books 2012: Necropolis: London and Its Dead, by Catharine Arnold

The subject matter of this book was fascinating - how the people of London have handled the burial/disposal of the dead over many centuries - but the book left me a little flat. The chapters are in roughly chronological order, but within each chapter, I thought the material could have been organized a little better. There were some spots where Arnold repeats herself, which a good editor should have caught. There are a few photos included in the book, but I would have liked more, and some charts/graphs/timelines would have been useful too to help the reader understand (for example) the scope of the cemetery problem or the order of events. Although the chapters are chronological, sometimes they loop back on themselves, and I would have liked a chart to help me keep track of, say, the founding of Kensal Green in relation to other cemeteries or the dates various laws were passed. Some of the content also got a little repetitive - the Victorian funerals are kind of Arnold's bread and butter in a book like this, but you can only read about so many funerals (and so many black ostrich feathers on so many horses) before it all blurs together, especially when the funerals are for personages famous in the 1800s who are no longer famous.

Overall, I thought the book was an enjoyable read because I'm really interested in the topic. And it was a good book, but the flaws that are present are so fixable that it was just a little disappointing.