Class distinctions prevailed through funeral attire but industrialisation made possible the production of cheaper dresses which found a market among people of limited income. In addition, magazines provided dressmakers with a template for copying expensive fashions at a lower cost. This was emphasised by Mrs Humphry in Manners for Women:
The making of mourning dresses is now conducted at such speed, as compared with the deliberate and leisurely mode of procedure of long ago … At first sight fashion would seem to have as little to do with mourning as it has with grief, but as those who wear the garb of woe are not invariably mourners in the strict sense of the term, fashion influences this form of dress very appreciably.
The proliferation of magazines and papers in the nineteenth century brought with it an increase in advertising and there was fierce competition between companies that offered services in relation to mourning. George Shillibeer (1797–1866) ran London’s first omnibus service which commenced on 4 July 1829 and shuttled between Marylebone and the Bank of England. Shillibeer was something of a maverick and he decided that meeting the needs of the bereaved made more business sense than running buses. In 1851 he advertised in the Daily News that he could save customers ‘one half’ if they used his company instead of any other undertaker. Large shops such as Jay’s of Regent Street opened as the London General Mourning Warehouse in 1841. Within a decade other shops along Regent Street were quick to follow. Pugh’s Mourning Warehouse (1849), Peter Robinson’s Court and General Mourning Warehouse (1853) and Nicholson’s Argyle General Mourning and Mantle Warehouse (1853) were all advertising and advising customers on what apparel to wear. Catalogues displayed illustrations of dinner dresses and mourning dresses for bereavement occasions. By 1862 Jay’s advertised ‘A complete Suit of Domestic Mourning for 2½ guineas’. Peter Robinson’s of Regent Street advertised in the Illustrated London News in January 1873: ‘Mourning for Families in Correct Taste.’ Robinson’s promoted ‘Skirts, in new Mourning Fabrics, trimmed crepe’ from thirty-five shillings to five guineas. Jay’s could boast the royal crests of arms above their window display as well as making the claim in advertisements in the Queen in 1890 that, ‘Messrs Jay are constantly receiving new millinery from the first houses in Paris, and the most approved forms are at once copied to suit every degree of Mourning.’
Manuals such as Cassells Household Guide (1880) offered advice and guidance on how to proceed after bereavement from registering the death, the costs of the funeral and the expense of burial in the various metropolitan cemeteries. It also added in volume 3:
The blinds of the windows of the house should be drawn down directly the death occurs, and they should remain down until after the funeral has left the house, when they are at once to be pulled up. As a rule, the females of the family do not pay any visits until after the funeral. Neither would it be considered in good taste for any friends or acquaintances to visit at the house during that time, unless they were relatives of the family.
With some alertness to the sensitivities of class it also stated:
It sometimes happens among the poorer classes that the female relatives attend the funeral; but this custom is by no means to be recommended, since in these cases it but too frequently happens that, being unable to restrain their emotions, they interrupt and destroy the solemnity of the ceremony with their sobs, and even by fainting.
In a similar condescending tone the Lady’s Magazine, commenting on the widespread mourning which accompanied the death of Princess Charlotte in November 1817, stated that ‘Considerable distress has always been occasioned by a general mourning’, especially to ‘the labouring class of manufacturers’. Giving more practical guidance, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) advised on the best approach to condolence visiting:
Courtesy would dictate that a mourning card should be used, and that visitors, in paying condoling visits, should be dressed in black, either silk or plain-coloured apparel. Sympathy with the affliction of the family, is thus expressed, and these attentions are, in such cases, pleasing and soothing.
The culture of mourning was changing by the late Victorian period. Acknowledging concessions to fashion as well as a decline in the display of mourning, Mrs Humphry wrote:
Of late years the periods for wearing [mourning dress] have been very much abbreviated, and many other changes have taken place in what may be called … the etiquette of mourning … We have all been wearing black crepe for so long that things have become rather mixed … Even widows do not wear their weeds nearly so long as was usual and they are seen in places of amusement … while still wearing deep mourning – a thing that would not have been tolerated by society ten years ago. The whole matter is undergoing a revolution.
Although some widows continued the practice of wearing mourning dress in the twentieth century, the ‘revolution’ Mrs Humphry wrote about was unstoppable and the Victorian rituals of mourning began to be observed less and less.
2
Resurrectionists and Bodysnatchers
If one crime above all others can be guaranteed to evoke an immediate shudder and sense of revulsion, it is probably the illicit seizing of unburied corpses and especially the exhumation of corpses for sale to teachers of anatomy and surgery. It intrudes on some of our most primeval and deeply-felt fears and taboos. It is a crime that we associate with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and late-Georgian society. By no means unique to the capital, it is, however, a crime that was associated with London!
