Charging the Dead: The Necroeconomies of Burial Laws and the Legal Suspension of the Dead

Abstract

While Victorian studies have traditionally examined anatomy laws and the dissection of executed criminals, this article discusses laws that required payment for execution and burial costs, and uncovers actual cases in which families refused payment and as a result the state refused to release the corpse. Capital punishment looms over novels such as Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Yet, conspicuously absent from these novels are the necropolitics and economics surrounding the dead body of the executed, which saw more legal protections in the nineteenth century. The aim is to not only excavate laws rarely discussed in critical literature, but to interrogate the astonishing lengths the common law and ecclesiastical court systems were taking in order to manage bodies (through fees, burial prescriptives, customary laws, and so on). Execution and burial fees were designed to financially exploit the grieving poor. Therefore, what often resulted was a suspension of burial – a delay caused by necroeconomies built into these grim financial systems. The article thus brings together ecclesiastical court cases to underscore the tension between customary burial fees, Poor Laws, and their critique in fiction.