Grave Emotions: Textiles and Clothing from Nineteenth-Century London Cemeteries

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What is the last thing someone ever wears, who decides, and what emotions do those garments embody? Excavations by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) of two 1840s Non-Conformist and Baptist cemetery sites answer some of these questions for poorer mid-nineteenth century Londoners. The decayed textiles emerging from these graves are a new and emotionally rich source for exploring the distance of the recent past. The unexplained, chance-found scraps of clothing and shrouds read in their own context reveal unique information, breaking archival silence about burial rituals and death-related consumption practices in lower social levels than the middle classes. The choice of interred textiles and garments—such as a satin baby’s bonnet, pinned silk ribbons and a false waistcoat—their qualities and construction all bespeak emotions around pride, dignity, religious feeling, tenderness, and socially codified grief. Clothing fragments become a substitute fleshliness as the bodily tissue they cover wears away, the last traces of the invested, materialized emotions surrounding death. The article also moves between the technical and the interpretive to consider the emotions and affects these intimate, poignant and sometimes gruesome objects evoke in the researcher during analysis. How, or should, these feelings be considered as part of research after stripping my own emotional responses for the supposed objectivity required of an archaeological report?