The Great Outdoors
Anna Goodall moons about in a graveyard
After scouring dust-lined shelves in dimly lit bookshops, sniffing musty pages and fighting crumbling cardboard boxes for literary gems, Literary London decided it was time to get a bit of fresh air. Not that I was overwhelmed by a head rush on arrival at Bunhill Fields – far from it. This ancient unconsecrated burial ground is, after all, right in the heart of the City of London.
The name derives from ‘Bone Hill’, so-called because of the large number of human remains dumped here in the sixteenth century. Over a hundred years later the site was fenced off and set aside for the burial of those who had died from the plague (as mentioned in Defoe’s fictional account of the period, A Journal of the Plague Year). However, the lease was eventually made over to a certain Mr Tindall. He permitted burials in the unconsecrated ground and it became the resting place for many notable Dissenters.
In the main paved area, a white obelisk marks Daniel Defoe’s resting place. Beside it, in a weird juxtaposition, is a simple gravestone for William Blake and his wife Catherine Sophia. On the opposite side, the ground’s most elaborate monument is reserved for John Bunyan. His grandiose tomb displays a supine statue of the man himself atop its weathered stone, and is further embellished with bas-reliefs of images from The Pilgrim’s Progress.
One can only sympathise with the prudent Bunyan for keeping out of what looks, at first, to be an antagonistic arrangement between Defoe and Blake. The slightly unconvincing grandeur of Defoe’s monument is offset by the Blakes’s mysteriously simple and unprepossessing marker. And perhaps a PP reader knows why atop William and Catherine’s gravestone there is a hoard of pennies, put there as if for wishing or good luck.
Both lived very near their eventual resting place: Blake was born in 1757 in Soho but lived at 3 Fountain Court, just off the Strand, for some time before his death; Defoe, meanwhile, was born around 1660 in the ward of St Giles Cripplegate. He was imprisoned for a short time at Newgate Prison, and nearly a century later Blake took part in the Gordon Riots in which the same gaol was stormed and captives released. Defoe’s infamous heroine Moll Flanders begins her illustrious career as a thief in the once teeming alleyways around Bunhill: Leadenhall Street is where she is first tempted by ‘the Devil’, though she swiftly moves onto Aldersgate Street, and then Lombard Street, a little further into the City. The twists and turns Moll takes in her chequered career paint an evocative picture of the capital’s geography – it was clearly a place Defoe knew intimately.
Blake was a man involved with some of eighteenth century London’s most radical thinkers, such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Paine, and his grim evocation of the city (which also stands for the doomed English Commonwealth as a whole) in the poem ‘London’ is also perhaps one of his best. Both men had a preoccupation with sin and redemption and society’s part in the fall of the individual and mankind; and they both seem to have had a certain fascination with both the idea and the reality of London itself. Hmm, maybe they’re getting on better than I first thought?
On the day I visited, a music video (involving two people dressed like Victorian undertakers!) was being filmed among the gravestones. And the band? Why, it was Vatican DC, of course! Somehow I didn’t think the Nonconformist residents of the Fields would approve. Then again, perhaps they saw the funny side …
Bunhill Fields, City Road, EC1
