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Perhaps one of our more
unusual historical destinations, Highgate
Cemetery
is a famous cemetery located in Highgate, London.
The cemetery in its original form
(the older, Western part) was consecrated by the Bishop of London on
20th May 1839. It was part of an initiative to provide
seven large, modern cemeteries to ring the city of London. The
inner-city cemeteries, mostly the graveyards of individual churches,
had long been unable to cope with the number of burials and were
seen as a health hazard and an undignified way to treat the dead.
The first inhumation at Highgate
Cemetery took place on the 26th May, and was of Elizabeth
Jackson, a 36 year old spinster of Golden Square in Soho.
Perched on a hill above the smoke
and filth of the city, Highgate Cemetery soon became a fashionable
place for burials and was much admired and visited. The Victorian
romantic attitude to death and its presentation led to the creation
of a labyrinth of Egyptian sepulchres and a wealth of Gothic tombs
and buildings. The rows of silent stone angels have born witness to
pomp and ceremony as well as to some dreadful exhumations…read on!
In 1854 the eastern part of the
cemetery was opened, across Swains Lane from the original.
These avenues of death entomb
poets, painters, princes and paupers.
There at least 850 notable people buried at Highgate including 18
Royal Academicians, 6 Lord Mayors of London and 48 Fellows of the
Royal Society. Although perhaps its most
famous occupant is Karl Marx, several other people worthy of mention
are also buried here including:
-
Edward Hodges Baily - sculptor
-
Rowland Hill – originator of modern postal service
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John Singleton Copley - artist
-
George Eliot, (Mary Ann Evans) - novelist
-
Michael Faraday – electrical engineer
-
William Friese-Greene - inventor of cinematography
-
Henry Moore – painter
-
Karl Heinrich Marx - father of Communism
-
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
– model of the
PreRaphaelite Brotherhood
Today the cemetery's grounds are
full of mature trees, shrubbery and wildflowers that provide a haven
for birds and small animals. The Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of
Lebanon (topped by a huge Cedar of Lebanon) feature tombs, vaults
and winding paths through the hillside. For its protection, the
oldest section, with its impressive collection of Victorian
mausoleums and gravestones plus elaborately carved tombs, allows
admission only in tour groups. The newer section, which contains
most of the angel statuary, can be toured unescorted.
For further detailed
information concerning opening times, dates, directions and details
of the escorted tours visit the Friends of Highgate Cemetery web
site -
http://highgate-cemetery.org
And back to some of
those people of note and their stories…
 Edward Hodges Baily.
Edward Hodges Baily was a British sculptor who was born in Bristol on 10th
March 1788. Edward’s father was a celebrated
carver of figureheads for ships. Even at school the Edward
demonstrated his natural talent producing numerous wax models and
busts of his school friends. Two pieces of his early work were shown
to the master sculptor J. Flaxman, who was so impressed with them
that he brought Edward back to London as his pupil. In 1809 he
entered the academy schools.
Edward was awarded the academy
gold medal for a model of in 1811. In 1821 he
exhibited one of his best works, Eve at the Fountain. He
was responsible for the carvings on the south side of the Marble
Arch in Hyde Park, and produced many busts and statues, with perhaps
the most famous of all Nelson in Trafalgar Square.
Rowland Hill
Rowland Hill
is the man usually credited with the invention of the modern postal
service. Hill was born at Kidderminster in
Worcestershire on 3rd December 1795 and for a time he was
a teacher. He published his most famous pamphlet Post Office
Reform: its Importance and Practicability in 1837, when he was
42.
Hill wrote in his reform plan
about the need for pre-printed envelopes and adhesive postage
stamps. He also called for a uniform low rate of one penny a letter
to anywhere in the British Isles. Previously, postage had depended
on distance and the number of sheets of paper; now, one penny could
send a letter anywhere in the country. This was a lower rate than
before, when the cost of postage was usually more than 4d, and with
the new reform the sender paid for the cost of postage rather than
the receiver.
The lower cost made communication
more affordable to the masses. The uniform penny postage was
introduced on 10 January 1840, four months before stamps were issued
on 6 May 1840. Rowland Hill died on 27th
August 1879.
John
Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley
was an American artist, famous for his portraits of important New
England society figures. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, his
portraits were different in that they tended to portray their
subjects with artifacts that were indicative of their lives.
Copley travelled to England in
1774 to continue painting there. His new works focused mainly on
historical themes. He died in London on 9th September
1815.
 George Eliot
George Eliot
was the pen name of English female novelist
Mary Ann Evans.
Mary was born on 22nd November 1819 on a farm near
Nuneaton in Warwickshire, she used many of her real-life experiences
in her books, which she wrote under a man's name in order to improve
her chances of publication.
