Inside-out and outside-in: Learned institutions and garden cemeteries in 19th-century Britain

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the simultaneous emergence of both intellectual institutions and garden cemeteries in Georgian and Victorian Britain. As two heterotopias, the chapter explores their relationship and how the two spaces are inversions of each other, with the cemetery becoming the ‘inside out’ of the museum as a type of outdoor museum that collected and documented the lives of the dead. The chapter explores how the Victorian fever and excitement for collecting (in many forms), gathering and analysing data from increasing populations in provincial cities were utilized as a justification for a new space for the dead on a grand scale, thereby recreating scenes from antiquity with newfound knowledge among a powerful new middle-class civic elite through their new and developing institutions from learned societies. This civic elite is often faceless in scholarship, and in response this chapter brings certain significant individuals to the fore to show that their roles and networks of influence were just as important in contributing to the formation of these new garden cemeteries as that of renowned cemetery designer John Claudius Loudon.