Category Archives: Cemetery book review

Reviews of cemetery books.

Toasting The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe

Friend to Cemetery Travel and contributor to Death’s Garden Revisited, Sharon Pajka, PhD, is a professor of English at Gallaudet University and the author of Women Writers Buried in Virginia. On the weekends, you can find her in the cemetery, giving history tours or volunteering and running the website River City Cemetarians.

Sharon has a brand-new book out from The History Press about the graves of people who knew Edgar Allan Poe during his life. I asked her to tell us about it.

Toasting The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe

by Sharon Pajka

I have fond memories of visiting cemeteries with my maternal grandfather, a genealogist. I remember him handing me slips of paper with distant family members’ names. I would search to find their graves. Not much has changed since my childhood, except instead of searching for my family members, I now create thematic tours of cemeteries for others and myself.

As a literature professor, I tend to focus on writers. Most recently, I have been searching for graves connected with the author Edgar Allan Poe. For the past few years, I have given an annual tour in Shockoe Hill Cemetery in which I highlight connections between Poe and those interred in the cemetery. The cemetery is 12.7 acres with approximately 30,000 interments. It was much smaller during Poe’s lifetime. He lived with his foster parents in several places in and around Shockoe Hill’s neighborhoods. He visited the cemetery both alone and with his wife to grieve the loss of his foster mother as well as a significant muse. Today, the cemetery includes his foster family, his first and last fiancée, and more friends and acquaintances than any other cemetery. Poe most likely would have been buried in this cemetery if he had not taken that last fateful trip in 1849.

Last year, I expanded my research from Poe’s connections who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery to create a grand tour of cemeteries to visit many of the people Poe knew well during his life. Some of the cemeteries I visited were places Poe also visited. Some cemeteries were places where Poe would recognize only the names on the graves; others were places where Poe would both recognize the names and be familiar with the land—although prior to it being established as a burial ground.

There is nothing inherently unique about visiting the graves of individuals whose work was admired during their lifetimes; many bibliophiles make excursions to the graves of their favorite writers. There is something unique about visiting the graves of those who were one degree of separation away from an author. I wanted to meet the people Poe knew when he was alive to have a fuller story of the author based on the people with whom he associated.

I went to cemeteries and visited graves of his mother, wife, foster family, first and last fiancée, bosses, friends, cousins, school peers and instructors. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore lists over 200 correspondents along with “420 surviving letters.” It was not possible for me to visit the graves of everyone Poe knew, at least not in one summer. I conducted research and made several road trips to southern cemeteries, mostly in Virginia and Maryland, along with Washington, D.C., Kentucky, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

I traveled to 19 cemeteries and visited 37 memorials. The names I had read in biographies and museum exhibits were now the names engraved on the tombstones—his birth mother Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, who is buried in Saint John’s Episcopal Churchyard in Richmond, VA; one of the judges for the Baltimore Saturday Visiter literary contest that Poe won and who would later help support Poe financially: John Pendleton Kennedy, who is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland; southern author and friend, Philip Pendleton Cooke, who is buried in Burwell Cemetery in Millwood, Virginia; the reverend who married Poe to his cousin, Amasa Converse who is buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky; William Gilmore Simms, who in Poe’s words was the “best novelist which this country has, upon the whole, produced,” is buried in Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina; and the man who received an urgent message about Poe’s health, Joseph Evans Snodgrass, who is buried in Hedgesville Cemetery in Hedgesville, West Virginia. These were individuals who supported, inspired, and challenged him. There are even a few who attempted to foil his dreams.

Since I was a teen, my father has clipped newspaper articles that he thinks will interest me. Many of the articles that I have kept since the late 1980s are focused on the Poe Toaster, the individual who visited Poe’s grave annually and left tokens at the grave. I have long been enchanted by this shadowy figure’s ritual of visiting Poe’s grave on the author’s birthday for over seven decades. Recently, I have even taken the time to offer my own toasts— although unlike the Toaster, I did not leave roses or cognac.

