A brief history of chopping up dead people and the working class.
The Resurrectionists
‘I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame’
- Chapter 4
Sooner or later, any committed artist is going to require materials for their designs. It just so happens that Viktor Frankenstein required pieces of the dead. This is the unsavoury side of Viktor’s vaulting ambition. The story he recounts to Walton by chapter four of the novel has mostly focused on family drama, his personal academic conflicts and Viktor’s pure hope of giving something worthwhile to humanity. He may be a touch egotistical but he and Walton are great men, ego is the fuel they run on to conquer unseen lands. But with Viktor’s descent into the charnel houses and catacombs, that story at last turns Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus from a soap opera into a horror.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an audience throughout history and across the globe that wouldn’t see the interference of corpses as at least taboo, if not downright disgusting. Any individual secretly harvesting bits of the deceased for their own hidden creation has moved beyond academic detachment and into derangement. But for Shelley’s audience, this threat was more than just an imagined fear.
This was the age of the resurrectionists. Not to be confused with grave-robbing, which is merely unearthing the recently dead to steal the goods buried with them, the resurrection men, or body-snatchers, stalked the cemeteries of university towns under the cover of darkness. By little or no lamp-light, they sank spades and hands into the soft soil of fresh graves. Dragging their ‘goods’ through the darkness – the fresher the better – the filth-covered men would then proceed to the quarters and residences of the socially respected and refined university-educated doctors and anatomists of the city where former humans would change hands for a fee.
Body-snatching fell into an unusual, legal grey area. Despite what people may have thought (and certainly despite how they felt) dead bodies or their composite parts didn’t actually belong to anyone. Since a dead body didn’t belong to anyone, it couldn’t be stolen from anyone either. Resurrectionists technically committed a crime against the grave site, not the grave’s occupants — a crime very rarely punished with little more than a swift whipping. If body-snatchers stole any of the goods within the grave, however, that would count as theft and could face severe punishment. But the body-snatchers knew their industry well and the body within the grave was often worth a lot more than the risk of stealing and fencing any additional goods. Indeed, a trademark sign that a loved one had been spirited away by these not-quite-criminals was the discovery of the clothes the deceased had been buried in not far from the much more obvious clue of an empty grave.
Watchtowers were built in graveyards and cemeteries, the rich paid for bespoke, iron coffins and vaults while the poor dug further into the ground and covered their departed in heavy stones and weights. Graves were covered with concrete, technical contraptions were developed to prevent coffin-lids being opened, and in Scotland wrought-iron cages called mortsafes were built over grave sites. Despite watch-patrols, servants attending vaults and chapels, dogs and the occasional angry mob, the body-snatchers largely avoided being caught red-handed. Even if someone was certain they knew who had robbed the grave of their loved one, it was very hard to prove after the fact since the evidence was inevitably destroyed by the anatomists’ work.
Later authors would explicitly write about the resurrectionist and use their macabre reputation as inspiration. Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities featured a resurrectionist in 1859. And later still, in 1884, Robert Louis-Stephen published his strange-tale, The Body Snatcher in the Pall Mall Gazette. While these later writers benefited from the historical familiarity with body-snatchers, Shelley was lucky enough to be publishing Frankenstein during the height of one of its greatest scandals. In 1828, almost directly in between the publishing of the second and third editions of Frankenstein, William Burke and William Hare, then the most famous resurrectionists in world, terrorised Edinburgh and were put on trial for the murder of 16 souls in the pursuit of the anatomist’s fee.
Certainly, by the time of the 1931 third edition, Viktor Frankenstein’s ghastly work would have been seen through the lens of this trail and the copy-cat murderers taking place in London that very year. The Bethnal Green Gang would drug their victims before bartering with London’s anatomists. They eventually became known as the London Burkers — ‘burking’ entering the vocabulary of the time, meaning: ‘To murder, in the same manner or for the same purpose as Burke did; to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim’s body for dissection. ‘
Viktor doesn’t admit to using resurrectionists. His work is far too secretive and compromising for that. But readers must have suspected him of burking. Afterall, we know he is looking for the finest, bespoke parts, telling Walton, ‘I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!’’ We know that Viktor, in his ego, ambition, shame and illness isn’t a reliable narrator. And his need for a companion and the Walton’s respect suggests Viktor needs to cast himself in the best light.
‘Instructing me as to what I ought to procure,’ Viktor states in reference to Waldman – the professor at Ingolstadt who shepherds young Frankenstein from ‘petty experimentalist’ to ‘man of science’ – refers not just to the test tubes and chemicals he’ll need in his learning but the essential materials of a dead body. Before his shift to grave-digging, Viktor must be aware of the shady business of the cadaver trade. Was emotional separation a precurement needed for Viktors’ evolution?
