The Duke of Wellington died on 14 September and his state Funeral took place on 18 November. It was planned on a more magnificent and elaborate scale than any previous such occasion in the nation's history and, given Dickens's detestation of costly and elaborate funeral ceremonies, it is not surprising that he reacted negatively to all this. 'I think it a grevious thing,' he wrote to Miss Burdett Coutts on 23 September, 'a relapse into semi-barbarous practices...a pernicious corruption of the popular mind, just beginning to awaken from the long dream of inconsistencies, monstrosities, horrors and ruinous expenses, that has beset all classes of society in connexion with Death' (Pilgrim, Vol. VI, pp. 764–5). In the same letter he expressed his belief that it would be useless to publish any remonstrance on the subject until the wave of public emotion had subsided.
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