While standing in each cemetery, I read letters to and from Poe at the graves of those who knew him. It is often too easy to walk through a cemetery admiring the memorials and epitaphs while completely forgetting that these were people with their own interests and stories. I did not want these visits to be solely focused on learning about Poe. I wanted to understand each individual’s life before standing at their stone. They had their own stories, which organically led me to becoming somewhat of The Toaster for each of them. I took a whiff of orris root at the grave of Frances Allan, a perfume Poe’s foster mother was remembered for wearing. I sat by the water near where Susan Ingram gathered with family and friends 173 years ago when Poe read poetry to them. Although we do not have recordings of Poe reading his work, the Poe Museum in Richmond offers several great renditions online, including “Ulalume,” which seemed magical to Ingram.

While I learned much about Poe during this project, I also learned about poets and writers I had not previously studied, including Philip Pendleton Cooke of Winchester, Virginia. Poe delighted in Cooke’s work and valued his opinion, so it was, in fact, Poe who introduced me to Cooke and his beautiful poetry. I read Cooke’s poetry about fall trees at his grave while early spring winds blew pollen around me. I still felt the magic.

Taking this journey — and visiting Poe’s grave numerous times — I was able to learn about him from so many different angles and perspectives. I admire his work ethic and his drive to make a living doing something for which he clearly had a talent. Writing was not pure joy for him. He did not always have an opportunity to advance southern literature or even American literature, frequently churning out popular stories that the newspaper readership demanded.

The amazing part of this project was that I was able to have a deeper connection to Poe’s life, work, literature, and the sacred burial grounds. Visiting the graves transformed me. On August 21, The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe will be published by The History Press. I hope that my book encourages readers to make their own connections with cemeteries and to visit some of the graves of Poe’s family, friends, and foes. Maybe you’ll bring your own toast.

You can order a copy of The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe from Amazon or directly from The History Press.

Graves of California Settlers

What Lies Beneath: California Pioneer Cemeteries and GraveyardsWhat Lies Beneath: California Pioneer Cemeteries and Graveyards by Gail L. Jenner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I hate to rate this book so low, since the author says she cracked ribs and got a concussion in the course of researching it. Unfortunately, the book suffers from trying to cover way too much ground, splitting California’s 58 counties into 10 sections and jamming them into 300 pages. Because it has so much to cover, everything ends up glossed over at speed. I often got the feeling that fewer stories, told in greater detail, would have been more satisfying.

The author chose to focus on the unknowns of history, which means she left out Levi Strauss, Phineas Gage, Emperor Norton…although she does include Wyatt Earp, who wasn’t a California pioneer. She does a very commendable job of including pioneers of color, including William Leidesdorff (although his name is misspelled), Mary Ellen Pleasant, and the Spanish and Mexican land grant owners. She also talks at length about some of the Chinese pioneers who made history in the state.

Rather than arranging each section by cemetery, the chapters flow through various members of each family — often switching mid-chapter to talk about burial grounds in other counties without mentioning they are hundreds of miles away from the area for which the chapter is named. I found it really confusing, even with flipping back and forth to the map to see where each digression took me.

There aren’t many photos in the book (always a complaint for me), but those that are included seem to be placed randomly. For instance, the cross remembering soldiers killed in the Modoc War (in one of California’s northernmost counties) is placed at the start of the Central Coast chapter. The Modoc War itself is discussed 110 pages earlier, in the San Diego chapter. (San Diego is one of California’s southernmost counties, more than 800 miles away.) If the event is important enough to be included, why isn’t it referenced in the appropriate geographic area?

Most disappointing, sometimes cemeteries are given a street address in the text, but often they aren’t. There’s no list of cemeteries mentioned (other than combing through the index), no suggestion of additional resources, no contact information.

I really wanted this to be a terrific book, especially since it was a gift.

If you’re a completist like me and you’d like a copy of the book for your collection, you can get one from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HGEbPW

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Recommended Cemetery Books

Every so often, someone writes me to ask for a list of cemetery books I recommend. I haven’t had a list assembled, so the best I could do was point people toward the 171 cemetery books I’ve reviewed on Goodreads.

