The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

In nineteenth-century London, a broad coalition of urban reformers—including journalists, architects, medical officers of health, coroners, police court magistrates, and inquest juries—called for the construction of public mortuaries in order to remove the dead from working-class homes in the days, sometimes weeks, before burial. Their goal was to protect urban populations—especially the most vulnerable, young children—from the spread of contagious diseases. However, the campaigners for public mortuaries made their case by claiming that working-class burial and grieving practices, particularly Irish Catholic wakes, threatened the moral as well as physical state of childhood—accusations that no doubt fuelled working-class resistance to burial reforms. Furthermore, conflicts over the burial of deceased infants and stillborns suggested that child humanity and selfhood were best realized not in working-class domestic spaces, but through public venues such as mortuaries. The campaign to build public mortuaries and separate the dead from the living thus highlighted the fundamental role of the modernized urban public sphere in shaping Victorian ideals of childhood associated with dependence, sentiment, and human interiority.