Three quarters of us now choose cremation for our funerals. Researched from original sources, From Dust to Ashes is the first full-length account of this process in Briatin and analyses the religious, political, economic and social reasons behind our individual choices. The 'Victorian way of death' was challenged by a succession of reformers. One such was Queen Victoria's surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, who founded the Cremation Society in 1874. Cremation won its first legal recognition in the trail of the Welsh druid, Dr William Price, in 1884. Despite the Cremation Act 1902, cremation was slow to win public approval, but in the conditions of a twentieth-century society twice at war, cremation grew rapidly after 1945. Today, the cremation movement is responding to new challenges, of which environmental concerns are the chief. This book will be fascinating and authoritative reading for social anthroplogists, social historians, sociologists of the family, as well as funeral directors in training.