British Hearse & The British Funeral

By N.M. Scott
September 2011
Book Guild
Distributed by the Trans-Atlantic Publications
ISBN: 9781846245121
160 Pages, Illustrated
$42.50 Hardcover

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N.M. Scott's seminal work charts the history of two vital yet little lauded British institutions: the funeral, and the means of transportation used to get there. From the early country hearses which consisted of a simple farm cart converted for the purpose, to the over-wrought fussy finery of the Victorian age and eventually the ushering in of the motor hearse in the early twentieth century, it is these diverse vehicles that have often defined the funerals to which they travelled, be they famous folk such as Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy, or the largely unremembered but none the less worth dead.

For, like it or not, the funeral in British culture has always been, and always will be, an occasion. As the Reverand Sabine Baring-Gould remarked, "There is no from of enjoyment more relished by a West Country man or woman than a 'buryin."

 

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