The Creature, however, may have been read as a resurrectionist and burker in his delivery of the dead to the surgeon Frankenstein. His fee however, isn’t money but the creation of his own loved one the end to his solitude. Here, audiences must have been reminded of the awful dread that it could be your loved ones the resurrectionists bring to the doors of learned men to be dissected and discussed. They would have also seen the hypocrisy of the scientific mind. Viktor, as a student of science builds a detachment to his work. He tells Walton, ‘a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm.”’ And yet, after abandoning the creation, Viktor dreams of embracing his beloved Elizabeth, who transforms into his decaying mother;
‘…her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed. ‘
Lot’s of Frankenstein is about death but the direct reference to grave-worms clearly shows a connection between these specific passages. One way of reading these together is to see Viktor as suddenly disgusted by his previous opinion on the dead; that he loses his scientific detachment and realises the humanity that is compromised in the disturbing of the dead. But no change prompts him to take ownership for his actions later, to protect the family the creature promises to take from him or indeed, providing the creature with parental guidance. Similarly, when Elizabeth’s body is being watched by unnamed women he says,
‘After an interval I arose, and as if by instinct, crawled into the room where the corpse of my beloved lay. There were women weeping around; I hung over it…’
Referring to his late fiance as it, not her, suggests he still maintains some detachment.
The other way of reading it is that Frankenstein only cares about these things when they apply to him. The pieces of paupers that make up his own creation are simply materials, but the thought of his own mother’s cadaver is enough to send him into terrified shakes.
We may be tempted to offer Frankenstein some slack here, after all, it is the body of his old mum that rots in his hands during a nightmare rather than a cold dismantling of her body on a surgeon’s slab in the quest for morbid knowledge. Indeed, in her youth Shelley would sit by her mother’s grave at St Pancras graveyard (itself a harvesting ground for the resurrection men) reading her father’s Essay on Sepulchres which had the passage;
‘His heart must be “made of impenetrable stuff’” who does not attribute a certain sacredness to the grave of a one he loved, and feel peculiar emotions stirring in his soul as he approaches it.’
Besides reflecting Shelley’s own feeling of losing her mother, it’s just good writing which further humanises Frankenstein.
We may even say it’s better for men of science to use the resurrectionists and have that distance from the deceased, and that an emotional proximity to the corpse might tarnish the surgeon’s ability to think clearly. But anatomists of Shelley’s time would almost have certainly read and admired the works of William Harvey. Harvey was a 17th century physician who is considered one of the fathers of the scientific method and the man who discovered how blood circulates through the human body — the theory but not the man is referenced by Waldman at Idolstadt (“‘They [scientists] ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe.”’ (emphasis added)). In his compiled anatomical lectures, Prelectiones, Harvey details anomalies he found in the dissections of his own father and sister. While Frankenstein may have wished he retained a Harvey-like separation from even just the idea of a corpse of a parent, general audiences may have found this separation unusual.
Perhaps a third option is that Frankenstein always remained the sensitive boy he began as, and he is lying to Walton about his scientific detachment in the name of progress. Either way, Frankenstein’s developing relationship to the resurrectionists adds a dramatic, internal conflict to the character. Rather than make him inconsistent or illogical, it deepened his psychology. His flirtation with the dimensions and disputes of death make him more compelling.
Of course Shelley couldn’t have predicted the moral outcry at the resurrectionists trade when she first sat down to write Frankenstein. Like so many other ideas in the book, as time moved on, the readers found and added that aspect to the novel themselves, collectively increasing the richness of the world and characters. Although, that may not have mattered. Shelley’s first Frankenstein was already something worse than a body snatcher. He was an anatomist.
The Anatomists
‘I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body.’
- Chapter 4
Many factors drive a man to body-snatching and burkery; Poverty, greed, bloodlust or just getting to work outdoors with your friends. Appalling though they were, the resurrectionists were part of the criminal under-class and their work was shocking but not surprising. What is surprising is why respected men of means and education knowingly bought illegally obtained but top quality corpses at low, low prices.
The first reason perhaps sums up most simply what Frankenstein has become known for: scientific achievement abandoning morality. A little law breaking was vastly outweighed by the potential discoveries the anatomists could make.
Although, you could easily argue that enough people are born and die everyday that scientific advancement was still perfectly possible without deviously digging up the dead. Here we encounter the second, more sinister and unassailable reason. The economics of murder.
