Death, Burial, and Commemoration in 19th- and Early–20th Century British ‘Lunatic Asylum’ and ‘Mental Hospital’ Cemeteries

Abstract Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘lunatic asylums’ and ‘mental hospitals’ in Britain were legally obliged to provide for the burial of deceased patients whose remains were not reclaimed by relatives or guardians. While burial in local churchyards and cemeteries was idealised in administrative guidance, burial frequently took place in onsite asylum cemeteries instead. Due to their poor historic documentation, these spaces and practices have not been readily foregrounded within existing literature and have received only limited scholarly address. In the present paper, a broad range of documentary and material evidence will be presented, correlated, and thematically arranged, facilitating for the first time a sustained review and interrogation of these spaces and practices. This will contextualise further enquiry into the historic emotional significance of these sites and practices, employing theoretical lenses of ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ in relation to the navigation of grief, memory, and complicated loss. This paper will thereby demonstrate how novel multidisciplinary research methodologies – further to facilitating the reconstruction of understudied spaces and practices in the history of psychiatry – can also be used to gain insight into the emotional histories of marginalised populations of the past, many of whom are under-represented in fragmentary and authoritatively authored historic documentary records.