But Dr Carpue can;
As for my trunk, it’s all packed up
To go by Pickford’s van.
The cock it crows, I must be gone.
My William, we must part;
And I’ll be yours in death although
Sir Astley has my heart.
Don’t go to weep upon my grave,
And think that there I be;
They haven’t left an atom there
Of my anatomie.
Those hostile to the work of the anatomists circulated wildly sensationalist allegations about their activities. What happened to corpses while they were in the care of the anatomists? Those cadavers displaying anatomical peculiarities were examined and scoffed at by audiences of gaping students and the bodies of attractive young women were defiled, or so it was alleged. Bodily parts were abused. Drinking cups and sugar basins were fashioned out of skulls and it was even claimed that some surgeons kept vultures which were usefully employed disposing of such parts of the cadavers as they themselves had no use for.
The mass graves in which paupers were sometimes interred always interested resurrectionists. If several inmates of a poor law workhouse died in a short space of time, say about a week, they might be placed in a common burial pit. This could contain a dozen or more corpses, some relatively fresh, others in an advanced state of decomposition. If the resurrectionists were not too squeamish, they might obtain several corpses with little more effort than what was required for seizing just one.
Those readers already disgusted by the activities of the resurrectionists may recoil in greater horror on learning that even lower forms of criminal life lurked in burial grounds. Some desperadoes opened up graves in order to obtain bones which could be ground down and sold for fertilizer. Others left the bodies behind but salvaged the wood from the coffins to be sold as kindling. Some removed teeth to sell for reuse as dentures for fashionable people. A female corpse with unusually luxuriant hair might be scalped. Everything had a market value. Could anything be worse than the lowlife that exhumed and dragged away newly-buried bodies in order to remove the fatty tissue for sale as raw material for candle-makers?
As the activities of the resurrection men and bodysnatchers increased, public concern led to the establishment in 1828 of a Select Committee on Anatomy. It enquired into how the schools of anatomy obtained the cadavers which they used as specimens. The Committee questioned a large number of witnesses including leading anatomists and professional resurrectionists. It commented on the anomaly that under the law of the time, virtually all teachers and students of anatomy were guilty of a misdemeanour for buying exhumed cadavers but only those who actually dug them up were ever prosecuted. It also learnt that in 1827 more than 1,000 inmates of workhouses in London had died with no known friends or relations, their bodies therefore being unclaimed and going on to receive pauper funerals. A trifle callously, it concluded that if only these bodies were made available on a regular basis, the abhorrent activities of the resurrectionists would no longer be required.
The understandable fear generated by the activities of the resurrectionists and their close kindred, the bodysnatchers, led Edward Bridgeman to invent and market his ‘Patent Iron Coffin’ in 1818. This was made of cast iron and designed so as to be almost impossible to reopen once sealed. About a hundred were sold but they were greatly disliked by clergymen and sextons because although they were somewhat smaller than conventional coffins, they did not eventually break down in the same way as wooden ones did.
In 1819 a parishioner of St Andrew’s in Holborn by the name of Gilbert, wanted his wife to be buried in a Bridgeman coffin. The incumbent of St Andrew’s, however, greatly disliked these coffins and demanded an extortionate fee to discourage the interment. Gilbert, incensed by the rector’s action, took him to an ecclesiastical court. Rather inconveniently the rector then died and with Mr Gilbert remaining unbowed and his wife unburied, the case dragged on in an uneasy limbo. The Bishop of London, anxious to pour oil on troubled waters, suggested that while the dispute was sorted out, Mrs Gilbert should be placed temporarily in a wooden coffin. However, the cadaver was securely sealed in a Bridgeman coffin and was therefore quite irretrievable. Five months passed with Mrs Gilbert remaining unburied and her husband was threatened with prosecution. Bridgeman had been waiting and watching and he now perceived an opportunity for free publicity for his product. He led a funeral party bearing Mrs Gilbert in her patent coffin to St Andrew’s looking to force the issue with the parish authorities. A confrontation occurred as the participants postured, jostled and even threw a few punches. All concerned were egged on by the large crowd that had gathered, keen for entertainment. Mrs Gilbert, cosy in her coffin and totally oblivious to the chaos going on around her, was placed on a convenient stone block nearby. To the onlookers’ chagrin, the outcome was something of an anticlimax as Bridgeman was led away charged with causing a breach of the peace. The coffin containing Mrs Gilbert was placed in the church’s charnel house as a temporary measure.