In the very early 16th century, barber-surgeons had access to 4 corpses per annum. And they were so named because barbers, who owned sharp objects like razors and scissors, were more likely to perform surgery than physicians – a history recognised today in the tradition of surgeons going by Mister rather than Doctor.
But in the mid-18th century Parliament passed the The Murder Act 1751, or to give it it’s long title, ‘An act for better preventing the horrid crime of murder.’ Before getting to the irony of this law actually encouraging the horrid crime of murder it had two notable effects. The first was that dissection by surgeon became a form of capital punishment. The state would not only kill you for your crimes, they’d have you chopped up. Criminals would be reduced from personhood into little more than a shopping list of bloodied items. Worse, it deprived the guilty of a decent Christian burial. The added fear the state instilled wasn’t just an idea of a physical one, it was a spiritual one. No-one wanted to show up to Judgement Day literally in pieces.
The second, consequential effect was that the anatomists began to be seen as executioners of the state. Jack Ketch and the hangman might be doing their gruesome duty but the surgeons, in the eyes of the public, were desecrating the body to their own ends and denying a man eternal rest.
In fact, this bothered the general population so much that pitched battles and riots became commonplace at executions. Members of the public, after allowing and watching a hanging, would fight officials to save the bodies from the blades of these butcher-barbers. What’s more, a certain class-solidarity was formed in the matter. Journalist, John Wood , writing for the Ordinary of Newgate in 1770 observed,;
“…brick-makers came out to defend the bodies of two felons with several years of good standing in the trade against the surgeons, when bargemen came down from Reading to guard one of their own at his hanging, when the Hackney coachmen rallied to keep the body of a fellow coachman ‘ from being carried off by Violence’, or when the small cottagers and market people of Shoreditch surrounded the tumbril of Thomas Pinks their neighbour in the village, ‘declaring they had no other Intention, than to take Care of the Body for Christian burial’
The class element of Frankenstein is ignored all too often but this occurred during a time when English law was so brutal and cruel it became known as ‘The Bloody Code ‘. At the start of the 18th century, 220 crimes carried a mandatory punishment by death. The scope of these crimes ranged from rioting and treason to forgery and theft. In fact, property laws formed the basis of a lot of the Bloody Code and were seen as a way of wealthy lawmakers protecting their stuff from the poor, or rather, terrifying the poor into obediance.
In his highly influential work Commentaries on the Laws of England, judge and MP Sir William Blackstone described the crimes within the Bloody code laws as;
‘… a melancholy truth, that among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than a hundred and sixty have been declared by Act of Parliament to be felonious without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death. ‘ (emphasis added).
The poor, in their going about their day to day lives, feared being hanged and given to the anatomist. So, you can see why despite Viktor’s lofty goals, audiences might already be prejudiced against him. His creature is made of parts of otherwise good men, denied the right to fair heavenly judgement. It’s not only in his creation of life that Frankenstein threatens and imitates the seat of God, but also in his dominion over death.
Liberal judges and jurors knew the code was a tad excessive — they’d even attempted to argue that stolen items were worth less than 16 pence threshold shouldn’t result in death in hopes of saving a few lives. But with the discovery and colonisation of America and Australia, new opportunities presented themselves. Rather than death and dismemberment, the accused could now be given the excited prospect of indentured servitude at a work camp at one of Britain’s new and exotic colonies. The general relaxation of the law and lack of enthusiasm for state sponsored murdered slowed the supply of materials for the surgeon-barbers just as demand was increasing. The market was then disrupted with further meddlesome red-tape with the introduction of the 1823 Judgment of Death Act, which made death a optional punishment for all crimes except treason and murder. On average those sentenced to capital punishment dropped to little over 50 a year, just one-tenth of what the anatomist demanded.
So, the anatomist moves from a state-sponsored delivery of judgement, to a shadowy figure employing body-snatchers and murderers.
At the 1831 trial of Burke and Hare, William Hare added snitch to his résumé. He turned King’s evidence, gaining immunity to prosecution, by confessing to 16 murderer and condemning his former business partner to the gallows. William Burke was hanged, and befitting his crimes, dissected. The public, however, were not entirely pleased with the result. The people of Edinburgh saw Robert Knox, the surgeon who paid the resurrection-men seven and ten per cadaver as guilty of murder as Burke and Hare.
