BOOK REVIEW
These Silent Mansions A life in graveyards Jean Sprackland Johnathan Cape 2020
Gillian Wolfe CBE Learning, Arts & Heritage Consultant
There is a moment in this entrancing book when the author is driving past a cemetery with her six year old son and he says in astonishment, ‘look how many people have died!’ John Donne calls them ‘numberless infinities of souls’ and any visit to a cemetery cannot but link us to thoughts of the ephemeral nature of life and the manner in which lives are recorded at death. This is a delightful and deeply thought provoking book. Jean Sprackland has moved home many times and here she invites the reader to follow her life journey around the country by describing her local burial sites, in so doing she initiates a discussion about how society has and is dealing with memorialising those who have died. She has a light touch about her personal history giving just enough information to humanise the account and for the reader to get to know her a little but not enough to make this an autobiography. She’s a good storyteller and must have spent a huge amount of time researching some of the lives marked by the gravestone. Not lives of the great and good but of ordinary local people. Sometimes of those with the briefest of lives, such as tiny Agnes, a malformed dwarf who died aged 19 months in 1851or Elizabeth Pickett whose life ended aged 23 in 1751when her clothes caught fire; to the author’s own great grandmother Ethelind buried in 1902 in a paupers grave. Not being famous meant her chosen subjects required considerable detective work, either from churchyard burials or from the Victorian cemeteries that bore the strain of numbers in a rapidly expanding industrial society that was, by and large, culturally Christian with a homogenous burial aesthetic. Sprackland’s view is that the dilapidated state of graveyards confront us with our collective failure to remember the dead and respect them as we should. Numerous Victorian tombs are indecipherable, headstones listing perilously towards the earth are a common sight; many are only just visible hidden in brambles and ivy. No one 12
AUTUMN RESURGAM VOLUME 63 / ISSUE 3