Those who could afford them hired mortsafes. These consisted of a strong heavy iron framework lowered with a block and tackle and fixed over the grave until such time as the body concerned was too putrefied to interest the resurrectionists. Normally the mortsafe was then removed. None are known to have survived in situ in Greater London but one can be seen in the churchyard at Henham, Essex, not far from Saffron Walden. In a few cases the huts or small rooms used for watching over burial grounds have survived. One can be seen in the churchyard of St John’s, Horsleydown, Bermondsey. Another stands in Giltspur Street just to the east of St Sepulchre’s and close to the site of Newgate Prison.
The evidence put before the Select Committee on Anatomy in 1828 made it quite clear that the corpses surreptitiously obtained by the anatomists almost all belonged to what we now call the ‘disenfranchised’. Predictably they were executed criminals or those who died in prison, suicides, ‘unclaimed’ inmates of hospitals and workhouses and men from the ‘other ranks’ in the army and navy.
In early November 1831, a gang of men were trying to hawk the body of a youth around a number of London anatomy schools without much success. It was a nice, fresh cadaver and should have fetched a good price. Its teeth had been removed. The surgeons did not usually cavil when such a specimen came their way. They did this time because it looked very much as if it was the body of a murder victim. The authorities were alerted and the gang members were quickly arrested. They were habitués of the Fortune of War public house in Giltspur Street, a known resort of resurrectionists and close to St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The corpse was eventually identified as that of a youth of Italian extraction whose name was Carlo Ferrari, or Ferriere, who soon became known as ‘The Italian Boy’. It seems that he obtained a frugal living working the streets equipped with a tray containing plaster or wax busts of well-known people which he offered for sale.
The case of the ‘Bethnal Street Gang’ and ‘The Italian Boy’ attracted enormous voyeuristic interest and spawned the publication of innumerable catchpenny ballads and broadsides. Within days of the execution of two of the gang, a stage play was showing at a theatre in Curtain Road, Shoreditch. This was not far from the misleadingly rural-sounding but squalid slums known as Nova Scotia Gardens which were the base for many of the gang’s activities. This location became almost a tourist attraction for a while and rejoiced in the nickname ‘Burkers’ Hole’.
Those convicted of the murder of the ‘Italian Boy’ were hanged before a huge crowd outside Newgate Prison. This had become the main site for executions in London after they ceased at Tyburn in 1783. With ironic justice, their bodies were then passed on to the surgeons for public dissection.
The case of the ‘Italian Boy’ followed the lurid revelations surrounding the activities of the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare in Edinburgh and the disclosure that mass deaths from cholera in 1832 had provided an unusually large number of specimens for the lecturers in anatomy and their students. There was a growin
g public determination that the trade in illicit bodies had to stop – and immediately! Parliament was compelled to take action. The first Anatomy Bill presented in 1829 failed to get through the House of Lords and fell again in 1830 because Parliament was dissolved. In 1832 a further bill slipped through almost unnoticed during the furore about parliamentary reform.
In 1832 a bill known generally as the Anatomy Act virtually ended illicit exhumations and bodysnatching. Executors and others such as the poor law authorities, having legal charge of those who died unclaimed, could donate their bodies to licensed surgeons and teachers of anatomy as long as the deceased had not previously and specifically stated an objection to being dissected. Regulations were made to ensure that the remains were decently buried after they had ceased to be used as subjects.
The Anatomy Act of 1832 and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 were evidence of the stark social and economic realities of the developing industrial society. Gone were considerations of responsibility on the part of the rich and powerful for the poor and powerless. Relations between individuals and between classes were now primarily defined in terms of money, the ‘cash-nexus’. The Anatomy Act was a piece of class legislation. In the first hundred years that the Act was in operation, almost 57,000 bodies were dissected in the London anatomy schools alone. All but a few of these came from the institutions of the Poor Law.
