Troubled proximities: asylums and cemeteries in nineteenth-century England

Introduction

The demands of early health reformers to remove burial grounds from … city centres were … an initial symbolic expulsion of the dead from the community of the living. It preceded and helped shape that ‘suppression’ of death that is characteristic of more recent times … Not only death is sequestered from the ordinary activities of daily life; so are other phenomena which, in becoming ‘detached’ from the normal run of social life, produce specific sources of anxiety or distress – including both madness and physical illness of a serious sort. (Giddens, 1981: 195)

Various authors tackle what Giddens calls the ‘sequestration’ of death in Western societies, a growing sense that ‘death [is] not a natural part of life’ (McGreevy, 1992: 56). Ariés (1974: 57) writes about death being ‘increasingly thought of as a transgression which tears man [sic] from his daily life, from rational society’, because death has become an individualized tragedy rather than an unavoidable facet of collective living. Baudrillard posits the anxiety about facing the meaninglessness of death – the problem that ‘the dead are dead’ – that feeds into a tendency for the dead to be ‘ghettoised on the outskirts of the village, and then they disappear altogether’ (Gane, 1991: 104, 113). Ariés suggests an elision of death and irrationality, while Baudrillard hints at the spatial solution of ousting the dead from settlements, and these notions coalesce in Giddens’ proposal that both death and madness (or irrationality), together threatening the ‘ontological security’ of Western societies, became ripe for socio-spatial ostracism from centres of living populations.

If addressed in terms of their material manifestations – madness and the asylum, on the one hand; death and the cemetery, on the other – then it can be shown the removal of both asylums and cemeteries from nineteenth-century English urban areas became widespread as both an objective and, with exceptions, a realized outcome. The will to ‘ruralize’ the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum is now well understood, anchored in older notions about the curative properties of ‘natural’ environments, but seriously ratcheted up under the heightened press of ‘modernity’, urbanization and industrialization (Philo, 2004: ch.5–7). The example of the Tukean retreat to the countryside as the preferred venue for tending the over-stressed mind, choosing the rural over the urban, was a catalyst for this flight to green fields (Digby, 1985: ch.3, ch.10). The collective weight of various medical, moral and economic arguments propelled what, in an apt phrase, French (1951: 73) terms the ‘thoroughly rural-minded’ vision of the Lunacy Commissioners (LC) and others central to advising on asylum location. Never entirely absent, though, was also a wish to rid the city of its troublesome people, those who might be disquieting to ‘sane’ inhabitants. Some scholars, including Foucault (1965) and Scull (1979), have supposed this exclusionary impulse to be the real driver behind asylum ruralization, mistrusting any voicing of the countryside’s therapeutic advantages by contemporary experts, but the interpretative snares of controversy here can be sidestepped for present purposes (see Philo, 2004: ch.2, ch.8). ¹

Running in parallel was a will to send cemeteries into the countryside, a spatial practice ‘in accordance with the Roman Law, which required that the dead should be buried without the walls of cities’ (Cunningham Glen, 1858: 1). It was a practice increasingly urged within a raft of public health reforms designed to cleanse the nineteenth-century city, striving to remove environmental ‘nuisances’ carrying supposed threats to human health. From the 1830s, intensified by mortality from cholera epidemics, disputes raged about the dangers posed by over-full urban graveyards, particularly in London. Private companies opened ‘garden cemeteries’ on the outskirts of the metropolis, and government regulation and associated public schemes arose to curb metropolitan burials in favour of ex-urban solutions (Curl, 2000: ch.3–4). Influential pamphlets appeared, notably by the surgeon G.A. (‘Graveyard’) Walker, who declared that ‘[d]eath is rife, diseases always prevalent in the vicinity of intramural burial places’, insisting instead that ‘a general system of extramural sepulchre sh[ould] be organised throughout Great Britain’ (Walker, 1852: 3–6, 28; my emphasis). Legislation ensued, notably the Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852 (15 & 16 Vict., c.85) empowering the Privy Council ‘to stop all interments in any burial-ground or place of burial in the metropolis’, and stipulating that ‘no new burial-ground could be opened in London (or within two miles of it) without express permission’ (Curl, 2000: 141). Parochial burial boards were formed to open new cemeteries, often distant from their parish bounds, and an Act of 1853 (16 & 17 Vict., c.134) widened this insistence on ex-urban burial-grounds to all major urban areas. The cumulative effect of the burial acts was to render cemeteries, like asylums, ‘properly’ rural rather than urban phenomena.

