Highgate Cemetery: “Buried Treasure?”

Dr David McAllister will discuss attitudes to burial in the years leading up to the birth of the Garden Cemetery movement in the early nineteenth century and the establishment of Highgate Cemetery itself. His talk will focus on attempts by a series of writers including Wordsworth, Burke, Godwin and Bentham to identify the value of buried bodies, and to establish whether the grave was anything more than an inefficient dumping ground for human remains.

David McAllister is a lecturer in Victorian Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and course director of its MA in Victorian Studies.