A Victorian Notion of Death

Victorian Monuments Overgrown in Highgate Cemetery

Ivy, weeds, and wildflowers beneath a canopy of plane trees overpower Highgate Cemetery in northern London.  Created in 1839 as one of the first cemeteries outside of the City of London (and as a refuge from grave robbers who were busy unearthing bodies for medical research), Highgate holds family tombs for almost 160,000 departed souls.  Reflecting Victorian symbolism and attitudes toward death, crumbling tombs for England's founding industrialists, writers like George Elliot, and even dissident socialists like Karl Marx jostle one another amid a losing battle with nature. Visitors and family leave odd mementos: a package of drink mix for Marx, a dozen oranges for a Chinese businessman, notes in many languages weighted down with rocks, notebooks for Radclyffe Hall, an early Lesbian author who scandalized society by writing of two women who "spent the night together but not as friends." Unlimited individual stories, no gardeners, little repair, and an occasional fox running through the labyrinth of paths demand reflection on mortality.