Even in the present largely secular age, dinned into us and firmly rooted is the belief that the remains of the dead should be treated with respect. From earliest times, however, there has been a tension between this reverence and the needs and interests of wider society. Man’s innate sense of curiosity and desire to push back the boundaries of what is known, has led him to try to find out how the body works or what happens when it malfunctions. As far as doctors, surgeons and scientists are concerned, it has provoked a desire to understand bodily functions and be able to treat disease and malfunctions more effectively. The research needed to bring about developments which might benefit mankind as a whole has frequently conflicted with the powerful forces of established religion. Here we trace how and why the issue came to a head in England and how it manifested itself in London, particularly in the period from 1750 to 1830.
The robbing of graves was not a new activity. For example, thieves had eagerly plundered the untold riches to be found in the burial chambers of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs. Corpses have always attracted that minority of the population given to the black arts and to necrophilia. In England exhumation was occasionally used as a form of aggravated punishment. John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384) was regarded as a heretic by the hierarchy of the Church and many years after his death his remains were taken out and burnt. King Richard III’s body was hastily buried in the abbey of the Greyfriars at Leicester after his death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. At the Dissolution the building was ransacked and his body removed and supposedly thrown into the nearby River Soar. Richard III is the only English monarch to have no known grave. Two years after Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector died, his remains were removed from their resting place in Westminster Abbey. In 1661, during the reaction against the execution of Charles I, Cromwell and two other regicides were posthumously found guilty of treason. They were exhumed and their remains were dragged on hurdles to Tyburn where they were ritually hanged. After several hours their heads were hacked off and taken away while the bodies were supposedly dumped in a pit next to the gallows. The heads were displayed at Westminster Hall.
In the Middle Ages, knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was minimal. In 1300 the Church had outlawed the dissection of human bodies for the purposes of research or demonstration on the grounds that they were images of God and that a body that was incomplete would not be able to be reunited with its soul at the Last Judgement. Dire penalties faced those who dared to defy the ecclesiastical authorities. The Church taught t
hat nothing could justify the dissection of humans, even if they were criminals who had committed heinous crimes.
For hundreds of years, men training to be physicians had to make do with the teachings of Galen (AD c.130–201), the great Greek anatomist. His observations, although unquestionably acute and profound, were based on the dissection of a wide range of mammals and what we now know as the incorrect assumption that the information derived from such sources was also applicable to human anatomy. While Galen’s teachings were acceptable to the Church, their continuance stood in the way of human progress.
A restless soul who could not reconcile what he knew empirically with what was being taught, was the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). His enormously-detailed, finely-illustrated and seminal work published in 1543, generally known as De Humani Corporis Fabrica, outraged the religious establishment, not least because it was clearly the product of its author’s extensive and systematic dissection of human bodies. Perhaps he started the whole thing because the first body that he systematically dissected was stolen to order. It was the remains of a felon dangling from a gibbet!
The contribution of Vesalius cannot be exaggerated and he more than anyone else can be said to have started the movement which put the study of human anatomy on a scientific basis. One effect of this was to increase the demand for anatomical subjects for demonstration and teaching purposes. Conflict was inevitable between the forces of religious, legal and social orthodoxy and those of scientific enquiry. The Renaissance polymaths Leonardo and Michelangelo eagerly seized every opportunity that presented itself for minute examinations of the internal disposition of the human organs. Leonardo is thought to have dissected over thirty human corpses. A new approach to the study of natural phenomena was being created. It was to prove unstoppable but England lagged behind Italian and Dutch practice so far as the study of medicine and surgery were concerned.
In England in 1540 Henry VIII created the Company of Barber-Surgeons. He granted them the right to secure the bodies of four executed felons a year. They were entitled to use these as object lessons in public lectures and demonstrations. The King thereby unknowingly created an unholy alliance which was to cause enormous controversy over the years. This was between medicine, science and the apparatus of the State in the form of the law and the judiciary on the one hand and the world of crime, criminals and exemplary punishment on the other. In the reign of Charles II (1660–1685) two additional corpses per annum were made available.
Surgeons before the nineteenth century were not held in high esteem. They were rough-and-ready men who treated injuries and wounds, often without great success, performed amputations, frequently with fatal results and bled patients thought to be suffering from all manner of ailments. If the patients lived it was frequently in spite of, rather than because of, the surgeons’ ministrations. They also cut hair and treated piles, in-growing toenails and various other unglamorous conditions sadly all too common among their patients, most of whom were from the poorer sections of society. The role of the physicians was more prestigious and they worked with better-off patients, although there is little evidence that their efforts were any more effective.
William Cheselden (1688–1752) can fairly be described as the father of English surgery. In 1711 he started giving private anatomy classes and obtained his necessary visual aids by openly buying the bodies of executed felons. Cheselden’s initiative was disapproved of by both the Company of Barber-Surgeons of which he was a member, and by the public as a whole. They rejected the idea that publicly anatomising executed felons was an activity that would ultimately improve the human condition. Understandably, they found the whole idea creepy and repulsive. In 1745 Cheselden was instrumental in setting up the negotiations that led to the creation of the Company of Surgeons, which in 1800 became the Royal College of Surgeons. Its headquarters, Surgeons’ Hall, was located in Old Bailey, a street right on the doorstep of Newgate Prison which housed many condemned felons and other prisoners. This was very handy because any prisoners who died and whose bodies were unclaimed, were easily obtainable for demonstration purposes. Unofficial practice was for the unclaimed bodies of felons hanged at Tyburn also to be obtained by the London surgeons.
