Here is one of my early images for Scrooge Studies, showing the gravestone of Ebenezer Scrooge in Stave Four. It's modeled after the headstone of Captain Joseph Griffith of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, buried in Ancient Cemetery, Y-Port.
And here is a photo of Captain Griffith's headstone itself:
Ancient Cemetery dates to the time of the founding of Yarmouth in 1639. I don't know how long cultural continuity between Great Britain and the American Colonies survived - undoubtedly some things have survived to the present and other things fell away at different points, accents being the most obvious of things that have diverged. There is also the very nature of the founding of Plymouth Colony. I saw a BBC documentary about it where the Puritans were described by historian Pauline Croft as "a very, very small group of very extreme people" (The Mayflower Pilgrims: Behind the Myth, 2016, quote starting at around 00:02:00). I think that's a fair characterization.
I've come to think of coastal New England after a phrase by Herman Melville's Ishmael: "the Puritanic sands" (Moby-Dick, end of Chapter 6). There's the oft-remembered bit about Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawing the observance of Christmas. I sometimes wish that certain Christmas traditions, such as depicted by Seymour in The Book of Christmas, had been more popular on the Western Side of The Pond.
On headstones, there is a survivor into the 1800s: "ye" on tombstones. Recently I learned about this from Stephen Jarvis, author of Death and Mr Pickwick: The "y" in "ye" is actually a morphing from the old Anglo-Saxon "thorn" character, which was pronounced as "th," not "y" (so "ye" should actually be pronounced "the"). Having studied a bit about the evolution of German, where thorn appears in the First Germanic Sound Shift, I was delighted to see its descendant here in my neighborhood Puritanic cemetery.
I would also like to take this opportunity to highly recommend Death and Mr Pickwick, in which Stephen has packed an enormous amount of historical information into an insightful, sometimes tragic, frequently comic, and uniquely engaging novel about the origins of The Pickwick Papers.
In the spirit of Halloween - a tradition whose practice seems quintessentially New England despite its probably very pagan (or at least un-Puritanic) origins - here are some photos of other headstones from Ancient Cemetery. There's some lovely detail on some of them, especially in the borders. And a comparison of the dates reveals a "fashion" in the half-round areas on the top of the tombstones. Early tombstones (1600s-early 1700s, as near as I can guess - often they don't have dates) tend to be small, with an abstract design that might be opposed clouds. In the 1700s, the classic Death's Head, often winged, became widely used. Around 1800, this in turn became supplanted by a Weeping Willow, an urn, or both, and remained widely used until the mid-1800s. I'm guessing that the stones may have been commissioned en masse and then used as needed, which would explain the "popularity" of particular styles in particular periods.
There are also some other interesting script details, such as a merging of the "c" and "t" in "Oct." and "October," "lyes" instead of "lies," and elongated "s" characters which look a bit like "f." Some of these show the elongated next to the regular "s," such as on the headstone of "Mifs DESIRE GRIFFITH" (Captain Griffith's daughter). This form of a double-s is quite similar to German "ß" as well. All of these photos are under my copyright.
This grave, of Lucrecia Sturgis, is one of the early headstones. This shot shows the abstracted opposing-cloud motif:
And this one, of Thomas Baxter, shows an interesting joining of the "T" and "E" in his last name:
Happy Halloween!
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