Various scholars identify asylums and cemeteries as close relatives in the nineteenth-century English ‘institutional landscape’. One garden historian describes the asylum as ‘one of a group of novel landscape types’ arising at this time, ‘includ[ing] the public park and cemetery’ (Rutherford, 2005: 61–2), and often enrolling the same architects, landscapers and horticulturalists. Geographers have long regarded asylums and cemeteries as equivalent land-uses, both exerting ‘centripetal’ effects on nineteenth-century urban form by exploiting large, accessible and relatively cheap plots of peripheral land sometimes called ‘fringe-belts’ (Conzen, 1960; Whitehand, 1967). Wehrwein (1942) anatomizes an ex-urban ‘institutional desert’ of ‘unwanted yet necessary’ industries and facilities, including cemeteries and social welfare facilities like ‘blind schools’, while Carter (1976: 305–7) combines Wehrwein’s insights with work on late-nineteenth-century Paris to encapsulate the banishing to city margins of ‘defensive works, mental hospitals, cemeteries and waterworks’. Shurmer-Smith and Hannam (1994: 175–6), investigating the ‘purifying’ impulses of modernity and specifically referencing an 1890 map of Portsmouth, detect ‘the nineteenth-century concentration of the prison, fever hospital, workhouse and cemetery, with the lunatic asylum only a little to the east’. These studies evidently explore the exclusionary fates shared by asylums and cemeteries, as stated by Giddens, but in so doing they arguably obscure what also emerges from the historical record: namely, the unease sometimes arising between asylums and cemeteries when thrown into proximity.

Unwanted neighbours

You no more think of madness by having windows that look to Bedlam [Bethlem], than you think of death by having windows that look to a church-yard. (Samuel Johnson, quoted in Stevenson, 2000: 98)

Lunatic asylums and cemeteries have long been neighbours in the city, a prime example being the ‘Bethlem Churchyard’, a parochial burial-ground for St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, where deceased Bethlem residents were often laid to rest from the later-1500s, and then again when Bethlem relocated to Moorfields in the early-1800s and made use of the ‘New Churchyard’, the burial-ground for St Stephen’s Coleman Street, directly abutting the hospital (Andrews, 1991: ch.6). The first signs of neighbourly discord between the two land-uses perhaps arose in connection with the Liverpool Lunatic Hospital, a charitable foundation of 1792 sited in the grounds of the infirmary at Shaw’s Brow, then towards the edge of town. This site quickly became problematic as the city sprawled outwards to engulf it, but the main problem lay with the parochial burial-ground on the Great Heath to the west of the site: a ‘huge pit’ dug in 1806 which was rapidly filled with layers of coffins, roducing a stench ‘so horrible that in 1816 a writer to the Liverpool Mercury drew attention to the … danger’ (Bickerton, 1936: 92–3). By 1830, both asylum and infirmary had been relocated to Brownlow Hill, at a greater distance from the city centre and this burial-pit.

The 1814–16 parliamentary inquiries into ‘English madhouses’ touched on the case of St Luke’s Hospital in London when Edward Wakefield, a land agent, compared cheerful and gloomy views that inmates might experience from different asylums. Specifically, he related how ‘the galleries [at St Luke’s] look over the large parish burial-ground of Saint Luke’s, in which there are almost daily instances of interment incurring under the very eyes of the unfortunate people who are confined there’ (PP, 1814–15: 820). ² Stevenson (2000: 98, 103) proposed that the architect’s wish to accomplish ‘a truly rational elegance’, with ‘large, arched windows’, unwittingly ‘permitted that rather unsatisfactory view of the burial-ground’. This troubling proximity attracted repeated criticism over the following years, as when the Lunacy Commissioners (LC, 1850: 8–9) expressed disapproval of the burial-ground, noting that the St Luke’s physicians saw it as ‘prejudicial to the lunatic patients’ and urging its removal. Two years later it was indicated on an inserted site plan (LC, 1851: 12) that weekly interments in the ‘parochial burial-ground’ had ceased in 1849 owing to episcopal intervention (LC, 1851: 321). The LC reviewed this matter again nearly two decades later, adding that ‘the practice then followed was to dig trenches about 10 feet deep and pile up coffins in them until they were filled’ (LC, 1869: 62). The impression is that moral objections to the burial-ground were now being supplemented by medical objections, with one early chronicler of St Luke’s implicating it in the death of twelve patients from cholera and diarrhoea during 1848: ‘The parish burial-ground was credited with having polluted the well from which the hospital up to that time had drawn its main water-supply’ (Rawes, 1904: 48).

