The best result of my google-search for the origins of the idiomatic phrase, “turn over in the grave” was this, from wikipedia:
One of the earliest uses is found in William Thackeray's 1849 work The History of Pendennis, where Mrs. Wapshot, upset by a man's advances on the widow of Mr. Pendennis whom the widow had "never liked," says it's "enough to make poor Mr. Pendennis turn in his grave."
Can anyone out there trace the phrase back further than 1849?
I can try to set it back much further.
The Gemara are old Jewish texts. I can not say how old, as today is the first time I heard about them, but surely from before 1842, Wikipedia gives a date of 500 CE.
In there, in Sotah 7b, it says (in the English translation by Soncino):
All the years that the Israelites were in the wilderness, Judah's bones kept turning in his coffin until Moses arose and begged mercy for him.
The original reads:
כל אותן שנים שהיו ישראל במדבר היו עצמותיו של יהודה מגולגלין בארון עד שעמד משה ובקש עליו רחמים
I don't know if the 'modern' usage goes back to this text, it might have been 'reinvented' in the 1800s.
I can push it back a little further, but not much. Here's what Google Books gives for 1700–1849:
1848 – Why, his very bones would turn in his grave at the bare thought of it — Farmers' Library and Monthly Journal of Agriculture, Volume 3
1847 – Could our deceased father hear that, I think he’d turn in his grave. — Rambleton: A Romance of Fashionable Life in New-York During the Great Speculation of 1836
1845 – The Scotch Presbyterians are building a stone Gothic temple in Oxford-road, which would almost make John Knox turn in his grave with dismay. — The Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol 35
1843 –What has become of Prussian honour? A general of infantry, with fourteen battalions and twenty escadrons, runs away before 2500 men! If your father could hear this it would make him turn in his grave. — The Foreign Quarterly Review
1842 – Burke may smile, or turn in his grave, if he pleases ; yet the assertion just made is true. — The Eclectic Review, Vol 1
Thackeray seems to have had a pretty live ear for currently fashionable language.
The oldest reference I've found in English uses the phrase turn in his coffin, used with the same meaning as that required. It comes from 1802, in The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (page 28) in the following passage:
I should be glad to know what our ancestors would have thought and felt in this situation? what those weak a deluded men, so inferior to the politicians of the present day, the Marlboroughs, the Godolphins, the Somers's (sp?), the King Williams, all those who view with such apprehension the power of Louis XIV., what they would say to a peace, which not only confirms to France the possession of nearly the whole of Europe, but extends her empire over every other part of the globe. Is there a man of them, who would not turn in his coffin could he be sensible to a twentieth part of that which is passing, as perfect matter of course, in the politicks of the present moment?
Falkner; a novel the final novel by Mary Shelley, written in 1837 includes this sentence (pp 27 to 28):
It was bad enough now, but, by and by, she saw nothing but the parish ; though Missy was born for better than that, and her poor mamma would turn in her grave at the name of such a thing.
On October 26 1816 in Cobbett's Weekly Political Pamphlet (page 409) is the sentence:
These regulations , and the penalties which are attached to any breach of them, operate to an almost total exclusion of the common people from any considerable portion of useful knowledge through the means of the press, about the freedom of which our unprincipled hirelings have still the audacity to boast, though if our forefathers could hear of the state of slavery to which it is reduced, the hearing of it would make them turn in their graves.
Not quite so early, but still significant in terms of the adoption of the phrase, is that it was used in the UK parliament on April 19 1831, as recorded by Hansard (p1609)
A predecessor of the right hon. Gentleman in the Chair had declared, that practices were now openly avowed with respect to seats in that House, which were sufficient to make our ancestors, could they be informed of them, turn in their graves;
"sich im Grab umdrehen" is a common saying in German. I did not research but my guess is that the saying wandered from German into English, perhaps by translation of novels. But maybe already the old Romans had this saying.
Added: There is not much to be found about the German saying. There are instances from the 18th c. (Lessing, Gellert) and it is assumed that the saying is older. I skimmed through Grimm's article Grab (grave) and found nothing about the saying, even though the article Grab is a book. - Added: Grimm has two instances for the saying under umdrehen, from about 1800-1830.
The saying is found in other languages too.
Spanish: revolcarse en la tumba.
Italian: rivoltarsi nella tomba.
None of the references I checked gave an earlier first-occurrence date than Wikipedia's, but one—The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (1998)—makes the interesting claim that, while the phrase "turn in [one's] grave" is "British, American & Australian," the allied phrases "turn over in [one's] grave" and "spin in [one's] grave" are strictly American. Evidently, disgruntled corpses tend to be livelier in the United States than in the rest of the world. The earliest deceased spinners in a Google Books search date only to 1902, however.