Slightly more useful was the Listopia list I started of Must-Have Cemetery Books.  82 people have voted on the list, adjusting the ranking of the books beyond what I would choose, but it will give you a good idea of what’s popular.

Finally, I have a solution to the cemetery book list dilemma! Bookshop.org allowed me to put together a list of Cemetery Books Every Taphophile Must Have. I was limited to books available on their site, so it doesn’t include some of my favorites that have gone out of print. (Those appear on the other lists, but you’ll have to scour ABE Books for them.)

If you’d like to start — or add to — your own cemetery library, the Bookshop.org list will set you up nicely.

You should know that I am an affiliate at Bookshop.org, so I earn a small commission on any books you order from either of my lists. (The other list is my books available on Bookshop.org. It also doesn’t include everything, but I’m trying to work that out.)

Remember, you can always order a copy of my cemetery books directly from me by clicking on the bookstore tab above.

Under London

Necropolis: London and Its Dead by Catharine Arnold

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


London is basically built on layer upon layer of graves. The book opens with the Bronze Age tumulus on Parliament Hill, which the author calls one of the oldest burial grounds in the city, predating Highgate Cemetery by over 4000 years. I would have liked to hear much more about the earliest burials in the area.

And I would have liked to read more about the Roman-era graves as well. I was thoroughly fascinated by the earliest chapters of this book, since those are the times I am the least familiar with.

The book really grabbed me when it explored the plague pits of the medieval Black Death. I hadn’t realized that the Danse Macabre (or Machabray) had ever come to England from the continent. I could have read much more about those centuries, although so little seems to be left above ground to mark them.

The Tudor chapters were fascinating, but things started to slow down for me after that, as the author got into material I knew better. If you are newer to the study of all things dead in London, you might find this crucial material. For me, the pace dragged.

There were highlights, though. I loved to read about Shelley and Keats in Highgate Village, before the cemetery was built. I’m fascinated by the work of Isabella Holmes, previously unknown to me. She visited every surviving graveyard in London, in hopes of closing them down and converting them to parks. I’m going to have to track down her reports. And the chapter about the fight to legalize cremation gave me insight into another subject I don’t know enough about.

All in all, this is a very readable book, full of intriguing tidbits and lots of food for thought. However, I wish each chapter had a map to display the locations of the places she talks about — or better yet, transparent maps so you could overlay them as see how deep the bodies go.

Get your own copy of Necropolis on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3lhOb9R


View all my reviews on Goodreads.

Respectable Burial review

Respectable Burial: Montreal's Mount Royal CemeteryRespectable Burial: Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery by Brian J. Young

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This may be the most boring cemetery book I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot). I bought a shrink-wrapped copy without paging through it because I’m fascinated by the cemeteries of Montreal, but this book turns out to have few photos of the monuments in Mount Royal Cemetery — and even fewer color views of the cemetery itself. That’s one strike against it.

Rather than illuminating the history of Montreal through the people buried in Mount Royal Cemetery, this book focuses on the business of running the cemetery, including minutiae on cemetery board discussions on how to police the behavior of visitors. There is a whole lot of detail about how burying the poor was seen as a Protestant duty and the rules the cemetery board consequently put in place to punish families who needed assistance burying their dead. Actually I found that quite interesting, although it went on and on.

Often, the most interesting stories in the book appeared in the photo captions, which described some of the controversial figures buried in Mount Royal. It made me wish I was reading a book comprised on the captions, instead of the main text.

To be honest, all things being equal, I prefer to explore Catholic cemeteries over Protestant ones, because Catholic cemeteries tend to have more sculpture and more detailed epitaphs and I can get a better sense of the people buried in them. Perhaps the same can be said for books about Catholic cemeteries vs. Protestant ones?

If you’d like to complete your cemetery book collection, you can buy a copy of Respectable Burial from Amazon: https://amzn.to/38wTMiW

View all my reviews on Goodreads.