Knox avoided giving testimony in court and had made some distance between himself and the body-snatchers by virtue of having an assistant deal with the transactions. But it was not enough. The historical ill-will towards surgeons and combined with the logic that Knox provided incentive to murder was enough. As Knox (supposedly) marked the youngest and best cadavers “fresh” as they arrived for his classrooms, in a time when dead-bodies were hard to come by for anatomists, how could he not have known how Burke and Hare were obtaining them? Turning a blind eye to grave digging was one thing, but turning a blind eye to murder, nay, soliciting murder was quite another matter. Anatomists didn’t help matters in quelling the public’s association of them with burking. John Bell, the Shelley family doctor no less, wrote in his Letters on the Education of a Surgeon that; “In Munro’s class, unless there be a fortunate succession of bloody murders, not three subjects are dissected in the year.“
Bell was complaining about the anatomist reliance on the hangman for subjects and “fortunate succession” may just be Bell’s wry attempt at gallows humour — in fact it’s a good contender for the definition of the term. But flippant or not, it’s there in black and white. A medical endorsement, directly or indirectly, for more murders.
Furthermore, the public didn’t quite grasp how Burke and Hare had claimed their victims, assuming they had strangled them to death. Although it ultimately had the same result, this wasn’t the case; they sat on them.
With their victims drunk or otherwise incapacitated Burke would sit on their chest while Hare covered their nose and mouth, the benefit to which, aside from a fresh body, was that this method didn’t leave a mark.
But the public believed their victims to be strangled all the same. And in Frankenstein, they must have seen an echo of Knox’s clear guilt and responsibility for death in Viktor’s response to the corpses the creature leaves for him. Victor, the anatomist, sees the “stifling” marks of strangulation around each of the victims’ throats and knows that his creation, his desire to push boundaries of knowledge of human life, is ultimately the cause of death. And what does he do? He remains silent lest he be thought of as a madman. In Frankenstein, audiences saw Knox’s complicity in the West Gate murders.
Rather by chance, it is while Viktor is in Edinburgh with Clerval that we almost see his admission of responsibility for the murders the creature has committed; “I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime.”
Viktor, while denying the his causal involvement of the murders, something the audience can see more clearly than he does, still feels the guilt of his involvement.
After the trial of Burke and Hare and the public perception of the acquittal of Robert Knox, an angry mob attacked Knox’s home. And while the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated Knox, he was after all, an incredibly successful surgeon and influential lecturer of anatomy, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh knew he was damaged goods. He was removed from his position of Curator of the Comparative Anatomy and shortly after moved to London, where his career never quite attained the same highs.
The whole incident had left a sour taste in the mouths of the public but anatomy was as sought after as ever. But something had to be done about the association of the anatomist with private and public execution. Jeremy Bentham thought he had a few ideas for the greater good.
Making Matter Worse
‘…where can I find rest but in death? ‘
- Chapter 24
Less than a year after the release of the third edition of Frankenstein the cottage industry of body snatching and the anatomists’ regrettable association with it would be laid to rest and the novel would take on yet another dimension. All this was helped, in no small part by the efforts of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, father of utilitarianism. The crusade of the utilitarians is to answer the question “what is the morally right thing to do”’ and their solution is that which creates the greatest good for the most people. (Like all ethical codes it’s much more complicated in practice than in theory, but for the sake of bypassing a lengthy and probably dull excursion from our subject, the definition above will give us the gist).
Frankenstein himself can be read as a utilitarian or indeed a challenge to utilitarianism. His quest to free man from the disease of death is a greater good. On his death-bed Frankenstein tells Walton, “My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater portion of happiness or misery”. This last section is the very core of utilitarianism. But Viktor is poisoned by his own ego and fails to understand that in utilitarianism, happiness is an equal right. It should be the goal of all individuals, otherwise it becomes just doing what you want to do. The creature might not be the same thing as Frankenstein, but his personhood cannot be denied.
Utilitarianism is a consequential theory, meaning morality is judged on the results of an action, over the intention. Since murder is the direct result of Vikor’s work, a utilitarian might wonder exactly which action created so much death. His creation of the creature, or his abandoning of it?
Bentham was a supporter of dissection after death and championed the partial preservation, taxidermying and display of human remains in something he called the Auto-Icon. It was a kind of statue made from the skeleton and some preserved parts of the departed combined with stuffing. ThiS would be a better representation of late loved ones than paintings or sculptures and would alleviate some fear of death as well as solve the issue of accumulating, rotting corpses. Although perhaps he hadn’t given much consideration to the effect of accumulating dead relatives loitering all over the place. Bentham had written in his own will that after his death he would undergo the same process he proposed and the Bentham auto-icon sits on display to this day in University College London’s Student Centre. Bentham’s Auto-Icon is said to sit in on College Council meetings and holds the deciding votes on deadlocked motions. Heartbreakingly, this isn’t true. What is true is that the mokomokai method of treating, smoking and drying out of craniums used by Maori to preserve the tattoo’d heads of their people, which Bentham’s doctors wanted to emulate, was a failure and soon the Auto-Icon’s head was replaced with a wax replica. The not-quite intact head of Bentham now remains under lock and key to prevent rival colleges from stealing it for fun. Again.