There is an old Arab proverb that ‘barbers learn their trade on the heads of orphans’. This implies that being orphans, the infants had little option but to comply with the needs of the barbers. From the early 1830s, the medical profession developed its anatomical knowledge and honed its surgical skills on the inanimate bodies of many of society’s most deprived citizens. They too had little alternative. It would have been cold comfort to them to know that in their tens of thousands they contributed, each in a small way, to the revolution in medical and surgical practice which so much increased life expectancy in the twentieth century.
Before leaving this subject let’s have an excerpt from ‘The Surgeon’s Warning’ by Robert Southey (1774–1843), which captures the loathing felt for the surgeons, teachers of anatomy and their associates:
All kinds of carcasses have I cut up,
And now my turn will be;
But brothers, I took care of you,
So pray take care of me.
I have made candles of dead men’s fat,
The Sextons have been my slaves,
I have bottled babes unborn, and dried
Hearts and livers from rifled graves.
All night long let three stout men
The vestry watch within;
To each man give a gallon of beer,
And a keg of Holland’s gin;
Powder and ball and blunderbuss,
To save me if he can,
And eke five guineas if he shoot
A Resurrection Man.
And let them watch me for three weeks,
My wretched corpse to save;
For then I think that I may stink
Enough to rest in my grave.
The desecration of graves did not completely end with the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832. In 1869 Dante Gabriel Rosetti obtained the permission of the Home Office to open up the coffin of his wife. This is because he had placed some unpublished poems in her grave when she died seven years earlier; maybe his love for her had worn a bit thin or perhaps he wanted to sell them because he had a cashflow problem. So in the hours of darkness Rossetti and a small party made their way into Highgate Cemetery and recovered the poems. The book in which they were written had to be disinfected and then every page had to be dried. It was a legal but extremely macabre way of increasing one’s published literary output.
NOTES
1. Linebaugh, P., The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons, in Hay, Linebaugh et al, 1977, p. 68.
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Controversies
Infanticide, Suicide, Cremation and Euthanasia
Attitudes towards illegitimacy have a long history of stigma. The 1624 Act to ‘prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children’ remained in force until the early nineteenth century and was aimed essentially at unmarried mothers. Infanticide was viewed as the most common form of murder in the seventeenth century and was one of the reasons for the creation of London’s Foundling Hospital in 1739. There were high levels of infant urban mortality in the early nineteenth century. The bodies of babies were regularly discovered in streets or rivers. Some of them had not died of natural causes.
Life was especially cheap for illegitimate children. A consistent stream of cases came to the Old Bailey involving young mothers who had killed their children, normally by strangulation. Others sought different methods. In 1675 a woman from St Martin-in-the-Fields threw her infant into the fire and ‘then threw the Coals upon it, where it was burned to Death.’ In 1681 Ann Price locked her new-born baby in a box. The London Post in July 1700 reported on a woman who was sent to Newgate for murdering a three-year-old child. The father was a married man who pressured the woman to kill the child. In the most painful fashion the woman shoved red-hot ‘Knitting-kneedles up the Child’s Fundament … by which he Languished and Dyed.’ The following year The Post covered the story of a pregnant woman who, in Ratcliff Highway, strangled her four-year-old son and, ‘causing his Tongue to hang out, she cut it off; and afterwards cut his Throat.’ A new-born child was found with its throat cut, in a muddy ditch near Lambeth Church in 1718 and the mother cut her own throat the next morning. In August 1730 a young mother was committed to Newgate for the murder of her one-month-old bastard child. She cut off the child’s head and hurled the body into a field near Enfield. In 1733 Frances Deacon murdered her child by throwing it into a pond – a common method of disposing of babies. At Moorfields in 1735 Elizabeth Ambrook threw her baby son from a window two stories high. It died.
