The idea that death became taboo in the twentieth century derives partly from the growth of a sanitised culture which has diminished contact with the corpse. As Lindsey Prior suggests, the cadaver in the latter half of the twentieth century was treated as a thing and talked of in terms of ‘it’ rather than a personal name. For the Victorian and Edwardian working classes, however, death and the cadaver were inseparable from domestic living space. Scandals in the first half of the nineteenth century concerning the retention of corpses in houses for a week or more subsided with the boom in burial insurance and the increased powers of public health officials. By the 1880s, most working-class families buried their dead within four days of expiration. Nonetheless, the spatial proximity of the living to the corpse alarmed medical practitioners and public health reformers who perceived the putrefying body as a source of contagion. Yet locating the dead in a domestic context was integral to the performance of rites associated with the dignity of the dead and the expression of sentiment. The act of washing and laying out a corpse, for instance, represented a final gesture of intimacy and affection. It also assisted the bereaved in renegotiating the boundaries between themselves and the dead whilst framing visual memories of the deceased at peace.