She defied the convention of the
day by living with George Henry Lewes, a fellow writer, who died in
1878. On 6th May 1880 she married her ‘toy-boy’ friend,
John Cross, an American banker, who was 20 years her junior. They
honeymooned in Venice and, it is reported, that Cross celebrated
their wedding night by jumping from their hotel balcony into the
Grand Canal. She died in London of a kidney ailment.
Her works include:The
Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861),
Middlemarch (1871), Daniel Deronda (1876). She also
wrote a considerable amount of fine poetry.
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday
was a British engineer who contributed to the modern understanding
of electromagnetism and invented the Bunsen burner. Michael was born on 22nd
September 1791, near the Elephant & Castle, London. At fourteen he
was apprenticed as a book-binder and during his seven year
apprenticeship developed an interest in science.
 After he sent Humphrey Davy a
sample of notes that he had made, Davy employed Faraday as his
assistant. In a class-ridden society, Faraday was not considered to
be a gentleman, and it is said that Davy's wife refused to treat him
as an equal and would not associate with him socially.
Faraday’s greatest work was with
electricity. In 1821, he built two devices to produce what he called
electromagnetic rotation. The resulting electric generator used
magnets to generate electricity. These experiments and inventions
form the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology. Ten years later, in 1831, he
began his great series of experiments in which he discovered
electromagnetic induction. His demonstrations proving the concept
that electric current produced magnetism.
He gave a successful series of
lectures at the Royal Institution, entitled `The Natural History
of a candle'; this was the origin of the Christmas lectures for
young people that are still given there every year. Faraday died at his house at
Hampton Court on August 25, 1867. The unit of capacitance, the
farad is named after him.
William Friese-Greene
William Friese-Greene
(born William Edward Green), was a photographer and prolific
inventor. He is principally known as a pioneer in the field of
motion pictures and is credited by some as the inventor of
cinematography.
William Edward Green was born on
7th September 1855 in College Street, Bristol. He was educated at
Queen Elizabeth's Hospital. In 1869 he became an apprentice to a
photographer named Maurice Guttenberg. William quickly took to the
work and by 1875 he had set up his own studios in Bath and Bristol,
and later expanded his business with two further studios in London
and Brighton.
He married Helena Friese on 24th
March 1874, and decided to add that artistic touch by modifing his
name to include her maiden name. It was in Bath that William
made the acquaintance of John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, an inventor of
magic lanterns. Rudge had devised a lantern, the 'Biophantoscope',
which could display seven slides in rapid succession, giving the
illusion of movement.
William found the idea amazing
and started work on his own camera - a camera to record real
movement as it occurred. He realised that
glass plates would never be a practical medium for true moving
pictures and in 1885 he began to experiment with oiled paper and two
years later was experimenting with celluloid as a medium for motion
picture cameras.
Early one Sunday morning in
January 1889, William took his new camera, a box about a foot square
with a handle projecting at the side, to Hyde Park. He placed the
camera on a tripod and exposed 20 feet of film - his subjects,
"leisurely pedestrians, open-topped buses and hansom cabs with
trotting horses". He rushed to his studio near
Piccadilly were he developed the celluloid film, becoming the first
man ever to see moving pictures on a screen.
Patent No. 10,131, for a
camera with a single lens to record movement was registered on 10th
May 1890, but the making of the camera had bankrupt William. And so
to cover his debts, he sold the rights to his patent for £500. The
first renewal fee was never paid and the patent eventually lapsed in
1894. The Lumiere brothers patented Le Cin’matographe in March one
year later in 1895!
In 1921 William was attending a
film and cinema industry meeting in London to discuss the current
poor state of the British film industry. Disturbed by the
proceedings he got to his feet to speak but soon became incoherent.
He was assisted to his seat, and shortly afterward slumped forward
and died.
William Friese-Greene died a
pauper, and on the hour of his funeral, all the cinemas in Britain
halted their films and held a two-minute silence in belated respect
to 'The Father of the Motion Picture'.
Henry Moore RA
Henry Moore was
born in York 1831, the second of thirteen sons. He was educated in
York, and received tuition in art from his father, before entering
the RA in 1853.
His early work
involved mainly landscapes, but he later specialised in seascapes of
the English Channel. He was regarded as the leading English marine
painter of his time.
He
married Mary, daughter of Robert Bollans of York in May 1860. They
lived in Hampstead, and he died in Ramsgate in the summer of 1895.
Moore was a Yorkshireman, and it is more than likely that it was
his straightforward Yorkshire tact that resulted in the rather late
official recognition of his talent and standing.
Karl
Marx
 Marx was born into a progressive
Jewish family in Trier, Prussia (now a part of Germany) on 5th
May 1818. His father Herschel was a lawyer. The Marx family was very
liberal and the Marx household hosted many visiting intellectuals
and artists through Karl's early life.