The Marylebone Mercury reported a number of cases of infant deaths between 1857 and 1859 including a baby found by two young men in a basket in Regents Park, by no means an uncommon event, and a housemaid who found a parcel containing a dead baby wrapped in it during a visit to a church. The Times noted in 1861 that within the past five years 278 infants had been murdered in the metropolis. This was among the lower of the estimates for infant deaths.
In 1867 Central Middlesex was the location of over half the infanticides carried out in Britain. This appalling record was highlighted and publicised by a small group of coroners and doctors. Between 1861 and 1865, responses to the issue of infanticide included the establishment of the Association for the Preservation of Infant Life, the National Society and Asylum for Prevention of Infanticide and in 1870 the Infant Life Protection Society. Despite these initiatives, there was no effective legislation until after the First World War.
As thousands of children were at risk of being abandoned, there was no shortage of louche people ready to exploit the situation, notably through the practice of baby farming. This involved ‘relieving’ mainly unmarried mothers of their babies for a fee, taking them into care and then later killing them. Rapacious owners of ‘lying-in’ houses preyed upon both infants and their unmarried mothers. The owners of many of these houses placed advertisements in newspapers stating that they would offer good care of infants for a specified period of time. Newspapers must have known what was going on and bear some responsibility for indirectly assisting this awful practice. A young mother could easily find up to a dozen advertisements in some papers. Desperate and vulnerable, they responded to these ads, made the necessary arrangements with the baby farmers who took the infants in and often they never saw their children again. Many did not want to.
The London Times of 25 February 1834 showed little compassion when it fulminated to the effect that poor relief should be for the destitute and that the provision of relief to mothers of illegitimate children was detrimental to female morals. Many young pregnant women had limited employment opportunities which exacerbated the costs of keeping a child from starvation. The opt
ions were stark: they could place their children in a workhouse, commit infanticide or resort to baby farmers. In the latter case the child would be ‘adopted’ for a set fee and then disposed of as soon as possible, usually by poisoning. Dumping children in the street or in a river saved on burial costs.
Frederick John Wood was fourteen months old when farmed out to a house at No. 24 Swayton Road, Bow. When he died ten months later, the coroner reported that the cause of death was fluid on the brain and a malformed chest. The owner of the house, Mrs Savill, like many others who were involved with this awful crime, was not charged. In January 1868, the Pall Mall Gazette exposed a Mrs Jagger of Tottenham, who was reported to have had from forty to sixty infants in her care in a three-year period, the majority of whom had died of starvation. An informant tipped off the authorities that no fewer than fifty-five babies had died in an eighteen-month period whilst under the ‘care’ of a Mrs Martin of No. 33a Dean Street, Soho. Martin had made a very comfortable living by charging between £10 and £50 per child. However, without sufficient evidence from witnesses and mothers, many of whom were reluctant to come forward, she escaped prosecution and eventually moved from the area. Fate did serve up some degree of justice, however, when she died from apoplexy in November 1869.
Some lying-in houses in the Brixton and Peckham district came under surveillance the following year after sixteen infant bodies had been discovered. A policeman, Sergeant Relf, was alerted when he saw an advertisement in the newspaper stating, ‘good home, with a mother’s love and care, is offered to a respectable person, wishing her child to be entirely adopted.’ Relf replied to the address which was in Goar Place, Brixton, using a false name. Having gained access he found ten infants, five of whom were seriously malnourished. The owners, Sarah Ellis and Margaret Waters, were charged with conspiracy to obtain money by fraud as well as the murder of one of the infants, John Cowan. The trial attracted much interest and was covered extensively by the newspapers as the ‘Brixton Farming Case.’ Graphic and ghoulish descriptions appeared of how babies were poisoned, their bodies wrapped in old rags and then dumped in the streets. One witness at the trial stated that Ellis and Waters often left the house with infants and later returned with only the children’s clothing. It is difficult to know the actual number of children who died whilst in their ‘care’, but it is thought that they murdered between sixteen and nineteen babies in the Brixton area. Ellis, who administered narcotics to the children, was released from prison but Waters was hanged at Horsemonger Lane on 11 October 1870.
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