In a paper prompted by an inspection of St Luke’s in 1855 by leading Commissioners, J.C. Bucknill, serial commentator on lunacy matters, remarked:

In the year 1750, when the site for the present building was fixed upon, little or no attention had been paid to those laws of nature which render any locality healthy or the contrary for the habitation of man; it is not, therefore, a matter of much surprise that the site was bounded on one side by a burial-ground, and on the other by a pond. (Bucknill, 1856a: 216; my emphasis)

Tellingly, Bucknill explicitly cited the burial-ground to highlight an association that would, by the 1850s, be interpreted as contravening the ‘natural laws’ of asylum location. His was then just one voice among many calling for the relocation of St Luke’s, or more minimally for it to establish a green-field ‘colony’, not least to escape from the deficiencies of proximity to a burial-ground (Philo, 2004: 490–3).

The 1844 ‘Domesday’ inquiry by the (Metropolitan) LC fuelled complaints about asylums ‘at the centre of towns or populous suburbs’ (PP, 1844: 6). When berating cramped, gloomy, usually urban sites not affording ‘health of mind’ nor ‘promoting tranquility’, the Commissioners related: ‘At the asylum at Bedford, with 139 patients, there are only six acres, besides what is covered by the buildings and yards, part of which is used as a burial-ground’ (PP, 1844: 16). The suggestion is that the burial-ground was deemed an inappropriate neighbour for the asylum on account of inhibiting the mental well-being of patients, but the wording also shows that this neighbour was actually the Bedford asylum’s own burial-ground, set on its own increasingly town-girt estate. As such, this instance is an ideal pivot-point for switching now to examine what happened to asylum-cemetery relations once the latter did become a co-dweller on the same piece of land.

The asylum cemetery

These hospitals were designed as self-contained towns, in which half the patients admitted ended their days and made their last journey no further than a few metres along a path to the institution’s burial ground. (Védie, 2005: 111)

In an authoritative 1850s statement of burial legislation, it was indicated that, ‘when [a] death takes place in an hospital for the cure of diseases or other public establishment, the obligation of burying the body is imposed upon the governing body of the hospital or establishment’ (Cunningham Glen, 1858: 13). This duty must have applied to public asylums as a particular species of hospital housing paupers with relatives and friends often unable or unwilling to collect a body and arrange a burial, albeit there was variability in the extent to which kith and kin might become involved here (Andrews, in this issue). Given the escalation in size of the asylums after the 1840s – by 1860 the average number of residents in a county asylum was over 450, with several nudging 1,000 – there can be no doubt that asylum managers faced a significant problem in discharging their burial duties. Using local burial-grounds was an option, as at the Denbigh Asylum discussed by Michael and Hirst (in this issue), but another solution – perhaps cheaper, more convenient and minimizing dealings with external agencies – was to provide a burial-ground placed somewhere on an asylum’s own estate. In consequence, ‘[i]t was not uncommon for nineteenth-century asylums to have their own cemetery’ (Hilton and Hilton, 2009: 104; see also Andrews, in this issue). The phenomenon of the asylum cemetery is little-researched, and hence the mistaken presumption that ‘ultimately more of [the asylum’s] charges left the asylum in coffins each year than were restored to society in the possession of their senses’ (Scull, 1979: 194; my emphasis). In reality, a substantial number probably never left at all, even after death, and instead were taken but a few paces to a cemetery in the asylum’s own grounds.

