It is not so much among the wealthy upper classes that the mischiefs of this useless and expensive mummery are felt, as amongst the middle and working classes.  An expensive funeral is held to be “respectable.”  Middle-class people, who are struggling for front places in society, make an effort to rise into the region of mutes and nodding plumes; and, like their “betters,” they are victimised by the undertakers.  These fix the fashion for the rest; “we must do as Others do;” and most people submit to pay the tax.  They array themselves, friends, and servants, in mourning; and a respectable funeral is thus purchased.

The expenditure falls heavily upon a family, at a time when they are the least able to bear it.  The bread-winner has been taken away, and everything is left to the undertaker.  How is a wretched widow in the midst of her agony, or how are orphan children, deprived of the protecting hand of a parent, to higgle with a tradesman about the cheapening of mourning suits, black gloves, weepers, and the other miserable “trappings of woe”?  It is at such a moment, when in thousands of cases every pound and every shilling is of consequence to the survivors, that the little ready money they can scrape together is lavished, without question, upon a vulgar and extravagant piece of pageantry.  Would not the means which have been thus foolishly expended in paying an empty honour to the dead, be much better applied in being used for the comfort and maintenance of the living?

The same evil propagates itself downwards in society.  The working classes suffer equally with the middle classes, in proportion to their means.  The average cost of a tradesman’s funeral in England is about fifty pounds; of a mechanic, or labourer, it ranges from five pounds to ten pounds.  In Scotland funeral expenses are considerably lower.  The desire to secure respectable interment for departed relatives, is a strong and widely-diffused feeling among the labouring population; and it does them honour.  They will subscribe for this purpose, when they will for no other.  The largest of the working-men’s clubs are burial clubs.  Ten pounds are usually allowed for the funeral of a husband, and five pounds for the funeral of a wife.  As much as fifteen, twenty, thirty, and even forty pounds, are occasionally expended on a mechanic’s funeral, in cases where the deceased has been a member of several clubs, on which occasions the undertakers meet and “settle” between them their several shares in the performance of the funeral.  It is not unusual to insure a child’s life in four or five of these burial clubs; and we have heard of a case where one man had insured payments in no fewer than nineteen different burial clubs in Manchester!

When the working-man, in whose family a death has occurred, does not happen to be a member of a burial club, he is still governed by their example, and has to tax himself seriously to comply with the usages of society, and give to his wife or child a respectable funeral.  Where it is the father of the family himself who has died, the case is still harder.  Perhaps all the savings of his life are spent in providing mourning for his wife and children at his death.  Such an expense, at such a time, is ruinous, and altogether unjustifiable.