Cloisters

November - Course of the Month

Each month we will highlight one of our courses that we think is a little bit more special than usual. This month it is the turn of 'Before we go to paradise: the Development of the Garden Cemetery'.

I am learning all the time.  The tombstone will be my diploma.

-Eartha Kitt

“All Souls Cemetery Kensal Green, why would I be interested in an old overgrown cemetery in London?” You might well ask. However, these great cemeteries tell us much about the Victorians and their attitude to death. Far from shutting it away both literally and psychologically, as we tend to do, the Victorians celebrated our final journey with mixture of formality and sentimentality. They favoured elaborate funerals with professional mourners known as mutes. These were followed by periods of mourning governed by a precise code of etiquette. This produced a whole new industry in mourning ephemera. Graves and memorials were elaborate and richly decorated reflecting all the fashionable tastes of the time mixed with a complex language of signs and symbols. 

There is much Kensal Green can tell us about Victorian society therefore: its hopes, fears, tastes and fashions. In doing so, it allows us to reflect on our attitudes to death in our post-Christian society - a society where all the old certainties, which formed the basis of belief in the Victorian age barely figure on our moral and ethical radar.

Finally, where else will you find such a fascinating and eclectic mix of personalities? For example:

• The composer of The Bohemian Girl

• The man who mortgaged his brain  

• The famous tight rope walker who cooked an omelette high above Niagara Falls

• The writer who lies next to his ‘Woman in White’

• The servant who put a pillar box on every street corner

To find out more, you’ll have to enrol!

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