Stigmatising poverty: understanding the treatment of poor and destitute bodies in British cities (1800–60)

This article revisits how the poor and destitute were treated in the waning years of the churchyard-based burial system. Working-class families increasingly risked funeral destitution as changing norms increased the expected cost of burial and mourning. A death in the family meant lost revenue and possibly debt. New goalposts for respectability and 1830s utilitarian reforms worsened the outlook for the dead poor, exposing their corpses to physical destruction through dissection – once the punishment of executed murderers. Poor families often preferred pauper burials, paid for by parishes and Poor Law unions at the cost of most funerary furnishings, the choice of resting-place and, on occasion, even the basic dignity of individual funerals, creating symbolic violence. Paternalistic ideals expressed by key institutional actors often concealed economic self-interest, while the working-class’s infantilisation undermined their identity. Lastly, lack of parliamentary will to endorse radical reform compromised Britain’s funeral transition, leading to an extraordinarily heterogeneous burial system.