An 1843 lunacy bill, extending a prior act on the obtaining of wastelands for the use of asylums, talked of ‘providing chapels and cemeteries for the same asylums’ (PP, 1843: 2; my emphasis). The 1845 and 1853 lunacy acts omitted any such reference, but an 1854–55 bill carried the following clause: ‘And whereas it is expedient that burial-grounds should be provided for persons dying in any county or borough lunatic asylum …’ (PP, 1854–55: 6). The proposal was that every asylum’s Committee of Visitors should ‘give, grant and convey to Her Majesty’s Commissioners for building new Churches’ a portion of land owned by the Visitors, ‘not exceeding two statute acres’, to be consecrated and ‘thereafter exclusively appropriated for the burial of pauper and other lunatics dying in such asylum, and of the officers and servants belonging to such asylum and dying therein’ (PP, 1854–55: 6). The wording here was identical to that agreed in An Act to Amend the Lunatic Asylums Act, 1853 (18 & 19 Vict., c.105, s.13), passed in August 1855, offering a legal framework authorizing asylums to provide burial-grounds that would probably be sited on an asylum’s own estate. The latter can be inferred because the lands to be used would be owned by the Visitors, although it is true that they might already own land disjoint from the asylum estate or purchase land elsewhere for this purpose.

The 1855 act clarified a process already underway, alongside the involvement of the Church Commissioners in consecrating asylum cemeteries. Their own 1856 Annual Report recorded conveyances under this act of land as burial-grounds for both the Essex and the Hampshire asylums (PP, 1856a: 4), while the 1856 Annual Report of the Poor Law Board confirmed that ‘the Visitors … of any such asylum are [now] empowered to provide a consecrated burial ground for the reception of the pauper as well as the other lunatics who may die in such asylum’ (PP, 1856b: 13). An 1857 bill to amend the burial acts declared that: ‘It shall be lawful for the Committee of Visitors of any lunatic asylum … to provide a burial-ground for the burial of patients’ (PP, 1857, Sess.2: 2–3), but this clause disappeared in the new burial act passed in August 1857. Momentarily, it looked as if jurisdiction over asylum cemeteries might pass to the burial acts, but in practice it remained under the lunacy laws, with the 1862 Lunacy Act underscoring that asylum Visitors ‘may provide accommodation for the burial of pauper lunatics dying in the asylum by acquiring a new burial-ground, or by enlarging an existing burial-ground’ (25 & 26 Vict., c.111, s.9). It was now clear that Visitors could ‘themselves hold such land on trust as a new burial-ground or as part of an existing burial-ground’, or that some other ‘person or body of persons’ could be paid to act in this capacity, and the impression is also that quasi-ownership by the Church Commissioners, briefly implied in 1855, had disappeared as the preferred or only possibility.

The factual evidence of asylum cemeteries being opened in England is patchy. A Parliamentary Return of 1857–58, giving details about land attached to each public asylum (Table 1), includes entries noting the presence of a burial-ground (although lack of such a mention probably did not mean that one was definitely absent). Ecclesiastical returns furnish another window, with Returns listing parishes with ground recently consecrated as churchyards recording various burial-grounds associated with county asylums (PP, 1863a, 1873, 1877). An 1863 Return noted a consecration fee of £14-2s.-0d. paid to bishops for the Sussex asylum burial-ground (PP, 1863b), while a prior article on this asylum had expressly mentioned ‘[a] piece of ground, of one-and-a-half acres, … set apart as a burial-ground’ (Robertson, 1860: 276).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Extract of entries in 1857–58 Return of Lunatic Asylums in England and Wales explicitly mentioning burial arrangements on asylum lands (PP, 1857–58)

Asylum	Relevant description	Land area*
Essex	‘cemetery’	1,1,2
Gloucestershire	‘buildings, airing grounds and burial ground’	8,3,0
Lincolnshire	‘30 acres under cultivation; the rest occupied by cemetery, buildings, plantation, airing grounds and roads’	30,0,0
Middlesex, Colney Hatch	‘burial ground’	1,2,0
Middlesex, Hanwell	‘buildings, shrubberies, airing grounds, courts and burial ground’	26,2,5
Monmouth, Hereford, Brecon and Radnor	‘cemetery’	0,1,20
Warwickshire	‘buildings, courts, burying-ground and roads’	9,0,0
Wiltshire	‘buildings, airing courts, plantations, cemetery ground, & c.’	17,1,19

