Early Victorian Cemetery Architecture
In
1833, when the Ruskins visited the
New Cemetery in
Frankfurt am Main,
John Ruskin gained perhaps his first exposure to the new urban cemeteries that were starting to replace the traditional parish churchyard in the
1820s and
1830s
(see
List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”).
Possibly, by that time, he may also have visited
Liverpool with his family, where he could have viewed that cityʼs new
St. Jamesʼs Cemetery,
which opened in
1829. Responding both to hygienic concerns, which had become pressing owing to rapid urban growth that led to overcrowded city burial places, and
to the need for nondenominational alternatives to Anglican parish churchyards, the new cemeteries were operated by joint stock companies.
Architecturally, these cemeteries presented a significant focus for neoclassicism until that taste was displaced by Gothic Revival influences in
mid‐century. Entered via a massive gatehouse,
often modeled on the Greek Doric propylaeum, the grounds were conceived as a classical
Elysium, inspired by the
Arcadian landscape tradition in painting and estate gardening.
Another classical model was the “city of the dead” or necropolis, drawn from
Etruscan tomb complexes and (although quite different from the Etruscan model in origin and conception) Roman catacombs.
Like
John Nashʼs conception of
Regentʼs Park in
London,
classical architectural style combined with the contemporary taste for the picturesque, which determined the serpentine layouts
of walks, drives, and the botanically diverse plantings. The English gardening tradition melded with neoclassical monuments even in new cemeteries on the Continent.
The hugely influential design combining these elements was the
Cimetière du Père‐Lachaise in
Paris, established in
1804,
and created by
Alexandre‐Théodore Brongniart (
1739–1813)
under the patronage of
Napoleon Bonaparte. (Apparently, the Ruskins visited
Père‐Lachaise
on their way home from the
Tour of 1833,
since
Ruskin planned to write about the cemetery in the
Account of a Tour on the Continent; see
List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”.)
In
Britain, cemetery architecture eventually came under the influence of
John Claudius Loudon (
1783–1843),
who modified the combined
Arcadian and picturesque tastes that had governed the garden cemetery, by enforcing a characteristically comprehensive plan
that was hygienically practical for disposal of the dead yet also morally instructive for the living observer.
Loudonʼs treatise,
On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards was published in the year of his death
(
Rutherford, The Victorian Cemetery,
5, 10, 13, 20–21, 22–23, 11, 24–29;
Worpole, Last Landscapes,
46–49, 79–88, 135).