Thomas W. Laqueur Quotes

By 1850, the pauper funeral had become perhaps the dominant representation of that vulnerability, of the possibility of falling irrevocably from the grace of society, of exclusion from the values of one's culture. It was an image that worked on the poor; they would, as one observer put it, "sell their beds out from under them sooner than have parish funerals." Anxiety about pauper burial did not, of course, stand alone in drawing - pushing might be the better verb - the poor into industrial civilization, but ignominious burial was one of the most powerful ways in which the relationship between money and standing was made manifest, a metaphor for the meaning of consumption, a vehicle for the creation of desire that made the new economic order possible.

The falseness of the seventeenth century became a large measure of the truth by the nineteenth. Money made the man, or at least went a long way toward doing so; and death became the occasion for a final accounting, a stocktaking of worldly success. Of course, there were other metrics: virtue, martyrdom, political standing, fraternal ties. But it took money to publicize them. The funeral became more and more a standardized commodity whose cost could be matched with exquisite precision to the class and degree of 'respectability' of the deceased. When one bought a funeral, one bought a more or less splendid parade, each additional bauble, each horse, each feather or set of nails adding to the base price. Bit by bit, finery accumulated, and by looking at the account books of an undertaker who specialized in pauper funerals, we can begin to see the bounds of decency in death.