*

Acres, rods, perches of lands so described

The clearest national-level picture emerges from the LC reports, which frequently discussed asylum cemeteries. For instance, referencing post-mortem examinations at Glamorgan asylum, it was admitted: ‘When burial takes place at the asylum, the examination takes place without the friends being aware of it’ (LC, 1870: 243; my emphasis; see also Andrews, and Hurren, both in this issue). The implication was not that burial ‘at the asylum’ was remarkable, but that failure to inform relatives of an examination would be. Reviewing the Middlesex asylum at Banstead, it was noted that ‘[a] burial-ground in connection with this asylum has been sanctioned’, adding that the LC ‘have urged the desirability of building a small chapel in the grounds for the performance of the burial service’ (LC, 1876: 32). The Visitors resisted, which prompted a follow-up statement: ‘We trust … that … a small mortuary chapel will be erected, as is the case at most asylums having private cemeteries’ (LC, 1878: 216). Usefully, the latter statement acknowledged that ‘private cemeteries’ dedicated to the exclusive use of the asylum, probably sited in an asylum’s own grounds, were indeed now an entirely common phenomenon.

Unwanted tenants

Curiously, none of the books, articles or other publications on the hospital mentions the cemetery; and photographs, postcards and plans invariably favour an angle from which it cannot be seen. The first mention of its existence is revealed in the wish made in 1878 by the director, M. Cabrianat, to be buried among his patients … The walled cemetery, a few metres north of the asylum at the edge of the forest, was probably opened around 1835. It is flat with identical alignments of metallic crosses, one on each of the mounds numbered from 1 to 999. No monument projects above the walls. (Védie, 2005: 113)

There are numerous indications that the cemetery as unwanted neighbour carried over to the asylum cemetery as a necessary yet difficult tenant residing on an asylum estate, and that there was even a will to prevent asylums arriving at the on-site solution. Indeed, the sequencing of sections in the 1855 legislation (18 & 19 Vict., c.105) implied that the first solution (s.10) to be contemplated by an asylum’s Visitors should not be on-site (s.13), but rather interment in the local parish burial-ground or, if impossible, in that of a neighbouring parish. The Visitors might purchase plot-space in these parish burial-grounds, making them asylum cemeteries located somewhere other than the asylum’s own estate, or the Visitors might enter into a contractual relationship with one or more parochial burial boards to permit the use of their burial-grounds. The second solution (s.12) encompassed the latter option, but broadened it to include the possibility of burial agreements with the owners of any cemetery. In both instances, the impetus was transparently towards an off-site solution, immediately complicating the on-site model that was arguably the default for how the post-1845 asylums dealt with their dead.

The 1860 Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics debated (and appended) a ‘Lunatics Asylum Bill’, a document referred for consideration during the Committee’s 1859 session, containing a section with almost identical wording to an 1857 burial bill (PP, 1860: 58, App.6). The Committee proposed:

… to authorise the Committee of Visitors [of any asylum] to pay or contribute such sum of money as the Commissioners in Lunacy shall approve, for or towards the enlargement of any churchyard or consecrated burial-ground, that the lunatics dying in the asylum need not be buried within the precincts of that asylum, to which in many cases great objections are entertained. (PP, 1860: v, xx)

The message could not be plainer: there were serious objections to on-site asylum cemeteries, and so off-site arrangements should be sought instead. The Bill returned to Parliament in 1862 with a section that, while annotated as ‘Burial of lunatics in asylum’, provided a highly inclusive form of words on the subject of Visitors obtaining or enlarging burial-grounds. Indeed, if not precluding that Visitors ‘may themselves hold such land’, probably meaning on their own asylum estate, it also encouraged Visitors to ‘purchase for the purposes aforesaid any land’ or to contract out the job of burial ‘to any person or body of persons … agreeing to provide accommodation for the burial of such paupers as aforesaid in any burial-ground’ (PP, 1862: 4; my emphases). The 1862 Act repeated these words verbatim, while the consolidated lunacy legislation of 1890 (PP, 1890) demonstrated a continuing preference for off-site burials, even if necessitating lengthy journeys to burial outwith the immediate locality.

