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[books 2013] Necropolis
Nov. 18th, 2013 04:22 pm69. Necropolis: London and its dead by Catharine Arnold
A potted history of burial practice in London from prehistoric times till the present.
I'd been really looking forward to this, but was kind of disappointed. It turned out I knew more than I thought (I thought my area of expertise was on resurrection men and the Anatomy Act but it turns out there's more overlap than I realised). The chapters on prehistory and the medieval period were really short, and so over-simplistic as to be misleading (again, that's where my particular interests lie).
I did think the chapter on the Plague Year was good.
I was disappointed with the big sections on the Victorian cemeteries - as I said above, I knew more than I thought, and Arnold focuses mostly on Highgate and Kensal Green, which are the ones I already knew quite a lot about. I would have liked more on Tower Hamlets in particular.
Overall it's not a bad general history, but the wrong book for me.
A potted history of burial practice in London from prehistoric times till the present.
I'd been really looking forward to this, but was kind of disappointed. It turned out I knew more than I thought (I thought my area of expertise was on resurrection men and the Anatomy Act but it turns out there's more overlap than I realised). The chapters on prehistory and the medieval period were really short, and so over-simplistic as to be misleading (again, that's where my particular interests lie).
I did think the chapter on the Plague Year was good.
I was disappointed with the big sections on the Victorian cemeteries - as I said above, I knew more than I thought, and Arnold focuses mostly on Highgate and Kensal Green, which are the ones I already knew quite a lot about. I would have liked more on Tower Hamlets in particular.
Overall it's not a bad general history, but the wrong book for me.
