Moving, Research, and Death from a Victorian Perspective

Much progress was made in the past two weeks on the London stage of my UK adventure. A week ago Wednesday I moved into my new flat, and I've been really enjoying getting to know my new flatmates. I also found the biggest and best health food store in the world (seriously, I think it might be!!), the Whole Foods store on Kensington High Street. Let me just say it's 3 levels of "wow" for someone who loves shopping for healthy foods as much as I do. And I finally got a gym membership again!!! It feels so incredibly good to be working out again, I can't even tell you. :)

I finally had a meeting with my museum contact, and she was really lovely and accommodating. Looks like I've got approval from them to do my research, and although I had a bit of a hiccup with amending my research proposal with the Research Ethics Board at York U near the end of last week, that has thankfully been sorted out and I'm good to go. So, this next week will involve identifying the groups from which I want to recruit interview participants, and then contacting them about sending a message out to their members. Hopefully this will work and they'll want to talk to me. My museum contact also got me in to the "Discussing Darwin" talk at the NHM that was sold out, and that was really cool! Andrew Marr, a BBC tv personality, was there to talk about his new 3 part series on Darwin, and it was interesting to see what themes people emphasised in their discussion re: the impact the theory of evolution has had on society. There was this guy dressed as Darwin pushing another guy dressed as a dodo (in a wheelchair, of course) in the museum, which was quite funny. It's really fantastic to see how popular the exhibition has been here.

I did a bit of sightseeing as well, and have ended up at the Tate Britain, the National Gallery (again, to see everything I missed the first time), and the two prominent Victorian garden cemeteries of Highgate and Kensal Green. I did tours of both cemeteries, and while both were great, the former was incredibly impressive (which is probably why it's credited as being the most famous cemetery in Europe, along with the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Jim Morrison is buried). Although it may seem morbid and kind of depressing to some people to be touring cemeteries, I really love learning about the symbolism, ritual, and cultural practises of the Victorians around death, especially since these two cemeteries (of seven that were all built in London in the 1830s to handle the vastly higher number of deaths after the plague and the dire health consequences of the industrial revolution) contain the burials of many famous people. Karl Marx, for instance, was buried in a rather interesting grave in Highgate (as you can see in the photo).