Churchyard Memorials, ‘Dispensing with God Gradually’: Rustication, Decline of the Gothic and the Emergence of Art Deco in the British Isles

Abstract

Abstract:This article considers rusticated memorials in many churchyards and cemeteries in England and Wales, between c. 1850 and the present day, analysing their forms, chronology, and their wider social and artistic significances. These memorials have hitherto been a neglected form among British memorial styles. The discussion here focuses on the English Midlands, Kensal Green Cemetery (London), and Montgomeryshire in Wales. It appraises how such memorial rustication may relate to changing attitudes to rurality, ‘natural’ landscapes, and secularisation over time. As an analysis of shifting memorial tastes, the article assesses the chronology of rustication against the periodisation of two more dominant memorial types: namely Gothic memorials, which prevailed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Art Deco memorials, which gained popularity from the 1920s. It appraises regional differences in memorial style change, showing little English and Welsh variation in this after the mid-nineteenth century. There is attention to the hitherto little studied decline of the Gothic, and to the wider significance of the more secularised memorial forms that followed it. The role of these Gothic, rusticated, and Art Deco memorials for an understanding of social, attitudinal, religious and secularising change is emphasised.