"Trading in Death": Contested Commodities in 'Household Words'

Abstract

In his final will and testament, Dickens issued the following order: "I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity. I DIRECT that my name be inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb, without the addition of "Mr." or "Esquire". I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever .... (qtd. in Forster 421-2)." Dickens's emphatic directive regarding the form of his own burial attests to his well-known dislike of the elaborate customs associated with the "respectable" Victorian funeral. His fictional undertakers - Mr Sowerberry in 'Oliver Twist', Mr Mould in 'Martin Chuzzlewit', Mr Omer in 'David Copperfield', and Mr Trabb in 'Great Expectations' - are depicted with something of that "attraction of repulsion" which characterised his fascination with the dead and death more generally. As Harry Stone has noted, the name of Sowerberry conveys Dickens's obsession with cannibalism in combining the notion of something unpleasant to eat (sour berry) with its "darker, less obvious homonyms" of sower or burier of corpses (82). Such corpse-devouring also underlies the description of Mr Mould enjoying his "cool, transparent" glass of punch amidst the "sweets of domestic repose" (Dickens, 'Chuzzlewit' 345): while he beams lovingly at Mrs Mould, says the narrator, "from the distant shop a pleasant sound arose of coffin-making with a low melodious hammer, rat, tat, tat, tat, alike promoting slumber and digestion" (346). In these fictional portraits, Dickens explores the contrast between the awareness of the horrors of the corpse and the familiar routines of the funeral parlour, between the sacred mystery of death and the secular commercial interests of the trade, as part of his satire on the commodification of death.