That the LC had arrived at a preference for off-site burials by the early 1860s is clear from their reluctant agreement to on-site provision at the Sussex asylum, where ‘[s]pecial difficulties prevented any other arrangement for the burial of patients dying in the asylum’ (LC, 1860: 9). They aired an identical sentiment when grudgingly assenting to the same outcome at the Northamptonshire asylum (LC, 1878–79: 90). Similarly, ‘though retaining our objections to the provision of asylum cemeteries for pauper lunatics’, the LC consented to the ‘purchase of land for the purpose of a cemetery to be attached to the Cambridgeshire asylum’ (LC, 1862: 3; see also Hurren, in this issue). Referencing the new South Yorkshire asylum at Wadsley Park, near Sheffield, they mentioned negotiations ‘which we are glad to report … resulted in a resolution of the Visitors to contribute the sum of 300 l towards an enlargement of the parish churchyard’ (LC, 1871: 38). When the LC discussed the West Yorkshire asylum at Menston, they regretted that the Wadsley example could not be emulated, since it remained necessary here ‘to provide a special burial-ground for the asylum dead’ (LC, 1890: 270); and ‘special’ almost certainly meant a burial-ground on the asylum estate earmarked solely for deceased lunatics. In their 1883 report to the Birmingham borough asylum at Rubery Hill, the LC stated: ‘We regret to learn that burials in the parish churchyard will probably be discontinued, it being impossible to enlarge it and the parishioners objecting’, with the solution being ‘to form a burial-ground on the estate’ (in LC, 1884: 306). The LC could accede to on-site solutions when the distance between asylum and cemetery was found to be too great, as in the case of the Kent asylum, where ‘inconvenience and expense … had long been felt of taking the funerals to [a] cemetery through the town of Maidstone, a distance of four miles’ (LC, 1870: 15–16). Similarly, when discussing the London borough asylum at Claybury:

Aware of the great distance to which the corpses of the patients dying in this asylum are carted for burial, and of the inconveniences which must arise from that distance, we would suggest that the purchase of land at the rear of the asylum might make it feasible to form a cemetery there …. (LC, 1896: 295–6)

As for the reasons behind opposing the on-site approach, it is easy to identify medical-hygienic reservations. Bucknill, reviewing asylum annual reports from 1856, revealed how ‘[t]he Visitors of the Lancaster Asylum report that they have closed their cemetery by the advice of the medical men, and that all interments will for the future take place in the new cemetery for the township of Lancaster’ (Bucknill, 1857: 485). The precise thinking of these ‘medical men’ went unelaborated, but presumably accorded with wider mid-century concerns about health dangers arising from too-close proximity of the living to the dead. Later in the century, the LC discussed high mortality rates at the Warwickshire asylum, many from typhoid and dysentery:

We must … point out that the cemetery, so very close to the asylum, is now full, and likely if further used to become dangerous to the health of the inmates. We strongly urge the Asylum Committee to appropriate for burial purposes a site more remote from occupied buildings and attended by no possible risk of contaminating their water supply. (LC, 1890: 257)

The LC did not necessarily insist on this cemetery being relocated off-site, but urged careful attention to its precise location on the asylum estate, here for medical reasons.

One exchange before the 1859 Committee suggested unease about asylum cemeteries from a moral-psychological perspective. Representatives of the Middlesex Asylums at Colney Hatch and Hanwell were quizzed about their on-site cemeteries:

3054. Do you think that the existence of a burial-ground within the walls has a prejudicial effect upon the patients? – No.

