Necropolis: London and Its Dead

by Catharine Arnold

Traditionally, although burials took place south, east and west of the church, the north was reserved for outsiders and outcasts. A suspected murderer might be buried on the north side; his victim in a place of honour – east, west or south.

By the mid-eighteenth century, another new attitude was emerging, one which encouraged reflection on death as a spiritual exercise and a valid form of artistic expression. The experts on Victorian death, James Stevens Curl and Chris Brooks, have described this tendency as, respectively, ‘the cult of sepulchral melancholy’ and ‘graveyard gothic’.

any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without conscious intention.’