and family to live in close quarters with the corpse, or visit the deceased in the days before burial, and take comfort that their loved one was at rest and had been treated with dignity. In an echo of the associationist theories which aligned with Chadwick’s warnings about the negative moral impact of viewing the dead, the process of laying out in fact was intended to lessen the shock of seeing a corpse. Viewing a composed and presentable body gave reassurance that any pain felt by a loved one had now ended while providing an opportunity for the final farewell to be one in which welcome memories could be made.

The peculiar visibility of the working-class corpse

The reasoning behind the care with which the body is washed, laid out and dressed becomes more apparent when considering how visible the body was before burial in the rural working-class home. Folklorist Nicholson (1890) describes the tradition of ‘watching’: ‘After the corpse has been laid out it must be constantly watched till buried, and at night a light is kept burning in the room’ (p. 6). Folklorists often ‘othered’ this custom of ‘watching’ the corpse, choosing to depict it as a ritual with supernatural concerns rather than allowing that it actually granted the family time and space to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. Visiting the corpse also frequently took on a sensory element as it was traditional for people to touch the dead body, its very coldness conveying the reality of death. Bardgett (1994), a modern-day undertaker, gives an insight into why families might currently chose to view a dead body at the funeral home:

Where someone has died after a long period of pain it may be a help to relatives to see the person free from pain and looking at peace. On the other hand, if a death has been very sudden the relatives may have great difficulty in accepting that the person has died, and seeing the person afterwards may help the acceptance of death. (p. 195)

This reasoning applies to a modern context but this same effect may have been felt by those following the nineteenth-century tradition of visiting a corpse. The peaceful presentation of a corpse could reassure loved ones that suffering had ended and confirmed the reality that their loved one had died.

In many rural homes family members took turns to sit with the dead body, never leaving it alone, in an extension of the reciprocal behaviour seen around the sickbed. Edwin Grey (1934/1977), who wrote about rural life in Hertfordshire in the 1860s and 70s, describes how the ‘watcher’ as they were known would make sure hot water was on hand and the fire kept stoked, and he mentions that he himself performed this duty for a number of his neighbours. Another key aspect of the tradition was to leave a candle always burning (Gutch & Peacock, 1908), and a scathing account of the practice from 1828 is included in the County Folklore series:

The company is usually composed of two or three females, perhaps, one rather of an advanced age; these make it their business, on such occasions to discuss the whole annals of spectrism … till at length … [they] are ready to fancy the corpse moves, and is about to rise and lay hold of them. This, of course, furnishes them with topics of conversation on another similar occasion; where they will state that they are persuaded Will Such-an-one is not at rest, for at his wake, his corpse appeared to move frequently; that the candles were nearly extinguished divers times; that shrouds were formed round them, pointing to some one, of whose husband there has been no account of since he sailed. (Gutch, 1901, p. 303)

This characterisation of the watching of the corpse as tradition deriving from superstitious origins and wholly concerned with the paranormal is typical of some of the folklorists who neglected to consider the emotional role of these traditions. The sexist, mocking tone of the extract, such as the emphasis on this being a group of ‘females’ and that one is of ‘an advanced age’, inadvertently reveals the very sociability of the event during which community bonds are strengthened and family narratives are shared.

Watching over the dead would have provided the family a chance to sit with their loved one and consider their loss, providing space and time for them to come to terms with death and mentally say farewell. Folklorist John Nicholson (1890), who personally spent time with rural folk, recorded a far more sympathetic depiction of the custom of gathering to watch the dead the night before burial, describing a social occasion where close family and friends would gather to sing hymns:

After the hymns have been sung and reminiscences related, the women take the children home to bed, and the elders stay awhile, to smoke their long clay pipes and taste the home-brewed ale, but by and by these go too, and only the nearest relatives are left. (pp. 6–7)

This scene of quiet camaraderie would have provided an opportunity for memories of the dead to be shared and condolences given. It was a moment when those most important to the family could come together and mark the passing of one of their own away from the more public ritual of the burial. Customs around sitting with the body until burial reveal how very visible the body was in the rural working class home, taking up space and demanding attention. Contrary to Chadwick’s assertions that coexisting with a corpse created negative associations with death, the folklore record reveals that in the rural working-class home the body was treated with great respect and that time spent watching over the body would have provided people with the reassurance that their loved one was now at peace.