3055. Is there any objection entertained by the relatives? – Notice is always given by the officer to the relative to remove the body if they think fit, or if they prefer the body to be buried in the burial-ground of the asylum …

3057. Is any request ever made by the relatives to have them buried in the parish churchyard? – We do not enter into any question with them upon that point; we give them the option of removing the body if they think fit to inter it elsewhere. (PP, 1859 Sess.1: 253–4)

Disquiet was evidently felt by the questioners, perhaps reasoning that, if visible to patients, an on-site burial-ground might compromise their well-being by seriously detracting from otherwise cheerful surroundings and prospects. The witnesses resisted this inference, but the mere fact that it was made at all is illuminating, as too are the concerns raised about the status of being interred at an asylum rather than elsewhere, a matter to be revisited presently. Returning to the Claybury example, the passage previously cited held a sting in its tail, the full final sentence running as follows: ‘the purchase of land at the rear of the Asylum might make it feasible to form a cemetery there, out of sight of the patients’ (LC, 1894: 295–6; my emphasis). In sum, the last phrase starkly demonstrates a lingering moral concern about the possible harmful effects of a burial-ground too readily visible to patients, the suggestion unequivocally being that if one was present it should remain well hidden.

Conversely, other commentators railed against this hiding away of the on-site asylum cemetery. The thinking here sat within a broader objection to the ‘exclusivity’ of burial-grounds for deceased patients, as the LC underlined when considering a proposal at the Cornwall asylum ‘to convert a detached ³ portion of land belonging to the institution into a burial-place for patients’:

We had no hesitation in repeating the opinion which we have already given in our previous reports, viz., that it is not at all desirable to establish cemeteries exclusively devoted to patients dying in asylums …. (LC, 1864: 5)

In a commentary, Arlidge (1864: 430) described this statement as ‘decisive opinion’, and it was evidently one that the LC had felt obliged to voice before. Commenting on the resolution of the Kent asylum dispute with the Maidstone burial board by ‘form[ing] a burial-ground on the asylum estate’, they later declared: ‘We have always entertained strong objections to the separate burial of pauper lunatics as a class’ (LC, 1870: 16). This claim affirmed the prevailing expert view: basically an antipathy to the asylum cemetery on the grounds of wishing to avoid pauper lunatics being buried as a ‘separate class’ distinct from, and positioned as inferior to, other citizens.

There was a further dimension to this critique entailing the details of exactly where on an asylum estate an exclusive burial-ground might reside. The Rubery Hill experience was recounted in one commentary:

It is reported that a scheme has been prepared and sanctioned for providing accommodation on the estate for the burial of pauper lunatics dying in the asylum and not removed by their friends. This, though a very common arrangement, is, we think, an unfortunate one. There is no more reason for an asylum than for a hospital having a special grave-yard, and we are strongly of the opinion that it is much better in every respect that the pauper lunatic should find a resting place in the parish churchyard rather than in some obscure corner of the asylum estate. (Anon., 1885: 118)

This ‘very common arrangement’, the on-site model, was here cast as ‘an unfortunate one’, but what also stands out is the allusion to ‘some obscure corner’ where an asylum cemetery might find itself. Similarly, a commentator approved of the Lancashire asylum at Prestwich for going off-site, but with an added remark about how such a solution ‘is so much more desirable than a cemetery on the estate, in most cases a most woeful, dismal, neglected spot’ (Anon., 1886: 294). These evocative geographical descriptions for on-site burial-grounds – neglected, obscured, apparently unloved – forcefully raise the stakes of the broader objection to exclusive burial of deceased lunatics in asylum cemeteries, worrying about not only the exclusivity of burial but also the very ‘burying away’ of the asylum cemetery itself.

A further twist arose at the York Retreat, prompted by a government order issued for the closure of the Friends’ (Quakers’) burial-ground at York, presumably under the drive to evict the dead from urban areas. The response was ‘the selection of a site for a [new] burial-ground upon these premises [i.e. at the Retreat] for the joint use of the Friends of York, and of this institution’ (in Bucknill, 1856b: 274). The Retreat report continued:

It has long been thought that the discontinuance of a separate burial ground for the use of this establishment, and the indiscriminate burial of the sane and the insane in a common resting place, would divest the idea of dying in the establishment, of some of those feelings which are so naturally suggested by the sepulchre of the insane in a separate burial place. The removal of every barrier by which the insane are separated from the rest of the world in idea, whether it regards them alive or after death, is an appreciable advantage. Although the lunatic is necessarily much separated from the sane during life, that is surely no reason why his ashes should not mingle in one common ground with those of his sane fellow creatures …. (in Bucknill, 1856b: 274)

