{"product_id":"highgate-craig-ferguson-9798235958647","title":"Highgate: A Walk Among the Dead","description":"\u003cp\u003eStep through the gates of one of the world's most famous cemeteries - and learn to read it the way its Victorian visitors once did.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHighgate Cemetery has been many things across nearly two centuries: a commercial solution to a Victorian sanitation crisis, a fashionable status symbol for London's rising middle class, a nearly abandoned ruin swallowed by ivy, the epicenter of a bizarre 1970s vampire panic, and finally a rescued heritage site saved by ordinary volunteers with hand tools and nothing but determination.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStructured as a guided walking tour and narrated by a scholarly, gleefully morbid historian-guide, HIGHGATE takes you through twenty chapters covering: \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e- The Egyptian Avenue and the Victorian fashion for borrowed antiquity\u003cbr\u003e- The Circle of Lebanon, built in a ring around a cedar older than the cemetery itself\u003cbr\u003e- The full, unsentimental economics of Victorian death - what a grave actually cost, and what that meant\u003cbr\u003e- The coded language of mourning: broken columns, reversed torches, angels who won't meet your eye\u003cbr\u003e- Karl Marx, George Eliot, and Michael Faraday - three very different graves, three very different arguments about what a monument is for\u003cbr\u003e- The infamous \"Highgate Vampire\" panic of 1970, and how a derelict cemetery became a tabloid sensation\u003cbr\u003e- The volunteer rescue that saved the cemetery from ruin, grave by grave, ivy strand by ivy strand\u003cbr\u003e- The cemetery as it exists today - still receiving burials, still selling plots, still very much alive\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is not a dry academic survey. It's a walk - through iron gates, sunken avenues, and quiet unconsecrated ground - told by a guide who finds the whole business of Victorian death genuinely, unapologetically fascinating, and wants you to feel the same way by the time you reach the gate again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor readers of Victorian social history, London history, cemetery and mortuary studies, and anyone who has ever wondered what a headstone is actually trying to tell you.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Craig Ferguson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798235958647\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Craig Ferguson's Dark House Publishing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/23\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 118\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.37lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.28d","brand":"Craig Ferguson","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48998545555711,"sku":"9798235958647","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/highgate-craig-ferguson-9798235958647","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}