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Necropolis: London and Its Dead, by Catharine Arnold
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Above, a city thriving with life. Beneath, a city filled with the dead.
London. A vast, labyrinthine, ever-moving place that shimmers as the jewel of Britain. But what about beneath it? What of it's history? It's mishaps? It's dead?
Catharine Arnold invites us on a gloriously macabre tour - across London's many graveyards, cemeteries and burial plots in a quest to discover whether what has departed can teach us anything about what is to come. It's an intriguing, occasionally dark, occasionally humorous journey that reaches right back to the Romans and concludes with the most recent display of mass public mourning: Princess Diana's funeral.
Utilising archaeology, anthropology, anecdote and history, Arnold explores the presence of death in people's lives and the developments and changes in mourning and burial through two millennia. London's greatest disasters, including the Great Fire and the Black Plague, are explored and analysed for their massive impacts on both the population and the change in the disposal of the dead, while the unusual resting places of several thousand Londoners are highlighted and studied, as a means of examining growth and city development. Implicitly entwined with the passing of generations is the transformation of an entire population; where and how people live, where and how they die, and where their children move on to. Arnold marvellously celebrates the possibilities of living in a city as large as London and sensitively demonstrates how much modern citizens owe to their ancestors.
Filled with beautiful details, such as the reason we wear black to funerals (Romans believed the colour made mourners invisible to vengeful spirits), and in an optimistic and respectful voice, Arnold brings us a unique history of one of the world's greatest cities - built atop centuries of history and still rising to this day. If you've ever wondered where the sweet hereafter might be, then look no further - Arnold shows us beautifully how even in a city as massive as London, the dead never really leave us.
- Sales Rank: #538553 in Books
- Brand: Arnold, Catherine
- Published on: 2007-06-04
- Released on: 2007-06-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .3" w x 5.12" l, .48 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
- Trafalgar Square
Review
"Everything you always wanted to know about perishing in London." —Kirkus Reviews
"Deeply pleasing. . . . Entertainment of the most garish and exquisite kind. . . . A Baedeker of the dead." —The Times
"Enthusiastic, good-humored and constantly engaging." —Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Catharine Arnold read English at Cambridge and holds a further degree in psychology. A journalist, academic and popular historian, she is the author of the Lost Time, winner of a Betty Trask award.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Very Interesting!
By Michael P. Williams, Esq.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. Ms. Arnold's phenomenal research and attention to detail is tremendous! Many of the book's histories and facts are RIVETING! The book, unfortunately, contains a few cumbersome and/or extremely slowly moving passages, which compelled me to put the book down for a while. I, nevertheless, am happy to have read this book, and I am most certainly much more familiar with London's entombment history.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and a bit technical but fascinating. London is ...
By Paulette Buongirno
Interesting and a bit technical but fascinating. London is an old city but to think it was built on top of a several cemeteries is fascinating. The next time I visit I will be watching where I am walking. The concept of building on top of cemeteries is not new because as populations increased land does not. Some civilizations moved the bodies if there was room but others just added layers. Archeologists can learn a lot about history because of this.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Dead bodies under your feet
By Mercedes Rochelle
Necropolis is one of those fascinating books that one reads with a sort of guilty pleasure, treading over remains of the dead long gone and not pleasantly remembered. There is so much territory to be covered (so to speak) that it's hard to take it all in. But the predominate impression I came away with is that London was one vast cemetery, with buildings and parks and parking lots constructed over a millenia's worth of corpses.
In my naivete, I never gave much thought to the question of what happened to old bodies until my visit to Pere LaChaise, when I saw that they were recycling an old empty-looking vault. Of course...once the remains have disintegrated, why not re-use the precious real estate? What I didn't realize was that for centuries, people thought of their burial spot (especially in a churchyard) as leased space. They did not expect to rest in peace until the Judgment Day; they were content to occupy a plot until their body decomposed and made room for the next corpse. Apparently under normal circumstances, a person was happy to get a good 10 years in a churchyard. But as the population grew and the space was at a premium, the resting period grew shorter and shorter until bodies were being exhumed before they even had a chance to fully decompose. Where did all the throw-away bodies get dumped?
This is where the comprehension starts to break down, at least in my mind. Perhaps it just wasn't well documented, but in the reading I was stymied by the contemplation of tens of thousands of dug up bodies and coffins being carted away to somewhere. The author made it clear that Catacombs were not widely used, especially in the Middle Ages. Burning of remains created riots (in the early days), so that was not an option. I would like to have known how they dealt with this problem, but the book's concentration was on finding and creating new graveyards, while diverting the populace's attention away from overcrowded churchyards. Of course, there were also the many plagues, which overtaxed an already delicate situation.
The attitude of people toward death in the Middle Ages was much more pragmatic than our own, and it seems that the cult of death really took a turn during the 19th century. The last 2/3 of the book covered the Victorians and later, where we see the growth of the whole funeral industry up to its most extreme (and expensive) excesses. Grand new cemeteries were built outside the city by landscape architects designed to be enjoyed by the living; specially constructed trains carried mourners great distances to the funerals that took place in the adjoining chapels. World War I put an end to the showy funerals and extended mourning periods, as suddenly there were no bodies to bury (if the dearly departed was a soldier), and not enough time to waste on extravagant shows of grief.
This interesting book gives us many anecdotal examples of related issues, such as body snatchers and suicides, abuses and putrefaction beneath chapel floors, the development of cremation. Although it left a lot of questions unanswered, Necropolis proved a good read from beginning to end.
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