Today, 8 January, is the 250th anniversary of Baskerville’s death. When Aris’s Birmingham Gazette published notice of Baskerville’s death on Monday 23 January 1775 the announcement was concise:
Died. On Monday last, at Easy Hill in this Town, Mr John Baskerville; whose Memory will be perpetuated, by the Beauty and Elegance of his Printing, which he carried to a very great Perfection.
Whilst it tells nothing of the arrangements for his funeral it raises an uncertainty as to the date of Baskerville’s death. While Aris states he died ‘on Monday last’—16 January 1775—his various biographers almost unanimously date his death as Sunday 8 January.
Baskerville was buried on his own premises at Easy Hill. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, his deist persuasions and ‘hearty contempt of all superstition [and] the farce of a consecrated ground’ meant a home-burial was a logical conclusion to his ideological stance, an assertion of his independence from society’s traditions, and his freedom from both civic and religious authority. Secondly, it was explicit evidence of his wealth. Baskerville was sufficiently prosperous to be interred at home. Thirdly, Baskerville’s internment in his garden populated with ‘trees and shrubs of every kind’ and his desire to spend eternity in his self-made ‘Little Eden’ chimes with the era’s concern for place, space and the natural world.
Baskerville’s will stated that he was to be placed in a specially prepared vault in ‘a conical building in [his] own premises’. Two years before his death the conical building had been ‘raised higher’ to accommodate the vault and was ‘painted’. His epitaph was inscribed on the building’s exterior. A photograph in the Library of Birmingham shows his coffin was made of lead, which would have provided an airtight seal preventing the body from premature decay and kept death’s effluence at bay. Baskerville’s body was dressed in a shroud, evidence for which exists in the Library of Birmingham where there is a yellow rosette made of linen, cut from the shroud by Dr George Edward Male, the father of English medical jurisprudence. Burial in a shroud typically meant the corpse was without personal clothes. Evidence of the shroud, therefore, belies frequently repeated claims that Baskerville was buried in his ‘court clothes’ and in ‘shoes with very large buckles.’ A final piece of evidence of Baskerville’s burial is a branch of laurel that was found on his chest and scatterings of laurel, bay and other leaves in his coffin. It is impossible to know if they were to disguise the smell of the decomposition, or whether they formed part of the wreath which may had dressed the coffin.
Baskerville had the time, money and inclination to pre-plan his burial. Indications as to the form his funeral might have taken can be deduced from his will, in conjunction with material and later photographic evidence which enable some assumptions to be made about the event. But whatever form it took the funeral bore the marks of John Baskerville’s personality, and ‘whatever else it was it was not commonplace.’