The cultural imperative to visit the corpse

Watching the body was generally carried out by those closely connected to the family but the tradition of visiting the corpse was open to everyone in the community. Elizabeth Roberts (1989) states that in working-class families in Lancashire the tradition of visiting the corpse persisted, in some cases into the 1970s and 80s, and that more people turned out to visit the corpse in their home than came to the actual funeral. She also remarks that it was common practice to bring children to view a dead body and yet they were seldom allowed to attend a funeral. This is confirmed by the folkloric sources which depict the visiting of the corpse as a key aspect of the burial rites. R. M. Nason (1899), a vicar working in the rural village of Ryton in Tyne and Wear, shared the following account from 1899 in Folk-Lore:

I was attending the burial of a well-known parishioner who died at the age of eighty-eight last month. On arriving at the house I was asked to go upstairs to say a prayer in the presence of the corpse. The room upstairs was full of guests, and also the landing. The body lay in the centre of the room, the flap of the coffin-lid turned back, and the face left visible. (p. 254)

The people spilling out from the bedroom and into the hall confirms the great numbers who had crowded in to say their final farewells. The presentation of the corpse as dressed and shrouded in their coffin with only the face visible is also notable because it represents the culmination of the phases of preparation outlined previously in this article. By this point the body is nearly ready for burial and it is offered for viewing in the coffin, not in the natural state in which they died, but in a carefully stage-managed fashion. The body is now clean and dressed, its limbs are straightened and composed in a position of rest, but all that is left visible to the guests is the face – a portion of the body sufficient to allow a final glance or to allow a friendly touch or kiss to be bestowed. At this moment of final farewells the majority of the body is now hidden from sight, with only the familiar face in view, signalling that the gradual removal of the body from the home is almost complete and that its transition from this world to the next will soon be over with its ultimate consignment to the ground.

When visiting the corpse it was customary to touch or kiss the dead whether you were close-kin or not. This was a folkloric tradition which had such cultural importance that those visiting felt compelled to take part in the ritual whether they wanted to or not as evidenced by this letter by J. P. Emslie to the journal Folk-Lore in 1899:

In 1860 I went with my father to the house of a friend who had just died. He lay in his coffin, and my father placed his hand on the forehead of the corpse, and told me to do the same. As we left the house my father said to me: ‘This is the first time you’ve ever seen a dead body, and I wanted you to notice what a peculiar coldness there was in it. And’, he added, in a somewhat apologetic fashion, ‘they say that you should always touch any dead body that you see, for it prevents you dreaming of him – at least, that’s what they say’. (p. 477)

Most folkloric sources agree that the reasoning behind the touching of the corpse was to prevent the dead from haunting them or appearing in their dreams, but folklorist Burne (1883) suggested it had older origins, relating to the medieval concept of cruentation whereby a corpse would bleed if the murderer touched it. A number of other folklorists also depict the touching of the corpse as stemming from the desire to publicly demonstrate that no grudge was held between the living and the dead (Denham, 1895; Henderson, 1879; Thiselton, 1881), however the sources which quote the words of those urging visitors to touch the corpse directly nearly always give preventing haunting as the reason (Carson, 1900; Emslie, 1899; Gutch & Peacock, 1908). Malinowski (1925/2004) writes about the contrary emotions conjured up by being in the presence of the dead; on one hand friends and family feel love for the departed while on the other they cannot help feeling a primal fear of the dead body as an object. He argues that customs such as touching the dead are carried out at some personal cost to the individual who must fight their fear to carry out this ritual. A dead body is unmistakeably cold, it would not feel the same as touching the face of living, breathing person. The sensory experience then confirms the finality of death, the coldness of the skin conveying the reality that the body has transformed and no longer houses a living spirit. Freud (1957/1917) wrote that a key function of the ‘work of mourning’ was for the living to cut their ties to the dead and that one of the ways this can be achieved is through ‘reality testing’ in which mourners learn to differentiate between the external and internal world: between what might be fantasy, and what can be established as reality (pp. 244–245). The sensory experience of touching the cold corpse and the realisation that it is no longer a warm, living body can be seen as a version of ‘reality testing’; the tactile experience serving to reinforce the absoluteness of death and the separation of body and spirit.

The cultural expectation to take part in these moments was so strong that even if the participants did not really believe their action held any supernatural power, they were certainly attuned to its social power in communicating respect for the dead. Burkin (n.d.), who was a child in a working-class family in the 1900s, reflects on this in her unpublished autobiography:

One poor boy named Walter, who always looked so ill, died of Tuberculosis […] the class collected for a wreath, and I and two others were detailed to take it over to the house. The ‘Departed’, were always put in the parlour (or front room) until the funeral, and all neighbours and friends were expected to call in, so we three had to go in and see our playmate, as his Mother would have been most upset had we refused. (no page numbers)

The ritual is thus perpetuated as each new generation feels obliged to comply with the wishes of the older generation; the tensions between those feelings of fear and repulsion, and the desire to fulfil a duty and demonstrate care must be mastered, if only for a moment, to ensure the culturally-required ritual is respected. This provides an example of a traditional practice that had an important performative aspect, everyone could witness each person’s interaction with the corpse but the inner emotional impact of such an encounter was not outwardly seen and could be at odds with it. The existence of a custom does not mean it held the same emotional significance for everyone. It seems often traditions were enforced by the older members of the community, creating an obligation that younger people should follow the ritual to avoid offending those for whom the tradition was still significant.

