Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition (London: Constable, 1980), p. 136. John Evelyn’s father-in-law had been disgusted by ‘the novel Costome of burying every body within the body of the Church & chancel, as a favour heretofore granted onely to Martyrs, & greate Princes, this excesse of making Churches Charnel-houses being of ill & irreverent example, & prejudicial to the health of the living: besides the continual disturbance of the Pavement, & seates, the ground sinking as the Carcases consume, & severall other undecencies’ (entry for 24 February 1683, in The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 737).

22. No action regarding this was taken until after the publication of George Alfred Walker’s Gatherings from Grave-yards, Particularly those of London, with a Concise History of Modes of Interment among Different Nations, from the Earliest Periods; and a Detail of Dangerous and Fatal Results Produced by the Unwise and Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living (1839; reprint edn New York: Arno Press, 1977). This work exposed the scandals of the Enon and Elim Chapels, which had been established in London in the 1820s. Walker (p. 154) is quoted in Hugh Meller, London Cemeteries (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 9. See also James Stevens Curl, A Celebration of Death, pp. 285–6. I am indebted to Bob Davenport for these three references, as well as for those from The Diary of John Evelyn cited in note 21 and Julian Litten’s The English Way of Death cited in note 23.

23. See Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: Robert Hale, 1991), p. 221. On the other hand many English, irrespective of social class, seem to have preferred to be buried in churchyards. Indeed, the serenity of the English rural churchyard was romanticized in Thomas Gray’s immensely popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard of 1750. See Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (London and Harlow: Longman, 1969), pp. 103–41. Gray contrasts the simplicity of the grave sited ‘beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade’ with the pomp and grandeur of ‘the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault’ of the high-ranking or wealthy.

24. Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). On p. 388 Lewis has his virtuous heroine ‘surrounded by mouldering Corses, breathing the pestilential air of corruption’. Earlier, on pp. 368–9, other characters have had to hurry through ‘a thick and pestilential fog’ in vaults under his monastery of St Clare. In contrast, Radcliffe alludes to this reality of contemporary burial places only under the cover of one of her Miltonic epigraphs (see Vol. III, Ch. III):

Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,

Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres,

Lingering, and sitting, by a new-made grave.

(Comus, ll.