The evolution of the Anglo-American rural cemetery: landscape architecture as social and cultural history.

Abstract

A typical Englishman or American making the Grand Tour in the closing decades of the eighteenth century paid the obligatory visit to Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville, and in the early years of the following century such ‘tourists’ made pilgrimages to the new Parisian cemetery, Pere Lachaise. In Cemetery Improvement (1840), for example, George Collison pointed out that ‘Every continental traveller pays an early visit to the cemetery of Pere Lachaise’, while Americans almost invariably described that burial ground as ‘the most attractive spot in France’. At first these published travel accounts took on a formulaic quality, with each book repeating almost verbatim what other visitors recorded of the beauty of the scenery, but predictability detracts only slightly from the historical value of such descriptions: at Ermenonville and Pere Lachaise English and American travellers confronted scenes foreign to their experience at home. Rousseau, the great champion of nature, was buried on an island in a garden, an a...