Folklore collectors seemed especially keen to ascribe paranormal meaning to the tradition of touching the corpse, probably because it fitted with their Romantic-nationalist worldview to believe that the rural folk unthinkingly maintained ancient beliefs, and that these ‘survivals’ provided a link to England’s distant past. Although superstition may well have held some sway when encouraging some to touch the dead body, for others it was a simple, human response; a way to show sympathy to the grieving family and love for the person who had died. Richard Blakeborough (1898) was one of the few folklorists who ascribed an emotional resonance to this moment:

It is looked upon as a kindly action, when standing by the corpse of some dear one, if the visitor gently touch the same. In some undefined way, this solemn contact of the living with the dead, makes known to the sorrowing ones that nothing but sympathy is felt. (p. 121)

Visiting the dead was an important social occasion when the community would take their final look upon the dead and as such it became an essential part of collective memory-making. The knowledge that everyone had taken part in the ritual and made a personal farewell to the deceased would have provided great comfort to the family and assurance that the community had properly paid respects to their loved one.

Conclusion

When harsh winter storms lashed the east coast of America in December 2022 at least 50 people were killed and many people were cut off from medical help, meaning that they suddenly found themselves having to deal with the bodies of the dead. This unexpected turn of events inspired Rettino (2022), a local nurse in Buffalo, to issue a set of instructions on social media detailing what to do with a corpse. Her sensitive post included the key information that ‘a dead body is not an emergency and is safe to have in the home for a few days’ and ended with the poignant ‘It is ok to touch your loved one, to hold their hand or kiss their cheek’. The requirement for these instructions made obvious the modern distance from the corpse – people now rarely encounter a dead body and even less frequently have any personal involvement with preparing a body for burial. It also called into question why we have become deskilled in this area and asked what function close involvement with the corpse served in the past.

The long goodbye enabled by the rural working-class tradition of keeping the body in the home until burial, allowed the family, friends and wider community time and space to come to terms with the death of someone in their social network. The folkloric rituals carried out as part of the preparation of the body for burial enabled rural working-class families to follow a process which slowly transformed the body in readiness for burial, placing its visual appearance at its centre. This gradual preparation of the body and the emphasis on viewing the corpse was in direct contrast to the urban experience. Edwin Chadwick reframed the corpse as something to be afraid of – he argued that the fumes from the decomposing body could not only cause illness, but the presence of the body in the home also had negative moral implications, causing an association between death and feelings of terror, and distracting the labouring classes from their work. Chadwick’s report and the larger burial reform movement encouraged a transformation in urban responses to death; no longer should the body remain in the home tended by family or close neighbours, now paid professionals were required to remove the body from sight for the sake of public health. This disconnect with the body continued into the twentieth century and was compounded by the increased medicalisation of death which saw health workers and undertakers taking control of the body (Walter, 1994). Unfamiliarity with the corpse goes some way to explain why today dead bodies have become feared and their presence in the home is no longer perceived as comforting. Noted anthropologist Gorer (1965) surveyed 359 British bereaved people and discovered that more than half of the deaths that occasioned their bereavement occurred in hospital, less than a quarter of the bereaved were actually there at the moment of death and that the majority of respondents had no religious or social rituals to help them to navigate mourning. This modern distance from the dead body made it alien, the medicalisation of death convincing families that professionals were needed to do a job that was once always carried out within the community.

The care and attention shown to the body in the rural home through washing, laying out and dressing the corpse reflected the importance of the ‘respectable’ appearance of the dead. These private rituals were performed to make the body ready for a public viewing and provided the local community a last opportunity to see the dead. As a result, it was essential that the body be decently cleaned, presented in a restful pose and dressed in clothes which reflected their identity. The ritual ‘watching’ and visiting the corpse both afforded opportunities for the family to come together and share condolences; with final, often collective, memories formed during these moments. Many would have ritually touched or kissed the corpse, providing the definitive realisation that this was now a cold, dead body; an empty vessel. This physical reminder of the actuality of death would have served as a powerful way for friends and family to start to accept their loss and begin the process of mourning.

For outsiders looking in, as many of the folklorists were, the close proximity of the family to the body of their loved one may have seemed unsettling or laden with paranormal superstitions, but for the rural folk themselves these rituals served to demonstrate respect towards the dead, allowed sympathy and ‘mutual aid’ to be offered, and formed important community events in recognising and accepting the loss of a fellow villager. Although Chadwick railed against the potentially negative impact of keeping a decomposing body in the home, the folkloric practices recorded in nineteenth-century folklore collections reveal that these rituals in fact allowed rural working-class families to show their great respect for the dead. The appearance of the dead for the rural working classes was not something that provoked horror but rather provided an opportunity to stage-manage the ‘respectable’ presentation of their dead to the wider community, offering a ritual process to follow which marked the transformation of the dead and signalled the body’s gradual, and final, removal from the home. This close involvement with the corpse is something that has been lost in recent years and judging by the American nurse’s advice, dead bodies have become unfamiliar and anxiety-inducing. Reconsidering the positive function of the traditional folklore associated with preparing the body for burial could open up ways of thinking about how we might return to this more family-centric, home-based treatment of the corpse.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire Cock-Starkey

Claire Cock-Starkey is a part-time PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London, exploring the folklore of death and dying in nineteenth-century rural England.

Notes

1. For Frisby the ‘moral economy’ relates to the value placed on relationships between people and how these connections and social networks encouraged reciprocal behaviours.