Published in Mnemoscape No.3 (2016), a brief exploration of Victorian funerary monuments, Dr Who and 'Man-sized in Marble' by E. Nesbit: In her book on ‘graveyard hunting,’ The London Burial Grounds (1896), Mrs. Isabella Holmes describes...
morePublished in Mnemoscape No.3 (2016), a brief exploration of Victorian funerary monuments, Dr Who and 'Man-sized in Marble' by E. Nesbit:
In her book on ‘graveyard hunting,’ The London Burial Grounds (1896), Mrs. Isabella Holmes describes All Souls’ Cemetery at Kensal Green as ‘truly awful,’ decrying ‘its catacombs, its huge mausoleums, family vaults, statues, broken pillars, weeping images, and oceans of tombstones’ (Holmes: 1896, 256). It was not, however, the ‘corruption underneath,’ the ‘ninety-nine acres of dead bodies,’ or the fact that it joined the Roman Catholic site that so offended Mrs. Holmes, but the extravagance of the monuments themselves:
Can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money than by erecting costly tombstones? They are of no use to the departed, and they are grievous burdens laid on the shoulders of succeeding generations (Holmes: 1896, 256 – 257).
And the most common of these decorations were angels. As Bob Spiel has noted, ‘There are probably as many statues of angels across Britain as statues of anything’ (Speel, 2009). Mrs. Holmes had no time for the ornamental ostentation of the Victorian bourgeois funeral, a well-known celebration of death rivalled only by Egyptian pharaohs. She argued that such things were going out of fashion, while the cash expended on monumental masonry would be better employed building churches, creating hospital beds, sending the poor on holiday, funding voluntary schools and missionaries, and erecting public drinking fountains (Holmes: 1896, 258 – 259).
As the age of empire collapsed into the crisis of belief, and therefore representation, that followed the First World War, and less became more in art and design, Mrs. Holmes was proved right. The Romantic excesses of the Victorians gave way to the utility and experiment of Modernism, rendering the frozen figures of the potter’s field, once symbols of faith and the triumph of wealth over death, rather ridiculous; as Joyce reminds us in Ulysses:
—They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave, sure enough. One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up … And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he (Joyce: 2000, 135).
The graveyard angels had reached their zenith by the end of the nineteenth century, after which production began to drop off, with only a brief Art Deco resurgence in the 1930s.
To us, Kensal Green is, like St. James’ at Highgate, the quintessential Victorian cemetery: ancient, eldritch and imposing. These atmospheric necropoli are familiar now as gothic spaces. More mise-en-scène than momento mori, the silent monuments and mausoleums were frequently used as external locations in horror films of the old school, most notably Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), and Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt (1972) and From Beyond the Grave (1974) – all of which shot exteriors at Highgate – and Vincent Price’s wonderful Theatre of Blood (1973), part of which was filmed at Kensal Green. It is this rich semiotic vein that Steve Moffat so successfully tapped when he created the Weeping Angels for the Doctor Who story ‘Blink’ in 2007.
