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Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Hardcover)

by Catharine Arnold (Author)
2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
RRP: £14.99
Price: £12.74 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd; annotated edition edition (2 May 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0743268334
  • ISBN-13: 978-0743268332
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.8 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 251,203 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #83 in  Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Sociology > Family & Social Groups > Death & Dying

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Product Description

Review
"Stitching archaeological discovery and architectural detail to anecdote and cultural commentary, "Necropolis" paints London as a city 'drained by death.'" "--Financial Times"

Peter Ackroyd, The Times
'Deeply pleasing . . . Entertainment of the most garish and exquisite kind . . . A Baedeker of the dead'

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Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Necropolis: London and Its Dead
79% buy the item featured on this page:
Necropolis: London and Its Dead 2.9 out of 5 stars (8)
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Bedlam: London and Its Mad
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Customer Reviews

8 Reviews
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4 star:
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3 star:
 (3)
2 star:
 (2)
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Average Customer Review
2.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars What a shame - A great opportunity wasted..., 28 April 2008
By Mrs. K. A. Wheatley "katywheatley" (Leicester, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Necropolis: London and Its Dead (Paperback)
I did some courses at University on death and mourning rituals and they were fascinating. When I lived in London I also used to spend a fair amount of time visiting Highgate cemetery, also fascinating. Coming across this book seemed like a blessing, dealing with and adding knowledge to areas of interest.

Sadly, I think I know too much. The issue with this book is that it is 'death lite'. I think that it's great as an introduction to the subject, but if you already know things, it's not going to take you any further forward. There is already an excellent paperback book available on underground London the name of which escapes me, but which covers much of the ground Arnold goes over here. The section on Highgate is no more than you would get if you went on one of the excellent tours held by The Friends of Highgate Cemetery. I was most disappointed here, as I was really hoping for something new, rather than the highlights.

I also think the section on Diana is gratuitious and this is going to sound ironic for a book about death, but rather tasteless. Again, nothing you wouldn't know if you had followed the story with any interest at the time, and it strikes me as something the marketing department thought might be good to sell books rather than something Arnold herself had more than a passing interest in.

The bones, ha ha, are here. It just needs fleshing out. This would have been a much more satisfactory book if it had been better researched and about twice as long. As it is, it's just a coffee table book or something you can chat about to Londoners at a dinner party other than the housing market.
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35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Informative and amusing by turn, 20 May 2006
By P. W. H. Bradley - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
London and its dead covers the period from Roman times to date, with emphasis on the periods of the Black Death, the Victorian era and the Second World War. Very well written, and the macabra nature of the subject matter is treated sensitively. It is informative and amusing by turn, detailing some of the grisly aspects of death, various cemetery related scandals and lots of good hard factual information. If you have an interest in cemeteries or in London as a city this is a must read book. My only quibble is that there were very few illustrations, and those chosen were not good. Other than that, it's excellent!
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Ghastly History Gorgeously Told..., 25 Jul 2007
By Ms. Kl O'shea "the_bad_blood" (Bristol UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Necropolis: London and its Dead is a fascinating study of London's status as centuries-old burial ground, and how the city's relationship to death and its dead has played a pivotal role in its history. It begins with the Neolithic tribal settlements in the area which became the capital, moving onto Roman ritual and burial and then,in the post-Pagan centuries, the vast differences in the treatment of death via Christian belief. Medieval death, plague and the notion of ars moriendi (the art of dying well) are explored, as is the Great Fire of 1665, the population boom of the following two centuries. The crystalisation of Victorian attitudes to grief and mourning naturally take up a great deal of the book, as do the completions of the vast (then) out-of-town cemeteries such as Kensall Green and of course Highgate, after the massive scandals of the Resurrection-Men, mass burials, cholera and the public health horrors of the mid-1800s. Moving on from the nineteenth century, Arnold argues that the intricate and established cult of grief long-held in Victorian London necessarily had to alter after the mass deaths of WWI made intimate mourning and, indeed, graveside reveries, impossible and contrived in the face of rapidly advancing, agnostic modernity.

The amount of material covered in this slim paperback edition is quite staggering, but Arnold makes easy work of the vast subject matter and manages to convey a neat narrative progression throughout. She has an obvious relish for the macabre, but never falls into either of the standard-issue pitfalls when dealing with the subject of death: she neither becomes overly hammy and lighthearted, nor does she descend into the sober depths of elegy. At all times she is even-handed, engaging, critical and honest.

The Victorian period is allotted a considerable amount of space and this book would be of great interest to those interested in Victoriana. Far from revealing an especial prejudice on the part of the author, however, this merely reflects the fact that it was during the nineteenth century that the subject of death was critical from a social, cultural, political and health point of view. Proof that we take many things for granted nowadays, Arnold retells the horrors of Victorian burial: the foul, crammed churchyards, the thefts of bodies, the mass graves where decomposition was often aided with quick-lime and bodies were made to fit their 'snug' abodes via dismemberment, or unscrupulous undertakers jumping up and down upon the corpses...facts both intriguing and harrowing illuminate this book throughout. The Victorian industry of death is also examined: the importance of mourning fashion, of status, of monuments and propriety.

Fascinating throughout, I would recommend this book to anyone with even the mildest curiousity about the subject matter. It is thorough and never exploitative. You will finish reading it, as I did, and feel absolutely certain that London has a unique and sometimes ghastly relationship with its dead. To finish: did you know that part of the London Underground near Kensington veers away from its usual straight course due to the impossibility of drilling through a mass grave of plague dead on that site?...
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 		 Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Very poor
Like a previous reviwer said the author tends to go off at tangents that have nothing to do with London. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Lesley S.

3.0 out of 5 stars necropolis now

This could have been a very good book indeed. after all, death and its accompaniments are endlessly fascinating and a cultural history of death in the world's most vibrant... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Dr. Sn Cottam

3.0 out of 5 stars Victorian London and its dead
I started reading this book and thought it was brilliant - really off-the-wall subject matter.

However, about a third of the way through the focus shifts to the... Read more
Published 10 months ago by PH

2.0 out of 5 stars Poorly researched; weak structure
Catharine Arnold is not a historian - and it shows. Although the bibliography lists a number of authoritative books, too much of the research is based on out of date texts and... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Will Duffay

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but lacking in focus
This book is well written and interesting but the author keeps going off into subjects which are only tangential to the study of London's dead and burial grounds. Read more
Published on 27 May 2006 by R. Wooldridge

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