Cremating the dead is nothing particularly new. It's been going on since the Stone Age. But in Britain, we've not been too keen on it since we became a nation of God-fearing Christians. Burning was something reserved for heretics. Often, we didn't even wait until they were dead.
But after a few hundred years of sticking the dead in the ground, along came the Victorians, with their (often entirely reasonable) fear of germs, dirt and disease. Sir Henry Thompson, physician to the Queen, was a champion of cremation, and in 1874 he formed the Cremation Society to push for the legalisation of the practice as a “necessary sanitation precaution against the propagation of disease”.
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