The Royal College was the only body that could award qualifications in surgery in England and Wales and anyone wishing to become a surgeon had to meet the requirements of the College and become a member. In 1823 the controversial decision was taken that anyone who wanted to be recognised as a member of the College would have to submit certificates of attendance from one of four London teaching hospitals. These were St Thomas’ and Guy’s which were then known as the ‘United Hospitals’, St Bartholomew’s and the London Hospital. The courses they provided were extremely expensive and often of poor quality. For that reason there was a role for private schools of anatomy and surgery because they gave students the opportunity to practice dissection relatively cheaply, rather more informally and under the supervision of lecturers who often had superior didactic skills to those in the hospitals.
The man who can be fingered for putting the crime of body-snatching onto an established basis was William Hunter (1718–83), an immensely energetic Scotsman who had moved to London and numbered among his numerous activities lecturing on human anatomy. His classes were very much ‘hands on’ and he prided himself on being able to provide every student with the opportunity to practice on human cadavers. Firmly pushing legal issues and moral scruples into the background, he paid associates to rob graves and they in turn bribed sextons, hospital porters and others to provide information and practical assistance. In 1767 William moved into a house in Great Windmill Street. To these premises considerable numbers of corpses enclosed in baskets and hampers were wheeled in hand barrows, and sometimes left in the middle of the night inside the railings to await his attention in the morning. He never asked how or from where these specimens had been obtained. William eventually specialised in obstetrics and it was known that he would buy female corpses at different stages of pregnancy but also that he would pay particularly high fees for cadavers exhibiting especially interesting abnormalities of gestation.
William was joined by his brother, John (1728–1793), who went on to even greater eminence as an anatomist, surgeon and physiologist and is considered by many to be the founder of scientific surgery. John, whose contribution to improving the human lot cannot be overstated, also put the pursuit of knowledge before other considerations and not only employed men to obtain a large and steady supply of illicit ‘specimens’ for him, but seems to have positively enjoyed socialising with these nefarious operators. Perhaps this was evidence of the ‘common touch’ for which he was well known.
Still the demand for specimens for demonstration and practice continued to grow. The Act to Prevent the Horrid Crime of Murder (usually called the ‘Murder Act’) was passed in 1752. It allowed the courts, at their discretion, to submit the bodies of convicted murderers to the surgeons for dissection and public exhibition. This was a form of aggravated punishment because such deceased felons would not be accorded Christian rites of passage. For the superstitious at least, this meant that they would be unable to enter Heaven at the Second Coming, a situation further confirmed by the fact that after dissection they would not be anatomically complete. As well as hopefully acting as a deterrent to murder by wickedly turning the screw on convicted murderers, this act offered the further advantage of generating an additional supply of cadavers for the advancement of science. As Peter Linebaugh (‘The London Hanged’, 1991) commented, ‘it appears that a precondition of progress in anatomy depended upon the ability of the surgeons to snatch the bodies of those hanged at Tyburn.’1
The Murder Act was a much-hated piece of legislation. The preamble to the Act specifically stated that ‘in no case whatsoever the Body of any Murderer shall be suffered to be buried’. It was seen as a spiteful aggravation of the dreaded judicial punishment of death by hanging. It intruded cruelly on the bereaved relations when the
y were at their most vulnerable. Dissection of the corpse and its subsequent public display was regarded as an affront to accepted religious norms and to folk beliefs and practices which were every bit, if not more, deep-rooted. Attitudes to death were a curious mixture of Christian and semi-pagan beliefs. It was for this reason that relations, friends, workmates and members of the crowd frequently fought with the surgeons’ men around the scaffold at Tyburn in order to prevent the body of the executed felon being taken away to be publicly dissected. Anyone convicted of rescuing or attempting to rescue a corpse from the custody of the surgeons was liable to transportation for a term of seven years.
Death by hanging was not always instantaneous. There were cases of felons who had been hanged, cut down and placed in their coffins only to come around later. In 1709 John Smith was hanged at Tyburn. Two hours after he had supposedly died, he was cut down and taken to a nearby house where he made a complete recovery and for the rest of his life was known as ‘Half-Hanged Smith’. In 1736 Thomas Reynolds was hanged at Tyburn. He was cut down when all signs of life were judged extinct. His mourning relations had just reverentially placed his body in the waiting coffin and were about to put the lid in place when, with an air of understandable indignation, the deceased started moving and then remonstrating with them. The hangman, stung by such public evidence of his poor workmanship, wanted to have another go at Reynolds but the crowd carried him off as if he was a trophy. Unfortunately all this excitement was too much for Reynolds and he died shortly afterwards.
London Page 3