A Victorians' Greatest Fears

      

What were Victorians’ worst fears? The two greatest were the poorhouse and a pauper’s funeral. The poorhouse, or poor farm, was a county-supported home for the community’s poor, most often elderly, disabled and “lunatic,” with no one else to take them in. A pauper’s funeral is what it sounds like: a funeral for someone whose family was too poor to pay for it, provided at taxpayer expense. 

     Both were seen as a sign of abject failure - moral failure, at that. For now, we’ll examine just the pauper’s funeral. 

     As society changed with the Industrial Revolution, social standing came from earned, rather than inherited worth; membership in a variety of organizations such as fraternal, union, religious and alumni groups; philanthropy, entrepreneurship; and one’s connectedness to the community. Funerals were a display of one’s social worthiness. The flowers, the number in attendance, the rituals performed by a group such as the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans’ group which was the largest in the country), the Masons, the Knights of Pythias or the I.O.O.F. (International Order of Odd Fellows), meant you were known, respected, and you belonged. 

     A pauper’s funeral was the opposite. The pauper failed as profoundly as one could; you were materially and morally a failure, buried in an unmarked grave, even a mass grave, without ceremony, anonymous. Poverty was seen as a moral issue – one was probably lazy or intemperate. One’s family lost the right to the corpse and to making decisions about it. Before the passage of some laws, it might be used in medical research before burial, with the family having no say. 

     An 1841 poem, “The Pauper’s Drive,” captured the anonymity and lack of belonging, or “ownership,” as a couple of stanzas shows:

There’s a grim one-horse hearse in a jolly round trot,

To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot;

The road it is rough and the hearse has no springs,

And hark to the dirge that the mad driver sings.

Rattle his bones over the stones!

He’s only a pauper whom nobody owns!

O where are the mourners? Alas, there are none,

He has left not a gap in the world, now he’s gone –

Not a tear in the eye of child, woman or man;

To the grave with his carcass as fast as you can

 Rattle his bones over the stones!

He’s only a pauper whom nobody owns!

     It was a life-long stigma and source of deepest shame for the family. The fear of being buried in this way haunted the poor. Many in the Victorian era noted that the poor would deprive themselves of even the necessities of life for the sake of saving for a funeral, or scraping up the money to make payments on burial insurance. In fact, the tremendous rise in fraternal organization membership was in large part because many offered, or even began, as burial insurance organizations. 

     In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a fictionalized version of Betty Smith’s childhood at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Nolan family is desperately poor, yet every week, when the insurance man came around to collect, the mother, Katie, always had the nickels and dimes to pay. There were times when she had her children play a game in which they were Arctic explorers, stranded in the North waiting for a supply train to reach them. In reality, there was no food in the house. 

     When husband and father Johnny Nolan dies of alcoholism at age 34 in 1914, he had a respectable funeral, costing $175 from the insurance payout, with a hearse and four horse-drawn carriages. 

Coffeyville, Kansas

     All communities of every size grappled with how to help the poor. An 1886 opinion piece in the Gate City Gazette urged Coffeyville residents to give to the poor in winter, “Whatever the cause for this – be it indolence, improvidence or dissipation – matters not….when a man and his family are suffering for the comforts and needs of life is no time for a moral lecture on his previous misconduct…Relieve the suffering and then lecture if you will; give bread and then advice; cloth the naked and then chastise.”

     The Kansas legislature joined other states in passing legislation in 1885 ordering township trustees to ensure that every honorably discharged Civil War veteran, whose family lacked the means to pay for a “decent” burial and headstone, would be provided one from township funds. It specified that they were not to be buried in a potter’s field or any area of a cemetery that had been designated for paupers. The burial costs were not to exceed $50 (about $1,500 in today’s value) and the headstone, $20 (about $615). So, an ordinary pauper was buried in shame and disgrace, but this law was ensuring that the veteran would not be.

     As with other county expenditures, the newspapers printed what county commissioners paid for care of the poor. In 1898, for example, Foreman & Blair, a furniture store in Coffeyville, was paid $31 for a pauper burial. (Furniture stores made caskets and often had undertaking departments.) In 1899, F. F. Axtell was paid $13 for burial of the poor. 

     In the terrible case of a man described as a wayfarer, a mover, a homeless, emaciated man who died of hydrophobia in Coffeyville in 1898, officials were obviously bothered by his horrible death and disgraceful burial. Yet he was buried without ceremony in a pauper’s grave. They had done what was expected. 

     The last stanza of “The Pauper’s Drive” makes a plea for compassionate care for the deceased:

But a truce to this strain – for my heart, it is sad,

To think that a heart in humanity clad

Should make, like the brutes, such a desolate end,

And depart from the light without leaving a friend.

Bear softly his bones over the stones;

Though a pauper, he’s one whom his Maker yet owns. 

Sources:

     Laqueur, Thomas. “Bodies, Death and Pauper Funerals,” Representations, No. 1 (Feb. 1983), pp. 109-131, University of California Press.

Nuland, Sherwin B. "The Uncertain Art: Grave Robbing," The American Scholar, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 125-128.

     Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, New York: Harper Collins, 1943.

     Sinclair, Upton. The Cry For Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, 1915.

Strange, Julia-Marie, “Only a Pauper Whom Nobody Owns: Reassessing the Pauper Grave, c. 1880-1914,” Past and Present, No. 178 (Feb. 2003) pp. 148-175. Oxford University Press.

Walvin, James. "Dust To Dust: Celebrations of Death in Victorian England," Historical Reflections, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 353-371.

Newspapers:     

“Help the Poor,” Gate City Gazette (Coffeyville, Kansas), 3 Dec 1886, p. 2.

     “James Brown Died of Hydrophobia In a Cell of the Calaboose Last Night,” The Coffeyville Record, 3 March 1898, p. 5.

     “Burial of Soldiers,” Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 30 May 1885, p. 8.

     “Bills Allowed by the County Board of Commissioners,” Coffeyville Daily Journal, 20 Oct 1898, p. 2

Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023