Something else Bentham left after his death in 1832 was an unpublished essay entitled Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living. In it, Bentham correctly identified the cascade of scientific and medical knowledge that dissection would provide, writing;
‘In process of time, however, the dead have been turned by the living to a beneficial account. Their bodies, delivered to anatomists, have become important subjects for physiological, chirurgical, and medical study. From the examination of the insensible dead, alleviation and healing have been communicated to the susceptible living: and in this, the groundwork is laid of more extensive benefits.’
Bentham recognised that dissection of the dead fitted l utilitarianism. It would, if handled properly, bring more good than bad. Animal dissection was helpful too, but only so much could be inferred from comparative anatomy. But he also recognised that murder for progress set a bad precedent as well as creating a bad reputation for dissection, and he was aware more than most pro-anatomists of what their demand for materials would do;
‘But why, it may be asked, should more attention be paid to the senseless carcass of the biped, than to that of the quadruped ? Because, if human carcases are saleable, their value is a motive to murder. The pecuniary value attached to them created murderers in the shape of Burkes and Hares.’
Finally, Bentham wrote that dissection as a punishment had a limited scope and, echoing Blackstone, knew that it wouldn’t stop those who committed crimes to survive, like stealing food or soliciting. Auto-iconism however, was to be considered a celebration of an individual and a contribution to society with Bentham describing it “as a means of reward and encouragement’” whose benefits were “boundless”.
Bentham died and his body was offered up to science. His donation helped gain support for the Anatomy Act of 1832 which allowed next of kin to donate their late loved ones to science and almost entirely halted the resurrectionist trade and copycat burkings by promising to surgeons, anatomists and medical schools the unclaimed bodies of those who died in hospitals, prisons and workhouses. A group generally known as the poor.
Bentham couldn’t have predicted this, he was dead to be fair, but the poor hated that they were now fair game for two reasons. The first, we’re familiar with. No one wants to be disassembled come judgement day. The second is that the change in the law did not change the cultural associations of dissection. The process was still very much seen as a punishment. A punishment for which the crime was poverty. A moral dimension was added to the process which placed one class of people below another.
Over the decades this particular manifestation of class-indifference has vanished in Britain and we now benefit from the medical knowledge gained from these dissections, but at the time, Bentham’s greater good seemed to come at too great a cost, socially and fiscally. This was of course a century before the formation of socialised healthcare in the form of the NHS. So, the medical benefits of dissection were beyond the reach of those whoses bodies had been devoured to create the same benefits.
Once again the nature of Frankenstein’s creature shifts and he can be seen through the lens of class. Now, the creature is more than an individual. He is a mass, a crowd, made up of parts stolen from the forgotten, the ignored and the condemned. Stolen by and for the benefits of an upper-class surgeon acting in his own interest. The creature may identify himself with the biblical Adam, but to Frankenstein, he is the demon, Legion.
Riots again took place across the country, as the poorest in society protested the exploitation of their dead. In 1833, an anatomy lab in Cambridge was destroyed by a mob as they attempted to stop the dissection of one of the subjects there. What the utilitarians had failed to account for was simple — the belief and experience of others. Though their intention was good, to redefine the law to promote scientific advancement, they failed to recognise that the law isn’t consistent across class. Bentham’s Auto-Icon sits as a testament to a great man and influential thinker in a prestigious university. That’s quite a different legacy than being forgotten and sold, to be an object that is destroyed rather than an icon that is preserved.
Again, a class-element comes into play in this reading. All this took place at the earliest beginnings of the industrial revolution. Industry, owned by the middle and upper classes, would create a swell among the working classes who where crammed into the cities and multiplied. Uncouth, smelly and breeding like rabbits, what Faustian deal had the rich made? To quote Viktor as he toiled over the prenatal creature, what “filthy workshop of creation?” would they become? And worse, what if, like the creation, they wanted autonomy and respect and the ability to control their futures and the futures of their children. No, that wouldn’t do at all. “A race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existences of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” That’s what Viktor fears from the monster. And it’s what those in power feared as they began to create, exploit and abandon the working-class.