The solution did not insist on removing the deceased ‘insane’ off-site, but instead proposed bringing to the on-site asylum cemetery the ‘sane’ who had died elsewhere. While not meeting all objections to an on-site asylum cemetery, this decision offered an intriguing spin on objections cast in terms of exclusivity. Bucknill (1857: 495) subsequently used the Retreat’s innovation as a counterpoint to the Wells authorities, who effectively ostracized lunatics dying in the Somerset asylum from interment alongside ‘sane’ parishioners, suggesting that ‘[t]he Wells Burial Board have in this matter acted in a very different spirit to that of the Society of Friends at York, who have selected a site for their new burial-ground upon the premises of their lunatic asylum.’

Conclusion

We have long been aware that even pauper lunatics often entertain a strong objection to being buried in an asylum cemetery. Among all sects of our countrymen in agricultural districts the feeling that the churchyard is the only right resting place for their remains is exceedingly strong … The aspect of the cemetery also has a depressing influence even upon patients who are not likely soon to become its tenants; to avoid this influence it is often pushed into some obscure corner of the grounds, and it is hard to say which evil is the worst, this, or a more cheerful and therefore a more obvious site. (Bucknill, 1856b: 274)

Following his reflections on the enlarged clientele of the Retreat’s burial-ground, Bucknill encapsulated key objections to asylums possessing on-site cemeteries, informed by the sentiment that the deceased lunatic should ultimately be able to escape an asylum’s bounds through removal to a ‘proper’ place of burial, imagined as a country churchyard. In effect, therefore, the very phenomenon of the on-site asylum cemetery came into question, partly because of its ‘depressing’ hold on still-living asylum residents, to say nothing of physical health threats, and partly because of a prominent antipathy to the asylum as a suitable final resting-place. More broadly, then, an initial construal of public cemeteries as inappropriate neighbours for an asylum, as in the St Luke’s case, later became transformed into a construal of asylum cemeteries as dubious tenants on an asylum’s estate. The rationale driving this wedge between the asylum and the cemetery remained broadly the same, albeit now supplemented by misgivings about the exclusivity of on-site asylum burial-grounds where deceased lunatics were interred as a ‘separate class’. Bucknill’s commentary also signals a contested micro-geography of where exactly on an asylum’s estate its burial ground might be located: one argument was that it needed to be obvious, prominently positioned near the buildings and in a ‘cheerful’ setting, precisely to counter any feeling of lonely anonymity; while another was precisely the reverse so as to protect the sensibilities of the existing inmates, in which case a remote setting, ‘some obscure corner’, became the preferred solution. ⁴

The result was that on-site asylum cemeteries, and some of their off-site variants as well, quickly became lost, hidden, forgotten and forsaken. Védie’s remarks make this plain, as does his appraisal of the Leyme asylum cemetery as one that had been ‘for too long witness to the isolation of abandoned patients buried without a relative present’ (Védie, 2005: 114). This comment underscores the complex ethico-politics attached to these neglected asylum cemeteries, a feeling of loss and even anger about the multitudes of people who died in asylums and were perfunctorily interred, their remains left anonymously in the ‘obscure corners’ of once-remote asylum estates, often unmarked or under now-unreadable headstones. A particularly contentious issue entails the historical practice of burying individuals in asylum cemeteries marked only by numbered stones, and various examples from across the globe can be given of ‘psychiatric survivors’ – even in concert with ‘psychiatric elites’ – seeking ways to identify and re-mark such graves in memorialization of the people concerned and as a reminder of psychiatry’s undoubtedly problematic past (Flis and Wright, 2011). Collins (2009: 37) supposes that ‘historic cemeteries of the marginalised’, specifically those for asylum patients, are ‘likely to be unmarked or poorly marked’, as well as being more prone than other resting-places to disruption or obliteration. There duly remain serious concerns surrounding the status and fate of those consigned to asylum cemeteries in nineteenth-century England, since their very obscurity was the melancholic terminus of a century-long locational combat between asylums and cemeteries.