When the Corpse Slept Beside Us
Funerary practices and death rituals are an accessible entry point for understanding periods of history tied to specific cultures and geographies. These customs often have long ties to groups’ core belief systems in religious and local folkloric contexts. Pre-Victorian traditions around the deceased were closely tied to the rhythms of everyday life. If one out of every seven people you knew died of tuberculosis and the average lifespan of your loved ones was twenty-five years old, then death would not feel like a distant outlier that happens to some now, but to most of us eventually. Working-class lives were deeply connected with the seasons, the land they worked and the brutal yet short lives they shared.
When loved ones passed, the body often stayed in the home until it was time for the burial. This was the tradition among rural working-class folks in Britain and elsewhere. Old folkish beliefs frequently focused on liminal spaces where the veil between the human and spirit worlds was thin. The dead family member in the home could have created a space that was both sacred and liminal. A chance to spend time with the departed and reflect on the loss of the individual and on mortality itself. An opportunity for the family to share a drink and say their quiet goodbyes.
In 1842, Edwin Chadwick’s “The Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain” was published, and it was severely critical of this practice. The delay of departure was seen as a misfortune, spewing a host of both physical ailments and moral detriment. Religious beliefs often held that aspect of the dead, the body bones, etc, were a source of corruption for the living and that the worse the person was in life, the more morally infectious their remains would become.
The Chadwick Report and subsequent public campaign, fueled by bureaucracy, demanding that death should be handled expediently, completely overlooked the value of these community rituals with their performative focus. The dead were washed, dressed and prepared. The Victorians and their obsession with morality often saw poverty as a moral failing; thus, poor rural people were considered evil and filthy, and their practices were seen as an affront to the moral cleanliness of urban society. This concept of ‘moral hygiene’ was ironic given the deplorable conditions of urban Victorian environments (human waste, lack of hygiene, etc.), especially through the contemporary lens of germ theory.
Attempts to modernize rural people were carried out through propaganda, with little evidence. This new bureaucracy valued expediency above all else and promoted a new methodology in which the body was spirited away immediately, an obvious act of concealment or disappearance of the physical vessel. The body had no value to them, and this aligned perfectly with the church, which was exclusively concerned with the departed spirit. The establishment, including the church, saw these folk traditions as an affront to these goals.
From all sides, British society was witnessing an attempt to exert control over the uncontrollable, whether through strict bureaucracy or the continuation of folk ceremonies.
It took the natural process and sanitized death and dying, making it a medical problem, and yet another issue in which the solution was an industrial framework (the funerary industry). Nevertheless, another way to exert class control in an already disparate society.
Folkloric practices have the power to rehumanize the process of death and dying. Modern ‘Death Doulas’ guide individuals through their journey out of this world, mirroring the well-developed process of childbirth. Reintroducing these practices can connect people with their past, across generations. It allows cultures to reclaim the ritual imagination and come to terms with the realities of life-presence, decay, and remembrance. It is a chance to reinstate this domestic ritual as a quiet resistance to the sterile concept of hygienic death.
References
Cock-Starkey, C. (2025). “A distressing scene”? The corpse in the nineteenth-century working-class home. Mortality, 30(3), 745–759. https://doiorg.ezproxy.hollandcollege.com/10.1080/13576275.2024.2373210
Macintyre, A. (1967). Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Book). Economic History Review, 20(1), 177–178. https://doiorg.ezproxy.hollandcollege.com/10.2307/2592056
Frisby, H. (2015). Drawing the pillow, laying out and port wine: the moral economy of death, dying and bereavement in England, c.1840–1930. Mortality, 20(2), 103–127. https://doi-org.ezproxy.hollandcollege.com/10.1080/13576275.2014.954240