Marx first enrolled in
the University of Bonn in 1833 to study law. Bonn was a notorious
party school, and Marx did poorly as he spent most of his time
singing songs in beer halls. The next year, his father made him
transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. It was there, that his
interests turned to philosophy.
Marx then moved to France and it
was in Paris that he met and began working with his life-long
collaborator Friedrich Engels. After he was forced to leave Paris
for his writings, he and Engels moved to Brussels.
In Brussels they co-wrote several
works which ultimately lay the foundation for Marx and Engels' most
famous work, The Communist Manifesto, first published on
February 21, 1848. This work was commissioned by the Communist
League (formerly, the League of the Just), an organization of German
emigrés whom Marx had met in London.
That year Europe experienced
revolutionary upheaval; a working-class movement seized power from
king Louis Philippe in France and invited Marx to return to Paris.
When this government collapsed in 1849, Marx moved to London.
In London Marx also dedicated
himself to historical and theoretical works, the most famous of
which is the multivolume Das Kapital (Capital: A
Critique of Political Economy), first published in 1867.
Marx died in London on 14th
March 1883, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. And the rest is
history …
…World War I led to the Russian
Revolution and the ascendence of Vladimir Lenin's leadership of the
communist movement. Lenin claimed to be both the philosophical and
political heir to Marx, and developed a political program, called
Leninism, which called for revolution organised and led by the
Communist Party.
After Lenin's death, the
Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph
Stalin, seized control of the Party and proceeded to murder millions
of his own people.
And in China, Mao Zedong also
claimed to be an heir to Marx, and led a communist revolution there.
Elizabeth Siddal
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was said to be the epitome
of aesthetic womanhood. Her mournful beauty appears time and again
in the portraits of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. In William Holman
Hunt's 'Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus', she appears as a
Sylvia.
In John
Everett Millais's 'Ophelia' she lies amongst the grassy water
plants.
But it is with Gabriel Dante Rossetti that Siddal's name will be
best remembered.
It was
Walter Deverall, honorary artist of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
who discovered Elisabeth Siddal. Looking through the window of a hat
shop near Piccadilly whilst shopping with his mother, Deverall
noticed the striking looks of the milliner's assistant.
Introducing her to his fellow artists, Rossetti, Millais and Hunt,
the three founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Elizabeth's
full and sensual lips and waist length auburn hair, soon made her
their favourite model. But the
intense demands placed on her by the three artists nearly killed
her. In 1852, Millais composed and painted the famed portrait of
'Ophelia' in his converted greenhouse studio. For this work
Elizabeth was required to lie day after day in a bath of luke-warm
water, from which she ultimately contracted pneumonia.
None of the three young men found her more attractive or alluring
than the poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The attraction
proved mutual, as first she became his lover, then subsequently his
fiancée.
Having lived together for a number of
years they eventually married in 1860. Their
relationship however was not a happy one with Siddal's continuing
health problems, and Rossetti's sexual philandering; their marriage
had begun to flounder within a short time.
 After
two years of increasing marital stress, Rossetti arrived home one
day to discover his Elizabeth dying. She had misjudged the strength
of a draft of Laudanum, and had fatally poisoned herself.
As she
lay peacefully in her open coffin in the sitting room of their house
in Highgate village, Rossetti tenderly placed a collection of love
poems against her cheek. Elizabeth took these words with her to the
grave.
It was
seven years later when Rossetti's artistic and literary reputation
had begun to wane, perhaps due to his increasing addiction to Whisky
that this strange story took an even stranger twist.
In an
attempt to bring his client back into the public eye, Rossetti's
literary agent suggested that the love poems should be retrieved
from Elizabeth's grave.
And so
with an Exhumation Order signed, the Rossetti family tomb resounded
to the sound of picks and shovels once more. To ensure that no
member of the public witnessed the event the grave was opened after
dark, a large bonfire lit the ghoulish scene.
Those who
were present, and that did not include the brave Mr Rossetti, gasped
as the last screw was removed and the casket opened. Elizabeth’s
features were perfectly preserved; she seemed to have merely slept
for the seven years since her burial. The manuscripts were carefully
removed, after which the casket was re-buried.
After
first being disinfected the manuscripts were returned to Rossetti.
The love poems were published shortly after but they were not the
literary success expected and the whole episode haunted Rossetti for
the rest of his short life.
©HUK
USEFUL
LINKS
For further detailed
information concerning opening times, dates, directions and details
of the escorted tours visit the Friends of Highgate Cemetery web
site -
http://highgate-cemetery.org
National
Federation of Cemetery Friends - formed by a number of heritage
and conservation minded groups concerned about the decline in care
of our Victorian cemeteries.
Death in
Victorian Southampton
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